The noise grew less and less, and at about half past two, died away altogether and the ‘all clear’ blew; we had had six hours of it and it hadn’t ceased for a minute. That was nothing to the raids of the autumn and winter, of course, which used to begin from six in the evening and to go on, without cessation, till sunrise, and which we had every night for three months or more; but it had been quite a raid while it lasted.
At half past five we got up and went to the V.A.D.’s house to try and clear up a bit, so that the girls could get some kind of breakfast before going on duty. We got spades and shovelled the glass and plaster into the garden. A man passed the gate and I asked him if anything had happened in the road where I lived. He said that a bomb and a parachute-mine had fallen there, and there’d been a fire. I left them to it and went down to see what had happened to my house. It was a fresh, cold morning. On the way I tripped over a paving stone; mud and stones had been flung over the hospital wall from the bomb crater in the grounds; one dollop of mud, as large as a man’s torso had fallen with such force as to smash the pavement in.
My little road is a curve of perhaps sixty semi-detached houses, thirty each side of the street. The people are ‘lower-middle-class’ people, bus drivers and shopkeepers and so on. They have saved up all their lives for these homes and are buying them on the never-never system; they are pretty rotten little houses, brand new; but to their owners they represent all their dreams of independence and respectability. This is not just words; I’ve lived among them for over a year now, and I know that this is true; their home really is their ‘castle’. They don’t go out very much, they don’t spend anything on pleasure; they stay at home and polish their little possessions, and dig in their little gardens, and tell themselves that they are house-owners, men of property, that they are somebody. After perhaps generations of pinching and struggling and saving, steadily rising in the world: this young couple or that elderly couple have arrived. They have their castle.
Well, in the middle of this double row of little castles, there was a huge gaping, water-filled crater. On either side of it were heaps of rubbish that had been the homes of sixteen families: sixteen little houses just nothing but rubble, burnt and black in one part; on either side of them stretched perhaps another sixteen houses in all, with their roofs torn off and their walls caved in; the pathetic possessions of the people who last night had so proudly stepped about them—sliding off tipsy floors into the rubbish strewn around. As far as the eye could see there was no window unbroken, nor any roof on which the tiles were not heaped fantastically together, as the passing waves leave ripples in the smooth sand.
My own house was still standing; the front door hung crazily on its hinges; all the windows were broken and the framework blown in, black gaping holes with jagged glass around the edges. The rooms were strewn with broken glass and most of the furniture was overturned: my bed was covered with glass splinters and the wooden bedhead scratched and scarred with it—I wouldn’t have stood much chance if I’d been there. The aspidistra, symbol of respectability in every little castle, handed down like an heirloom through the family, lay on the floor, its roots white and twisted about its scanty supply of earth; the green earthenware pot was smashed to a thousand pieces. Two statuettes of Art and Science lay with it.
I called to my landlady, but could get no answer. I went out of the house again and found her husband standing among the ruins, five houses down the street. There were a lot of people there, in all sorts of odd garments, standing about talking, weeping, searching. Several cars and vans were parked near the crater with stretchers on their roofs; they were still searching for victims, and as I came along, a stretcher was carried carefully down a pile of crazy rubbish as high as a house—and, indeed, it had once been two houses—and laid carefully down in the road. I realise now that, as nobody went near it or attended to the sheeted figure upon it, the body must have been that of a corpse; it looked ominously short and stumpy. Terrible things happen in an explosion.
Everybody was talking. The disaster had happened at about ten the night before and the demolition squad had been searching the ruins ever since. Eleven people were known to be dead. Did I remember the woman with the big, light-coloured dog? Well, she was dead; and her husband and her son were dead; another son had been taken away to hospital, badly burned. The dog was dead.
My landlady’s husband said that they were all right; they had been in their Anderson, and though they were shaken by the explosion and the whole place seemed to cave in on them, they were both unhurt; his wife had crawled back into it and was trying to get some sleep. I met several people I knew to speak to. I asked one woman about her house: she pointed to it and turned away from me and began to cry. There was practically no roof and two of the walls were half gone; the floor sloped crookedly downwards and two wooden beds, with little scrolls painted on them in gold, were sliding slowly off.
I pushed my way through gardens that once were jealously fenced off, to the row of houses backing upon those demolished. Many of these were very badly damaged: altogether I suppose fifty houses are uninhabitable, not counting many that by patching and plastering may be said to be more or less whole. I found the woman who used to be my landlady, surrounded by the inevitable broken glass and dusty plaster. She sat on the edge of the bath and said what a mess the house was in. She was usually a very whiny, miserable woman. I had never seen her so chirpy. She said they were thankful to be alive; nothing else mattered.
I came slowly home. Every now and again I saw someone I knew and called to them: ‘Are you all all right?’ They all replied: ‘Yes, thank God. All alive… that’s the great thing, isn’t it? Something to be thankful for!’ Homes gone, clothes gone, possessions gone—condemned for at least some time to the charity and hospitality of others, freedom gone, independence gone, ‘respectability’ gone—but they were cheerful and thankful because they were still alive. I have heard a great deal of the courage and cheerful endurance of the people of England; sometimes it has been under the spur of excitement or gratitude in the visits of Royalty or of the Prime Minister or of reporters—but I saw them in their moment of starkest reality, fresh from their wounds; I wasn’t anybody, lots of them didn’t even know me by sight, they were stripped of every sort of pretence or affectation—and I found them all, unselfconsciously of the same mind: courage, fortitude, generosity, cheerfulness… Something to be thankful for: we’re all alive.
They weren’t all alive. I saw a girl come round the corner: she had been on duty all night as an ambulance driver, and there had been nobody to warn her of what had happened. She stopped at sight of the havoc in the little street and then she began to run down it, screaming: ‘Mother! Mother!’ A woman ran up to her and tried to hold her back, but she wrenched herself free and ran on down the street to what had been her home. I hope I shall one day forget her face, turned up to the sky, and that horrible, rather squealing cry of Mother, Mother! Her mother was the ‘woman with the big, light-coloured dog’. She was dead and the father was dead and the brother was dead, and the dog was dead; the second brother may be dead too, now, from all I’ve heard. They were burnt to death, screaming, under the laths and plaster of their home.
Our house has escaped miraculously from much serious damage. The windows are gone, of course, and the roof seems to have been lifted right off and settled down again. Where the tiles are gone, the rain has been dripping through and it’s been raining for three days now, ever since the raid; we’ve had to huddle the furniture together here and there where it’s dry, and bring most of the things downstairs; the gas has been cut off and we have no light, no cooking and no water: it’s all very uncomfortable and inconvenient but the local council are getting the tiles on again and patching up the windows with a sort of cardboard-y stuff and the gas must be on again soon: and it’s all nothing when one thinks of the little houses five doors down. We have been very lucky not to be much more badly damaged than we were, even if I have lost the second copy of my MS., the first
having been burnt in the great fires in the City. I have learnt from the people in this street, to be thankful for being alive.
It seems that we were saved from devastation by something very much like a miracle. The thousand-pound high-explosive bomb hit the ground just as the mine floated, parachute-borne, to the very same spot. The explosion of the bomb blew the mine into the air and it exploded above ground-level, losing much of its blast more or less harmlessly over the roofs, or at any rate doing damage only to tiles, where it might have swept down the whole road of houses like a pack of cards. There is a couple of feet of plaited cord and a yard or so of ragged blue silk in our garden: pieces of the parachute. They are a beautiful colour.
These are our own personal bombs; there were lots more, of course, and from my window I can see another row of little houses reduced to rubbish. Lots of people have gone off to the rest centres till new homes are found for them; many are sleeping in caves near here, fitted out as shelters. It is still raining and there has even been a little snow; it’s dreadfully cold.
I’ve written it all down, the history of this particular night, just for myself. It’s without any distortion, just because I have written it for myself. If I keep saying that I wasn’t frightened, it’s because I really want to remember how I felt; in the general aggregate I suppose I was rather frightened, but never acutely so; and the answer is this: you are always either alive and thankful—or you’re not. The bomb hurtles down, and before you have time for more than a sick queasiness, you’re being ‘glad to be alive’. Till I’m actually hit and hurt, or killed, I shall always, I think, have this grand feeling of exhilaration—‘Well, I’m all right!’ If I’m hurt and still conscious, it will be: ‘At least I’m alive, and it’s all over, bar the shouting.’ (I know that from a motor accident.) If I’m dead, I’m dead. If I’m trapped, in fire, drowning, being gassed, being pressed upon by tons of masonry—ah, then will be the time for fear, horror, despair! But till then, it’s always: ‘Good! I’m safe!’ and a feeling of glorious relief. There just isn’t time to be afraid. I have never seen anyone show any sign of fear in an air-raid, unless it was some poor old ladies getting a little weepy in a bus once when it was so nearly hit as makes no matter; and even they soon perked up. I certainly have never seen anyone out of control in the least, not for a moment. It’s true that after a bad night, I dread a repetition. But as soon as the thing begins, the fear goes; and I remember now that in the autumn I used to trot off nightly through just such raids, walking slowly and coolly, and taking it all as a matter of course. I think everyone is much and about the same; it takes people a little differently, some of us feel sick when we hear the siren, some of us feel cooped up in a shelter and would rather die in our beds… I am certainly not in the least heroic, and if I were ever tempted to think I was, I should just recall those three or four young, rather silly little girls in the kitchen, and the one that went on sewing because, bombs or no bombs, she had to wear that dress on duty next day.
The worst thing is this damn rocking. The whole earth seems to be shuddering beneath one, heaving horribly. After all, it’s three days now since I even heard a bomb drop, but I’ve felt it, on and off, ever since. The chair I’m sitting in is doing it as I write.
Murder Hath Charms
The Trial of Adelaide Bartlett
MURDER HATH CHARMS, WE must confess, for those of us not too closely brushed against it; and how much more so ‘when a lady’s in the case’—those delicious pouter-pigeon ladies who so closely followed each other into the dock in the latter half of the last century: with their bosoms and their bustles and their tight little waists, all starry-eyed. And when, furthermore, the truth of their innocence or guilt must now be for ever in doubt—they are surely irresistible? Mrs. Bravo so plump and pretty, lacing the wine or the water with antimony—did she or didn’t she? Poor Florence Maybrick, adding to her elderly husband’s already sufficient consumption of aphrodisiac arsenic—did she or didn’t she? And Adelaide, sweet Adelaide, with her great big brown eyes and her great big brown bottle of chloroform—did she or didn’t she…? We shall never know now.
It was in the year 1875 that the friends of Miss Adelaide Blanche de la Tremoille purchased for her a husband—in the shape of a Wicked Grocer named Edwin Bartlett, who thenceforward kept her in a cage most cruelly all day—and in a separate bed most cruelly all night. Or so said Adelaide, on trial for his murder eleven years later. For he believed that a man should have two wives, one for use and one for companionship; and Adelaide, he explained to her, was to be the one for companionship.
To add to the improbability of her name, Adelaide Blanche de la Tremoille was, as Miss Austen would say, the natural daughter of Somebody—rich enough to have provided for her adequately, ‘decent enough to have wished for concealment’. She was nineteen when the marriage was arranged but Edwin, having ‘a reverential regard for advanced learning’ of which he himself had very little, packed her off to boarding school for the next three years and only then received her permanently into his home. He had invested his own purchase price in the family grocery business and now had a chain of flourishing shops. They set up house in rooms over one of these establishments in Herne Hill.
There she remained, poor young creature, very friendless, occupying herself with her needlework, music and the care of some Newfoundland dogs which her husband bred ‘for showing’—one gets the impression that there was not very much that Edwin did just for fun—and which were kept in kennels close by. Her sole companion was her aged father-in-law who, devoted to his son, with whom he incessantly talked business, had disapproved of the marriage and henceforward disliked and distrusted her.
After two years of this she petitioned for a baby of her own; and at last, evidently feeling that the better the day the better the deed, Edwin relented and on a Sunday afternoon ‘a single act’ took place. Adelaide became triumphantly pregnant and, attended only by a midwife named Annie Walker, in due course she was delivered of a child. But the baby was stillborn. She went through a bad time, declared herself unwilling to have any more children; platonic relations were resumed and that was that.
Or so said Adelaide.
After several changes of residence, in the course of which they got rid of the company of Bartlett senior, the couple finally came to rest in Claverton Street, Pimlico—a typical London house of that period, of which so many still exist—one of a long, stucco’ed terrace, with steps up to the front door and two pillars and a balcony forming a porch. But it was not much of a life for an active and alertly minded young woman: two first-floor rooms, divided only by partitioning doors, and all the housework and cooking done by a landlady…
Or it wouldn’t have been; but by now a new and exciting element had been introduced. The Reverend George Dyson had arrived upon the Bartletts’ scene.
The Rev. George was attached to a Wesleyan chapel, where his duties appear to have been light for soon he was spending a great deal of time with the Bartletts, both of whom quite doted upon him (a young man with a large, plummy face, soft, dark eyes and a plentiful, black drooping moustache, it is nowadays hard to find much charm in him)—and soon he had undertaken to promote even further the advanced learning for which Edwin had so much regard. Latin, history, mathematics and geography—the last perhaps somewhat in the general direction of Oh, my America, my new-found-land!—a poem by a fellow cleric considerably more literate, if a great deal naughtier, in verse than the Rev. George. For while Donne addressed himself strictly to his bird, with George it was all his birdie—
‘Who is it that hath burst the door
Unclosed the heart that shut before,
And set her queen-like on its throne
And made its homage all her own?—
My birdie!’
This effusion went on for many stanzas, all with the same refrain. After Edwin Bartlett died, the author was at great pains to get it back from Adelaide: and who can blame him?
The lessons took place in the fro
nt room at Claverton Street and often lasted all day; not surprising that sometimes Adelaide was so exhausted as to have to take them sitting on the floor, her head resting against George’s knee, the curtains drawn across and even pinned together, to take the strain from her eyes. These were very dark and large in an oval face, crowned by close-cropped, curly dark hair. The mouth is full-lipped and rather sensuous. No wonder that at last it was all too much for George who went to Edwin and confessed that he was becoming ‘too interested’ in Adelaide.
Edwin was unperturbed. He begged George to continue as before and soon a somewhat astonishing situation emerged, which certainly was understood and accepted by all three—in which it was agreed that Edwin had some obscure condition which gave him not much longer to live and that Adelaide was more or less made over to George in advance, as his prospective wife.
October. November. On December 8th—in 1885, this is, the eleventh year of the marriage—Adelaide sent round the corner for the nearest available doctor. He found Edwin very low, weak and deeply depressed, suffering from sickness, diarrhoea, and haemorrhage of the bowels. On looking into the mouth, he observed also a blue line round the edge of the gums which suggested that at some time the patient had taken mercury. This in turn suggested what counsel later referred to euphemistically as ‘a pestilent disease’ which, however, Edwin to the last refused to admit to; (one wonders a little, all the same, about that baby, stillborn to a perfectly strong and healthy young woman; and it does seem that Edwin was ever a prey to undefined, perhaps secret, fears). It later emerged that as a young man he had decided that dentures would be better than the real thing and had accordingly submitted to the awful agony of having all his own perfectly good teeth sawn off at the gums. The stumps had now decayed and his entire mouth was in an appalling condition. Within the next twelve days he had sixteen of these stumps removed; they revealed an underlying fungoid growth with resultant sloughing, eroding and sponginess which we may feel it more agreeable to pass over.
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