Free The Love-Charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel

earth’. Seeing this as a personal accolade, she is tempted to keep it there as testimony to her car’s prowess. As she rolls through the streets,
     
    the other cars, yes, and even omnibuses, may yield to me and my Morris pride of place in the Hyde Park Corner scuffle, at the Marble Arch roundabout, and dashing up Baker Street.
     
    Driving an ambulance enabled Macaulay to fulfil her ambition to take pride of place on the road. It also gave her the chance to get her hands on the clanging bells that she admired in the fire engines that she also included in Personal Pleasures .
    But since she first signed up to drive an ambulance, Rose Macaulay’s enthusiasm for speeding had been chastened. The current ill-health of her lover, Gerald O’Donovan, began in June 1939, when Rose and Gerald had a car accident on a motoring holiday in Wales. Swerving to the wrong side of the road as she approached a corner, Rose ran into an oncoming car. Gerald suffered serious head injuries, which were followed by a stroke. For several weeks his chances of life were uncertain. Devastated, Rose informed Jean that ‘if he dies, you won’t be seeing me for some time’.
    In fact, Gerald did not die until 1942, but Macaulay never overcame her guilt at hastening his demise. The climax of her final published novel The Towers of Trebizond (1956) is a reenactment of her own accident. The first-person heroine Laurie kills her lover Vere by driving recklessly. She rushes self-righteously through a green light, knowing that a bus is charging across its own red light. The accident is not completely her fault, but she apportions the blame unequivocally:
     
    I knew about the surge of rage that had sent me off, the second the lights were with me, to stop the path of that rushing monster . . . I had plenty of time to think about it; no doubt my whole life.
     
    Unlike Gerald O’Donovan, Vere dies instantaneously after the crash. By fast-forwarding the years between crash and death, Macaulay made clear the pattern of cause and effect she perceived as operating between these two events.
    The imagined guilt of The Towers of Trebizond did have its basis in an experienced reality. For the first few months after the accident, it seemed that the crash would hasten Gerald’s death more immediately than it in fact did. Rose began to mourn with all the intensity of a grieving widow, and to blame herself, not just for the accident, but for the imperfections in his life. In Trebizond Laurie immediately condemns herself for coming between Vere and his wife for ten years, observing that ‘he had given me his love, mental and physical, and I had taken it; to that extent, I was a thief’. Rose herself had taken Gerald’s love, mental and physical, for twenty years. Her sense of his impending death, coinciding with the increasing certainty of war, left her desolate. Once war began, it was hard to regain immediate confidence behind the wheel. Driving through London in her ambulance, she relished the empty roads and the speed legitimised by her siren. But she could no longer see herself as invincible.
    Arriving in Camden Town, Macaulay found the incident post which the warden had marked with the customary two blue lamps placed on top of each other. She was confronted by the remains of two houses, now reduced to an enormous pile of ruins. Immediately, she was struck by the odour of gas, seeping through the pits and craters in the rubble, and by the unmistakable smell of the explosion itself. According to John Strachey the raw, brutal stench of a bombing incident was not so much a smell as ‘an acute irritation of the nasal passages from the powdered rubble of dissolved houses’. But on top of this there was the acrid overtone left by the HE bomb itself, as well as the ‘mean little stink’ of domestic gas. For Strachey, ‘the whole of the smell was greater than the sum of its parts. It was the smell of violent death itself. It was as if death was a toad that had come