'Spirit, Mettle; Courage, Pluck'

“It happened to me last year to lose my home with all contents in a night of that phenomenon that we oddly called blitz, though why we should use the German for lightning for attack by bombs I do not know, unless to appease by euphemism, like calling the Furies Eumenides.” Perhaps it’s that Churchillian obstinance of the people of England during World War II. More than bravery it’s defiance, a quality summed up in such words as spunk and grit – tough little monosyllables, hard as rocks. The writer is Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), the perennially forgotten and quite wonderful novelist (The Towers of Trebizond) and superb writer of nonfiction. I’ve written before about her essay “Book-Building after a Blitz,” published in the June 6, 1942 issue of the Saturday Review of Literature. Macaulay had returned to London on May 13, 1941, to find that her flat in Marylebone and its contents had been destroyed during a German bombing raid three nights earlier. The Blitz started on September 7, 1940.…

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