Love in the Blitz

by Eileen Alexander

Thursday 28 March Did I tell you, darling, about my urge for a Red Dress – a very bright red dress, preferably with white buttons. When Aubrey and I walked from the Mayfair to the New Gallery to see ‘Pinocchio’ – I kept darting away from him to flatten my nose avidly against window-panes in which red dresses were displayed, with cries of Rapture and Longing. (The cries of rapture and longing came from me, not the red dresses.) Aubrey was not only Alarmed – he was Appalled.

  What shall I do about it, dear? If I don’t have a red dress – I shall probably suffer from Repressions for the rest of my life – and if I do – you’ll probably never speak to me again – and that would be such a Sorrow to me that I can’t contemplate it, even in jest.

  Saturday 30 March Yesterday, I had lunch with the Nathans – the most agonizingly well-regulated household in the world – each member of the family has a little saucer with the week’s butter ration on it, and a little flag bearing his or her own initials – and they have competitions to see whose ration lasts longest!! Mrs Nathan billowed in, rather late for lunch – she was in black-and-white checks, from head to foot again. Why does she do it? After an excellent lunch which culminated in a Camembert as resilient as a spring mattress and as smooth as cream – Joyce and I went to see Raffles26 – undistinguished but pleasant.

  In the evening Herman & I went to The Beggar’s Opera. After the theatre we went to supper at the Landsdown Restaurant in Berkeley Square. There were some fantastic people dancing. There was one man in uniform with the tiniest hand I ever saw and little feet, and the most colossal massif centrale outside France. He was very tall and there was a little woman with him who was simply prancing about like an india-rubber ball, holding her two fore-fingers in the air and skipping from one foot to the other – occasionally pausing to prod him in the stomach. (Each time she did this Herman & I were certain that he was going to explode with a loud pop.) We hoped for her sake that she was tipsy – we feared she wasn’t – particularly. But the most absurd thing of all was that the man, who looked like a General suffering from protracted adolescence – was in fact – a 2nd Lieutenant! Why this was so extraordinarily funny, I don’t know – but it was. Perhaps because it was so incongruous.

  Monday 1 April I’m glad you liked my farm,27 dear. The scenery is rather staggering, isn’t it? In a guide book entitled So You’re Going to Wales, the view from the farm is described as the most beautiful in the world.

  I wasn’t surprised at Aubrey’s mollocking either, darling. Of course he’d be ‘sound’ at it – everything he does is sound. Why should mollocking be an exception?

  Bless you for not minding about the red dress. My father is sending me a cheque for my birthday. I may get one with that. I saw one in Bognor today with white spots. It looked like spring – as it would catch a Tired Intellectual in its strong toils of grace – I hope it does.

  Wednesday 3 April I forgot to tell you in my last letter that there is someone who always calls me ‘luv’, too. He’s an aged Jew from Baghdad – but he made several of his millions in Manchester. (He’s a British Subject now – and his three sons are English Gentlemen from head to heel.) Someone told him once that to be an English Gentleman it was also necessary to be a sportsman. That’s easy, sez he – and he employs an expensive coach and his eldest son became a Ju-Jitsu expert – and his second ran for England in the Olympic Games. The youngest is the most promising of all – but he’s still at school. Mr Smouha28 is Pleased with his Brood – and so he calls me ‘luv’ – because he can afford to be generous.

  Saturday 6 April I had a Beautiful letter from Aubrey this morning. He says, of my letter: ‘I read it between parades this morning & a Sergeant Major gazing at the blatantly feminine note-paper winked at me with misplaced lechery & enquired “What does she say?” (He said something else as well which my pen, schooled in moderation, cannot set down.)’ His superior officers have set him problems in slogan-writing for the troops. His suggestion, he says, was received without enthusiasm. It was: ‘Private soldiers are the Braces of the High Command: not noticeable but quite indispensable.’ I’ll tell him what you say about writing to him. It may produce some effect – but I doubt it because he thinks you have far more to tell him than he has to tell you.

  I had a letter from Ismay this morning by the same post as yours and Aubrey’s. It was almost human, and it had a rosy glow of retrospective pleasure on its face when it described Charles’s six days leave at Easter, which they spent at their London flat. (I gather they spent most of the time entertaining their relations to meals – but no doubt they had the evenings to themselves – in which to knit happily on either side of the hearth!) Even her clichés had a glimmer of life – like Lyons’s pastry – if you warm it up in the oven.

  Monday 8 April Have you any wires you can pull, dear? If so try for your life – and mine – and don’t forget that the Air Force and Navy have intelligence services too – and if you get into them you’re not expected either to fly or run the Gauntlet of the U-boat pest. (I’m not suggesting that you would mind if you were – but I would.)

  Oh! why didn’t I cultivate the acquaintance of Sir Edward Grigg – permanent under-secretary for War – when I was at the War Office? My father wrote to me at the time, saying, ‘Look up old Grigg, we were at John’s together.’ I told Leslie about this and asked who Grigg was. He said, ‘Oh! Grigg,’ as one would say ‘Oh! spinach,’ if one were Aubrey – and so I pursued the matter no further. What a damned fool I was, and am, & ever shall be.

  Thursday 11 April Darling, ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’29 sounds nonsense until you suddenly & sickeningly apprehend its meaning in a kind of leaden stupor, as I did when I was confronted with an actual date – July. Then the vague and frightening notion of you in battle-dress and in a place where I am not, formulated itself into a dark reality. (Oh! apparently that thought didn’t lie too deep for tears after all! It was really a delayed action of my tear ducts.) You are ten thousand times a properer man than I a woman, my dear love, and it’s shallow and selfish of me to twitter at you. But once this particular cloud has out-wept its rain,30 I promise you’ll hear no more on’t – but please don’t be cruel only to be kind, and remind me of what is past and passing and to come. You treated me like a child in not telling me, until it was over, that you were going to see the Military authorities (bless you for it). Please go on treating me like a child – and only tell me things of that kind if and when you have to, for I am pigeon-livered and lack gall31 – and when I think of you as a cog in the military machine I am sick and sullen32 (though, as I once pointed out to Aubrey, I’m like Cleopatra in that alone).

  Friday 12 April I don’t like the Miss Sloane: Leslie: Eileen: Gershon equation. Leslie can’t do without Miss Sloane, but he is nevertheless wholly & permanently unaware of her as a living person. She’s just the Hand that Wields the Pen. You would be quite justified in looking upon me in just that light, of course – but nevertheless I hope you don’t.

  On the other hand, I do like the Thought of being built for comfort, not speed – though it does make me feel rather like a hearse – (a feeling, I might add, wholly in harmony with my present mood, which makes Mariana in the moated Grange seem like a Bright Young Thing).33

  1 In May 1939 the government had introduced a very limited programme of conscription, and on the outbreak of war this was superseded by the National Service (Armed Forces) Act, under which all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one, with numerous deferments and exemptions, became liable for conscription.

  2 Helen Marion Wodehouse (1880–1964).

  3 A reference to ‘Jabberwocky’, by Lewis Carroll (1832–98).

  4 The sinking of HMS Courageous off the coast of Ireland by a U-boat with the loss of 519 lives. Hailed as a triumph in Germany, it came as an early blow to British pride in the Royal Navy.

  5 ‘An unconsidered trifle of the goldsmith’s art’, the vinaigrette was a small ornamented container with a pierced grille containing a
perfumed sponge. A lifelong passion of Eileen’s, she would have the best collection in England and after the war write a book on the subject.

  6 From Adonais: An elegy on the death of John Keats, by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).

  7 A drama (1936) starring Isobel Lillian Steele and based on her own experiences.

  8 A play by the Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov (1860–1904).

  9 Characters based on the life of Francesca de Rimini (c.1255–85) from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (c.1265–1321).

  10 Eileen would be a little unfair to Hore-Belisha: on his death in 1957 he left two-thirds of his estate to Miss Sloane and the other third to Miss Fox.

  11 Margery Kempe (c.1373–1438) was an English Christian mystic, known for dictating The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language.

  12 An allusion to ‘Sonnet 55’ by William Shakespeare.

  13 Macbeth, Act II, scene ii.

  14 A glass coffee machine.

  15 Gershon was always complaining about Eileen’s spelling, and she happily confessed that she could not spell in any language, including in Hebrew.

  16 As You Like It, Act III, scene ii.

  17 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).

  18 Hore-Belisha had been at odds with his generals since he first took office, and disagreements over the disposition and readiness of the BEF in France finally led to his dismissal. Public opinion was on his side but it was the effective end of his political career.

  19 An RFC pilot in the First World War, Sir Alan Cobham was a famous pioneer of long-distance aviation.

  20 A controversial Jewish orientalist and historian, Dr Bernard Lewis worked in intelligence during the war.

  21 From the poem ‘The Sun Rising’ by John Donne (1572–1631).

  22 ‘Sonnet 116’ by William Shakespeare.

  23 Most likely a reference to ‘Desert Bloom’, a poem by Gertrude Thomas Arnold (1876–1962).

  24 Eileen’s car, ‘the most delicate shade of ivory imaginable’, named after the legendary queen of King Ninus of Assyria.

  25 Jewish writer, translator, poet and decorated wartime soldier, Raphael Loewe came from a long tradition of Jewish scholarship. His father, Herbert, the Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge, had written a letter of support for Eileen’s application to Girton.

  26 A British film made in 1939 starring David Niven and Olivia de Haviland, based on ‘Raffles’, the amateur cracksman short stories, by E. W. Hornung (1866–1921).

  27 On his walking holiday in north Wales, Gershon had stayed at the farm Eileen owned near Beddgelert in Snowdonia.

  28 Even by Egyptian standards, the cotton manufacturing Smouhas were spectacularly rich. In the wake of the Suez conflict they would lose a huge fortune when Nasser confiscated Jewish Egyptian property. Joseph’s son, Edward, won a bronze medal for Britain in the 1928 Olympics.

  29 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, by William Wordsworth (1770–1850).

  30 Adonais, by P. B. Shelley.

  31 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii.

  32 Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, scene iii.

  33 A reference to ‘Mariana’, a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–92).

  May–September 1940

  On 7 May, in the middle of the disastrous Norway campaign, Neville Chamberlain opened a two-day debate on the debacle in the House of Commons. The idea of the campaign had from the start been Winston Churchill’s, but three days later it was Chamberlain who was gone, a scapegoat for Norway and belated judgement on the years of appeasement and moral failure, and Churchill was prime minister. It was not a moment too soon. On the same day, German armies swept into neutral Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland. The Phoney War was over.

  The Battle of France, which began on 10 May 1940, was effectively all but over for the British by the end of the month. At that time, and since, the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ masked the extent of the humiliation inflicted on the Allies, but the brutal truth was that within the space of three weeks, neutral Holland and Belgium had been overrun, France brought to her knees and almost 340,000 British and French troops, minus almost all their heavy equipment, transport vehicles, tanks and guns, left trapped in an ever-diminishing pocket on the French Channel coast. The campaign would limp on hopelessly through the early weeks of June, but by the 22nd, France had gone the way of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium and the invasion of Britain seemed only a matter of time.

  To those returning from France to Britain in June 1940, however, London still seemed remarkably untouched by events across the Channel, and the ‘terror bombing’ it had expected in September 1939 no nearer than before. In many ways, in fact, the war had yet to affect Eileen directly, but when on 10 June Mussolini’s Italy declared war on Britain and France, her mother, Vicky – married to a British citizen, and the mother of three British children, but like so many Jews within the old Ottoman empire, the owner of an Italian passport – suddenly found herself categorised as an ‘Enemy Alien’.

  At a time when an invasion was expected at any moment ‘Fifth Columnist Fever’ was in the air – even Jewish refugees would find themselves interned on the Isle of Man – and while Vicky herself was at no risk her money was. The fear in the Alexander household was that with an Italian army threatening Egypt, and so many Egyptian Italians known to be fascist sympathisers, the family-owned Mosseri Bank, and with it all Vicky’s capital and their only regular source of income, might be confiscated.

  The news of the death of Vicky’s brother, Eli, the head of the bank, only the day after Mussolini declared war, further darkened the future, and one of the first casualties was Eileen’s academic career. The fears would eventually prove groundless, but with dire talk of what the Nazis would do to Jews when they invaded, and her father threatening to take the whole family to Canada, Eileen, like most of her Girton friends over the next eighteen months, gave up her dreams of Arthurian Romance and Cambridge to apply for war work in one of the government’s rapidly expanding ministries.

  The war had at last caught up with Gershon, too, who – after spending his final month of freedom walking in Wales, where he stayed on the farm owned by Eileen, and farm-labouring in the West Country with a Cambridge friend – was now ‘1310136 Aircraftman 2 G. Ellenbogen’, the lowest rank in the RAF. For a man with his education and language skills his future lay in intelligence work, but in 1940 he was still too young for a commission into the intelligence branch, and for the next eighteen frustrating months his life would revolve around a succession of bases and camps across the country, punctuated only by the occasional snatched and uncertain leave in London.

  This at least meant that he could see Eileen, because in the middle of May 1940 the Alexanders took a house in London’s Swiss Cottage, and for the rest of the war 9 Harley Road, NW3, would be her home. The house was a comfortable, detached, red-brick building not far from the anti-aircraft battery on Primrose Hill, sandwiched between larger houses on either side, with a couple, Mr and Mrs Wright, to cook and generally ‘do’ for them, an Austrian refugee called Mrs Seidler as their first semi-permanent ‘guest’, and a big garden at the back, complete with its own concrete air-raid shelter.

  The shelter’s time would come, but over the long summer months of 1940, as Beaverbrook’s factories worked heroically to keep up with fighter losses, and RAF pilots were thrown into the fight with only a handful of hours of air time behind them, the battle between Goering’s Luftwaffe and Dowding’s Fighter Command – the ‘Battle of Britain’ – raged largely over the villages and fields of south-east England. While there were continuous attacks on airfields, ports and shipping, it was only at the beginning of September 1940, when the Luftwaffe turned from the airfields, radar stations and strategic targets of the south-east to the capital, that London’s volunteer army of wardens and fire-watchers – soon to include Eileen and her mother – found themselves
on the war’s front line alongside the city’s firemen, gunners, barrage balloon teams, medics and bomb-disposal units. The Blitz – short for Blitzkrieg, Lightning War – had begun.

  3

  My Young Fellow

  Saturday 13 April 1940 [Eileen’s twenty-third birthday] Darling, when I wrote to you yesterday, I felt as though I should never smile again – but I was wrong. This England1 produced not a languid twitch at the corners of my mouth or anything like that – but a twinkle, and then a wide smile, and then a giggle, and then the loud laugh, which is such a source of surprise to you, dear.

  The birthday atmosphere is somewhat marred by it’s being Saturday, and the fact that I have a headache as though the flames of Hell were roaring in my skull.

  Well, with all this, my gloom fell from my shoulders like a cloak – and now, I’m ready to laugh at anything – even at the merry absurdity of my ever casting you into the limbo of Men I have Known & Forgotten. As a matter of fact, I never forget anybody, not even the young man of Jewish Lineage and Parisian up-bringing who, for some reason known only to himself, wanted to impress me – and set about it by telling me that he’d had his first Mistress at the age of 12½, and that she was the mother of his best friend at school. He hastened to add that the suggestion came from her – and that Love (by which he meant Lust) was Very Beautiful. All this happened by moonlight on a Messageries Maritimes Liner in the middle of the Mediterranean – and was intensely funny. I listened solemnly to his catalogue of wantonness – and then laughed and laughed and laughed – and said ‘Goodnight’. I don’t suppose he’s ever been the same since.