Square Haunting
Page 1
FRANCESCA WADE
SQUARE
HAUNTING
Five Women, Freedom
and London
Between The Wars
‘I like this London life in early summer –
the street sauntering & square haunting.’
VIRGINIA WOOLF, diary 20 April 1925
CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
PROLOGUE
IN THE SQUARE
H. D.
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
JANE ELLEN HARRISON
EILEEN POWER
VIRGINIA WOOLF
AFTER THE SQUARE
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Text Permissions
Index
About the Author
Copyright
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Woman of Samaria, Guilford Place, in 1912. London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).
Jane Harrison at Newnham College, circa 1912. The Principal and Fellows, Newnham College, Cambridge.
Maps of Bloomsbury, John Cary (1795) and Edward Stanford (1897).
Mecklenburgh Square, east and north sides, circa 1904. Collection of Brian Girling. Reproduced by kind permission of Amberley Publishing.
H. D. in Mecklenburgh Square, 1917. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Letter from D. H. Lawrence to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 17 November 1917. Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham.
H. D. and Perdita. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Richard Aldington (front row, far right) in 1918. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The first women graduates, October 1920. By kind permission of the Principal and Fellows of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
Dorothy L. Sayers as Sir Hugh Allen in the Going-Down Play of 1915. Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford.
Advertising material for Whose Body?. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Dorothy L. Sayers at the Detection Club in 1939. Popperfoto/Getty Images.
Jane Ellen Harrison by Augustus John, 1909. The Principal and Fellows, Newnham College, Cambridge.
Jane Ellen Harrison as Alcestis, Oxford, 1887. The Principal and Fellows, Newnham College, Cambridge.
Jane Harrison with H. F. Stewart, Gilbert Murray and Francis Cornford, circa 1909. The Principal and Fellows, Newnham College, Cambridge.
Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees in Paris, 1915. The Principal and Fellows, Newnham College, Cambridge.
Eileen Power lecturing at Girton, circa 1915. The Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge.
Invitation to a kitchen dance. Courtesy of Basil and Alexander Postan as executors for the Lady Cynthia and Sir Michael Postan.
Eileen Power and H. G. Wells, 1930s. From Charles Graves, Cigars and the Man (Martins Cigars Ltd, 1938).
Recording one of Rhoda Power’s history lessons, 1931. © BBC Photo Library.
Leonard and Virginia Woolf photographed by Gisèle Freund in 1939. Photo Gisèle Freund/IMEC/Fonds MCC.
Leonard Woolf and John Lehmann at the Hogarth Press. Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Getty Images.
Virginia Woolf in the garden at Monk’s House, 1926. Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images.
‘Hedge-hoppers’: woodcut by Diana Gardner showing planes flying over Rodmell, 1940. Courtesy of Claire Gardner.
Mecklenburgh Square (north side) after bomb damage in 1940. Photograph reproduced with permission of Goodenough College. All rights reserved.
Guilford Street in 1940. Courtesy of Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre.
PROLOGUE
A few minutes past midnight on Tuesday, 10 September 1940, an air raid struck Mecklenburgh Square. From number 45, John Lehmann heard gunfire rumbling in the distance, the hum of aeroplanes at an insistent crescendo until ‘three whistling, ripping noises’ directly overhead were followed by the unmistakable tinkling of breaking glass. Climbing out of bed, he opened the blackout curtains to find his windows shattered and the London skyline obscured by flames. His friend Stephen Spender’s house on nearby Lansdowne Terrace, usually visible from his second-floor window, appeared to be enveloped in a burning cloud. ‘Well,’ Lehmann found himself thinking, surprised at his state of calm, ‘poor old Stephen’s the first to go.’
Lehmann left his room and hurried downstairs, shouting out to his sleeping landlord as he passed. Before he could open the front door he felt the building tremble with another explosion – ‘the house seemed to clench itself like a fist for a moment, then silence,’ he later recalled – and as he tentatively peered outside, he was met with the sight of ‘an enormous bellying cloud of grey dust advancing down the road towards me like a living thing’. Instinctively, Lehmann ran into the square – the searchlight had broken, plunging the area into total darkness – and collided with neighbours in pyjamas rushing the other way. An acquaintance from number 46, wearing a tin helmet, explained that an unexploded time bomb was lodged in the square’s garden, and the shelter there had been evacuated.
Five houses on the east side of the square formed Byron Court, a block of residential accommodation for nurses from the Royal Free Hospital on Gray’s Inn Road. As his eyes accustomed to the dark, Lehmann thought that it looked rather odd, then realised after a few seconds that he was seeing a tree beyond – the building had been smashed to bits, one side standing sliced open like a doll’s house.
For the first time in the war, death felt very close to Lehmann. But for the moment, there was little he could do. He sat on a doorstep and chatted to a woman in Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform while the residents of Mecklenburgh Square waited for dawn to confirm the end of the raid. Couples lay in the road entwined for warmth under improvised coverings; someone produced a Dostoevsky novel and began to read as the sun rose; a group of young women, rescued from Byron Court, huddled together in a stairwell. At last, the all-clear sounded and the makeshift party dispersed, back to their flats if they dared, or to find shelter in nearby churches, underground stations or hotels.
When he returned to Mecklenburgh Square later that morning, broken glass glittered on the pavement while firemen’s hoses snaked across the garden. Rain had dissolved the dust that had coated the bushes at dawn, but the grass was scorched with the detritus of incendiary bombs. A squad of firemen was trying to control the smoke still pouring out of Byron Court, while ambulances and blood-transfusion units stood by alongside hordes of police. Numbers 30, 31 and 32 had been demolished by a delayed-action high-explosive bomb; seventeen residents had been admitted to the Royal Free, with people still being stretchered out at 11 a.m. Six nurses died. All day the square was busy with arrivals and departures, as London’s Blitz bureaucracy cranked into its hastily established routine: gas inspectors searching for leaks, the electricity board collecting meters and cookers, deliveries of chloride of lime to disinfect the remaining houses, the PDSA enquiring about distressed animals, and the overworked mortuary van, drawing up to collect the dead. A warden was instructed to authorise and record all comings and goings in the square, as residents returned to pick up post and retrieve business papers, bedding and ration cards. ‘09.26 Mr Jackson, No. 8 Mecklenburgh Square, fed cat.’ ‘13.50 Mrs Harrington, room 52 Byron Court searching for property – left 14.17 none found.’ ‘15.40 Mrs Golding given permission to empty wardrobe in road.’ ‘20.13 Dead body removed. Female.’
Virginia and Leonard Woolf, John Lehmann’s neighbours and colleagues in the Hogarth Press, arrived from Sussex that afternoon to find a crowd gathered in Doughty
Street, the entrance to Mecklenburgh Square cordoned off and access to their flat at number 37 forbidden. Virginia could see that her friend Jane Harrison’s former home, yards away at 11 Mecklenburgh Street, was ‘a great pile of bricks … Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still standing. A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out – a clean cut.’ A neighbour told the Woolfs that the previous night’s explosion – the culmination of three nights of German air raids aimed at nearby King’s Cross station – had blown him right out of bed. Leaving the square and wandering, dazed, around her usual haunts – from Holborn, where the streets gushed with water from smashed pipes, down the gridlocked Chancery Lane, where her typist’s office was destroyed, around Lincoln’s Inn and over to Regent’s Park – Virginia saw smoke rising from gaps in the streets, a shell of a cinema with its stage visible from the road, a beaten-up restaurant ruefully offering wine to passers-by. As she and Leonard drove away that evening, a siren went off and people began to run; the Woolfs raced through empty streets, dodging past haphazardly parked cars and frantic horses released from their shafts.
A week later, on 16 September, the time bomb exploded, bringing down the ceiling of the basement room which housed the printing press, blowing several doors off their hinges, breaking every window and all the Woolfs’ china. Sparrows fluttered in through holes in the roof and perched on the rafters; the pipes issued spurts of water at unpredictable intervals which cascaded down the stairs. On her next visit, Virginia returned to a Bloomsbury utterly altered from the one she knew. Her old home at 52 Tavistock Square was destroyed (‘rubble where I wrote so many books. Open air where we sat so many nights, gave so many parties’). Number 37 Mecklenburgh Square was uninhabitable; a chalk cross she found marked on the door gave Virginia a shivering vision of the Black Death. Sirens wailed outside while the Woolfs and John Lehmann, along with the grimly cheerful overalled clerks from the solicitors’ office upstairs, shared cold sausages and attempted to sort the salvageable (the works of Darwin, the silver, some Omega Workshops plates) from the irreparable (most of their crockery and the gramophone) while the wind blew through the splintered windows. A local gardener was enlisted to help excavate the carpet with a spade. On her hands and knees, Virginia scrabbled through the shards of glass and plaster powder, emerging, momentarily triumphant, with twenty-four volumes of her diaries – ‘a great mass for my memoirs’. She never lived in London again. And Mecklenburgh Square – home, through its two-hundred-year history, to pioneering activists, lawyers, doctors, artists and writers – was now in ruins.
IN THE SQUARE
Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the City, and should still ask for more.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, ‘London Revisited’ (1916)
Marooned on an island in the middle of a busy junction, a stone woman stoops to fill an urn with water. The drinking fountain on which she kneels has long since run dry; the steps leading down to the public lavatories behind her are boarded up; the elegant parade of Georgian buildings to her right is severed by a busy construction site. She breathes the fumes of cars passing down Guilford Street, which connects Bloomsbury with Clerkenwell and London’s east, while workmen perch on her pedestal to eat their sandwiches. She is a remnant of the past frozen in the present, her name and story buried like the Fleet river on whose banks Guilford Street was built.
Cities are composed of roads and buildings, but also of myths and memories: stories which bring the brick and asphalt to life, and bind the present to the past. For Virginia Woolf, this unassuming statue just outside the entrance to Mecklenburgh Square – the Woman of Samaria, commissioned by a group of sisters in memory of their mother and designed by Henry Darbishire in 1870 – was ‘one of the few pieces of sculpture in the streets of London that is pleasing to the eye’. In a city decorated liberally with images of hoary statesmen in celebration of their service to Empire, Woolf was intrigued by this anonymous woman, who seemed to represent an alternative, hidden history. ‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,’ Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own. In that book, she describes wandering the streets of London and observing women talking, walking, shopping and selling; their everyday animation reminds her of ‘the accumulation of unrecorded life’ which historians – in their habitual focus on ‘the lives of great men’ – were yet to chronicle. For Woolf, the statue paid subversive tribute to the forgotten women of London’s past, a small but significant reminder of the figures who have been left out of books, or whose talents were never allowed to reach their full potential, simply because they were women.
The Woman of Samaria, Guilford Place, in 1912.
In May 1917, T. S. Eliot described for his mother a visit to the American poet Hilda Doolittle, his new colleague on the Egoist magazine. ‘London is an amazing place,’ he wrote. ‘One is constantly discovering new quarters; this woman lives in a most beautiful dilapidated old square, which I had never heard of before; a square in the middle of town, near King’s Cross station, but with spacious old gardens about it.’ Somehow, Mecklenburgh Square has remained a quiet enclave out on Bloomsbury’s easternmost edge, separated from the better-known garden squares by Coram’s Fields and the brutalist ziggurat of the Brunswick Centre. It is bounded by a graveyard (St George’s Gardens) and the noisy Gray’s Inn Road, while its central garden – unusually for Bloomsbury – remains locked to non-residents and hidden behind high hedges. But for D. H. Lawrence, a one-time lodger there, Mecklenburgh Square was the ‘dark, bristling heart of London’.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Mecklenburgh Square was a radical address. And during the febrile years which encompassed the two world wars, it was home to the five women writers whose stories form this book. Virginia Woolf arrived with her bags and boxes at a moment of political chaos; she deliberated in her diaries ‘how to go on, through war’, unaware that another writer had asked exactly that question in the same place twenty-three years earlier, as Zeppelin raids toppled the books from her shelf. Hilda Doolittle, known as H. D., lived at 44 Mecklenburgh Square during the First World War, and hosted Lawrence and his wife Frieda while her husband Richard Aldington was fighting in France. In 1921, three years after H. D. had left the square abruptly for a new start in Cornwall, Dorothy L. Sayers created Lord Peter Wimsey, the swaggering hero of her first detective novel, in the very same room where H. D. had begun work on the autobiographical novel cycle that would occupy her for the rest of her life. From 1926 to 1928, Jane Ellen Harrison, the pioneer of classical and anthropological studies, supported a Russian-language literary magazine from the square, working among a diverse milieu of diaspora intellectuals. And at number 20, between 1922 and 1940, the historian Eileen Power convened socialist meetings to chart an anti-fascist future, scripted pacifist broadcasts for the BBC and hosted raucous parties in her kitchen.
These women were not a Bloomsbury Group: they lived in Mecklenburgh Square at separate times, though one or two knew each other, and others were connected through shared interests, friends, even lovers. H. D. and Sayers lived in the square when their careers had hardly begun, Woolf and Harrison at the very ends of their lives; Power lived there for almost two decades, Sayers and Woolf just one year each. But for all of them, in different ways, their time in the square was formative. They all agreed that the structures which had long kept women subordinate were illusory and mutable: in their writing and their lifestyles they wanted to break boundaries and forge new narratives for women. In Mecklenburgh Square, each dedicated herself to establishing a way of life that would let her fulfil her potential, to finding relationships that would support her work and a domestic set-up that would enable it. But it was not always easy. Their lives in the square demonstrate the challenges, personal and professional, that met – and continue to meet – women who want to make their voices heard.
Though I’ve lived in London all my life, I’d never heard of Mecklenburgh Square unti
l I walked through it by chance one summer evening in 2013. Gazing up at the firmly drawn curtains above H. D.’s weather-worn blue plaque (the only commemoration of any of them there today), I tried to imagine the conversations that had taken place just a few metres away, almost a hundred years earlier. Later, at home, reading about this mysterious square and its illustrious roster of past inhabitants, I was astonished to learn that so many other women writers – some of whose names were unknown to me, but whose lives and work sounded as fascinating as the more famous ones – had made their homes here around the same time. I wanted to know what had drawn these women here, and what sort of lives they’d lived in these tall, dignified houses, where they had written such powerful works of history, memoir, fiction and poetry – often recreating the square itself in their work. Was their shared address simply a coincidence? Or was there something about Mecklenburgh Square that had exerted on each of them an irresistible pull? They all seemed, on the surface, such different characters, preoccupied by divergent concerns and moving in separate, if occasionally overlapping, circles – but was there anything fundamental that united them, beyond the simple fact that they had happened to alight, at some point, in this hidden corner of Bloomsbury?
The next time I found myself nearby, I took a detour to Mecklenburgh Square. As I wandered around looking for gaps in the thick hedge through which I might glimpse the garden, I remembered Virginia Woolf’s famous declaration of 1929: ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.’ Turning back for a last glance at H. D.’s balcony as I headed towards Russell Square tube, I wondered if Woolf’s extraordinary essay might help me understand the texture of these women’s lives here, the prejudices they were fighting and the opportunities they grasped. I began to suspect that what H. D., Sayers, Harrison, Power and Woolf herself were seeking in Mecklenburgh Square was everything Woolf had urged women writers to pursue: a room of their own, both literal and symbolic; a domestic arrangement which would help them to live, work, love and write as they desired. Perhaps, I thought, it was this which attracted them all, in the interwar years, to Bloomsbury: a place already with a literary heritage, close to the British Museum Reading Room and the theatres and restaurants of the West End, where a new kind of living seemed possible, and where radical thought might flourish amid a political atmosphere founded on a zeal for change.