The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/18/love-charm-bombs-feigel-review

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London had a terrible war, by any reckoning: 30,000 civilians dead, the landscape of the city changed irrevocably, the blackout, rationing, evacuation. It wasn't Warsaw, or Hamburg; but the overwhelming experience for most of its inhabitants must have been deprivation and dread – a longing for the horror to finish, so that real life could begin again. And yet the danger and displacement could be exhilarating – it broke the rigid frames of life, shook up class consciousness and made individuals hungrier for pleasure, more impatient at postponement. "Who are you going out with tonight, darling? Is it someone you'd like to die with?" girls are supposed to have asked one another. Elizabeth Bowen wrote that war effects "a thinning of the membrane between the this and the that"; "War is a prolonged passionate act, and we were involved in it." When the war was over, some felt they never lived with the same intensity again.

Lara Feigel's book takes five writers who spent most of their war in London and composes a group portrait of their lives and of a significant moment in our British collective culture – recent enough almost to touch, and yet so unlike our present. The result is deeply interesting, because Feigel is a good storyteller and responsive to the nuances of expression in the period. She quotes extensively from her writers' fiction and letters and diaries, letting them tell the story in their own words; the result is, among other things, a kind of archaeology of language. Henry Yorke, who wrote as Henry Green, volunteered as a fireman and made notes on the new lingo he was learning: getting the flames down was "putting the light out", other firemen were "cock" and children were "nippers"; all this became material for his 1943 novel Caught. Yorke was the privileged son of a Birmingham factory owner – sophisticated, charming and secretive, prone to anomie; fellow volunteers in his AFS unit nick-named him "the Honourable".

In the Blitz death and danger and exhausting long hours of physical work were very real. Both Yorke and Graham Greene, who was an air raid warden, were fairly convinced they wouldn't survive the war – which solved all sorts of existential problems. It was a relief to both men, for instance, to find they acted courageously when crisis came, because they had a role to play and because the others (their "mates") were watching. It's impossible not to be moved and impressed by the mettle these leisured intellectuals prove, when they're put to the stiff test. Bowen, too, was an ARP warden, walking the Marylebone streets night after night in a darkness that transformed them into "inscrutable canyons"; her flat in Regent's Park was bombed. Rose Macaulay drove an ambulance and stood by one night while rescue workers dug out a woman alive from the ruins of a house along with her four dead children: boys of 11 and 12, babies of three and one. Macaulay lost her flat and everything in it, including the letters from her lover, who was dying of cancer. Greene's house was bombed – he wrote cheerfully about "the rather Mexican effect of ruined churches". Perhaps there's something in the language-training of their class and period and set that helps explain their stoicism and resilience – in an emergency there's nothing like a choppy phrase or a brisk irony, a bit of impersonal distance. "I thought I was done for," said Rosamond Lehmann to Yorke. "These times are an absolute gift to the writer," Yorke wrote. "Everything is breaking up." "One's first corpse," wrote Greene in a letter to his mother, "was not nearly as bad as one expected."

Part of the novelty of the war experience, for civilians as well as for soldiers, was how it blurred class codes and muddled people up: "The spell of the Old School Tie had lost its power; people walked the streets shabby," cleaning "the brick dust from their faces and hair. Liberated from checking for signs of status, Londoners looked straight into each other's eyes." In the first flush of common purpose, Bowen waxed eloquent on the collective community: "We have almost stopped talking about Democracy because for the first time we are a democracy"; though when it came to a Labour victory in 1945, an older class politics reasserted itself. Greene thought the socialists were "such bores", Yorke dreaded the raised taxes on his family business, Bowen couldn't bear "little middle-class Labour wets".

The fifth writer in Feigel's story is Hilde Spiel, a novelist from a family of assimilated Jews, who came from Vienna with her husband and parents in 1936. Despite enthusiastic efforts – she loved English literature and translated both Greene and Bowen – she never managed to penetrate the inner circles of the London literati. Though she was determined not to fall into the emigre's habit of criticising Englishness, she couldn't help being startled by the stiffness: in a short story she drew on her experience of staying with English friends near Oxford when it was announced at dinner that their son's beloved dog had been run over. The boy cried and his family watched him with distaste, his mother reproaching him: "Will you control yourself, Edmond?" The narrator then cried, too, "out of homesickness for a country in which one could sob unrestrainedly when a sorrow befell one". Poor Spiel's letters were sometimes a wail of longing for lost happiness. "I really had a sort of mystical belief until then in our future and felt supported simply by the fact that we are such nice and talented people, and that it would be a waste to let us go down. Well, I'm not so sure now."

Spiel's war was spent as a housewife in suburban Wimbledon, where she queued at the fishmonger's and counted ration coupons like everyone else (though in all those years none of their neighbours ever invited them inside). She is the only mother among the five writers, giving birth to three children, one stillborn, during the war; though Yorke and Greene have children they are very absent fathers (Spiel's husband, Peter, who calls her "Mummi", contrives to be absent, too, as much as possible). In 1946 she returned on a visit to Vienna as correspondent for the New Statesman. Although she felt "heartbreak beyond words", visiting the scenes of her old life ("all the bottled-up emotion, repressed for years, when courage had to be bought at the price of dulled sensation"), it was as if she was coming fully to life again after a long hibernation. "I'm sick, sick, of a housewife's life," she wrote home to Peter. "That doesn't mean I'm not going back to it meekly, because it's my duty, and I asked for it, anyway. But it's a terrible sacrifice all the same."

All that British repressed emotion didn't mean there wasn't plenty of sex in wartime London. Even Macaulay (whom Virginia Woolf had described as "a spindle shanked withered virgin") turned out to be cherishing an illicit passion. Feigel's book reads partly as the record of a peak moment in the history of British adultery. Marriage was compromised, companionable, a bit despicable (a bit middle-class). Adultery, inside a system of strongly coded behaviours, could operate as a form of truth telling. Greene and Yorke were incorrigible, and their male confidence in their entitlement seems limitless; in a disenchanted world, sex could be counted on. They took love very seriously. Bowen, writing to the love of her life, Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie, said he was her "eternity". "Let neither of us forget, for a single moment, what reality feels like and eternity is. Beloved, I can't believe any human being can ever have made another as purely wholly unchangeably and yet increasingly happy as you have made me." The resonance is almost high Victorian; magnificent when it's juxtaposed with the rest of her compressed, stylish reserve. It's difficult to imagine anyone as grown-up and sceptical as Bowen using that heightened love-language nowadays without irony. We are more domesticated, or less wholehearted, or something – and we look back to our near-forebears in their extremity across a gulf of difference.

• Tessa Hadley's novel Married Love is published by Jonathan Cape. To order The Love-Charm of Bombs for £20.00 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 033 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

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