The Love-Charm of Bombs

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The Love-Charm of Bombs Page 36

by Lara Feigel

Hilde herself was still keen to be in Europe, but she was anxious about reports of renewed Nazism in Germany and about the risk of spending too long outside Britain and losing their carefully acquired Englishness. Peter wrote to reassure her that there was no Nazism and that they could return to England whenever they wanted. In fact, living in close quarters with the other British officials in Berlin they could be more intimately connected to the English than in London, where they were often isolated in Wimbledon. In Berlin he worked in a British office, surrounded by the British; ‘it is certainly not the Krauts who determine the picture’. And, perhaps more persuasively, he wanted them to be together. ‘I should like to give you a big kiss on your big soft lips and sleep with you in the same bed and feel your warm tummy,’ he added, in a rare expression of physical affection.

  See notes on Chapter 17

  18

  ‘O, maybe we’ll live a while in Killala’

  The English in Ireland, 1947

  Not everyone could contemplate leaving London altogether. However displaced they felt in post-war England, Henry Yorke and Graham Greene had no alternative home to return to, and instead found a respite from the English austerity of the late 1940s in briefer trips abroad. One particularly enticing destination was Ireland, which for them, as for Elizabeth Bowen, seemed to offer a tranquillity and ease that was now lacking in England. In fact the Irish economy was no stronger than the British economy. Unemployment was high and the cold winter of 1946 caused fuel shortages in Ireland as well as Britain. Bread rationing was imposed in January 1947. Strikes were threatened, and in June 1947 de Valera told the trade union representatives that the government would reluctantly ‘take whatever steps it felt necessary to protect bread supply’. But for Graham Greene and Henry Yorke as well as for their mutual friend Evelyn Waugh, the country’s economic and social problems remained hidden. They appreciated the continued old-world luxury of the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin and the apparent plenty of rural Ireland.

  Evelyn Waugh made several visits to Ireland in the autumn of 1946, hoping to buy a Big House or castle in which to hide away. That November he mentioned ‘constantly recurring’ thoughts of Ireland in his diary.

  Not so much of what I should find there as what I should shake off here. The luxury of being a foreigner, of completely retiring from further experience and settling in an upstairs library to garner the forty-three-year harvest.

  He was certain that Britain as a great power was done for and that the loss of possessions and claim of the ‘proletariat’ to be a ‘privileged race’ would produce increasing poverty. He told Winston Churchill’s son Randolph in December 1946 that he was negotiating to buy a castle in Ireland where he hoped to find ‘brief shelter from the Attlee terror’. In the end he did not buy the castle. Six years later Nancy Mitford remarked to him that ‘total to me is the mystery why you don’t live in Ireland’. It was made for him, with its pretty houses, cold wetness, low income tax, polite lower classes and uncompromising Roman Catholicism.

  Ireland was made, too, for Henry Yorke, who visited the country twice in 1947. Yorke had always been fond of Ireland, having fished there as a boy. Even the 1938 holiday had been pleasurable until the Munich crisis made it too difficult to continue. Before the war the Yorkes had stayed regularly with the Earl of Rosse at his eighteenth-century Gothic house, Birr Castle, in County Offaly, which some claim as the original of Kinalty, the house in Loving. Now Yorke was curious to see how Ireland had fared in the war, having described it from an imaginative distance in his novel.

  In Loving Yorke shows the English servants to be contemptuous of Irish neutrality. ‘The war’s on now all right,’ Kate says to the other servants, ‘and do these rotten Irish care? They make me sick.’ ‘It’s too bloody neutral this country is,’ Raunce tells Edith, revealing that his mother thinks they are ‘’iding ourselves away in this neutral country’. And his boy Albert goes so far as to return to England to join up as a soldier. But any patriotism Henry Yorke himself had felt during the war had dissipated by 1947 and he, like Waugh, was keen to make the most of the positive consequences of neutrality. In May, Dig had jaundice, so Henry took her and Sebastian to Dublin for eight days to recuperate. They stayed, like Bowen, Waugh and Greene on their nights in Dublin, in the Shelbourne Hotel. Bowen in particular was fond of the Shelbourne, reporting to Charles Ritchie after a visit to Dublin in November 1945 that ‘the dear Shelbourne was very much the same’. In her 1951 history of the hotel she commended it for carrying on its own ‘impassive, cheerful, wonderfully unchanged life throughout changing, sometimes distressful times’. Yorke too welcomed the unchanged luxury of the hotel, which contrasted refreshingly with the seedy London pubs where he now spent a large part of his days.

  In September 1947 Henry Yorke took Dig and Sebastian to the Shelton Abbey Hotel in County Wicklow, on the coast between Dublin and Bowen’s Court. This was a holiday which he described to Matthew Smith as ‘a complete success’. But he remained disengaged, both from the countryside and his family. Since the affair with Mary had waned he had rarely experienced anything passionately. His enjoyment of Ireland was very different from his happiness during that first holiday in Suffolk with Mary and Matthew, where he had felt like a donkey dropping its burden. Now his pervasive sense was one of apprehension. They were living in a large Victorian mansion, eating six-course meals and looking out onto a pageant of every shade of green. But Henry was finding the surroundings eerily desolate. There were no birds, rabbits or fish to be seen, and the only noise was the sound of a railway engine. ‘Sebastian and Dig are the only things that hold me to life,’ he told Matthew; ‘they laugh and giggle all day long and do not notice.’ And he blamed Ireland itself for his own troubled detachment: ‘The thing about Ireland is that it is cursed. That is probably true about all of us, and we may only notice it when over here.’

  Graham Greene’s visit to Ireland in April 1947 was one of the defining moments of his life. He flew to Dublin and then drove to Achill Island in County Mayo, just off the coast from Castlebar and a day’s drive north-west from Bowen’s Court. There he spent a week in a small cottage rented by Catherine Walston, a rich American socialite with film-star looks, impetuous vitality and candid sexuality. For most of the year Catherine was in charge of Thriplow Farm near Cambridge, one of the most extravagantly luxurious houses in post-war England, where she lived with her five children and her husband, Harry Walston, a rich gentleman farmer, civil servant and future Labour candidate. But occasionally she would retreat to this small, white, three-room cottage in Ireland, which looked out onto barren, wind-shorn grass and an empty bay. Together, Graham and Catherine filled up buckets of turf for the fire, baked bread, ate boiled eggs and made love on a mattress on the floor. For the first time in months, Graham was writing without difficulty; for the first time in years he had found peace. In a poem written in 1949 he depicted this as a revelatory entry into a new world:

  A mattress was spread on a cottage floor,

  And the door closed on a world, but another door

  Opened, and I was far

  From all the world I had ever known.

  Graham was ready to close the door on the old world. In his autobiography, he described 1946 as a year when he felt himself at a loss. He was finding it difficult to write, chiefly because the booby-traps he had planted in his private life were blowing up one by one. He had always thought that war would bring death as a solution, but instead he was alive, causing unhappiness to people he loved and frequenting brothels once again. Like Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, the book he was struggling to write, Graham Greene contemplated suicide. But in fact salvation came through love instead of death, and it was a love that would result in his most passionate novel, The End of the Affair, and that would bring him some of the most intensely happy and also the most anguished moments of his life.

  Catherine was twelve years younger than Graham and had come into his life the previous summer as his would-be goddaughter. On the verge of converting t
o Catholicism, she wrote to tell him how crucial his novels had been in her decision and to ask if he would take the part of godfather. Too busy to play more than a nominal role in the proceedings, Graham sent Vivien to the christening in his stead. On 25 September he wrote Catherine a belated congratulatory note, confessing to being a neglectful godfather – he had not even sent her a silver mug – and conveying her all best wishes for the future. She replied with an enticing description of Achill Island; Graham suggested that she should come to tell them all about the west of Ireland when she was back. He was in fact genuinely curious about Ireland. Earlier in the year he had written to Evelyn Waugh saying that he was keen to go to Ireland, because he liked the Irish and approved so strongly of their recent neutrality, and complaining that Vivien had an anti-Irish phobia, so he would not be able to go. Soon he would make plans to go to Ireland with Dorothy the following May.

  Vivien Greene (top right) at the christening of Catherine Walston (bottom left)

  Graham and Catherine finally met in the autumn. They had a drink in London, where Catherine was intrigued by Graham’s descriptions of excursions to the nude revues at the Windmill Theatre. Then in December Catherine invited Graham to come to lunch with her family at Thriplow Farm. Evelyn Waugh, visiting Thriplow with Greene in 1948, described it to Nancy Mitford as ‘an extraordinary house’, which revealed ‘a side of life I never saw before – very rich, Cambridge, Jewish, socialist, highbrow, scientific, farming’:

  There were Picassos on sliding panels and when you pushed them back plate glass and a stable with a stallion looking at one. No servants. Lovely Carolean silver unpolished. Gourmets’ wine and cigars. The house a series of wood bungalows, more bathrooms than bedrooms. The hostess at six saying ‘I say shall we have dinner tonight as Evelyn’s here. Usually we only have Shredded Wheat. I’ll see what there is.’ Goes to tiny kitchenette and comes back. ‘Well there’s grouse, partridges, ham, a leg of mutton and half a cold goose’ (literally). ‘What does anyone want?’ Then a children’s nannie dining with us called ‘Twinkle’ dressed with tremendous starched frills and celluloid collars, etc and everyone talking to her about lesbianism and masturbation. House telephone so that generally people don’t bother to meet but just telephone from room to room.

  Waugh described Catherine as ‘barefooted and mostly squatting on the floor. Fine big eyes and mouth, unaffected to the verge of insanity, unvain, no ostentation – simple friendliness and generosity and childish curiosity.’ Her sister Belinda later said that Catherine was someone who people always felt compelled to look at:

  She had a marvellous carriage, for one thing. She held her head high. She was dark-haired, sort of an auburn colour – and wonderful eyes and – short hair – and cheekbones that were fine cheekbones, rather widely spaced eyes, dark eyebrows, and she wore her clothes with great flair. She never showed that she was frightened of anything.

  Her style, according to the art historian and director of the Tate Gallery John Rothenstein, who was a mutual friend of Catherine and Graham’s, was that of ‘a Marie-Antoinette in elegant jeans or (according to the season) jodhpurs’. And Rothenstein described Catherine at this time as an intelligent woman bent on self-improvement. During the war, after remarking on the narrowness of Catherine’s reading, he was challenged to produce a reading list. Once he had done so, Catherine read and reread her way through it. At this point, she was not religious. Rothenstein took her to mass occasionally and had to explain to her the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. There had been signs, though, that she was attracted to Catholicism. Her intellectual and religious education had been furthered by a reading of Greene’s novels, and she was now ready to continue her education with Graham himself.

  Catherine Walston

  Initially, Graham was impressed by Catherine’s glamour and wealth, but assumed that she was too beautiful to love. ‘I had no idea whatever of falling in love with her,’ Bendrix states of Sarah in The End of the Affair. ‘For one thing, she was beautiful, and beautiful women, especially if they are intelligent also, stir some deep feeling of inferiority in me.’ Love, when it came, was the result of a journey home in a low-flying plane. Lunch finished at three o’clock; it would be eight o’clock by the time that Graham arrived back in Oxford by train. ‘Why not fly?’ Catherine suggested. ‘I’ll come over with you and fly back.’ They drove to the local aerodrome and boarded a tiny plane. After a 45 minute flight over snowy countryside they landed in Kidlington, just outside Oxford.

  Since childhood, Graham had been thrilled by the idea of flying. Aged seven, when asked to state his greatest aim in life for the school magazine, he had responded that it was to go up in an aeroplane. Now, flying in a private plane with a beautiful woman beside him, he succumbed to the erotic charge of the adventure and of her hair, blown against her face. ‘The act of creation’, he wrote to Catherine the following September, ‘is awfully odd and inexplicable like falling in love. A lock of hair touches one’s eyes in a plane with East Anglia under snow and one is in love.’ Again and again, he came back to the plane journey as a moment of discovery. In April 1949 he told Catherine that he was experiencing the same kind of in-love feeling as after the plane ride to Oxford, as though he had never made love to her and longed instead to hold hands at a movie. Revisiting it a year later, he could not believe that the plane trip was not designed. And in 1955, writing a book called 110 Airports, he regretted that he would have to omit the most important: Cambridge, snow on the ground and Catherine’s hair blown across his nose.

  If the moment of falling in love occurred on the plane journey in December 1946, then love itself developed during the April 1947 trip to Achill. Looking back in 1949, he wondered if they would have done more than begin without their time in Ireland. Achill had set a seal of time and place on their love. He would always recall Achill as a place where, removed from the luxury of Thriplow and the paraphernalia of their daily lives, he and Catherine could see each other clearly. He came back repeatedly to the simplicity of the cottage itself as a setting that enabled a shared unmasking of two people who were habitually masked; he by his reticence and shyness, she by the effervescence of her public persona and by the cushioning luxury of her usual settings.

  Returning home, Graham missed Catherine intensely and became exhausted by the strain of lying simultaneously to both Vivien and Dorothy. Since Graham’s lunch at Thriplow in December, Vivien had been coldly polite to Catherine and possessive and suspicious of Graham. At Christmas, Catherine had sent the Greenes a turkey as a present. This was a great luxury in an age of rationing, but Vivien, unwilling to accept charity from her husband’s beautiful goddaughter, gave it away to the nuns. Dorothy, meanwhile, was more self-righteously demanding than Vivien. Soon after his return Graham reported to Catherine that Dorothy was complaining that he had changed in Ireland, although she still believed it was merely that he had come under the influence of a pious convert. He was dreading taking Dorothy on the long-promised holiday to Ireland, of all places, in the middle of May. He had been dreaming about Catherine (‘woke up blissfully happy. You had been with me very vividly saying, “I like your sexy smell” – and of course I had a sexy smell! It had been one of those nights!’) and hated the idea of seeing Dublin with someone else.

  Greene’s visit to Ireland with Dorothy in May coincided with the first of Henry Yorke’s post-war trips to Ireland. Greene’s mood was not dissimilar from Yorke’s; this was a holiday dominated by drink and emotional detachment. Writing to Catherine, Graham complained that this was both a second-rate Ireland and a second-rate squalor. He and Dorothy had lunched at Jammet’s and then escaped to the countryside. Before Graham’s departure, Catherine had wished jealously that both he and Dorothy would be horribly ill while they were away and now her wish had come true: he had sweated all night with a bad fever and a splitting headache. Despite this, much sense had been talked between coughs; Graham was trying to persuade Dorothy to move on away from him. He asked Catherine if he could
have a week at Thriplow on his return to recuperate from his so-called ‘holiday’ and finish his novel.

  Before he could retreat to Thriplow, Graham was hosting a party for the French writer François Mauriac, who was receiving an honorary degree in Oxford. It was a large literary party for which Graham provided the drinks and Vivien was expected to supply the food. For Graham, it was partly a chance to see Catherine, and to introduce her to literary friends such as Rosamond Lehmann. For Vivien, who found it impossible to supply snacks given the stringencies of rationing (they had only two ounces of butter a week), the task was unmanageable. And the difficulty of preparing for the party was compounded by the humiliation she suffered during the party itself, at which Graham was too focused on Catherine to introduce his wife to any of the guests. Vivien later described how Graham led Catherine into the garden where he sat talking to her in front of the French windows. Vivien, who did not know anyone at the party, went to ask him to come and help pouring drinks. ‘I’m not the butler,’ he retorted.

  The next day, Vivien obtained her revenge and forbade Graham from spending the following week at Thriplow. Graham persuaded her to let him go from Friday until Tuesday on condition that he spent all his future weekends in Oxford. He complained to Catherine that he felt like a cornered rat; he did not want to live permanently in handcuffs. Rather melodramatically, he was wondering about killing himself, and asked rhetorically if the ban on suicide only lasted for the first three years of an insurance policy.

  On Catherine’s side, there was no need for negotiation or subterfuge. Like Graham and Vivien, Catherine and Harry Walston had had no sex for many years. But unlike the Greenes, the Walstons had come to an ‘arrangement’, allowing both of them (but more often Catherine) to have lovers. This left them happier than they had been to start off with. Initially, Catherine had married Harry without love. On the day of her wedding, Catherine admitted to her sister Bonte that she was only marrying Harry to escape their family and small-town America. In 1969 she told her sister Belinda that at the time she married Harry she had decided that ‘if I found anyone I liked better, I would leave Harry and marry X’. But she added that although their ‘sex life broke down before it hardly got started’, this did not matter as they had become ‘very loving friends, almost twins – brother and sister’ and she could now ‘not live without him, without his compassion, his fondness, justice, humour, willingness’. Certainly, Harry allowed Catherine a tremendous amount of freedom. Their friend Lady Melchett later reported to Greene’s biographer that even with Harry in the house Catherine would say things like, ‘You know, Graham and I were in bed all day and all night – that’s why I’m feeling a bit jaded.’

 

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