The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  Returning from Ireland and finding London ‘rude, lewd and untidy’ after the decorum of Dublin, where she had stayed for a few days, Elizabeth Bowen spent the final week of June campaigning. The electioneering itself, she told Charles, was getting more and more idiotic on all sides; at intervals loudspeaker vans dashed around Regent’s Park. She was supporting a Liberal candidate who had decided at the last moment to stand in South Marylebone, although she knew it was a ‘lost cause’. The Liberal party, under the leadership of Archibald Sinclair, was never a serious contender. Alan was planning to vote Labour on the grounds that the Labour candidate was a woman. ‘His 1912 feminism,’ Elizabeth explained to Charles; ‘I ask him whether he wants the country run by Jews and Welshmen?’ Graham Greene approached the election with similar flippancy. ‘Reluctantly I shall vote Conservative,’ he informed his mother. ‘The Socialists are such bores! But if there was a Liberal I’d vote for him.’

  In the event, Labour won a resounding victory, gaining 393 seats, while the Conservatives were left with 197 and the Liberals with 12. Peter de Mendelssohn, learning of the results in Berlin, was delighted. ‘For once it feels good again to be a Britisher,’ he wrote to Hilde. ‘We are, after all, awake and not merely a people of overaged, somnolent share-holders and dividend earners.’ Social insurance, land reform, housing, schools; all the reforms for which the British had waited so patiently could now be pushed through.

  Graham Greene remained flippant even after the results were declared. Lunching with the writer Walter Allen at Rules he saw the headline ‘SOCIALISTS IN’ plastered across the Evening Standard. ‘Damn!’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t you approve, Graham?’ Allen asked. Greene told him that he did not care one way or another and had not bothered to vote himself, but he had been planning to make a prank call at three o’clock, assuming that the Tories would win. ‘There won’t be any point in doing so now,’ he complained. It turned out that he had been intending to ring the Reform Club where the editor of the Spectator, Wilson Harris, lunched every day. Harris was Greene’s former boss and a long-term enemy, and was also a Churchill-supporting MP. Greene was going to pretend to be speaking from the Cabinet Office and tell Harris to call at 10 Downing Street at 3.30, making him think that he was about to be offered high office.

  Elizabeth Bowen was more earnestly disappointed by the election and it became clear that her sympathies were with the defeated Conservatives. The results, she told Charles, were ‘a terrific psychic shock to me’.

  I felt sick, and shortly afterwards was. I don’t think I minded the Socialist walkover: it was the complete collapse and failure and ignominy of the people who represent the ideas I support that got me down. In a flash I saw so many things that I had been trying to hide from myself.

  She was angry with the Conservatives for conducting their own campaign with ‘a tactlessness, a sheer psychological ineptitude, that was shattering’. They had insisted to the public that Churchill had won the war on their behalf when in fact most people were convinced that they had won the war themselves: ‘Ma by standing in the fish queues, little Herbert by helping with the fire-watching’. She felt that their voting was a reflex of indignation at being told anything to the contrary.

  Although she was distressed by the Labour victory (and especially by its scale), Elizabeth was infuriated with the Conservative party. Indeed, she would not have wanted the Conservatives to win by an enormous majority either. ‘Obviously, from the point of the good Conservative, the Party needs a good purge’ she informed Charles. She was even in favour of Labour ‘doing some heavy bulldozing work within the next two years or so’ and, especially, of their breaking ‘Big Business’. Her own Conservatism was driven more by a respect for tradition than by a commitment to Tory economic principles. She had always hoped that the aristocratic Tories would eventually repudiate ‘Big Business’, though she had now come to see this as hopelessly unrealistic.

  Elizabeth’s horror at the election results was more a response to the lamentable failure of the Conservatives and the Liberals (who had lost half their seats) than to the change of government. She empathised passionately with them for their defeat and was personally sad to lose Churchill, who had been a hero for her throughout the war. However she was prepared to accept the presence of Labour and of the welfare state they would create. What she could not tolerate was the levelling that was evidently about to ensue. She had lost the spirit of camaraderie that she had demonstrated in letters and essays written during the Blitz. In that first draft of the ‘London, 1940’ essay she expressed just the kind of belief in the war as a ‘People’s War’ that she now repudiated in dismissing the popular conception of Ma in the fish queue and Herbert on the roof fire-watching. ‘It is the people’s war,’ she had stated there, ‘for the people’s land, and what we save we rule. And we have it in us. It is this stir of big power in little people, the wide-awake look in the eyes, the nerve in the step, that makes this autumn in Britain a sort of spring.’

  The problem was that this sense of camaraderie existed alongside a more elitist sense of entitlement. Charles noted in his diary in 1941 that Elizabeth always managed to get hold of large quantities of smoked salmon; even during the Blitz the rich home was quite different from the poor home. He expressed hopes that Elizabeth shared when in December 1941 he prayed in his diary that after the war God should leave them their luxuries, even if they had to do without necessities.

  Let Cartiers and the Ritz be restored to their former glories. Let houseparties burgeon once more in the stately homes in England. Restore the vintage port to the clubs and the old brown sherry to the colleges. Let us have pomp and luxury, painted jezebels and scarlet guardsmen, – rags and riches rubbing shoulders. Give us back our bad, old world.

  Elizabeth, like Charles, saw the rise of the working classes as heralding a failure in taste. While she could accept some sharing of wealth and welfare, she bristled at the thought of popular culture displacing the older modes of life that she loved.

  And Elizabeth Bowen was not the only one to repudiate her wartime enthusiasm for democratic levelling in the immediate post-war period. Henry Yorke, who had gone further than Bowen in applauding the breakdown of class distinctions, at least within the fire service, was immediately fearful of the high levels of taxation that would be brought in by the Labour government. Taxes had already doubled between 1938 and 1945 and looked set to go up more, just at the point when Yorke’s family business was successful for the first time in years. Ultimately, his loyalties were with the conservative upper classes. He may have feared the domination of the world by the Mosleys in 1939, but he and Dig were the first people to write to Diana Mosley when she was put in prison the following year. ‘Another lot who are put out are those who for some years have been mildly pink,’ Elizabeth Bowen wrote to Charles on the day of the election. ‘They are now in a great (and I imagine for some time unnecessary) fuss about their investments. Also they are faced by the fact that their political ideas are no longer daring.’ She wished that Proust were there to mock the hypocrisy of the aristocracy as they eagerly contradicted themselves.

  At the beginning of August Yorke delivered his new novel, Back, to the Hogarth Press. An early mention of it occurs in a letter to Rosamond Lehmann in March, where he wrote that it was ‘all about a man whose nerves are very bad: and as far as I can tell will be no better or no worse than anything else I have done.’ Despite this relative optimism, it had been a hard book to write. ‘I’ve been working like mad,’ he told Mary Keene in June. ‘The new book is being difficult.’ And he was writing it at a time of general unhappiness. ‘It’s very sad. Nothing but work, work, work and not getting anywhere,’ he complained.

  Although Back is set in 1944, it is a novel that reflects Yorke’s own sense of post-war deflation. Its central character, Charley Summers, experiences the end of the war as a period of anticlimax, having lost a leg fighting overseas and been sent home. He feels displaced by civilian society, primarily because Rose, a girl he was
having an affair with before the war, has died. The plot of the novel hinges on a case of mistaken identity. Charley becomes convinced that Rose’s illegitimate half-sister Nancy is Rose herself, who has only pretended to die. It takes him several months to forget Rose and fall in love with Nancy, having now been persuaded that she is a separate person. The mood and setting of the novel feels pallid after the impassioned lyricism of Loving. There is the occasional enthusiastic description of Rose: ‘crying, dear Rose, laughing, mad Rose, holding her baby, or, oh Rose, best of all in bed, her glorious locks abounding.’ But on the whole Charley finds her harder and harder to remember and his love for Nancy is more quietly admiring than ardent. Sex is presented as merely a brief respite from unhappiness rather than a source of joy. Contemplating an affair with his secretary, Charley muses that ‘this was the sole promise there was in being alive’. It is the only aspect of life that is not unremittingly bleak.

  Back is in part a novel about confused, illegitimate fatherhood. Rose’s father, Mr Grant, has fathered Nancy during a brief affair, and although he acknowledges this second daughter he is never a committed father to her. Charley always suspects Rose’s son Ridley of being his own child rather than Rose’s husband’s, but searches in vain for ‘an echo of his own face in those cheekbones’. In fact the narrator tells us that ‘unknown to him’ the child has nothing to do with him at all, ‘except in so far as he was a reminder of his Rose’.

  Implicit here is a rejection of Alice that may have been partly behind Mary Keene’s violent antagonism to the book. Her copy of the novel, which is not inscribed by Henry, contains an angry piece of personal literary criticism on the back page. Here Mary complains that ‘Charley (he is called Charley as one calls a child) Summers can’t react to anyone. He is them and not himself. So they have to be both themselves and him. He has no active love, but a sickness, which is mainly bewilderment.’ She adds that the war is blamed for this state but that this is suspect and that if Charley Summers were a boy just reaching puberty all would be understandable. Rejected, Mary took refuge in a scathing dismissal of the man she had loved who, she suggests, was himself incapable of love in the first place. Certainly Henry Yorke presents Charley Summers as a man unable to access his emotions easily, though in fact he himself seems to be no more forgiving of his central character than Mary is. Unlike Loving, this is a book that does not encourage easy empathy between reader and characters, although Mary was right to see that the muted mood of the book was Henry’s own.

  During the summer of 1945, the war against Japan was finally drawing to a close. It had been a long-drawn-out and costly struggle. Even on VE Day newspapers had reported more British soldiers lost in the fighting in Burma; for people with relatives overseas and for anyone outside Europe the war was still going on. On 21 July America appealed to Japan’s leaders to surrender, warning them that their opportunity was passing rapidly and that a refusal would result in the almost total destruction of the country. No surrender was forthcoming, and on 6 August America dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. President Truman announced that this was 2,000 times more powerful than any bomb dropped before. Its impact was catastrophic; most of Hiroshima was destroyed within minutes. In Britain, people debated the ethics of the act. According to the Manchester Guardian the Allies had already dropped the equivalent of one and a half times the Hiroshima bomb on Cologne and its use was ‘entirely legitimate’. On 7 August Evelyn Waugh noted that newspapers, ‘as often miles wide of public conscience’, were jubilant about the bomb, forecasting vast benefits to the world by its discovery. But Victor Gollancz was representative of many of his contemporaries when he complained that it was ‘further debasement of the human currency’. On 9 August Evelyn Waugh reported that the newspapers had now started to express consternation about the new bomb, hurriedly catching up with public opinion. That day a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. As the world looked on in horror at the extraordinary destructive power of the new weapon, the Emperor of Japan, Hirohito, began negotiations for a Japanese defeat. He capitulated in part because he was frightened by the Russian success in occupying Manchuria and he had decided that he would rather Japan was occupied by the Americans than the Rusisans. On 15 August he announced the unconditional surrender of his country. Because of the time difference, the British heard the news on 14 August, and 15 August became VJ Day, celebrating victory over Japan.

  VJ Day itself was experienced fairly universally as an anticlimax. King George VI opened Parliament with a speech proclaiming the nationalisation of the coal mines and of the Bank of England; crowds lined Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. But it was hard to celebrate with the same enthusiasm as in May. In Wimbledon Hilde Spiel was looking after her children on her own once again. At the beginning of August Peter had briefly returned at last, but his visit had been too short for them to resume the usual rhythms of their lives. She was disappointed that he was too caught up in his own adventures and successes to empathise fully with the pain that she had experienced during his absence. And her distress was compounded when she was given a clear indication of their continuing status as exiles. When the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Hilde and Peter were at Kingsley Martin’s cottage in Essex. The assembled guests were all deeply stirred by the news of the bomb. Hilde thought of her father, whom the news would have roused to enthusiasm as a scientist, but still horrified as a moral human being. Kingsley Martin announced: ‘This means the end of the war.’ Turning to Hilde and Peter, he observed, ‘I expect you will go back to your own country now?’ ‘Then we knew,’ Hilde later wrote, ‘though we did not admit it to ourselves, that nine years of assimilation into the English world had been in vain.’ They had spent much of the war in the company of Kingsley Martin, defying the German bombs together; they had celebrated the first signs of victory with him; and he, more than most British people, was anxious to remember the humanity lurking within every German. But it did not occur to him that nationality could ultimately be anything less than immutable.

  By the time of VJ Day, Peter was back in Berlin and Hilde wrote to him describing the celebrations. For her the day began with a domestic crisis. Her domestic help, Mrs Stanhouse, rang at eight in the morning and announced that as it was VJ Day she would not come. ‘I was genuinely angry,’ Hilde told Peter, ‘and cried: The Fools!’ There was no bread, meat or vegetables in the house. But then Beate, the nanny, went out hunting for food and returned with some rolls, having stood in a bread queue of fifty people, and they all settled down to another great day. ‘One will miss them in time, but at the moment they’re just five for a penny.’ As it was pouring with rain, she did not hang out the flags, in case they were soaked. Towards lunchtime, the sun came out, spirits rose and Hilde and the children roamed around the town.

  It was, well, very much like other V-days, but in some ways they hadn’t timed it quite so badly after all, what with the Opening of Parliament and this, that and the other. In scorching heat we stood outside Buckingham Palace for an hour and a half, looking at the queer sights . . . soldiers stuck all over with flags leading a snake round and round the square, two nuns in a taxi, and crowds, crowds, crowds.

  By chance, Hilde lined up exactly where the Cabinet and the House of Commons walked into St Margaret’s church for the Thanksgiving service and so she had a clear view of Churchill, Morrison, Attlee and Eden, followed by the other MPs. ‘Churchill wrung my heart,’ Hilde wrote, ‘walking with hands clasped at the back, gloomy and solemn like Beethoven, and not stirring to acknowledge the crowd who cheered him more than Attlee.’ She found it a curious situation. As far as she was concerned, nobody would have wanted the Conservatives back and everybody liked Attlee, who seemed a modest and decent man. But there was ‘something in Churchill that grips your heart, and you can’t resist him personally’. Unlike Elizabeth Bowen, Hilde thought that it was admirable for the country to have voted Labour, ‘against one’s sentiment obviously’.

  From Germany, Peter did hi
s best to repair their marriage, wondering if he had shown enough sympathy during his visit. ‘My sweet, I was glad and happy to be back home again,’ he wrote to Hilde on 9 August.

  It was good and restful to share your room with you, I loved and enjoyed every minute of it. Now that you’ve got over the worst of it – without my being able to help you at all – I must tell you how immensely I’ve admired the fortitude and bravery with which you have mastered this dreadful situation. It gives me the creeps, even now and in retrospect, to think that you were in this fearful mess at the time, all alone. How good you were, my mummili – it’s been a packet, and you’ve carried it all the way. I did not want to speak about it all while I was home, because I wanted to do nothing that might weaken you or revive anything you had already overcome. That is why I was cool and, perhaps reserved even – but that was because I wanted to strengthen and reinforce your own coolness and steadiness so painfully acquired. I think you understand. I knew not how to deal with it all.

  Just before VJ day, Hilde and Peter’s son Anthony was christened. Hilde presided alone in Peter’s absence and Hans Flesch-Brunningen was godfather. Remarkably, Juliet O’Hea was godmother, together with their friend Joyce Arrow. Juliet was still attempting to sell Hilde’s novel and the two women had been ‘most cordial and polite’ with each other on the telephone that February. Hilde was still extremely jealous but had decided that Juliet represented less of a threat to her marriage when contained within the family structure. As godfather, Flesch helped Hilde to organise the event. Increasingly, he was taking on the role of Hausfreund, the gentleman friend who was a normal feature of the lives of most women in 1920s Vienna. In Austria at least, this could be compatible with marriage, and as things stood Peter seems to have accepted the other man’s role in their lives. Certainly, he did not have much room to complain; he was leaving Hilde to do almost everything for the family alone. At the end of July he relinquished all responsibility for the christening to her.