The Love-Charm of Bombs (11 page)

Even after Macaulay signed up to drive an ambulance in March 1939, she still hoped that war could be avoided. At the start of the war, she was prepared to go to almost any lengths to avoid bloodshed. Two weeks after war was declared, she wrote that ‘if Nazism
really
can’t be defeated except by war, I say, let it win (for a time) in spite of all its horrors and cruelties. It is less irrevocable than war.’ A month later, she informed her sister that she had been thinking the situation over, and it seemed ‘an appalling indictment of our civilisation and intelligence that we can’t remove from the scenes into a Home for the mentally unsound a man obviously so mad as [Hitler] is getting’. Then, she insisted, unrealistically, ‘we could have peace at once’. If the 1937 pamphlet was the work of a naive idealist, then these 1939 musings were the deliberations of a fantasist. Grieving for her dying lover, Macaulay could not accept the mass death that would result from war, although she could no longer propose a viable alternative.

Over the course of the first year of the war, Macaulay regained some of her own strength. Gerald O’Donovan recovered from his stroke and, although he was then diagnosed with cancer, his condition became temporarily stable. When Macaulay was not busy ambulance-driving or writing, she was happily and intrepidly cycling round London, lunching with friends amid the ruins. Later, in October, she assured Jean that she felt ‘very well again now, and able to cope with life’. As a result, she was able to escape from her sense of war as a personal nightmare and to assess it as a public event. And so, in the
Time and Tide
article, while bemoaning the ‘blind, maniac, primitive, stupid bestiality of war’, she admitted that there was no alternative. To accept the ‘still more blind, maniac, primitive, stupid bestiality of Nazi rule over Europe’ would be to spit at civilisation ‘even more earnestly’ – ‘not even the most pacific pacifist can see (so far as I can discover) any third way’. Where once she advocated the passive acceptance of Nazism, she was now strong enough to accept war as the price that must be paid in fighting against it, condemning anyone who thought otherwise: ‘pacifists should surely be the first to hate an order which is based on armed terrorism, which glorifies war, whose leaders proclaim that prolonged peace is ignoble and makes man decadent’. There was no longer the suggestion that it might be enough merely to pronounce Hitler insane or to attempt to bore the Germans into abandoning their wicked ways.

Macaulay’s role as an ambulance driver contributed to her renewed spirit. Cleaning her ambulance, bandaging her patients, she was glad to have exacting tasks to distract her from sorrow. She was glad too that, unlike in the First World War, she could engage in these tasks on equal terms with men. This time she was spared the disjunction between sitting in a trench and knitting at home. In an article written in autumn 1940 about the role of women in wartime, she observed that it was only in the ambulance services that the sexes were on the same footing and doing exactly the same work. In the fire service, they were not allowed to go out to the fires with pumps; in the air service, they could not obtain jobs as pilots; and even on the omnibuses, they could be conductors but not drivers.

At the end of August 1939, anxiously waiting to hear whether war would be declared, Macaulay had reported her preparatory activities to her sister. She and her friends were busy buying blackout material, filling in cracks in their windows and stockpiling sand. ‘I think,’ she observed, ‘this is a good thing, as it gives people something they feel useful to do, and may actually diminish effects of raids, and therefore lessen fear and prevent collapse of nerves in crowded districts, and prevent a bad raid being a knock-out blow.’ It was even more useful to feel that she was helping others, and it was this that made the war bearable for her. Helping people, she was able to forget herself, as Dorothy instructed Alix to do in
Non-combatants and Others
. As a result, she found the nights when she was on duty much easier to bear than the nights when she was crouching under her table at home, experiencing each thud as a personal threat. ‘I rather wish I was ambulancing tonight,’ she wrote to Jean on 11 September, feeling her house rock, listening to the continuous pounding of the bombs dropping. ‘I am expecting my ceiling to collapse and the furniture from the flat above to come through on to me.’ Ambulancing would at least distract her from anxious expectation.

However, the anxiety itself remained intense. ‘Where will it end?’ the rescue worker asked Macaulay on 26 September, and it was her own question throughout the war. For Greene, the destruction would bring a necessary apocalypse which would cleanse both his own life and the world. The gamble with death might well pay off; he might emerge stronger than ever. For Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Yorke, wartime life was too exciting to succumb to despair. Ultimately, Macaulay could not enjoy the danger as they did because she could not believe that either she or the world would survive it. ‘There is so little time,’ she wrote to Virginia Woolf, ‘and one feels (a) sleepy (b) disintegrated. I expect this war is thoroughly demoralising. We shall emerge (as far as we do emerge) scattered in wits, many of us troglodytes.’

See notes on Chapter 3

4

6 a.m.: All Clear

Soon after Rose Macaulay arrived home for bed on the morning of 27 September, the all clear siren began to sound across London. This was a single note, sustained for two minutes. It was as haunting a wail as the danger signal, but Londoners had learnt to find it reassuring after three weeks of bombing. As yet no one had assessed the total damage of the night but in all there had been 481 fires reported. Of these, six were classified as serious, requiring up to thirty pumps; sixty-five were medium, including twenty in central London; and 409 were small. Each of the small fires could have caused the level of destruction that Macaulay found at her incident in Camden Town.

All over the city, people now began to emerge from the shelters and wander home. The previous day
The
Times
had issued a report urging shelterers not to crowd immediately into the streets after the all clear sounded, but most people found it difficult to resist the urge to go outside into the dawn. The returning daylight brought the brief, ecstatic holiday from fear that Bowen described in
The Heat of the Day
. Seen through relieved, exhausted eyes, the ruins and barrage balloons became especially picturesque once they were tinged with pink from the sunrise.

Hilde Spiel,
c
. 1939

In Wimbledon, Hilde Spiel now removed the mattresses from the windows and returned them to the beds, where the family had been trying to sleep on uncomfortable bare bed frames. She had slept very little that night. There had been bombing planes above Wimbledon almost all the time, and one of the night’s six serious fires was in Merton High Street, just a mile south-east of Spiel’s flat. Spiel and her husband, daughter and parents remained inside their cramped flat during even the most severe raids. The three-storey concrete apartment house had no air-raid shelter or cellar and they were reluctant to go to the dark and uncomfortable public shelter. At the start of the war, the government had expected raids to be clear-cut events lasting up to an hour, and the shelters had not been built as all-night refuges. In November a Wimbledon doctor wrote angrily to Parliament complaining about the ‘glaring deficiencies’ in the borough’s shelters.

There are no bunks, and the Shelterers sleep either on the wet floors or on the wet benches. The Sanitary accommodation is inadequate and in the Trench Shelters is indecent as the closets are covered by a sacking curtain which exposes to view the person sitting on the seat.

Spiel and her family would rather remain at home where between sirens and thuds they played Schubert records for consolation or listened to Beethoven symphonies on the radio. Spiel later wrote that ‘since those days that heroic music has never again moved me so passionately’.

Hilde Spiel’s husband, Peter de Mendelssohn, usually managed to ignore the raids, writing away at his desk as the bombs crashed around him. He worked at the Ministry of Information by day so the nights were the only time he had to write his own books. Too focused to be distracted by danger, he was determined to make his name as a novelist in England. Hilde found it harder to remain calm than her husband did and she resented his mental seclusion. Like him, she was buoyed up by the resilience of the English. She later wrote that enduring the bombing was easier in London than elsewhere ‘because of the daily example of English stoicism, English equanimity, English humour, which lay before your eyes’. But she was worried about her eleven-month-old daughter, Christine, whom they periodically wondered about sending to wait out the war in America. The official ARP Guide assured Londoners sheltering in their homes that although any house hit by an HE bomb was ‘almost sure to collapse’, the danger of houses falling as a result of nearby explosions was very small. This did not provide much reassurance when there were bombers directly overhead, though, especially as the guide added that ‘other dangers of a less spectacular kind’ such as blasts and splinters could cause more casualties than direct hits. Hilde was also distracted by the anxious screams of her mother, Mimi, who was hysterically frightened by the raids and showed no inclination to mimic the calmness of the surrounding Londoners.

In the preface to her wartime stories, Elizabeth Bowen recalled her awareness throughout the war that compared with those on the continent the British could not be said to suffer. ‘Foreign faces about the London streets had personal pain and impersonal history sealed up behind the eyes.’ For Spiel the Blitz was more difficult than it was for Bowen because whereas Bowen was surrounded by friends and admirers, and was successfully pursuing a glamorous literary career, Spiel was abruptly cut off from friends and from a literary scene in which she had been just beginning to shine.

When Hilde Spiel left Vienna for London in 1936 she was the author of a prize-winning novel,
Kati on the Bridge
, and was feted and adored in Vienna’s café society. She was a passionate young woman of twenty-five, sustained by illusions and by intense and impulsive love affairs with men who were about to change the world. Everything, including politics, was personal. In 1930 she had joined the socialist torchlit march around the Ringstrasse, pressurising her mother to join her in signing up to the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. But her own party membership was largely the result of a love affair with a socialist newspaper editor and she was prepared to lay aside political commitments when they impinged on more pleasurable aspects of life. Devastated by the brutal defeat of the elected socialists in the Austrian Civil War in February 1934, she became determined to leave Austria. However, she was even more determined to complete her studies first. And in the meantime she enjoyed herself, winning second prize for the best suntan at the local swimming pool that summer.

In her early twenties Hilde took on one brilliant older man after another as her mentor – philosophers, writers, political thinkers – attending their lectures, sometimes accompanying them around Europe, adoring and adored in turn. Writing, loving, trying out herself and life for size, she was sustained by Vienna itself, which provided her with ‘a climate of the most beautiful illusions’; this was a city in which the increasing menace of fascist brutality coincided with a longstanding tradition of courtly chivalry. Hilde’s father Hugo had two deep scars to the left of his chin as a result of youthful duels. Before Hilde’s mentor, the philosopher Moritz Schlick, was shot dead as a Jew in the summer of 1936 he rode a horse each day in Vienna’s Prater. Sometimes the intensity of life in Vienna with its dramas and contradictions became unbearable. Periodically Hilde escaped alone with her skis to the Alps where she threw herself down mountains, forcing herself to achieve more and more exhausting physical feats.