Sneak preview, FM33 - Josephine Kamm, Peace, Perfect Peace (1947)

From Eileen Kamm's wonderfully informative introduction to her mother-in-law's novel:

She lived in London all her days, fascinated by the interactions of city life, talking to her friends and to strangers she met at the bus stop, and relishing the sense, during the period before and after the second World War, of living at the hub of crucial events and witnessing social upheavals unimaginable in the rather staid world into which she had been born. Although the 1930s, when she did voluntary work with Jewish refugees and became aware that religious persecution was not consigned to history nor Britain immune from invasion, were an unsettling decade, it was in her nature to get on with things. When war broke out in 1939 she joined the Ministry of Information as a senior officer and pamphlet writer and had her flat bombed, as well as publishing several novels for adults, of which Peace, Perfect Peace was penultimate.

I noted in my review of the novel here how invaluable it is as a detailed record of life in the immediate postwar period, and Eileen expresses that far more eloquently than I did:

The close examination of what mercifully was to prove a temporary world, with its clothing coupons, communal soup kitchens euphemistically rebranded as ‘British Restaurants’, trains crowded with homecoming soldiers and people tired yet optimistic of better times to come, is sometimes poignant, and often wryly comic. It is history to us, but written without the distorted nostalgia of distant memory. What we hear in Peace, Perfect Peace is the voice of a lively young woman with an observant eye, experiencing that world every day.

As with so many of the treasures from this period, there were some slightly condescending reviews. After summing up the plot, the Guardian noted:

A comedy of contrivances ensues, common sense prevails, and after a ladies' battle domestic peace is made. A small, good-humoured novel handles the children with discretion.

The Observer also stressed the supposedly feminine themes, though perhaps a housewife somewhere can explain what he means, as I can't quite decipher it:

Josephine Kamm dwells mercilessly on post-war discomfort, but offsets the gloom with some happy dialogue and character-drawing. She is at her best with the Woman; and every housewife will know whom I mean by that.

Thanks very much, but I'll take Eileen's own summing up of the novel's womanly concerns:

The characters, especially the women, are fully realised in their faults as well as strengths; Peace, Perfect Peace is, in a quiet way, a feminist novel...

Happily there were also more enthusiastic contemporary reviewers, as evidenced by the below, from the back cover of Kamm's subsequent novel, Come, Draw This Curtain.

Peace, Perfect Peace is available in both e-book and paperback formats from Dean Street Press, released August 5, 2019.

Schoolgirls and Nazis (but not quite what you might think): JOSEPHINE KAMM, Nettles to My Head (1939)

Publicity photo printed with review of
Kamm's previous novel, Disorderly Caravan

"One must have a few compensations," said Enid, "for being beyond the pale.''

"I don't see why," said Molly amiably. "After all, you did kill Christ."

"Molly, how can you say things like that! And anyhow it's not strictly true." Phyllis was flushed with embarrassment. "What must Enid think of you?"

"Enid doesn't mind." Molly handed her a biscuit. "You don't mind, do you, Enid?"

"Not a bit," said Enid, who knew that Molly's comments were never animated by malice. "It was rather a good remark when you come to think of it."

Nettles to My Head is a part school, part widening world story, but with a difference made fairly obvious from this quote early on. Enid Abel, who is sixteen when the novel opens, is the only Jewish student in her school, and is never allowed to forget the fact for long. Her classmates are mostly indifferent, even if constantly aware, as seen above. She has to sit out prayers, and can't even attend occasional talks about missionary opportunities (in which sense she is surely rather luckier than the other girls, really):

"I have to stay away from missionary talks, but I'm not exactly out of them because some of the girls are always praying for me. Phyllis Johnson has a prayer list at the end of her Bible which starts off with cannibals and ends up with me. I don't mind, you know; but I believe I'd be a tougher customer than a savage when it came to converting."

And the rather pathetic headmistress of the school never hesitates to remind Enid that she doesn't quite fit in:

"Poor Miss Farrow, she just can't help being anti-Semitic. We hardly ever have any Jews here, but in the scholarship exam last year Enid's papers were so undeniably better than anyone else's that she had to accept her. She takes it out of her in small ways, though."

Ultimately, this is a surprisingly enjoyable tale, even if it's a bit uneven here and there. Its themes of the anti-Semitism encountered by a young girl at boarding-school and then, in the second half of the novel, in the "widening world" could have become preachy or obvious, but in Kamm's hands it's explored with humor and some striking depth. Enid is spunky and more or less unbothered by the obvious biases she encounters, and she also encounters good people and those who are simply oblivious. One of the latter being Mary Cross, the school's new matron, who takes Enid under her wing as best she can against Miss Farrow's resistance.

The first half of the novel is really quite as entertaining as any school story, but with an added depth and intelligence not always present. The girls are often funny, and much is made of the foibles of some of the mistresses—particularly Miss Roberts, the history mistress, who fawns over Miss Farrow and dreams of retiring to a shared home with her, but is repeatedly shot down, and Miss Wheeler, the earnest French and music mistress, who lives in a romantic dream world of unrealistic fantasies about her quite run-of-the-mill fiancé, whom she rarely sees in the flesh. The latter is often the butt of the girls' jokes, especially the following passage which for some reason made me giggle more than anything else in the book. The school is on a field trip to Silbury Hill, mostly chattering away and ignoring the illustrious professor discussing its historical significance as they make their way to the top:

"Whew!" breathed Molly. "There ought to be an ice-cream man up here. I could just do with a tub."

"Sssh!" said Enid. "Let's watch Miss Wheeler seeing things."

Helen had taken off her hat and was fidgeting with one of her plaited coils of hair. Her eyes were half-closed and her lips moved silently.

"What do you think she's saying?"

"Something about a centuries-old habitation of a savage people, or earth piled upon earth as a monument to mankind. You know the sort of muck, Molly."

"You'll write a really juicy essay if you put things like that in it."

"I shan't. They make me squirm."

"Miss Wheeler's going to make an intelligent comment to the professor," said Molly. They sidled up behind her to listen.

Oh, that last comment keeps getting me every time I read it.

The second half of the novel, when Enid leaves school, becomes more serious and a bit more uneven, but Enid is always a delightful character to spend time with. She is pressured by her grandfather to only consider dating Jewish men, and is repeatedly thrown together with David, a friend of the family, who is obviously her grandfather's ideal grandson-in-law. But she makes her own way, dating Stephen, a glib young man who, it gradually dawns on Enid, loves her in spite of her Jewishness.

I love old library cards, and both of these were in the copy of Nettles
that I read, but...what's wrong with this picture that tells us that
the card on the right had been mistakenly placed in the wrong book?

There are occasional passages that might jar some readers today. For example, I simply can't hear the word "Jewess"—even spoken by a Jewish character in a novel by a Jewish author and intended, as here, to benignly refer to a Jewish woman without any suggestion of anti-Semitism—without cringing, but it does makes me wonder if other uses of the term in other books of the time might have been more benign than I have assumed?

And I'm not sure that many readers looking back with the benefit of hindsight instead of merely anxious about the Nazi threat would laugh very much at Enid's mother's joking to Mary about her terrible brothers-in-law:

"They were quite odious; as different from my husband as they possibly could be. Enid and I call them Crime and Punishment, and we've decided that if ever we had to choose between a concentration-camp and marriage with one of them—which luckily isn't at all likely—we should choose the concentration-camp."

In part, she's obviously using humor to dispel some of the anxiety of an increasingly disturbing situation, but it's probably safe to say that any joke involving concentration camps hasn't been funny since, well, not long after this novel was published!

The overall effect of Kamm's story, though, is to highlight some of the conflicts and pressures faced by Jewish characters that others might find hard to imagine, however unbiased they might be, and to do it in an entertaining and amusing way. Enid can be blasé about most of the casual racism she encounters, but there's also a sort of darkness in her personality, a tendency to dwell on troubles, especially that rising horror of Nazism unfolding in the novel's background. And those fears can't be reassured away, even by well-meaning Mary blandly assuring Enid that such things could never happen in England. (Undoubtedly they're exacerbated, too, by the dawning realization that Stephen is a jerk.)

This is the third of Josephine Kamm's five novels for adults. I wrote about the fourth, Peace, Perfect Peace (1947), back in 2016 (see here), and I just announced last week that Dean Street Press and I will be reprinting it as a Furrowed Middlebrow book in July! 

Some time after that I read the last, Come, Draw This Curtain, but never got round to reviewing it. After the many high points of Peace, I was a bit disappointed by Curtain, which is probably why I never managed to post about it. But Kamm always seems to be an earnest, socially-involved author, not unlike Ruth Adam, and is therefore always interesting and thoughtful even if the overall results aren't great literature. Based on the blurbs for them in the front of my library copy of Nettles, I may very well have to add Kamm's first two novels, All Quiet at Home (1936) and Disorderly Caravan (1938), to my new Hopeless Wish List. They sound lighter and funnier, perhaps, and would undoubtedly be great reads, but seem to be nonexistent in the U.S. [Cue sad violins.]

Clearly, too, Nettles to My Head belongs on both my Grownup School Story List (half the book qualifies, at least) and in the "approach and early days" section of my World War II Book List. It's a two-for-one deal!

Before and after the war, part 2 (JOSEPHINE KAMM, Peace, Perfect Peace)

In my last post, I focused on Noel Streatfeild's really delightful novel of the earliest days of World War II, The Winter Is Past.

And if Streatfeild's novel provides a fairly detailed view of what life was like at the beginning of the war, Josephine Kamm's Peace, Perfect Peace (published in 1947 and acquired recently in yet another little book buying splurge) is almost overwhelming in its level of detail about life in the first months after the war has ended. It's irresistible in its wealth of information about postwar life—Kamm seems to have set out to meticulously record as much of the situation around her as she could, making it a central part of the plot and the drama—rather like a photographer who, sensing they're in the middle of history even while going about mundane day-to-day activities, might pull out a camera and start documenting. Obviously, not everyone realized the fragile, passing nature of that particular moment, as relatively few novelists seem to have taken it as their subject matter, and none that I know of did so to the extent that Kamm does here. I've read quite a bit about the war and the postwar years, both history and fiction, and I learned numerous things from Kamm's book that I'd never known before, as well as having brought home to me the actual day-to-day impacts of some of the issues I already knew about.

The novel (recommended for my WWII Book List by Ann—thank you, Ann!) begins by focusing on Clare, who spent the war working in a bureaucratic government office evacuated to a seaside town, but is now back in London, struggling to produce a follow-up to her one promising novel, published just before war broke out. At the beginning of the novel, Clare (who is also engaged in a hopeless affair with a married man) decides to take a break from the struggle and return to Seaport to visit her friend Joanna Smallwood and the two grandchildren, Giles and June, whom Joanna has had with her while her daughter-in-law Frances worked in the A.T.S. and her son served abroad.

From there, although Clare reappears occasionally, trying to convince herself to break it off with the married man and trying to continue her novel, the main focus of the novel shifts to the tense relations between Joanna and Frances, who is now returned from the A.T.S. and is planning to take her children back to London. But Joanna has become very attached to Giles and he to her, and Frances believes that Joanna is undermining Giles' feelings toward his mother in order to keep his affections for herself.

It's a somewhat unusual structure for a novel, and I felt that it left Clare a bit high and dry at the end with an only partially resolved storyline. But Kamm's plotting is effective, and the novel was a compelling read even when it felt a little disjointed. I also liked that, just as in Streatfeild's novel, Kamm's characters are all flawed in convincing ways—no idealization here—and the unusual structure allows for each of the characters to be viewed from at least two angles and with varying perspectives. I suspect that not all readers will find the psychology between Joanna and Frances entirely satisfying, though the reader is privy to Joanna's thoughts and so it's clear that Frances is right in her assessment. But from Clare's different perspective on her friend, we get to see the kind, caring, loving side of Joanna as well, which is refreshing. Kamm's characters are three-dimensional, however awkward the structure required to show them to be.

At any rate, I didn't find that these minor flaws weakened the novel very much overall, because it's really the plethora of insight into postwar life that is the selling point here. Sometimes it's just a passing detail that's striking, as when Clare notes that "the sound of Mr. Turner's typewriter told her that yet another never-to-be-read pamphlet was on the stocks," and we recall, having read the author bio on the book's jacket, that Kamm herself spent much of the war writing pamphlets for a government office. Or there's this brief passage as Frances comes outside one distracted evening:

Instinctively Frances fumbled in her handbag for a torch before she faced the lights and the certainty of the lifted black-out. For some time now she had taken streetlighting for granted, but in her present sense of withdrawal she had forgotten.

Sometimes it's a description of something we've seen before in wartime novels, now with a changed significance in the postwar days:

Seaport bay was sheltered on either side by red Devonshire cliffs and formed a pleasant retiring place for ex-Army officers, members of the I.C.S. and elderly women. A number of them were to be seen now sitting in covered seats reading The Times or enjoying the first sleep of the day. They never sat on the beach, for to reach it they would have to pass through a rusty barbed-wire entanglement which had been pierced in a number of places by determined summer visitors, some of whom now lay face downward on the stones exposing their pink or brown backs to a damp breeze.

The residue of the Blitz also hangs about (literally) in the dust in Frances' flat:

The only flat which Frances Smallwood had been able to find was on two floors of an inconvenient house in a Bayswater street. The rooms were lofty but narrow and awkward to arrange, for they were matchboarded off from one another, having once been two large rooms instead of four small ones, as they now were. Although the house had escaped bombing, the blast had brought about cracks in the walls and draughty subsidences of floorboards and window-frames. Through the windows, whether open or closed, the dust and dirt of the street drifted to settle thickly and stickily on the furniture. There was a garden at the back, or rather a strip of humpy lawn and a few laurel bushes, but this was the property of the ground-floor tenants, and Frances had been told that the children would not be allowed to play in it. The view in front was of a row of houses similar to their own, although there were gaps where one or two had been bombed out of existence. Some of the windows were shrouded in net, and many still kept their black-out curtains as a sign that their owners lacked the coupons, even if they had the money, to buy new material.

And those of you interested in the clothing situation during rationing and material shortages might be interested in Clare's attempt to spruce herself up with a simply wool dress:

She went by Underground to Piccadilly Circus, intending to work her way up Regent Street and, if necessary, along Oxford Street. By the end of the morning she had visited at least half a dozen shops. In one or two she had been treated with friendly kindness but in the others she met with chilly indifference or disdain. She was shown a number of unsuitable dresses made of unsuitably thin materials. "Wool," one saleswoman told her, "is a thing of the past, or the sort of wool you're looking for is. It must be quite some time since you tried to buy a wool dress, isn't it?" Clare admitted that it was and also turned her back on a soft, blue-grey frock which seemed much warmer than the others but cost twenty guineas. In the end she bought a bottle-green which she would have to alter herself before it would fit and which cost her a good deal more than she had intended to spend.

There are numerous other passages I could share, but the last passage I'll quote is lest I've given the impression that Kamm isn't a perfectly charming and interesting writer as well as a grade-A documentarian. Here's Frances' young daughter discovering the unconsidered—and entertaining—implications of bombs:

"Can't we have a wood fire? I hate that smelly gas.''

"So do I, but the landlord won't let us. He says that fires make the flat dirty.''

June shouted with laughter. "But it's dirty already. I know you do your best, but there must have been very dirty people in it before we came.''

"It's partly due to the bombing. Bits of walls and ceilings and things fell down even in houses which weren't actually bombed. There's a house," said Frances, pointing at a gap in the street, "or, rather, there isn't a house, which the bombs knocked down altogether."

"Goodness gracious! I didn't know bombs actually did any damage. If anybody had been in that house they might have got hurt, mightn't they?"

"They might," replied Frances, pleased to think how well she and Joanna had succeeded in keeping the horrors of war from June.

"I wish I could have seen it happen. There might have been some blood and bones."

This is not the easiest novel to get one's hands on, unfortunately, but if you have an opportunity, I'd urge you to seize it. I'm hoping to check out one or two of Kamm's other adult novels as well, and of course, if you're not aware already, I should also mention that Kamm went on to become something of a trailblazer for her early "young adult" fiction, almost before there was such a genre—most famously with Young Mother (1965), which tackled teenage pregnancy in a sensitive and nonjudgmental way.

Thanks again to Ann for putting this book on my radar!

The recent book buying splurge that brought Peace,
Perfect Peace onto my shelves; no doubt you'll hear
more about the other three titles as well..,