So, little man, what did you do in the war? A guide to Sunday lunch with the Great Generation

There is art and there is war art, which seems to play by different rules. An exhibition at the Imperial War Museum is attempting to show us what those rules are and why they exist. But who benefits?

‘Blackout’ by Joan Vernon Connew

CONSIDER, IF YOU WOULD, JMW Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, just for a moment.

You know the picture. It is a major possession of the National Gallery and may be counted among the great works of the English 19^th century. Summon it, if you can, to your mind’s eye: a great railway bridge spans half the canvas, from middle top to bottom right. The bottle nose of an 1840s railway engine can be seen huffing across the bridge in the middle distance towards the viewer’s right shoulder in a spectacular brume of golden light and spun vapour, the light dancing, shimmering and thickening in response to the energies of the space and of the moment. It’s a picture telling us that the churning blur of modernity is humanity’s natural seat and that feats of engineering, such as Brunel’s great railway bridge, conveying a nation of passengers rapidly through the elements into the West, are a sort of English Manifest Destiny for an industriously expanding British Empire.

It is a great painting. The thing (qua thing) is in itself a glory well-fitted to the painting’s subject matter. Both subject and object matter — that is, the wooden frame, canvas, oil — collude with the viewing mind to lift the spirit and drive the heart to an ecstasy of new propulsion. Unbraked. Unstoppable. Going, going… ahead.

Compare it in your mind’s eye to the photograph (top) I wickedly took of Joan Vernon Connew’s Blackout last week, where it hung modestly on a wall in a gallery of the Imperial War Museum. Blackout (1942) was created very close to exactly a century after Rain, Steam and Speed. It shows a different Britain immobilised in a state of profound darkness, in which nothing can be seen at all except the small sticks of downlight permissible for people (and vehicles) to deploy against the murk, following regulation to the point at which light might as well not be there at all. The painting presents every shade of dark you can think of. Nothing shimmers. Humanity is no longer blazing forward, as if riding the very rays of the sun, but stumbling around helplessly in the pluming black, unsure of where to put its feet, endangered by the very paltriness of the light that it carries in uncertain hands. The city of London is a cave in which nothing is illuminated and people are no more substantial than shadows.

The two pictures express two very differing ideas of our country, ideas which proceed from the importance of movement to life. As painted surfaces, they are the product of not entirely dissimilar techniques (though one is clearly superior to the other — at least more refined) and they are both good paintings. Yet one of them moves me far more than the other. Far more.

You can probably guess which one it is too. Yes. It’s the one painted by a not very well-known woman artist you are likely not to have run across before. The other one is a truly great work of art, by any standard. But I know which I’d hang on the wall of our front room.

I am going to try to explain to myself why. You are very welcome to listen.

THERE IS A HUGELY touching exhibition running currently at the Imperial War Museum in south London. It is sticking around till autumn, which feels right. And I am not exaggerating (nor in the pay of the IWM) when I say that I found it the most gripping, perhaps even attaching art show I’ve seen in long while. It has both haunted and chafed me for more than a week now and I expect it to continue to do so for a while yet. I will certainly visit it again before the leaves start throwing themselves from the trees.

It is wee: three rooms. It goes under the title Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art. Admission is free. Its themes are established matter-of-factly on celluloid in the ante-chamber to the third-floor gallery it lives in behind a set of plate glass doors, out of the cold shadow of the military hardware parked up to the threshold of virtually every gallery in the building. Those themes tug at the loom of wiring that we all have within us, to a greater or lesser extent: the wiring that connects us as individuals to the Second World War, if not through ‘lived experience’, then as the terminal links in a chain sustaining a very particular oral narrative repeated indefatigably by our Grans and Grandpas and their children (our parents), as we ourselves were growing up over the Sunday lunches and days out and holidays of the post-war and post-post-war periods. That oral narrative is perhaps the stickiest and most lasting of all the emotional resins that have bound us over the past seventy years: the collusion of personal memory and family culture in the manufacture of a very particular kind of sentimental ‘history’.

And it is startling, when it lands, the realisation that the youngest individuals to whom this exhibition will speak in this very particular register — and for whom I suppose I am writing by reflex — will now be in the region of sixty years old plus. Sixty. That is the minimum age you have to be, now, to have been “too young for the War” yet also shaped by it; to have only encountered and then been implicated in those narratives at second- and third-hand, sustaining the common realities of the war as they were soaked up, stored and fermented by the family elders, then piped through your parents, with plenty of filter and tumble added by them, to arrive at the threshold of your less-than receptive Sixties-kid ears in the form of some stoic tale of suffering according to the specifications of Duty, or Privation, or Courage. From which we may learn. All of us.

Not putting herself first: Celia Johnson in ‘In Which We Serve’

WHEN I WAS JUST about old enough — let’s say eleven or twelve — I figured out how to switch myself out of the circuit that charged senior elements of the extended family with a current positively churning with their collectivised knowledge of the sacrifices of the all-too-recent past. That current seemed to bring on in these older people a sort of heightened, rather performative pragmatism in all their responses to the world, and a maniacal distaste for whatever seemed to excite the young — which trivialities were often met with a dismissive “not strictly necessary, is it, Mary, dear?” Mary, her daughter, was my mother, and still is (and to be fair, she did on occasion tell Gran to get off my case). And it became plain that there was no comfortable place for me in that circuit, useless wiffly-waffly dreaming boy that I was. So I did precisely as I had learned to do at school, which was to switch myself out of the current and think about the things I really did care about, such as pop music and girls and cricket (or football, if it was the football season), while outwardly maintaining a convincing interest in Grandpa’s latest on-going denunciation.

Grandpa had been a very junior gunner with the Royal Artillery in the “Great War” (he was “at Gallipoli”) and he had also been a pitiless father to his son up to and including and even after the “second lot” in 1939-45; while his son — my dad — being then roughly my age as it was in 1970 (ten), was evacuated from his south-east London home to live alone with a strange woman in Tunbridge Wells, beneath the persistent chatter of the Battle of Britain, and then, soon after that battle had been won, by armadas of Heinkels, Junkers and Dorniers rumbling over to deliver the Blitz to the street in which Dad’s ma and pa lived, close to the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. That’s what I imagined anyway. In my mind, my dad endured the war alone in a featureless bedroom in Tunbridge Wells, gibbering with anxiety and afraid to descend into shared living space for fear that if he did so, the news would be broken to him that his adored mother lay entombed in rubble, while his father resentfully boarded the train to Kent to retrieve his son — without a scratch on him.

It is an obvious and ineluctable fact that we boomers and post-boomers have no memory of the war at all, none based on actual experience — which is why I imagine there isn’t a single soul among the members of that sub-generation, now aged (let’s say for the sake of tidiness) between sixty and seventy-five who has ever felt inclined to bang on about the vital contribution to the “war effort” made by their mums and dads, aunts, uncles and grandparents. We were the end of it because we actually wanted it to stop and go no further. We were, in one sense, a buffer generation, too young to fully enjoy the Sixties, most of us, and too old to have escaped Sunday lunch with Hitler. Everything we ever learned about the “second lot”, we were obliged to gloze second-hand, out of politeness and respect; we did it by attending with great seriousness to someone else’s story, which was almost always about an individual made of rather sterner stuff than us; a person who had suffered to live and, in doing so, gave us the privilege of a life without suffering — not their kind of suffering anyway. So we do in a way have memories of the war; in fact we are full of them. They are just not ours.

It came at you from everywhere, the war and its lessons. There was the comic book version of WW2 that proliferated in the 1960s — and, Gott in Himmel!, the less said about that the better. Also, the serious matter contained within the proper history books, as they gradually found their way into the general readership, their research supported by the slew of government-sponsored national surveys that followed the war and its attendant decade of formal Austerity. Those remarkable surveys were our Domesday book. And most preciously — as an embodiment of the peace in legislation, and in enlightened and fellow feeling — that great postwar effort gave rise to the delicate but ever hopeful NHS.

And to service this incubating postwar consensus, there was no shortage of culture provided: films and TV dramas of one sort or another (romantic ones, dramatic ones, earnest ones, rote ones — all of them patriotic to a fault) each vying for your attention on the growing mass medium of black and white TV rented from DER — and they were all about the war that had recently finished in atomic slaughter and the uncovering of the machinery of the Final Solution. Yet you’d be forgiven for assuming that neither of those two atrocities had actually taken place; for this was, for a lengthy period, a sanitised war, and a war that no one ever needed to name because it was always ‘on’, always there, churning away, entertaining you as it compelled you to experience your inadequacies and deficits; a war that stood as the apparatus of a moral framework that required that no one actually talk about its deeply hideous aspects, while, at the same time, encouraging them to burble on more or less continuously about its value as a calibrator and fount of virtue and maker of men.

Later on, the films lodged themselves in my psyche in… oh, I don’t know… in much the same way, surely, that Hellenic culture found its way into the Renaissance mind — the doomsday premise of an archaic yet perfected society resisting engulfment by darkness, not with phalanxed hoplites this time, nor a fleet of fast triremes and the cut of logic-based, strategic thinking; but this time, in our time, cheerfully, with the Tilley lamp of British pluck and the gravy boat of Duty, flanked on either side by the moral supremacy of the cut-glass vowel, sharpened and then plunged like a stake into our sopping native soil, as the Wehrmacht massed across the Channel behind their fast boats. “Get beck, I say, you dreadful Hun, get beck to wherever you came frum — end take thet with you for your pains!” was the real title of every one of those films I used to watch on wet Sunday afternoons with a strange ache inside that was almost enjoyable. They were given different titles on release— In Which We Serve, Mrs Miniver, The Cruel Sea etc — supposedly to differentiate them one from another, but I knew, even at the age of eleven, that they were all the same film. They were possibly what Gran was channelling when she ticked me off for holding my knife the wrong way or for scratching my elbow at the table. I really was a dreadful Hun. All the good work done by the English middle class in defeating Nazism, with unbending personal discipline and by defending the little woman and the children, preciously confined within the walls and garden of sun-drenched ‘Rose Cottage’ somewhere in the Home Counties, would have been as naught, a wasted effort, if our own little Huns were allowed to get away with burping at the dinner table.

Yes, but then we did chuck it away, anyway, we post-boomer might-as-well-be-Huns in all our feckless self-absorption and collective need to dismantle — or so it was said — what had been fought for, only fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years before. Here was the “generation gap” rendered as unbridgeable gulf (”generation gap” being a term only used officially for the first time in 1967, of all years). We wanted to hear the beat of drums for dancing, not the ring of spoon upon forehead, the fffwitch! of cane on exposed backside, let alone whatever sound a bullet makes as it barges through flesh at high velocity. Neither did we feel, at any philosophical or moral or ethical level, that we had to conform to the model of duty, or whatever it was the headmaster was whanging on about in school assembly on this particular day, which had also once been quite another day of the exact same date, thirty-odd years before, on which soldiers fell, women wept and the tide began to turn at last against the barbarous Hun or Jap. A day given over to the formal reaffirmation of the 1960s schoolboy’s own inadequacy and the repudiation of his paltry gratitude.

Nor did we wish to support the continued usage of such language as ‘Hun’ and ‘Jap’, or ‘Dago’ and ‘Coon’, for that matter, to the utter contempt of many of those who’d survived the prisoner-of-war camps. Prigs, we were in the eyes of those who’d suffered for our freedom; ungrateful, uncouth prigs. And new bloodless wars were fought over language in particular but also over representation and the entitlements of the human as an autonomous organism in a society subject to law: just look at those highly civilised Ancient Greeks! Not a stitch to sew between them, once chitons had been shed… and hard at it, hammer and tongs, both indoors and out. Sex became all too apparent as the 1950s peeled themselves off to reveal the 1960s, where it had certainly not been apparent before. “Yes, sex exists, of course it does, we all know that — but why do we have to see it all the time? And hear it, which is sometimes worse. And drugs, also indoors and out — not so apparent, but that only made them more hazardous. Which also gave rise to… hair! Hair, for heaven’s sake. Hair here, hair there, hair everybloomin’where. ‘Hair? Fuck, yeah!’ as they would say with their potty mouths permanently set to the mouthing of words with four letters in them. And there were fucks in the theatre! And then it spread to television. Inevitably. It seems hardly necessary to point out now that foul mouths became normal, even cultural, an essential adjunct to shopping and going on buses and… well, everything. Basically, objectively, how many fucks amount to enough Anglo-Saxon, would you say? Go on, how many?”

Fuck the Empire! That was the big fat subtext though. Or so the old wingcos thought, in disbelief. And they were right. We did think that, the scurvy knaves of my rough generation; and we still do, even if we do now admit that we swear far too much and our hair has now all gone, like the Empire. Fuck knows where.

But if I might speak personally, and politely, for a moment…

It was the rubble. It has always been the rubble.

‘Haberdasher’s Hall, 8 May 1945’ by Eliot Hodgkin

THERE WAS RUBBLE everywhere when I was a kid, twenty, twenty-five years after the war ended.

Rubble disfigured the nation, like a disease of the tissue itself. Or perhaps more like an unpleasant medical condition: rubble didn’t usually kill you but it was unattractive, intractable and not comfy at all, a rash on the surface betraying the likely presence of deeper disorder — and it was just about the only thing residual from the war that was left to its own devices, to do its worst and the Devil take the hindmost etc. It sank slowly into the topography, assuming permanently embedded status as the years and decades of economic expansion and recession ticked by. Rubble did not, for us, present quite the same problem as it did for Berliners and those who remained in Dresden.

Rubble is basically harmless after all; the only real danger with it lies, ironically enough, in its apparent inertia, which can be transformed in an instant into lethal instability, tipping, pitching, trapping, snapping the unwary limb. But give rubble a wide berth and its threat is nullified. In some parts of London and the industrial North, rubble was just left to be what it is, quietly monumental, sometimes fenced off and neutered, but not all of it, leaving only the ghost of a latent threat, its only meaning lying exhausted in its abstraction of something that was once whole. Rubble not only symbolises disintegration; it is disintegration. And if everywhere you look, everything that you see is disintegrated, then … well, it is hard to feel wholesome when everything around you is in bits.

But Nature intervenes in the world of rubble as it does everywhere else, given half an opportunity.

Shrubs and small trees grew out of bombsite rubble with quite unusual energy during the Second World War, at great speed and with apparent intent. They billowed, the weeds, like the green sails of an invading armada filling the horizon, its precise intent unknown beyond the menace of its relentless convergence. Weeds the like of which you’d never seen in your own back garden proliferated everywhere there was rubble, each crater of broken stones a petri dish for what appeared to be new species, or old species at new scale, fierce new life pushing aside the hardcore piled up in the gaps in our architecture.

Liverpool Street Station was my favourite rubble for years.

It was mostly debris, scaffolding and plastic sheeting for the duration of my childhood and adolescence. Perhaps I exaggerate, but only by a little. Liverpool Street was the north-eastern gateway from my home city in East Anglia to the glamour of the capital. A darkly thrilling knot in the fabric. …Then the concertina gates which regulated access to the platforms with mighty crashes that shook your teeth — all was hustle, bustle and the minding of one’s business in the old station’s parchment-yellow light, shadowed by tonne upon tonne of filthy overhead ironwork. Most alluring of all, Liverpool Street’s platforms emitted a polished chocolatey gleam — a texture and silken shimmer not dissimilar to the stuff underfoot in the aisles of cathedrals, the glow-traces of unending passage, the gentle glossing by passing feet, to and from, feet both large and small, shod and barely shod. In one very important and nuanced way, the station came to symbolise a lost attribute of our nation: it is strange, in present circumstances, to think that once upon a time the British had a reputation for extending a genuine welcome to those seeking asylum from persecution and war, and that we were proud of it: Liverpool Street Station was the portal through which the Jewish children of the kindertransport passed to safety and the hope of new life.

And what a light and airy toilet of a place it has become: naff white ‘Carrara marble’ everywhere; a superabundance of tatty retail outlets marking the rim of a shapeless concourse; more ways to buy a croissant than you can shake a baguette at. The noisy claque of concertina gates has given way to the barely audible bleep of digital readers at the ticket barriers — the station has very much more in common with a shopping mall than with a cathedral of the steam age. I limp through its gaping chambers almost every week and I make a deliberate effort to remember it as it was, a place in which great journeys began and ended in sooty darkness.

Beauty and Destruction is not an exhibition about war at the sharp end, nor does it trouble itself to enter the engine rooms of war’s machinery. Nothing so dull or exciting. Nowadays we’d perhaps use that cold, techy euphemism “collateral damage” to describe what so many of these paintings are describing. But this show isn’t about “collateral damage”. It is about the impacts of war upon its softer targets and their hard enclosures, and the human effort made to meet those impacts in the domestic, industrial and civil realms, all of which require different responses depending on context and location and available human resources. It’s a description of a different kind of fight. In a sense, it is an account of war’s secondary events, its knock-ons and knock-downs away from the battlefield, and how, in a new perversion made possible by new technology, from 1941 onwards, the battle was brought down from the skies to set a fire in London’s fields.

THE PAINTINGS THE Imperial War Museum has chosen to exhibit so movingly are all the work of government-commissioned war artists (by the War Artists Advisory Committee). Some of them, such as Ardizzone, Sutherland, (Eliot, cousin of Howard) Hodgkin, Minton, Moore (Henry) are established, even famous up to a point. Their work is remarkable, humanistic, even loving, as you’d expect it to be — but also earnestly dispassionate. And some of it looks awfully poised stylistically, as if to say suavely to the viewer, “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. You better believe it: I am by Henry Moore!”

But they are still terrific. Edward Ardizzone’s civilians, asleep in a deep shelter, loll together with convincing sausagey weight and convey the volume and presence of real people, joined by a shared skin of fear and boredom, still clinging together, limp as real sausages. (Clive King’s Stig of the Dump, one of literature’s great rubble-dwellers, would not emerge from his cave for another twenty years, drawn by the great Ardizzone.) Graham Sutherland’s The City: a Fallen Liftshaft 8 May 1945 is ascetic and reptilian-mechanical — and dislocated — which is rather as you’d expect a Sutherland depiction of a lift shaft to be, whether it’s a high-functioning lift shaft or one that’s had its joists twisted like pipe cleaners by high explosive. The destroyed buildings penned meticulously by John Minton, and seen strangely from above as if from a time-travelling drone’s-eye view, are neurotically empty. The anxiety is palpable in them.

The poster image, chosen by the Museum to articulate and ultimately to sell the show as a prospect, is Eliot Hodgkin’s ghostly beautiful tempera on panel, Haberdasher’s Hall, 8 May 1945, which distils the ideas and feelings expressed by the exhibition’s title into an elegant not-quite-allegorical rubblefest. The bomb-smashed Hall is a hulking Alp of broken masonry and brickwork, but we observers, who cower, half hidden, on the Alp’s lowest slopes, are distracted by the triffid-like appearance into the forelight of rampaging stems of Rosebay Willow herb — aka ‘bomb-weed’ — the presence of which is so in your face as to be both threatening and a joyously uncomplicated testament to Nature’s self-renewability.

Rubble is everywhere but it does not constitute the real core of this show, despite its proliferation as both scenery and prop and menace. That core you will find in the dynamism of a fiercely resisting population going about its business despite the chaos, the darkness, the fire and flood, the dislocation and the piles of crap all over the place. And why is it not surprising that, where the male painters are predominantly interested in stuff — in buildings, conflagration, machinery, menacing shadows, secret installations, dying barrage balloons, huge vessels under construction, a fire-service boat in the lee of Hungerford Bridge as fingers of searchlight quarter the night sky — the objects that so enslave the objective view — the female artists in the War Artists Advisory Committee’s employ were observing compassionately: looking after, tidying up, caring, queuing, tending, feeding, going about their business. The objective view that expresses the possibility of empathy.

Connew’s Blackout is my favourite picture in the show but it is not even slightly meaningful to say it is the best. The moment you say that, and you turn the exhibition into a beauty contest, then you lose connection with both its motives and its greater objective, which is to present the destruction of war not as an aesthetic outcome but as a vicious process with a strange beauty to be found inhering in whatever remains. That is because war, like painting, is a human process.

Only Frances Macdonald, of the women artists engaged by the WAAC, seems particularly interested in the objects of war. But then she was set up by the government with a shack built in an advantageous position next to London Docks so that she was able to record the secret manufacture of the huge caissons that were essential to the floating Mulberry Harbours that enabled the D-Day landings.

Evelyn Gibbs: ‘WRVS Clothing Exchange 1943’

Otherwise, the labours of the women artists of the WAAC seem to have been concerned, whether by commission or by personal artistic choice, with what befell the softest tissue in the fabric of war. Bodies and souls — the things that really matter.

The prolific Evelyn Dunbar made a formal arrangements of the white aprons of the nurses’ in St Thomas’s Hospital in Evacuation Quarters. Uniformed nurses were similarly put to the service of the expression of human pathos by pattern — and by broken pattern — by Powell and Pressburger in The Life and Death of Col. Blimp. Just what is it, doctor, about a uniform?

Grace Golden goes into an Emergency Food Office and finds not only pattern but all of humanity gurning and mumbling in discrete, acquiescent queues about the floorspace of a Church Hall. The high stage area, the sacred station of the local Am-Dram Soc, is curtained and redundant at the top of Golden’s rectangle.

Louisa Puller’s delicate watercolour and ink tracings of the bomb damage around St Paul’s and Holborn Viaduct contain rubble in abundance but feel more like gaping wounds, sutured by cranes, bacterial humanity attendant but not visible to the naked eye. She is not at all interested in the human form, Puller — but then again it is likely you have never seen rubble quite so ripped and tenderised as this, a metaphor perhaps, or maybe just a simile of human pain.

The youngest of all the artists engaged by the WAAC was the excellently named Mabel Hutchinson. I had an Auntie Mabel and so, very probably, did you — and she was probably no more your real aunt than mine was. I can’t recall what my Mabel did in the Great War or the Second Lot, for that matter, but I am going to pretend that Mabel Hutchinson was my Auntie Mabel, aged 22, about to commence her studies at the Slade but now, suddenly, deputed to a Rest Centre in Bermondsey. And here she is, drawing quickly and directly on to canvas with an oil-loaded brush, catching what’s in front of her. A yellow room of dark, silent, waiting shapes and in the centre of the 40x60cm canvas is a tiny interaction you might not notice at all if you were in a hurry.

‘A Bermondsey Rest Centre’ (detail) by Mabel Hutchinson..

A weary matron, standing as straight-backed as her sore feet will permit, hands buried in her voluminous pockets, unable to bend at all to attend properly to the small voice of the small boy in front her, perhaps ten years old, maybe less, standing up and looking at her, bravely, and quite unaware of the tracks of tears visible in the filth on his face, of which he would no doubt be ashamed were he made aware of them … and what’s he saying? It’s hard to tell even in the relatively gentle hubbub of the Rest Centre.

She thinks he’s just told her that he’d somehow mislaid his dad — and his mum… His mum… well, he’d come up on the train from Kent on his own, to find his mum. And he just can’t seem to find her. He can’t find even find their house. Everything …

Well, everything’s just rubble.

Happy birthday, Angus. This is for you.

‘Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art’ is at the Imperial War Museum, London, until 1 November

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press