been removed and not yet rehung. Many once stylish restaurants were now reduced to drabness and even squalor.
The shortage of materials made all but the most urgent repairs illegal …. London’s shabbiness was so sad, I thought, because it was unwilling - quite unlike the cheerful down-at-heel air of some minor Latin American capital. London remembered the past and was ashamed of its present appearance.
Christopher was excited, during those two days he spent with me, a little confused by the war-time changes he had already noticed, and a little nervous about the way he would be received.
We soon, I think, put him at his ease - as many of his old friends as could be mustered to meet him in person, and others who were on the telephone as soon as the news got round. None of us had joined the scapegoat chase in which politicians and journalists who had never known them (or most likely their works) had tried to vilify him and Auden as ‘escapers’. We had been sorry not to have him during the weird, sometimes apocalyptic and frightening experiences we had been through; we had been a little sceptical, while the bombs were falling, of his mystical exercises in Yoga temples and monasteries; we were immensely glad to have him back, even for so short a time as he planned to stay with us, even in this slightly transmogrified form. We noted that the face, deeply tanned by the Californian sun, was a little more lined; but that the deep-set eyes, though opened wide in respectful amazement or horror at the tales we had to tell, twinkled with the same old impish appreciation of anything comical or fantastic. We noted that his favourite talk was of Hollywood and movie-stars; and we wondered sometimes whether he didn’t in fact see us as characters in a film - an American film of little old England heroically carrying on in spite of all trials and tribulations.
After these all too brief days of happy reunion with his old friends and getting the feel of post-war London, Christopher went straight up North to see his mother and his brother Richard at the old family home of Wyberslegh Hall in Cheshire, which he found in a thoroughly run-down condition. ‘I was never meant for these latitudes,’ he cried in his first letter to me, ‘and I huddle miserably in front of a blue gas-fire. London seems almost as remote as America. If only we lived there still! I spend most of the time reading my old diaries (goodness what energy I had in those days! It’s a marvel I’m not impotent) and washing dishes. My mother hasn’t changed a bit. She does all the cooking. But Nanny is very, very old …_’ And in the next: ‘Being up here is like a steamship journey. You just screw down the porthole and weather it out. I have all my letters, photographs and books to amuse me. Turning over the pages of Evil Was Abroad l wished so much you’d write another novel. Will you? Please … .’ Later on he went down to Cheltenham to stay with his old friends Olive Mangeot and Jean Ross. He tried to get over to Stratford to see Beatrix, who was playing an assortment of parts, including Viola, Portia, Isabella and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, but swirling floods cut them off from one another.
In his article for the ‘Coming to London’ series he tried to give an outsider’s impression of the rigours of that terrible winter:
Few of my readers will need to be reminded that this was the winter of the coal shortage and the great blizzards. The snow started a week after my arrival; and it soon assumed the aspect of an invading enemy. Soldiers turned out to fight it with flamethrowers. The newspapers spoke of it in quasi-military language: ‘Scotland isolated’, ‘England cut in half’. Even portions of London were captured; there was a night when no taxi driver would take you north of Regent’s Park. With coal strictly rationed, gas reduced to a blue ghost and electricity often cut off altogether,
The shortage of materials made all but the most urgent repairs illegal …. London’s shabbiness was so sad, I thought, because it was unwilling - quite unlike the cheerful down-at-heel air of some minor Latin American capital. London remembered the past and was ashamed of its present appearance.
Christopher was excited, during those two days he spent with me, a little confused by the war-time changes he had already noticed, and a little nervous about the way he would be received.
We soon, I think, put him at his ease - as many of his old friends as could be mustered to meet him in person, and others who were on the telephone as soon as the news got round. None of us had joined the scapegoat chase in which politicians and journalists who had never known them (or most likely their works) had tried to vilify him and Auden as ‘escapers’. We had been sorry not to have him during the weird, sometimes apocalyptic and frightening experiences we had been through; we had been a little sceptical, while the bombs were falling, of his mystical exercises in Yoga temples and monasteries; we were immensely glad to have him back, even for so short a time as he planned to stay with us, even in this slightly transmogrified form. We noted that the face, deeply tanned by the Californian sun, was a little more lined; but that the deep-set eyes, though opened wide in respectful amazement or horror at the tales we had to tell, twinkled with the same old impish appreciation of anything comical or fantastic. We noted that his favourite talk was of Hollywood and movie-stars; and we wondered sometimes whether he didn’t in fact see us as characters in a film - an American film of little old England heroically carrying on in spite of all trials and tribulations.
After these all too brief days of happy reunion with his old friends and getting the feel of post-war London, Christopher went straight up North to see his mother and his brother Richard at the old family home of Wyberslegh Hall in Cheshire, which he found in a thoroughly run-down condition. ‘I was never meant for these latitudes,’ he cried in his first letter to me, ‘and I huddle miserably in front of a blue gas-fire. London seems almost as remote as America. If only we lived there still! I spend most of the time reading my old diaries (goodness what energy I had in those days! It’s a marvel I’m not impotent) and washing dishes. My mother hasn’t changed a bit. She does all the cooking. But Nanny is very, very old …_’ And in the next: ‘Being up here is like a steamship journey. You just screw down the porthole and weather it out. I have all my letters, photographs and books to amuse me. Turning over the pages of Evil Was Abroad l wished so much you’d write another novel. Will you? Please … .’ Later on he went down to Cheltenham to stay with his old friends Olive Mangeot and Jean Ross. He tried to get over to Stratford to see Beatrix, who was playing an assortment of parts, including Viola, Portia, Isabella and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, but swirling floods cut them off from one another.
In his article for the ‘Coming to London’ series he tried to give an outsider’s impression of the rigours of that terrible winter:
Few of my readers will need to be reminded that this was the winter of the coal shortage and the great blizzards. The snow started a week after my arrival; and it soon assumed the aspect of an invading enemy. Soldiers turned out to fight it with flamethrowers. The newspapers spoke of it in quasi-military language: ‘Scotland isolated’, ‘England cut in half’. Even portions of London were captured; there was a night when no taxi driver would take you north of Regent’s Park. With coal strictly rationed, gas reduced to a blue ghost and electricity often cut off altogether,
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