A Chelsea Concerto Read online

  Frances Faviell

  A Chelsea Concerto

  ‘Take off your coat,’ said the doctor. I took it off. ‘And your dress,’ he said. ‘It’s too dangerous – the folds may catch in the debris and bring the whole thing down.’ I took off the dress. ‘Fine,’ he said shortly. ‘It’ll have to be head first. We’ll hold your thighs. Go down and see if it’s possible to give an injection. Can you grip the torch with your teeth?’

  Frances Faviell lived in Chelsea before and during the London Blitz, having became a Red Cross volunteer when World War II began. Chelsea was particularly heavily bombed and the author was often in the heart of the action, witnessing or involved in fascinating and horrific events through 1940 and 1941. Her memoir evokes an unforgettable cast, Londoners and refugees alike, caught up together in extraordinary and dangerous times – not forgetting the ‘Green Cat’, a Chinese statuette, standing on the author’s window sill as the home’s talismanic protector.

  Frances Faviell’s memoir is powerful in its blend of humour, tenderness and horror, including the most haunting ending of any wartime memoir. A Chelsea Concerto is reprinted now for the first time since 1959, with a new introduction by Virginia Nicholson.

  ‘Irresistible reading. There could be no more graphic account of what one first-aid worker and her small party witnessed and did during the London Blitz … while characters are sketched in with a novelist’s art, the impression left is one of stark truth.’ Birmingham Post

  ‘I am so happy that A Chelsea Concerto is back in print. It is a gem of a book, one of the best personal memoirs of WW2 on the home front, written with an artist’s eye for detail and immediacy.’ KATE ATKINSON

  FM4

  FOR MY SON

  JOHN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Dedication

  Contents

  Foreword by Virginia Nicholson

  Acknowledgements

  Map

  Prologue

  PART I REHEARSAL

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  PART II PERFORMANCE

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Photos

  About the Author

  Furrowed Middlebrow Titles

  The Dancing Bear – Title Page

  The Dancing Bear – Chapter I

  Copyright

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  I FIRST CAME across Frances Faviell’s memoir of the Blitz when embarking on research for a book of my own about women’s wartime experiences. A couple of the standard histories referred me to A Chelsea Concerto (1959), so I borrowed a copy from the London Library. This was the beginning of a two-year quest to trace its author, and to pursue every possible avenue in trying to retell her story.

  What was it about the book that so possessed me? There is a huge genre of what might be termed “Blitz-Lit”, telling the story of that extreme period endured by (largely) Londoners, between autumn 1940 and spring 1941, when the Luftwaffe attacked their city nightly, and in which more than 40,000 civilians were killed in seventy-one major air raids. But among all the available diaries and memoirs (and I read many of them), Faviell’s Chelsea story was the star.

  There are books where we want to find out what happens, and A Chelsea Concerto is certainly one of those. But more than that, I found – every time I turned to it – that I relished its author’s company. I wanted to be with her; I wanted to experience the Blitz through her eyes and sensibility. The book had been out of print for years and, with difficulty, I acquired a second hand copy.

  Frances Faviell was not her real name. She was born Olivia Faviell Lucas in 1905 and studied painting at the Slade School under the famous Henry Tonks. Little is known about her first marriage to a Hungarian painter named Karoy Fabri, but after they parted Frances continued to paint under the name Olivia Fabri. In 1940 she was engaged to a government official named Richard Parker, whom she married that autumn; their son, John, was born in an air raid in September 1941. Her chosen borough, Chelsea, was rich in artists and writers, and she relished their company. She was well-travelled, attractive, a talented linguist and artistic.

  Faviell paints as vibrantly with words as she must have with colours. In early September 1940, the sky above the Thames is ‘gay and alive with silver balloons…like drunken fish.’ A few days later, the sirens alert London to its first bombardment, and Frances watches the East End burning from the roof of her building in Cheyne Walk: ‘Presently, instead of darkness following the sunset it remained light – a curious yellow-orange light almost like sunrise.’ With an artist’s eye, she records the tracery of searchlight patterns, the beauty of fires caused by incendiary bombs falling ‘like fireflies’, and the blood-red taint of the sky above London after the appalling raid of 29 December: ‘the kind of sky in which Turner would have delighted.’

  But Faviell’s powers of observation are not limited to the picturesque. For the social historian like me, her noticing glance has a compelling authenticity. A lull in the bombing brings women out to have their hair permed – ‘…during the Blitz…no one fancied being caught in a raid when fastened securely to the waving machine.’

  Likewise, she picks up on the wartime propensity for firemen and rescue workers to call each other by nicknames – ‘Smasher, Crasher, Tapper, Dibs, and similar ones…It gave some sort of equality to the heterogeneous mixture of people all working together in the common cause.’ Elsewhere, she notes the tendency for guests to arrive at a Christmas party equipped with pyjamas and toothbrush, prepared to stay the night in an air raid shelter should the need arise. In the shelters, too, Frances’s maternal heart is stirred at the ‘infinitely moving’ sight of mothers, in the most primitive of circumstances, helping their children prepare for sleep, tucking them up with a cuddly toy. And we are there with her.

  Emotions like this are easy to share – but Frances’s humane readiness to allow vibrant responses to surface is unusual in the stiff-upper-lip literature of the time, and it is this above all which makes her such a rare companion. When Frances tells us she feels ‘real craven fear’, we are terrified with her. Her patriotism is real too, as is her choked emotion at the spectacle of the little boats limping up the Thames, after rescuing the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. We are with her too during the strains, stresses and cheerful democracy of the First Aid Post, and we share her engulfing fury and despair at the burning of her city, and the pointless loss of life. Compassion underlies her narrative. The cast of characters who inhabit Faviell’s Chelsea – painters and writers, refugees and VADs, The Giant, Penty, Kathleen, Mr and Mrs Ferebee, Granny from Paradise Walk and many others, some lovable, some exasperating, but all real – are a microcosm of London’s suffering millions. Their personal adversities were repeated across our capital, and across our nation.

  Underlying the particulars of daily life in wartime Chelsea is a love story. Richard Parker is not at the forefront of Frances’s tale, but he is never far away. During the Battle of Britain Frances and Richard watch a twisting diving dogfight in the sky above Hendon. Suddenly, she recognises that she is witnessing ‘the real thing…WAR. I was glad Richard was with me…I thought t
hen – nothing matters if you are with the person you want to be with.’ As in the best of stories, it becomes vital to the reader that their happiness should survive the horrors that will befall it.

  On this front, the reader may need a strong stomach. Frances Faviell’s account brings the atrocities of war into ghastly close-up. Working as a nurse at a First Aid Post brought her up against horrific injuries; it was often her task to reassemble bodies dismembered by blast, in preparation for identification. But as we read, we know that not even this can prepare her for the experience of a direct hit on her own home. If you want to know what it feels like to be bombed, look no further. If for nothing else, the penultimate chapter of A Chelsea Concerto should find a prominent place in the anthologies of war.

  Post-war, Frances picked up the artistic social life that she left behind in 1939. With time and peace of mind to give to painting, she resumed her work as a miniaturist and portraitist, and acquired a name as a published writer. But the war memories persisted. Though she found it painful and difficult, Frances embarked on her book about the Chelsea Blitz, finding it both liberating and cathartic. But A Chelsea Concerto was to be her last literary venture. In 1959 Frances Faviell confronted an unwinnable war, for at fifty-four she was dying of an untreatable cancer.

  Her book was forgotten, by all except historians. Unpicking Faviell’s own story from her memoir, in order to re-tell it in a larger context, and discovering what happened to her in the years leading up to her death, was to prove challenging. But a prolonged search finally led me to Frances’s son, John Parker. It was a relief to meet him, to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, and to discover that many of my instincts about his mother were correct.

  Now, at last, John’s efforts are bringing A Chelsea Concerto to a new audience, and his mother’s jewel of Blitz-lit will live again.

  Virginia Nicholson

  November 2015

  Acknowledgements

  ALTHOUGH this account of the Blitz and its prelude is as correct and authentic as I could make it, it is necessarily restricted by being a personal experience and is in no way intended either as a documentary or a history. It has been extremely difficult to obtain the details as there are as yet no collated records of the Blitz; and for this reason I have confined my book to those incidents in which I either participated, witnessed, or which were vouched for by those working in my own group of Civil Defence.

  As with each painter the same model presents a different aspect, so to each of us a shattering experience such as those eight months has necessarily left widely divergent memories coloured by that aspect of the Blitz which affected us each personally. Should this book give the impression that only a small circle was involved I would remind readers that in the Civil Defence Services we were all strictly confined to our own particular area or post unless specially seconded in emergencies to others. That large and magnificent band of ordinary civilians, artisans, housewives, business men, artists, authors, and people of every walk of life are now scattered. Many are dead – others prefer not to remember those tragic but stirring days – and for me the writing of this account has been painful as well as difficult. If I have inadvertently been incorrect on any point I apologize and beg the indulgence of all those concerned as I do for the omission of all those wonderful fellow workers with whom I have lost touch. To the many people who have helped me with information and with the checking of dates and times of events and incidents I am deeply grateful and herewith record my thanks.

  Through the good offices of Captain Councillor Cecil Townsend of the Royal Hospital and Chelsea Town Hall I was not only able to get in touch with many former friends from the days of the Blitz but also to obtain valuable help from Mr F E Wenham, Civil Defence Instructor, Mr Jack Eldridge, assistant to the Town Clerk in Civil Defence, and Mr Ronald Buse, his assistant.

  Miss Doris Eldridge, of the Chelsea Municipal Library, was most kind in helping me trace records and reports of events and in hunting up sources of information. The Editor and staff of the West London Press were both interested and very helpful; and I am indebted to their paper as well as to The Times for much help, as also to the Daily Telegraph and to the Manchester Guardian for corroboration of events and checking of dates. The Imperial War Museum’s staff were extremely helpful. I owe an enormous debt to Miss Jo Oakman, fellow painter and former ARP warden, who most generously allowed me access to her private records of the Blitz and who checked and re-checked various incidents with me. Mr and Mrs George Evans and Miss Hilda Reid, former ARP wardens in the area in which I worked, have been most gracious in giving me details from their own personal diaries of the Blitz and in helping me with their own recollections of events. Dr Graham Kerr allowed me the use of her own diary of the first part of the Blitz and Mr Graham Kerr, former ARP warden, helped me with personal memories, as did the Misses Iredale-Smith, who were wardens for our own street.

  Lady Compton, my former Red Cross Commandant, has been extremely kind with much help on many points, and to her and my fellow VADs, especially Peggy Dowdall, I owe special thanks, as I do to Dr Lendal Tweed. To Suzanne, Elizabeth, and Denise Fitzgerald I am as much indebted for their help with dates and events as I am for their unfailing kindness to us during and after the Blitz. Mrs Margerie Scott, author and broadcaster, sent me much help on various points from her present home in Canada and to Sir Ernest Rock Carling I owe thanks both for constant encouragement and for the checking of events.

  Mrs May Sargent helped me with details of her relatives the Marshmans, and the Registrar of Births, Marriages, and Deaths in Chelsea gave me valuable help in corroborating dates.

  My final and perhaps most hesitant thanks are due to Edmund Blunden, who urged me to persevere and complete this book when I was about to abandon it as hopeless.

  Prologue

  LAST NIGHT there was a concert in aid of the Red Cross in the beautiful chapel of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea. A lovely still, mellow evening and the gardens and building itself looked inexpressibly peaceful and ageless as the audience strolled in them during the interval and watched the barges passing on the Thames. I walked there too, and chatted with some of the old Pensioners sitting in the late sun on the benches under the cloisters, under those Latin words which describe them so touchingly as ‘broken by age and the wars’.

  From there I could see children and dogs playing in that piece of ground near the river belonging to the hospital and open to the public – the place where I once walked and played with my little Dachshund Vicki, known to many as ‘Miss Hitler’, and where I met and made many friends. And suddenly, as I stood there, they all came crowding back again – the grey ghost faces, the wail of the sirens, the sound of gunfire, the crash and reverberation of bombs, the drone of planes and the crackle of flames. Back they all came…Kathleen, Anne, Cecil, Larry, Catherine and the baby, Grannie and the horse, Beauty, the East Enders, the refugees…

  Why just now? Why? I don’t walk in this part of Chelsea as frequently as I used to do, so much has happened since then. But sometimes on an evening such as this I stroll along the Thames and up Swan Walk and so come to what used to be my home, No. 33, Cheyne Place. It is all rebuilt now, a small elegant, modern house. It used to be much taller and the first floor had three windows from which I could look down Swan Walk to the river, and above this was the flat where Kathleen, Anne, and Penty lived. Farther down the river the Old Church, destroyed the same night as my home, is almost rebuilt and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother will attend its consecration.

  Chelsea has a proud record of her citizens in the days of the Germans’ Blitz on London. They acquitted themselves magnificently in the Battle of the Bombs, emerging at the end of the war with a splendid list of decorations and awards for their gallantry under fire. The little borough was the third most heavily bombed in London. Of her war-time population no less than 2,099 were bomb casualties, 534 of these being fatal. This meant roughly that one in every fourteen persons in Chelsea was killed or injured. Her citizens, many of them d
istinguished in the world of art and letters, many of them ordinary, unpretentious workers at everyday jobs, joined together in a unanimously determined effort and worked magnificently in Civil Defence to battle with the bombs.

  It seems only yesterday that I too, like these pretty young nurses selling programmes, wore that uniform of the Red Cross. And the ghosts will not recede or leave me in peace. Pushing, jostling, thrusting away their grey forms they blossom before my eyes from the muted cobwebby hues of memory to those of warm, pulsating life. They will not recede; insistent and determined they force me to take up my pen and go back with them to the summer of 1939…

  Chelsea

  June 1956-March 1958

  PART I

  REHEARSAL

  Chapter One

  WE WERE HAVING a grand-scale Civil Defence exercise in Chelsea. It was June 19th, 1939. We all thought the idea very silly – we’d had one scare the previous year – and now it all seemed childish. We’d filled sand-bags, dug trenches, fitted thousands of gas-masks, only to throw them all away in an excess of relief when Chamberlain returned from Godesburg with a respite from Hitler. The scare of war had largely died away because the public had decided that it should die away. There would be no war – and the forlorn abandoned gas-masks on rubbish heaps, and the bursting sand-bags seeping over pavements and streets, were witnesses to the public’s decision.

  And now, almost a year later, here we were in Chelsea having this full-scale exercise in our little borough. Mrs Freeth, my housekeeper, and I had both been given our parts to play. I was to be a casualty, she was to take shelter on a piece of pavement marked with white-painted lines to indicate that here (when built) would be the air-raid shelter for our area. I was living at No. 33, Cheyne Place in the Royal Hospital Road. In this exercise this was in District Sloane under Major H A Christie. Our group warden was Mr Paul de Laszlo. Air-raid wardens had called and instructed us in the parts we were to play – we had been thoroughly drilled.