Love in the Blitz Read online

  Of course you got full marks for Morse – I don’t need to draw myself up to MFH23 for that – I knew you would.

  Thank you for not letting your new life drive a wedge between us, darling – I’m only frightened because I love you so much – It’s not really surprising, is it? (I mean that I’m frightened! It would hardly be modest of you not to think the other surprising.)

  Thank you for telling me that you were ‘rather irritated by (my) clucking’ at the beginning of your letter – but I had noticed – but please, darling, don’t be irritated with me again. – I can’t help clucking – and my clucks never mean anything. Please say in your next letter that you’re not irritated any more – I knew you were going to be angry – and when I came in from Miss Sloane’s office, I sat with your letter on my knee for well over ten minutes not daring to open it.

  Thursday 29 August Hell was let loose in the sky last night darling – and I slept through most of it. The Sirens went at nine and, because I thought it would be uncivil to go to bed so early I sat in the shelter until ten, knitting – and then went up to bed. When I said goodnight to them, my parents were sullenly silent – but I undressed, and in a few minutes I was asleep. Mrs Seidler woke me at two and said ‘Listen’ – and I did and I could hear the bombs crashing quite close at hand – she told me that my mother had spent the whole evening crying piteously – so I went down to the shelter as a Gesture. There were red patches in the sky from fires – and the searchlights criss-crossed like basket weave. I sat in the shelter for half-an-hour & we could still hear bombs and AA Fire – after that things quietened down – and I couldn’t stand the shelter any more – I could feel that suffocating hysteria welling up inside me as it did the other night – and I went back to bed and I slept till morning, neither hearing the All Clear or anything.

  Since I’ve been kept awake o’ nights my headaches have started again – it’s as though the bones of my skull had been battered in. My mother says that unless I agree to spending my nights in the shelter, she’ll send me out of London – Lionel suggested Blackpool with a wicked smile – (I’d told them at dinner that the sirens had never sounded in Blackpool since the war began) and after that she said no more.

  You know, darling, I don’t think women discuss the ‘unmentionable’ topics, which all men talk of when they’re among themselves. Some of the dirty-minded little perverts at school used to stand in corners and smack their lips over pornographic talks – but they always stopped when I came into the room. Doris collected & retailed stories of hair-raising obscenity – but they didn’t offend – because she was so objective about them. Jean is different – Her conversation isn’t frankly & healthy bawdy in the Chaucerian manner, as I imagine that kind of conversation is among the nicest men, it is unpleasant & suggestive – and I should think hers is the idiom, verbal & atmospheric, of women who do discuss these things – jest – but I think it’s the exception rather than the rule.

  I must go now and help my mother choose Sheila’s & Allan’s wedding present. They want an old book. They’re getting married tomorrow at 3 in Audley St (St Mark’s Church) & their reception is to be at Claridge’s.

  Please forgive me for clucking & snapping, darling – but suppose you suddenly found yourself in possession of the Kohinoor diamond, wouldn’t your nerves be a bit frayed at the thought that the whole world was striving to take it from you by fair means or foul? I think you would – but I’ll try not to cluck again – I only want to please you.

  1 A 1940 propaganda historical drama about a village defying tyranny.

  2 Military Intelligence.

  3 Andrew Weir, 1st Baron Inverforth (1865–1955) created and headed the firm of shipowners in Glasgow.

  4 From ‘Gerontion’ by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).

  5 From the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400).

  6 From Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 66’.

  7 Full Height.

  8 King’s Parade, a street in the centre of Cambridge.

  9 From ‘The Dedication’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

  10 Ian Nance joined the Colonial Service in Africa, before serving in the Abyssinia campaign with the King’s Own African Rifles.

  11 Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) was a British politician and later leader of the British Union of Fascists.

  12 At the beginning of the war the government had set up the Central Register to process the thousands of temporary civil servants that Whitehall was going to need.

  13 Officer Cadet Training Unit.

  14 His Full Height.

  15 The Dorchester lunches, organised by Lord Nathan in support of Army Welfare. Sir John Anderson, the guest speaker at this lunch, was effectively the home front supremo in the wartime government, but best known now for the ‘Anderson Shelter’ named after him, a curved, galvanised corrugated steel air-raid shelter, 6 ft high by 4.5 ft wide and 6.5 ft long, that could be sunk into the ground or covered in soil and sandbags. Issued free to all householders with an income under £5 per week, over 2.5 million were erected before and during the war.

  16 Measure for Measure, Act III, scene i.

  17 Anthony Eden, Conservative MP and enemy of appeasement, was Foreign Secretary from 1935–38 and after being Secretary of State for War returned to the Foreign Office at the end of 1940.

  18 ‘The Definition of Love’, by Andrew Marvell (1621–78).

  19 Young Fellow.

  20 Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, scene i.

  21 Ack-ack or Anti-Aircraft fire.

  22 Orde Wingate met his future wife, Lorna, on a sea voyage from Egypt when he was thirty and she sixteen, and they married two years later. They were both committed Zionists.

  23 My Full Height.

  September–December 1940

  For fifty-six out of the next fifty-seven days and nights, beginning on 7 September, London would be bombed. The shift in German tactics from the airfields to the cities might have been a tacit admission of failure, but if it arguably put paid to Hitler’s invasion plan, that would be of precious little comfort to the capital, where in the East End and the docks, more than four hundred were killed and sixteen hundred wounded in that first massive raid alone.

  It was typical of Britain’s pre-war planning – too little and too late – that in crucial ways London, and particularly the poorest and most crowded areas, was hopelessly unprepared. The Luftwaffe might not have had the planes or accuracy to inflict the kind of casualties feared, but until Londoners took matters into their own hands and occupied the underground stations, a government wary of nurturing a defeatist ‘deep shelter mentality’ had left the capital criminally short of the kind of shelters that would have saved so many East End lives.

  While it was of no help to the thousands already left homeless, however, with each passing September day the threat of invasion was receding. On the same Saturday that the Blitz began, the codeword ‘Cromwell’ – the warning of an imminent invasion – had been issued, but for all the false alarms and rumours of German parachutists, no invasion came and by the 17th, with the ‘weather window’ closing and Britain’s Fighter Command still defiantly intact, German invasion plans were indefinitely postponed.

  But if the Battle of Britain was won, there was no let-up in the bombing, and with Britain’s night fighters as yet ineffective, and the capital’s anti-aircraft guns as much a danger to Londoners as Germans, the nights ahead would belong to the Luftwaffe’s bombers. In the early days of the Blitz the raids had generated a good deal of class hostility, but as the attacks spread from the East End across the whole of London, and the king and queen found themselves as likely to be bombed out of their home as was a bank clerk, ‘Britain’, as J. B. Priestley memorably put it, found itself ‘being bombed and burned into democracy’.

  Something of this new democratic feeling – and with it a more richly varied cast of characters – finds its way into Eileen’s letters. For the first year of the war her vie
w had not stretched much beyond her family and Cambridge circles, but with the beginning of the Blitz the letters broaden out to embrace a world and a London of bus drivers, chars, wardens, policemen, secretaries, cinema queues and – most fertile of all – work.

  She had, of course, helped out in Leslie Hore-Belisha’s constituency office, but her first real job was at the War Office’s newly formed Welfare Department. The Army Welfare Service, to give it its proper title, was the brainchild of a distinguished veteran of Gallipoli and the Somme, the London-born and St Paul’s-educated solicitor, Liberal MP, newly minted Labour peer, Zionist and ‘Vociferous Clatter’, Harry Nathan. At the beginning of the war Nathan had realised that there was nothing in place to help soldiers with the myriad problems of long separations, and after consultations with service chiefs had come up with the Welfare Service, a voluntary organisation, dependent on unpaid workers and charitable donations – Nathan’s ‘Dorchester Lunches’ were a rich source of supply – and aimed at relieving ‘as much as possible the anxieties of a soldier about his family, his job, his home’.

  As there was no Treasury money available for this, Nathan had persuaded his law partners in Finsbury Square to partition off fifteen rooms of the firm’s offices, and it was here, at the end of October, after the best part of a month humming and hawing over the offer of a job at Bletchley, that Eileen reported for her first paid work. It was an hour for her on the tube from Swiss Cottage to Moorgate and for the next two months, until the offices were badly bombed and their records destroyed in the terrible raid of 29 December, Finsbury Square and the bizarre antics of bigamist soldiers and unfaithful wives would provide Eileen and her letters with much of their copy.

  The strategic bombing of Britain’s major cities and ports would continue deep into 1941, but Britain, under Churchill, was in it for the duration. By day, across the length and breadth of the city, Londoners like Eileen were finding their way to work, cramming into overcrowded and fetid tubes, sitting on diverted buses, picking their way through streets lined by the smoking ruins of shattered buildings, and heavy with the smell of broken sewage pipes and death. By night, too, London was coming to terms with life under the Blitz. In underground stations, in commandeered and improvised shelters, in ‘Andersons’ and ‘Morrisons’, in cellars, surface shelters, church halls and under railway arches, in whole sections of the tube network, equipped at last with bunks by authorities badgered and shamed into action, London sat, dozed, talked and grumbled its way through the raids. But, then, as Eileen wondered, what else was it to do? ‘When the papers say that people in London are behaving normally, they’re telling the truth,’ she wrote to Gershon, ‘everyone is pretending as hard as possible that nothing is happening … I don’t think Hitler will destroy London, because London, if its legs are blown away, is prepared to hobble on crutches.’

  4

  Blitz

  Friday 30 August 1940 Thank God you’re in Blackpool, darling. Even if you have leave soon, I begin to feel that perhaps you’d better go home. Here you will have disturbed nights and disturbed days – and no rest at all – & you’ll hear the thudding of the war machine without intermission. I think you know what it costs me to say this, but I feel that I owe it to you and your parents not to let you walk straight into a barrage of gun-fire on my account. Yesterday the sirens sounded during Sheila’s wedding (The all-clear went as they were signing the register) and again at the reception. Kirby was held up all along the road and was only able to get Joan to London at 5.30, just in time to whirl feverishly into Claridge’s and see Sheila & Allan for an instant before they left. She had to spend the night here – because there was no train to Peterborough after 5.30 – but she was in the air-raid shelter from 9 till 4. We were able to show her a lively slice of death-in-action – The AA guns on Primrose Hill were firing for the first time – and there were two screaming bombs close at hand – (they didn’t sound as bad as we’d been led to expect.) I went to bed at 10.30, to the usual accompaniment of bitter protest – but the noise was so terrific I couldn’t sleep – and when the windows rattled and the floor shook after an explosion which sounded as though it were actually in my left ear, I went down to the shelter until things quietened down a little.

  3.10 Three raids this morning, darling – and terrific Scenes over the third because I was sick of going to the shelter. Pa says he & I can’t live together – Either I must leave the house or he will. Vociferous histrionics all round. I think I am nearly mad at the moment, darling – I have no control – and nothing to hold on to. It’s terrifying.

  There’s nothing like Air Raids, darling, for Drawing People Out. Did I tell you about the old woman on the ’bus the other day – who, on the sounding of the sirens, was given the choice by the conductor, (like the rest of us) of alighting or carrying on with her journey – said ‘Go on – They don’t allow no dumb animals in them shelters – and what ain’t good enough for my cat – fair ’uman ’e is – ain’t good enough for me.’

  Darling, it occurred to me in my bath – I forgot to tell you that the Great Bond between Captain Wingate & me was that all his Great Thoughts came in the bath as well. He says it’s a Heritage from the Man who Found his Own level – and rushed out into the street to Tell Everybody All. (My idiom, darling – I leave out the Great Man’s name1 – because I can’t spell it.)

  Tuesday 3 September Lord Nathan’s lunch was quite interesting. Eden spoke with Fervour and said nice things about the oppressed peoples & the ATS. He also referred to the Brief Lives of Secretaries of State for War (as such). Every time he signed a letter to the king recommending anyone for a DSO he said, the following qualifying words were always typed underneath ‘His Majesty’s Secretary of State for War – for the time being’!!!!

  Thursday 5 September Nurse is getting married this afternoon – She’s charging up & down the stairs in a welter of diaphanous garments – My mother and Mrs Seidler are up to their ears in food for the reception – Pa is writing his lecture in the shelter, whence I can hear the thin strains of Mendelssohn’s wedding march – played as a duet on violins by Lionel and Dicky – It’s all quite fantastic and too Ruritarian for words. Have you ever seen an Ivor Novello musical play? – well, this is it! – even unto the Hint of Tragedy, when her brother Refused to Give Her Away, because he is a Welsh Methodist, and she is to become a Catholic – but it All Came Right in the end – and he is now Yapping Obligingly at Her Heels.

  Friday 6 September While you were having a ten-minute raid, we were having a ten-hour one. Last night the explosions were so terrific that I took my pillows downstairs and slept on the drawing-room sofa. The fantastic thing was that the worst explosion occurred about five minutes after the All Clear – and the LCC2 was so Put Out by this, that no sooner had the bomb-reverberations died away, than the sirens went again – Another Warning!

  Tell me All about the Commission, darling. Was your remark an Inspired Statement or just a Hope? Incidentally, your photograph grows on me. It really looks like you and furthermore, (and this is a Terrific Solace) it looks at me and not beyond me, like your more Beautiful Civilian Portrait.

  Nurse’s wedding was quite pleasant. She looked really lovely – but the service was gabbled & there was no music & no flowers in the Church. We had the reception here with froths & froths of champagne – and all the culinary delicacies that my mother, Mrs Seidler & Lyons could devise – and the last iced wedding-cake on the market – two tiers of it, and little silver wotnots everywhere. My father made a really charming little speech – and Nurse’s mother-in-law and I Found One Another.

  Sunday 8 September Another disturbed night on the drawing-room sofa, darling. The raid began at 8.15 and lasted until 5. During an afternoon raid, Bernard, Jean & I were nearly blown out of the window by gun-fire from Primrose Hill – but we had a pleasant afternoon in Spite of All – and they stayed to dinner. We drew up a list of parental dont’s to guide them in the upbringing of their twins – (They want twins – so
as to Get It All Over at Once). They are going to make a fair copy of the document – sign it & date it – and then, put it safely away for future reference.

  After dinner, we all went up to Mrs Seidler’s room and watched the glow from the fires at the docks. The houses were chocolate-coloured, darling, against a translucent sky, the colour of vin rosé, and there were bulges of smoke welling up, feathered at the edges – and occasionally the dazzling comet-fall of a flare and the light of an anti-aircraft shell – as though an electric switch had been flashed on and off. It was beautiful, darling.

  Wednesday 11 September Darling. Lionel & I thought we’d shake off our war-weariness by going to see ‘Busman’s Honeymoon’ at Leicester Square. I don’t know if you’ve read ‘Busman’s Honeymoon’ but in it Lord Peter Wimsey mollocks with his wife in the idiom of Donne – so naturally it’s a terrific Solace to me.