Read Online The Love-Charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Lara Feigel
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always had difficulty hearing over the noise created both by the fire itself and by the pumps, and also found it arduous to breathe. The smoke came in hot waves which made his eyes run and his throat tickle, bringing on a painful cough. He found that the thick, cold smoke of a continuing fire was worse than the hot smoke of a recent explosion:
This gripped by the throat. Until you could break a few windows you were throttled, but if you had a head cold it was miraculously cured. You lost so much mucus by the eyes and nose.
For Yorke, the fighting of fires was at once a practical, communal task and an intensely personal, dreamlike experience. In his short story ‘Mr Jonas’ he describes all his fellow firemen withdrawing into themselves when faced with a fire, as though each ‘had come upon a place foreign to him but which he was aware he had to visit’. The fire became an imaginative landscape which Yorke inhabited as ‘something between living and dying’, caught between hope and fear, ‘betwixt coma and the giving up of living’. In this state he could find the fire itself abstractly beautiful, retreating into a visual experience which seemed to have nothing to do with the actual immediate danger. When faced with a fire in Caught , Richard initially sits still before the immensity. The flame is ‘a roaring red gold’, pulsing rose-coloured at the outside edge; ‘the perimeter round which the heavens, set with stars before fading into utter blackness’ is ‘for a space a trembling green’. The sheds burning at the docks become
a broken, torn-up dark mosaic aglow with rose where square after square of timber had been burned down to embers, while beyond the distant yellow flames toyed joyfully with the next black stacks which softly merged into the pink of that night.
But caught up in the solitary, imaginative experience of fire, Yorke was then suddenly awakened into the actuality of danger. Yelling and receiving instructions, he experienced the scene once more as real.
See notes on Chapter 2
3
1 a.m.: Rescue
As the fires across London were gradually brought under control, rescue workers and ambulance drivers could attend to the people trapped underneath the debris. Now that the spectacular lighting effects were starting to fade, the human costs of the bombing were becoming more apparent. At one in the morning, Rose Macaulay was dispatched to an incident in Camden Town, where the inhabitants of two fallen houses were buried under ruins. The night of 26 September 1940 was one of Macaulay’s most active on duty as an ambulance driver, and she recounted it three times: immediately afterwards, in a letter to her sister Jean, and two weeks later in an article in Time and Tide and in a letter to Virginia Woolf.
The incident was not far from the ambulance station but it was still a hazardous drive. With her headlights dimmed, Macaulay found it difficult to avoid hitting patches of rubble in the street. Describing the Blitz in her 1942 Life Among the English, she recalled the darkness of these nights, when ‘cars crashed all night into street refugees, pedestrians, and each other’ and dust from pulverised buildings settled on the windscreens.
Macaulay had always been a reckless driver. Indeed, she signed up with the ambulance service in March 1939 partly to put her courageous motoring skills to good use. In a 1935 catalogue of Personal Pleasures , Macaulay included three separate entries on the joys of driving. The first, headed ‘Driving a Car’, opens by lyrically extolling speed and the open road:
To propel a car through space, to devour the flying miles, to triumph over roads, flinging them behind us like discarded snakes . . . here is a joy that Phaethon, that bad driver, never knew.
Another entry, more ambitiously headed ‘Fastest on Earth’, records her joy on returning to her parked car to find a leaflet on the windscreen advertising ‘Fastest on
This gripped by the throat. Until you could break a few windows you were throttled, but if you had a head cold it was miraculously cured. You lost so much mucus by the eyes and nose.
For Yorke, the fighting of fires was at once a practical, communal task and an intensely personal, dreamlike experience. In his short story ‘Mr Jonas’ he describes all his fellow firemen withdrawing into themselves when faced with a fire, as though each ‘had come upon a place foreign to him but which he was aware he had to visit’. The fire became an imaginative landscape which Yorke inhabited as ‘something between living and dying’, caught between hope and fear, ‘betwixt coma and the giving up of living’. In this state he could find the fire itself abstractly beautiful, retreating into a visual experience which seemed to have nothing to do with the actual immediate danger. When faced with a fire in Caught , Richard initially sits still before the immensity. The flame is ‘a roaring red gold’, pulsing rose-coloured at the outside edge; ‘the perimeter round which the heavens, set with stars before fading into utter blackness’ is ‘for a space a trembling green’. The sheds burning at the docks become
a broken, torn-up dark mosaic aglow with rose where square after square of timber had been burned down to embers, while beyond the distant yellow flames toyed joyfully with the next black stacks which softly merged into the pink of that night.
But caught up in the solitary, imaginative experience of fire, Yorke was then suddenly awakened into the actuality of danger. Yelling and receiving instructions, he experienced the scene once more as real.
See notes on Chapter 2
3
1 a.m.: Rescue
As the fires across London were gradually brought under control, rescue workers and ambulance drivers could attend to the people trapped underneath the debris. Now that the spectacular lighting effects were starting to fade, the human costs of the bombing were becoming more apparent. At one in the morning, Rose Macaulay was dispatched to an incident in Camden Town, where the inhabitants of two fallen houses were buried under ruins. The night of 26 September 1940 was one of Macaulay’s most active on duty as an ambulance driver, and she recounted it three times: immediately afterwards, in a letter to her sister Jean, and two weeks later in an article in Time and Tide and in a letter to Virginia Woolf.
The incident was not far from the ambulance station but it was still a hazardous drive. With her headlights dimmed, Macaulay found it difficult to avoid hitting patches of rubble in the street. Describing the Blitz in her 1942 Life Among the English, she recalled the darkness of these nights, when ‘cars crashed all night into street refugees, pedestrians, and each other’ and dust from pulverised buildings settled on the windscreens.
Macaulay had always been a reckless driver. Indeed, she signed up with the ambulance service in March 1939 partly to put her courageous motoring skills to good use. In a 1935 catalogue of Personal Pleasures , Macaulay included three separate entries on the joys of driving. The first, headed ‘Driving a Car’, opens by lyrically extolling speed and the open road:
To propel a car through space, to devour the flying miles, to triumph over roads, flinging them behind us like discarded snakes . . . here is a joy that Phaethon, that bad driver, never knew.
Another entry, more ambitiously headed ‘Fastest on Earth’, records her joy on returning to her parked car to find a leaflet on the windscreen advertising ‘Fastest on
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