I help myself to some home-made plum cake—Laura is an
excellent cook—and I wonder how many women today are back in their pre-war
ruts. For how many was the war merely a temporary disarrangement and for how many
others has it meant complete re-adjustment, an entirely new set of
circumstances? This is a stupid thought for me to have when, even in my own
case, I don't know the answer.
With
the possible exception of Josephine Kamm's Peace,
Perfect Peace, which I reviewed here,
this fourth of Barbara Beauchamp's seven impossibly obscure novels (most of her others
are going on the next iteration of my Hopeless Wish List) may be the
closest you can get to time travel back to an English village (with an
occasional foray into London) in the days just after the end of World War II.
As such, although it may not be the most polished of novels, it will surely
earn a place on this year's Furrowed Middlebrow Dozen and should probably find
its way onto every historian of the postwar's bibliography.
As
was the case with Kamm, it's as if Beauchamp somehow realized—unlike most
authors—how unique and how fleeting were the details of life in those brief
weeks and months just after the war's end, when both men and women were
returning from service and readjusting, often with difficulty, to some approximation
of their old lives. She seems to have realized, too, that, among all the
patching up and rebuilding, the intense desire by most to put the realities of
war behind them meant that many of those details would be irretrievably lost. And
she decided, bless her heart, to carefully document it all, with a particular
focus on women who have served—particularly in the ATS (Auxiliary
Territorial Service) and the WAAF (Women's
Auxiliary Air Force).
Helen
Townsend, who narrates occasional sections of the novel, and neighbor Helen
Watson are unlikely friends as a result of having served together in the ATS.
Helen is married to Gyp, the local doctor, but has spent much of the war in an
affair with Brian, and both men are now due back from active service. ("As
a married woman I re-allocated myself two months ago when I knew Gyp was on his
way home. Otherwise I think I should have stayed on.") Laura, meanwhile,
stuck caring for her domineering father since her mother died in 1943, is
already missing the war.
Then
there's Mary Cross, the widowed mother of an RAF pilot, who has determined to
be both father and mother to her son while supporting him by writing the
"Aunt Jennifer" advice column for a major magazine:
Even as 'Aunt Jennifer,' who now dealt almost exclusively with
demobilization and re-settlement queries, she was sometimes startled at the
problems confronting her readers. In some she detected a dangerous apathy to
existing conditions and in others a too fanatic desire to go on fighting—anything
and everything, without seeming reason or purpose.
There's
Angela Worthing, a well-to-do woman determined nevertheless to have a career,
who tries to help out Brian's troubled brother Peter. There's John and Maggie
Cobb, the owners of the local pub the Cock and Pheasant, wherein a fair amount
of the novel's action takes place; the Cobbs' son Dick, who thrived in the
service and was made an officer, but now gets harassed by police when he wears
his medals because they assume they're fake; and their daughter Lily, who was a
corporal in the WAAF and is now an unmarried mother, since her fiancé was
killed on his final mission.
Other
characters come in for attention too, each well-defined and convincing, and the
plot is comprised basically of their efforts to adjust to the dramatic changes
in their lives and the society around them. But what made the novel deliriously
readable for me was the sense of being a fly on the wall witnessing vividly
authentic scenes of ordinary life, with details I've never encountered anywhere
else. So many wonderful scenes I'll have difficulty restraining myself, and
they need little explanation, since their point (for Beauchamp, it seems, as well
as for me) is documentary. There's Laura on the train:
Seated between a man in a neat blue suit and a harassed-looking
mother with a baby and a small girl sprawling about her, Laura began to
assimilate the other occupants of the carriage from behind the barrier of
selfconsciousness which always encompassed her in the presence of strangers. In
the corner opposite was a W.A.A.F. in an incredibly faded and spotted uniform, her
bleached hair carefully bunched above her forehead and straggling into untidy curls
round her clean starched collar. She looked a baby behind a façade of lipstick and
mascara and was identical with thousands of other girls of her generation, a
monstrous regiment of maidens who had marched through six years of war: good girls,
bad girls, clever girls and stupid girls, who remembered little before the
reign of Bevin.
Laura sighed. She would have liked to have been the W.A.A.F.
and to have begun the peace in her early twenties.
And
there's Angela with a unique perspective on the lifting of the blackout:
She felt better as the taxi passed through Portland Place. The
B.B.C. had discarded its blast walls. Funny how one had never really noticed
that it had been camouflaged. So much of London had gone unintentionally grey
during the war.
Once at the club, her exhilaration returned. She had a tiny
room at the top of the building and she began to unpack her belongings with a
sense of excitement. It reminded her suddenly of the feeling she had experienced
when the black-out was finally lifted. A daredevil feeling because you could
leave your windows uncurtained for all the world to look in. You were safe from
V. weapons and at the same time protected because other people could keep an
eye on you.
Narrated
by Helen, there's this startling tale about mussels:
I am glad we have mussel soup because it is one of his
favourites. I got the mussels in a jam jar from Mary Cross who was up in London
today. She says that the woman in her market who sells them is quite the rudest
woman she knows, but the mussels are first class. Mary says the woman has every
right to be rude because of the queues, and her son being killed at El Alamein,
and being blitzed out three times, and having a murder committed on her
doorstep on V.J. night. The police even searched her cellar for the weapon.
Mary says the mussels are a miracle.
But
my favorite is this glorious little walking tour—also from Angela's point of
view—of postwar Bloomsbury, which is particularly of interest to those who have
visited Persephone's shop, since Angela must surely have gotten a mysterious
shiver of anticipatory pleasure passing by what would someday be a lovely grey
shopfront:
She walked round by Lansdowne Place where, since May 1941,
they'd been patching up the blitzed corner. She noticed, with methodical
satisfaction, that yet another gleaming yellow brick building was nearing completion.
You could date the devastation and the rate of repair from the lighter brick
walls down to the grey black of the house on the Guilford Street corner.
Yes, spring was certainly here. The ladies of Guilford Street
had discarded their utility furs for brighter and shorter jackets. Pale
sunshine gleamed on the darkening partings of bleached heads. They are feeling
the draught, poor dears, Angela thought, and noted the complete absence of
American uniforms from the street scene. That was the big transformation—apart from
spring and scaffolding—there were no Americans.
Poor Americans. Angela almost regretted their departure.
They'd been good time fellows and the good time girls in London had taken them
up in a big way, gum and all. Individually, Angela had liked them. In herds,
they'd been a little overpowering. They'd had too much money and they looked so
dreadful in those uniforms—all bottom somehow. She remembered someone in a pub
who'd once told her that the trouble with American men was that their own women
treated them like dirt, which was why they ended by behaving like dirt. It made
you think. She thought about Peter.
The blitz scars of Guilford Street were healed with fresh
green weeds. In a few months' time they would be carpeted with the yellow of
dandelions and speared with the tall bright pinkness of fireweed. She turned into
Lamb's Conduit Street to do her shopping. The tradesmen's sons were beginning
to filter back from the services. They were easier to buy from than their fathers
and mothers, less fractious and exhausted by five years of rationing and
form-filling.
It's
amazing, with so many authors writing about the war, and surely a whole slew of
novels and memoirs published just after the war, that so few writers thought to
so carefully document this exact moment in time. I get a little ghostly frisson reading some of these passages
(and there are more I could share if I thought it wasn't just ridiculously
overdoing things), as if I'm really witnessing these past streets, buildings, thoughts,
and tradesmen's sons first hand.
If
any of Beauchamp's other six novels are as enticing as this one, then she is a
treasure indeed. But even if the others pale by comparison, I'm thankful to her
for this incomparable snapshot of a place and time.
By
the way, Beauchamp was apparently for many years the partner of a more
successful author from my list—Norah C. James, who is probably still best known
for her scandalous bestseller Sleeveless
Errand (1929), which happens to have been described in a New Republic blurb as "a story of post-war London"—the
war in that case, of course, being World War I. Although James continued
publishing into the 1970s, Beauchamp's last book, The Girl in the Fog, appeared in 1958. The two also wrote a
cookbook together, 1949's Greenfingers
and the Gourmet. Sadly, any other details of Beauchamp's life are so far
lacking, so if anyone suddenly realizes she was your great great aunt, do
please get in touch.
Meanwhile,
if I can't get my grubby little hands on more of Beauchamp's work, perhaps it's
finally time to sample James's?
OK, you sold me! NOW - can I find it?
ReplyDeleteTom
There were a handful of copies of this one floating around but not many. Good luck Tom!
DeleteThere's a good bit at the end of James's autobiography (starting on p. 313) about traveling with Barbara Beauchamp, then about their cohabitation, and finally about joining the Civil Air Guard together for flight instruction as World War II loomed into view. Barbara Beauchamp is also that book's dedicatee. (It's called I Lived in a Democracy.)
ReplyDeleteGrant Hurlock
That sounds great Grant. Duh, I should have thought of looking at James's memoirs. Thanks for the recommendation!
DeleteThis sounds absolutely intriguing - one for you to re-publish perhaps, Scott?
ReplyDeleteThat has crossed my mind Jane! We'll have to see how it goes.
DeleteOh golly, this sure sounds like something right up my alley, or just my cup of tea. Either.
ReplyDeleteIt might indeed fit you like a glove Susan! (That's the best I could do for another figure of speech...)
DeleteI vividly remember the London bombsites covered in fireweed from my early childhood - rebuilding took a long time. I do hope you'll republish this one, it sounds a real treasure.
ReplyDeleteThat's so interesting. I recall being surprised that in Catherine Aird's A Late Phoenix from the 1970s there's still a ruin from the blitz that's only now being removed for new construction. It's easy to forget just how long the reminders of the war remained.
Delete