Wars of the Heart The Culture Show

On seven September, 1940, a sharp-eyed warden surveyed the

London skyline. He spotted miniature silver planes

circling around the target area in such perfect formation that they

looked like children's toy models at a fair.

Britain had been bracing itself for the last 12 months.

Now the front line of the Second World War was coming home.

would come into its own. With death a constant presence, life

became urgent and precious, and in this febrile atmosphere, allegiances

would be tested and infidelities begun. It was an absolute gift for a

writer and search of new material. A few loyal members of the London's

literary set remained in the city to do battle on the home front.

They were waiting for the opportunity to prove themselves.

What lay on the horizon would be the making of them and would inspire

some of their finest work. Like many Londoners, writer Graham

Greene evacuated his wife and children to the countryside.

But, ever alert to possible material, he also contacted his

publishe suggesting: "You might be interested in a book called The

First Hundred Days which will be a personal account of conditions in a

bombed London." But all this was a little premature.

It would be another year before the bombers arrived.

For those who remained in London, anticipating a battle on the home

front, it was a tedious time of watching and waiting.

People tried on their gas-masks, watched for fires that never

started, and nervously eyed the doormat for their call-up papers

from the ministry. And while they waited, London's literati gravitated

here to waited, London's literati gravitated

With writer and journalist Elizabeth Bowen, with poets Dylan Thomas and

Hilda Doolittle, and perhaps Evelyn Waugh if he happened to be in town.

These were the successors to the Bloomsbury Group, the stayers-on in

London, the people who found the climate of danger almost addictive.

Out of the fug and ferment of this bohemian quarter would come some of

the most compelling literary out of the heat of the blitz.

They're all inspired by the wartime lives of their creators. Lives that

would be turned upside-down when the bombing began.

With the Thames to guide them, and the moonlighting the way, the aerial

bombardment continued relentlessly until dawn.

London awoke to find the East End in tatters.

The blitz moved the front line from a distant mark on the map into our

own streets and gardens. That autumn, the brutality of the Second

World War came crashing into people's homes.

As Graham Greene observed: It happens in the kitchen, on landings,

beside washing baskets; it comes to us without staring a

beside washing baskets; it comes to ceased to function as one great city

but broke down into a series of small towns.

In this strange surreal world, even familiar stomping grounds became

foreign territory. In the Ministry of Fear, a spy

thriller set in wartime London, Graham Greene describes the morning

after a particularly heavy attack. This was the same route they had

taken last night, but it had been elaborately and trivially changed.

What a lot of activity there had been in a few hours.

The sticking up of notices, the amountering of traffic, the getting

to know a slightly different London. He noticed the briskness, the

cheerfulness on the faces. The blitz created a strange

suspended moment inside which anything seemed possible.

And writer Elizabeth Bowen observing London from her flat overlooking

Regents Park sensed something heady in the air that lent itself to

romance. It came to be rumoured, she wrote,

that everybody in London was in love.

That summer, Bowen began an affair with a Canadian diplomat, Charles

Ritchie, a relationship her husband conveniently decided to ignore.

Their passionate liaisons would tea fine her wartime experience and help

balcony of her sitting room that looks out over Regents Park. The

tall call room is full of mirrors, flowers, and books. She wants to

dedicate her next novel to me. I hope she will, and that it will be

her best. The heat of the Day is a eulogy to

the strength of a city under siege, and an open love letter to Charles

Ritchie to whom she did indeed dedicate the book. I think she used

the phrase open love letter to Charles Ritchie to whom she did

indeed dedicate the book. I think she used the phrase "almost

exonerated people from guilt" because of the unusual nature of the

times. It was almost like the blitz gave people licence. What I think

she needed was a big relationship to fuel her imagination, to give her a

secret life, if you like. Charles was immensely socially popular,

everyone wanted Charles at their parties, and he

everyone wanted Charles at their while, it was a very passionate

affair. I think the war gave it its intensity because, as she said,

there was always the third person in a relationship, which was history.

That time couldn't have happened except this time.

They had met each other at first not very often throughout that heady

autumn of the first London air-raids. Never had any season been

more felt.One bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death.

Out of the mists of morning, charred by the unmisty glitter, between the

last sunset and the first note of the siren, the darkening, glassy

tenseness of the evening was drawn fine. And you felt more and more

called upon to observe the daytime as a pure and

called upon to observe the daytime the time? How she was describing was

a thinning of the membrane between the this and the that. It was the

thinning of the membrane between everything between rich and poor

people, the living and the dead, and lovers. Relationships grew up very,

very fast, that people felt liberated in some sense to do things

that they didn't do before; that there was a conspiracy feeling

between those people who stayed in London during the war, and those who

had refugeed themselves to the country. One of the things she said

was in general it was the wicked who stayed and the good who went away,

and of course she wasn't a wicked woman, but you can - you know what

she means. When each new dawn was

she means. in the countryside, a general

feeling of unmarriedness prevailed, and London became a playground for

adults who found themselves single all over again.

For Graham Greene, whose we've Vivien had been evacuated to Sussex,

the combination of danger and sexual freedom was especially aluring.

Green and Vivien had married a decade previously and produced two

children, but the relationship soon dwindled into a purely companionate

marriage. So escape the Khost phobia of family

life, Green rent add room in Bloomsbury where he could retreat to

write. It was, perhaps inevitable that, on

the day war was declared, Green would glance out of his study window

and catch the eye of the land lady's daughter.

The passionate relationship daughter.

non-starter. What Dorothy lacked in beauty, she more than made up for

with an infectious laugh and a redoubtable spirit.

A fellow air-raid warden, Dorothy became Green's trusty accomplice on

their treacherous nightly patrols, returning from duty in the early

hours, they would fall into bed to make careless love as the bombs

rained down outside. But the fact that Green had fallen

for Dorothy Glover didn't prevent him seeking additional pleasures

elsewhere, and these stolen liaise sons would find their way into the

great post-war novel, The End of the Affair. It was dark and quiet by

this time in the streets, although up in the moon, the sky moved the

blobs and beams of search lights. up in the moon, the sky moved the

woman flashed on her light and said, "Like to come home with me, dear?"

Graham Greene had always been a thrill-seeker. In his youth he had

added spice to his life by playing Russian roulette. Now, night after

night, the blitz delivered everything he had always longed for:

danger, tribulation, and sex. The aerial bombing brought the front

line of the war home on to British soil.

This was a civilian conflict. One of the most searing responses to

the action wouldn't be penned by a soldier abroad but a spirited

intellectual living my old town square.

In 1942, American poet Hilda Doolittle wrote The Walls Do Not

Fall, the first of a trilogy of poems written amid the 50 the 50,000

incidents of the London blitz. Hilda Hilda Doolittle wrote The

Walls Do Not Fall, the first of a trilogy of poems written amid the

50,000 incidents of the London blitz.

Hilda Doolittle, or "HD" as she was known to her friends, refused to

leave London when the war n when the war began. "If one has taken joy and

comfort from a country, one doesn't like to leave it when there is

trouble about," she observed. During the blitz, HD lived a boldly

bisexual life in Knightsbridge with her partner Bryer Bryer and her

daughter, Perdita. The block she experienced in the

1930s would be released. She found The block she experienced in the

Ruin everywhere, yet, as the fallen roof leaves the sealed room open to

the air, so, three our desolation, thoughts stir. Inspiration stalks us

through gloom. On16 April 1941, London experienced

the most brutal night of the blitz. Over 1,000 people died, 100,000

homes were destroyed, and scores of firemen fought to prevent the blaze

engulfing the city. Henny York had volunteered for the

wartime fire service reasoning that the position was

novel, Caught. They saw the whole fury of the conflagration in which

they had to play a part. They sat very still beneath the

immensity, for against it, warehouses, small towers, puny

steeples seemed alive with sparks from the mile-high pandemonium of

flame reflected in the quaking sky. Henry Yorke was already leading a

double life, writing under the quaking sky.

Henry Yorke was already leading a double life, writing under the pen

name "Henry Green". During the blitz, London became a dramatic

backdrop against which he played the starring part.

Didn't York play up to the idea of firemen as heroes? He signed up at

the beginning of the war as a fireman very much wanting to be a

hero and London, and he loved the fact that

he had his 48-hour shifts and then have a day off in which he would see

the young girls he described as dragging on the floor when firemen

passed, and take them to clubs, bars, and dance away. Girls used to

say to each other, "Who is it something you're going out tonight?

Someone you would like to die with?" The blitz gave him the opportunity

to be a film star in an extraordinary set? Absolutely, yes.

He loved playing roles. He had a whole set of personas, the

aristocrat, the businessman, then, in the Second World War, he became

the hero, and that was the role he loved most of all.

In a letter to a friend, York observed, "These times are an

absolute gift to the writer," and they

in London was a target. Henry Yorke was the son of a wealthy

industrialist, but, like the privileged hero of his novel Caught,

he found a night on duty in the fire service soon put pay to social

difference. In some fantastic way I am sure you

only get in a war, we were suddenly alone and forced to rely on one

another entirely. But, after 12 months of bickering,

each crew was thrown upon itself on its own resources. The only thing to

do was to keep together. Most of London literati came from

upper middle-class stock, but, in the rush and tumble of wartime, they

found themselves mixing with people from all walks of life.

Nowhere was there from all walks of life.

Elizabeth Bowen revelled in the fact that her fellow wardens were of all

types, so different, in fact, that were it not for the war, they

wouldn't have met at all. She detected a new, more egalitarian

society. We've almost stopped talking about democracy, she wrote,

because, for the first time, we are a democracy. We are more, we are

almost a come immune. -- commune. Meanwhile, Graham Greene

turned his uncomfortable nights into a scene for his book, the Ministry

of Fear. Ayerza long the walls, the bodies

lay two deep, while, outside, the raid rumbles and book, the Ministry

of Fear. Ayerza long the walls, the bodies

lay two deep, while, outside, the raid rumbles and reskieded. --

resceded. An old man snored, and two lovers lay with their

resceded. An old man snored, and two inappropriate goings on. An official

accompanying the chief warden on one of his nightly visits was disgusted

to note a couple locked in an intimate embrace. But that is Mr

Green, the chief warden explained, one of our finest wardens, and his

nice wife. Mr Green's nice wife was of course his long-term miss stress,

Dorothy. -- misstress, Dorothy.

Towards the end of 1942, the war retreated from the immediate horizon

to a distant pin-prick on the map, and London, devoid of danger, began

to feel worn out and world-weary. The gay abandon of the previous year

was spent, but the chaos and the rationing remained. On leave from

the Marines, Evelyn Waugh rationing remained. On leave from

losing its buoyancy, and despite the relentlessly upbeat propaganda,

people were simply tired of taking it.

To work or think was to ache. In offices, factories, ministries,

shops, kitchens. The hot, yellow sands of each afternoon ran out

slowly. Fatigue was the run reality.

You dare not envisage sleep. Apathetic, the injured and dying in

the hospitals watched light changed on walls which might fall tonight.

For Elizabeth Bowen, this change of mood co-insighted with a cooling off

in her affair with Charles Ritchie, following an afternoon in Kew

Gardens, Ritchie confessed in his diary, "I am in love with Elizabeth

imaginatively." It was becoming diary, "I am in love with Elizabeth

and it never did become institutionalised, that love affair,

because they never could live together, and they never did live

together, and it was always a question of secret meetings and

hurried meetings. How much do you think this relationship found its

way into her writing? Hugely. I think she needed it in order to

write - put it that way round. She said, "I am a writer before I am a

woman." However bad the things that happened to her, it could be fed

into her writing. She needed intensity of life in order to write,

but the writing was what it was all for,that kind of way.

The months before the declaration of peace were as strained as the last

days before the outbreak of war. Elizabeth Bowen observed, "A general

paralysis and apprehension, the reverse equivalent

paralysis and apprehension, the distorted values, and the

high-pitched level, and the fortitude which we had proved beyond

doubt that we possessed. I have passed the flame. I had had my

initiation. I was tired of all that. In the closing months of the war, HD

suffered a mental collapse. During which she scaled the roof of her

flat, flung her clothes to the ground, and had to be restrained

from throwing herself off too. She would suffer from post-traumatic

stress disorder for most of her adult life.

But, like so many of London's literary set, HD had survived the

war only by writing about it. On 27 March 1945, London was hit by

the last bomb On 27 March 1945, London was hit by

It really looks as if the war might be over soon, he wrote to his

mother. One doesn't feel one will have much energy left for peace.

For Elizabeth Bowen, the days following the declaration of peace

were great and beautiful. The whole city seemed to leave the

ground. Everyone wore a curious limpidity of

expression, like new-born babies or souls just after death.

Dazed but curiously dignified. But after the initial euphoria, a

sense of deflation devended. London had grown used to trials and

tribulations, had grown used to trials and

Charles Ritchie returned to native Canada and married his cousin, while

Graham Greene and Henry Yorke found, with the return of their wives and

children, their extra-marital escapades became a little more

problematic. This group of writers who lived and wrote in London during

the blitz were all seeking something, something that lay

forever round the next corner, in the next bar, in the warmth of

another person's bed. For a moment, they found it, only to

have it snatched away again when the final all-clear sounded. Elizabeth

Bowen spoke for them all when she wrote, "I would not have missing in

London during the war for anything. It was the most interesting of my

life." The war had