‘down in the terraces between the targets’ such civilian experiences of war in another of Nicholson’s poems from his 1944
collectionFiveRivers, a mass observation piece called ‘Evacuees’.^64
Geoffrey Hill does not seem to have been evacuated, but shocked and awed as a
little boy—and then to have lived through the war-long blackout. InThe Triumph
of Love, he recalls the spectacle of Coventry’s destruction in an aesthetic mode that
may consciously recall Benjamin’s criticism of the Futurists. Hill’s entireœuvre
speaks against succumbing to such a confusion of values—though his plush local
effects can be similarly and not only self-critically spectacular:
A stocky water tower built like the stump
of a super-dreadnaught’s foremast. It could have set
Coventry ablaze with pretend
broadsides, some years before the armoured
city suddenly went down, guns
firing, beneath the horizon; huge silent whumphs
of flame-shadow bronzing the nocturnal
cloud-base of her now legendary dust.^65Hill’s particular anger and resentment as a war child are here brought to focus with
‘Ingratitude|still gets to me, the unfairness|and waste of survival; a nation|with so
many memorials but no memory’.^66 In the earlierMercian Hymns,Hillhadconjured
the life of the boy in the Blitz with a greater inwardness and a memorialization
all the more indelible for its lack of clamour: ‘At home the curtains were drawn.
The wireless boomed|its commands. I loved the battle-anthems and the gregarious
news.’ Hill’s poem then moves to ‘the earthy shelter’ where the speaker huddles
with ‘stories of dragon-|tailed airships and warriors who took wing’.^67 Elaine
Feinstein similarly escaped in her Leicester bomb shelter: ‘and yet at night|erotic
with the|might-be of disaster|I was carried into|dreaming with delight.’^68 These
two examples also instance the likely solitariness of the civilian’s relationship to
peril in wartime. The generation of poets who had been children during the Blitz
were enabled, thus, not to write poems about the significance of the events they lived
through, but about their own survival tactics—which had involved fictionalizing,
or dreaming, identifying with warfare emptied of its grim banality.
Though Hill describes Britain as a ‘nation|with so many memorials but no
memory’, for aerial bombardment and civilian casualties the future of the past
may in fact be aggravated by a lack ofadequatememorials. This is the burden of
Joe Kerr’s ‘The Uncompleted Monument: London, War, and the Architecture of
Remembrance’.^69 The great difficulty with official remembrance is that the history
(^64) Nicholson, ‘Evacuees’, inCollected Poems, 53.
(^65) Geoffrey Hill,The Triumph of Love(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 2–3.
(^66) Ibid. 40. (^67) Hill, ‘XXII’, inMercian Hymns,inCollected Poems, 126.
(^68) Elaine Feinstein, ‘A Quiet War in Leicester’, inSelected Poems(Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), 61.
(^69) Joe Kerr, ‘The Uncompleted Monument: London,War, and the Architecture of Remembrance’,
in Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Jane Rendell, with Alicia Pivaro (eds.),The Unknown City: Contesting
Architecture and Social Space(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 69–89.