The Years Between (1939-44)

by Cecil Beaton

  In the one week of air raids London life has entirely altered. Most families are closeted together in their basements. Few people go out at night, and if you wish for company you must invite your friends to stay the night: everyone dosses down in the basement. No theatre is open.

  I had had enough of being alone in the house and was fortunate enough to find Harold Acton free for an evening. We drank and ate to the roar of bombs and felt extremely safe in each other’s company. I must say Harold is a most entertaining person under any conditions, but tonight I feasted on his talk! In his deep, unctuous voice, he takes a roistering pleasure in overstepping the conventional mark into often acceptable, and always entertaining, obscenity. The nearer the bombs dropped the louder we laughed, and the delicious French wine gave us courage to explore the night.

  The sky was rose-coloured, and each vast explosion was preceded by a flash of blinding light. Every time a whistling bomb was heard we threw ourselves flat on the pavement close to some railings, and the relief that the bomb fell the other side of a block of flats was such that we were quite elated.

  Having been out in all this turmoil, I was able to sleep more peacefully than I have for some weeks, for nothing plays havoc with one’s nerves so much as imagination.

  Life started slowly next day. Reports of further damage trickled through: a bomb had fallen in the grounds of Buckingham Palace making the suffering of the East Enders seem a little less in that they are not alone in their misery.

  Again I went about with my camera. At the Natural History museum nearby, the curator showed me the wreckage. The Times, he complained, had minimized the damage. Why, the herborium had been burnt out by an incendiary bomb! And that was the centre of interest of all the botanists of the world! Vitrines by the acre were smashed to smithereens, the carcasses of pre-historic animals had gone to dust — and the force of an explosion had caused a sheet of writing paper to cut a crack right through a mahogany cupboard door.

  Ashcombe

  What balm to escape to this haven of peace, after the nights we’ve had in London! For one continuous week London has been terribly bombed. Everywhere people were shivering in shelters and cellars while above, too high to be picked up by the searchlights, were the Hun planes, droning like a slow swarm of bees: jerky bees — buzz-er-buzz-er-buzz. Every moment a distant ‘crunch’ would be heard, and then a whistle: an inverted rocket sound, and the terrible explosion of the bomb followed. Since listening to this noise so many of the household sounds, the crackle of a fire in the hearth, the crashing of the tray with all the glasses on it, the thud of a banging door, or a housemaid thumping upstairs — all these become the noises of destruction.

  For ten hours each night my poor mother remained cowering in the basement at Pelham Place, and flinching at each crunch. Then my secretary, Maud Nelson, managed to get her off to the country, but not before they had had a further air raid while waiting at Clapham Junction. Here they saw a Boche brought down amidst cheers. I was unnerved at seeing my mother’s ordeal, and was relieved when I was alone at home, sleeping down in the basement in the room vacated by the maid, Dorothy. Sleeping? Well, not sleeping — just lying awake listening to the symphony above. The basement room is a sort of sound box and there is no note that I miss. Worst, perhaps, of all, is when the whistling bomb ends in silence, and you know a time bomb has been dropped, perhaps even in your own backyard. Eventually one became so sleepy that the monotonous recurring arrival of German planes, and subsequent bombing, acted as a soporific; and one’s slumber would only be disturbed by the ‘rat-at-tat’ of a silly little gun, or a particularly shrill swish of a close-by bomb.

  The beginning of the week had been the worst. The waves of planes droned above while they took their time to deposit their loads. Searchlights were impotent to locate them, and there were no anti-aircraft guns. But, now that our guns have come into action, we are comforted. Even if they prove themselves to be of no practical use they have created among the civilian population a wonderful feeling of confidence. The din is deafening. The night after the AA guns had answered the bomb explosions, people appeared with sparkling eyes, and clasped each other with the greeting, ‘Oh, the lullaby of the guns!’

  WAX MASKS IN ALBEMARLE STREET

  Pelham Place

  I went to Albemarle Street to see if the wax head I had seen among the debris of a former hairdressing establishment was still there. As I arrived a demolition squad was pulling down a large top-heavy façade. Whrump! The cloud of black dust eventually settled. I clambered over the rubble to find a new wax head lying, bald but smiling, among the cracked mirrors, glass fragments and wreckage of the ladies’ beauty shop. The men working on the job were helpful, and when I asked one if he had seen lately the head with golden hair flying wild, he said he thought it could be unearthed. It was. The ghoulish head was produced from a mound of rubbish, and I proceeded to photograph it against the dreadful surroundings.

  Suddenly the usual officious passer-by appeared. A little man with ferret eyes and a pointed red nose. I must show my papers. Yes, there was nothing wrong with the papers, but it didn’t say you could photograph those wax heads — it wasn’t right — the Ministry of Information would not want to show anything like that. I explained that, in any case, my photographs had to be submitted to the censor. But the discontent had started and now gathered momentum. The newspaper seller, who before had been so blithe and friendly, became truculent and grumbled that he wouldn’t let me leave the spot until a policeman appeared and proved that everything was in order. A plain-clothes man edged his way through the gathering crowd, and whispered that everything was straightforward but that the feelings of the people must be pacified.

  It was some time before the constable appeared and I was escorted to the nearest police station. After a few telephone calls everything was put right, but the constable explained that I had done wrong in provoking the antagonism of the crowd and a record should be made of the case. This seemed a somewhat empty formality since all the records had been destroyed by last night’s bomb.

  When one looks around at the damage, one realizes that the people have every reason to be highly-strung and super-sensitive. I felt thoroughly sad and somewhat unnerved as I walked down the havoc of Savile Row and Conduit Street, where scarcely a window-pane remains intact. And the East End is far worse.

  ZOG QUEEN

  Another day I photographed the Zog Queen. The cortege came up the awful old staircase of the squalid Vogue studio in the middle of Bloomsbury with such a clatter that I thought a demolition army was arriving. Three blackish, dirty, greasy bandits appeared, smoking furiously, and spitting, hands in pockets. Then appeared a German nurse carrying an albino child in a yellowy-white bearskin coat. Followed the tall young Queen in a red velvet tambourine hat, and an old American crone, a Baroness something, who is supposed to be lady-in-waiting, but who is said to be the Queen’s grandmother. All the Vogue assistants and secretaries came out of their lairs and dark-rooms to join the circus.

  The Queen, with her ever-ready, eager smile and bright popping eyes, is so pretty that she would make an ideal appendage to any chocolate shop.

  An air raid had long been in progress and we no longer paid any attention to the gunfire, but the Queen, as she sat on the arm of a property sofa in front of the camera, was scared stiff at each bang.

  ‘Is that a cannon?’ she kept asking.

  We pretended it was nothing, but each time the guns roared the entourage grabbed at the child in a half-hearted movement to save it. The child is two years old, yet looks four, with unhealthy pale skin, long pointed nose, and receding chin like a rodent.

  The studio, now windowless with tarpaulin nailed where there was once glass, was frigidaire cold, and there was a question of whether or not the child, for its photographic ‘turn’, should be relieved of its heavy coat. The grandmother piped up in broadest Chicago accent, ‘We can’t take a chance with its health!’ The Queen spoke German, French, English and Albanian, the last b
eing a language that sounded comic with all its pffts, pees, wees, pings and fitts. When practised by the bandits in an effort to attract the attention of the gyrating little child, the scene was hilarious.

  While the Queen and her male escorts did a war dance for the edification of the child, with no success, I listened, trigger poised, to Mrs Redding, the studio manageress, making conventional headway with the Baroness.

  ‘It must have been awful when you had to leave Albania so hurriedly?’

  ‘Oh, my dear, we had to leave everything, everything, everything! And we had to get in motors, and she there — she — the — er — Queen, was about to have a haemorrhage any minute, but we had to go round and round and round the mountains, and all the while we were just crazy with fear that we’d fall over the precipices, and then, dear, what do you think they did to try to get the — er — the Queen and the child? They started to throw stink bombs!’

  The Queen, now tired of dancing, resorted to screwing up her nose and making funny faces to attract in vain the child’s attention from one of its fly buttons. The Baroness continued her gossip.

  ‘Of course, we’ll go back there one day. Meanwhile, we have to make a new life for ourselves at the Ritz!’

  But the Foreign Office has no intention of ever setting Zog back on the throne and, one by one, the circus will be broken up, and one wonders if the scruffiest bandit will remain loyal once the last gold nugget has been taken from underneath the hotel bed.

  RAID ON LONDON DOCKS

  September

  The War Office arranged for me to take photographs on Salisbury Plain. It was pleasant to be able to work with my base at Ashcombe. However, as always happens, if I am away from London for even a few days, the accumulation of work there becomes alarming, and when I returned it was to find Talleyrand’s desk heaped with packages, papers, letters, telephone messages and cables. I hurried through them to see if any spelt disaster, then, relieved that they didn’t, bolted off for dinner with Ivan Moffat, in his flat on the top of a huge house in Fitzroy Square.

  There were eight of us, the majority socialistic young women with lank hair. No sooner had we sat down to the table than the alert went. Eve Kirk, the painter, whose potato features are compensated by an innate elegance of manner and speech, had to leave immediately as she is warden in the square.

  When the guns were heard some of us went on to the roof to see if there was anything to be seen — and, my heavens, there was!

  The Germans were dropping chandelier flares all the way from the docks along the river to Chelsea. The spurts of shells looked like exploding stars. An enormous red glow lit up the sky against which domes and steeples, and the bobbles of near-by plane-trees, were silhouetted.

  It was cold on the roof, and so much shrapnel was falling all around us that it was foolhardy to remain. But a raid is more exciting and stimulating, and somehow less unnerving, when one is out of doors.

  However, we came below. Ivan was excited and kept repeating in his rich port-wine voice, ‘It’s terrific! It’s a full-scale raid against the London river!’ But the bombs were not confined to the docks. A terrible swishing noise, like the tearing of a giant linen sheet, ended in a vast explosion preciously near the house. The windows were broken, the doors of cupboards blown open, and the entire solid building rocked. Then followed the sickening noise of air raid wardens running to the scene of the crime.

  Some of Ivan’s guests now became really jittery and, moping and wailing, descended to the shelter. Others quarrelled with one another. At various stages down the circular stairs people whimpered, ‘I’m going home.’ — ‘No, don’t! Wait!’ — ‘I’m going now.’

  During the lull in the storm Ivan and I made intermittent visits to the roof to look at the flaming panorama. Old fires were extinguished, but new ones were forming. One conflagration was so near that I felt it might be a target, and that we might easily be hit by a stray bomb that was intended to add fuel to the main objective. The licking noise of the flames was horrible. Vast sparks flew across the skies looking like aeroplanes themselves. One’s eyes were smarting in the smoke-filled air.

  Eventually I went home by taxi. The driver was rather frightened, but the girl I took home was strangely unmoved. We discovered that bombs had fallen on almost every part of the city and, in fact, were continuing to do so. Whole streets were paved with broken glass, and it was macabre to hear the rows of burglar alarm bells heedlessly ringing away in the shops whose doors and windows had been broken by the blast. The awful buzz of hundreds of aeroplanes above was made less sinister by the lion roar of our guns.

  Back at home I felt I was still in the centre of the raid for, again and again, one’s heart almost stopped as another terrible bomb shriek shot towards one, and ended in a crash that shook the house to its foundations. What to do but tackle the mountainous pile of papers on Talleyrand’s desk? I started to reply to various business notes. I wrote a lot of letters to friends abroad, and, at last, became so exhausted that, in spite of the din being no calmer, I decided to go to bed.

  In my half-sleep the noises were unbelievable: there was such a continuous banging and thumping that all the remaining glass in my windows was broken, and the appalling bee-buzzings of further planes seemed to drone ever nearer and nearer so that I felt they were about to come right through the bedroom curtains. Several times I put my head under the clothes while a bomb exploded not, mercifully, on my roof, but on someone else’s nearby. Next morning I heard a plane had come down as near as Kensington High Street.

  FRANCIS ROSE

  Ashcombe

  Francis Rose[10] has spent many months at Ashcombe. He has nowhere to go, and precious little to scrape from the bottom of his once overflowing cornucopia, yet he seldom complains about the tide of events. He seems unworried, and is oblivious to everything including the elements. For six hours on end he can paint, hunched in a thin overcoat in icy gales on the Downs, not minding that his face and hands are literally frozen blue.

  Francis has not been an easy guest. He has left hot taps running, burnt a hole in a sofa and, oblivious to rationing, has helped himself liberally to stimulants. One night he left the light on in his bedroom while he slept. Heedless to blackout rules, he had not even pulled down the blind, so that a policeman from miles away had to trudge over the Downs in a raging tempest to knock up the house at early dawn. Worse, he has been quite unadaptable in asking my mother, who has been doing the housework, at all unsuitable times of the day if she doesn’t think the room with the painted animals in the Palais des Papes at Avignon is the most beautiful thing in the world, and whether she has ever eaten orchid salad — a favourite salad in China. Now, to my mother’s relief, he has got some job as an aircraftsman in the RAF.

  WALTER SICKERT

  September 21st (Saturday)

  Having scrounged two cans of petrol, and as the autumnal sun warmed our spirits, we decided to take the opportunity that might never again present itself, of motoring from Ashcombe to Walter Sickert at Bath.

  Quite a family party it was that set out, for, in addition to my mother and Aunt Jessie, Oggie Lynn and Maud climbed into the car. We were blessed: everything went smoothly. It was a real ‘joy-ride’. In spite of there being no signposts we found the way without difficulty. Bath lay in a vivid blue mist in a bowl of trees and grey stone. I recognized the Sickert house, with its large spreading chestnut and lions on its gatepost, from the latest pictures that the old boy — he must now be over eighty — had sent to the Leicester Galleries. The box-like house is of stone with tall well-proportioned windows. Inside it is somewhat sparsely furnished in the civilized taste of England in the late eighteenth century: a solid chair, a fine Regency sideboard, a Chinese bowl filled with fruit, and drawings and pictures in simple bevelled gold frames. Walter Sickert’s room was white and bare but for a vast bookcase, some of his own pictures, a step ladder, easels and on the chimneypiece a row of wonderful plaster caricatures by Jean-Pierre Danton (who is considered to have caught s
o wonderfully the fire of Paganini’s playing in his Paganini statuettes).

  Mrs Sickert appeared — a tired, drab little woman, in faded, dark colours with untidy hair. Suddenly one realized that she was, in an oriental way, an exquisite objet de vitrine: her flat shoes on her spindly feet became those of a ballet dancer, and she showed herself to be a sensitive artist. She is also the gentle nurse and perfect wife for a painter, and like a little Chinese amah she slid around in the near distance attending her husband with infinite tact and devotion.

  The great old man, smoking a cheroot, was lying deep back in a large leather chair with outstretched arms, displaying sensitive bird-like hands. His magnificent wild and farouche head was adorned by brilliant white shocks of hair and square beard. Behind him a huge window framed a salad-coloured view of Bath.

  From where he lay his eyes fell upon an early portrait of his mother — a rather dark, Ingres-like painting of a woman with hair parted in the middle: a gold brooch at her throat. ‘It is by Fuseli, that’s a good name, isn’t it? And it’s well done, the brown of the hair and the gold of the brooch.’ Occasionally Sickert’s brain would give off a flash of brilliance, but suddenly he could not remember what he wished to say. Then his imagination would take control, and he would blurt out all sorts of inconsequent things like a wise lunatic or a highly cultured child. It is astounding to think that this old man should be able to take control of his senses when it comes to painting, for it soon dawned upon me that poor old Sickert’s brain was in a state of advanced decay. Yet in front of a canvas he seemed to regain all his power; his pictures are as solid, well constructed and bold as only those by a man in his prime could be.

  Enthusiastically I photographed him in the studio and, in answer to my ‘Please keep still’, Sickert would gesticulate, ‘Enchanted — Of course I’ll keep still. I won’t even talk if you don’t want me to’; but, nevertheless, he demonstrated his latest work — a dry, scaly, solid piece of architectural painting done in greys and brown, of the Kingsway Arch (now taken down). ‘I will make that like a lily of the valley!’ he said. But I think the lily of the valley thought came into his head at this last minute. An omnibus was being sketched in. He explained, ‘You see, I always wanted to be a bus conductor. That coat over there’ (he pointed to a buff coat with a darker velvet collar) ‘I like, because I feel like a bus conductor in it.’