By the time Stephen joined the Fire Service, it had become so large that it faced the problem of what to do with the men when there were no fires. Noticing this, he wrote to the London Civil Defence Region suggesting the formation of debating societies. The idea was well received, and soon he found himself in the role of Area Organizer of Discussion Groups in No. 34 Fire Force.
The beginnings were simple. The firemen met and the organizer asked a question, such as What did everybody feel about Russia? It would be up to the men to come up with ideas. Then Stephen began to invite his friends to participate. These included Kenneth Clark, a key figure in cultural activities during the war, and Julian Huxley, the distinguished zoologist. Count Mihály Károlyi, former President of Hungary, told his audience that they should be lighting fires all over Europe, not putting them out. Stephen was teased about this by his fellow firemen for weeks afterwards.
My father’s lifelong socialism included a desire to ‘educate’ the working classes in order to bring them up to the level that he and his friends took for granted. If his fellow firemen teased him about Count Károlyi and his other eccentric friends, it suggests that they knew what he was doing, recognized the class element and were good-humoured about it. Meanwhile it never seems to have occurred to Stephen that the spirit in which he followed this self-imposed duty was close to that of his father Harold, who’d spent most of his life engaged in good works of this kind.
Stephen persisted in applying to join various branches of political intelligence but without success. According to my mother, in one interview he was asked: ‘and what kind of a degree did you get at Oxford, Mr Spender?’ He explained that he had not taken his Finals. He had no degree. ‘Oh? And so what exactly did you do with your time?’
This was the voice of conventional England at its most cutting. Yet this world was in retreat. During the Second World War, England changed radically without anyone being fully aware of the fact. Food rationing was a logical step for a country under siege, but it was also a move towards a more egalitarian society. In other words, socialism. That bottle of extra-strong orange juice filled with vitamins was a benefit that transcended class, though the working classes added a teat and gave it to babies and the upper classes poured it into a tumbler with gin.
In November 1943, an internal vetting request regarding Stephen received this answer from MI5: ‘Stephen Spender, like several other young and progressive thinkers, joined the Communist Party in the days of the united front because he saw in this the only way to combat fascism. His behaviour and writings of recent years show that he is no longer in sympathy with communism and in fact will have nothing more to do with them. There is no security objection to his employment by P.W.E. on the Continent.’ The Political Warfare Executive was in charge of propaganda to Europe during the war.
In May 1944, Stephen was given three months’ leave from the Fire Service. ‘I don’t think I shall ever go back,’ he wrote to T. S. Eliot, ‘because the Chief Regional Fire Officer has complained to the Regional Commissioner that my hair is untidy. Truly. They don’t like my hair, and they don’t like to say so … I am quite delighted, as I had never expected such recognition. It is like their deciding that, after all, Virginia Woolf is not quite suitable to be a Watchroom Attendant.’
He was discharged from the Fire Service a fortnight later and started a new job in the Political Information Department, the visible face of the otherwise secret PWE. The PID had an address – Bush House, the headquarters of the BBC – a phone number and paper with letterhead, which Stephen occasionally used for his private correspondence.
His first job was to file information on Italian Fascism. He did not speak Italian and he had no knowledge of Italian politics. Was he being tested, or was it just the usual confusion of Britain at war? Of this peculiar period of his life, he told me one wonderful detail. In the corridor he bumped into Charlotte Bonham-Carter, who was working on aerial reconnaissance in the Italian section. ‘My dear, I’ve just ordered a sortie over Verona,’ she said. ‘So beautiful, the Roman Arena! I simply had to see whether it was all right.’
I was born on 13 March 1945, at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in west London. My birth coincided with the explosion of one of the last German V2 rockets to land on the city. It fell near Maresfield Gardens, so it’s just as well that Mum was busy elsewhere.
Soon after my birth my parents moved into 15 Loudoun Road, the house in St John’s Wood where they lived for the rest of their lives. It stood at the head of long rows of terraces built down the hill towards Abbey Road. The view down the hill gave a feeling that the original wood of St John’s Wood was not totally dead. Mum could sit at the piano and look out at greenery and dream of nature. As I grew up, I got to know the nearest trees as intimately as I knew my bedroom on the top floor. My thigh tingles at the memory of one huge pear tree, long gone, which several times I slid down in my shorts desperately clinging to the trunk.
I can just remember Loudoun Road in the early days, the walls unpapered and the floorboards without their fitted carpets. In my bedroom there was a lithograph in four panels showing a little boy bowling a hoop, by Pierre Bonnard. I loved it. But the key memory of my earliest bedroom is a light hanging from the ceiling whose nakedness was not covered by the lampshade. It was like living in a painting by Francis Bacon. In fact to this day I cannot separate the London of my childhood from Bacon’s canvases, or vice versa.
The bombed London of my childhood smelt differently from how it smells today. There was a fine dust in the air – or at least so I remember – vaguely electrical with overtones of mouldy carpet. The war took a long time to fade. At the Church Street market they sold useful war debris, like a mile of tangled copper wire, or a gas mask of crumbling rubber, or a primitive machine for turning old gramophone records into flower pots by warming them over a mould, or a fireman’s helmet with dents in it, or a liquid for giving colour to black-and-white photographs. ‘Our wonderful country makes the best coloured pencils in the world,’ said the woman selling this potion, and a surge of patriotic pride would make us hand over a threepenny bit, even if we had no photos worth colouring.
Down Baker Street, cheap shops squatted in the holes left by grander ones that had been bombed … I can’t remember the end of the war, of course, for I was a mere babe in arms, but I can remember the mood six or seven years later. I think I can understand how deep the craving was to get out of recently besieged Britain as soon as the fighting ended.
As France was liberated, Stephen became obsessed by the idea that he should get to Germany as soon as the hostilities were over. If only he could speak to Ernst Robert Curtius, he might find some explanation for the disaster of the Nazis.
He was interviewed for this purpose by the Allied Control Commission in November 1944. It went badly. He described this interview twice, once soon after it happened in a letter to Julian Huxley, and then six years later in his autobiography, World within World. In the letter to Huxley, he said he’d told the interviewers that he wanted to make contact with German intellectuals who would be involved with literature and culture after the war. ‘The interviewer at the end of the table said: Do you think that after the Nazis there can really be such a development? Among what class of people?’ Stephen mentioned Curtius, but his application was rejected.
Retelling this incident in World within World, he quotes this man as having said, ‘We can assure you, Mr. Spender, that after this war there will be no culture in Germany.’ This sounds like an after-dinner improvement of the original story. But whatever was said, the interviewers were looking for trained officers to send to Germany for a full two years after the war to help with reconstruction. Spender did not have the necessary qualifications.
In an unexpected turn of events, he was offered a candidacy for the Labour Party in the snap election called by Churchill for July 1945. Either he turned the offer down, or somehow the message didn’t reach him because he was in Paris. But this