Celia Dale is best known as an accomplished crime writer, winning, in fact, the Crime Writers’ Association Best Short Story of the Year award one year — but that’s a bit of a limiting label, similar to calling Georges Simenon an accomplished crime writer even if he’d never written a single Inspector Maigret policier. The police usually play a minor supporting role in the dozen or so “crime” novels she wrote from 1950 on. Instead, she focuses on what Eileen Dewhurst called the “atmosphere of understated menace pervading superficially normal lives.” In her last novel, Sheep’s Clothing (1988), for example, two women posing as social workers trick the old and slow out of their mattress-hidden fortunes — a story closer in mood to Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori than to something by P. D. James. She was at her best in noting what one reviewer called, “the minutely observed details of lower middle class life.”
These minutely observed details are at the heart of her first novel, The Least of These, which follows one lower middle class London family, the Sharps, through their experience of the Blitz. The widowed Mrs. Sharp would be certain to put the stress in that phrase on middle rather than lower. When they begin making their evening journey to sleep in their local Underground station, she notes that”there were not very many of the Sharp’s kind down there with them.” But she distrusts the Edwardian Baroque construction of their terrace house and loses what little faith she had in garden Anderson shelters after a near-hit almost kills a neighboring family.
The Least of These is really less a novel than a fictionalized account of life for ordinary Londoners during the Blitz. In early September, the first raids are more novelty than threat. “That Man’s here again,” a nightclub emcee announces as the sirens sound and the audience chuckles. Queenie, the middle daughter, rides along with a boyfriend, taking part in a Sunday caravan to see the damage from an early raid. “Slowly, foot by foot, the cars crawled nearer, and in every vehicle faces gaped at this inconceivable, this fantastic thing — a London shop, wrecked by a bomb. A bomb!”
As the raids continue, the disruptions they cause increase. “Travelling was queer, too, since the raids had started: you never knew where you would find yourself.” Buses are forced to detour through hitherto undisturbed neighborhoods, much to their consternation. “You would look out suddenly and find the bus lumbering diffidently down an avenue of villas, all shocked and shut away behind their outraged railings. Blocks begin to be pocked by ruins left by direct hits. The survivors “lowered their blinds and turned their eyes away, denying the unseemly.” Gaps appear in the assembly lines in factories. “Some of the workpeople were dead, some were in hospital; a few had packed it up and gone to relatives in the country.” Windows are boarded up. Tea is given up when a bomb strikes a water main. Still, they carry on as they can — “you cannot live without wages.”
But then a bomb hits the house next door to Mrs. Sharp’s eldest daughter Effie, her husband and children. “And in the timeless nightmare of a second, the Davises and Effie heard the bones of their house groaning and crunching above them … grinding and crumbling and sifting and interlocking” until the sounds fall away and dust falls like silent snow. As so Mrs. Sharp decides they’re best off spending their nights in the Underground.
Latecomers, the Sharps find “no corners vacant, no merciful angled wall against which to build, sured that your back is guarded and unspied upon;” “All the angles and crannies were taken, old women sat there in stockinged feet, men lounged with newspapers, babies slept.” I’m no Blitz scholar, but The Least of These struck me as perhaps the most vivid account of what it’s like to shelter night after night on the platforms and stairways of an Underground station. As many of us are learning in this pandemic, people can adapt remarkably quickly to radical changes in circumstances if it means survival. Indeed, the abnormal soon becomes normal through habit:
On the Sunday some of the families left their children down there all day to make sure of keeping their places at night. The platforms and corridors filled up earlier than before, and there were more people, squashing tight together along the walls, voluable and busy and determined to live at least this night in safety. Children squalled and ran under the yellow light, like waxen animated dolls; old men, grey and threadbare as their clothes, hunched themselves between raucous mothers wearing pinafores beneath their shabby overcoats. Youths in jackets as loud as their laughter, slick as their slick hair, thrust and lounged about the corridors; the girls giggled together, prinking their Woolworth jewellry above their tight trousers. For as night followed night a sort of uniform had been evolved among the glamour girls of the tube stations — the full battlement of war-paint, jewellry, high heels, curled coiffures, all bravely worn and yielding not a fraction to the exigencies of death and its avoidance; and with it all, trousers, the sole acknowledgment of war’s existence.
Some take advantages of the changes. One of the Sharp girls, Reenie, gets involved with a gang that stops lorries along deserted roads and steals cigarettes and other rationed items. Prostitutes find it easier to set up trade in the remnants of ruined houses. Soon, “everything, everyone” is different. Queenie finds she “could hardly remember what their lives were like before the raids started. Cinemas, clothes, dances, fun, the scores of people bound up in that existence who had vanished utterly.” She imagines that even the German aircrews flying overhead each night growing bored with the routine, happy to head home “over the Channel, eating sandwiches, emptying their flasks of coffee, while down below the brittle crust of London is broken in a new place….”
The Least of These suffers some of the typical faults of a first novel. The narrative arc is a flat straight line running from early September 1940 to some months later with barely a diversion. We start with the Sharps and we follow along with them through a relentless chronology to an ending in which Dale, according to one reviewer, J. C. Trewin, “outdoes Elizabethan tragedy in a last paragraph which disposes of the entire dramatis personae in less than a dozen lines.”
But Dale was already demonstrating her remarkable talent for observation — for observing the fine telling details of individuals, their dress, manners, and thoughts; and for observing people in numbers, their simplicity and stupidity. She almost certainly spent just as many nights on the cold, crowded platform of a tube station, huddled close to hundreds of strangers, hearing the coughs, whispers, and snores, smelling the urine from the little boys whose tired mothers usher them to the edge of the platform (“‘At’s what it’s for, ain’t it?”), trying to shut out the glare of the lights overhead. And she knew the Sharps, or people like them, their fears and ambitions and favorite comforts. It’s this knowledge that makes The Least of These such a compelling book. It takes a crisis such as we’re experiencing now to remind us how universal some isolated and specific stories can be.