Introducing a recent edition of The Fourth Pig (1936), Marina Warner tried to elucidate why Naomi Mitchison had been so neglected by readers and critics:

This reading seems to function both as a biographical-literary-historical sketch and as a way to ask an inescapable if implicit question: for if Mitchison is intriguingly ‘partly modern’, which of her texts might allow readers to understand this mode? A predictable answer might reach for her most famous novels, but it is worth noting the scale of the commitment they demand from a reader: The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) – 720 pages; We Have Been Warned (1935) – 582 pages; The Bull Calves (1947) – 532 pages. This is major fiction in both length and complexity; the works cover vast amounts of time, both narrative time and reader’s time. It is an art of excess, intentional or not, and with that many other aspects of value can be elided. But as well as writing novels Mitchison also wrote journalism, political tracts, poems – and many short stories. And I believe it is in her short stories – with their intensity and focus, as well as their craft and connection to the ‘tale’ and oral traditions – that readers now can best understand Mitchison’s aesthetic: her engagement with the past; her testing of the form; and her conception of the political responsibilities of any writer. This is a potent combination, and one in short (and shortness does have many virtues) that best shows her version of being ‘partly modern’.

Mitchison is not alone in using a compact form for complex ends.

The virtuosic opening of W. H. Auden’s ‘Poem XXX’ from March 1930 – with its aircraft, pilots and aerial views – has proved enticingly talismanic for many accounts of interwar literature:

Our dependency on Auden’s observer is established in these first lines; and then the omnipotence of his view, with its ability to target or focus on details, carries the line of sight into the, as yet, peaceful garden party. Later in the poem he has moved much further on, and (with his wirelesses and dance bands and interconnectivity) he negotiates technology and agency, imperative urgency and the possibilities of recounting sensations. These processes mean both trying to delineate where the human stops and where the machine begins, and trying to find a language for the strange sensations the machine enforces upon the human subject. Many have read this poem as overdetermined by its opening, which reveals Auden’s totalitarian desires for allying his poetic viewpoint with the kestrel/bomber, and shows contempt for the little lives below which could be snuffed out at will (Cunningham 1988: 192).

But there is a much better example from Auden’s writing for thinking about the multiple facets of aeriality. It is formally inventive and wildly unsatisfying, as well as being full of jokes that are never quite jokes and (nearly) entirely hawkless: it is ‘The Journal of an Airman’, the central section of The Orators (1932). This journal of a flyer, engaged in both introspection and fomenting an uprising, oscillates between registers of sub-Buchanesque bluff bravado and fin-de-siècle poised camp. It is a bricolage of prose epigrams, sestinas, doggerel, alphabets, genetic diagrams and telegraphese, as well as accomplished descriptions of aircraft maintenance, introspective diary-keeping, wished-for genealogies, letters to wounds, nightmares and fantasias of totalising attacks. But it is also manically elusive, ‘endlessly hinting at a secret narrative the reader is duty bound to track down’ (Smith 1994: 313). The clues come thick and fast – whether scraps of information from apparent spies, the list of possible airbases at ‘Stubba, Smirirndale, Hamar and Sullom’ (1977: 76) or the very idea of reconnaissance.

In the late summer of 1940 Dylan Thomas travelled from Laugharne to London – and was caught in one of the first major bombing attacks from the Luftwaffe. He reported the experience, and the psychic shock-waves it sent out, in a letter to his friend Vernon Watkins:

This is an initial and partial report from a city undergoing bombing – but also a self-examination of the fears that bombing brought in the 1940s. It combines touches of popular surrealism (the animated taxis with fearful faces) with real faces being shaved (signs of apparent normality). Moreover, it marks the start of Thomas's engagement with the war as brute actuality rather than a dreaded future, and the difficulties inherent in thus writing of and from such destruction. He did ‘settle down’ to writing poems again before too long. They were, in their different ways, both ‘nightmarish’ and yet replete with possibilities of how lyric poetry could engage with the specifics of industrialised warfare. This chapter situates these Second World War works in a comparative context, reading them alongside the art of one of Thomas's contemporaries. Such a move shows the multiple analogies between both aesthetic fields, but also reveals that a different model of understanding this specific visual and literary relationship might be possible.

The artist Ceri Geraldus Richards was born in Dunvant, a small village on the Gower Peninsula 5 miles west of Swansea, in 1903.

1. ‘No,’ she said, ‘stay. Please.’

2. ‘Why?’

3. ‘You are safe here.’

4. He smiled. ‘From more bombs?’

5. ‘From a lot of things.’

6. Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (1943)

The pre-First World War vantage point of H. G. Wells’ The War in the Air (1908) extended as far as imagining beyond the cataclysm of bombs and zeppelins. For at the end of this work ghosts populate the futuristic bombed city; ghosts that could be animated out of the ruins.

The actuality of the bombing of London was not quite so severe as to create a terrain that would allow a swineherd such an adventure; but after the Blitz the city, unhoused, on edge and shattered, was one amenable to numerous forms of strange sensations – and depictions. The possibility of the phantasmagoric in a ruptured cityscape, which was unexplainable with conventional logic or undepictable according to available materialist systems of plausibility, seemed to many writers a natural assumption. This was especially the case when the shape-shifting actuality of destruction seemed to literalise and release images that were previously purely hidden in mental depth; making the unconscious conscious. For the bombsites as a terrain not only disclose a history, in as much as they expose layers of the past, and of quotidian lives, but they also become ruins unlike any ever seen before. They are thus both old and new, linked both to the past and to immediate human pain and suffering; they become places of phantasmal apparitions. The major writers to be attended to in this chapter – Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen and David Jones – all use these possibilities, but they do so in divergent ways and offer different complex moral inheritances.

In Greene’s description of a Brighton slum clearance scheme his central phrase –‘as if’ – is doing some stern and strenuous work. The preceding sentence has described a scene that could have been placed in any bombed city of the Spanish Civil War or drawn from the Japanese attacks on China, both conflicts underway when the novel was written, in 1937–8. If his disingenuous use of ‘bombardment’ as a way of describing a gale prepares expectations, then the template of the bombed metropolis as applicable to Britain is realised, partly as a form of foreboding and partly as an index of the details of destruction. All the items, disjunctions and classic tropes of the bombsite from that wartime literature to come are already present: household objects exposed violently to the world, disordered and incomplete remains, the absent glass as indicative of recent blast. Yet this is a scene of peacetime, the construction of a municipal utopia that will replace the actuality of squalor in the ironic Paradise Row. The real British bombsites, and Greene’s response to them, would follow only a few years later.

This book tracks how British culture feared, predicted, engaged with, portrayed and interpreted the bombsites of the Second World War; those spaces of destruction in the midst of British towns and cities caused by enemy attacks. Both the national psyche and the architecture of cities today still bear the marks of the Blitz of 1940/1, the ‘little Blitz’ of 1943/4 and the V1 rocket and V2 missile attacks. Over 50 per cent of buildings within greater London were damaged, with the totals in some boroughs being far higher. The book’s argument stems from a belief that such material conditions provide the subject of many works, whether overtly or implicitly. It also argues for the significance of the more abstracted value of these spaces (whether theological, metaphorical, allegorical) for the narratives and iconographies of British culture, both then and now.

1. The number of these flowering plants and ferns on ruined sites rose after a few seasons to 126: among them, pleasant to name if hard to distinguish – Bulbous Buttercup, Codlins-and-Cream, Musk Mimulus, Swine’s Cress, Gallant Soldiers, White Goosefoot or Fat Hen, Yorkshire Fog, Fool’s Parsley, Evening Primrose.

2. G. W. Stonier, ‘The Flowering Wen’ (1951)

The creation of implausibly lush zones in the midst of London was one of the most unexpected transformations that resulted from incendiary and high-explosive bomb attacks. Acts of personal endurance and survival during the Blitz itself, framed by rhetoric and stoicism, did not offer any teleology for London’s inhabitants to expect this subsequent floral revival. The blackened timbers, fallen masonry and exposed brickwork of the bombsites, markers of how the war had arrived in the city, were also habitats that the metropolis had not previously possessed. Swift colonisation of such debris by plants, through seeds carried on the wind or by birds, was remarked upon by naturalists as early as 1941. In the years that followed many bombsites became luxuriant spaces where ruins and ashes were shaded by the energetic growth of leaves and flowers. Not all inhabitants were surprised – or should have been surprised. For analogous to the pre-war concept, as imagined by modernism, of the city as a zone of fragmented destruction, literary and visual culture had proleptically envisaged the return of the wild to the metropolis.

Detailed fictional templates of how the city would revert to nature had been created from the time of the Victorians onwards; however, the effect of actually seeing the city’s ruins ‘invaded’ or ‘occupied’ by vegetation – loaded words in the wartime and postwar years – troubled and intrigued both writers and artists. The recuperative metaphorical potential in flowers springing from rubble or birds singing over blackened buildings was obvious, and it was utilised officially in posters and broadcasts – but also in more complex and ambivelent ways as inspiration for various artistic works. The complications unleashed when now deserted parts of a city reverted to a greenly fruitful state also brought complex responses, ranging through elation, menace, neurosis and dread. For while this new jungle became a haven for flora and fauna, a space for children’s games and Gothic imaginations, it was also a lawless and liminal zone.

Within the longer history of imagining the ruination of the city, both as a pleasure and a terror, stretching back through Troy, Alexandria and Rome, British late Victorian literature was highly detailed and specific. Its combinations of war fear and war lust drew heavily on conceptions of death from above, combining metaphors for heavenly vengeance with the model of totalising omnipotence offered by the Royal Navy. Even before credible aircraft flew, works such as William D. Hay’s Three Hundred Years Hence (1881) feature the unleashing of ‘a rain of awful death to every breathing thing’ from aeroplanes to ‘subjugate the inferior races’; while in Samuel Odell’s The Last War, or the Triumph of the English Tongue (1898) thousands of airships, laden with bombs and a form of ur-Napalm, wipe out French and German cities. Tom Harrison, many years later, commented astutely on the hyper-inflation of possible destruction in such works: ‘Air-power was born with a kind of huge attachment, a Siamese twin, so that the facts of the matter were intimately blended with an almost separate, quite identifiable other form called Fear-Fantasy.’

The British War Office publication, issued in 1905, The Manual of Military Ballooning conflated a directly plausible military use of balloons for observation and reconnaissance with the future possibility that dropping gun cotton charges might have a ‘moral[e] effect’ on the enemy. But any conflict of manoeuvre was assumed to be land- or sea-based: the possibilities of aerial attack were limited by miniscule payloads and the vagaries of the weather. The imaginative potential of war being extended into another dimension did, however, start to make an appearance, and especially so in a medium itself as new as flight – film. The peril from above had to be anchored down by narrative decencies – through, for example, a compliant heroine and proto-boffin embracing at the close of The Battle of the Clouds (1909). Yet these generic elements appear oddly sinister as its depictions of a city engulfed in voracious flames is only partially offset by the subplot hinted at in its subtitle: A Love Story of the Inventor of the Aerial Torpedo. Contemporary to this is The War in the Air (1908), H. G. Wells’ attempt to extrapolate technological prowess and insert picaresque tangents in his imagined world war fought from airships. In it the cities are vulnerable and without defence – and it is the Germans that, plausibly, have the upper hand. In Wells’ work – a ‘fantasia of possibility’ – the ‘moral effect’, explained in the Military Ballooning Manual and determined by the War Office at great length, is seen in the movements of masses and totalising destruction.