The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  ‘saving resort’: EB, preface to The Demon Lover and Other Stories (The Mulberry Tree).

  ‘By moonlight’: William Sansom, The Blitz: Westminster at War (London: Faber, 2010), p. 49.

  ‘most beautiful’: RM to Jean Macaulay, 6 September 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘We at least’: EB, review of The People’s War (The Mulberry Tree).

  ‘through the particular’: EB, preface to The Demon Lover and Other Stories (The Mulberry Tree).

  ‘the only non-groupy’: EB to William Plomer, 6 May 1958 (The Mulberry Tree).

  ‘imaginary but nevertheless’: John Lehmann, I Am My Brother (London: Longmans, 1960), pp. 169–73.

  Newsreel

  ‘plywood under his skylight’: see GG to VG, 30 August 1939 (VG Bod).

  ‘if necessary for years’: Winston Churchill, speech, 18 June 1940, War Speeches, 1939–45, compiled by Charles Eade (London: Cassell & Co, 1951–2).

  ‘The prospect of invasion’: HS, diary, 2 May 1940 (HS NLV).

  ‘German parachutists’: see Juliet Gardiner, Wartime: Britain 1939–1945 (London: Headline, 2005), p. 222.

  ‘1333 people’: see Richard Overy, The Battle of Britain: Myth and Reality (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 83.

  ‘There are two corrections’: J. B. Priestley, broadcast, 9 July 1940, Britain Speaks (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940).

  ‘Why doesn’t he come?’: in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London: The Folio Society, 1995), vol. 3, p. 170.

  ‘many-coloured flares’: J. B. Priestley, broadcast, 4 September 1940, Britain Speaks.

  ‘the Führer has decided’: in Juliet Gardiner, The Blitz: The British Under Attack (London: HarperCollins 2011), p. 7.

  ‘when the western skies’: William Sansom, The Blitz: Westminster at War (London: Faber, 2010), p. 27.

  ‘I’ve fought fires’: HY to Rosamond Lehmann, 11 September 1940 (RL KC).

  ‘I hear little by little’: RM to Jean Macaulay, 8 September 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘Scraps of cloth’: Virginia Woolf, diary, 10 September 1940, The Diary of Virginia Woolf , ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1977–1984).

  ‘We have need of all’: Virginia Woolf, diary, 18 September 1940 (The Diary of Virginia Woolf).

  ‘When your flat went’: EB to Virginia Woolf, 5 January 1941, The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, 1999).

  ‘Hitler expects’: Churchill, speech, 11 September 1940 (War Speeches).

  ‘momentous sound’: Sansom, The Blitz, pp. 34–5.

  ‘less fearful in dealing with fire’: ibid., p. 24.

  ‘the quality of service’: J. B. Priestley, broadcast, 10 September 1940 (Britain Speaks).

  ‘To work or think’: EB, HoD, ch. 5.

  ‘How fantastic life has’: RM to Jean Macaulay, 11 September 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘out in the wide world’: Sansom, The Blitz, p. 49.

  1: 7 p.m.: Blackout

  ‘Through the railings’: EB, ‘London, 1940’, The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, 1999).

  ‘local authorities had decided’: see Westminster, CD114.

  ‘walking in the darkness’: EB, preface to The Demon Lover and Other Stories (The Mulberry Tree).

  ‘casualties due to blackout’: see Vera Brittain, England’s Hour (London: Continuum, 2005), ch. 4.

  ‘new sense somewhere between’: ibid.

  ‘Greene was based’: see GG, Ways of Escape (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), ch. 4.

  ‘like a street in a city’: EB to Noreen Butler, September 1940, in Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen (London: Phoenix paperbacks, 1993), p. 133.

  ‘I had always placed’: EB, ‘London, 1940’ (The Mulberry Tree).

  ‘200 cigarettes’: ibid.

  ‘as appalling a night’: EB to Noreen Butler, September 1940 (in Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 133).

  ‘after black-out we keep’: EB, ‘London, 1940’ (The Mulberry Tree).

  ‘I do ap-p-pologise’: see John Sutherland, Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 271.

  ‘The sound of the Boche’: EB to Noreen Butler, September 1940 (in Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 133).

  ‘The very soil of the city’: EB, HoD, ch. 5.

  ‘twinship with one’s century’: EB, A Time in Rome (London: Vintage, 2010), ch. 3.

  ‘the fateful course’: EB, HoD, ch. 7.

  ‘a pink, rattled’: EB, ‘A Year I Remember – 1918’, Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

  ‘an impression of abounding’: Rosamond Lehmann, letter correcting obituary of Elizabeth Bowen (RL KC).

  ‘Hers was a handsome face’: May Sarton, A World of Light (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 193.

  ‘It is possible that Elizabeth’s’: EB, B’s C, ch. 9.

  ‘a kind of protracted debauch’: Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, vol. 2: The Infernal Grove (London: Collins, 1973), p. 104.

  ‘depressive when the bombs’: GG, interview, 1975 in Henry Donaghy (ed.), Conversations with Graham Greene (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), p. 95.

  ‘which Greene admired’: see GG, ‘Lightning Tour’, Spectator, 13 June 1941.

  ‘the instant that an individual’: John Strachey, Post D, Some Experiences of an Air Raid Warden (London: Gollancz, 1941), p. 18.

  ‘air raids were much less trying’: EB, autobiographical note, 1948 (EB HRC).

  ‘we were a generation’: ibid., ch. 2ii.

  ‘he dreamed that he was Wilfred Owen’: see GG, A World of my Own: A Dream Diary (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 44.

  ‘we young writers’: Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (London: The Hogarth Press, 1938), p. 74.

  ‘I can’t help wishing’: GG to VG, undated (GG HRC).

  ‘Russian roulette’: see GG, ‘The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard’, The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951).

  ‘expected for so long’: GG, ‘At Home’, Collected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).

  ‘If war were only’: GG, ‘One Man’s War’, Spectator, 6 December 1940.

  ‘faint susurrus of the’: GG to VG, August 1939 (VG Bod).

  ‘suffer that word’: GG, Ways of Escape, ch. 3ii.

  ‘scientific formulae scrawled’: Muggeridge, The Infernal Grove, p. 78.

  ‘high heartless buildings’: GG, ‘Men at Work’, Penguin New Writing, 1942.

  ‘Greene tried to persuade Waugh’: see Evelyn Waugh, diary, 28 May 1940, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (London: Phoenix, 2009).

  ‘the possibility of throwing stigmata’: see Muggeridge, The Infernal Grove, p. 78.

  ‘there was something rather’: ibid., p. 103.

  ‘for persons of courage’: ‘Air Raid Precautions Training Manual’ (Westminster, CD149.1).

  ‘a quite unnecessary’: Violet Bonham Carter, ‘Air-raid Wardens’ Claims’, Spectator, 8 November 1940.

  ‘mere cant’: Strachey, Post D, p. 23.

  ‘Those who don’t like scratchy’: EB, ‘Britain, 1940’, People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

  ‘We wardens were of all’: EB, autobiographical note, 1948 (EB HRC).

  ‘instantly pop open’: EB, draft typescript of HoD (EB HRC).

  ‘exchange of searching’: EB, ‘Britain, 1940’ (People, Places, Things).

  ‘This is a people’s war’: GG, ‘The Cinema’, Spectator, 29 September 1939.

  ‘unembittered humour’: GG, ‘The Theatre’, Spectator, 1 November 1940.

  ‘heroic raconteur’: GG, Ways of Escape, ch. 4i.

  ‘as though the proximity’: GG, interview in Marie-Françoise Allain, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 19
84), p. 129.

  ‘Molly Hawthorn’: GG, ‘The Londoners’, The Month, November 1951.

  ‘dragging, drumming, slowly’: EB, HoD, ch. 5.

  ‘There is the distant drumfire’: Harold Nicolson, diary, 24 September 1940, Diaries and Letters 1939–45, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Collins, 1967).

  ‘The incendiaries sounded’: see Barbara Nixon, Raiders Overhead, A Diary of the London Blitz (London: Scolar Press, 1980), p. 35.

  ‘it was possible for one aeroplane’: see ‘Air Raids: What you must know and what you must do’ (Westminster, CD175).

  ‘The Home Office had’: see Mike Brown, Put That Light Out! Britain’s Civil Defence Services at War 1939–1945 (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999), p. 88.

  ‘incendiaries could be regarded’: see Strachey, Post D, p. 62.

  ‘there were a pair of skiing sticks’: GG, ‘At Home’ (Collected Essays).

  ‘Of course we were painting’: Inez Holden, It was Different at the Time (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1943), p. 69.

  2: 10 p.m.: Fire

  ‘Eighty German aircraft’: see Nat Arch, AIR 16/432.

  ‘Faith in tables’: RM to Jean Macaulay, 23 September 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘phobia of being buried’: ibid.

  ‘government decrees had stipulated’: see London Met, Ambulance Box 6.

  ‘My God, what a world’: RM to Rosamond Lehmann, 10 September 1939 (RL KC).

  ‘a great stroke of luck’: RM to Jean Macaulay, 26 September 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘any exercise or instruction’: memo, 21 September 1940 (London Met, Ambulance Box 52).

  ‘I like my ambulance colleagues’: RM to Virginia Woolf, 10 October 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘Sub-station 345V’: see HG, ‘Before the Great Fire’, Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green (London: Harvill, 1993).

  ‘an eccentric, fire-fighting’: Rosamond Lehmann, ‘An Absolute Gift’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 August 1954.

  ‘Quite well but sleep’: HY to Rosamond Lehmann, 11 September 1940 (RL KC).

  ‘to work myself silly’: HY to Mary Strickland, 10 March 1939, in Jeremy Treglown, Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green (London: Faber, 2000), p. 125.

  ‘the seven-thousandth fireman’: see HG, ‘Before the Great Fire’ (Surviving).

  ‘not likely to fall down’: ibid.

  ‘a course that no one failed’: ibid.

  ‘likely enough to die’: HG, Pack My Bag (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 153.

  ‘what seems to be the alternative’: HY to Evelyn Waugh, 14 October 1939 (Waugh Archive, HRC).

  ‘the AFS was a suicide squad’: see HG, ‘Before the Great Fire’ (Surviving).

  ‘All that was real to him’: HG, Caught (London: Harvill Press, 2001), p. 25.

  ‘three years after one war’: HG, Pack My Bag, p. 1.

  ‘We who must die soon’: ibid., p. 92.

  ‘Old ladies gave’: HG, Caught, p. 47.

  ‘His life in the Fire Brigade’: Evelyn Waugh, diary, 26 November 1939, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (London: Phoenix, 2009).

  ‘Fire fighting is a waiting’: HG, ‘Before the Great Fire’ (Surviving).

  ‘For forty-eight hours’: HG, Caught, p. 21.

  ‘We come here ready for’: ibid., p. 93.

  ‘the Fire Service, now that’: HY, draft typescript of Caught (HY archive).

  ‘a group of progressive novelists’: Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen (London: Chapman & Hall, 1955), ch. 1.

  ‘it was a particular tradition’: see William Sansom, The Blitz: Westminster at War (London: Faber, 2010), p. 121.

  ‘However frightened, they are’: HG, ‘Before the Great Fire’ (Surviving).

  ‘We’re absolute heroes now’: HG, Caught, p. 176.

  ‘judge of my delight’: HG, ‘A Fire, a Flood and the Price of Meat’ (Surviving).

  ‘Who are you going out with tonight’: see Trapped: The Story of Henry Green (BBC documentary, 1992).

  ‘the writer, our kind’: HY to Rosamond Lehmann, in Lehmann, ‘An Absolute Gift’.

  ‘well-read, articulate’: James Lees-Milne, Fourteen Friends (London: John Murray, 1996), p. 123.

  ‘The men, I loved them’: HY, interview with the Star, 15 June 1929.

  ‘how little money meant’: see HG, Pack My Bag, p. 154.

  ‘Yorke was as happy’: see Anthony Powell, Messengers of Day (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 25.

  ‘The behaviour of my AFS unit’: HY to Mary Strickland, 10 July 1940, in Treglown, Romancing, p. 125.

  ‘putting the light out’: HG, Caught, pp. 45, 145.

  ‘In his dirt, his tiredness’: HG, ibid., pp. 49, 46, 161.

  ‘semi-military discipline’: see Sansom, The Blitz, p. 121.

  ‘Shortly after 11 p.m.’: see Westminster, CD25.

  ‘Everywhere the searchlights clustered’: Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen, ch. 1.

  ‘Yorke sat forward in his seat’: see HG, ‘A Rescue’ (Surviving).

  ‘Three more HEs’: see Westminster, CE38.

  ‘A 1940 air-raid manual’: ‘Air Raid Precautions Training Manual’ (Westminster, CD149.1).

  ‘Yorke always had difficulty’: see HG, ‘Mr Jonas’ (Surviving).

  ‘This gripped by the throat’: HG, ‘Before the Great Fire’ (Surviving).

  ‘had come upon a place’: HG, ‘Mr Jonas’ (Surviving).

  ‘a roaring red gold’: HG, Caught, pp. 178, 181.

  ‘Yelling and receiving instructions’: see HG, ‘Mr Jonas’ (Surviving).

  3: 1 a.m.: Rescue

  ‘gradually brought under control’: see Nat Arch, AIR 16/432.

  ‘cars crashed all night’: RM, Life Among the English (London: Collins, 1942), p. 47.

  ‘To propel a car’: RM, Personal Pleasures (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935), ‘Driving a Car’.

  ‘the other cars’: ibid., ‘Fastest on Earth’.

  ‘if he dies’: Jean Macaulay, interview in Constance Babington Smith, Rose Macaulay: A Biography (London: Collins, 1972), p. 151.

  ‘I knew about’: RM, ToT, ch. 25.

  ‘he had given me his love’: ibid.

  ‘an acute irritation’: John Strachey, Post D, Some Experiences of an Air Raid Warden (London: Gollancz, 1941), p. 78.

  ‘Dust liquefies’: RM, ‘Notes on the Way’, Time and Tide, 5 October 1940.

  ‘very nice and matey’: RM to Jean Macaulay, 27 September 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘Sorry Miss’: RM, ‘Notes on the Way’.

  ‘fifteen bomber planes returned’: see Nat Arch, AIR 16/432.

  ‘This adds to his comfort’: memo, 22 November 1939 (London Met, Ambulance Box 38).

  ‘tended to vomit’: Jean Macaulay in Babington Smith, Rose Macaulay, p. 78.

  ‘an infinitely incapable’: RM, Told by an Idiot (London: Collins, 1965), part 4, second period, ch. 2.

  ‘thinking it led on’: RM, Non-Combatants and Others (London: Capuchin Classics, 2010), chs 3i, 9v.

  ‘A Watford-based volunteer’: see Angela Raby, The Forgotten Service: Auxiliary Ambulance Station 39 (London: After the Battle, 1999).

  ‘eight ambulance drivers’: see London Met, Ambulance Box 73.

  ‘It is all in the night’s’: RM to Jean Macaulay, 27 September 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘It’s like this every night’: RM, ‘Notes on the Way’.

  ‘not to be too vivid’: RM to Virginia Woolf, 10 October 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘mortified elephant’: RM to Daniel George, 30 August 1939 (RM TC).

  ‘I am improving’: RM to Jean Macaulay, 25 June 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘it will be hateful’: RM to Rosamond Lehmann, 10 September 1939 (RL KC).

  ‘fell dumb in the’: RM, ‘The Garden’, Poems of Today, 1915.

  ‘rich earth’: Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’, Poems of Today, 1915.

  ‘who walked about’: RM, ‘Coming to London’, John Lehmann (ed.), Coming to London (London: Phoenix House Ltd, 1957).

&nb
sp; ‘the death at the war’: RM to Katharine Tynan, 25 December 1915, in Sarah LeFanu, Rose Macaulay (London: Virago, 2003), p. 112.

  ‘As I can’t be fighting’: RM, Non-Combatants and Others, ch. 16vi.

  ‘on the side of the angels’: Victor Gollancz, Reminiscences of Affection (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968), p. 82.

  ‘I hate party politics’: RM in ibid.

  ‘a lot of wrongs’: RM, Dangerous Ages (London: Collins, 1921), ch. 7v.

  ‘Our civilisation’: RM, An Open Letter (London: The Peace Pledge Union, 1937).

  ‘Oh it’s you that have’: RM, ‘Many Sisters to Many Brothers’, Poems of Today, 1915.

  ‘things happening across’: RM, Non-Combatants and Others, ch. 2v.

  ‘Oh, what does one mean’: RM, And No Man’s Wit (London: Collins, 1940), pp. 315–16.

  ‘If Nazism really’: RM to Jean Macaulay, 14 September 1939 (RM TC).

  ‘an appalling indictment’: RM to Jean Macaulay, undated, 1939 (RM TC).

  ‘very well again’: RM to Jean Macaulay, 3 October 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘blind, maniac, primitive’: RM, ‘Notes on the Way’.

  ‘only in the ambulance services’: see RM, unfinished and untitled article, 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘I think this is a good thing’: RM to Jean Macaulay, 28 August 1939 (RM TC).

  ‘I rather wish’: RM to Jean Macaulay, 11 September 1940 (RM TC).

  ‘There is so little time’: RM to Virginia Woolf, 10 October 1940 (RM TC).

  4: 6 a.m.: All Clear

  ‘481 fires’: see London Met, FB/WAR/3/10.

  ‘glaring deficiencies’: Dorothea Fox to Ellen Wilkinson, 23 November 1940 (Nat Arch, HO207/995).

  ‘since those days’: HS, DaB, p. 127.

  ‘because of the daily example’: HS, ‘Psychologie des Exils’, 1975, Kleine Schritte: Berichte und Geschichten (München: Heinrich Ellermann, 1976).

  ‘almost sure to collapse’: ‘Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter’ (Westminster, CD174).

  ‘Foreign faces about’: EB, preface to The Demon Lover and Other Stories, The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, 1999).

  ‘the socialist torchlit march’: see HS, DaB, p. 56.

  ‘a climate of the most’: ibid., p. 41.

  ‘definitely the man for me’: HS, diary, 1934 (in DaB, p. 74).