The Love-Charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel Read Free Book Online Page A

lead people to view pre-war surrealist art with new eyes. During this period the novelist Inez Holden surveyed Regent’s Park with a surrealist painter friend. There were two or three odd stockings slung over the branches; purple damask draped on a tree; a brand new bowler hat balanced on a twig. Turning to Holden, the painter announced smugly: ‘Of course we were painting this sort of thing years ago, but it has taken some time to get here.’
    Since the night of the Woburn Square bombing, fresh gashes had been created in Greene’s district every night. Two days earlier, the YMCA club on Great Russell Street was bombed, killing five people, including a member of the Home Guard. Tonight as the aeroplanes gathered overhead, Greene was waiting expectantly to see any new ruins the bombing might bring.
     
     
    See notes on Chapter 1

2
    10 p.m.: Fire
     
     
    At 9.30 p.m. Rose Macaulay set out for her 10 p.m. ambulance shift. By now the raid was fully underway. Incendiaries were falling throughout Marylebone and the blacked-out streets were lit up by fire and searchlights. Eighty German aircraft attacked London over the course of the night, flying in over Norfolk, Suffolk and the south coast. Despite the danger of the streets, Macaulay was relieved to leave her flat. During evenings at home, she spent the raids under the dubious protection of her kitchen table. ‘Faith in tables is important,’ she had informed her sister Jean in a letter earlier that week. But her faith was not strong enough to assuage her phobia of being buried under rubble: the result of seeing a succession of houses and blocks of flats reduced to piles of ruins from which the inhabitants could not be extracted in time to live. She would rather brave the explosions from the street, or from the relative safety of the ambulance station dugout.
     

    Rose Macaulay in her flat in Hinde House in 1950
     
    The ambulance station was a half-hour walk from Macaulay’s flat, through the side streets of Marylebone. Lurching along in the darkness, Macaulay presented a frail figure. Always tall, thin and angular, she had become bonier with age and was currently existing chiefly on a diet of tomato juice. But at fifty-nine, she was in fact still stronger than many of her younger colleagues at the ambulance station. As an undergraduate, she had spent her evenings scaling the university roofs, and was surprised when the other turn-of-the-century undergraduates at Somerville College did not wish to do the same. Now, she kept her climbing skills honed by clambering up and down the staff ladders in the stacks at the London Library. Volunteering to drive an ambulance in March 1939, she was unfazed by the regulations, which set the upper age limit at fifty, or by the application form, which asked volunteers to assess their ability to lift a person on a stretcher to the top bunk of an ambulance.
    In the spring of 1940 official government decrees had stipulated that any female ambulance drivers over fifty should relinquish their duties, but Macaulay had managed to maintain her post. She had no inclination to rein in her physical courage or to surrender to the conventions of middle age. Nonetheless, close friends had been saddened to see her age visibly over the past year. They ascribed it to the war which, as a vocal pacifist, she had found hard to accept. ‘My God, what a world,’ she wrote to Rosamond Lehmann a week after the declaration of war; ‘I feel still that it is a nightmare and that I will wake – but know it isn’t.’ A few friends, such as Lehmann herself, also attributed Macaulay’s new frailty to the decline in health of Gerald O’Donovan, her secret lover and companion of the past twenty years. ‘He is terribly weak,’ Macaulay reported in the same letter to Lehmann; ‘I don’t think he’ll get well ever.’
    Arriving at the ambulance dugout, Macaulay tried out her new prize possession: a blow-up lilo that she had found in Selfridges earlier in the