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

day. This, she told Jean subsequently, was ‘a great stroke of luck’: they had informed her previously that they would not have any more for weeks. She blew it up by mouth and put it ready for use on the floor, although she knew it was unlikely she would get much sleep that night. She then joined the other drivers, awaiting instructions as they listened to the bombs overhead. Earlier in the war, they had been given extra training during the periods of waiting, but on 21 September London County Council had announced that as long as the severe raiding continued it was desirable that ‘any exercise or instruction which would deprive personnel of any opportunity there may be for sleep should be avoided’. Instead they could chat, play games and knit, and Macaulay was cheerful in the company of the other ambulance workers. Away from the ambulance station, she was a literary grande dame : the author of over twenty novels, many of them bestsellers, and a familiar, eccentric presence in literary London. Here she could discard that persona and take pleasure in the shared everyday preoccupations of wartime life. ‘I like my ambulance colleagues, male and female,’ she wrote to Virginia Woolf in October. ‘You would too, I think. They teach me to knit, and are not unduly cast down by what they have to see and do.’
    Not far from Macaulay, Henry Yorke was also waiting to be called out to a raid at his fire station, Sub-station 345V ‘A’ Division, at 79 Davies Street. Firefighters had the longest shifts of all defence workers; as a full-time auxiliary fireman, Yorke was on duty for forty-eight hours followed by a twenty-four-hour break. This suited him because the time off was long enough to make progress with his writing, which was more prolific than it had ever been despite the long hours of work. He could also go into the office of Pontifex, the family business he was helping his father to run, which specialised in making equipment for breweries and bathrooms. Charming, rich, funny and briefly single now that his wife Dig and six-year-old son Sebastian had been evacuated to the countryside, Yorke spent the evenings of his leave taking girls out to restaurants, bars and nightclubs, impressing them with tales of his heroic exploits. Rosamond Lehmann affectionately described Yorke in this period as
     
    an eccentric, fire-fighting, efficient, pub-and-night-club-haunting monk, voluble, frivolous, ironic, worldly, austerely vowed to the invisible cell which he inhabited and within which a series of intricately designed, elaborately executed, poetic yet realistic war novels were being evolved.
     

    Henry Yorke, photographed by Cecil Beaton, 1949
     
    On duty, both Macaulay and Yorke wore full official uniforms. She had been issued with a peaked cap and a dark blue drill coat, which some ambulance drivers complained was too insubstantial to survive many nights of bombing. Yorke was dressed in a dark blue uniform with silver buttons and red piping. He wore rubber boots and a tin hat and carried an axe and spanner in his blue belt. Auxiliary firemen were only issued with one uniform, and by the end of a shift both Yorke and his clothes were black with soot and soaked through from the water used to put out fires. Despite the excitement of his time off, Yorke found the long shifts draining. For the past two and a half weeks he had been continually busy fighting major fires. And conditions at the fire station itself were not helped by the fact that there had been no gas at the station for several days, which meant that there were no heaters to dry clothes and no hot food. He was also exhausted. ‘Quite well but sleep the great difficulty,’ he wrote to Rosamond Lehmann a week into the raids. Sleeping on duty was very difficult, and off duty Yorke was too busy writing and socialising to catch up on rest. In March 1939 he had told his friend Mary Strickland that his pre-war routine was ‘to work myself silly and then go out . . .