For Nancy Cunard, the Second World War was a time of heart-hurting silence. She was working in London, cut off from her home in occupied France. No word came from her many friends there; she had no way of knowing the fate of Le Puits Carré, the cottage in the village of La Chapelle-Réanville in Normandy that she had bought in the late 1920s. ‘How much I thought then about the old days,’ she wrote later:

Réanville in the dripping mist, outside the printery; Réanville in the scorch of July at the beginning of G M’s Peronnik; Réanville of all those night hours among the circulars and address books spread over the floor. I thought about the way of life in 1928 – Aragon composing designs for Snark (where might he be now?) – Henry’s wafted music, Rhapsody in Blue (in what country was he at present?) …  I thought of my many Spanish friends in France, and wondered what was happening to them?

As much as to her sense of loss and dislocation, her memories speak to how closely bound her home and her emotions were to the arts and to