‘Hedge-hoppers’: woodcut by Diana Gardner showing planes flying over Rodmell, 1940
Sussex, on the south coast, formed the German planes’ entry point into Britain: bombers sped over the garden of Monk’s House so low that the Woolfs, eating lunch outside, could make out the swastikas on their tails as they passed overhead. At night, Woolf would be woken by the low drone as they flew in from the sea; she would lie awake until she heard them returning, having dropped their bombs on London. Often, one plane would hold back and circle the Ouse Valley until the fleet returned, scattering bombs on the Downs and meadows with no apparent policy. A Lewes stonemason who monitored the skies told Leonard that he and his band of spotters were convinced this was a coward afraid of flying over London; when the anomalous explosions ceased one day, they guessed that the rogue pilot had been discovered and dispatched. Once a bomb dropped so close that Woolf’s pen jumped from her fingers as she was writing a letter, creating the grim symbol of an ink-blot which obliterated her paragraph. Every excursion presented peril: Virginia and Leonard walked out huddled close together, ‘prudently deciding that 2 birds had better be killed with one stone’. ‘Should I think of death?’ she wondered, gazing at the sunset flushing the haystack fiery red. She tried to imagine the feeling of being killed by a bomb: ‘I’ve got it fairly vivid – the sensation: but cant see anything but suffocating nonentity following after … I said to L.: I dont want to die yet.’ One evening, while Virginia was writing to Ethel Smyth, she heard the sound of gunfire, and ran outside to see a German plane be shot down over the Lewes racecourse: ‘a scuffle; a swerve: then a plunge; & a burst of thick black smoke’.
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Standing behind the barrier between Doughty Street and Mecklenburgh Square on 10 September 1940, watching neighbours jump on smouldering bricks to quell the sparks, Woolf wondered what fate had befallen the inhabitants of these destroyed houses: ‘the casual young men & women I used to see, from my window; the flat dwellers who used to have flower pots & sit on the balcony’. She was ‘greatly relieved’ when the Hogarth secretary advised her and Leonard not to attempt to sleep in Mecklenburgh Square that night, and was mildly alarmed by the attitude of the solicitor Mr Pritchard, who insisted on remaining at his desk in a leather coat and hat to protect himself from the cold, dust and rain (‘he watches raids from his flat roof & sleeps like a hog’). Returning by car a few days later to assess the damage, the Woolfs were caught in a raid outside Wimbledon and had to retreat to the nearest shelter, where they met a family who had been living there since being bombed out of their home, sleeping on wood shavings while the wind whistled through bullet holes in the corrugated steel. When eventually the Woolfs reached London, they convened with Lehmann at the Russell Hotel and heard the story of that night: the crash of bombs, the sight of a tree where Byron Court had been, the ‘great cloud of thick grey dust’ and the neighbours huddled in doorways in their pyjamas. It was some weeks until they could return to the house, and even then it was clear that they couldn’t stay there. To her surprise, Woolf remained calm in the face of this disastrous end to her Bloomsbury life, which had begun with such promise but ended up a worry and a burden. She felt a strange ‘exhilaration at losing possessions – save at times I want my books & chairs & carpets & beds – How I worked to buy them – one by one – And the pictures. But to be free of Meck wd now be a relief. Almost certainly it will be destroyed – & our queer tenancy of that sunny flat over … I shd like to start life, in peace, almost bare – free to go anywhere.’
For the first time in her life, Woolf was now without a home in London, the city which, to her, had always represented freedom. During her years living out in Richmond, Woolf had felt an exile: she tried to accustom herself to the suburbs, but would idly house-hunt on every visit back to the city, bewitched by its ‘tumult & riot & busyness’. She loved watching the majestic ships pulling into the docks, unloading cargo from all over the world; she loved the allure of Oxford Street’s shop windows, and people-watching in Bloomsbury squares, chatting inside with friends while ‘odd characters, sinister, strange, prowled and slunk past our windows’. Woolf associated walking in London with fertile trains of thought – she often referred to ‘making up’ phrases and scenes as she rambled through Bloomsbury or around Charing Cross – and called her visceral creative response to city-walking ‘street frenzy’. She described the city as ‘reviving my fires’ after days spent indoors through illness or bouts of hard work: ‘London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets … To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.’ London, she wrote to Ethel Smyth after the Blitz began, was ‘the passion of my life’: even the uncomfortable tenure at Mecklenburgh Square had not dimmed her love for the city, and her belief in its healing powers. Early in the war she had written: ‘Odd how often I think with what is love I suppose of the City: of the walk to the Tower: that is my England; I mean, if a bomb destroyed one of those little alleys with the brass bound curtains & the river smell & the old woman reading I should feel – well, what the patriots feel.’
In Rodmell in March 1940, lying awake in bed with the starlight pouring through the window, anxious about aeroplanes and Margery Fry, Woolf tried to force herself to think of something ‘liberating & freshening’, and chose ‘The river. Say the Thames at London bridge; & buying a notebook; & then walking along the Strand & letting each face give me a buffet.’ Her words echo her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’, a paean to the imaginative possibilities of the city, in which a search for a lead pencil – a means of writing – provides ‘an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner’. Wandering out, feeling like ‘an enormous eye’ giddy with the ‘irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow’, Woolf celebrates the sense of freedom and community she feels in London, where ‘we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.’ Gazing up into lighted windows, she thinks of all the lives being lived in parallel, the characters, stories and history hidden – for now – behind closed doors. Her words are a rallying cry for the possibility of fiction, of history and biography, and by extension for the pleasure of reading.
Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washer-woman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?
AFTER THE SQUARE
An incident here and there,
and rails gone (for guns)
from your (and my) old town square.
H. D., ‘THE WALLS DO NOT FALL’ (1941)
After the bombing of Mecklenburgh Square, the Woolfs found themselves suddenly ‘marooned’ in the countryside as if on a desert island, surrounded by ‘the melancholy relics of our half-destroyed furniture’. Petrol rationing prevented much travel, so Virginia used the exile to ‘cram in a little more reading’, seeking to recreate the activity of London through her imagination alone. She found, to her pleasant surprise, that the enforced solitude suited her: she enjoyed gathering apples, bottling honey, and the simple routine of ‘breakfast, writing, walking, tea, bowls, reading, sweets, bed’. Six days after the bombing, the Woolfs dismissed their London servant Mabel Haskins, who went to live with her sister in Holloway; Virginia felt buoyant at ‘the end of resident servants forever’. ‘One must drop a safety curtain over ones private scene,’ she told Ethel Smyth; she reflected that living in one place, cut off from outside distraction, made her feel paradoxically freer than before. ‘By shutting down the fire curtain, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry?’
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br /> The problem of 37 Mecklenburgh Square dragged on. Before a second explosion in November 1940 caved in the back of the house, John Lehmann had made arrangements to move Hogarth operations to the Garden City Press at Letchworth in Hertfordshire. (This printer had also taken on the publication of the Economic History Review, which Eileen Power continued to edit, chasing up copy and dispatching stern reminders about unpaid subscriptions.) Meanwhile, the Woolfs brought their possessions back from London to store at Monk’s House. There they lived ‘in the devil of a hobble and mess’: crockery piled on manuscripts, and Leslie Stephen’s bound editions of the classics scattered in heaps around the sitting room. ‘I’ve had to empty the whole of 37 Meck Sqre into this cottage,’ Virginia wrote to Ethel in December 1940. ‘Oh I can’t go into the dreary details – how we went to London and found mushrooms sprouting on the carpets, pools standing on the chairs, and glass to the right left and then a ceiling fell.’ Leonard wrote to the Bedford Estate asking for a remission on the rent they were still paying on 52 Tavistock Square (‘If refused, we mean to tackle the Duke, & ventilate in the papers’), and received a letter in reply saying that the matter was settled, since the house had been utterly destroyed the previous night. The news that Vanessa Bell’s studio had been incinerated, with around a hundred canvases lost and ‘a frigidaire and a statue the only survivors’, enhanced the vertiginous sense that their past was receding into oblivion. Yet Virginia felt she had ‘never had a better writing season’. ‘I want to look back on these war years as years of positive something or other,’ she wrote, as if embarrassed at putting her own productivity before the common grief.
Mecklenburgh Square (north side) after bomb damage in 1940
In November, Woolf had felt confident, even ‘triumphant’ about Between the Acts. ‘I think its an interesting attempt in a new method … A richer pat, certainly fresher than that misery The Years,’ she wrote. But by February 1941, when she finished the book, she had changed her mind, and insisted to Leonard – who had read the manuscript and loved it – that it should not under any circumstances be published. They decided to offer John Lehmann the casting vote, and within days he wired to Rodmell to tell Virginia the book was an unqualified success: it possessed, he later insisted, ‘an unparalleled imaginative power … a poetry more disturbing than anything she had written before, reaching at times the extreme limits of the communicable’. On 27 March, Virginia replied, confessing that she still felt the book ‘too silly and trivial’, that it had been ‘written in the intervals of doing Roger with my brain half asleep’, and that publication must be postponed until at least the following autumn. Leonard attached a covering note to warn Lehmann that Virginia was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. By the time he received the letter, Virginia Woolf was dead.
‘I never like or respect my admirers, always my detractors,’ Woolf wrote in her diary two months before her death. Leonard described her as suffering from ‘an almost pathological hypersensitiveness to criticism’, which meant that the completion of a book and the approach of its publication always placed her under ‘a terrific mental and nervous strain’: she had experienced two of her darkest episodes around the times of publishing The Voyage Out and The Years, and as she finished Between the Acts the depression that had recurred at intervals throughout her life returned. Towards the end of January she had fallen into a sudden ‘trough of despair’ which lasted almost a fortnight. With previous attacks, she and Leonard had learned that she could avoid collapse if she retreated to bed as soon as the symptoms began. But this time there was no warning. Convinced that her condition was more serious than ever before, Leonard drove Virginia to Brighton to consult her doctor, Octavia Wilberforce, who advised complete rest: while they were discussing treatment, a German bomber whistled over the roof and crashed its cargo into the sea. The following day, Friday, 28 March 1941, Virginia spent the morning dusting with Louie Everest, then in the afternoon she walked into the River Ouse, leaving short, heartfelt notes for Vanessa and Leonard. Her letter to her husband ended, ‘I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.’
The news of Virginia Woolf’s death shocked the nation. An obituary in the Observer described it as ‘a serious loss to English letters’; alongside the piece was published a poem ‘in memoriam’ by Vita Sackville-West, remembering Woolf as ‘rich in her contradictions; rich in love’. Elizabeth Bowen wrote to Leonard that ‘a great deal of the meaning seems to have gone out of the world’. A coroner gave an interview to the press in which he suggested that Woolf’s ‘extremely sensitive’ nature had made her ‘much more responsive than most people to the general beastliness of things happening in this world today’. Leonard, furious, wrote to the Sunday Times to reject this account, pointing out that while they had both been devastated by the war, the reference in Virginia’s suicide note to these ‘terrible times’ referred not to politics but to the private horror of another breakdown, and the fear that she might never be able to write again.
Accounts of Woolf often view her whole life in the light of her suicide, reading backwards from those last dreadful days in search of signs of the darkness to come. But interpretations which present her as a fragile, tormented genius do not do justice to Woolf’s strength, humour, imagination and resilience. In later recollections, friends were at pains to dispel ideas that she was in any way ‘gloomy and querulous’, and instead remembered her wit, her infectious hooting laughter, her love of jokes and gossip, her affinity with children and her fascination with other people. The year she spent in Mecklenburgh Square, though it ended in her death, was full of activity, friendships new and old, projects and plans. In September 1940, she had hoped for ‘another ten years, if Hitler doesn’t drop a splinter into my machine’: some years earlier she had written in her diary that ‘between 50 & 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live’, and even two months before she died she was possessed by ‘a fizz of ideas’. During her time in the square, her work was moving in exciting directions, expanding on the themes that had occupied her through her life as she responded to external events: it is a great loss that these books were never written.
Yet Woolf lives on. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Leonard published selections from her essays and diaries at regular intervals; the full diaries appeared in print between 1977 and 1984, edited by her nephew Quentin’s wife, Anne Olivier Bell, while Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson edited her letters, and Quentin himself published the first biography, authorised by Leonard, in 1972. Later readers have taken issue with his account, which played down her politics and portrayed her as a literary eccentric; subsequent scholars have read her as deeply engaged with the world, her interrogation of the self and society an important precursor to the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s and its conviction that ‘the personal is political’. Today, Virginia Woolf is the subject of regular homage, in forms ranging from academic studies, exhibitions and biographies to novels, television series, blockbuster films and a ballet. And thanks to the National Trust, Monk’s House remains preserved for visitors to search for clues to Woolf’s character, observing the living room with its walls washed a luminous mint-green, the fireplace tiles painted by Vanessa Bell with a delicate lighthouse, balls studding the lawn as if she and Leonard had a moment ago abandoned one of their fiercely competitive games of bowls. She remains an icon, a figurehead for generations of women to ‘think back through’.
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‘Oh! That this blasted war were over,’ wrote Eileen Power in 1939. ‘The boredom of it is incredible. My mind has been blown out like a candle. I am nothing but an embodied grumble, like everyone else.’ Power’s sabbatical application for 1939–40 had been approved by the LSE authorities in January, but was cancelled in September due to the war. At the start of the new academic year, the LSE moved its activities to Peterhouse College in Cambridge, and Power left Mecklenburgh Square behind. She and Munia Postan, eager for a home to suit their modern marriage, designed a new house to be
built especially for them at 2 Sylvester Road in Cambridge, where Power would live and lecture to Postan’s students as well as her own, while he remained in London, working for the Ministry of Economic Warfare, which had taken over the LSE buildings.
In the middle of May 1940, Postan was sent to Moscow. Power had been braced for him to be called away on diplomatic business, but his departure – of which she learned from the evening papers – meant that she was alone when she heard the news of the Dunkirk evacuation, which was widely supposed to presage an imminent invasion of Britain. ‘If only you could be here and all this a nightmare,’ she wrote to Postan. But her letter did not reach him. On 9 June, he was denied entry to Russia and made to turn back; the following day, Italy entered the war. Unable to travel home though Europe, he was forced to embark on a roundabout voyage through Turkey, Greece and South Africa. Power spent two months waiting, with no idea if her husband was still alive or whether she would survive long enough to see him return. Under pressures hard to imagine, she wrote begging him not to return to Britain if the country was invaded, and promised that ‘if I emerge alive from this nightmare I shall join you whenever I can, wherever you are’. If he returned to find her dead, she insisted that he must remarry and have children if he can – ‘the poor world will need your brains and character’ – and should name any daughter ‘Eileen Power Postan’. ‘Thank you my own darling,’ she added, ‘for making me as happy as a human being can be made and if I never see you again remember that no one could love you more.’
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