Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  In the autumn of 1940, the Badminton girls were evacuated from Bristol to a seaside hotel in a village called Lynton in Devon. Bernard took a dim view of Wendy’s going back to Bristol twice a week with BMB to have cello lessons, since that city was getting almost as severe a pounding as London. “I hardly think,” he wrote on October 14, “two concentrated ’Cello lessons are worth Wendy’s possible safety.” But Win thought it was essential for Wendy to carry on with her music, Blitz or no Blitz. After all, she wrote, “we must equip our children for a future peace time and Wendy’s ’cello will definitely be one of her assets.”

  Hilary’s twin brother, Roger, was at a prep school called St. Edmund’s in Hindhead, Surrey, run by a headmaster named Mr. Bully. The school building, a huge Victorian country house, had once been rented out to George Bernard Shaw. One of the unusual features of St. Edmund’s was that it had a nine-hole golf course, an extraordinary luxury for small boys. Since Hindhead was located halfway between London and Portsmouth, German bombers would have made a nightly appearance. Win wrote that of all their children, Roger suffered most from the constant air raids and sirens.

  John, in a remoter part of England, was safer from the bombs, but still felt persecuted by other boys. Many decades later, at his house in Sussex, he showed me photographs of his time at Uppingham. Freshly combed boys in school blazers lined up in neat rows behind the housemaster, with John looking rather morose. He pointed at a tall figure with wavy brown hair, and remembered him with affection as the “school slut.” Memories of nights spent in bed together engaging in various experiments came flooding back. Sleeping with boys, he said, was the one aspect of public school life that made him feel included. None of this, of course, is in any of his letters home.

  Bernard was stationed at a girls’ boarding school called Benenden, in Kent, on a grand estate that once belonged to William the Conquerer’s half brother. The girls had evacuated the rather bombastic mock-Jacobean Victorian building, after which it was turned into a military hospital. During the summer of 1940, before the Blitz had actually started, Bernard was frankly bored, feeling sidelined, useless, away from any meaningful action, especially since the hospital still had no patients. His duties, among other things, included buying colored napkins in London for the officers’ mess, and having meetings with the man in charge of the local Home Guard, a keen botanist who spent most of his time nursing specimens of Japanese cherry trees.

  The hospital in Benenden, in the way Bernard describes it, still sounds like a boarding school: the petty jealousies and rivalries among the medical personnel, the tiresome commanding officer known as “the Beak,” a word I first came across in boys’ comic books in the 1950s about English boarding school life. “It’s a simply gorgeous day,” writes Bernard on July 28, “and as I sit here on this seat overlooking these stately grounds with no sound but the flies buzzing round, a woodpecker in the neighbouring tree & the distant crack of cricket balls, I can hardly imagine that we are all at war & that the world is still so mad, & that perforce we have to remain separated indefinitely.”

  Curiously, one of the first patients to be treated at Benenden was a German airman shot down in the Battle of Britain. Bernard’s descriptions of the battle, which lasted until late September, read a little like reviews of a sporting event. A letter from September 9 mentions having “a front stall view” of several “thrilling” fights. I can picture him, sitting in a deck chair on the vast Benenden terrace, pipe clenched in his mouth, a stiff drink at hand, watching the Spitfires and Messerschmitts circling overhead leaving puffy white vapor trails in the perfect late-summer sky: “It was a good score yesterday, 9 for 17 and apparently 40 bombers among the Bosch losses!”

  “Last night,” he continues in this same letter of September 12, “I watched Underwood perform a very slick and life-saving pulmonary operation on a Bosch airman—which was more than he really deserved.”

  Win’s reply on the sixteenth is equally robust: “I am so glad that you are all busy on your proper jobs at last—and that the casualties are mainly German. That is excellent news. What a brilliant day’s work yesterday. I don’t think this has been such a good month for Hitler after all.”

  The extraordinary thing—or perhaps it wasn’t so extraordinary, really—is how life carried on while the fate of Britain was being decided in the skies. A week before the German airman’s life was saved, there was a dance party for the Benenden staff, which, Bernard reports, “went off well despite the continuous drone of Jerry planes overhead and the flash of many searchlights. I was orderly officer and spent most of my time seeing that the blackout was efficient. Somehow I was not in the mood for dancing & so did not appear on the floor but retired to bed fairly early and listened to a performance of the Fauré Piano Quartet instead.”

  The German pilot, after reviving from his operation, told Bernard that he had been treated better than he would have been in any German hospital. Hitler, he now realized, had obviously been telling lies about Britain. Bernard was suitably impressed. A few letters later, on September 24, Bernard returns to the subject of German airmen, this time in a somewhat cryptic manner. “Many of the German airmen brought down,” he writes, “are found to be carrying ‘what nots’—you know purple sachet things. They must think they are coming here to find [England] well occupied by their own troops. On finding out his mistake one fellow gave it to one of the troops saying that he would have more use for it than himself.”

  I looked up “what not” in various dictionaries, finding out from one of them that “what not” was sometimes used as a slang expression for male genitals. This cannot be the case here. I consulted Jonathan Green, the world’s greatest expert on English slang. Even he was nonplussed. The only plausible conclusion I can draw is that the airmen carried condoms, for which they would have found little use in the POW camps.

  There is no mention of “what nots” in Win’s reply on the thirtieth. Instead, she gives in to one of her periodic moments of despair, the kind of thing she took exception to when it came from the “foreign bohunks” living in their house in London. The problem was not so much the bombs, which had been falling around Kintbury too; she and her youngest, Susan, had to hide from the air raids in a tunnel. But she misses Bernard dreadfully and feels “wretchedly depressed.” The war, she writes, “looks ever more endless & complicated & the odds are continually piling up against us, and I just can’t see any future for us, or feel any conviction in settling down with you to real family life again. I am so frightened that the 7th C.C.S. [Bernard’s unit] will be packed off to the East at any moment now, with things blowing up to a crisis over there. My darling, I want you so, & I just can’t bear this endless, & ever more endless separation.”

  Like many people, but in her case perhaps more than most people, Win was desperately keen to be of some use: “I feel such a skunk doing no war work when everyone round here is doing their bit.” In fact, in June she had retrieved her old VAD nurse’s uniform from the mothballs and tried it on “in readiness” (she was pleased to note that it still fit her). She also volunteered to work as a nurse for the Red Cross earlier in 1940, but was turned down. She explains why in a letter on June 26: “Isn’t it the limit about the Red Cross business. One never seems to live down one’s parents’ foreign extraction . . . I feel rather indignant about this whole thing, considering my father became a British subject 53 years ago.”

  The name, always the name. She asked Bernard whether Sholto (Amulree) might be able to write a letter to the proper authorities to sort out her difficulty.

  Whether he did is not divulged. But in October, Win signed up for General Service, which could mean anything from picking up the wounded after an air raid to scrubbing floors. She ended up scrubbing floors in a hospital near Newbury hoping to fill in as a proper nurse. But even there, doing her patriotic duty, she could not escape from her self-consciousness. “It was rather embarrassing yesterday,” she writes on October 6. While h
aving lunch with a large number of nurses in the common room, Win was suddenly addressed in a loud voice by a Mrs. Robinson, who said, “Are you Jews, because I think I taught Susan Jewish Scripture—not that I know anything about Jewish Scripture but I read her Old Testament Bible stories.”

  Win was mortified: “I got terribly red and all eyes were turned on me in some surprise. Rather tactless I thought, but she evidently had no feelings about it.”

  Once again, it is easy to mock Win’s response. Why feel embarrassed? But then it is an experience I have never really had; I don’t look Jewish, I don’t have a Jewish name, and I grew up in a country and at a time when anti-Semitism was taboo, at least to express in public. Even mention of the word “Jew” was best avoided. I knew, of course, that prejudices existed; I just never encountered them. Until one day in the 1960s, when I took a summer job at a solicitors’ firm in the City of London, where I ran errands for two smooth young men who were just down from Oxford or Cambridge. They seemed perfectly nice and had the manners of the kind of English gentlemen that Win would have approved of. The name of a client was mentioned. “A Jew, of course,” said one of the young men, whereupon the other replied, “Yes, I don’t suppose you’ve ever met a Jew you could trust.” I was speechless, out of cowardice perhaps, but also out of shock. I had simply never heard anyone say such a thing before. Perhaps I had just been oblivious, or too well shielded, or simply naïve. Perhaps this casual anti-Semitism was the mark of a country that never bore the stain of Nazi occupation. Bigotry of this kind could still be expressed unselfconsciously, as it were.

  It was a small thing, nothing more than a vulgar remark uttered in a perfect public school drawl. But it comes back to me every time I read about Win’s social cringes. She had to put up with something I never did.

  —

  Desperate times sometimes make people turn to religion, or at least magical thinking of one kind or another. In July 1940, after a visit to Badminton School, where BMB invited Win to examine a piece of shrapnel from a German bomb that fell onto the playing field, Win sends Bernard a “medal blessed by Cardinal Hinsley,” which she sincerely hopes “will do its stuff.”

  At the end of September 1940, Hitler decided for the time being to postpone his planned invasion. The Luftwaffe had been unable to conquer the skies over Britain, not least because of a disastrous change of tactics. Instead of attacking the airfields, which the RAF badly needed to continue the battle, the Germans decided to concentrate on bombing large cities in the hope of breaking British morale. It did the opposite. But in the beginning of 1941, things still looked exceedingly bleak for the British. The United States was keeping out of the war. De Gaulle and the Free French were a noble but marginal presence. General Rommel’s panzers were pummeling British and Commonwealth troops in North Africa. Benghazi fell on April 4. By April 14, the Germans were closing in on the Egyptian border.

  On April 7, 1941, Win begins on a familiar note. Bernard, she claims, quite unfairly, could “return with complete contentment to a bachelor existence,” while she had to deal alone with a house full of people, coping with the gardener, who was often surly, with Laura, who was often overworked, Hans Levy, who was in the early stages of a difficult adolescence, and with her mother and mother-in-law, who spent the war years with her in Kintbury. She then turns to the grim news of Benghazi being lost to “the blasted Nazis,” just as Narvik had been before. “I just can’t see how we can come out of this on top, and yet I know that we must, and that all this horror is meant in some way to serve the Divine purpose.”

  This is a remarkable statement from a woman who professed not to have any religious belief. Nevertheless, she writes, “I feel a great longing lately for St. John’s Wood, and I wish you were nearer, and that you were there to share it with me.” St. John’s Wood is the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, opposite Lord’s cricket ground in London. (“Lord’s,” by the way, refers to Thomas Lord, a cricketer at the end of the eighteenth century, not the Lord above.)

  Bernard replies on the ninth of April from his new billet in Ormskirk, Lancashire, that, contrary to what she might believe, he has no desire to return to bachelorhood at all. He doesn’t mention St. John’s Wood, but says that he “prays daily” for the resumption of their peaceful life together. One has to keep hoping, he writes, in his typical fashion: “So for the time being I find the only way is to make the best of things, to keep smiling, not to think too much of the dangers that surround us.”

  Win is hardly reassured. She writes back on the same day that she still views the future with “the gravest apprehensions.” What do Bernard’s colleagues in the army think? “Has anyone any concrete hopeful theories, or do we still just ‘hope’ and ‘have faith’?”

  On the sixteenth, she writes, “I cannot imagine what it would be like to be finally extricated from all this horror—it seems as if it must go on for ever—or worse befall—but surely some miracle must happen to save our beloved England?”

  Gone is the strident jingoism of her earlier letters (it would soon come back in less despairing times). She speaks of having “to cling to every straw,” of forcing herself to continue “believing in the future.” St. John’s Wood, one feels, is one of those straws, that and the hope for miracles. But her religion was of little use to her. She made this quite clear in October 1940, when she wrote on “the Jewish New Year’s Eve” about going to a service with Bernard’s mother “to pray for so many things which can only be achieved with the help of God.” However, she worries: “I wish I could be more of a help to her, but I’m afraid she misses the true Jewish spirit in me and so probably feels particularly isolated.”

  If anyone felt isolated, it was Win herself, without Bernard to talk to, and without the consolation of any particular faith, including the one that was nominally her own, to fall back on.

  Bernard never fell back on the Orthodox religion of his childhood, even in his bleakest moments. Instead, he found spiritual solace where he could find it, including the Church of England, albeit doubtfully. His answer to Win’s letter about hoping for a miracle is partly a reply to her earlier letter about longing for the Liberal Jewish Synagogue. He writes on April 19, “Your desire for St. John’s Wood in these trying times I can well understand. Generally on Sundays I attend Church parade, although the padres who take it are not very stimulating.”

  His religious feelings are more clearly spelled out in a letter written from Benenden on October 9, 1940. He speaks of the Day of Atonement service at St. John’s Wood, attended with Win and his mother. It comforts him to observe the holiest day of the Jewish year. “Try as I do,” he writes, “I cannot ever obtain the same spiritual satisfaction from my Church attendances & last Sunday when I went to the local Harvest service I stumbled into a sung Eucharist. This meant a Communion for those who felt so inclined & that was the whole service. I naturally, in company of many others, did not take it & in fact, I found the proceedings & prayers rather curious & difficult to comprehend.”

  Returning to the Yom Kippur service at St. John’s Wood, Bernard writes in the same letter, “Our prayers are especially needed for all those of the Jewish faith whose lot in so many countries is unbearable and their number increases progressively with the evil cloud of Hitlerism.”

  He had initially written the words “those poor Jews” before crossing them out and replacing them with “those of the Jewish faith.” I am not sure quite why. After all, it didn’t matter to Hitler whether Jews stuck to their faith or not; a Jew was a Jew and that was enough reason for murder. But perhaps that was exactly the point. Maybe Bernard preferred not to think of himself in terms of race, even though in other instances he did use it. If Win’s feelings were complicated by the lack of a religious or cultural tradition, besides the German Jewish attachment to classical music, Bernard’s sense of allegiance was not entirely straightforward either.

  In May 1941, Bernard was shifted once more to another military hospital, this
time in Bangor, Northern Ireland, a sojourn that a few months later provoked the remark that “we English will never really understand [the Irish], North or South. What unreliable people they are in these parts anyway.” He was sometimes given to make such remarks. I remember him complaining to me once about the increasing number of “dagos” serving one on the London train to Edinburgh. He changed his mind about the Irish.

  One of Bernard’s last letters from Ormskirk begins with a nostalgic image steeped in his particular kind of romanticism, which in his case often turned to the music of Wagner. Listening to the strains of The Flying Dutchman on April 25, he wonders “when we shall ever again put on our evening dresses & white ties & sally forth to Covent Garden or its equivalent & have an evening of Grand Opera together.” In “this mad world” their former life “seems to be receding further and further into the distance.” Still, he says, “the old Dutchman pulled through with his Senta after all his enforced vicissitudes & ill fortune, and reached his goal. There is a homily for us.”

  The homily is a little odd, given that the Dutchman was cursed by Satan to roam the world as a ghost until he finds a woman who pledges herself to him until death. A woman named Senta does indeed appear to save his soul in the end, but only by plunging into the roiling sea. The implication of this ultimate sacrifice, in the true Wagnerian spirit, is that only death will bring redemption.