The Love-Charm of Bombs (18 page)

Yet this was not, according to Sean, ‘a happy lunch':

 

She did not say why she was revisiting our well-fed and neutral Dublin from her bombed and Spartan London, and I did not ask lest I should touch the nerve of some private crisis at Bowen's Court, and a lunch is a lunch even if between foiled lovers. As it was I blundered almost with my first words, saying with a gush of false gaiety as I shook out my table-napkin, ‘Well, Elizabeth? So it is taking a world war to divorce us?'

 

Uttering these ‘insensitive words', Sean remembered his blunder of the previous August; Elizabeth gave him the same reply – this was the sort of thing that war ‘does to people'. ‘Presently,' Sean O'Faolain later reflected, ‘we outdid one another in fatuity.' He said floridly, ‘I am afraid, Elizabeth, that I am content too often to let life ride me down. Whereas I always imagine you riding down life astride a powerful, prancing dappled horse.' ‘I have never before felt so completely a leader!' she replied.

During lunch, Sean was oblivious of the fact that Elizabeth was using him once more as material for the Ministry of Information. ‘I was able,' she wrote in her report, ‘to see again, over tea or sherry, people whom I had met elsewhere, and to continue conversations that had promised to be interesting. Ostensibly I was in Dublin on holiday and “having a rest”.' Again she listed O'Faolain among her contacts, and it was from his point of view that she described Dublin society as ‘suffering from claustrophobia and restlessness'. The intelligentsia was minding the suspension of travel to and from Britain and was frightened of parochialism; the resulting deliberate escapism could be dreary, though she was struck by ‘the intelligence (if not always the wisdom) and the animation of the talk'.

In his autobiography, O'Faolain claimed that a few weeks later he gathered that Dublin gossip was suggesting Bowen was there for the Ministry of Information. If this was true, then the gossip did not reach very far; James Dillon, the leader of the Opposition and the subject of several of Bowen's interviews, later expressed complete surprise when he found out about her reports. Whether he learnt the news then or later, O'Faolain found it distressing: here was another example of what war did to people. And Sean's Elizabeth, the romantic dreamer, may have thought that she wanted to help the war effort but would have been devastated if Ireland had abandoned her neutrality: ‘the very thought of Ireland at war would have torn Elizabeth's heart apart'. He was right, of course: Bowen never questioned the judiciousness of neutrality as a policy. Her passionate love of Ireland, which had intensified during the relationship with O'Faolain, continued into the war and beyond. She had signed up as a spy partly to protect the interests and reputation of the country she loved. But O'Faolain underestimated the detached pragmatism with which she hoped, in her letter to Virginia Woolf, that she could ‘be some good' in mitigating the tension between the two countries. O'Faolain would claim Bowen again and again as an Irish writer. ‘She is an Irishwoman, at least one sea apart from English traditions,' he insisted in a 1956 account of her fiction; she knew English life only ‘as an exile with an Irish home'. He could not accept the extent of her practical investment in Britain winning the war.

For her part, Bowen was still more loyal to O'Faolain than her Ministry of Information report might suggest. While she was in Ireland, he asked her to review his new novel,
Come Back to Erin
, for the December issue of
The Bell
. The resulting piece is a generous tribute to the man she had loved. Opening with the statement that ‘
Come Back to Erin
is the ironic title of Mr O'Faolain's latest, and greatest, novel', Bowen found that the book was too large to come inside the scope of a short review: ‘To give the range of humanity, at its highest and lowest, is probably the first task of the novelist: Mr O'Faolain has done this.' He had regained the ‘magnificent objectivity and the poetic fullness' of
A Nest of Simple Folk
, which he had posted to her before his first visit to
Bowen's Court
. And he had produced a tragedy devoid of cheap tricks, cynicism and sentiment. To read the book was to suffer, to an extent. But there was a tenderness, a ‘love of man in the writing that leaves a sort of sweetness about the heart'.

Elizabeth Bowen remained in Ireland until the end of January 1941. Alan joined her for Christmas and then she was alone once again, in the severe seclusion of Bowen's Court. ‘To be here is very nice,' she wrote to Virginia Woolf at the beginning of January,

 

but I no longer like, as I used to, being here alone. I can't write letters, I can't make plans. The house now is very cold and empty, and very beautiful in a glassy sort of way. Every night it freezes. There are some very early lambs which at night get through the wires and cry on the lawn under my windows.

 

Boxed in by the barren mountains, she was feeling claustrophobic with no one to talk to. And, whatever British journalists might say about the luxurious conditions in Ireland, rationing made country life difficult. There was no petrol at all, so she was completely immobilised – ‘at least immobilised until we get new ideas about time'. She had a bicycle but found it impossible to think while cycling; she would much rather have had a horse. Meanwhile, in another world and another time, the bombing in London continued, and it was almost time to return.

 

 

See notes on Chapter 6

7

‘How we shall survive this I don't know'

Hilde Spiel, Graham Greene and Henry Yorke, autumn 1940–spring 1941

 

Hilde Spiel also left London in October 1940, though she was less reluctant than Elizabeth Bowen to leave the bombs behind. She and her daughter were evacuated to Oxford where they stayed with their friend Teresa Carr-Saunders and her husband, who was the director of the London School of Economics, in an old English manor house on the Isis. Peter de Mendelssohn was less liberated by his family's departure than Greene or Yorke. He would not have been averse to a wartime affair, but he had a novel to write in the evenings, a severe lack of money, and was constrained by the continued presence of Hilde's parents. Hilde herself was pleased to escape both Wimbledon and the bombs. The countryside around the Isis was beautiful, and Oxford felt decidedly more cosmopolitan than the dreary London suburbs.

Away from London, though, Hilde grew more fearful. She no longer had to set an example of English stoicism for her hysterical mother and she became preoccupied with the more nightmarish aspects of the war. ‘This morning at 8am I dreamed that you and I left a restaurant and in the vestibule were both shot dead,' she wrote to Peter. ‘I still remember falling down on the floor next to you and saying quite calmly: just kiss me goodbye in case we should die. It wasn't really unpleasant and now I quite know what it feels like.' Meanwhile, reading about the bombing in London, she was anxious about Peter's safety. ‘My darling, I am horrified at the thought of what you're going through in Wimbledon,' she complained a few days later. ‘Sixty bombs in one night – it is incredible, dearest, will this wretched Ministry never evacuate London? . . . How we shall survive this I don't know . . . If the Americans don't save England it'll be hopeless.'

Hilde now had little faith in the British ability to win the war without America. As a result, she and Peter looked into the possibility of escaping as a family, first to America and then to the Azores. But the plans proved too complicated and Peter was indecisive. On 11 October 1940 he told Hilde that he was now convinced that it was too late, and that he was relieved by this outcome. ‘The Azores would have been a perpetual nightmare to me.' He apologised to her for ‘all the heart-searching confusion I caused you with my indecision and even damaging ideas' but he was praying that he had done the right thing. From the beginning of the war he had hated the idea of leaving Europe. ‘If England fights, it fights not just for itself but also for us,' he had reminded Hilde in 1938; ‘we are Europeans.'

Later, Hilde agreed with Peter. In her autobiography she wrote that ‘it would have seemed like desertion . . . to leave the sinking ship while others, less directly concerned in the resistance to Hitler's tyranny, were risking their necks'. But at the time, she was less prepared to put her principles before her safety, and at first she was devastated that they had missed their chance to escape. ‘I have not much faith in our “luck” left, in our personal luck, I mean, since we've missed the chance of going to America,' she told Peter.

 

I really had a sort of mystical belief until then in our future and felt supported simply by the fact that we are such nice and talented people, and that it would be such a waste to let us go down. Well, I'm not so sure now. I don't believe England is going to win soon enough to let us escape, physically and psychologically.

 

Hilde was still wondering about sending Christine to safety alone, perhaps accompanied by Erika Mann, Thomas Mann's daughter, who was about to cross the sea in a military convoy protected by British destroyers. Peter, writing to Hilde to describe how this would work, announced that he was 65 per cent for and 35 per cent against the idea, though there was a danger that the ship would either be bombed or would get stuck in the Azores, where it was stopping en route. He wanted Christine to be safe and he wanted Hilde back with him in London, not least because he was finding it exhausting looking after her parents without her.

 

We must . . . make a determined effort to get the Spiels a house and to organise our life. I can simply not do it alone. It would be very lovely if Mummi could come back.

 

But Hilde's lack of faith in their own luck made her doubt that God would have any mercy on the boat Christine was sailing on. At the same time, succumbing to a hysteria not dissimilar to her mother's, she announced that even if Christine was safer in Oxford than on a military convoy on the Atlantic, it would be a safety bought at the price of a lifetime of fascism.

 

I know that England will be defeated and therefore I'd rather have my child drowned in the attempt to escape this than suddenly find herself in an England ruled by Mosley and Tyler Kent.

 

By the end of October, they had abandoned any thought of sending Christine across the sea alone, and Hilde settled into life in Oxford. Peter was relieved that his wife and daughter were safe. Coming back from a visit to Hilde in Oxford at the end of October he told her that his return to London had convinced him that

 

wherever you are – provided it is warm – you will be better off than here. This is no longer a place for women and children. Not that things have become any worse. On the contrary last night was quite harmless, we all slept soundly through everything, but two days away from it make you forget the general picture, and that general picture is nerve-racking and ghastly.

 

Both Hilde and Peter were finding moments of escapism in visits to the cinema. In November Hilde saw
Waterloo Bridge
and
sank happily into the world of Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh (‘the only person I know to look heavenly in an old beggar's hat'). Fed up with ‘the Spiel faces' in Wimbledon, Peter went to see a new biopic of the actress Lilian Russell. ‘It moved me to tears,' he told Hilde, ‘although there isn't really very much to it.' What had moved him was

 

the thing with which I had completely lost touch – you know: human voice, laughter, tears, a little music, someone talking of love – do you understand? In short, feeling, sentiment, human warmth. How one loses these things in this life of ours, in this daily bombing routine. Suddenly you come up against a note of music, a ripple of laughter, a beautiful face, a smile – and it just overwhelms you. How poor we have become through this war. The simplest, human things are suddenly a revelation, forcing tears into your eyes, for no reason at all. It is as if, after a long time, somebody says something nice and warm and personal to you – something you had completely forgotten existed.

 

Hilde wrote back, assuring her ‘dearest Pumpi' that she could understand how he felt.

 

It happened to me whenever we heard music or saw a film or read something beautiful, ever since this horror started. It is incredible how little of our life is left. Very often now, in the peaceful countryside, I remember the joys of earlier days, and it seems unbelievable that I should ever have been unhappy in the midst of these wonderful things and adventures.

 

Living amid the English restraint of the Carr-Saunders family, she was missing the intensity of life in Vienna. In a short story called ‘Another Planet' written at this time she describes a true episode that occurred during her stay. Here, evacuated with her daughter to a house on the Thames a couple of miles from Oxford, the narrator is bemused by the formality of her host family. The four children, all younger than twelve, speak with the same decorous, joking expressions as the adults, with any regression into baby-speak frowned upon by their demanding parents. At first the narrator is impressed, if not enraptured, but then one Sunday lunchtime the family meal is interrupted by the arrival of a neighbour, who tells the twelve-year-old son Edmond that his dog, Benjamin, has been run over and gruesomely killed.