Continuing our series of special Literary Footprints 2018 posts, Oonagh Gay gives us a taster of her walk Dodging the Blitz: Bloomsbury Second World War Novels on which you can discover the locations and stories from some of the greatest novelists of their age as they drew influence and inspiration from their own experiences of this most trying of times.  You can hear much more on the walk, dates and booking details on Oonagh’s walks page.

Author of many iconic post-war novels, Graham Greene had an eventful Second World War. His novels of the period, End of the Affair and the Ministry of Fear, are directly taken from his wartime experiences and love affairs in Bloomsbury as an air raid warden, while working at the Ministry of Information based in Senate House (his lover, Dorothy Glover, lived at Gower Mews, and was also an air raid warden there).

He was one of many writers  in the area who lived through the Blitz, with T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, and Virginia Woolf all directly affected by the wartime destruction. This walk takes you to the main locations used by Greene, but also introduces you to other writers who brilliantly bring to life the Blitz in Bloomsbury.

Today, Bloomsbury’s terraces are well maintained and prosperous. But in the 1940s, they housed students from the Slade Art School, and nurses from University College Hospital, as Pat Barker’s novel Noonday brilliantly brings to life.

Canadian soldiers, billeted in a hostel were subject to devastating bombing just metres from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (where Greene served as a warden on the night of 16/17 April 1941) which left the area in ruins. Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means is set in a hostel in 1945, where a buried bomb is the vehicle for the tragedy at the heart of the novel.

One of the main threads running through these novels is illicit sex during wartime; everyday life is dislocated, and secret affairs flourish, whether heterosexual, or homosexual.

Sarah Waters’ Blitz novel The Night Watch also has a Bloomsbury setting, as one of the main characters, Helen, lives in Rathbone Place. Waters depicts the real-life destruction of the Place in April 1941, and the desperate search by Helen’s lover, Kay, an ambulance driver, to find her in the wreck of a local factory.