remained independent, falling in love in April 1935 with an Italian diplomat called Tino (‘a man like a tree, handsome, tall, mustached, and a fascist by conviction’) and then in 1936 with the gloomy Italian writer Alberto Moravia.
When she did finally marry Peter and move to London later that year, Hilde was expecting an adventure. The move was politically motivated. Hilde was racially Jewish and it was clear to them both that Hitler would soon encroach on Austria. But Hilde also considered herself an urbane Anglophile and she was excited by the prospect of a new life in England. However by September 1940 she had found herself, aged twenty-nine, a penny-pinching housewife who spent her days looking after her small daughter and parents in a suburban terraced house, queuing at the fishmonger’s shop and meting out ration coupons while she waited for her husband to return from work. Gradually, fear and monotony were muting her emotions. She would look back on the whole war as a ‘dreary and wretched’ period offering merely ‘varied but still monotonous danger’. She felt that she was gradually deterred from expressing violent emotions, both by the example of English stoicism and under the pressures of the otherwise unbearable war. The calmness with which she forced herself to confront the bombers circling Wimbledon came at the expense of strong feeling and, she later realised, of creative inspiration.
For both Hilde and Peter the Blitz was doubly difficult because they were aware that the aeroplanes were piloted by their compatriots. In a 1975 essay on ‘The Psychology of Exile’, Spiel described the ‘split consciousness’ or ‘schizophrenic spiritual and mental attitude’ of Austrians and Germans who, more than the British, had ‘to welcome the horrible evil of war because otherwise a terror without end stood in view’. A pacifist by inclination, Spiel, even more than Macaulay, had to lay aside her horror of war and be grateful to Britain for fighting her homeland. At the same time, she could not forget that the bombs falling from the sky were potentially dropped by former friends. She and other exiles were longing for the defeat, ‘even the annihilation . . . of those whose fibres were bound with theirs through origins, childhood experience, landscape, friendship and blood relationships’.
In September 1940, Hilde Spiel was also in a more difficult position than Bowen, Macaulay, Greene or Yorke because she had dependants in immediate danger from the bombs. A week later, Peter would evacuate both Hilde and Christine to Oxford, but for now Christine was at risk as much as her parents. Christine had been born in Cambridge on 31 October 1939, two months after Britain’s declaration of war. With hindsight in her autobiography Hilde wondered what had induced them, in the brief breathing space between the Munich crisis and the outbreak of war, to think of bringing a child into the world. It was, she decided, ‘Peter’s zest for life, his most irresistible characteristic as a young man, which carried me along with him.’
Now, Christine inspired her mother with a helpful determination to survive but also with a more paralysing fear. Since the air attacks on Britain began in the summer, Hilde had been worrying about her daughter’s safety. ‘France conquered. We still live,’ she noted on 25 June in the small appointment diary where each night she distilled the personal headlines of the day in cramped English handwriting. ‘Yesterday the first air attack since last September. I would like to at least try to save Christine.’ Wondering in August if they would ever love life again, Hilde wrote at the bottom of that week’s page in her diary that she was ‘never yet so despondent and without hope’, seeing her daughter as the only reason to live. ‘We are daily threatened by an invasion which signifies our certain death. Sometimes I would choose that of all other choices. But I have Christine and I
When she did finally marry Peter and move to London later that year, Hilde was expecting an adventure. The move was politically motivated. Hilde was racially Jewish and it was clear to them both that Hitler would soon encroach on Austria. But Hilde also considered herself an urbane Anglophile and she was excited by the prospect of a new life in England. However by September 1940 she had found herself, aged twenty-nine, a penny-pinching housewife who spent her days looking after her small daughter and parents in a suburban terraced house, queuing at the fishmonger’s shop and meting out ration coupons while she waited for her husband to return from work. Gradually, fear and monotony were muting her emotions. She would look back on the whole war as a ‘dreary and wretched’ period offering merely ‘varied but still monotonous danger’. She felt that she was gradually deterred from expressing violent emotions, both by the example of English stoicism and under the pressures of the otherwise unbearable war. The calmness with which she forced herself to confront the bombers circling Wimbledon came at the expense of strong feeling and, she later realised, of creative inspiration.
For both Hilde and Peter the Blitz was doubly difficult because they were aware that the aeroplanes were piloted by their compatriots. In a 1975 essay on ‘The Psychology of Exile’, Spiel described the ‘split consciousness’ or ‘schizophrenic spiritual and mental attitude’ of Austrians and Germans who, more than the British, had ‘to welcome the horrible evil of war because otherwise a terror without end stood in view’. A pacifist by inclination, Spiel, even more than Macaulay, had to lay aside her horror of war and be grateful to Britain for fighting her homeland. At the same time, she could not forget that the bombs falling from the sky were potentially dropped by former friends. She and other exiles were longing for the defeat, ‘even the annihilation . . . of those whose fibres were bound with theirs through origins, childhood experience, landscape, friendship and blood relationships’.
In September 1940, Hilde Spiel was also in a more difficult position than Bowen, Macaulay, Greene or Yorke because she had dependants in immediate danger from the bombs. A week later, Peter would evacuate both Hilde and Christine to Oxford, but for now Christine was at risk as much as her parents. Christine had been born in Cambridge on 31 October 1939, two months after Britain’s declaration of war. With hindsight in her autobiography Hilde wondered what had induced them, in the brief breathing space between the Munich crisis and the outbreak of war, to think of bringing a child into the world. It was, she decided, ‘Peter’s zest for life, his most irresistible characteristic as a young man, which carried me along with him.’
Now, Christine inspired her mother with a helpful determination to survive but also with a more paralysing fear. Since the air attacks on Britain began in the summer, Hilde had been worrying about her daughter’s safety. ‘France conquered. We still live,’ she noted on 25 June in the small appointment diary where each night she distilled the personal headlines of the day in cramped English handwriting. ‘Yesterday the first air attack since last September. I would like to at least try to save Christine.’ Wondering in August if they would ever love life again, Hilde wrote at the bottom of that week’s page in her diary that she was ‘never yet so despondent and without hope’, seeing her daughter as the only reason to live. ‘We are daily threatened by an invasion which signifies our certain death. Sometimes I would choose that of all other choices. But I have Christine and I
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