London, St. Valentine's Day, 1915

VirginiaWoolf




February 14, 1915



    We both went up toLondon this afternoon; L[eonard] to the Library, and I to ramble around theWest End, picking up clothes.  I am really in rags.  It is veryamusing.  With age too one’s less afraid of the superb shop women. These great shops are like fairies’ palaces now.  I swept about inDebenham’s and Marshall’s and so on, buying as I thought, with great discretion. The shop women are often very charming in spite of their serpentine coils ofblack hair.  Then I had tea, and rambled down to Charing Cross in thedark, making up phrases and incidents to write about.  Which is, I expect,the way one gets killed.  I bought a ten and elevenpenny blue dress, inwhich I sit at the moment.


             -- Virginia Woolf

FlightSub-lieutenant Reginald Warneford, RNAS, at Hendon in February 1915. 




   
     Reginald Warneford was the first pilot to destroy a Zeppelin inthe air when he brought down LZ.37 on 7 June 1915, during the second month ofthe Zeppelin bombardment of London. He was awarded the Victoria Cross.Warneford died in France on June 17, 1915 when his aircraft crashed.

Piccadilly Circus, 1915 

First Zeppelin to bomb London, May 1915

Theinterior of a restaurant at 76-77 Aldgate High Street showing the effects ofthe major Zeppelin raid on the night of 13 -14 October 1915.

Embankment Gardens, June 1915

London's"Theatreland" in the West End -- 1915 -- published during Zeppelinbombardments. Designed by MacDonald Gill (brother of celebrated Arts &Crafts movement artist and paraphiliac Eric Gill), the map is a lightheartedand colorful effort interspersed with topical jokes and anecdotes.



NOTE: This post began as a simple St. Valentine's Dayblog.  I thought it would be interesting to reprint Virginia Woolf's itinerary and some of her thoughts from ninety-sevenyears ago today.  

But my photo researchquickly took me somewhere else -- to other London 1915 venues (the war, which killed so many mothers' sons, poor and rich, was half-a-year old bymid-February) -- and it seemed appropriate to give a slightly broaderpicture given the mess we're still in today.  (Meet The New Boss, Same AsThe Old Boss, etc., etc.)  

It's so difficult asan American to imagine what it must havebeen like to anticipate and endure serial aerialbombardment.  New Yorkers (I am one)experienced 9-11, but even that corurscating, choking horror quickly became a "one-day event" for many people.  

HappySt. Valentine's Day!  I mean it.



MusicLinks:


ThePretty Things -- This Balloon Burning (from S.F. Sorrow)

 
TheKinks: Some Mother's Son (from Arthur)

Anthem

        Because there are few women who occupied the position Virginia Woolf assumed in her lifetime.  She says here somewhere that she can't bear what, in her own day, was written about Bloomsbury, and indeed thought, at one moment, to do her own guide to it.  But she cannot be blamed if she was singled out as she was.  Not so much the brilliance of her husband and friends, as her own genius, isolated her in a limelight all her own.  It is to her credit that she seems to despise this.  Nevertheless we can, in this volume, watch her fame rise, and then, in her own estimation, wane.  She takes a pleasure in both, as is perhaps natural in the self-comforting of a diary.  For it appears she can never get away from herself.  But then who can?

From:  Henry Green, A Writer's Diary (Review published in The London Magazine, 1954).  

Please also consult Here

and find a link to  the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf's voice.