The colours of the night in Catherine Ross’s title aren’t romantic in the least. They’re the colors of the signal flares fired from the control tower of RAF Tormartin to confirm that the bombers coming back after a raid are friendly and not Luftwaffe attackers. This is just one of the many details that led numerous reviewers to call The Colours of the Night the most accurate and authentic account of life on an RAF bomber base during World War Two written from a woman’s point of view .
Virginia Bennett, the novel’s narrator, is a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force stationed at an RAF Lancaster bomber base near Lincoln, assigned to the base motor pool. Lincolnshire, with its broad, fairly flat countryside and proximity to the North Sea coast, was, with East Anglia and North Yorkshire, dotted with RAF — and later, U.S. 8th Air Force — airfields from which the Allies launched the bombing raids on occupied Europe, Germany, and Italy that represented the longest single campaign of the Western front.
It was also the deadliest. To quote the Imperial War Museum, “During the whole war, 51% of aircrew were killed on operations, 12% were killed or wounded in non-operational accidents and 13% became prisoners of war or evaders. Only 24% survived the war unscathed.” An aircrew member was committed to fly thirty operational missions before he could be released to other less dangerous duties.
71 Squadron, the unit Bennett supports, flies twelve Lancasters, each manned with a crew of seven. Given a typical operational year (and the novel is set over the winter of 1942 to 1943, perhaps the most typical year for Bomber Command), she knows, most of the flying members of the current would be gone. “There’d be a 71 Squadron, of course, but of entirely new faces. It was a fact like the day of the week, or the month of the year. You accepted that fact.”
A fact that is only notional to Bennett until she finds herself falling in love with Flight Lieutenant Colin Craig. The two meet by accident — literally, as she is the first to arrive on the scene after Craig’s Lancaster goes skidding off the runway and into a muddy verge. He, of course, is handsome, cool, and instantly attractive. But she is cute, clever, and just stand-offish enough to attract his attention as well.
Their romance is considered fraternization between commissioned and other ranks and prohibited by regulations, so after a few bouts of flirting turns into something more serious, they have to resort to various subterfuges to spend time together — the most important being to ensure they’re never seen together. To further complicate matters, Virginia is an object of earnest interest by her motor pool section chief and Colin by the lieutenant in charge of the WAAFs at the base.
But the real complication is the fact of those statistics. As she senses that Colin is just as much in love with her as she with him, she asks the inevitable question:
“But what shall we do about us?” “What about us?” “Us,” I said slowly and painfully. “In the future.” He stared at me surprised, almost blankly.
And suddenly it hits her: “I knew that in his own mind he had no future.”
From this point, the tension is predictable: will Colin make it to thirty missions? On one hand, The Colours of the Night is no more than a well-crafted middlebrow romance. We know from the moment dashing Flight Lieutenant Craig emerges only slightly scathed from his crashed aircraft and borrows (and keeps) Virginia’s cigarette lighter that it’s just a matter of time before flirting becomes romance and romance leads to happy ending (or at least tentatively happy: Colin has made it clear he intends to return for another operational tour).
But offsetting this predictable formula is a wealth of details about the ins and outs of RAF and WAAF life. The regular medical inspections for the three scourges: lice, sexually transmitted diseases, and pregnancy. The itchiness and ugliness of the dark blue issue WAAF underpants and the various alternatives resorted to on all the days between medical inspections. The fact that no one knows what was happening on the base better than the radio and telephone switchboard operators.
Betty Beaty, alias Catherine Ross and Karen Campbell.
Catherine Ross was familiar with all this from having been a Virginia Bennett herself during the war. In fact, as Betty Smith (her real name), she met her own husband, Group Captain David Beaty, himself a bomber pilot. They married after the war and David Beaty turned his hand to writing, becoming a successful writer of aviation-oriented novels (sort of the RAF equivalent to Douglas Reeman) and nonfiction books. Betty Beaty took up writing herself, first as Catherine Ross, then later as Karen Campbell and Betty Beaty. As Betty Beaty, she published nine Harlequin romance novels.
The Colours of the Night is no masterpiece, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable tale that’s rigorous in its accuracy and honesty. I would recommend it highly to anyone who likes novels set during World War Two.
The Colours of Night, by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)
This is a contribution to the #1962Club, this autumn’s edition of the semi-annual reading club coordinated by Simon Thomas and Karen Langley.
Cover of the UK hardback edition of The Paper Dolls.
Ida Erickson, the central figure in Laura Beheler’s first novel, The Paper Dolls, is a well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed child. Despite the Depression, both her mother and father have good jobs and can treat her to new dresses, cokes, and store-bought cakes when many of her classmates wear hand-me-downs and go without lunch. Every day, Ida comes home and, the good little girl she is, goes to her room and plays. Which suits her parents, who are usually fighting behind their locked bedroom door. Without her parents, Ida is effectively alone:
Her grandmothers and granddaddies were all dead; they never even knew she got alive. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Damned old women sat around her kitchen table and slurped up her cokes. Ida rocked from side to side, tears wetting her arms, rolling down her chin, falling in small droplets onto the grass. Whispering blearily, she moaned. Was there ever anybody in the whole history of the whole world who didn’t have anybody?
Cover of the US hardback edition of The Paper Dolls.
With no real friends, Ida has provided herself with her own friends, the characters she keeps in her Universal Theme and Composition Book (No. S-1055). Sometimes they are just the head and shoulders taken from a Montgomery-Ward catalog; sometimes a full-length figure cut from a copy of The Delineator magazine. Beside each, she notes the name, vital statistics, key facts:
Sands Chutney — 14 years — 5 feet 1 inch tall — 109 pounds — English aristocrat — very rich. Agnes Eaves — 15 years — 5 feet — 97 pounds — blond hair — very educated. Dan Davis — 15 years — 5 feet 3 inches — 110 pounds — plays violin — is orphan.
Ida lives in a world so devoid of emotional or social interaction that her paper dolls are not only her source of entertainment and comfort but, as the years go by, more real than the real people in her life. When her father, apparently an inveterate philanderer, leaves to take a job in another city, abandoning Ida and her mother, Ida replaces him with a new doll (Fritz Robinson — 15 years — 5 feet, 2 inches — 120 pounds — shipwreck survivor). When her uncle Johnny, a musician, comes to stay for a while and shows more interest than any adult has before, Ida has a brief reprieve from the relentless dreariness of her non-imaginary like. But when Johnny moves on, Ida replaces him:
The first night he was gone, Ida found herself restless in a sea of aloneness. She got out the Universal notebook, laid out a few characters. For a long time she stared at the line-up, wondering what to do with it. Finally she decided Sands Chutney was named Sandy Chutney, and he played a clarinet.
Asked what she’d done on her summer vacation, Ida has only her paper dolls to fall back on:
“Well uh, I have this friend Sands Chutney who’s from New York. He came to see us, and he brought his girl friend with him. Her name’s Agnes Eaves. Well, he plays a real good clarinet, and she plays piano. And they taught me to play drums and guitar. Sands Chutney owns this httle night club back in Memphis, and that’s where he met Agnes Eaves. Well, they kept begging me to go back with them and play drums and guitar in the band. Two or three times I thought maybe I would, but I decided . . .”
Though Ida finishes school, gets a secretarial job, becomes an adult, the world of her paper dolls remains the focus of her life. Pearl Harbor is attacked and America enters the war. But to Ida, the war “was simply an incontestable fact, not a penetrating experience.”
Until she meets Allan, a Navy ROTC cadet, who quickly falls in love with her. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he falls in love with his impression of Ida. At a superficial level, Ida understands what is expected of a young woman in the social rituals of romance and is capable of playing her part. But at some level, Allan is nothing more to her than a three-dimensional doll, and to him, she is much the same.
When Allan ships off with the Atlantic fleet, Ida moves to New York to wait for him. She dominoes through a series of jobs until she lands one as a day clerk in the Waverly Hotel. Like many of its residents, the Waverly is “a lost and seedy aristocrat.” A bitter 4F Jew named Wally Safferman — well, befriends is too strong a word, so let’s say he attaches himself to Ida. She’s willing to buy drinks and listen, even if she doesn’t really like him much.
The problem with Wally is that he does see Ida for who she is: “‘Ida, you are so …’ He paused, looking for words, then finished, ‘You are so unborn.'” Wally understands the difference between simple innocence and raw naïveté. Ida is still cocooned in the illusions she’s built up around her dolls. “Did you ever go through that stage where you watched with horror while your childhood dream world collapsed?” he asks her in astonishment.
Unfortunately, before Wally can burst Ida’s bubble, Allan writes to say that he’s returning. He has a job lined up in Topeka, Kansas and expects Ida to report for duty:
I’m the man in this outfit. Therefore, where my job is simply has to be the place we go. This whole thing has been crazy long enough, and I’m tired of it. So here it is straight and simple: will you come to Topeka and marry me?
Will she, readers? Well, let’s just say that it comes down to a choice between Allan in Topeka and Sands Chutney in a dark Manhattan bar.
Some reviewers found The Paper Dolls too close to a case study to be fully successful as a novel, but Laura Beheler offers a convincing case for fantasy as a survival mechanism that gets a person through a lot of bleak days. Few readers will reach the end, however, without seeing its long-term limitations. Which is why the other things reviewers called The Paper Dolls was a horror story. If it is a horror story, it is entirely because we cannot help but empathize with Ida, the lost little girl.
Laura Beheler, from the dust jacket of The Paper Dolls.
Laura Beheler was no Ida Erickson. Raised in Fort Worth, she served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in World War Two, worked as a reporter for the Associated Press and a copywriter for Neiman-Marcus, took up fencing and became a regional champion. In the late 1940s, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she became a junior high school teacher and wrote three published novels starting with The Paper Dolls. She never married, remained in Santa Fe until her death in 2008 at the age of 87, and presumably never kept a notebook full of paper dolls.
The Paper Dolls, by Laura Beheler Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956
When Studs Terkel titled his 1984 oral history of the American experience in World War Two The Good War, he meant it ironically. Terkel’s book is full of accounts of G. I.s and civilians who could still, decades afterward, think of themselves as casualties. Thanks, however, to Tom Brokaw’s hagiographic 1998 bestseller The Greatest Generation, however, the honeyed glow that Terkel refused to give his portrait of the war is now once again well-established and part of the current dementia among some Americans for a history that’s all nice, clean, and guilt-free.
If you count yourself among these folks, Mary Lee Settle’s 1966 memoir of her time in the Royal Air Force, All the Brave Promises, is not for you. Indeed, Settle opens the book with a salvo designed to eradicate any inclination a reader might have of looking on that time nostalgically:
We are accused of being nostalgic. We have been. What we have remembered are events. The Second World War was, for most of us, a state, a state of war, not an event. It was a permeation, a deadening, a waiting, hard to recall. What we have told about is the terrifying relief of battle or the sweet, false relief of leave.
These were not the causes of a psychic shock from which a generation of people are only now beginning to emerge. For every ‘historic’ event, there were thousands of unknown, plodding people, caught up in a deadening authority, learning to survive by keeping quiet, by ‘getting by,’ by existing in secret, underground; conscripted, shunted, numbered. It took so many of them, so many of their gray days and their uprooted lives. It taught them evasive ways to survive. These ways, dangerous to the community and to the spirit, have been a part of the peace.
“It taught them evasive ways to survive” is not how Tom Brokaw wanted us to look on the experience of American veterans of World War Two. But it’s the sort of bracingly brutal respect for honesty that makes Mary Lee Settle’s writing seem at times like a slap across the face. Not an insulting slap — a “Wake Up!” slap.
Settle came to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the women’s arm and second-class component of the Royal Air Force by a circuitous route. After marrying an Englishman named Rodney Weathersbee in 1939, she followed him to Canada when he joined the RAF and was sent there for training and delivered their son Christopher while still there as a military wife. The marriage soon fell apart, though, and she headed back to West Virginia, where her parents took over the care of Christopher while Settle headed to Washington, D.C. to get involved in war work.
During that period before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it wasn’t easy for an American woman to get into the British forces. She started by applying at the British Embassy in Washington, where she was aided by the young Roald Dahl and the playright and World War One veteran flyer Ben Travers. Then it was a matter of getting to England, which she finally did in October 1942, along with a boatfull of Roayl Navy and RAF trainees.
Through Weatherbee and her embassy friends, a posh welcome was arranged and Settle spent a week enjoying the finest comforts wartime London could offer. But then she reported for duty and the fun part came to an end.
Her first day as a WAAF was a foretaste of what much of the next 13 months would be like. With her foreign accent, refined looks, and High Street clothes, Settle was quickly labelled an outsider by her fellow enlistees, most of whom came from poor families in the East End. They stuck together like a chorus, commenting savagely on the faults of their superiors and anyone else who wasn’t “their type.” For Settle, “It was the first glimpse of the stratification, almost Chinese in its complication and formality, which covered everything from a hairdo to a state of health to sugar in tea and by which each Englishman holds himself apart, himself his castle, from his fellows.” Although she did manage to establish a few weak friendships during her time, Settle son grew accustomed to her permanent position in the eyes of the other WAAFs as an undesirable and untrusted alien.
The year or so Settle spent in the WAAFs included some of the grimmest days of the war. This was the long, slow, unthrilling buildup to D-Day and beyond. Settle was assigned to RAF Hullavington, the Empire Central Flying School, where much of the RAF’s basic flight training took place, There, she was assigned as a radio operator, spending hours each day in the darkened control room and trying to communicate with pilots over weak and heavily jammed signals. It was like staring into a solid fog hoping to make out the faintest shapes, and it eventually led to aural hallucinations that nearly drove her mad.
The food was bad, the showers cold, the barracks largely unheated, and the days full of damp, grey, chilly English weather. The WAAFs were at the bottom of the station’s pecking order, lower even than the kitchen staff, some of who were prisoners of war. To make matters worse, any possibility for camraderie was undermined by the fact that WAAFs were assigned to positions individually, rather than as a formation. As Settle puts it,
It showed even in the language — one was ‘attached’ to a station, each new place approached without knowing a soul, so that to be posted off your station was a thing to be feared and in it was a vague sense of punishment. Such isolation among the vast majority of the ground crews bred an unseen poisoned miasma, secret beneath the structure as sex was secret to authority.
Her work and the living conditions proved exhausting, relentless, and utterly thankless. Any sense of contributing to a greater cause was life. On the other hand, as she realized one afternoon off as she cycled through some nearby villages, being treated like a cog in the war machine brought a novel, if odd, sense of freedom:
[For] the first time I sensed an irresponsibility, an ease of letting go. My uniform was issue, my bicycle was issue. I was utterly without worry about where my food was coming from. So long as I did what I was told, kept silence and remained acquiescent, I had freedom from decision, freedom from want, freedom from anxiety for survival. That, too, seemed out of my hands—the deci- sion of an abstract, an order from “above.” For a few minutes the rose hedges swept past me; I felt an almost mystic contentment. Then, even in the sun, cold fright caught me and I pedaled faster, as if I could ride away from the space of that feeling. I had experienced the final negative freedom, that of the slave.
There’s another one of those Settle slaps: “the negative freedom … of the slave.”
After a particularly long and demanding shift, Settle collapsed and was diagnosed as severely underweight and malnourished. She was sent to London to recouperate and quickly realized that her talents and temperament were better suited for work with the U.S. Office of War Information. The OWI arranged for her separation from the WAAF and her induction — as a major, though without uniform — into the U.S. Army.
The framing facts of Settle’s story — her marriage, her son, her escape into the OWI — are missing from All the Brave Promises. It took her much longer to provide these facts, in her unfinished memoir Learning to Fly, which was published shortly after her death in 2005. All the Brave Promises is not, however, a book that depends on external context to succeed. Her aim, as she later wrote, was simply to document how thousands of young English women were used by their country and to counter what she called “the official peacetime bravery … the self-congratulation of it, its terrible mistakes.” “It was such a tiny arrow thrown,” she acknowledged, “But it was all I could do.”
With an aim as keen as Mary Lee Settle’s however, even tiny arrows can be deadly. If you should ever find yourself giving into notions of the romance of war, I recommend All the Brave Promises as an antidote.
All the Brave Promises: Memories of Aircraft Woman 2nd Class 2146391, by Mary Lee Settle New YorK: Delacorte Press, 1966 London: Heinemann, 1966
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, popular German-language authors were experiencing a resurgence: Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll, Hans Fallada, Wolfgang Koeppen, Ernst Junger — even the old stager Erich Maria Remarque — were all active and writing books which are still remembered and probably still read now.
But one author outsold them all during this time. Hans Helmut Kirst had his books regularly in the German best-seller lists, with sales of his forty-eight titles usually hitting around half a million copies each in the domestic market and with over twelve million copies in total worldwide. Yet today Kirst is largely forgotten.
Kirst’s output of fiction was prodigious but he was driven. He was also scriptwriter for eight films produced for the German market (six of which were from his own books); a documentary film-maker; and, on at least one occasion, an actor in a tv series. One of his books was made into a (not very good) big-budget film: The Night of the Generals starred Peter O’Toole, fresh from his success in Lawrence of Arabia. (The script had many notable contributors, including Gore Vidal, Paul Dehn and Joseph Kessel; O’Toole was apparently reluctant to take the part but felt an obligation to the producer Sam Spiegel, because of Lawrence).
Hans Helmut Kirst’s Gunner Asch novels in UK Fontana paperback editions.
Despite all this work, if he is remembered at all, Kirst‘s name is usually linked with his creation, Gunner Asch. In a series of four books, the adventures of the titular hero picked up on the literary exploration of the absurdity of military life that has accompanied conflict, from Alphonse de Vigny in the Bourbon restoration through good soldier Schweik’s adventures in the Great War to Hawkeye and Trapper in M*A*S*H.
His books (twenty-four of which were translated into English) fall into four broad categories. First, there are the humorously cynical army novels (like the 08/15 series about the misadventures of Gunner Asch), written from 1955 onwards. Then the historical thrillers, usually based in a military context (Night of the Generals, which appeared in 1963; Officer Factory, also 1963; The 20th of July, 1966; Night of the Long Knives, 1976) which are more serious explorations of the brutalising effects of military life. Then come the later novels, set in contemporary Germany and often crime-based in some way to reveal the seamy side of the post-war German ‘economic miracle’ (Undercover Man, 1970; A Time for Scandal, 1973; A Time for Truth, 1974; A Time for Payment, 1976). Finally, the outliers: the apocalyptic No One Will Escape, 1959 — like Shute’s On the Beach but grimmer; and The Fox of Maulen (published in the U.S. as The Wolves), 1968 – a bit like Fallada’s Alone in Berlin but a little less bleak.
This last title is undeservedly forgotten not least because it can stand as an archetype for Kirst’s “anti-war” books. It also has a timelessness as a fable of the corrupting effects of power.
The story revolves around what happens in the (fictitious) village of Maulen in the (real) region of Pomerania between 1932 and 1945. It follows the rise, fall and collapse of the local Nazi party seen through the eyes of one man, Alfons Materna, who is a shrewd, self-reliant and independent local farmer.
The plot is simple, although there are numerous characters. Written in four parts, the story follows the path of Materna’s political awakening. The first two parts deal with his transition from disinterested hostility to active opposition to the bumptious and malign leaders of the local Nazi party. Then through the third section, the period of the Nazi’s grip on the village, Materna has to wriggle ethically to survive. In the final section, the collapse of the village’s existence is traced as Russian tanks roll across the Pomeranian farmlands.
Materna is intrinsically hostile – but initially passively so – to the discipline that the local Nazis want to impose on the villagers and merely wants to get on with his life without interference – and (initially) without interfering in the lives of anyone else. Since the death of his wife, Materna has been used to being left alone to live his life, unmoved by the swirls of political argument, local or national.
His passivity disappears when his younger son is killed in a bungled weapons practice run by the local SA. Seeking some adventure as an alternative to their dull rural existence, both of Materna’s sons had joined the local party for the opportunities it offered for supposed comradeship, possible whoring, and certain excessive drinking. Then, when the effects of the Nazi’s racially-inspired policies begin to encroach upon the farm that Materna’s forefathers have owned for generations, his world is threatened and he feels forced to act.
Spurred by personal dislike of the strutting local Nazi leaders, Materna moves from passivity to individuals to outright opposition to the Nazi party in the village – brought about mostly by a mix of his grief, an innate contrariness to authority, and a streak of basic decency. His weapon (initially) is not sustained political argument (for he has no articulated opposition to what is going on) or even overt violence but barbed flattery, pricking the pomposity and incompetence of the local Nazi functionaries.
Later, as Materna’s contempt for the individual members of the local party grows, he increases the tempo of his campaign and progresses to using ridicule, blackmail and jealousy. Based on marital discord and prompted by unfounded rumour, he tries to wreck the relationships inside the structure of the SA. The story is told to show how Materna (always with his own interests at the forefront) brings down the ambitions of individuals with less guile, cunning or foresight. Materna is no saint. He is both greedy and generous, hard and sentimental, morally upright and debased at the same time.
At first, Materna’s low-key rebellion is purely a matter of self-interest. His farm workers – who often came from those parts of society that the Nazis wanted to eliminate – are crucially important to his business. But as they become demonised and persecuted, he begins to feel a sense of identification with the injustice, and organises a sort of underground railway foe the persecuted, which gradually comes to dominate his life. He reluctantly helps more and more people, often ones previously unknown to him, to escape to less dangerous places (in the mid-1930s even Poland seemed safer than turbulent Germany).
This underground railway becomes a business in itself and towards the middle of the book Materna has to realise that it is now longer possible to run it safely, together with the farm. And so he bargains with the local SA chief to authorize the travel of two “undesirables”: one of his trusted workers – a Jew – who will take charge of the other end of the railway; and a disabled woman he has come to love, whose life would be threatened were she to stay.
Although Materna could have left with the departing group, he chooses to stay to fulfil the economic terms of the bargain. He also explains that he wants to stay “to see what happens and have some fun,” a desire he explains is activated by both personal animosities and by a growing dislike of what is happening to his (specifically) local world.
Of course, as the book draws to a close Materna cannot escape his fate any more than can the other villagers of Maulen. Kirst’s ingenious ending is in keeping with the moral ambiguity of his characters.
But there is a deeper – and troubling — aspect to the book beyond the explication of the moral ambiguities and compromises in the story. The novel deals with moral choices, ethical dilemmas and personal deceits. A book about moral dilemmas cannot be judged without examining the moral record of the author himself. Here the evidence is not clear cut.
Kirst was born and grew up in the district of Masuren, a backwater of the then-German region of Pomerania. He joined the German Army in 1933, at the age of 19 and in the pit of the Great Depression. He became a member of the Nazi Party soon after. So, while it can be assumed that he bases the characters in his book on real-life acquaintances, it’s clear that Kirst was not describing his own experiences.
By the middle of the war, Kirst had risen from the ranks to the level of lieutenant in an anti-aircraft artillery unit. Although he never saw front-line action, he was appointed as the political instruction officer for his unit — entrusted with explaining, justifying and proselytising for Nazism and its policies.
After the war, Kirst claimed that he had confused the party of National Socialism with the country of Germany, and that he had been unaware that “one was in a club of murderers”. But can that really be so, given his record and position? Who can say from this distance whether Kirst repented and purged his guilt through writing or whether he just sublimated his experiences? Certainly, he went through a process of formal ‘de-Nazification’. Unlike others – Gunter Grass for instance — he never sought to conceal his past. But since Kirst never let a good idea have only one outing he employs the basic idea of subversion from The Fox of Maulen again in his later novel Party Games (1980), although this time with less poignancy and broader humour. The question then arises “Is the repetition evidence not of repentance but just commercial exploitation of experience?”
Kirst’s books were often criticised for subordinating the horror of events in Germany during the reign of the Nazis to a sequence of humorous incidents at a local level, which consequently glossed over the wider social and historical context. Some critics saw this as partly an act of self-exculpation. Kirst was writing — and his books were published — at a time when the problem of the recent past and the taint that had on the New Germany were matters of constant public discussion.
In one way or another, all of Kirst’s books deal with the effects on individuals as they shift from being members of a turbulent civil society prior to the rise of Hitler to followers of (or resisters against) doctrinaire Nazism and finally survivors or victims of the de-Nazification process .
Coincidentally — deliberately? ironically? – The Fox of Maulen was first published in Germany as Die Wolfe (the US edition carries the original title, The Wolves) in 1967, a year after Kurt Kiessinger became Chancellor of West Germany. Kiessinger was the first prominent former member of the Nazi party to achieve a high office in the West German government, having been a lawyer in the Kammergericht, the highest state court, for the city-state of Berlin, between 1935 and 1940, and having joined the Nazis in 1933).
Regardless of the motive, by reducing the focus to the local and personal, Kirst was able to show the impact of huge events on the individual lives of those who were “ordinary” – often resentful of the hand life had dealt them, not usually particularly active politically, not especially well-educated and not influential. He could take characters who, despite their handicaps of class or status or lack of wealth, saw opportunities to achieve their ambitions when their society developed in a different political direction. His stories thus became fables of lasting relevance, illuminating with mordant humour the havoc created by flawed characters placed by chance in positions to become agents of influence. His novels entertain and instruct (for those who are alert to the parallels). Change the names and the contexts and the basic stories in many of Kirst’s novels (and especially The Fox) can be applied to many other political events of the years of this century – never mind the events of 70 years ago. This, to me, is the mark of a novel of lasting value.
The Fox of Maulen is both the high water mark of Kirst’s writing and the high water mark of his examination of the morality of resisting or rejecting — making accommodations to survive in a world where moral choices cannot be resolved into simply black or white.
As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.
The Fox of Maulen, by Hans Helmut Kirst London: William Collins, 1968
“A hundred women came to paradise and a hundred angels fell” reads the tagline on the cover of the Red Seal/Gold Medal paperback original edition of Nancy Morgan’s 1952 novel City of Women. It was an obvious attempt to repeat the success of Gold Medal’s edition of Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks, a memoir of life among the women of the Free Free forces in London, down to its cover by Barye Phillips, the same artist, showing women in much the same variety of déshabillé.
Beneath the surface, however, the two books had little in common aside from the fact that both were clearly based on lived experience. In Morgan’s case, however, the experience was that of living in the large complex erected near Pearl Harbor to house the hundreds of civilian workers brought to Oahu after the declaration of war.
Lynn and her husband Mack have come from Kentucky on a ship full of troops and civilian workers. The idea of taking war work in Hawaii was entirely hers. Mack, we soon discover, is a small-minded, embittered man who should never have left home, let alone gotten married. Had Mack ever been happy? Lynn wonders soon after they move into a bleak, nearly unfurnished apartment in the married quarters. “Perhaps he had been before he married her. He had told her so many times that he was.” Mack is utterly out of place in Hawaii: “He hated it, the sun hurt his eyes, and he was affronted by the sensual warmth.”
Lynn, on the other hand, quickly comes to love her new situation. She’s good at her job, desired by the thousands of single men on the island, even desired as a friend by the women she’s become acquainted with on the ship.
Though Lynn decides to move into the single women’s quarters after Mack throws her clothes out the window in a jealous fit, it takes Morgan another two hundred pages to make their break permanent. For her part, the process is made easier by meeting a handsome, understanding lieutenant, though this only provokes Mack further into his fortress of surliness. She starts to receive anonymous letters: “Watch your step. We know what you’re doing and what will happen to you if you don’t stop seeing that lieutenant. You’re a filthy whore and we find ways to get rid of women like you.” “We” is clearly Mack and his buddy Toby, who probably resent most of all not having a nice basement to chain Lynn up in.
Much of the book is taken up with the other dramas that arise among Lynn’s barrack-mates, most of which we can predict. An unwanted pregnancy, a romance with a married officer, and a case or two of island fever. There is also the somewhat more “scandalous” element of a happily predatory lesbian, but Morgan is too unsure of, if not uncomfortable with, same-sex relations that it’s not much more than a novelty item. Neither does she treat her exotic setting as much more than a backdrop. Nancy Morgan may have been writing from firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be a civilian worker living in Hawaii during the war, but for all she makes of it, City of Women comes off as no more interesting than a week or two’s worth of General Hospital.
City of Women, by Nancy Morgan New York: Red Seal Books/Gold Medal Books (Fawcett Publications), 1952
Charlotte Salomon’s “autobiographical play” Life or Theater? is often described as a work of Holocaust art. It’s true that Salomon created it while living as a Jewish German refugee in the south of France and that she was arrested, shipped to Auschwitz, and murdered there on 10 October 1943. And the repression of the Jews by the Nazis is a backdrop whose shadows grow longer as the story reaches its climax.
But Life or Theater? is first and foremost a story of private tragedies, tragedies whose full details have only gradually come to light over the course of decades.
Beween July 1940 and February 1943, Salomon, daughter of a wealthy Berlin surgeon, Dr. Albert Salomon, told a story in nearly 1,300 paintings on 10×13-inch sheets of paper with a narrative of 32,000 words of dialogue and description inscribed on their backs. From these, she selected 769, which she entrusted to her French doctor in Villefranche, with instructions for him to pass them on to Ottilie Moore, the German-American millionaire in whose villa Salomon and her grandparents were living. A few months later, she and her husband were arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she was executed, probably on the day of their arrival.
Charlotte Salomon and her grandparents in France 1939 or 1940.
By the time of her arrest, Salomon’s grandfather was dead. She had killed him, preparing an omelette laced with the poison veronal. As Toni Bentley wrote in her 2017 New Yorker article, “Salomon’s crime that morning was not a mercy killing to save the old man from the Nazis; this was entirely personal.”
Life or Theater? itself is entirely personal, despite its historical context. Every character is someone from Salomon’s life. Its dramas are family dramas, its emotions individual and specific to her. And it is a work of self exploration, though the explorer admits her expedition is incomplete. As she wrote in a preface to what she described as “Ein Singespiel” — a libretto, if you will:
Since I myself needed a year to discover the significance of this strange work, many of the texts and tunes, particularly in the first paintings, elude my memory and must — like the creation as a whole, so it seems to me — remain shrouded in darkness.
The suicide of Charlotte Knare.
The story opens in darkness. The first painting shows a Berlin street at night, what appears to be a bridge, and a sequence of figures — a woman at first but growing less distinct — leading to the darkness at the lower lefthand corner. “One November day, Charlotte Knarre left her parents’ home and threw herself into the water,” the text tells us. Knarre is the name she gives her mother’s family, the Grünwalds; Charlotte Knarre is the aunt for whom she is named, the aunt whose suicide four years before Salomon’s birth proved only the first in a series of deaths that shaped her life.
In the next scene, Dr. Albert Kann, a young military doctor, courts and marries Franziska Knarre. Charlotte is born in 1917, but her mother suffers from depression and, within six panels afterwards, is shown taking an overdose of opium. Though she is found before it can take effect, she then jumps to her death while recouperating at her parents’ apartment. In reality, nine years passed between Charlotte’s birth and her mother’s suicide.
Charlotte waits for her mother to come at night.
Charlotte struggles to understand her mother’s death. She leaves a letter on her mother’s gravestone: “Dear Mommy, please write to me.” She sits up nights expecting her mother to visit, like an angel.
Her life improves somewhat with the arrival of a governess, but then, in 1930, Dr. Kann meets and marries Paulinka (Paulina Lindberg in real life), an aspiring singer. For much of the next few years and several hundred pages, the focus shifts from Charlotte to Paulinka — her increasing popularity as a singer, the obsession of an older man, a theater director, for her and then Paulinka’s own obsession with a poet and mystic named Amadeus Daberlohn (“penniless Mozart”).
For Charlotte, Paulinka is a figure of fascination for her beauty, talent, and glamorous lifestyle — and a source of intense jealousy, first as a competitor for her father’s affection and then as Charlotte herself becomes obsessed with Daberlohn. At the same time, Charlotte learns from her grandmother that she has experienced even more tragedies that the suicide of their two daughters. Her brother and sister also took their lives; her husband has had affairs, stays with her only for the sake of appearances.
Der Sturmer announcement of the boycott of Jews.
History begins to intrude upon this private story at the start of Act Two: “The swastika — a symbol of bright hope!” reads the text over a picture of brownshirts marching down a street, featuring the date “30.I.1933.” By the next panel, however, Der Sturmer announces the boycott of Jewish businesses. Dr. Kann is dismissed from his university post.
Two panels of Daberlohn’s monologues.
But the greater shadow that descends over Charlotte’s world is that of Amadeus Daberlohn. Page after page after page appears with a series of his head and lines of dialogue –or rather, monologue. At one point, there are fifteen straight pages of his head and his talk; at another, nearly a dozen of Daberlohn shown reclining, the images and words growing more rushed and indistinct. One has to wonder whose madness is being depicted: Daberlohn’s or Charlotte’s?
Charlotte and Daberlohn in a park.
Charlotte and Daberlohn meet away from the Kann’s home. He encourages her affection: “You are so beautiful. When you smile, your hands smile too.” The two are shown kissing. Embracing on a park bench. Arm-in-arm on the street.
And the focus shifts again, from Charlotte and Daberlohn to Daberlohn himself. To his attempt to create a masterpiece, an adaptation of the story of Adam and Eve into a contemporary setting. He superimposes this story onto his own relationship with Charlotte. Then he turns his back on her and his “masterpiece” becomes a version of the Resurrection blended with that of Orpheus and Eurydice. “My hopes, therefore, life with the future souls of young girls who are willing to tread the path of Christ, the Orpheus path,” he writes. Daberlohn’s “masterpiece” seems more than a little creepy as portrayed by Charlotte, still clearly infatuated with the man at a distance of some years.
Suddenly, it is 1938, and the public and private tragedies converge and accelerate. The assassination of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by the Jewish exile Herschel Grynszpan incites the destruction of Jewish shops and properties in Kristallnacht. Dr. Kann is sent to prison at Sachsenhausen. Paulinka manages to get him released and they leave Germany for the Netherlands.
After Grandmother Knarre’s suicide attempt.
Charlotte joins her grandparents in France. There, her grandmother attempts to hang herself. In the aftermath, her grandfather reveals more dark family secrets. The grandmother makes another attempt, throwing herself out a window like her daughter had. And succeeding like her daughter had.
Charlotte talks with her grandfather.
Yet, somehow, Charlotte manages to find hope. She draws energy from the warmth and beauty of southern France. “You know, Grandpa,” she says, “I have a feeling the whole world has to be put together again.” To which he replies, “Oh, go ahead and kill yourself and put an end to all this babble!”
“She had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths,” Charlotte writes of her work over the year following her grandmother’s suicide. “And from that came: Life or Theater?”
This ending omits the poisoned omelette. And none of the words in Salomon’s text touch on the question that naturally arises when one learns of it: what was Salomon’s real motivation for killing her grandfather? It is hard not to look for answers in the pictures, however. Is there another untold story, a story about abuse, lurking in the many dark pages of Life or Theater?, written beneath the pages and pages of talking heads and feverish monologues, in the frenzied speed that seems to have driven Salomon’s brush throughout so much of this project?
The last panel of Life or Theater?
The last image shows Charlotte in a bathing suit, kneeling on the beach, looking out over the blue Mediterranean as she paints or sketches. On her back are painted the words Leben Oder Theater. When I first read the book, I assumed the question was being posed as a choice between Life (as in real life) and Theater (as in Art). But now I wonder if Salomon intended it to be read differently: as a choice between Life (her own desire to draw inspiration from the beauty around her, to put the world together again) and Theater, as in the Greek tragedy, the family drama that the women in her family seemed to feel condemned to sacrifice themselves to.
Life or Theater? has appeared several times in English, each time with more material as new papers and paintings are discovered. The best and most comprehensive was the 2017 edition from the Overlook Press. Unfortunately, this edition is already out of print and hard to find. Taschen’s edition from the same year is still available, though it’s slightly abridged. Previous versions appeared in 1963, with a foreword by the theologian Paul Tillich, and in 1981 following the exhibition of 250 paintings at the Jewish History Museum in Amsterdam.
In all cases, the book is presented as an art book — large and very heavy with its hundreds of pages of full-color images. But I think this does the book as a book some disservice. For it can also be seen as a graphic novel. Indeed, many of its images will seem familiar to today’s readers, much more accustomed to the presentation of graphic novels.
Take this image from early in the book, showing Charlotte’s mother and father at the hotel when they spend their wedding night. Three wordless panels as they progress up the staircase, into the room, and into the bed.
The wedding night of Charlotte’s parents.
In 1943, this would have seemed novel, more like three shots from a film than any painting. But we can easily picture similar images from a book by Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown or Jimmy Corrigan. And I do hope that one day some editor will have the courage to package the book in this way. Not only because it seems truer to the spirit of the book, but also because its readership will remain limited as long as reading it means holding a great ten-pound lump in the lap for hours at a time.
Life or Theater? is one of the most intense and moving works of autofiction I’ve ever read, and I highly encourage others to discover it, even in ten-pound lump form.
Life or Theater? by Charlotte Salomon New York: Overlook Press, 2017
“One of the most ardent pursuits of man is finding excuses to persecute other people.” This chilling observation by Laurie Lee forms the epigraph to A Significant Experience, Gwyn Griffin’s story of the persecution and torture of a naïve young man — really a boy — by the officers of a British Army training base in Egypt during World War Two. It was a setting Gwyn Griffin was familiar with, having been born and raised in Egypt as the son of a Colonial Service officer and having served during the war and after in a variety of Army and police units in the Middle East and Africa.
is an illustration of what happens when an inflexible system encounters a foreign and incompatible body. Van der Haar, the son of a Dutch merchant long settled in Syria and fluent in English, French, and Arabic, is befriended by a British military intelligence officer who wants to use him as an agent and interrogator. To bring him into the Army, however, requires the boy, not yet 18, to complete the short officer training course run at the base.
That Van der Haar is out of his element is obvious:
As individuals, most of the staff would have wised to be kind to Van der Haar, but in their professional capacities they could not be so. He had to be shouted at on the parade ground as much as any other cadet; he had to be officially chased on the square, officially bullied by the N.C.O. instructors, officially harried by the authorities…. To the other cadets — ex-sergeant-majors, sergeants, and corporals, combat soldiers who had often been years in the army — this treatment meant nothing; they knew it for the bluff it was.
to Van der Haar, fresh out of a French-run lycee where he learned the fundamentals of rationalist thinking, the idea that abuse of cadets by the staff was simply a scheme to inculcate a predictable level of regimentation and obedience seems absurd: “when he was shouted at he thought the shouter was really angry, really hating him.”
Van der Haar can’t march straight, can’t handle his rifle properly, can’t respond as required to the stimuli of daily drill. While this perplexes most of the staff (was it really possible that someone “could know absolutely nothing at all about the British Army”?), it maddens Captain Lutwyche, who prides himself on running the best company in the school. Maddens him because Van der Haar’s innocence and beauty stirs the homosexual desires he prefers to satisfy outside the camp, with Arab boys, in alleyways with the safety of the night.
Grumbling about Van der Haar in the officers’ bar, Lutwyche is informed that, because he’s considered a “boy soldier” under Army regulations, he can be punished for his minor infractions by caning. Lutwyche wins the approval of the camp commandant for this course of action and arranges to have this “significant experience” delivered to Van der Haar that evening. He leaves it to Battalion Sergeant Major Ulick to explain the decision and the punishment to Van der Haar:
He paused, frowning, trying with all his might to do something he had never done before: to evaluate and analyze a social concept and to put the result into words. He knew the facts. He knew that the English upper-class, whom he thought of always in terms of “officers,” put a peculiar and irrational value upon corporal punishment; it was almost an obsession with them, and practically every officer he had ever known “believed in it.”
To Ulick, caning is just one of the mysterious tribal rituals of the officer class, and “as such must be jealously retained, guarded, and worshipped.” He neither agrees with nor condemns its application: beating is simply another absurd element in the whole charade of military discipline.
For Major Seligman, an officer with a wartime commission rather than a Sandhurst-trained Regular, however, decision to cane Van der Haar is the action of an institution only capable of existing within its own artificial reality. The Regulars who run the training camp (and the Army itself) were part of “the machine of organized English upper class brutality,” which aims to eliminate “all those feelings and emotions which made the whole difference between man and beasts and which the system so deplored….” His thoughts speak for the millions who took the first opportunity of the General Election in 1945 to put Clement Atlee in place of Winston Churchill.
And likely for Griffin himself. Though he attended a boarding school in England and served the Empire in several of its colonies, he considered it morally and intellectually corrupt. Where Graham Greene saw in colonial stations the signs of moral exhaustion, Griffin saw active and malevolent forces. He and his wife — the daughter of a colonial governor — tried living in various places in Africa and Australia, but it was only when they settled in rural Italy that they were able to distance themselves from these forces.
It’s unfortunate that within a few years of making a home there that he died suddenly, of a blood infection in 1967 at the age of 45. His last novel, An Operational Necessity, a fictional account of the shooting of the survivors of a torpedoed merchant ship, the S. S. Peleus by a German U-boat, had only just hit the bestseller lists and in the U.S. and U.K.. All set in real or fictional British colonies or at sea, his novels might be compared with those of Alistair Maclean or Hammond Innes were it not for the streak of indignation that simmers in all of them.
This book is slight, just under 100 pages, and the comparisons with Billy Budd are obvious, if incidental. I found it hard not to read A Significant Experience and not see parallels with the callous actions and hostility toward “foreigners” of the current government in the U.K.. It makes one wonder whether the “machine of organized English upper class brutality” was in any way seriously affected by the end of the Empire.
A Significant Experience, by Gwyn Griffin New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963
This is a guest post by the novelist and childrens’ book author Eric Brown
‘The summer of nineteen-thirty-nine was a thoroughly rotten one.’ So opens Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, a chapter of autobiography by the Hungarian writer Adam Martin de Hegedus, published in 1944.
De Hegedus first came to England in 1927, staying five months to study reference books at the British Museum Library on International Law and to learn English in order to enter the Hungarian diplomatic service. At the end of that time, however, he decided to return to Hungary only to pass his final law examination: then, as he writes in Vanman, to abandon his plans to become a diplomat and ‘return to England and settle there for good and become an English writer.’ He continues: ‘It was England’s mental climate that had proved so all absorbing, so conquering, all powerful, compelling, that it made me feel at home at once…’
Throughout the Thirties he was based in London, working as the London correspondent for several Hungarian newspapers as well as placing articles with British periodicals as varied as Esquire, The Observer, Evening Standard and the London Mercury. 1937 saw the publication of his first book, Hungarian Background, and he completed his debut novel, Rehearsal Under the Moon, in 1940. Later that year, when Hungary allied itself with Germany, Britain broke off diplomatic relations with his homeland and de Hegedus was no longer able to send his daily cables to Budapest. He had lost his main source of income and decided ‘the best thing I could do was to volunteer for one of the Forces.’ In October 1941 he was sent to train as a gunner near Wakefield in West Yorkshire.
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is his record of the following year, his training in Yorkshire and Nottingham and his posting to Kent to await assignment overseas. In the memoir, de Hegedus portrays himself as an outsider, forever looking in. There were the obvious facts that he was a Hungarian in Britain – despite having taken British nationality in the Thirties – and a writer, about which he commented: ‘I am to some extent inhuman and cold. Looking for copy all the time […] And the writer is lonely. The job has its gratifications, but it has dreadful drawbacks. The writer, you see, is not allowed to live.’ But what de Hegedus could not confess in his otherwise starkly honest account was that he was even more of an outsider because he was homosexual.
In hindsight, knowing what we do about de Hegedus, it’s not difficult to read between the lines and decode the sometimes buried messages in the text. In the chapter entitled ‘The Girl From Newcastle’, he describes his meeting and subsequent one night stand with a woman in the WAF: she ‘had a workmanlike handsomeness’ and ‘a nice deep voice’ and ‘there was something brave, almost heroic and masculine in [her] spirit’. He’s at home in the all-male environs of barrack life and describes the camaraderie (and the physical attributes) of his fellow soldiers.
On one occasion he is more overt in his sympathies and attraction. In Nottingham he meets Bombardier Brown, a troubled young man who says of himself: ‘I know that I am different. I have known it ever since I was a kid and I made up my mind that I would fight against it even if it’s impossible.’ In a moving passage, de Hegedus recounts an intimate meeting with Brown in which the young man unburdens himself. ‘… I am putting up a terrific fight. I may be beaten in the end, but I’m trying not to give in.’
De Hegedus questions Brown about his ambitions and learns that the Bombardier was turned down by the RAF because of his eyesight.
‘I wanted so much to become a pilot and I would have made a good pilot too.’
‘Yes. And it would have made you happier,’ de Hegedus assures him. ‘All that preoccupation with danger and adventure. You wouldn’t have found time to think of your personal problems…’
‘And it would have been so easy to end my life. Just shot down and finished […] Sometimes I really wish I was dead.’
Weeks later, de Hegedus is stunned to learn of Brown’s death in a motorcycle accident outside Nottingham. He was speeding, ran into a lorry, and died instantly – the inference being that the young man took his own life.
De Hegedus’s grief is followed by remorse. ‘Oh, how bloody cold-blooded I sounded […] when I asked him question after question. And what a thrill I had when he answered, full, honest, clean-breasted. Well, of course, he was confessing…’
It’s tempting to wonder to what degree his grief was responsible for his subsequent nervous breakdown, compounded by what happened next.
During his time as a gunner, de Hegedus applied for a commission and was refused; later he requested a transfer to the Army Education Corps as a lecturer, a role for which he was eminently suited. He was a Doctor of Law, could speak four languages, and had experience lecturing – quite apart from the fact that he was phenomenally well-read and had a wide knowledge of the arts. After an interview with the Selection Board, however, his application was rejected for reasons he was unable to fathom.
Following a bout of insomnia and depression, de Hegedus suffered a nervous breakdown and was referred to a military hospital in Leeds. After a period of recuperation, he was discharged from the Army in 1942. His later attempts to find work to aid the war effort were stonewalled for the same reason he was refused a commission and turned down as an Army lecturer: as his parents were enemy nationals, de Hegedus was considered a security risk.
The autobiography closes with de Hegedus working as a van driver, delivering film posters to cinemas in London and the suburbs. It was menial work for a man of his ability, but it did have the advantage of allowing him time to write.
At one point in Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, while awaiting his posting overseas, de Hegedus contemplates the possibility of being killed in action: ‘It was, of course, unpleasant that from the literary point of view I had not had my season. I wanted to write at least five books, the kind of books I always wanted to write, messages in a bottle dropped into the sea, waiting for someone, like me, to pick up and read.’
Cover of an English edition of The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland (Adam de Hegedus).
Adam de Hegedus succeeded in his ambition to become ‘an English writer’. He wrote ten books: six works of non-fiction, two novels under his own name, and two1 under the pseudonym of Rodney Garland. The searingly honest and heartbreaking best-seller The Heart in Exile>2, 1953, as by Garland, was the very first work of fiction to tackle the theme of male homosexuality in 1950s Britain. De Hegedus died of poisoning, a suspected suicide, in October 1955.
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is not only a wonderfully well written and compelling account of the times – his evocation of army life is on par with anything by Julian MacLaren-Ross – but an insight into the complex personality of the man himself and a neglected memoir that deserves a wider audience.
Notes 1 Three later novels attributed to ‘Rodney Garland’, published after Adam de Hegedus’s death in 1955, were the work of fellow Hungarian novelist Peter de Polnay: World Without Dreams (1961); Hell and High Water (1962); and The Sorcerer’s Broth (1966).
Eric Brown has published over seventy books. His latest is Murder Most Vile, and forthcoming is the SF novel Wormhole, written with Keith Brooke. He lives near Dunbar in Scotland, and his website is at: ericbrown.co.uk
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting by Adam de Hegedus London: Staples Press Ltd., 1946
It would be natural for Women in a Village to be compared with Rebecca West’s masterpiece about her travels in the former Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Both West and Louisa Rayner were Englishwomen writing about a land and people relatively unknown to most of their readers. But West was never anything but a visitor to Yugoslavia.
Rayner, on the other hand, was a resident. Fascinated by the country on her first visit in 1936, she returned the next year, when she met and married a Belgrade fuel dealer named Stojan Božic. She would no longer be able to see the country “as a picture; I should not be able to stand back and disparage or admire. I was going to become a Yugoslav woman; I was stepping into the picture.”
That step may have ensured her survival after the Germans invaded in 1941. By then, she had become fluent in Serbian and fully assimilated into the culture, serving slatko and coffee to her husband and his friends as they sat and talked in their living room, working in the kitchen in the early fall as they canned great quantities of tomato sauce.
In 1944, she and her husband decided to flee Belgrade with their six-year-old daughter, joining a great exodus of civilians leaving the city as it became a target for regular Allied bombing raids. He chose Rušanj, then an isolated village along a hillside roughly ten miles south of Belgrade. Life in the village was so rustic that there was no notion of rent: the villagers simply took them in and made them part of the household.
Having reconnoitered the situation beforehand, Stojan chose to approach Savka, a grandmother, who was already sharing a two-room hut with two daughters-in-law and four grandchildren. Savka’s hut had only an earthen floor and everyone slept together in a single bed. The hut had no chimney; there was simply an opening at the peak of the tiled roof through which the smoke escaped. Instead of a stove, Savka cooked on an iron dome suspended over the fire.
Rayner, who’d taken a degree in classics at Cambridge, recognized the central room of Savka’s hut as what the Greeks called a melathron — a black room. “… [M]ore than a kitchen, but hardly a living-room and not quite a hall in the medieval sense. The walls and beams of this room of Savka’s were black with soot, for the smoke from the hearth visited every cranny before drifting out through the room.” She later wrote of her comparison between Savka’s hut and those of Homer’s time in an article titled “Kitchen Problems in Ancient Greece,” published in The South African Archaeological Bulletin in December 1956.
“I did not stay with Savka in her melathron in order to study Homer,” Rayner wrote. But “in that precarious and primitive way of living I found Homer a most cheering companion. Homer had gone through all this. Homer knew. And in all this smoke and dirt and toil Homer had kept his poise and his refinement.”
Rayner’s classical sensibilities are evident throughout Women in a Village. The way of life in Rušanj was closer in many ways to that of ancient Greece. Even before the war, the village operated more on a barter basis, and as the war made currencies fleeting phenomena with fluctuating values this became all the more so. As a refugee with little more to offer than labor and occasional contributions of food or cloth, Rayner focused on doing all she could to assimilate.
Thus, unlike Rebecca West, who could afford to be subjective, picking and choosing among the various ethnic groups of Yugoslavia, Rayner is at all times an empathetic observer. Reference to Homer was one of the ways in which she could deal with the radical changes forced by her situation. So she doesn’t recoil at what occurred after each meal:
A sketch of Savka’s house, from Louisa Rayner’s article in The South African Archaeological Bulletin.
… there was a black dog and his chocolate-covered mother. They served no purpose at all except to bark and lick the table clean after meals. The table (sofra) was about a metre in diameter and perhaps a foot in height. When the dogs had cleaned it, it was leant up against the wall out of the way. I suspect that the “table dogs” of the Odyssey also licked the tables and were not simply fed at table.
Rayner soon learns the merit of rustic ways, switching to wearing a wooden yoke after her first experience of hauling two bucketfuls of water from the well nearly a kilometer away from Savka’s hut. And when she finds the corpse of one of the neighbor’s chickens floating in a bucket, she simply extracts it and carries on. She comes to understand the importance of cattle in plowing even the smallest field and the tragedy of losing one of a matched pair. “She is a left-hand cow!” Savka chastises Rayner when she suggests borrowing one of another farmer’s spares. With many of the men having been conscripted into the Army or the partisans or forced labor in Germany, it is the women who do most of the work.
Rušanj is so far removed from its century that the villagers do not even observe St. Vitus’s Day, the day still held sacred by most Serbs, marking the death of the last Christian king in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. “It’s only a national holiday,” one of them remarks. The significance of that comment stunned Rayner:
Try to grasp the idea of the distance of stars. If you are not a scientist your mind faints in horror at the attempt. So in horror did my mind faint when I tried to comprehend the awful slowness of change. How long does it take for a new idea to be adopted — six hundred years? A thousand? Well, there is some hope. But how much more time is needed for that new idea to oust a new one? That is like the distance of stars. How long had it taken for the people of Rušanj, wherever they may have been living, to learn to worship oak trees — or the sun, or their ancestors? And how many millenia had they needed to forget whatever ideas they had before that? The mind faints.
Yet when it became clear that the Russians and Tito’s partisans were going to succeed in forcing out the Germans, the villagers adapted quickly to the emerging balance of powers — placing Rayner’s situation at risk. “It followed that a newly-converted partisan might be able to win the confidence of Russian and other Communists by denouncing someone who had spoken a word in favour of the British.” And even more so if the denounced were a British citizen.
Rayner and her husband returned to Belgrade soon after the Germans evacuated, but their stay would be short. By late 1945, they realized they would not be allowed to resume their former bourgeois ways and one or both could face imprisonment. Stojan arranged for visas through a friend in the French embassy and they left in January 1946, never to return.
Women in a Village was published in England in 1957. The book received enthusiastic reviews. V. S. Pritchett considered it “a most remarkable book…. Something quite new and original: war as it is seen by a distinguished, level-headed and sensitive woman. It is most interesting and well-written.” Most reviewers cited the author’s compassion and understanding. “Here is the drama of life and personality told with intelling perception in fascinating human detail and all on a level of taste and values calculated to excite the mind and heart at once,” wrote Monni Adams in the The Montreal Gazette.
Isabel Božic in 1986, photo by Dragoslav Simic.
By then, Stojan and Rayner had parted ways, she settling back in Cambridge. The book soon fell out of print and was forgotten. In 1986, however, it was translated into Serbian and serialized in the Belgrade newspaper Politika. This led to a journalist, Dragoslav Simic, tracking down Rayner, who was by then retired in a small village near Diss in Norfolk. Born Isabel Foster, she had kept her married name and had been known as Isabel Božic in England. Simic traveled to Diss and interviewed Isabel Božic, who explained that she had taken her mother’s maiden name of Louisa Rayner as a pseudonym. Simic then visited Rušanj, where he found one of Savka’s surviving daughter-in-laws, Vuka. A translation of Simic’s story can be found online at http://www.audioifotoarhiv.com/engl/Louisa-Rayner.html. Isabel Mary Foster Božic died in 2004 at the age of 90.
Women in a Village, by Louisa Rayner (Isabel Mary Foster Božic) London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1957
This is a guest post by the writer David Quantick.
“You didn’t have time to think about the dangers of a raid in the cipher room of the secret service sabotage organisation. You were too bloody annoyed.”
There are many mysteries about this book: they start before the book has even begun, in the authorial blurb, and they continue even after the book has ended.
In the endpapers of the dust jacket, an anonymous writer says of S-s-s-sh that “readers of her Contract for a Corpse should find this, her latest book, even more satisfying”. There is, in actual fact, no evidence of that a book called Contract for a Corpse ever existed, while the only other novel published under Kathleen Mary Carmel’s name – Secret Service – turns out to be a French translation of S-s-s-sh. “Kathleen Mary Carmel” is itself a pen name, made out of the author’s real names, and S-s-s-sh, while a small classic of genre fiction, is not what the writer is most famous for.
Kathleen Withers and S. J. Simon, courtesy of their family.
Kathleen Mary Carmel was best known as Carmel Withers. Nicknamed, inevitably, Caramel, she was a brilliant and highly respected bridge player, and it was through that game she met her future husband S. J. “Skid” Simon. They both represented their country at bridge and even appeared on TV television programmes playing bridge before World War Two.
Skid was a household name, a brilliant analyst and a formidable player who was not only the author of the influential Why You Lose At Bridge (a book that is immensely readable even if you know nothing about bridge) but also, with Caryl Brahms, one of the most popular writers of the 1930s and 40s. (I shan’t write about Brahms and Simon here, except to say it was as a lifelong fan of their work that I came to Kathleen Mary Carmel and S-s-s-sh: despite their own reduction in fame, Brahms and Simon’s work, which ranged from historical comedies to ballet-related detective novels, has had many fans, from the late Ned Sherrin, who wrote with Caryl Brahms and completed her autobiography, Too Dirty For The Windmill, and Neil Gaiman, who ranks Brahms and Simon’s No Bed For Bacon very highly indeed.)
When I came across mention of Kathleen Withers in Too Dirty For The Windmill, I wanted to find out more about her, but there was very little information out there. I managed to acquire a copy of S-s-s-sh (as well as its French translation) and spent a while trying to find the elusive Contract for a Corpse without any luck. All I knew was that she had a file in the National Archives related to her real-life work in ciphers during the Second World War, that she was a champion bridge player, and that she had been married to SJ Simon, who predeceased her by only a year.
S-s-s-sh is an excellent book. From its dedication – FOR THE CIPHER ROOM MICHAEL HOUSE – via its unsentimental tone, appropriate for a murder mystery set during the carnage of a world war, to its satisfactory conclusion, this is a novel that’s entirely convincing in its milieu and entirely chilling in the way it follows its murders and the reason for those murders. Along the way, we are engrossed in the minutiae of life in a wartime cipher department – the flirtations between male officers and female staff, the triumph at cadging an extra piece of toast and marmalade, the sheer exhaustion of working in near-impossible conditions to save the lives of countless men and women – and we are caught up in a bigger picture: this killer’s agenda is, unsurprisingly, entirely connected to the greater drama of worldwide conflict.
It is also a funny book, a suspenseful book and at times a chilling book. The scene where the narrator reports that she has found a woman’s body stuffed into a cupboard plays out with humour at her superior’s bureaucratic bluster but also with casual horror – “I was tired, the smell was sickening and now into the bargain I was getting bored”. And, as befits a story set in the small, cramped world of a cipher unit, where everything is a secret and everyone lives in each other’s pocket, throughout there is a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia quite at odds with the increasingly cosy way that current WW2 novels portray Britain at war, all country lanes and boffins cycling off to Bletchley. S-s-s-sh is a book that’s full of the mundanity of war and all that it implies.
By the sound of it, this dry, half-humorous, half-serious tone was entirely typical of the author, whose death in 1948 (it was reported as suicide) was deeply mourned by her fellow bridge players. “It is at this moment at once a pride and a tragedy of remembrance that the writer of this brief memorial recalls that he was for long her partner and her friend,” wrote one of her obituarists, Guy Ramsey. Friends and fellow players recalled her wit and intelligence, and it is clear that she was more than a match for her anarchic, chaotic and popular husband (who died of a heart attack after a television appearance).
Kathleen Mary Carmel Skidelsky, née Withers, deserves to be remembered for more than one excellent novel (I am hopeful that one day S-s-s-sh will be reprinted), and it looks likely that she will be: while researching this piece, I came across the work of Shireen Mohandes, a writer and expert on bridge history. Ms Mohandes has been researching Kathleen’s life in some detail, and brought several important facts to my attention: you can read her work at www.mrbridge.co.uk/library (she was also kind enough to source the accompanying photograph and to ask permission from Kathleen’s family to reproduce it).
For now, however, it’s enough to read S-s-s-sh for its lucid, convincing depiction of a novel world of terror, and to remember Kathleen Mary Carmel as both a writer and a person of distinction.
[Editor’s note: When S. J. Simon died in July 1948, just hours after appearing on television with Terence Reese, it was front-page news on most British papers, even though the Times incorrectly identified Caryl Brahms as his wife. His death devastated his wife, who suffered from severe depression thereafter and took her own life with an overdose of barbiturates just days short of its first anniversary. S-s-s-sh is so rare that the only copy listed in Worldcat.org is at the British Library.]
Stories on Kathleen Withers’ death from the Daily Mail and The Times.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
“Before the all-out bombings of Berlin began in November 1943, there were six houses on the Hofmann’s street,” Joel Sayre writes. “Now, in July 1945, there were, by official reckoning, one and a half, of which the house that Lilo lived in was reckoned as one.” Though it looked like an intact house from the street, its roof had been destroyed by an RAF incendiary bomb in early 1944 and the attic floor served in place — except when it rained hard or long.
The House Without a Roof is a story of how ordinary people survive under desperate conditions. But unlike other books about the early years of Germany’s recovery from the war, such as James Stern’s The Hidden Damage (1947) and The Smoking Mountain (1951), this book is as much about survival under the Nazis as it is about survival after their downfall.
That the Hofmanns made it through the rise of the Nazis and the war with their home and selves relatively intact was due to a combination of luck and wit. Hedi, the wife, was the daughter of a Jewish soldier killed on the Western Front in World War One, which made her, under the Nuremberg Laws, a Mischling — half Jew, half Aryan, and thus prohibited from numerous rights. Neither Hedi nor Fritz supported Hitler’s policies, but they soon found it necessary to avoid being singled out for retribution.
In turn, Lilo, their daughter, learned to blend in. One day, Lilo came home, upset that the grace she’d become used to saying at lunch had changed. Instead of the traditional,
Come, Lord Jesus, Be our guest, Let these gifts To us be blessed.
The pupils were instructed to say,
Fold your hands And bow your head, To Adolph Hitler pray; For he gives our daily bread, And all our wants he doth allay.
Lilo asks to be moved to a different school, but Hedi knows that under the Nazi’s scheme for standardizing the Nazification of German institutions , the Gleichschaltung, every kindergartener would now be saying this prayer. So, Lilo simply has to accept and go along. “Remember that it’s very, very dangerous to say that you don’t like Hitler, so you mustn’t ever tell our secret to anybody, ever, ever.” Just keep reminding yourself, Hedi tells her daughter, “Das Wunder ist ein Schwindel” (This miracle is a fraud).
Luck often brings the Hofmanns under its umbrella. One of tenants in their apartment house is a sculptor whose heroic busts are favorites among the Nazi elite and the other residents enjoy the protection accorded him. One day, a nurse in a neighboring apartment takes Lilo to visit the hospital where she works, where she meets Frau Ley, wife of ReichsleiterRobert Ley, one of the highest ranking members of the Nazi party. The Reichsleiter arrives, clearly drunk, and becomes enraged when he spots a crucifix on the wall. He rips it down and begins smashing the fixtures. Lilo is quietly escorted out and told the matter is not to be spoken of.
Berlin in early 1946.
Their greatest ordeal, however, comes when Fritz Hofmann, a strong, tall, and Nordically handsome man with a university degree, is invited to become a member of the SS, the most elite — and most extreme — element of Nazi Party. The idea sickens Fritz, but he recognizes this is an offer he cannot refuse. After considering the limited options before him, Fritz and Hedi — with the help of a friendly doctor — contrive a solution: Fritz will go mad. He benefits from having seen how his own father behaved (and was treated) when he went insane years before.
In the longest section of the book, Sayre recounts the extraordinary lengths and intricate maneuvers involved in convincing the doctors and SS officers that Fritz is, indeed, insane while avoiding becoming a victim of the state’s mental health system. The key to Fritz’s performance is his taking a pro-Nazi position more extreme and passionate than even the most fervent follower. He takes to drawing his visions of the ultimate triumph of the cause:
His masterpiece was an SS Armageddon on top of a mountain in the Urals, under a lowering sky. The central figures were Himmler — winged, of course — and Jesus Christ shaking hands…. About the two central figures stood a hierarchy of Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner, Sepp Dietrich, the Waffen-SS general, the smiling Standartenführer who had offered Hofmann the commission, and many others. Here and there, a wounded SS angel heiled Himmler and Jesus from the ground.
One comes away in awe of Fritz Hofmann’s ingenuity and stamina.
The Hofmanns also survived the almost constant Allied bombing that Berlin endured from 1943 on. Lacking a robust and deeply-buried subway system like London and Moscow, Berlin had few good options for sheltering its residents. The choices were hunkering down in a trench or huddling in a crowded basement with neighbors. The government began providing free postcards for contacting friends and relatives:
We are living We have had deaths We have been [half]/[considerably]/[totally] bombed out
These statements were thought to be sufficient to cover all situations.
The House Without a Roof is a remarkably light and sane account of a dark and crazy time, which is a tribute to the character of both the Hofmanns and Joel Sayre. Though none of his work is in print today, Sayre was considered one of the very best of The New Yorker’s exceptional team of reporters. As editor William Shawn later wrote of Sayre, “he had a strong individual style, his writing had humor, warmth, deep feeling for people, and great vitality.” My copy of The House Without a Roof came from the collection of James and Tania Stern and bears the following inscription from Joel Sayre:
To Jimmy Stern and his delightful missus whose first name, heard in a moment of booze, unfortunately escapes me. In sincere admiration.
The House Without a Roof, by Joel Sayre New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948
The Miserable Child is a six-year-old English girl abandoned in a dismal boarding school in the south of England. Her mother is in a sanatorium, her father, as the title suggests, is in the desert — in this case, serving with Montgomery in Egypt. It’s the autumn of 1942. At the school, they have whalemeat stew for lunch: “There is a war on, you know.”
The little girl knows she’s been abandoned: “Daddy Daddy Daddy, you don’t think of me at all,” she complains. “You imagine that I am secure, but there is no security for me if you are about to die.” In the desert, Monty has a Plan. A great offensive against the Germans is in preparation. The girl, of course, knows nothing about this — at the time.
In telling the story of The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert, Dinah Brooke adopts both the perspective of a frightened and lonely little girl in 1942 and of her adult self, aware of history with a big H (the battle of El Alamein) and a little one (her father’s being evacuated with a case of jaundice before the attack). At school, “The Miserable Child is alone and panic-stricken.” At the same time, however, she also wanders around the front in Egypt, observing the progress of the battle: “The Miserable Child wanders up to Kidney Ridge, where the enemy are launching heavy armoured counterattacks…. She prowls around the battlefield like a jackal, a hyena, sniffing at bodies as the sun rises high and the heat and the flies and the stench rise with it….”
Brooke switches perspectives instantly, without offering us signal or clue. It makes reading a disconcerting experience but also adds to the impact of the narrative. Though things follow a roughly chronological order, we are never quite sure of where the narrator stands. Are we seeing things through the eyes of the Miserable Child in the moment or through the eyes of the woman whose memories of her miserable childhood and knowledge of other facts provide context not available to the girl?
We are one-third of our way into the book before it becomes clear that this is really the story of the father, not the child. The son of a steel-makng family in the North, Bob is a promising young man, ready to work his way up the ladder at the works, eager to push for improvements. His judgment is not always sound, however. He has a bit too much of a taste for drink and he marries a fragile, artistic woman suffering from TB. When the war comes, he is happy for the opportunity to escape into the Army, placing his daughter into a convenient school and enjoying a spree in London with his best friend’s wife before shipping out.
Though Bob proves unfit for service and returns to a post with the steel works, his promise has already faded. He knows neither how to accommodate the growing role of the trades unions nor how to keep the trust of the financiers or government ministers. So, he heads to Kenya to launch himself again, divorcing his first wife and picking up another along the way. The Miserable Child, of course, is left to make her way at the same miserable school.
The construction firm he joins in Kenya goes bust, and Bob takes to drink while his new wife’s popularity among the clubmen leads to mocking comments behind his back. He gives up Kenya and the wife and heads back to England. Within weeks, he’s lying in a locked ward for alcoholics, admitted through the collusion of his brother and the presiding physician.
From here, Bob’s story is one of steady decline, with most of his time spent in jail or asylums. Everyone agrees he’s a fine fellow. On the few occasions when he’s able to visit his daughter, in school or in London or on the maternity ward after the birth of his first grandchild, everyone comments on his manners and charm. It’s just that he can’t take care of himself, let alone anyone else. And so he leaves the Miserable Child there in the hospital facing the prospect of raising her child without the help of her own parents.
With only what we’re told in the book, we’re left wondering what Dinah Brooke was trying to do in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert. We feel sympathy for both father and daughter, but what is the point of this account of their miseries?
Fortunately, Brooke gave us her answer in “An Obsession Revisited,” an essay she wrote for Fathers: Reflections by Daughters, a collection edited by Ursula Owen and published in 1983 by Virago. “I was obsessed with my Dad for twenty years,” she writes.
You could almost say I made a career out of him – or out of the lack of him. Do people whose fathers are more present in their lives become so obsessed? I never lived with him after I was three, hardly saw him between the ages of seven and twenty-five, yet the amount of energy I focused on him was phenomenal.
“It would be hard not to describe his life as a failure,” she acknowledges. Like Bob in the book, his father ran a steel factory — Lysachts Steel Works in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. He married a painter with lung problems, hit a plateau in his rise in the firm, and shrugged off the fetters of that life by joining the Army and warehousing his daughter in a boarding school. After the war, he divorced, remarried, went to Kenya and failed to make a new start. And from there, as Brooke puts it, “He became an alcoholic, went mad, and spent most of the rest of his life in asylums of varying degrees of Dickensian horror.”
Joseph Brooke and his daughter Dinah in 1938. From Fathers: Reflections by Daughters.
In hindsight, she sees the novel as an act of reparation — a posthumous attempt to establish kind of relationship she never had — and of restoration (of her father’s reputation):
I mean look, a book, printed pages, hard covers, shiny pictures. Just look at you, see what a mess you made of your life? You’re much better like this. Neat, full of good things, fixed, appreciated. You really fucked it up didn’t you, you silly old man, but don’t worry, I’ll make it OK. I’ll rewrite your life for you, not improving things much — playing around with the facts a bit, yes; putting you into the army instead of the air force so I can have some nice games with Monty at El Alamein, but not papering over the cracks; not trying to make you appear better, more successful, a better father.
Joe, while I’m writing about you I feel as if I’m pushing something uphill. Making a tremendous effort, as if I have to act both parts at once, the parent and the child. I did so want you to be a father to me. I did so want someone to be a father to me. You did the best you could. It wasn’t a lot. The desire was there, but the execution was feeble.
It wasn’t enough, though. “I was really hooked on fathers,” Brooke admits. She wrote another novel (Death Games (1976)), in which “a suicidal daughter pursues her father through the horrors of war-torn Vietnam, and finally, in the heat of the afternoon, she makes love to him, and as he comes he has a heart attack and dies.” In an early fictional instance of self-harming, the daughter holds lit cigarettes to her skin just to feel something.
“Thank goodness I’ve finished with that little lot,” she concludes.
There’s another twist in the story, however. In “An Obsession Revisited,” Brooke mentions spending six years at the ashram of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. After becoming interested in the Bhagwan’s teachings in London, she travelled to India and made several short stays, during the last of which the Bhagwan annointed her with a new name, Ma Prem Pankaja.
Brooke decided to bring her children along and to settle in India for the long term. As she later wrote,
So we went, and settled into a run-down ex-British Raj house next to the ashram, surrounded by mangoes and palm trees. The only trouble was the kids didn’t like it much. The schools were dreadful, and there weren’t any kids their own age, turning ten, around the ashram. My daughter was having quite a good time, but my son desperately wanted to go home, and I more and more wanted to stay.
So, Brooke took her children back to England, left them in the care of their father, the actor Francis Dux, and returned to India. Brooke’s close friend, the writer Sally Belfrage, joined her and remained at the ashram for the better part of a year. Belfrage later published an account of the experience, Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram (1981), that offers an independent, if not entirely objective, view of Brooke’s time as a sannyasin (convert).
Belfrage was outraged by Brooke’s decision to leave her children behind. She also wasn’t convinced by Brooke’s embrace of her new faith. “They make her wear only orange,” Belfrage wrote, but in Brooke’s case, “It’s not by any means the shaven-headed-saffron-Buddhists-of-Oxford-Street sort of thing — Dior or Chloe will do as long as it’s orange,” and she looked “as Vogue-y as ever.” To Belfrage, the Rajneeshis were nothing more than a cult: “If Bhagwan were Billy Graham, they’d be out crusading; if he were Charles Manson they’d be out killing….”
Brooke returned to England, having decided against following the Bhagwan to his new enclave in Oregon, around the time that Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram was published. Feeling attacked by her friend, Brooke wrote an article titled “The Myth of the Responsible Mother” that appeared in The Guardian in May 1982. “I’d like to say something about motherhood from the point of view of this character, which was me,” it began.
Headline from Dinah Brooke’s article in The Guardian, 31 May 1982.
“Leaving my children certainly did not happen easily or casually. Being an averagely neurotic, guilt-ridden middle-class Englishwoman I manage to make it as difficult as possible for myself and everyone else by endless agonies of indecision,” she admitted. In her response to those who criticized her decision, Brooke also pointed to experiences recounted in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert:
Among the myths to which I have subscribed is the one which decrees that children can only be happy rolling around like puppies in large groups wearing the minimum of clothes and not being forced to learn anything — because of course I was an only child and went to boarding school and had to wear a uniform.
And her feelings during this separation were perhaps not that different from those of her father over those years in the boarding school. “Most of the time I didn’t miss them at all,” she confessed. “My mother wrote regularly, sending photos and telling me how they were.”
After two years at the ashram, Brooke returned to England to spend Christmas of 1977 with them. When she returned to India, however, “I couldn’t stop crying. I cried for six weeks, almost all day, every day.” “Somehow,” she recognized, “all the sorrow of my own childhood were condensed into this endless crying.”
Discussing her situation, the Bhagwan suggested that Brooke was making the mistake of trying to take responsibility for her children’s feelings. She came to accept this view. “My parents are not responsible for the way in which I experience my life,” she informed The Guardian’s readers, “and neither I nor their father are responsible for the way in which our children experience theirs.” She felt justified in her choice: “I spent six years with an Enlightened Master, and not gift that life has to offer can be greater than that.”
As one can imagine, not everyone agreed with Brooke’s conclusion. The Guardian printed a number of angry responses to what most seemed to consider a “self indulgent” article. “I’m sorry that Dinah Brooke got so little out of being a mother,” wrote one. “My stomach churned on reading about Dinah Brooke’s six-year stay in India sans children,” wrote another, who couldn’t imagine spending even six days away from her own.
Dinah Brooke effectively disappeared from the printed page after “An Obsession Revisited” was published. In the short biographical remarks that preceded the essay, she wrote, “Returned to London. Ran a market stall, met Derek, now Mahabodh. Work as temp. sec. and freelance journalist. Tomorrow?” From what I’ve been able to determine, although Brooke had worked for The Observer and others prior to taking up fiction, her work after the ashram wasn’t for any major papers or magazines. [2023 update: Perhaps more will be revealed with the republication of her novel Lord Jim at Home by Daunt/McNally Editions.]
The Miserable Child and her Father in the Desert, by Dinah Brooke London: New Fiction Society, 1974
The Hiding Place opens with Hans Frick putting on his Nazi party uniform, preparing his breakfast, and taking a tray with meals down to the two RAF airmen imprisoned in his cellar. While they eat, he tells them a story about a British bomber shot down outside Karlsruhe. The crew, having been rescued after parachuting into the Rhine, were summarily shot by the local Gauleiter. He then heads upstairs, changes out of his uniform and into a suit, and bicycles in to work.
“The date was June the twelfth, nineteen fifty-two.”
Well into the 1950s, the Soviet Union was returning its last surviving German prisoners from World War Two. For several decades after 1945, stories would appear from time to time of Japanese soldiers who emerged from the jungles of Pacific islands after hiding out for years, unaware the war had ended. But in The Hiding Place, Robert Shaw imagines the plight of two British airmen held in isolation, ignorant of the outside world aside from the stories of victories on the Russian front, amazing new German weapons, and the continuing futile attempts by Allied bombers to attack Germany.
This is not, however, an alternate history like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Instead, it’s a tightly-focused study of the psychology of prisoners and their jailer that anticipates by over a decade the phenomenon known as Stockholm syndrome. Connolly and Wilson, having bailed out when their Lancaster bomber was hit on a raid over Bonn, are taken prisoner by Frick, a civil defense auxiliary. To keep them from being lynched by an angry mob, he ushers them to his nearby house and locks them in the bomb shelter that’s been built in his basement. Thanks to his late mother’s fears about being buried alive, the shelter is extremely strong and completely soundproofed.
As the first hours pass, however, he realizes the quandary he’s in: he cannot take the men to the Gestapo without questions about the delay; neither can he set them free. He soon decides the only solution is to keep them prisoner in his house. And so he enters upon a fiction that, once started, he can’t figure out how to end.
Shaw manages with remarkable success in convincing the reader that Frick could continue to convince his prisoners that his fiction is their reality. In part he does this by careful attention to the necessary practical details, but more is the result of his understanding of how prolonged captivity, particularly in relative comfort compared to what the typical Allied POW in Germany could expect, erodes the will to resist.
The monotony of their existence also saps their initiative. After an argument over Connolly’s latest idea for overtaking Frick and escaping, the two men stop suddenly:
After a moment, Connolly and Wilson felt the whole of the previous conversation had been incomprehensible: neither of them could remember what had been said; surely they had said it before; it seemed to bear no relation to anything whatsoever; and in what order had the sentences fallen? They didn’t know if it was exactly similar to hundreds of other conversations, or significant in some tiny detail, some fresh twist. Connolly swayed again. He felt so weak this morning. Wilson felt as if he had been improvising the same tune at a piano for years, and now, asked to play the original, had forgotten what it was. What had they been talking about?
Wilson endures their confinement better than Connolly. A lawyer in civilian life, he early on convinced Frick to supply pencil and paper so he could practice translating remembered English texts into German. When his memory ran out, his imagination took over. Gradually, Connolly becomes “aware how much Wilson was changing — how much he was beginning to enjoy writing — how much there seemed for him to do.”
Eventually — and quite by accident — Wilson and Connolly do escape, and in some ways what happens next forms the most interesting part of the book. Interesting because the reader wonders where Shaw will take the story. After all, the men think the war is still going on, that they are in the midst of enemy territory. So, even after getting away from Frick, Frick’s fiction remains with them: they are, indeed, actively resisting being set straight.
Frick also struggles to adapt to his new reality after the escape, for he has become as emotionally dependent upon them as they have been physically dependent upon him. Despite the inhumanity of Frick’s actions, Shaw makes him seem sympathetic in the end. The Hiding Place manages to be both thrilling and tender and — despite the very specific conditions upon which the story is premised — also somewhat timeless. It could almost as easily have been set during the American Civil War or on another planet as science fiction.
The Hiding Place was twiced staged as a television play: once in the U.K. with Shaw himself, along with Sean Connery, as the airmen, and once in the U.S. with James Mason as Frick and Richard Basehart and Trevor Howard as Wilson and Connolly. Unfortunately, neither one of the productions received positive reviews. Then in 1965, Gottfried Reinhardt, son of the legendary theater director Max Reinhardt, decided to turn it into a comedy, Situation Hopeless … but Not Serious with Alec Guinness as the jailer and Mike Connors and Robert Redford as the airmen, now Americans. One IMDB reviewer wrote that the movie “was sheer torture to watch”; another, that it was “the strangest Alec Guinness film out there.”
The Hiding Place was Robert Shaw’s first novel. And though he’s now primarily remembered as an actor, he wrote a total of five novels between 1958 and 1969. His second, The Sun Doctor (1961), won the Hawthornden Prize and is becoming rather rare and expensive. The Flag, is something of a realistic parable, perhaps along the lines of William Golding’s The Spire. The Man in the Glass Booth (1967), inspired by the Adolf Eichmann trial, was adapted with considerably more critical successful both for the stage and film. A Card from Morocco (1969), about two British expats on the prowl in Spain, bears traces of Anthony Burgess in its corrupted sense of humor. All, sadly, are long out of print.
The Hiding Place, by Robert Shaw London: Chatto & Windus, 1959
When Pantheon published Bryher’sBeowulf in 1956, one of its reviewers, R. T. Horchler, wrote, “Those who know Bryher’s historical romances will be surprised that Beowulf is a contemporary war novel, about the bombing of London in World War II.”
I have to confess that over the decades I’ve known about Bryher and her work, I always assumed that Beowulf was a historical novel — something from English history along the lines of The Player’s Boy (Shakespeare) or This January Tale (the Norman Conquest). It was only when I was browsing through a bibliography of World War Two fiction recently that I discovered my mistake — and quickly located a copy.
What’s more surprising, however, is that Beowulf has never been published in England. Bryher had, in fact, written the book in late 1943 and early 1944 while living in London as a refugee with her partner, the American poet H. D.. As Bryher later wrote in her war memoir, The Days of Mars, “The English refused to publish Beowulf. They do not want to remember. It was a documentary, not a novel, but an almost literal description of what I saw and heard during my first six months in London.”
Instead, after she returned to France following Liberation, Bryher was encouraged by her friends Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier to translate the book into French. Tt was published by Mercure de France as Beowulf: roman d’une maison de thé dans Londres bombardé in 1948. Bryher later repaid the favor by dedicating the American edition of the book to Beach and the memory of Monnier.
Monnier in particular loved the book, declaring in a French review, “As for myself, I should like better to have written it than most of the books that are spoken about.” Beach, who met Bryher in the 1920 when her then-husband Robert McAlmon brought the writer into Shakespeare & Co., saw a connection between Bryher’s behavior on that first visit and her approach to her subject in Beowulf:
Bryher, as far as I can remember, never said a word. She was practically soundless, a not uncommon thing in England; no small talk whatsoever — the French call it ‘letting the others pay the expenses of the conversation.’ …. She was quietly observing everything in her Bryhery way, just as she observed everything when she visited ‘The Warming Pan’ teashop in the London blitz days — and, as Beowulf proves, nothing escaped her.
Beowulf takes place over a few weeks in the course of the Blitz. It centers on a modest tea shop, the Warming Pan, run by Misses Selina Tippett and Angelina Hawkins. Bought with a legacy left Selina from her years in service, the tea shop runs on a mixture of hospitality and the altruism of its owners, who are willing to look past rationing restrictions to slip an extra cake to a hungry young soldier or to allow a lonely old man to spend hours nursing a cup in the corner.
There is no plot per se. Bryher simply introduces us to the Warming Pan, its owners, help, and a selection of its customers. She begins with Horatio Rashleigh. Old, lonely after the death of his wife, and no longer producing paintings that anyone wants, he survives on a tiny allowance given begrudgingly by a cousin. As if old age and widowerhood weren’t bad enough for him, war has left him thoroughly bewildered: “Why, this war was raging because people wanted to make haste, were shoddy, indifferent to detail, selfishly avid of some temporary laurel, unlike the anonymous craftsmen who had spent a lifetime on some obscure corner of a cathedral wall.” Horatio would have been happier living before the Industrial Age. “The artist abhors engines,” he observes to one of the few people who will still listen to him.
To the Warming Pan come an array of noncombatants. Colonel Ferguson, an expat returned after years in Switzerland, in hope of offering some service to some part of the government — with no clear notion of what, where, or how. Adelaide Spenser, a suburban wife in for a day of shopping, to whom the war is inevitable if undesirable: “If people make guns, it is human nature to want to use them.” Ruby, the waitress, worried each night that her family’s East End tenement will be destroyed by one of the German’s “century” (incendiary) bombs. The only soldier to appear in the whole book is Joe, a childhood friend of Eve, one of Selina and Angelina’s lodgers. Joe is also the only person who appears to thrive on the war — leading Eve to think, “It was a comment on civilization that it had taken a war to settle him into his right place.”
The Warming Pan is the culmination of a dream Selina has fostered through the decades she spent caring for an invalid, Mrs. Humphries. “Tearooms had had a special meaning for Selina. She associated them with freedom.” Freedom might seem an odd thing to associated with a tearoom, but in Selina’s mind, “Only those people who lived obedience for six and a half days of the week knew what liberty was.” The Warming Pan fulfils a need — serving as something like “a cross between a village shop and the family doctor.”
Selina has cultivated the art of the standard. “With the shortage of eggs and currants, all experiments had gone.” “Nowhere in all the district,” she reflects with pride, “had good standard things”: good farmhouse tea, nice crumpets and gingerbread, rock cakes and buns” — “the sort of food people wanted after a hard day or some hours of freedom too precious to waste on lunch.” Adrienne Monnier understood the value of these staples in wartime: “It is surely as a distributor of manna that Selina Tippett considers herself and fulfills her task. Complete manna, since tea with her is accompanied by perfect toast and excellent pastry,” Monnier wrote in an essay collected in Les Dernières Gazettes.
In offering these bedrocks of the English diet and a warm, hospitality place in which to enjoy them, she is not just running a business but improving morale. “For if clients came in to lunch and went off cheerfully afterwards, they, in turn, would affect their relatives and their maids.” “It was inspiring really,’ she thinks, “how much one solitary woman could do in defence of her native land.”
Her partner, Angelina Hawkins, is one of those tweed-cloaked Englishwomen whose energy could power a thousand homes. While Selina minds the shop and caters to its customers — never chatting too long or allowing too much familiarity, mind — Angelina is off doing battle with the war’s many attempts to interfere with and disrupt normality. “It added such richness to life, making so many contacts,” she thinks “hearing and learning so many things even if occasionally something went wrong.” It’s no surprise to learn, for example, that Angelina had roped Selina into taking classes in Esperanto before the war, or that Bryher characterizes her as “what the French called ‘an amateur of meetings.'”
A woman drinking tea atop rubble from the Blitz.
War’s inevitable disruption of norms and the earnest attempts by the English to defend them is the overarching theme of Beowulf. To Adelaide Spenser, war is “a queue and a yellow form with blank lines that had to be filled up with the stub of a broken pencil.” To Selina, it’s “an endless succession of rainy days in a small country place on a brief summer holiday.” There is something satisfying in how many characters find solace in the thought that they can always write a sharply worded letter to the Times.
And no one is as ardent a defender as Mr. Burlap, the veteran civil servant Colonel Ferguson visits in the vain hope of finding a position. Arriving at his office one morning to find his secretary’s desk has been requisitioned, Burlap’s reaction is a gem of stiff-upper-lip-ness: “I am worried, I have been worried, but am I to understand that … unauthorized persons have entered this room where I am engaged, oh, in a very humble and insignificant manner, in guiding the destinies of a war-racked country and have removed the tool with which you aid me in such labours?”
The Beowulf of the book’s title refers not to the monster of the Old English saga but a plaster bulldog that Angelina Hawkins brings in one day to serve as the Warming Pan’s mascot:
“In a salvage sale, opposite the Food Office. I can’t keep a dog, I know, in the raids, but it’s so cheerless without one. I was afraid at first that you might be tempted to call him Winnie, but then I thought, no, here is an emblem of the whole of us, so gentle, so determined….”
“And so stubborn,” Adelaide Spenser interjects. And despite the fact that Selina, Horatio, and almost everyone else in the shop finds Beowulf the bulldog ugly and in bad taste, he does, in the end, serve his symbolic purpose, perched atop a bomb crater outside the shop, a Union Jack tied around his neck.
If Beowulf has a documentary quality, it’s no coincidence. As Bryher wrote in The Days of Mars, it had a real-life equivalent:
Hilda had discovered the Warming Pan some years earlier and usually went there for lunch. Up to 1941, its owners, Selina and Angelina, supplied their clients with soup, meat, two veg and dessert for two shillings and ninepence. They were country people, they bought all the ingredients they could directly from farms and the cooking was plain but excellent. Such places are now extinct. I liked it because, as I said, I could go there without fear.
And it was the sight of a plaster bulldog that inspired Bryher to write the novel:
I saw a huge crater at the end of Basil Street. Somebody had fetched a large plaster bulldog, I assume from Harrods because they were then on sale there, and stuck it on guard beside the biggest pile of rubble. At that moment Beowulf, my war novel, was conceived.
Even the sad old painter Rashleigh came from her experience: “We had corresponded for years,” she wrote, “and as he earned his living painting miniatures on ivory of the Victory, what else could I call him but Horatio?”
At just 201 pages in the American edition with generous margins, widely-spaced lines and each chapter set out by separately-numbered pages, Beowulf is more novella than novel, but Bryher packs a lot into her carefully chosen words. Monnier considered it a “little classic” and one American reviewer called it a novel “in which all the excess baggage has been thrown out.” Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Orville Prescott wrote that Bryher “has succeeded so well in her modest project that Beowulf could serve as a loving memorial to the millions of Londoners who carried on, as one of Bryher’s characters said, ‘after all the nervous people must have left.'”
Cover of Schaffner Press edition of Beowulf
Marianne Moore, writing in the Saturday Review of Literature, compared Bryher’s tribute to the spirit of “Keep Calm and Carry On” to Colonel Ferguson’s small but honest attempt to come to the aid of his country:
Like the Colonel’s return, Bryher’s work is always an offer of services. Beowulf is not only a close-up of war but a documentary of insights, of national temperament, of primness and patriotism, sarcasm and compassion, of hospitality and heroism, a miniaturama of all the folk who stood firm.
It’s wonderful, therefore, that British readers will finally have a chance to enjoy Beowulf for themselves. In October 2020, Schaffner Press, a small U.S. independent publisher based in Arizona, will be releasing it for the first time to in the U.K.. It can be pre-ordered now from Hive, Blackwell’s, Foyle’s, and Waterstones, among other outlets, and U.S. readers can find links to a variety of sources on the Beowulf page on Schaffner’s website.
Beowulf, by Bryher New York: Pantheon Books, 1956 Tucson, Arizona: Schaffner Press, 2020
Most writers will be forgotten. While there are plenty of examples where a writer’s work has been neglected through deliberate acts of suppression, there are far more where the neglect is due to the lack of any deliberate act of remembrance. Fortunately, when it comes to the work of British women writers of the 1920s to 1950s, there have never been so many people committing deliberate acts of remembrance on a daily basis. Beginning with the ground-breaking Virago Modern Classics series, publishers such as Persephone Books, Dean Street Press, Handheld Books, Turnpike Books, NYRB Classics, and the recently-launched British Library Women Writers are busy bringing the work of dozens of writers back to print. Dozens of book bloggers are helping promote and celebrate these reissues. Academics are collaborating through such initiatives as the Middlebrow Network and Transatlantic Literary Women. And through his Furrowed Middlebrow blog, Scott Thompson continues to reveal just how rich and vast the ranks of these women writers were.
Yet even with all these hands to the task, some remain overlooked. Take Honor Croome for example. She published five novels between 1943 and 1957, all of them received with enthusiastic reviews that praised her precise prose style and her sensitivity to the qualities of even her most unlikeable characters. Two — the ones discussed here — deal with the relatively popular subject of the experience of women during the Second World War. And yet not only have her books all fallen out of print but her name doesn’t even appear in what is likely the most comprehensive catalog of the writers, Scott Thompson’s Master List on Furrowed Middlebrow. It’s not through lack of trying. But when being lost and forgotten is the default end state for writers, there can never be enough deliberate acts of remembrance.
And so I want to take a few minutes to recognize Honor Croome’s work by looking at her first two novels: O Western Wind (1943) and You’ve Gone Astray (1944). O Western Wind focuses on the lives of four women and their children while You’ve Gone Astray deals with just two — yet it’s the latter which ultimately has a broader scope.
O Western Wind opens on a crowded passenger ship crossing the rough waters of the Irish Sea, on its way to take hundreds of British women and their children to safety in Canada. Most of them are in the Third class compartments: “One can get away from the smell of ship in the first class lounges and even, occasionaly, in Tourist; never in Third. There is oil in it, and brass, and sea salt, and, particularly in Third, disinfectant, and bad sailors find it conducive to seasickness.” Sitting in the Third class bar are two cousins, Margaret and Cora, happy to have their children settled for the night.
Margaret is older, longer married; Cora is younger, wed to an RAF bomber pilot, and stunningly attractive. “I wish I could feel like Cora looks, at the end of a day like this,” Margaret muses. In the lounge, they meet Mary Hallam, a nervous mother, with a two-year-old daughter and just months from delivering a second child. To these three women, Croome adds Daphne Torrance — divorced with two teenage sons and an eye for available men — and then takes us through their first year of life as evacuees.
The women are settled outside Boston with the help of a local refugee committee. The contrast with wartime England strikes them as soon as they leave the train station: “No sand-bags or strong-points anywhere. No road-blocks, no sentries. Not a man in uniform to be seen. Not a plane in the sky. No one carrying gas-masks. No steel helmets on the policemen. A carefree, lovely land. And tonight there would be lights again.”
Margaret and Cora and their children end up in a remote country house. The peace and quiet of their surroundings seem unworldly after life in crowded, busy, noisy London:
Margaret and Cora, like dwellers on another planet, went marketing and swept and scrubbed and cooked, tended their children, drank their tea, and sat by the fire, evening after lonely evening. They had the children; they had housework. There — as mothers and drudges — they stopped short. It was a great deal, but a great deal was missing. Friendship meant an envelope with a printed slip “Opened by Examiner 3697” gummed over one end.
“Whole tracts of faculties lay idle,” Croome writes, and in both novels she examines the uneven and often unbalanced mix of domestic, economic, and intellectual demands that women who take on the responsibilities of child-rearing have to meet. Margaret thinks, only half-jokingly, “We should have been Victorian wives…. Then we should have found this a lovely, lovely rest.” Except, as she quickly adds, that probably would have meant she would have had eight children to care for and Cora four.
Eventually, the Greater Boston Hospitality Committee brings the four women and their kids together to live at Southwood, a large mansion left empty after the death of its dowager owner. In some ways, it comes to seem even more artificial than the isolation of their farmhouse in the country. Everything around them speaks of wealth, luxury, comfort — but it’s all given by the grace of the Hospitality Committee. “It seemed as though several new layers of unreality had interposed themselves between them and the great tragedy from which they had cut themselves off; and in their varying ways they fretted against their physical good fortune.”
I was often remind of Paul Cohen-Portheim’s Time Stood Still, his account of four years spent as an internee in a British camp during the First World War. Like him, these women are not abused in any physical way; and yet, the very artificiality and limitations of their situation become, in the end, a sort of torture. And like Cohen-Portheim, Croome’s women find that “The worst tortures of camp life were due to the small failings of one’s fellow creatures everlastingly in evidence.” Margaret thinks at one point:
For the duration, Clive Torrance would infest the dinner table. For the duration, they would have to check their conversation to keep it within Mary Hallis’s scope. For the duration, they would chit-chat with Mrs. Torrance about nothing in particular. Margaret found herself wanting, frantically, to hear the sound of a masculine voice, preferably several of them. I’m not turning into a man-hunter, I’m resigned to celibacy, but I am tired of being a full-time hen….
It is only after several crises that Margaret, whose voice seems to speak Croome’s own thoughts most often, finds a way to look beyond the walls of their comfortable but indefinite existence. “There would be moments of black depression,” she thinks, but she can at least “distinguish between the superficial and the real, now.”
O Western Wind draws in part on Honor Croome’s own experiences. She left Liverpool bound for Canada in July 1940 with two children (and, like Mary Hallam, within weeks of delivering another). Although the family would eventually settle in Ottawa after John Croome was appointed head of the British Food Mission to Canada, Honor and the children spent over a year living as refugees in Westwood, Massachusetts outside Boston. While there, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe taking exception to another British refugee’s suggestion that Americans were not showing sufficient gratitude for Britain’s sacrifices: “You owe us much, we owe you much,” she wrote. “Among other things each owes the other for their share in our joint victory over Hohenzollern Germany. Of what those shares were, let our dead as well as our dollars speak.”
When the Croomes returned to England in 1946, they needed a much bigger cabin. They were now a family of seven, bringing along three sons born in Canada. In other words, Honor Croome managed to produce two novels and three children during her own indefinite existence in the US and Canada. Her capacity for work seems astonishing. Both before and after the war she was a frequent reviewer for The Economist, and one of her editors, Sir Geoffrey Crowther, once said of her speed in reading, “A thousand pages in her sight are but an evening gone.” The same may have been true for her speed in writing. She must have been one of those rare writers who can work in short snatches, for she dedicated her second novel to “John, Ursula, Gilbert and David, because they occasionally kept quiet.”
Yet in neither book does Croome suggest that the solution to a woman’s challenges in juggling both family and a career is simply to work harder. You’ve Gone Astray (1944), in fact, is a demonstration that this is a recipe for failure. In some ways, the book is a prequel to O Western Wind: taking place between the early 1930s and the first year or so of the war, it follows two women — Linda and Kitty — from a short spell of sharing a flat in London through marriage, children, and successes and failures at work.
You’ve Gone Astray is far more about Linda than Kitty. Kitty — slight, beautiful, flirtatious and starting out as a writer of romance novels — is more of a leitmotif than major character. Though we enter the story through Kitty’s eyes, it’s Linda — tall, Amazon-like, with a fearsome intellect (if less formidable practical knowledge) — with whom we spend most of our time.
The daughter and niece of vigorous Edwardian activists, Linda feels somewhat guilty for taking a job with a reform-minded organization called the Housing Plan rather than heading off to India to run a hospital as her aunt did or crusading for women’s right as her mother did. Her work brings her in contact with Hugh, a journalist with a strong interest in social reform, and soon the two are married — and Linda is pregnant.
As she tries to raise her daughter while continuing to work for the Housing Plan, she realizes she’s missing out. On burning the midnight oil with colleagues, on a pint after work, on the Budapest Conference. She struggles with the cognitive dissonance of being both mother and manager: “She had to turn dislocating psychological somersaults, morning and evening, Saturday and Monday, switching from the role of expert and organizer to that of suburban housewife and back again.” And the simply physical toll: “She was almost always tired.”
Kitty encounters the same issues when she becomes pregnant several years later than Linda. She expresses a feeling my wife often recounted during her pregnancies: “It’s so inevitable. As though something had you by the scruff of the neck and were whispering in your ear, ‘You can’t get out of this. You can’t get away. You can’t talk your way out, no one can help you out, it’ll happen, I’m not sorry for you, my name is Nature.'” Unlike Linda, however, Kitty can afford to park her son with a kindly couple in the country while she types and socializes away and her husband — present in the book for little more than the essential biological moment — is off on archaeological expeditions.
Croome captures the blur of considerations and commitments that must swirl through the head of any working mother:
… waking with an eye on that clock, working, still with an eye on that clock, frantically, among perversely uncooperative kitchen utensils and crockery, listening desperately for Mrs. Pratt’s click at the gate, picturing the London train remorselessly pulling out of the station a mile away; crawling home in a rush-hour train, supper menus and unfinished business dancing an unholy saraband in her brain; listening to Mrs. Pratt’s chronicle of leaking taps, spoiled potatoes, mistakes in the grocery bill, and misdeeds by Diana (more a problem child than ever these days); flinging off her town clothes, flinging on an apron, plunging through the preparation for supper, with scarcely time to give Diana a good-night kiss; spending her evenings on endless letters to agencies and to the malevolent half-wits or mere phantoms whom those agencies recommended.
In a sentiment many women might share, she adds, “Linda yearned for a good servant as a prisoner for freedom, as a miser for money, as a sick man for health.”
The strain of it all takes its toll in numerous ways, leading to arguments, separation, even death. There are some grim chapters in this book. And though Linda and Hugh find some happiness on the other side — and Kitty finds an escape from her worries — Croome doesn’t offer us happy endings, just sustainable compromises. She was nothing if not a realist.
Croome’s own background bore some resemblance with Linda’s. Her mother, Mildred Minturn, was an American socialite who graduated from Bryn Mawr, where she became a close friend of Frances Fincke, later wife of the famed judge Learned Hand. In fact, Fincke turned down Hand’s first proposal to marry because she and Mildred had planned to live together and pursue careers as scholars and social reformers. Bertrand Russell met Mildred while she was at Bryn Mawr and the two maintained a flirtatious relationship even after she married Arthur Hugh Scott, an Englishman, in 1906.
Mildred took graduate classes at Barnard and traveled widely after leaving Bryn Mawr, visiting Japan and Europe and taking a desert caravan in Egypt with a fellow classmate. She was outspoken in her views, writing frequent letters to magazines in England and the U.S., and translated French Socialist Jean Jaures’s Studies in Socialism shortly before her wedding to Scott. She struggled, however, with health problems and died in 1922, when Honor was just a teenager.
Honor had a most cosmopolitan upbringing. She spent her early years in France, where her father taught at l’École de l’ Île-de-France, a French boarding school run on the model of an English public school. She attended a girl’s school in Switzerland (an experience she used as the basis for her 1955 novel, The Mountain and the Molehill), the Hayes Court School in Kent, Bryn Mawr College in the US (for a year — “I did not flunk out,” she was careful to note), then the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally the London School of Economics.
After the LSE, she wrote her first book, The Approach to Economics, then landed a job at the New Fabian Research Bureau, a left-leaning organization involved in statistics and planning — most probably the inspiration for the Housing Plan in You’ve Gone Astray. Soon after, she married John Lewis Croome, who’d been a year ahead of her at the LSE.
Honor Croome, from a 1944 newspaper article
In 1935, as she informed the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, she took a job as political secretary to Lady Astor. She wrote that “It’s tremendous fun” but also tiring: “I am rapidly going grey and can hear imaginary typewriters and telephones in my dreams.” A year later, she wrote that she left the post “owing to (a) nervous exhaustion and (b) incompetence” and “returned to the fleshpots and to society of son [John] and heir aged 2½.” “Very nice, too,” she added. She gave birth to a daughter, Ursula, in 1936 and wrote her classmates that she was busy with a family “to cook for, a job to hold down, and book to see through the press.” The book she referred to was her weightiest economic text, The Economy of Britain: A History, published in 1938, which she co-wrote with R. J. Hammond.
After nearly six years in the US and Canada, Croomes returned to their home in Claygate outside London in 1946 and Honor resumed her work as an economist and journalist while continuing to write and raise her children. She published her third novel, The Faithless Mirror in 1946 and began publishing articles for the general public in magazines such as Home & Garden. Included in Who’s Who’s starting in 1950, she answered the book’s pro-forma questionnaire by listing her primary form of recreation as “domesticity.” She published two more novels in the 1950s: The Mountain and the Molehill and The Forgotten Place (1957). She also published a further economics text, Introduction to Money in 1956.
When she died in 1960, The Economist made an exception of its practice of being “anonymous by conviction as well as by tradition” and printed a black-boxed notice of her passing. “To those who knew her,” the editors wrote, “every piece she wrote could only be hers; to those who did not, her reviews were no less identifiable, running like a strong shining thread through these pages. The style was the woman.”
They paid tribute to the high quality of her prose: “The cutting-edge and quality of what she wrote was that she knew, respected and was mistress of the English language. It was almost impossible to alter or cut her contributions.” As a reviewer, she was “lively and learned in the right sense of both words; sensitive but never soft; humane and good-humoured but never sentimental or trivial; critical, sometimes in a biting and indignant fashion, but never censorious; a civilised human being with a zest for life and people as well as understanding of great ideas and arguments.”
“It is hard to believe that there can ever be another like her,” The Economist piece concluded. “This is understatement,” responded Sir Geoffrey Crowther in the next issue. “Such beauty, such wite, such capacity to understand other people’s minds, sometimes even better than they do themselves, such capacity to move with grace in so many different fields from housewifery and writing about it to the most abstruse theoretical economics — all these in combination made her unique.”
Perhaps this post will now motivate other readers to discover Honor Croome’s unique qualities as a novelist.
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.
People sheltering in the Elephant and Castle Underground station during the Blitz
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.
The Least of These, by Celia Dale London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd., 1943 New York: Macmillan & Company, 1944
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!
Macmillan splashed this ad for E. Arnot Robertson’s novel, The Signpost across the top half of page 13 on the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, consuming paper that British publishers struggling with wartime shortages would have coveted. A Book of the Month Club selection, The Signpost was expected to have good sales based on the popularity a decade earlier of Four Frightened People, and it seems to have done respectably well. A month later, it was #7 on the Herald Tribune’s “What American is Reading” list, which surveyed 52 bookstores across the country, behind A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Lloyd Douglas’s Crucifixion epic The Robe. (“What America is Reading” offers a fascinating view of the American book market of the time, showing how many sales came from publisher’s stores (Scribners, Doubleday & Doran, Putnam’s) and department stores (Marshall Field in Chicago, Frederick & Nelson in Seattle, Woodward & Lothrop in Washington, D.C..)
The Signpost told of Tom Fairchild, an RAF pilot convalescing after being wounded, returns to Kildooey, a small fishing village in Donegal where he spent some happy summers as a boy. Getting from London to neutral Ireland seems impossible at first due to transportation restrictions and a closed border between Ulster and Ireland. A government clerk who conveniently turns out to be from Kildooey (it is fiction, after all) offers him a practical way past the latter problem, though:
“You go by Ulster, amn’t I telling you all this time?” said the clerk, irritable in his turn. “The frontier’s closed each night after six o’clock, mind, on the Ballinfaddy road.”
“Closed?”
“Closed. The guarda goes home then. Only a small road it is. There’s little traffic by day. Not worth keeping a man by night at the post.”
“So after six, you mean, I just go straight through?”
“Meaning that.”
Robertson dedicated the book “To the good friends I am about to lose in Eire.” The TLS reviewer wondered at this: “To lose through having written this book? But Miss Arnot Robertson would never have made friends of the kind of people who would take offence at The Signpost as another injustice to Ireland. Perhaps he missed the part where the RAF pilot sums up the Irish as “The kindest and most ruthless people, the most charming personally and the most stupid politically,” living in a land of “infinite leisure” which makes “poverty so bearable if inevitable.” Certainly one well-qualified critic, the Irish novelist Kate O’Brien, was less than impressed:
It is an Eire which I for one do not recognise, but it has the effect of toning down Miss Robertson’s customary assurance of judgement to a new speculativeness; it neutralises the well-known acidity and induces a warm, odd generosity. But, for all the author’s wit and goodwill, her beautiful village and crazy villagers are synthetic, straight out of a clever writer’s notebook. And, indeed, the two visiting strangers are synthetic also. I found the book entertaining in patches, but difficult to get through and impossible to believe in.
Despite its strong sales in the first lap, however, The Signpost failed to prove a winner in the long run and has been out of print for over 70 years now.
Writing Home, a drawing by Pfc. John Fabian, USMC, from “Marines at War: Sketches and Paintings by Marines” (1943)
I knew Mina Curtiss’s name as the collector and editor of the letters of Marcel Proust. Curtiss wrote of her experiences in tracking down Proust’s letters in her 1978 memoir, Other People’s Letters (which is, unfortunately, out of print again). But I was surprised to learn that during World War Two, she collected letters written by America G.I.s stationed all over the world and from all walks of life in the 1944 book, Letters Home.
I found the following review, by journalist and historian Gerald W. Johnson, in a small stack of brown and brittle old copies of the New York Herald Tribune weekly book review section that I bought from a dingy antique store in San Antonio back when we lived there. The review not only makes the book sound well worth rediscovering but itself captures some of things lost from that time (“It is my firm conviction that the boys were lying, but they lied like gentlemen, adding honor to the race”–a sentence no one could write today, for good and bad reasons).
The War — by the Boys Who Are Fighting It by Gerald W. Johnson, New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, June 11, 1944, p.1.
An intelligent woman, an associate professor of English in Smith College, has selected out of some thousands about a hundred letters from forty-odd men in the fighting services, including the merchant marine, and presents them in a book as a picture of war from the enlisted man’s standpoint.
Incidentally, she presents a problem that floors the reviewer. It is a good book, yes. But what kind of a book? The answer is, every kind—and how are you to describe every kind of book in a single review? In some cases, several letters from one man are reproduced; but no man is given more than twenty-five pages. The result is that style, content, point of view, everything changes with each new section.” There are intensely religious sections and bawdy sections, sentimental sections and cynical sections, tender and tough; polished and semi-literate, comic and tragic. One vast field of literature, however, is missing altogether. There isn’t a phony section in the book. These men were writing, not for publication, but for the information of the people at home, and not many men write pretentiously to the crowd at home.
Not that the book is altogether a truthful record. Take, for example, the letters written to a certain Mrs. Roark, of Grover, N. C., by her six sons in the services. Every man of them swore up and down that he was in fine health and spirits with not a care in the world and Mom must stop worrying (the one who was in the Philippines died in a Japanese prison camp). It is my firm conviction that the boys were lying, but they lied like gentlemen, adding honor to the race.
It is evident, too, that the writers are more discreet than exact when they touch upon two subjects—the horrors of the battlefield and the recreations of the man-at-arms in his infrequent hours of ease. But who would have it otherwise? The people at home do not, and cannot, know at the same time either the comradeship or the fierce stimulation of an active campaign. Yet without these the perspective on both recreations and horrors must be all wrong.
The letters are all from the ranks. Letters from officers were excluded as reflecting too much the sophisticated point of view; the exceptions are a few airmen, a parachute trooper, an ensign or two and a lieutenant of ordnance, and each of these was chosen for a highly individual point of view.
I said there is not a phony letter in the collection, yet there is one composed entirely of the most stilted, threadbare clichés from all the Fourth of July orations ever made. Furthermore, it came from this country and was written by a woman to her husband. He was an oiler in the merchant marine and he had been on one of the early runs to Murmansk, before protection was well organized. That convoy lost nine out of eighteen ships. New he was off again, and his wife wrote him as if she were addressing a large and unintelligent audience. But before you finish that discharge of bombast you discover the truth–the woman was sick with fear, but she had been told she must write cheerful letters and she was going to be cheerful if it killed her. When you see that, it transmutes all the tinsel into gold.
How it feels to drive a tank for the first time; what one does standing watch on the bridge of a destroyer; how the “grease monkeys” (ground crew) sweat it out when their pilot comes back an hour late; how the Australian women stride; how it felt to be torpedoed off Algiers; how sorry the men in Italy are for those on Guadalcanal; what the soldiers think of strikers—all these are here and they are of the substance of war as it is.
The book is full of stunning remarks: “I have been in Jerusalem and was at the place where Christ was born. . .. I sure do wish I was in North Carolina where I was born.” “Heaven help them [the Japs] when all our forces are concentrated in the Pacific. They are going to need all His help and a hell of a lot more, too!” “I’m a Roosevelt man but sometimes I wonder why.” “Freedom? Maybe it’s more than freedom. I think it is for the fulfillment of all the dreams and sacrifices that we, the people make.”
If you are interested in a picture of the war as a whole, done with literary skill, by all means stick to the books of war correspondents, who are professional writers, much better at the trade than these men. But if your wish is to see the thing as it is, to comprehend the attitudes of the men who are fighting it, this will do more for you than the most brilliant productions of the professionals.
The letters of Iowa soldiers [published in a daily column in the Des Moines Register and Tribune] stimulated me to make an anthology of enlisted men’s letters from all over the United States. (Officer’s letters predominated in similar anthologies.) I wrote a letter to two hundred and fifty newspapers asking them to publish a request to families of servicemen to send me their letters. Most of the city papers, as well as many small-town and village weeklies, cooperated. Within weeks I was swamped with contributions. In cartons, in outsized envelopes, in show boxes, or just in paper parcels came more hundreds of letters than even I with my obsessive curiosity could digest. But after I sampled one or two out of every batch it became clear that a collection of single letters would not reproduce or re-create the impact of my Iowa experience. I therefore chose thirty-six series of letters written from a man’s first day in the service to his latest and sometimes his last. Sixteen states and almost every branch of the armed services were represented.
Letters Home was published on D-Day and had a very good notice on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday book section. But the book failed to attract many readers, although excrepts from it continue to be published in textbooks and anthologies. Obviously my great interest in letters intended for someone is not widely shared. Even I, when the selection was finally made, felt smothered by other people’s letters and thought that never again would I want to read any that weren’t written to me.
Only three years later, Curtiss was in Paris hunting down Proust’s unpublished letters.
Letters Home, arranged and edited by Mina Curtiss Boston: Little, Brown, 1944
Since the Fifties, there have been plenty of junk or ‘Pulp’ novels depicting the Second World War from American and, to a lesser degree, British & Australian authors. (Yes, even Australia had pulp war novelists. Owen Gibson was one writer who, during the Fifties, churned out about 25 slim novels about Aussies in WW2. Totally forgotten now, his books are so rare that even the National Library doesn’t have copies of all of them).
Written purely for entertainment value with no literary pretensions whatsoever, these novels were easily digestible, usually churned out by hacks and often adhered to a routine recipe. That meant loads of action, rendered in a blunt, easily digestible manner along with a compulsory lurid sex scene or two. For the American types, the characters usually comprised the stock GI squad encountered in many a novel or Hollywood film- the wise-cracking New Yorker, the rich kid from Boston with a chip on his shoulder, the tall Texan farm-boy, the loud-talking Italian, the brooding Native American who grew up on a reservation etc.
The majority did not survive past their first print-run. Amidst the mediocrity, an occasional better example would emerge, usually when a writer tried just that little bit harder or dared to stray from the standard rules of the genre. One which stayed in my memory when I read it when I was at high school in the early 80s was The Glory Jumpers (1961) by Delano Stagg which stood out from fellow Pulp novels by the author’s attempt to realistically depict combat rather than the blood-and-guts battle-porn that lesser writers indulged in. I recently tracked down a copy and re-read it. Despite my advanced age, I was still impressed with it. It is certainly no great work of literature but it has the flavour of realism and after doing a little research on the net, I discovered that Delano Stagg was a pseudonym of two authors who actually served in WW2. The book features a similar scenario to Spielberg’s movie “Saving Private Ryan”: an outnumbered group of Americans has to defend a Norman village from an overwhelming force of Germans. Yet, despite the blood-and-thunder of the film, I found Stagg’s novel more convincing and more believable in its portrayal of battle. In the latter, not every G..I is an expert marksman, there is no hand-to-hand fighting (in modern warfare, enemy soldiers seldom get that close) and most casualties are caused by artillery.
Inspired by my re-discovery of Stagg’s little novel, I dug out another forgotten war novel from my youth: Ragged Regiment (1981) by George Marion. I first read this when I was 17, only six years after this novel was published. My original copy was lost so when I say “dug out,” I meant hunting down another paperback copy on eBay. I wish I could explain my fascination with obscure war fiction and why it has grown in the past ten years. Perhaps I like the idea that at least some-one is reading the labours of some long-forgotten author. Or maybe its resentment that some real gems of the genre have been allowed to lie neglected in dusty obscurity while a few famous (and in my opinion, over-rated) examples like All Quiet on the Western Front have never been out of print.
George Marion Cole (1927-2008) was an engineer and lawyer who lived most of his life in Seattle. Drafted into the US army in 1945, he arrived in Europe after VE Day and he spent a period in post-war Germany as a soldier in the Allied forces of occupation. During this time, he learnt to speak fluent German and developed an enthusiasm for the art and literature of that nation. Marion was also a keen writer and he wrote five manuscripts but only one — Ragged Regiment — was published.
Let’s get one thing clear. Ragged Regiment is not a great novel. In a literary sense, the writing is competent but routine. But to be fair to the author, I doubt Marion intended it to be. There is nothing pretentious or even ambitious about this novel. The only literary reference is the title: the phrase “Ragged Regiment” appears in Shakespeare via the character Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1. Having been published in 1981, Marion’s novel appeared long after the classic Pulp era of the 40s and 50s. Indeed, the late author might have been offended by my suggestion that his book has any link to that genre at all. But in my opinion, it bears similarities through its straightforward, unpretentious style and the ease of its consumption by the reader. However, Marion’s novel retains an interest for me because of its down-to-earth naturalism. That is the point at which this novel parts company with most Pulp war novels, through its focus on the everyday mundane life of a frontline soldier.
When one thinks about most of the popular portrayals of WW2, be it HBO’s Band of Brothers or screen games like Call of Duty, the focus has been on the men at the sharpest tip of the sharp end. Any and every battle is furious, relentless, bloody and vital. Everybody fights hard and many do not survive.
What makes Ragged Regiment stand out from this crowd is that it takes the opposite approach. The characters in the novel are rear echelon US army engineers who have spent the latter half of 1944 pulling non-combat duty in France, repairing roads and building bridges behind the lines. The central character, PFC Stan Nilson, has had a soft existence, running a PX store at a rear-line base. At the beginning of the Ardennes Offensive (the so-called “Battle of the Bulge“) in the freezing cold of December 1944, the regiment’s sheltered life comes to an abrupt end when they are sent into the lines to serve as riflemen.
Had this been a standard war novel of the Pulp era, or if it was the scenario of a more recent war movie, the regiment would end up fighting some epic, costly battle, having to defend a vital position such as a bridge or crossroads, which would escalate into a bloody finale. Alas, any reader expecting such from this novel is going to be disappointed. The engineers are assigned a sector to hold but it is on the fringes of the main battle. There is no grand attack by the enemy, no massed armour, no hordes of German infantry. This is a quieter sector that appears frozen by stalemate. The Germans do not launch major assaults; instead they probe the US lines, sending out patrols or occasional raiding parties. Deaths do occur — quite frequently but in a random fashion: a mortar round or sniper shot, a case of frost-bite, an accident, a friendly-fire incident. The engineers have no idea of what is happening in other sectors and simply have to do their best to survive and to hold the line.
What I like about this novel is its unstated quality which greatly enhances its’ realism. Instead of epic battles, we get to see the mundane concerns of the frontline soldier, where the cold, damp and lack of sleep are as dangerous enemies as the Germans. The novel devotes a lot of space to the simple problems a soldier encounters everyday- how to stay warm, how to keep your feet dry, how to rig up adequate communications, how to rotate shifts in the lines so everyone gets an equal chance at sleep. The novel shows vividly how fatigue can wear down a soldier’s reserves of strength as much as actual combat. One exhausted soldier, ordered to pull a second shift in the lines before he has had any rest, draws his rifle at his hated platoon sergeant and is barely restrained in time by some of his buddies.
Close encounters with the enemy are rare. Stan Nilson only has one such meeting and he kills his opponent in a very un-heroic, un-Hollywood fashion, shooting the German in the back. Even that is a Pyrrhic victory as the German has already killed two of Nilson’s friends beforehand. After that incident:
For the next three nights Stan went about his duties in a state of mental and physical numbness. He thought about Andy and the young German whose body he had riddled with half a drum of slugs. The images in his mind were at times clear and vivid, at other moments distant and misty. But always they were there. He shunned conversation and avoided company. It irritated him to see a hint of laughter or pleasure in the other men. Somehow it reminded him of what he was not and never again could be.
The severe stress of existing in a war zone is portrayed well but the novel also highlights the vital relief a soldier can derive from even a simple pleasure, like finally getting some hot water to shave in:
Stan knelt down beside the helmet, grabbed what was left of his bar of soap and began lathering his face. His concentration on the excruciating sense of pleasure flowing into his skin from the hot water was total and absolute. If he ever saw a bathtub again, he would soak in it forever.
Despite its lack of any artistic merit, the low-key restraint of this war novel marks it out as unusual, making a refreshing alternative to the more bombastic depictions of warfare that we normally receive.
This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill ([email protected]).
Ragged Regiment, by George Marion New York: Tower Books London: Star Books
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, 
I knew 