London, in the days leading up to 1 September, according to The Times, things were ‘largely normal’:
London at this time of tension has retained its usual appearance to a remarkable extent, but there are differences which the continuing crisis has made unavoidable. In the streets one of the most obvious is the banking of sandbags which now shields many buildings. Londoners are carrying on much the same as usual, except that every one is contributing something towards ensuring complete preparedness for any emergency. No worried casualties in a war of nerves are to be seen; the population remain calm, hopeful, and resolute.
(‘London Largely Normal: Calm in Time of Tension, Defence Activities’, The Times, Thursday, 31 August 1939)
Calm, hopeful, resolute? Maybe it was. I don’t know.
My family were all Londoners. I wish I could have asked them what it was like, but they had things to do. They were busy.
*
On 1 September 1939, my father was busy being evacuated:
The Government decision that evacuation should begin to-day as a precaution was made known yesterday in the following announcement by the Minister of Health, Mr. Elliot, and the Secretary of State for Scotland, Mr. Colville, which was broadcast several times during the day: — It has been decided to start evacuation of the school children and other priority classes as already arranged under the Government scheme to-morrow (Friday, September 1) […] Mothers and other persons in charge of children below school age should take hand luggage with the same equipment for themselves and their children as for school children. The names of the children should be written on strong paper and sewn on to their clothes. No one can take more than a little hand luggage.
(‘Evacuation To-Day: Official Advice to Parents, “A Great National Undertaking”’, The Times, Friday, 1 September 1939)
And my grandfather – who knows? He may well have been busy with the rest of the East End, all those cheerful Cockney geezers preparing for war:
East London is prepared, and the people living in this lively, crowded, industrially important part of the capital are justifiably proud of what they have done towards completing the nation’s defences. A tour of East London yesterday was a stirring and heartening experience. At one point, not far from the docks, a piece of waste land had fallen into the hands of a big squad of willing and tireless workers, whose picks and spades were quickly supplying fillings for thousands of sandbags. Stripped to the waist, the men dug vigorously, pausing only now and then to make a fellow-worker laugh with a cheerful quip.
(‘Cheerfulness in East London: Voluntary Help, Willing and Tireless Workers’, The Times, Friday, 1 September 1939)
The whole scene sounds highly unlikely, frankly – a fantasy of the Times reporter – but on the other hand I can certainly imagine him, my grandfather, George Sansom, stripped to the waist, filling sandbags, ready with a cheerful quip. He was a boxer, a tough guy, a sweet man, and born the same year as Auden, coincidentally, 1907, though his life and Auden’s could not have been more different. When Auden was moving from prep school to boarding school, George Sansom was leaving school to go and work at Windsor and Newton paint manufacturers in east London. When Auden was going up to Oxford, George Sansom was going off to work in a factory making orange boxes. And while Auden sat out the war, safe in New York, he served in the Merchant Navy. The year Auden died, George Sansom was retiring from the Post Office, where he’d worked as a postman for most of his adult life. Auden died in Austria, where he’d bought a home on the proceeds of book sales and awards. My grandfather died in Essex, having moved from his council flat in Poplar into sheltered accommodation on a busy main road in Romford. At Auden’s funeral, they played Siegfried’s Funeral March from Tristan und Isolde. After my granddad’s funeral at the crematorium, when all the family got together to clear out the flat, I was not surprised to find that there were no books in the house, not a single one, and that he owned only the clothes he stood up in, some bed linen, a few pots and pans, and three LPs: the Massed Bands of the Royal Marines; an Elvis Christmas album; and The Best of Pavarotti. His life savings were exactly one hundred and one pounds. When Auden speaks on others’ behalf in this poem, as he so often liked to do – ‘I and the public’, ‘We must suffer them all again’, ‘our wish’, ‘We must love one another or die’ – I wonder if he thought he was speaking on behalf of people like my grandfather. If he did, my grandfather certainly would not have thanked him for it.
*
(I make no apology for bringing in these family matters here, though I’ll try not to make a habit of it. Auden’s reviews and essays are defiantly personal, of course – but that’s always been a perk of the privileged; they’re allowed to be defiantly personal, because of who they are. They’ve earned it. The rich and the famous, we assume, and they assume, are just more interesting than the rest of us. They have permission to do and say what they want. Auden begins an early review, for example, ‘If the business of a reviewer is to describe the contents of the books he reviews and to appraise their value, this is not going to be a review.’ Well, in that case: this is not going to be a book.)
Anyway, all of this is just to be clear at the outset that a lot was happening on 1 September 1939.
And a lot is happening in ‘September 1, 1939’.
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
The first words of the poem: I sit.
It’s hardly a stirring start, is it?
Who on earth begins a poem from a seated position?
And who sits?
Auden sits?
*
There is no reason to assume that the ‘I’ who is sitting here at the beginning of the poem is necessarily the poem’s author, Wystan Hugh Auden, who was born in York on 21 February 1907, the youngest of three brothers, son of George Augustus Auden, a doctor, and Constance Rosalie Auden (née Bicknell), who had trained as a nurse and who loved opera and who doted on her precocious son. (Of his parents, Auden remarked that ‘Ma should have married a robust Italian who was very sexy […] Pa should have married someone weaker than he and utterly devoted to him. But of course, if they had, I shouldn’t be here.’)
The ‘I’ could be this Auden – the Auden who we know attended Gresham’s School in Holt in Norfolk and who in 1925 went up to Christ Church, Oxford, graduating three years later with an inglorious Third, and who in the late 1920s and 1930s worked variously
