Love in the Blitz

Abstract

"Doesn't it drive you mad not to know who Aileen's lover in London was?"I have heard variations of this question from several people since my biography of Aileen Palmer was published in early 2016.1 The eldest daughter of Australian writers Vance and Nettie Palmer, Aileen was in London during the Second World War after having served for two years as interpreter and administrator with the medical units attached to the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. An uncharacteristically effervescent letter Aileen wrote to her parents in early August 1940 offers a clue to what was happening in her life at that time. Buried in a page of chat about this and that, she writes: "I'm happy, oddly enough, in this chaotic world-happier, personally, than I've been for a long time-enjoying odd walks in the woods & Hampstead Heath, enjoying being in love as I never was before ..."2I had to read this letter again to make sure I wasn't imagining those words. Aileen doesn't elaborate and continues with unrelated chat in the close handwritten lines that border a typed page. The lover is not named in Aileen's letter but she also kept intermittent diaries during her time in war zones; one she kept in London speaks of a lover, only identified as "B," a woman.Stationed at an ambulance station in Stepney, Aileen met B some months before the start of the Blitz in September 1940 and began her diary on 23 August, soon after the letter to her parents:I always used to begin diaries with the object of "seeing how I spent my time." Now I have another object ... for I am no longer just talking to myself. A diary of the last few months would have been intensely interesting, but when most is happening in my life, I can never bring myself to keep a diary. The worst of me is I have never brought myself to form daily habits of any kind; with my present way of life, there is no normal time when I would sit down to write; and when I do find myself, as today, with a vacant evening, sitting at home by myself, my impulse is to immediately get up and rush out somewhere. Only I can't rush to B and I wish for the hours and minutes to pass as quickly as possible, till I see B again.3Strangely enough, it does not "drive me mad" that I do not know the identity of Aileen's lover. Perhaps it is because I was not trained as a historian but as an actor, then subsequently acquired a rich academic background in Theatre Studies and Women's Studies. Rather than ferreting out who "B" might have been, what interested me more was Aileen's emotional response to the situation.During the Spanish Civil War Aileen appeared to disguise her sexuality under a mask of indifference to her appearance, making joking references to her lack of feminine charms, a stance she adopted in Catholic Spain and also when she came to understand the Communist Party's moralistic rules. (A nurse in Aileen's medical unit was sent back to London during the first months of the war for having a lesbian love affair.) So, I was delighted to discover that Aileen was able to relax her guard and find intimacy with a lover in London.I did glean from Aileen's papers that her lover was most likely in charge of the ambulance station and I think I have a probable name. But what would I achieve by trying to track down that woman's background? Would I be doing her memory a service by outing her as a lesbian in a time when homosexuality was regarded as deviant?Lara Feigel has written of the effects of the nightly bombings on Londoners during the Blitz, The Love-Charm of Bombs.4 She takes the book's title from Graham Greene, who in one essay wrote:The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine (Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm.Feigel examines the war as it appeared to Londoners through the eyes of five novelists, all of whom describe "love" in terms of heterosexuality. …