by Robert Irwin
The W.A.C. was keen that I should get to ruins as soon as possible, while they were still burning and collapsing if I could, and in any case before the salvage and demolition teams had begun their work of tidying up. Since I took this mandate seriously, I worked by moonlight and by firelight, to the sound of tinkling glass and trying to shield my drawing board as best I could from the descending dust and soot. When subsequently people have asked me what I did in the War and I have replied that I was a War Artist, I am conscious that this may sound rather effete. It conjures up an image of me finicking away, mixing my paints to get just the right shade of beige to match a shadow on some general’s uniform. However, my work was genuinely dangerous. I was nightly under threat from falling bombs, unexploded bombs and collapsing buildings. And these were not the only dangers. The East End got the worst of the bombing and, when I drew and painted there, I tried to do so from a place of concealment in the shadows. Eastenders, bombed out of their homes and perhaps with relatives still buried in the rubble, if they spotted me at work, would mass against me and chase me through the ruined streets. I think that, if they had ever caught me, they would have driven a stake through my heart, in order to bring my ghoulish career to an end. Even in the West End I was several times threatened with death.
With part of my mind I could sympathise with such attitudes, for I felt strange to myself, as I sat breathing in the acid smell of explosive and that of scorched and rotting flesh, calmly sketching heads and hands sticking out of the rubble, while all around me people were rushing about, clawing away at mounds of bricks, operating stirrup pumps and forming bucket chains. I had left the madhouse for this. Everyone used to dread the cloudless nights and the bright full moon, the ‘Bombers’ Moon’ – everyone except me that is. I used to sleep in the daytime in anticipation of such nights and then at around six o’clock, when the first sirens were sounding, I would emerge with my drawing board, hungry for new visions of the Apocalypse.
So I loved my work. I could have been born for it. But what I hated about the War was the enforced mateyness and that feeling of we’re-all-in-it-together. I hated being offered ‘a nice cuppa’ and, whenever anyone muttered anything about ‘tickling the ivories’, I used to slip out of the room, for fear lest I be caught up in renditions of ‘Run Rabbit, Run, Run, Run’ or ‘Heil Hitler! Ja! Ja! Ja!’. It was inevitable that all sorts of things should become compulsory in wartime. However, I did not want my participation in sessions of ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’ to become one of those things. My long hospitalisation had left me unaccustomed to lots of people and chatter. I even had to force myself to go into pubs and I had to learn how to drink again.
At first, I tried to pursue my vocation as the artist of ruins in strict solitude, but, as I came more closely to grips with the nature of my work, I began to realise that this was not really possible. To get to the scenes of disaster swiftly enough I needed good intelligence and this could only be gained from the firewatchers, despatch riders and emergency services. As the weeks passed, I even found myself talking to gangs of looters and attaching myself to them as they raced towards the latest bomb site. The looters did not mind. After a while they came to regard me as a friendly neutral. So it was then that I was drawn into close relations with the thieves as well as the A.R.P. men, stretcher bearers, demolition teams and others and, as I worked, I would listen to them talking about the progress of the War. Their version of what was going on was quite different from what one got from the wireless.
I heard the most extraordinary things. Huns disguised as nuns were at work surveying our coastal defences. The Germans had already attempted a sea-borne invasion and failed. Their bodies were still being washed up on the beaches. The Royal Family had been evacuated to Canada and a troupe of actors were now impersonating them in Buckingham Palace. A kind of werewolf preyed on the bomb sites, looking for fresh bodies to eat. Most people said that he looked like a fireman and some said that there was a whole crew of werewolf firemen operating in the East End. What the werewolves did not eat themselves they sold at the back doors of posh restaurants on the Strand and Piccadilly. Then again, the foreman of one salvage crew told me how he had been chatting up a foreign girl in uniform – a green uniform he did not recognise, perhaps of something like the Free Latvian Forces – when the air-raid siren went off. They were in the vicinity of Chancery Lane, but instead of going down into the tube station, as everyone else was doing, the girl took him by the arm and made him follow her. They passed through the nondescript-looking door of some official-looking building and descended a deep and dimly lit spiral staircase. At the bottom, the salvage foreman found himself in a shelter the like of which he had never dreamed of. All the other people sheltering there were female officers in the green uniforms of their foreign army. There were beds with clean white sheets, champagne in ice buckets and great piles of tinned foods. The foreman spent a night of ecstasy in that shelter. However, though he did his best to memorise the exact location of its exit, he told me that he was never able to come back at that place again.
I was fascinated by the proliferation of rumour and the elaboration of wartime folklore and I started to keep a record of the things I heard. Then, feeling that I might be wasting my time doing this on my own and hoarding my records to myself, I got in touch with Roland Penrose again and enlisted in Mass Observation. This in turn led to a fateful meeting.
I had, for once, been painting in daylight. Madame Tussaud’s had been bombed the day before and I could not resist the visual opportunities presented by its partial destruction. Framed by collapsed walls, one could see waxwork bodies, in charred rags spread across the rubble-strewn floor and melting and flowing into one another. My painting of the scene accurately reproduces the uncanny effect and even today I can hardly bear to look at it. Having finished that day’s work, I walked down to Portland Place and met Penrose at the BBC’s Langham House. He was attached to the army as an advisor on camouflage, but he had got leave to come to London and do a broadcast on modern French art. He was going to take me to a Mass Observation meeting where he would introduce me to some of my co-workers. The blackout was, of course, in force, but a ‘Bomber’s Moon’ lit our way towards Soho Square. Then, just as we were crossing Oxford Street, Penrose grabbed my arm and made me wait. Just behind us was one of the Mass Observers, also on her way to the meeting.
‘Let me introduce you two,’ he said.
‘There’s no need,’ I said as I turned to face the young woman in W.R.N.S. uniform. ‘We know each other.’
‘Indeed. Ill met by moonlight, Caspar.’
It was Monica. The angular planes of her face were set hard in apparent anger. Then suddenly she softened.
‘I heard what you’ve been through, Caspar. I’m so sorry.’ And to my surprise, she kissed me full on the lips.
‘Well, this is a coincidence!’ said Penrose.
‘Not really,’ replied Monica. ‘There has to be a degree of improbability in the re-encounter of two people who know one another for it to qualify as a coincidence, but this encounter really was inevitable.’
At the meeting, Penrose, Harrison, Monica and one or two others spoke briefly about Mass Observation’s own philosophical and aesthetic goals, before new assignments and questionnaires, mostly emanating from the Ministry of Information, were dished out to those present. Most of the questionnaires had to do with the assessment of civilian morale. Drinking with the others at the Pillars of Hercules, Monica and I discovered that we now lived close to one another in Chelsea. Together we travelled back by tube to Sloane Square and from there we started walking and, as we walked, we started talking seriously.
‘I miss the Brotherhood,’ she said. ‘London now seems full of their ghosts. It’s good to see you again, even if you too seem a bit like a ghost. I watched you sitting so sad and quiet in the pub. Whereas before the War I remember you as always roaring and racing about, almost always with a different woman on your arm and you never seemed to care what they looked like or a
nything – until that typist girl, that is. And you and Oliver were always larking about, and MacKellar of course.
‘What’s happened to MacKellar?’ I wanted to know.
‘No one knows.’
I now learned that the time MacKellar had turned up at the clinic carrying a bunch of bananas must have been the last time he was ever seen by anyone in the group. I had expected him to visit again but he did not. I wish I had known. Just as I wish I had watched Ned more attentively before I entered the darkened room at the Dead Rat Club. There is a last time for meeting with and talking with everyone one knows, but one never knows when that last time will be. There will be a last time I go to Paris, a last visit to the cinema, a last breakfast, a last breath, but it is unlikely that I shall identify these ‘lasts’ for what they are.
‘What do you do now, Monica? I mean what are you doing in the W.R.N.S.?’
‘I thought the colour of the uniform would go with my eye make-up,’ she replied.
‘The uniform does suit you, but what do you do in it?’
‘I’m a cook.’
Monica did not want to talk about the W.R.N.S. She wanted to reminisce about the Serapion Brotherhood.
‘Now that Ned is dead, you are the leader of the Brotherhood,’ she said.
‘The way things have turned out, it seems that I am the Brotherhood.’
‘Well, I could rejoin,’ and she smiled at me mockingly. ‘But I’m not sure that there’s much point,’ she added and went on to expound her theory that the function of the Serapion Brotherhood had been predictive. It was a Cassandra among art movements. Its imagery of nightmare, naked bodies and severed limbs foretold the war that was to come. Having fulfilled its prophetic role, its day was now past.
By the time she had finished explaining all this, we stood outside the door of her house in a mews off the Kings Road.
‘I’d invite you in for a cup of coffee, only of course I haven’t any coffee. But come in for a cup of hot water anyway.’
‘At least it isn’t tea,’ I replied. ‘I loathe tea.’
And, though I was apprehensive about what was coming next, I followed her in anyway. I really did feel like a ghost, all pale and hollow. Perhaps after all I had left the real me trapped in the reflection of the mirror in the clinic.
Inside the flat, Monica produced not hot water, but some carefully hoarded brandy. We sat in facing chairs. Covering most of the wall behind her was a huge hand-drawn chart. A maze of annotated arrows ran all over the place. At a distance, it could have been mistaken for some elaborate battle plan in which tanks, infantry and artillery were all made to manoeuvre according to the intricately devised plotting of a master strategist. More closely examined, it proved to be Monica’s famous Coincidence Chart, a graphic layout in which who knew who was indicated by an intricate criss-crossing of differently shaded and dotted lines with authentic coincidences marked by red stars. For example, a few years before the Serapion Brotherhood was set up, Oliver and Ned met as they worked one summer as deck-chair attendants in Hyde Park. Neither of them at that time had any interest in Surrealism. Monica and Felix were in the same Latin class in the same posh school before they re-encountered one another at a meeting of the Serapion Brotherhood. That was another coincidence. Monica had chosen to put Ned at the centre of her vast map of the workings of chance.
In conversation that evening Monica kept coming back to Ned. She had slept with him of course. I think every woman in the group had. She looked back on the experience without affection.
‘He treated me as a child-woman – or a doll, something which opens and closes its eyes when tipped backwards and forwards. We – Jenny, Felix, Jane, Pamela and the rest of us – weren’t really expected to do anything. If one of us did produce a painting or a poem, that was just O.K., an unexpected bonus, but the women were really expected to be muses to you Brothers of Serapion. Jenny and I sometimes talked of defecting and founding a Sisterhood. Then that night in the club when you hypnotised me, that was the last straw – not that I minded you … it was the others. I admit hypnotism is rather fascinating.’
She paused, stuck for words. Then she shrugged and walked round the table to come and sit on the arm of my chair. There was something oddly sensual in the severity of her uniform and the fall of her heavy blue skirt. In an entirely abstract way I thought she looked very attractive. From her superior vantage point she looked down into my eyes.
‘Hypnotise me stupid.’
‘Monica, I can’t. I can’t do that any more.’
‘Oh just kiss me then.’
‘There’s not much point even in that. You said I was like a ghost. Well I am. I hardly seem to have a physical body. I’m not capable of sex and I can’t respond to women any more.’
She dropped to her knees in front of me and set to unbuttoning my flies.
‘Let’s just see shall we?’
She worked on me with her hands, determined to prove me wrong, but at first it was as I had predicted. So she broke away from this and stood up. Then slowly, very slowly and with her eyes focussed on nothingness, she began to undress. It was as if she were indeed stripping under hypnotic compulsion. Monica with her broad Slavonic face, big bones and long broad hips looked nothing like Caroline, yet, to my surprise, I found that I was attracted to her. My head was still telling me that the attraction was aesthetic only, with nothing of the erotic in it, but lower down I had thoughts that the head knew nothing of. When she had finished undressing, she refocussed her eyes upon me and, having seen that her performance had had some effect, moaning as if she hated what she was doing, she threw herself down upon me, so that her head was between my legs and her mouth kissing and nipping at my balls. A few minutes later we were rolling around on the floor with Monica fighting for the superior position, her breasts slapping against my face as she thrashed about. A few minutes later yet and I re-entered the state of manhood.
I gave up my rented room and moved in with Monica. The stuff about her being a cook in the W.R.N.S. was nonsense. She said that to everybody in order to discourage further questions. She eventually admitted to me that she worked in Naval Intelligence, but she never gave away more than that. ‘Careless talk costs lives.’ Since she could not or would not tell me about her work, I would lie on the bed beside her and invent her days for her, rich, satisfying days full of excitement: a rendez-vous with a submarine off the Isle of Dogs, a villain with a foreign accent neatly disposed of by being pushed into a bath of acid, a secret zeppelin hidden by camouflage discovered in Epping Forest, a spy at the very heart of Admiralty Intelligence unmasked by the intrepid Monica. As for my work, I might just as well have invented my own days also for all the interest she took in them.
I introduced Monica to Clive and Sally, but their meeting was not a success, for Clive, on being told that Monica was a cook, had bombarded her with questions about economic menus and kitchen hygiene and he could not be made to take an interest in any other subject that day. We saw quite a lot of Roland Penrose and his companion at that time, Lee Miller. Lee had been Man Ray’s photographic collaborator and mistress in Paris and now in London she was amassing an impressive portfolio of photographs of the Blitz. She and I happily compared notes on the art of ruins. Roland had given Lee a pair of golden handcuffs and Lee had shown these to Monica. Monica had promptly gone out and bought herself a pair, though she could not afford them in gold. In bed we played at what was I suppose a mild version of the Theatre of Cruelty. I was her hulking great slave-master and she was the slave-girl in bondage. I was never fond of these games and in time I grew heartily sick of them. However, since Monica insisted that she must submit and be degraded, I passively acted out the masterful role that she had assigned to me. It seemed that what made her attracted to me was my assertion of mesmeric power over her in the Dead Rat Club all those years ago.
The last great bombing raid over London was in May 1941 (though at the time of course we did not realise that it was the last of its kind). The Blitz had ended,
though not before it had punched great holes in my memories. The old Dead Rat Club, which had served briefly as a recreation centre for the Free French, was destroyed; so was the office of the Anglo-Balkan Fur Company in Soho; so was my former home in Cuba Street. Once the Blitz proper was over I switched to painting in the daytime and my ruins, though they still had not acquired ‘the true rust of the barons’ wars’, were no longer absolutely new ruins and my canvases registered the spread of willow herb and nettles over the brick and stone. Large parts of London now reminded me of the enchanted sleeping palace all overgrown by briars. I also painted Monica asleep, Monica as Titania, and Monica as a sex slave.
Our affaire lasted for two more years after the Blitz. I think that the reason we were together for so long was because we were so rarely together. We both worked long hours according to patterns that rarely matched and Monica was sometimes absent on mysterious missions. Since Jenny and the rest were now untraceable, we thought of ourselves as the last of the Serapion Brotherhood and in bed together we comforted each other as its orphans. But then one day Monica came home excitedly brandishing a book. Since I never go into bookshops that sell new books, I would not have spotted it, but Monica had. It was a pristine new copy of The Vampire of Surrealism by Oliver Sorge.
