The Love-Charm of Bombs (4 page)

Bowen later described how in

walking in the darkness of the nights for six years (darkness which transformed a capital city into a network of inscrutable canyons), one developed new bare alert senses, with their own savage warnings and notations.

The buses and cars in the street were almost invisible except for a tiny point of light at each side. Lenses on traffic lights were permanently covered by a black metal plate pierced by a single cross. Passing human figures had been reduced to shadows. It was hard not to trip over the kerb or the sandbags piled high on the pavements. Indeed, in the first month of the war casualties due to the blackout had exceeded British military casualties. But wardens were learning to feel their way around familiar pavements and to recognise each other’s outlines as they passed, developing a new sense somewhere between the sense of touch and the sense of smell.

The districts were small enough for wardens to get to know a large proportion of the local residents, as well as learning the layout of the streets and the location of any potential hazards. Bowen was probably based at her nearest post, which was situated in the basement of Francis Holland School on Park Road, just behind her own street, Clarence Terrace. The wardens at this post patrolled a patch that went as far as Marylebone Station in the west, the Marylebone Road in the south and the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park in the east. Greene was based at a post about a mile and a half south-east of the park, underneath the School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in Gower Street. He and his colleagues looked after an area bounded by New Oxford Street in the south, the Euston Road in the north, Gordon Square in the east and Gower Street in the west.

Tonight, Elizabeth Bowen was pleased to be back in London after two weeks away. She and Alan had been home since Monday. Clarence Terrace, like all the streets off the park, was still officially ‘closed’; there were barriers and bomb-notices at every entrance. Elizabeth reported to her cousin Noreen in neutral Ireland that it looked ‘like a street in a city of the dead, with dead leaves and bits of paper blowing about’. Going to bed, she felt as if she was sleeping in the corner of a deserted palace. Each day, the postman took a flying run down the terrace, and Elizabeth left to buy loaves and bottles of milk, largely to feed Lawrence the cat. ‘I had always placed this Park among the most civilised scenes on earth,’ she wrote in ‘London 1940’;

the Nash pillars look as brittle as sugar – actually, which is wonderful, they have not cracked; though several of the terraces are gutted – blown-in shutters swing loose, ceilings lie on floors and a premature decay-smell comes from the rooms. A pediment has fallen on a lawn.

On the night of the time bomb, Elizabeth had only had the chance to rush back into the house and pick up a box of 200 cigarettes, which seemed briefly more precious than anything else she could take with her. Away from home, she worried about her typewriter left uncovered as the dust blew through their suddenly emptied house. Elizabeth and Alan spent their first few days away from Clarence Terrace at the Mount Royal Hotel off Oxford Street, but after two days they were bombed out of Oxford Street as well. This raid, Elizabeth told Noreen, was ‘as appalling a night as I ever wish to see’, although as a member of the Home Guard Alan had relished being in charge, taking command of the hotel and issuing orders in a military voice as he directed the early morning traffic. Alan had enjoyed his adventure and now, returning after a week at the home of friends in the countryside, it was time for Elizabeth to enjoy hers.

Bond Street following the 17 September raid

Elizabeth Bowen described these September evenings as a time when ‘after black-out we keep that date with fear. The howling ramping over the darkness, the lurch of the barrage opening, the obscure throb in the air.’ In fact, though, she herself was more often exhilarated than afraid. On nights when Bowen was not on ARP duty, visitors to Clarence Terrace were expected to remain on the balcony to watch the display. ‘I do ap-p-pologise for the noise,’ Stephen Spender recalled Bowen announcing dryly as she led her guests inside after a raid. ‘The sound of the Boche bomber overhead is exactly like the enlarged sound of a wasp,’ she informed Noreen dismissively; ‘it makes the same priggish and consequential noise.’

In a section of her novel
The Heat of the Day
written during the war, Bowen pays testament to the strength of London itself in September 1940:

The very soil of the city at this time seemed to generate more strength: in parks the outsize dahlias, velvet and wine, and the trees on which each vein in each yellow leaf stretched out perfect against the sun blazoned out the idea of the finest hour.

As an Anglo-Irishwoman, Bowen had always had an ambivalent identity, feeling neither fully British nor fully Irish. Now she was embarrassed by Ireland’s decision to remain neutral during the war and had identified completely as a Londoner, defiantly protecting her city. And if it was London’s finest hour, then it was also Bowen’s own. She believed herself to be invincible, partly because she prided herself on being the same age as her century.

In her 1960 account of
A Time in Rome
, Bowen observed that ‘twinship with one’s century’ brings ‘the feeling of being hand-in-glove with it, which may make for unavowed confidence’. She attributed this feeling to Stella in
The Heat of the Day
, who finds that ‘the fateful course of her fatalistic century’ seems ‘more and more her own’. Both Stella and her creator had been too young to be actively involved in the First World War, though Bowen had spent some time as ‘a pink, rattled, inexpert VAD’ (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse in an Irish hospital for shell-shocked soldiers after leaving school in 1918. Looking back, she saw herself at this age as resembling a rabbit in the middle of the road. Now, as she and her century entered their forties together, Bowen was determined to take responsibility for her age. She, like Stella, would not die in the Blitz because the century itself had more in store for her.

According to Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen gave in this period ‘an impression of abounding health and vitality’. The admiring younger writer May Sarton recalled her friend as looking in this period like a drawing by Holbein.

Hers was a handsome face, handsome rather than beautiful, with its bold nose, high cheekbones, and tall forehead; but the colouring was as delicate as the structure was strong – fine red-gold hair pulled straight back into a loose knot at her neck, faint eyebrows over pale-blue eyes.

For May, Elizabeth was rendered human and approachable by her slight stammer and her rippling laughter, which was rather like a purr.

Bowen was currently writing a family history in which she described her grandmother, Elizabeth Clarke, in a passage that reads as an accurate self-portrait:

It is possible that Elizabeth’s
manner
was part of her physical personality. As a girl in her early twenties she was (to judge by successive pictures) less nearly beautiful than in her later life. But her way of holding herself and her smiling candid calmness must always have been distinctive and beautiful. In girlhood, the fine open moulding of her face, her eyes set in like eyes in a Holbein portrait, her rather large mobile mouth must have been distinctive and strange. She always moved with deliberation; her voice was low-pitched; she must have been a mixture of aliveness and repose.

By 1940 Elizabeth Bowen herself was both distinctive and beautiful. She was alive and ready to pounce; to walk out fearlessly into the darkness of the blackout; to fall, as she would six months later, precipitously and consumingly in love.

Elizabeth Bowen, photographed by Howard Coster, 1942

Meanwhile Graham Greene was already in love. At thirty-six, he, like Bowen, was growing into himself. He was the author of ten novels – most recently
The Power and the Glory
, which had been published in March. Tall, with grey-blue eyes, he had always been austerely handsome, and now his youthful shyness had begun to dissipate as a result of literary success and sexual experience. He was often accompanied during the raids by his feisty and beguiling comrade-at-arms, Dorothy Glover. In general, Greene was more elated by the bombing than Bowen. Since childhood he had yearned, both romantically and depressively, for death. And, with Dorothy, the heady combination of danger and sex was especially alluring. Greene’s friend the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge recollected the Blitz as

a kind of protracted debauch, with the shape of orderly living shattered, all restraints removed, barriers non-existent. It gave one the same feeling a debauch did, of, as it were, floating loose; of having slipped one’s moorings.

Greene himself looked back on this as a manic-depressive period: ‘depressive when the bombs were at their worst and manic when one woke up in the morning to the sound of the glass being swept up and one was alive.’

Graham Greene, photographed by Bassano, 1939

When he had first joined the ARP training course, Greene was nervous that he would faint, as he had done as a young man hearing descriptions of accidents, or even once as an adult cutting his own finger. But like many other wardens he found that once he was equipped with a job to do he stopped being afraid of his emotions. John Strachey, another literary warden who wrote a war memoir which Greene admired, recalled his relief on beginning his duties that he was no longer at liberty to worry about his own safety. He observed that

the instant that an individual is given even the simplest objective function, and becomes a member of an organised (and uniformed, this is notoriously important) group, the whole burden of deciding whether or not on any particular occasion to seek his or her safety is automatically removed.

A few years after the war, Bowen recollected that she had signed up as a warden because ‘air raids were much less trying if one had something to do’. She described how a warden in an air raid stumped up and down the streets, ‘making a clatter with the boots you are wearing, knowing you can’t prevent a bomb falling, but thinking “At any rate I’m taking part in this, I may be doing some good.” ’

Where Bowen gained solace from a belief in her own invincibility, Greene was more bizarrely reassured by the certainty that he would not survive the Blitz at all. He later recalled that he was scared to begin with, but that soon he gave up the idea that he was going to survive and ceased to be frightened. As a warden, Greene could enjoy the cleansing moment of apocalypse that he had been longing for since his childhood. ‘We were,’ he wrote, ‘a generation brought up on adventure stories who had missed the enormous disillusionment of the First World War, so we went looking for adventure.’ Indeed, his sense of the First World War was so vivid that years later he dreamed that he was Wilfred Owen, waiting for battle in a dugout and writing Owen’s own poems.