The Heart to Artemis

by Bryher;

  We suffered most from lack of news. I had only dared bring one book with me, Lyall’s Twenty-Five Languages of Europe, but it was invaluable. We could occasionally pick up a Portuguese newspaper from the beach that somebody had thrown away and, with the help of this book and French, decipher the headlines. Some of the worst bombing seemed to have happened in the area where H. D. lived. What should I find when we got to London?

  The apathy that had astonished me among the refugees invaded my own mind. “They” had got me into this, it was not my fault, I had warned people that there was going to be a war, now “they” ought to look after me. It was really a form of paralysis and something that I have never been able to make an ordinary person understand. We become citizens through self-denial and much hard work. If this is no longer recognized, if everything of value is swept away, the result is anarchy. I know that there was a difference between the refugees and myself, I was going home once I got to England, I had my language and they had lost theirs but I do not think that anybody who has had even the mildest of such experiences will ever be the same person again. The majority of the conventions will no longer matter.

  I realized that I had to take action at once. We discovered that our chances of getting home depended upon the Clipper being late, the plane that was on the regular line between America and Portugal and that connected at Lisbon with the service to England. If it did not arrive in time, there were places for a few of the refugees. I organized a watch at the air office. We went to Lisbon every afternoon and two of us took it in turn to sit there from four to seven. I was also heartless. One of the clerks admired the girl who had come with us from Geneva, “Flirt with him,” I begged, “keep him interested.”

  We went in day after day for three weeks. One evening the Clipper did not arrive. Our names were low on the waiting list but we were there with our passports, tickets and exit permits. Our friend, emotion in her voice and face, won over the clerk. “Be here tomorrow morning at six,” he said and we dashed back to Estoril for our baggage. The lights were shining in the darkness, the warm evening smelled of spices spread on tables in the open air and in one of those moments of prescience that we sometimes have, I knew that it would be years before I saw the South again or really felt the sun.

  We boarded the seaplane at dawn and now that we were about to leave, we could admire the harbor once more and the stretch of silver water that we could hear splashing at the take-off against the blacked-out windows. It was dull for an hour or two, then we ran into a storm. Some idiot had once told me seaplanes were steady. I cursed him for a little but eventually the ability to think or move left me. We were all airsick and there was a serious shortage of paper bags. A message passed that we could not land at the usual airport on account of a raid. None of us cared.

  We splashed down in complete darkness at a port in southern England whose name I never discovered. It may have been Poole. They helped us into a hall for interrogation and customs. The navy was running it and the officials were kind, speedy and efficient. Then we were piled into a bus, taken to a hotel and warned not leave it as we were in a restricted area. The pilot joined us and asked if we were now all right. It had been such a bumpy trip that he himself had felt airsick.

  We were sent to London by the first train next morning. We stopped several times on the journey, there had been air-raid damage, the censored newspapers might just as well not have been printed.

  It was midday when I reached Lowndes Square where H. D. lived. She had gone out to lunch. The last news that she had received from me had been a cryptic telegram on our arrival in Lisbon. “Oh, Bryher is coming over with the invasion barges” had been Osbert Sitwell’s comment on the situation.

  I sat gloomily on my suitcase outside the front door, trying to realize that I had reached London. It was natural to wonder what was going to happen. I felt resentful and (a sin in English eyes) bitter, “I warned you,” I murmured, looking at the blacked-out windows, “I warned you but you would not listen.” Here I was, aged forty-six, forced back into the cage and misery of the first war and I had no illusions that the second one would soon be over. I felt a little better when Hilda came up the staircase a few minutes afterwards to look at me in astonishment. She took me immediately to show me the pile of sand kept ready to throw on incendiaries. Many of my friends, I found, were scattered about England but at least I was with the people I loved. Our real wishes emerge in such a moment of peril; let my dedication at need be “the heart to Artemis” because it was only the days among the islands and my first probing of the air that seemed to matter now as the sirens started, the guns began, and we went with our blankets to the shelter downstairs.

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