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There’s No Story There, by Inez Holden (1944)

Women workers training at a Royal Ordnance Factory, 1943
Women workers training at a Royal Ordnance Factory, 1943

I keep lists of books to find, to buy, to read, and three titles that have been on all of them for years are Inez Holden’s wartime memoirs/novels: Night Shift (1941); There’s No Story There (1944); and It Was Different At The Time (1945). When my friend Kate Macdonald recently announced that her Handheld Press would be issuing Night Shift and It Was Different At The Time in a single volume, Blitz Writing, edited by Kristin Bluemel in 2019, I was thrilled. Seeing my reaction, Kate very generously offered to send me a PDF copy of There’s No Story There that Kristin has been using for courses for years.

In her own post on There’s No Story There, Kate writes that this is “both a story and not a story” because it is essentially nothing more than a slice of time in the life of a secret munitions factory in Yorkshire and the lives of its workers, without a definitely beginning or end, which is certainly true. But anyone who’s worked in a high security situation knows, one of the easiest ways to spot one is by its deliberate efforts to maintain a low profile. “There’s no story there … move along” is the kind of thing a security guard might say as he quietly suggests you’d best move along. “Security is the foundation of the whole thing,” the chief of security tells the plant manager.

There’s No Story There is set in what was undoubtedly a Royal Ordnance Factory or its private equivalent run by ICI Nobel, one of the massive facilities, usually located well away from population centers and favored bombing targets, at which artillery shells and aerial bombs were manufactured. These facilities were literally powder kegs, where extraordinary precautions were taken to prevent sparks or anything else that might trigger an explosion that would very likely set off others and result in the whole facility being blown out of existence. No wonder such an accident is never far from workers’ minds: “Now supposing there was a ‘blow’ here … Another part of my consciousness would be taken clean away from me…. Maybe I wouldn’t even remember leaving the hostel this morning…. There would be a parting in my memory as if a zip fastener had been ripped back and then got stuck suddenly….”

Holden may have taken some inspiration from Henry Green’s superb factory novel, Living (1929), because she uses a similar approach, scanning through the minds of a variety of the men and women working at the munitions plant. Julian, the Dunkirk survivor who transports shells from one shed to another; Mrs. Karslake, the hyper-officious functionary whose chief task is arranging for film showings to keep workers’ minds from the fact that they are never more than a second from obliteration; Ysabette Jones, the schizophrenic who boasts of her Group Captain boyfriend who “knows German, Italian, Spanish and all those already.” Holden’s proxy is probably the observer, Geoffrey Dutton, who lurks on the edge of the scene, obsessively recording conversations in his notebook. Only Geoffrey notices that the male and female workers “shared the same table, the same food, and the same fatigue — yet the conversation of the women and the men was completely isolated, on from the other.”

It would explain both the exceptional accuracy of the book and its essential shapelessness. The plant, its workers hostel, its operations and the interactions of the people are all artificial, temporary, full of privileges unknown elsewhere in England (Ham! Fruit!), and always on edge, one ear cocked for the possibility of an explosion. “There’s no story there, one can’t know it all. How can one? — with thirty thousand workers, some brave, some sad, some stupid, some clever, and others just kind of comical,” one young woman writes home. Although her letter would most certainly have been censored by someone in the Security office. These places would, after all, have run much more smoothly if they didn’t have to use people. And that tension between the desire to dehumanize the process and the unsuppressible insistence of people to be human provides the energy that makes There’s No Story There such a fascinating read.

Kate is considering issuing There’s No Story There if the reprint of Blitz Writing does well. So keep an eye peeled for when Blitz Writing comes out next summer!


There’s No Story There, by Inez Holden
London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1944

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