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7 ‘A la Guerre, comme à la Guerre’ 1943–1944

Iris’s wartime letters, though kind, abound in anti-sentimental pragmatism. While consoling Michael Foot on his hurt on the occasion of Leonie Marsh’s marriage, she remarks to Frank, ‘This sort of damn silly fidelity is rare enough in this bloody matter-of-fact chacun-pour-soi existence.’ This grim note of ‘à la guerre, comme à la guerre’ recurs. In November 1942 she wrote that she missed Frank’s ‘burly self, and ‘like all sensible people, I am searching out substitutes’. Two months later, after recounting to Frank her loss of virginity, she comments:

Ersatz? Well, yes, a bit – but then all life is rather ersatz now, since the genuine articles have been separated from us – & he is a fool who does not go ahead on the basis of what he has.

This is bitter-sweet consolation, especially for one whose standards for marriage were, in Frank’s own words, ‘1860 Baptist Chapel’. He wanted both an idealistic wife who would believe ‘crazily’ that ‘the whole of life can be cast anew’,¹ and children. Meanwhile Iris’s lovers, she implies, are inferior imitations or substitutes for Frank himself, tokens of how much he is missed. Finally, in March 1943 she writes:

It isn’t as if we all had endless lives & could say ‘OK we’ll put all that off till a better time’. Christ, this is the only time we’ve got, poor wretches, & we must make the best of it – our only lives and short enough of youth to enjoy them to the full.

Such briskness could sound cruel. When Iris reported to a friend that she had decided she was stronger than ‘David’ from the OULC, with whom she had spent a night, it is hard not to wonder how the chap in question felt about the verdict, albeit presumably unspoken. In one of her best novels, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, the devilish Julius taunts his listener, and the reader, by proclaiming that ‘Human beings are essentially finders of substitutes. They never really see each other at all.’ For the wise the first proposition might be true, but not the second.

Iris at this time was not wise, despite Frank’s idealisation of her, and nor did the exigencies of war, with its endless sense of a nightmare present full of longing and dread, cut off from its future, necessarily encourage wisdom. ‘How the war changed my life I only now begin to see and feel,’ she noted in 1977;² and later: ‘There is a kind of intensity, even rage, about that time when I had no notion what the future held.’³ Though she never wrote directly about the war in her novels, her experiences during it inform all her fiction. She put photos of the narrow alley outside Seaforth into her album. The flat and the famous hothouse emotional atmosphere of the war alike incubated within her imagination.⁴

2

In the autumn of 1943 Philippa Bosanquet moved from Oxford to London. She worked as an economics research assistant at Chatham House in St James’s Square on the prospects for post-war European economic reconstruction with American capital, together with representatives of governments-in-exile.⁵ At first she lived sometimes in her close friend Anne Cobbe’s rather grand flat in Weymouth Street, Marylebone, where she and Anne had a couple to look after them, but found this constricting (if meals are being prepared, you have to say when you will be in for them). So she gravitated more and more to the simplicity and freedom of Seaforth Place. But she was also looking for a place of her own, and found a rather flea-ridden but attractive flat in Fitzroy Street, into which she put a bit of furniture. It was only when Iris said she supposed they would in future spend half the week together in Seaforth and the other half in Fitzroy Street that they started to laugh and realised it would be much easier for them both to stay where they were. So Philippa never moved in to the Fitzroy Street place, and by mid-October was living full-time with Iris, where she stayed until spring 1945. Chatham House was within walking distance. In 1944 the time of V1 and V2 rockets began: going to work in the mornings they would find various buildings had disappeared in the night;⁶ they stepped through the resultant debris.⁷

On Philippa’s first night Iris explained that she had insufficient blankets, and showed Philippa how to pull down the blackout material from the skylight to cover her bed. They were often cold. The ancient gas-cooker supplemented the single feeble gas-fire on bitter winter nights, when the girls went to bed fully dressed, even wearing their overcoats, taking hot-water bottles with them – by the end of the war, when rubber gave out, unyielding stone bottles. (Philippa, noting later how often hot-water bottles appeared in Iris’s fiction, was unsurprised.) The Lyons tea-shop across Victoria Street gave them breakfast warmth, tea or coffee and sticky buns. Sometimes, though not often, older, richer friends like Thomas Balogh or Nickie Kaldor – those ‘cloistered aliens, with un-British [i.e. left-wing] views’, as Churchill remarked in the House of Commons, originally Philippa’s friends, later very much Iris’s also – would take them out to l’Etoile in Charlotte Street or the Gay Hussar. The men paid for the meal, as was then customary. The five-shilling limit on restaurant meals did something for social justice during that time of strict rationing. While clothes rationing did not worry them over-much, the fact that they had only three pairs of shoes between the two of them was troublesome, given the amount of walking that had to be done. The extremely broken-down and frayed state of Iris’s shoes much impressed Philippa’s sister Marion when they first met in a Chinese restaurant (one favoured dish: a plate, only, of plain boiled rice), more even than Iris’s fairly elderly raincoat, which was to become a trademark, and her lack of make-up.

When Iris’s single pair had eventually to be mended, Philippa lent her a pair of hers, and complained bitterly that she got them back as ‘flat bottom boats’, which was how they were from then on referred to. Iris later recalled the good times at Seaforth, and how much we laughed together – ‘the scene changes to Illyria’ (as we leave the supper table uncleared): I had forgotten that. The cheese and cabbage. How? pulled down the blackout. The bomb that arrived just before the alarm clock went off (not quite so gay).? ironing my blouse with desperate slowness as I chafe to go out to a party … ⁸

They were still young and ‘ready for silliness’, laughing a good deal, and with a closeness based on shared jokes and gossip about boyfriends. Once they decided to tell each other of the men who had asked to marry them. Philippa’s ‘list’ was soon done. As Iris’s went on and on Philippa asked crossly whether it might not save time if Iris listed the men who had not