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Inez Holden

Blitz Writing: Night Shift and It Was Different at the Time, by Inez Holden (2019)

Cover of Blitz Writing

As a rule, I don’t cover in print books on this site: the fact that a book is in print is proof that it may be underappreciated, but it’s certainly not forgotten. However, I have to make an exception in the case of the Handheld Press’s recent release of two of Inez Holden’s three books about life in Britain during World War Two in Blitz Writing: Night Shift and It Was Different at the Time.

I wrote about Holden’s other war book, There’s No Story There, back in August of 2018. I owe Kate Macdonald, the owner of Handheld Press, for passing along a PDF of a well-worn copy of the book that she in turn got from Kristin Bluemel, and these two women are responsible for bringing Blitz Writing to print. Bluemel’s introduction is invaluable not just for putting these two books in the context of writings about the war but also for providing the only available overview of Holden’s life and work to be published this century.

Although Night Shift is a novel and It Was Different at the Time nonfiction, the two books are related by more than just time. As with There’s No Story There, the real strength and connective tissue of the books is Holden’s finely-tuned ear. Whether her dialogue is invented or recorded — probably a mix of both — Holden was expert at capturing a whole person in their words. Whether it’s a long recollection by Mabs, one of the factory workers in Night Shift that’s almost a one-act play about battling Romeos, or just a line or two, Holden’s gift for exposition via dialogue is exceptional.

Holden and her friend Felicity visit an art show, for example, that turns out to be an attempt to market some kind of fuzzy-minded mysticism. As they attempt to escape, one of the cult members, referred to as “Norfolk-jacket,” swoops upon them. “Is there anything you ladies would like me to explain?” Felicity mutters an excuse about being late for an appointment, but Norfolk-jacket plows ahead with a sales pitch that would please any die-hard Scientologist: “Yes, yes, I shall be happy to tell you everything about the real meaning of life. Every Tuesday at half-past two we have lectures on the great and only truth…. Not so much a lecture, you understand, as a social, when Cosmic Wisdom is given to guest free, gratis.” Nothing quite sells profound revelation of the mysteries of the universe as packaging it in the form of tea socials.

At a fancy dinner party in November 1938, a Nazi emissary of some middle rank says of German intervention in the Spanish Civil War on the side of Franco, “No, he has — I mean our Fuehrer has — absolutely no interest in Spain. He will be glad to withdraw the few thousand of broken-down troops. The Fuehrer just sent them there for the sake of Mussolini’s blue eyes. Of course he thinks it good practice for our airmen.” To which Holden observes, “This was the first time we had heared anyone speaking of killing civilians from the air as being ‘good practice.'” “For the sake of his blue eyes,” by the way is an expression one hears from Dutch and German speakers, a way of saying “It’s nothing, just some trivial thing.” Holden manages to peel back the informality of a bit of dinner party chat and reveal the cold-blooded murder running beneath it.

To give you some idea of the service that Handheld Press has performed in issuing Blitz Writing, I will bring your attention to the fact that used copies of Night Shift and It Was Different at the Time have been unavailable at any price for years, and only a few copies of either are available through libraries. WorldCat tells us that there are a total of 23 copies held worldwide of Night Shift and only 13 copies of It Was Different at the Time. Neither book was ever reprinted or reissued until now. This is what saving neglected books looks like, folks. Keep up the good work, Kate!

Inez Holden: A Memoir, by Anthony Powell

Inez Holden, from a sketch by Augustus John
Inez Holden, from a sketch by Augustus John

From London Magazine, Oct/Nov 1974, Vol. 14 No. 4, a remembrance of Inez Holden, author of There’s No Story There, reviewed here in August:

Inez Holden died on 30 May this year. She had been unwell for some little time, but her death was unexpectedly sudden. I never had what might be called a day-to-day friendship with her, but, on and off, we knew each other for a long time. In spite of that, if asked conversationally what she was like, I could not attempt to do so by saying: “She was a little like so-and-so.” Inez was not really at all like any other woman I have ever met. One side of her always contradicted the other. In a strange way it was herself, rather than her books, that marked her out. Her novels, like her talk, full of wit and original ideas, never quite came off. They lacked construction. She was author of Sweet Charlatan, Born Old: Died Young, To the Boating, The Adults, and some others. She also wrote short stories, and documentary pieces. Some of the stories were transposed into C. K. Ogden’s Basic English in a volume called Death in High Society [online at Ogden’s Basic English].

I think it must have been as far back as 1927 that Evelyn Waugh, after a visit to Duckworth’s (the publishing firm where I then worked), suggested we should lunch together at The Gargoyle, a club he had recently joined. I had never been there. It had not been going for more than a year or two, and was in principle a night-club, though one of a very respectable order; frequented to some extent by the intelligentsia, even if Constant Lambert complained that the dance-floor on Saturday nights was crowded with “the two hundred nastiest people in Chiswick.” Waugh and I came on Inez Holden on the way there, or, more probably, found her already lingering at The Gargoyle. I had heard Waugh speak of her before, without myself forming a very clear picture. A clear picture, as I have said, was not at all easy to form. Even now I feel some diffidence in presenting this scrap of reminiscence, because there is so much about Inez that I have never known.

The three of us lunched together under the large picture by Matisse that hung in the dining-room, and gave the club a certain distinction. I think almost certainly Waugh, with his usual generosity, paid for Inez’s luncheon, although this was far from one of his affluent periods. Afterwards I was put up for the club, of which I remained a member for some years. It would have been logical for Waugh to put me up, Inez to second me, but I have an idea the process was vice versa. If so, I can find no reason for this, especially as she had never before set eyes on me. At that time Inez was very pretty. Those who knew her only after some glandular condition had sadly altered her appearance could not guess her earlier “consumptive charm.” (to quote Constant Lambert again), a then fashionable type of beauty, which — as it turned out quite unjustifiably since her health was not failing — led to Inez being known in some circles (the Sitwells and Willie Walton, I suspect) as “Gallopers.”

With regard to solidly ascertainable fact, books of reference show Beatrice Inez Lisett Holden as born 21 November 1903 (a fairly typical Scorpio, it might be judged) into the younger branch of a landowning Derbyshire family. Her father had been for a few years in the Indian cavalry; her mother (nee Paget) was reputed to have had some fame as an Edwardian beauty. Inez’s own references to her family background consistently suggested early unhappiness; domestic shadows fell from wholesale neglect, and regrettable behaviour on the part of both parents. Her political opinions reflected a sharp reaction (shown even in the early novels) against the hardness and selfishness of Edwardian smart life. At the same time, Inez herself never lost all trace of this Edwardian stigmata, revealed not so much in her outward appearance (which could be dishevelled), as in the way she regarded certain things….

Her first novel, Sweet Charlatan, was published by Duckworth’s. Inez was not introduced there by myself — nor, I think, Waugh — in fact, I felt professional reservations about the book’s chances…. Inez turned the heat on Thomas Balston, the moving spirit in Duckworth’s, and he accepted Sweet Charlatan, not a very good novel, for publication. Balston, a bachelor in his late forties, authority on Staffordshire figures and the paintings of John Martin, was not at all used to young ladies of the Inez type. He fell. I don’t think it would be going to far to say that for a short time she made hay of him.

During the immediate years before World War II, Inez had a flat in Albany Street, just around the corner from where my wife and I lived. We used to see a certain amount of her. This was the period of her practical interest in politics, stimulated probably in the first instance by the Spanish Civil War. At this time she would talk a lot about Peter Spencer (by then Viscount Churchill; like Evan Tredegar twice married in face of contrary tastes, but, in contrast, an impoverished viscount, rather than a rich one), and I remember Inez describing a Trafalgar Square meeting, where, she and Lord Churchill both on the rostrum, Left Wing sympathizers threw half-a-crowns on to the platform. “They’d have been quite easy to keep,” Inez said.

… During the war, she worked in a factory (operating the house-cinema, I believe), and I don’t think it was until the war that she became friends with George Orwell…. It was also during the war that Inez became friends with H. G. Wells. Wells lent her the garage flat in the mews at the end of the garden of his Regent’s Park house. There Inez lived for eighteen months. When visiting her Orwell me Wells, of whose writings he was a great admirer. Indeed my own rather reluctant readings of several Wells novels are entirely owed to Orwell pressure. For some reason, in spite of this liking for his books, Orwell irritated the writer himself; provoking Wells’s immortal comment, already on record: “Read my early works, you shit.”

After the war Inez lived for years in a flat in George Street, off Baker Street…. A compulsive newspaper reader and TV viewer, she would become obsessed by subjects the papers were running — say, sex-change or computer dating — and talk of these without cease throughout a whole luncheon or dinner…. Later Inez left George Street, moved to Lower Belgrave Street, where she would sometimes be seen about in the neighbourhood dressed in stray adjuncts of military uniform. One recalls that Miss Virginia Jenkinson was reported in the Double Daily Despatch gossip column as having a “penchant for wearing fancy dress in the day-time.” I last heard from Inez a couple of years ago. She wrote: “My own memory, I think, is phenomenal — really like the horse Clever Hans. Do you know about him? He could answer almost any question but he did have to tap it out with his hoof.”

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