The Silence Before The Bombs Fell





By John Sutherland
Guardian Unlimited
January 31, 2000



The End of the Affair



The End of the Affair has been doing well in the US. Currently it is number 17 in the box-office charts and performing strongly for its maker, Sony. Oscars are in prospect. This quintessentially London movie opens in London on February 11. Perhaps it will spark a Greenian mania - a retro-chic sales-boom for shabby macs and battered trilbies.

When John Ford's My Darling Clementine hit the screens in 1946 there were a few Tombstone old-timers who could remember the Wyatt Earp-Clanton shoot-out. They had been there and knew, as Hemingway would say, "how it was".

There are, I guess, a few hundred thousand Londoners for whom The End of the Affair is not (as it must be for most Americans and all Japanese) historical - a tale of long ago and far away - but the day before yesterday; a Proustian trip down memory lane.

The plot of Greene's 1951 novel (which Neil Jordan follows faithfully) skips artfully between the "bright condemned pre-war year" of 1939 to grim late-40s austerity; power cuts, one egg and eightpence (ie 3p) a week meat ration, pubs with no whisky (Bendrix and Miles drink rum in the first scene in the pub on Clapham Common). Paradise is always lost in Greene's fiction.

It is the big things in the plot that are hardest for those who weren't there to get hold of. The central event - as the website synopsis puts it - is a bomb dropping on the adulterous lovers while they're having it off in bed in one of those hotel rooms that you could rent by the hour in the 40s.

But it's not just a bomb; it's a V-1 known as a doodlebug or buzz bomb. These primitive cruise missiles were launched out of the blue (literally) on June 13, 1944 against London. The earth shakes for Bendrix and Sarah three days later. You were safe while you could hear the chug-chug of the ram-jet. When it cut out, you were in big trouble. There was silence just long enough for Clint Eastwood's "Do you feel lucky, punk? Well do you?" There were few atheists under a silently falling doodlebug.

Survival (salvation?) was so bloody arbitrary. As St Augustine put it: do not despair, one thief was saved; do not presume one thief was damned. Which thief were you?

Greene's heroine, Sarah, is dying throughout of TB. There's a poignant line in one of Orwell's letters of February 1948, as his lungs were disintegrating, about "this new American drug, streptomycin", which might help. It came too late for George and Sarah. Few diseases of the civilised world have disappeared as dramatically as "consumption". It killed without spoiling your looks. You died beautiful, like Greta Garbo in Camille. Antibiotics erased it overnight. God bless Alexander Fleming.

Everyone in the 40s knew how the bacillus was spread: saliva (hence that stern prohibition on public buses till the 60s, "no spitting" - perhaps Ken Livingstone, nostalgist that he is, will bring it back). When Bendrix kisses Sarah it is, as anyone around at the time would know, pure Russian roulette. That brush of the lips between Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore is as suicidal a gamble as Aldous Huxley's favourite saint demonstrating her sanctity by lapping up gobs of phlegm from the town pavements. It's a frisson which only the over-60s will feel.

As the film's web-blurb puts it "London is the main character". But London, 50 years ago, was something else. It was putrid. The air had to be tasted to be believed. It got so bad, and killed so many in 1954, that a clean air act was brought in. And with it, a clean London. Jordan's set designer, Tony Pratt, has re-created a visually grimed city. But no one who didn't actually swallow the acrid stuff can recapture the filthy actuality of 40s London pollution.

Thanks to the dirt-digging biographers we know more about Greene and his mysterious dedicatee ("Catherine - with love") than did our 1951 predecessors. But they had listened for the buzz-bomb, knew the dangers of spittle-spread consumption, and had gasped under London's pea-soupers. Many people will enjoy The End of the Affair, the movie. But only those who qualify for the senior citizen's concessionary tickets can really know where it's coming from.

 

Please visit the other link pages on this site:
Ralph Fiennes Links Page

 Ralph Fiennes Astrology Page

Back to the Jennifer Lash Links page
 

Back to the Ralph Fiennes - Jennifer Lash Main Page

This page was created with the Stonehenge.ttf font and is best enjoyed if you
have the font yourself.  If you want it please click on the green name Stonehenge.ttf above to download and install it to your PC.
Sorry not available for Mac's.  Thanks.
 

These pages are Copy written by Mary Sibley.  All rights reserved.
Please do not use anything within these pages without permission.
Please send an EMail to Mary Sibley for permission, thanks.