Anne Frank Remembered

Anne Frank Remembered, Miep Gies with Alison Leslie Gold  (TBR shelves, 2019)

Anne Frank was recently featured as a "Person of the Week" on the BBC History Extra podcast, which reminded me that I have had this book on the TBR shelves for a good while. I was also reminded by finding on the library sale shelves Etty Hillesum's An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, described as "the adult counterpart to Anne Frank."

As far as I can remember, reading Anne Frank's diary was my introduction to the Holocaust, as I think it must have been for others in my generation in the US. I owned a copy of the original edition, and when I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam after college, I bought the expanded version published later. I wish I could remember more about that visit now.

Though I haven't read the Diary in a few years, the story that Miep Gies told in her memoir was very familiar, but it was so interesting to see that familiar story from the other side of the door into the Secret Annex. This is also the first memoir I have read about life in occupied Holland during World War II. Both Miep and her husband Jan (Henk in Anne's diary) were active in the Resistance, beyond helping those in the Annex. I did not know that Miep was born in Vienna (in 1909) and sent to Holland after the Great War as part of a program to help feed children amidst post-war shortages. She never returned to live in Austria, but when the Nazis invaded Holland, she was classified as a citizen of the Reich, which distressed her and complicated her life and resistance work.

Miep Gies's narrative about the struggles of life in wartime, with the constant shortages, and also the constant small acts of resistance, is compelling. I also appreciated that her memoir covered the years after the war, and the changes in her life and in her country. I have Dutch ancestry through my father's side of the family, which I have only just begun to learn more about. I would like to visit again some day. In the meantime, I am very glad to have this on the shelves next to Anne Frank's famous diary.

Editing this to add: after hitting "publish" I realized I have read another memoir of life in the Netherlands during the war, Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place. I might need to read that one again.

FDR's Funeral Train, by Robert Klara

I had never heard of this book before it was chosen for one of my book groups this month.  It is an account of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's last trip (by rail) down to Warm Springs, Georgia, in late March, 1945. He had a private cabin there on the grounds of the institution he had founded, built around thermal springs, to treat polio victims like himself. Just weeks into his unprecedented fourth term, FDR was taking a brief break from war-time Washington. It was a trip he had made many times before. This would be the last. He suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage on the morning of April 12th, while sitting for a portrait. Within twenty-four hours, his body was back on the train. His massive copper casket was placed in the last compartment of the train, clearly visible through the car's windows with its honor guard of four servicemen. The train made its slow way back to Washington, as crowds gathered all along the route to watch it pass, many in tears. In Washington, there was a brief service in the White House on April 14th, before the family returned to the train with a carefully-compiled list of guests. This time they were headed north, to the Roosevelts' family estate in Hyde Park, New York. The next morning, April 15th, FDR was buried on the grounds in another brief service. In just three hours, everyone was back on the train and headed home.

Let me say first that there are a lot of trains in this book. The engines, the different cars, their various amenities, the tracks, the stations, the crews - all are described in meticulous detail, and in prose that sometimes verges on the purple. ("The locomotive's 4,075 horses had begun pulling . . . Moments later, the car would be nodding like a porpoise. . . the GG-1's traction motors took a quick sip of 11,000 volts from the wire overhead..." A car sputters along, "drinking its wartime cocktail of watered-down gasoline." And are a rising sun's rays really auburn? ) Several of the Pullman cars, such as the presidential Ferdinand Magellan, the train equivalent to Air Force One, are even included in the Epilogue that briefly outlines the lives and careers of the key players in the story. Though I like train stories and histories, I found the level of detail a little overwhelming.

The subtitle of the book is "A Betrayed Widow, A Soviet Spy, and a Presidency in the Balance." The "betrayed widow" was of course Eleanor Roosevelt. Present with FDR when he died was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. She and FDR had had an affair during the First World War, when she was working as Mrs. Roosevelt's social secretary. The affair officially ended in 1918, but they continued to see each other in the years that followed. FDR's daughter Anna had even arranged visits in the White House during Mrs. Roosevelt's frequent absences. (It must have felt like a double betrayal when she was absent working on behalf of her husband, as well as for the causes dear to her.) In the midst of the shock over the president's death, his staff also had to cover up the fact that Rutherfurd had been there. It was all to no avail, as Mrs. Roosevelt either already knew or soon learned. The press however kept a discrete silence.

The "Soviet Spy" was Lauchlin Currie, one of FDR's economic advisers. He doesn't actually appear in the story until half-way through the book, as a passenger on the train to Hyde Park. From his prominence in the subtitle, I thought he was going to play an important part, but all he did was ride the train up and back. It's of course interesting that the Soviets had secured an agent who actually worked in the White House, in the West Wing. He gave them information about the administration's economic policies and relations with Stalin. But his story seems shoehorned into this account of FDR's death.

The third phrase, "a Presidency in the Balance," refers to Harry S. Truman's sudden succession to the presidency. It wasn't completely unexpected: FDR was clearly in poor health by 1945, though his primary physician continued to insist it was just fatigue, a cold, nothing serious. I had forgotten that Truman had played no major role in the administration during his weeks as vice-president. The author points out that the new president wasn't even aware of the most important war-time secret: the development of the atomic bomb. He had to be brought up to speed quickly. Truman also decided that at this time of crisis, he needed to make an address to Congress. All the way up to the funeral, and all the way back, he was meeting with advisers and speechwriters. Mr. Klara carefully plots out which of Roosevelt's cabinet and advisers transferred their allegiance to the new president, and which were on their way out of power. A final chapter covers the address, in which Truman pledged himself to carry out Roosevelt's goals, particularly victory in the war still going on, under no terms but the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan.

I found this book very readable, and it held my interest throughout, though I didn't try to remember all of the details. (The other members of the group agreed.) I knew of Roosevelt's death at Warm Springs, and I've been there with my family as a child, when we were living in Georgia. I knew little about his funeral, and it was interesting to compare it with other presidential funerals. (The off-beat and fascinating National Museum of Funeral History here in Houston has a permanent exhibit on presidential funerals.) I was surprised at the speed, and the lack of pomp and ceremony, even though FDR had left instructions for a simple funeral. Reading this made me want to read more about Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman. I have a book of his letters to his wife Bess, and I've also been thinking about re-reading David McCullough's great biography of him.

Factory work in wartime

The Fancy, Monica Dickens

Monica Dickens wrote a book, One Pair of Feet, about working as a nurse in the Second World War.  In her autobiography, published many years later, she says that she had to quit nursing to find the time to write about it.  "The Ministry of Labour still allowed you to move from job to job, as long as it was war work."  She decided on factory work and trained to be a fitter. 

Through a Kensington friend, I got myself a job in the inspection department at Sunbeam Talbot, up near Little Wormwood Scrubs and the railway sheds.  They were repairing Rolls-Royce Spitfire engines for fighter planes, which had failed on test, or been damaged in a crash.

A year later, she was back working as a nurse.  In her spare time,

I used to lug my typewriter back to the hospital after supper and put it on the emergency operating table in the basement and sit on the anaesthetist's stool and try to write bits of a novel about a foreman in an aircraft factory before I was disturbed.

Though she didn't mention it by name, The Fancy is that book.  Her foreman's name is Edward Ledward.  The cover of my Penguin paperback shows him cradling a rabbit, one of the Flemish Giant breed that he raises in his back garden.  I don't know if I've been reading too many mysteries lately, or if it was the effect of the Super Moon, but I was convinced that something bad was going to happen to those bunnies.  Not just rabbit meat for dinner - something worse.  Maybe a direct hit on the hutches from a stray bomb in the Blitz, or even a preview of Fatal Attraction.  I spent half the book anticipating the worst - about rabbits, for pete's sake, never mind the human characters. There is some unkindness in this book, even cruelty and a couple of deaths off-stage.  But (spoiler alert) the bunnies live happily ever after.

As the story opens, Edward has just been promoted to a charge hand in the Inspection Shop at Canning Kyles, "which serviced aero engines."  He will supervise ten women on his bench, each of whom is responsible for checking a particular piece of the engines.  We get to know his crew as he does, following first one and then another in their work and in their personal life outside the factory.  I found them a bit confusing at first - Edward does too - so I made a list.  There's Dinah, "wildly, ecstatically happy" with her husband Bill; Kitty, smothered by her mother's loving care; Sheila, losing herself in love for the first time; and Wendy, whom Edward can't help comparing to a rabbit, quietly hiding a difficult home situation.  Edward has his own problems at home.  His wife Connie is often impatient and abrupt with him, uninterested in his work or the rabbits that he is successfully breeding.  Her mother and sister, who spend a lot of time with Connie, take an equally dim view of him.

The factory work itself is pretty dull, as Monica Dickens found out.  "In the relentless monotony of the work, any sense of purpose gradually dwindled in focus down to the weekly pay packet."  This isn't a grandly patriotic story of the war, despite the management's efforts to stress the importance of the factory work.  Though the war is always there, in the rations and the clothing coupons and the blackout, it is in the background for much of the story.  It's just the way things are to some of the characters, who hardly seem to notice it, while to others it brings tragedy and grief.

Once I got over my paranoia about the rabbits, I enjoyed this book very much.  It is of its time in casually racist references, but on the other hand Edward is quite at home in the "the Jewish colony" near where he lives, its residents kind and sympathetic.  I liked following the different characters, seeing how their lives intersect.  I had a pretty good idea where Edward's story was going to end up, though I had no idea how it was going to get there.  I thought the ending of two of the stories in particular were very cleverly and neatly done.  As with Monica Dickens' other books, I also enjoyed seeing how she used the events of her own life in her stories.  She is a good example of that adage, "Write what you know."  Now I'm wondering what to read next.

N.B. This book, published in 1943, completes the first quarter of my Mid-Century of Books reading project.  Honestly, I thought I'd be a lot further along by this point, and I expected to have more of the Victorian years accounted for.  I should have 1897 covered in a couple of days, thanks to Rudolf Rassendyll.

The wartime stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

This was my first book-box draw of 2014, and as usual, the box gave me something that I didn't think I wanted to read.  Given the choice, I'd have said that I'd read enough about World War II for a while, between Nevil Shute's secret mission and Agatha Christie's spies on the homefront, not to mention the quiet heroism of real-life war work in Jambusters. But once again the book box chose wisely, and I enjoyed this selection of Mollie Panter-Downes' stories, reprinted in a Persephone edition.  I have to mention again that this is the only Persephone that I have ever found in the Houston bookstores. I'd almost have bought it just for that.

These stories were originally published, like her celebrated "Letters from London" column, in The New Yorker.  Here the fiction is book-ended by two "Letters," the first dated October 14, 1939; and the second, June 11, 1944.  I was struck by a detail in the 1939 column:

Posting a letter has acquired a new interest, too, since His Majesty's tubby scarlet pillar boxes have been done up in squares of yellow detector paint, which changes colour if there is poison gas in the air and is said to be as sensitive as a chameleon.

In all that I have read about the Second World War in Britain, I had never come across that before.  Somehow that little detail - squares of gas-detecting paint - brought the war very close for a moment, perhaps because I could picture those red pillars so clearly, and myself dropping a note or card into them.

The stories that follow also date from the fall of 1939, through the winter of  1944.  But they are not a chronicle of the war - that was for her columns, I suppose.  And they are free from any sensationalism - no Fifth Columnists here.  Most are set in the country, outside the bombing zones and day-to-day danger.  On the surface they are quiet stories - an account of a sewing party, where members debate donating their clothing to Greek refugees; a couple who have nerved themselves to ask guests to leave; a mother worried about her children, evacuated to California, in the wake of Pearl Harbor.  Through her stories, Mollie Panter-Downes explores the war's effects on ordinary people going about their daily lives.  And their reactions seems very human, very psychologically and emotionally right.  I could see a connection between these stories and her later book, One Fine Day, set in 1946, which feels like a natural sequel, where she considers one family's adjustment to peace.

With this book, I particularly enjoyed Helen Ramsay, who appears in several of the stories (the editor, Gregory LeStage, suggests that she is a stand-in for Panter-Downes).  She copes in part through an acerbic interior monologue.  In "Mrs. Ramsay's War," she is living in a small country cottage with her daughter Susan, as well as a friend's two children, their nurse and their grandmother, evacuées from London.  The grandmother, Mrs. Parmenter, has also brought her two darling Pekinese with her.

That evening Susan, saying good night, remarked that she didn't want Camilla and Alan to go, ever.  Mrs. Ramsay felt impelled to hit her smartly over the head but instead went downstairs to the living room, where Mrs. Parmenter was knitting under the good light and listening to the wireless  . . .  Mrs. Ramsay, picking her way among suspiciously growling Pekinese, remembered with a good deal of wistfulness the poet's assurance that the grave was a fine and private place.

It doesn't take a war to make me feel like that - just a vacation with too much "family time" can do it.

Given how prolific a writer Mollie Panter-Downes was, with five novels and all those New Yorker pieces, fact and fiction, it is surprising how little of her work is available today.  The editor of my Persephone edition says that she "disowned" four of her five published novels. I haven't been able to discover yet if that means she suppressed them, as Georgette Heyer did her early books.  I suppose I could use my New Yorker subscription to access their archives and track down her pieces - all 852 of them.  That could be a long-term project.  Maybe I'll look for Minnie's Room: The Peacetime Stories... first.

On the track of Fifth Columnists

N or M?  Agatha Christie

In discussing Agatha Christie's books, many people pick Jane Marple or Hercule Poirot as their favorite of her detectives.  I always put my vote in for Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, who appear in four of her books (and some short stories).  I realized though that it has been quite a while since I actually read any of them, and I thought I'd better see if that was still true. It was probably the lingering effects of reading Jambusters that made me take this one off the shelves.

Tommy Beresford and Prudence (Tuppence) Cowley were introduced in the 1922 book, The Secret Adversary.  It is set in 1919, when both are looking for work after service in the Great War, Tommy in the army and Tuppence as a VAD.  N or M, published in 1941, is set in the early days of the Second World War.  Tommy and Tuppence are on the sidelines this time, both desperately wanting to do something for the war effort.  Their son Derek is flying bombers in the Air Force, their daughter Deborah doing hush-hush work somewhere in the north, yet they are considered too old to serve (in their 40s, mind you), though Tuppence is kindly encouraged to knit.  The frustrations of the older generation, and the rather patronizing attitude of the younger toward their aged parents, are also familiar themes in the war-time novels of Angela Thirkell.

One evening a non-descript young man named Grant arrives at their door, ostensibly to offer Tommy a desk job in Scotland.  But Grant has really come to enlist his help tracking Fifth Columnists in Leahampton, a seaside resort on the South Coast.  (I couldn't help thinking that this is DCS Foyle's territory, and they should really be consulting him and Sgt. Milner).  The catch, for Tommy, is that he has to go alone.  Tuppence isn't even to know of his assignment.  However, they have always been partners in detection, and she proves too smart for Tommy and the mysterious Mr. Grant.

Tommy is sent to Leahampton in place of another agent, whose recent death was not an accident. Farquhar was on the track of "N" and "M," code names for the top Nazi agents in Britain, the head of a chain of traitors that reaches even into the top military and the government itself.  With the German invasion looming, Grant's agency must locate and eliminate N and M.  The dying agent's last words point to "San Souci," a guest house in Leahampton, where Tommy and Tuppence take up residence, separately, under assumed names.  They then proceed to investigate their fellow boarders, who include Carl von Deinim, a research chemist and a refugee from the Nazis; the home's owner, Mrs. Perenna, who claims to be Spanish but looks and sounds Irish, and her rebellious daughter Sheila, often seen with von Deinim.

I have read quite a few mysteries from the period, featuring spies and disguises, secret codes, last-minute rescues and breathless escapes, threatened by traitors and sabotage from within.  They must have spoken to the deep anxieties of the times, as well as providing some welcome distraction, with traitors unmasked, bombs defused, invasion plans thwarted, the country saved.  This one feels a little over-the-top now, but it's still a diverting read, and less hyper-patriotic than some I have read.  It made me want to read The Secret Adversary again, and maybe Partners in Crime too.  That's one of the things I like best about Tommy and Tuppence: their partnership.  He's more the solid, steady type, she's more energetic and impulsive, but they work well together - even if they sometimes stumble onto the solution.  They may lack something in the "little grey cells" department, and they don't yet have the experience of Miss Marple, but together they manage to work things out in the end.  And they have fun doing it!

Women's work in winning the war

Jambusters, Julie Summers

I began seeing posts about this book I think even before it was published in 2013.  I knew it would take a while to get to the United States, and I didn't expect my libraries would have a copy.  So I had to wait not just for the U.S. publication, but then six months longer for it to become eligible for interlibrary loan.  Audrey's recent review came just as the right time to remind me, as the book was finally available.  And it was certainly worth the wait.  (Sadly, it came without the evocative cover.)

The Women's Institute has been in the background of some of my favorite books, including Angela Thirkell and The Provincial Lady.  But it's been just that - in the background, taken for granted, never explained.  So I found this book very informative not just on the WI's work in the Second World War, but on the organization as a whole.  I hadn't realized that it began in Canada, where the first branch formed in 1897.  The first WI branch in Britain came almost 20 years later, in 1915.  I had no idea that the WI exists only in rural areas, with a population of less than 4,000, and that it is dedicated to improving rural life, particularly for women.  I did know (from "Calendar Girls") that there is a national governing body, but I learned only from this book how highly organized the structure is, including the county levels.  It was also interesting to read that Scotland formed its own separate organization, so the National Federation of Women's Institutes comprises the English and Welsh branches.

While I found this book very informative on the WI in general, the focus of the book, as the subtitle states, is "The Story of the Women's Institute in the Second World War."  After an overview of the history of the WI, Ms. Summers focuses on the organization's main activities during the war.  These were often undertaken at the request of government agencies like the Ministry of Food, whose director Lord Woolton understood the power of a well-run and committed national organization with county and local branches.  According to Ms. Summers, the WI is best-known for its communal canning and jam-making, which not only preserved tons of fruit and other produce that would otherwise have gone to waste, but also added to the nation's food supplies as imports dwindled.  They did far more, however.  The women of the WI also coped with the floods of evacuees, especially in the first months of the war; planted gardens to increase food production (and then canned and preserved the harvests); knitted and sewed for the armed forces and refugees; and ran entertainments for themselves as well as for evacuees and soldiers stationed near-by.  I was particularly struck by the fact that not only was all this work was voluntary, but generally the women did not benefit from it.  After their heroic work canning or making jam, for example, all the production was turned over to be sold under the rationing program.  And above and beyond this, while the women were carrying on their own work in home and farm, under the difficult war-time conditions, not to mention housing evacuees, many branches were also raising separate funds for the Red Cross, or to provide ambulances for field service.

To tell this story, Julia Summers relied first on the records of the WI itself, housed in the archives of The Women's Library in London (a place I need to visit).  She also had access to the records of local branches, and to women who were members of the WI during the war (some in person and some via letters or diaries).  She quotes frequently from first-hand accounts, which bring her story to life as the women speak for themselves.  My only quibble is about her methodology: Ms. Summers did not document these quotations as she did the published works, in her end notes, nor are they listed in her bibliography.  It isn't always clear if she is quoting from interviews she conducted, oral histories, written reminiscences, or other sources.

I had begun to suspect that Ms. Summers has a personal connection to the WI even before I read that her maternal grandmother was a long-time member who helped found a local branch, often serving as an officer.  The author's admiration and respect for the WI is clear, and she makes a compelling case for the heroism of their service.  It was not glamorous work, knitting and canning and growing potatoes, but it was a crucial part of the war effort on the home-front and to victory in the end.

A troubling story of war

Most Secret, Nevil Shute

Reading Alex's lovely review of A Town Like Alice made me want to take it straight off the shelf again, though I can almost recite parts of it from memory.  But sticking to the Triple Dog Dare, instead I chose one of the three Nevil Shute novels that I've had unread for far too long.  It is the proverbial icing on the cake that all three also qualify for the Mid-Century of Books challenge.

I chose Most Secret because like Mariana, the Monica Dickens novel I had just finished, it is set in the Second World War.  The two stories could not be more different, however.  In Dickens' novel, the war is really just a framing device for the story that she want to tell.  Shute's, on the other hand, is an account of espionage and sabotage carried out against the Nazi forces in occupied France, centered in Brittany.

Nevil Shute's stories often begin with someone explaining how he became involved in the events he is about to recount.  Here, it is Commander Martin of the Navy, who works under the Vice-Admiral for Channel Operations:

So much happened in the two years that I spent in the Admiralty, I had a finger in so many pies, that I have found it difficult to say exactly when it was that this thing began. From my engagement diary it seems to have been about the middle of July in 1941, and I should say it began with a telephone call from McNeil.

I find these narrators, like Anthony Trollope's, immediately engaging, drawing me into the story from the first page.  Like Trollope, I think Shute has a distinctive narrative voice, instantly recognizable.  Sometimes the narrators speaking are just themselves framing devices, recounting a story that they have heard.  In other books, like this one and A Town Like Alice, they play important parts in the events, though the narration may shift away from them to follow other people.  Shute is very good at weaving together the first person accounts with those the narrators hear later, or piece together from other sources.

This story begins with Brigadier McNeil bringing a proposal from the Army to the Navy: a joint operation to use a Breton fishing vessel, brought over by refugees, for reconnaissance and covert action.  The proposal comes originally from three officers, led by Charles Simon, himself recently escaped from France.  The son of an English father and a French mother, he was educated in England but lived most of his life in France, which makes him an ideal agent.  With his admiral's agreement, Martin begins working with McNeil and Simon on their plans of attack.

This is a great action story, with daring raids and breathless escapes.  There is quite a bit of technical detail, a Shute hallmark, here about boats and weapons, which I tend to skate over.  Yet this is also a very bleak book.  According to the website for the Nevil Shute Foundation, it was written in 1942, shortly after the events it recounts, but it was published only in 1945.  I wonder, did it come too close to actual events to be published earlier?  After all, Nevil Shute spent the war years working on secret weapons for the British war effort.  Here, his story deals with the miseries and cruelties of the Nazis in occupied France, and the sometimes violent reactions of the population, particularly in Brittany.  At the same time, the weapons that Charles Simon and his company are preparing against the Nazis are equally violent, even cruel.  The question arises more than once: Do the ends justify the means?  For some, the answer is a given, an obvious yes when faced with the evils of the Nazi regime.  Others, like Martin, struggle more with the question, but in the end, despite some misgivings, they come to the same conclusion.

This is also a story of courage, of the heroism that people can rise to in the worst of circumstances.  It is there in Simon and his crew, and in the Bretons who help them whenever they can.  That seems to be a theme that runs through Nevil Shute's books.  He writes of ordinary people, with human flaws and weaknesses, caught up in extraordinary events.  They respond in heroic ways but see themselves as only doing their job, doing what they must, stepping up because someone has to.  They don't see themselves as heroes, or even anything special, but we do.  With this story, though, I found myself uncomfortable with the means, and the motives, for some of the action, which made characters more ambiguous, less easily defined.

The author's note mentions Shute's war-time work, and that reminded me that I've been meaning to read his autobiography, Slide Rule.  I've added it to my reading list, along with a re-read of A Town Like Alice and maybe some other old favorites, like Trustee from the Toolroom and The Far Country.  I also have a couple of his books, Beyond the Black Stump and The Rainbow and the Rose, which I read many years ago but now have no memory of, so I look forward to rediscovering those as well.

Growing up in Fascist Italy

Peace and War, Wanda Newby

This is the year that I discovered Eric Newby on my own TBR shelves, and so far I've read six of his memoirs and travel books.  In five of the six, his wife Wanda joined him in the adventures that he chronicles.  In the first I read, Round Ireland in Low Gear, Eric briefly told the story of how they met, while he was a prisoner of war in Italy during the Second World War, which of course was the subject of another of his books, Love and War in the Apennines.  I read a great review of this (under its more evocative British title) over on Leaves & Pages, which is also where I learned that Wanda Newby had written her own account of those years.  As soon as I read that, I immediately started looking for a copy.

Her book, subtitled "Growing Up in Fascist Italy," is divided into four sections.  The first, "My Country and My People," covers the first ten years of her life.  Wanda Skof was born in 1922, in an area of Slovenia called the Kras, which had been annexed to Italy at the end of the First World War.  She was the youngest of eleven children born to her parents, with her brother the only two to survive infancy. Both her parents were Slovenian, with deep roots in the Kras, and Wanda grew up among its fields and mountains.  She describes the villages, the people, their way of life, with affection and an eye for detail.  This is an area of the world I know very little about, and I found this section really interesting.

The people of the Kras felt themselves removed from the Italy to which they technically belonged.  Those who spoke Italian at all spoke a local dialect.  Benito Mussolini, who had risen to power with his Fascist party, suspecting the Slovenes in northeast Italy of disloyalty, determined to keep them under tight control.  As the Fascist presence in the area grew, Wanda's brother Slavko, eleven years her senior, joined many other Slovenes emigrating to Argentina.  Her father, a schoolmaster, was considered a potential subversive who might incite his students to revolt against the Fascists.  The government began a program of transferring teachers, sending Slovenes south to Italy proper, and bringing in properly-indoctrinated Italians into Slovenian schools.  Two years after her brother's departure, when Wanda was ten, her parents learned that they were being sent to a village called Fontanellato near Parma, in the central plains.  Like many of the transplanted families they found some difficulty in adjusting to a new community, a new way of life, and a new language.  For Wanda's family, their Catholicism gave them one point of continuity in the town, particularly for her mother, who was slower to learn Italian.  All three of the family already spoke German, which would soon prove an advantage.

The second section of the book, "First Steps in Italy," covers the family's move and explores their new community.  Here again Wanda describes their neighbors and the life of the community.  She made friends among the local children, and later her fellow students at the high school in Parma, a city she came to love.  She was still in school when Mussolini began to prepare the country for war in Africa.  Her father strongly opposed war and Fascism, and much of the surrounding country was Communist in sympathy (a unique Italian version of Communism).  In the third section, "Rumours of War," Wanda describes the lead-up to the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the events that followed, which seemed quite remote to the people of Fontanellato.  Despite rationing and other restrictions, war remained remote until the first troops from the area were drafted and sent to Russia in 1941; most disappeared without a trace, never to return.

There was great excitement in the village in 1943, when residents learned that a POW camp would be built there.  Wanda and the other young women often found excuses to walk or ride by, exchanging smiles and waves with the hundreds of young British prisoners.  The camp had been open only a few months when the news came that Italy, following the Allied invasions in the south, had asked for an armistice.  Before the Nazis moved in to re-establish Fascist control, the commandant of the camp allowed all of the POWs to leave.  Some would head south, hoping to reach the Allied force; some north, heading for Switzerland.  Eric Newby, with a newly broken ankle, was unable to travel.  With the village doctor, Wanda and her father risked their lives to help him evade the authorities.  In the process, as he and Wanda got to know each other, they fell in love.  The last section of Wanda's book parallels his, though it continues her story after he was recaptured and sent north.  The book ends with their reunion and marriage in April of 1946.

Though Wanda Newby's writing does not have the same verve as her husband's, I enjoyed this book.  It was interesting to see the events of Love and War in the Apennines from her point of view, and to learn more about the local people's efforts to help the escaped prisoners and to resist the Fascists, German and Italian alike.  In addition to introducing me to the Kras and its Slovenian people, it is also the first memoir I have read of life in Italy before, during and immediately after World War II.  It is of course one person's account, from the unique perspective of an individual "Slovenian by birth, Italian by education and English by adoption" (as the author's note states).  It is also written from the perspective of a young girl in a country village, and it does not discuss the political or military situation in great detail.  And then it ends too soon for me.  As I've mentioned before, I would love to read Wanda's account of her experiences as a war bride in England.  We get only a few glimpses in Eric's book covering those years, Something Wholesale.

A family divided in war & peace

Born 1925, Vera Brittain

Though I read Vera Brittain's three Testaments (Youth, Friendship and Experience), along with England's Hour, her account of London in the first years of World War II, in fairly quick succession, I haven't really looked for her fiction.  I came across this novel, published in 1949, at Half Price Books.  I was intrigued by the jacket copy:

Vera Brittain ended her famous Testament of Youth with the year 1925.  It was the story of her own youth, shipwrecked in the sudden whirlpool of World War I.  She has chosen the same year for the birth of Adrian Carbury - representative of a new generation, whose youth in turn was wrecked by World War II.

The subtitle of this book,"A Novel of Youth," is a bit misleading.  The story opens on a Prologue, with Adrian, aged three and a half, waiting for a surprise, which turns out to be a new baby, his sister Josephine.  It then circles back to his parents, particularly his father, Robert Carbury, who to my mind is the dominating figure of the story.  The only child of a Liberal MP from Staffordshire who rose to a Cabinet position, Robert disappointed his father by showing no aptitude for a political career.  With the outbreak of war in 1914, he joins the Staffordshire Light Infantry.  He finds himself unsuited to army life, and accuses himself of cowardice, even after he leads a desperate assault on a machine-gun nest that wins him the Victoria Cross.  Severely wounded in the attack, he is invalided out.  During his long convalescence, he agonizes over the men he killed, recognizing them as fellow human beings caught in a war they did not make.  His spiritual and psychological struggles lead him to embrace pacifism, and to decide to enter the Anglican priesthood.

Wars, thought Robert, came as a consequence of man's disobedience to God's Will.  Surely, then, the only work for a man who was free, and qualified to do it, was to try to teach God's Will, and persuade his fellow men to accept it?

He is assigned first to a settlement in the London Docks, and then to a parish in Battersea.  To his surprise, he finds he has a gift for preaching, and as word spreads his congregation grows quickly, drawing people from around the city.  Among them is the noted stage actress Sylvia Salvesen, still mourning her young husband, killed in action just after their wedding.  Robert falls in love with her as he counsels her in her grief and persuades her to return to the stage.  When he asks her to marry him; she accepts, though there is no room in her heart for another love, and her career will always be more real to her than her marriage.  Soon after their marriage, Robert is appointed to St Saviour's, a parish in the West End with only a small congregation.  His preaching and his spiritual leadership transform the parish.  It is there that Robert founds a group to work for peace, the Builders of Jerusalem.  Through the turbulence of the 1930s, he will continue to advocate for peaceful solutions to the crises, even after war breaks out.  He will then come under increased scrutiny from officials worried about his influence and suspecting treason.

The birth of two children has little effect on Sylvia's life, which remains in the theater.  Yet Robert, who loves them both dearly, finds it much more difficult to relate to them.  Adrian reacts to the constant crises and the bustle of his father's parish by shutting himself off emotionally to everyone but his sister.  Both children are embarrassed by Robert's love for them and by his pacifism.  In the second section of the book, the children are sent to the United States, to live with friends of their parents.  They return in 1942 almost as strangers, who constantly bait and needle their father, worn out with the years of war and his continuing work for peace, which eludes him even in his own home.

This novel seems to echo much in Vera Brittain's own life, paralleling her Testament of Experience.  She herself was from Staffordshire.  Like Sylvia, Brittain lost her first love, Roland Leighton, in the war.  She later married George Catlin, who apparently believed for years that she like Sylvia was still in love with the dead.  Her own son John was born in 1927, followed by her daughter Shirley in 1930.  In 1936, Brittain met Canon H.R.L. Sheppard, who after serving as an army chaplain in the Great War was assigned to St. Martin-in-the-Fields, where "Within months he transformed a moribund city church into England's most vital Christian centre."  The model for Robert Carbury, Canon Sheppard founded a "Peace Pledge Union," of which Vera Brittain became a sponsor.  Brittain's own work for peace brought her, like Robert, under government scrutiny during the war.  It was a factor in the decision she and her husband made to send their children, like Adrian and Jo, to friends in America.  The Carburys end up at Cayuga University in New York, standing in for Cornell where George Catlin was on the faculty.  In Testament of Experience, Brittain writes candidly of her difficult relations with her children after their return to England in 1942.  She addressed the autobiographical elements of the book in a letter to a friend:  "In this book I have sought to work out some of my own problems vicariously and it is to me the most important novel that I have written (which does not mean that I regard any of my novels as important)."  She also tried to reassure her son John that the character of Adrian was not a portrait of him, though it included elements of his life. "Like most fiction characters Adrian is a complete hybrid and what matters about him is that he should be typical of his generation."  Brittain's daughter Shirley Williams wrote in her autobiography that as children, John was clearly her mother's favorite, and in this book the author clearly prefers Adrian, with Jo a minor character.

As interesting as it was to read this book through Vera Brittain's life, I also enjoyed it as a compelling story.  True, there are times that her polemics almost take over the story, and I found the internal monologues that she wrote for her characters very unconvincing.  But she created a great character in Robert, who to me is the heart of the book.  I came to care very much about him, and I missed him in the sections that follow Sylvia and the children.  He has a great capacity for love, which is frustrated by the emotional distance of his wife and children.  He commits himself completely to his ministry and to his peace work.  There is much discussion of the difficult relations between the generations, though the younger Carburys seem to make little effort to understand their father's mind or heart.  This is a familiar theme from Angela Thirkell's novels, both during and after the war.  As with England's Hour, Brittain also paints a vivid picture of London in the war, particularly after Adrian is called up and joins the bomb-disposal squads.

After reading this book, I'll be keeping an eye out for more of Vera Brittain's fiction.

An Essex village in 1940

The Oaken Heart, Margery Allingham

After I read Margery Allingham's Tether's End a few weeks ago, I went looking for a list of the Albert Campion books.  I found a bibliography on the Allingham Society's website, but in the middle of the list was a title I didn't recognize, The Oaken Heart.  The summary of it was so intriguing that I immediately put in a request to interlibrary loan.  In the first pages of her book, Allingham explained its purpose and how it came to be written in a letter to the residents of her village near the Essex coast:

"Last November an American whom some of you know [her published at Doubleday] asked me to put it down so that he and his wife and his village in America could gather exactly what life has been like down here for us ordinary country people during the war. It was a business request, and I have made an ultra-careful job of it, as you will see, because I believe that he and his friends are sufficiently (but by no means exactly) like us for it to be possible for me to convey to him much more of the actual truth than is usual on these occasions . . . Also, the war is getting very close to them over there . . . It is not a private attempt at propaganda, nor yet a disinterested gesture on my part. I have been employed as a professional writer by the American to tell him what he wants to know." 

The village where Allingham and her husband Philip Youngman Carter lived is Tolleshunt D'Arcy (renamed "Auburn" in the book).  She began the book by introducing her readers to the village, its geography and its residents.  The Carters' home was in the center of it, and though they had only moved into it in 1934, they seem to have quickly found their place, probably in part because Allingham had lived in Essex from childhood.  She took a sociologist's interest in the community, analyzing their state of mind and heart starting in late 1938, through the fraught events of 1939, and then into the first two years of the war.  She described the evolution of the community's thinking on the war and Britain's place in it:

"In those weeks in May and June [1940] I think ninety-nine per cent of English folk, country and town, found their souls . . . [in] the bald discovery that you would honestly and in cold blood rather die when it came to it than be bossed about by a Nazi . . . They said things like 'Looks like we'll have to stand up to 'em then,' . . . or merely and most firmly, 'We can't have they here, no, no.'"

The greatest upheaval at the start of the war was the unexpected arrival of five hundred mothers and their young children, evacuees from London, most of whom were not well-suited to country life.  Allingham took a leading role in managing their placement with village families; meanwhile her husband had become the head of the local air raid wardens, and their home the village headquarters.  Though her focus remained on the countryside, in the later part of the book Allingham wrote about two trips to London in the midst of the Blitz.  Despite the continual air raids on her part of Essex, the damage was limited, at least up to the time the book was published in 1941.

As one might expect in a book written for an American audience, Allingham spent some time analyzing both the differences and the similarities between the British and the Americans, like she was trying to explain each to the other.  In her telling, the people of Auburn initially thought it only natural that America might not rush to Britain's aid again, though self-interest and the ties between the two countries would eventually have their effect.

In addition to coping with the upheaval of the war, Allingham was on a deadline to complete a Campion novel, published in 1941 as Traitor's Purse and set in the early years of the war. 

"On my part, the completion of my thriller was a vital necessity; no question about that. My part in the family war effort was to keep the home going and pay the taxes, and there were times when I wished I had been prenticed to a different trade. My tale was about a man with amnesia and required a mental contortionist with uninterrupted leisure to write the blessed thing . . . I was always hoping that the end of one thriller would not overtake me before I finished the other."

As I read The Oaken Heart, I was mentally comparing it with Vera Brittain's England's Hour, also published in 1941 and also written for an American audience.  The books, though very different, complement each other.  Brittain's focus was urban: "to present, from several different angles, this wartime life as it has appeared to the ordinary London civilian day by day."  Perhaps in a natural reaction to the months of bombing that she endured, the devastation that she witnessed, Brittain's book feels more urgent, almost impatient at times.  Yet though she also analyzed actions and reactions, feelings and thoughts, it was from more of a distance than Allingham, embedded in the middle of her small rural community.  As I read I was also comparing The Oaken Heart with the war-time novels in Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire series and her fictional portrayal of the home front.  One of the major differences I noted is that Allingham's village seems to have had less class division or class consciousness than Thirkell's.  Most of the Auburn residents that Allingham described and quoted would have been minor characters in a Barsetshire novel.

The Allingham Society's site described The Oaken Heart as "one of the great books to come out of the Second World War," and though I'm not an expert on the literature of the war, I'd agree with that.

A prisoner of war in Italy

Love and War in the Apennines, Eric Newby

This book is an account of seventeen months that Eric Newby spent in Italy during World War II, first as a prisoner of war, and then after the Italian Armistice in September 1943, a fugitive from both the invading Germans and the remaining Italian fascists.  Like many of his fellow British soldiers, he was hidden and helped by the people of the countryside.  Among them was a young Slovenian woman named Wanda, whom he married after the war.

I have read some military history on the Second World War, but that was years ago.  More recently my reading on the war has focused on the Holocaust, and on the home front in both Britain and the United States.  I don't know much about the war in Italy, or about life for army POWs, so what Newby was writing about was new to me.

He was captured with four other British soldiers off the coast of Sicily on August 12, 1942.  All members of the "Special Boat Section", they formed a unit sent ashore to blow up German bombers to prevent their attacking a convoy then approaching Malta with critically-needed supplies.  The operation, code-named "Whynot," which Newby recounts in detail, was a complete failure.  The men missed their rendezvous with the submarine that was to evacuate them, and they spent hours in the water before being rescued by fishermen, who turned them over to the Italian forces.

The next section of the book covers the year he spent as a POW.  He focuses on the last six months, after he was transferred to a camp located in a village near Parma in northern Italy, in what had previously been an orphanage.  It was attached to a convent of cloistered nuns, who did the prisoners' laundry and sometimes hid encouraging notes in their clothes.  Newby approaches this section as something of a sociologist.  He looks at how the men spent their time, explains the devastating effects of flocks of girls parading past the camp, and describes its social organization.  There was a definite hierarchy in the camp, headed by the "O.K." people, who ran everything.  Newby had a "marginally O.K." friend, who was his entrée into the fringes of society.  He tells us,

"I wanted the opportunity to observe the O.K. people at close quarters and some inner voice told me, quite correctly for once, that this was going to be my last chance ever to do so in the whole of my life.  Before the war I had rarely spoken to O.K. people, let alone known any well enough to talk to."

This period, marked above all by boredom, ended with the Italian Armistice on September 8, 1943.  At the time, Newby was in the infirmary with a broken ankle.  Since there was no plaster in the camp, he was confined to his bed.  The British troops, anticipating the arrival of Allied forces in the next day or so, prepared to leave the camp.  When it became clear that the Allied advance would be slow and difficult, the escaped prisoners had to decide whether to head south, which meant crossing the German and Italian lines, or north, hoping to reach Switzerland.  With his broken ankle making travel impossible, Newby had no immediate choice in the matter.  As Italian civilians gathered with clothing and food for the British soldiers, he finally saw a doctor, who whisked him away to a hospital.  Newby discovered later that he was hidden in the maternity wing, where the agonies of women in labor terrified him.  Here Wanda visited him, as she did other hidden refugees.  She taught Newby Italian and practiced her English with him, and as they became better acquainted they fell in love.

Wanda helped arrange his escape from the hospital just before he was to be arrested.  He spent the next four months hiding with country folk in small mountain villages, moving from place to place.  For several weeks he worked on a farm, backbreaking labor moving stones out of a field.  Later a group of villagers built him a concealed shelter in a forest and kept him supplied with food, and he was joined there by a friend from the orphanage camp.  More than once he had to leave a refuge because his hosts feared discovery, or because they learned that troops on their way to arrest him.  Twice he was denounced to the authorities by fascist sympathizers, and the second led to his final capture in December of 1944.  Newby wants to pay tribute to all the people who helped and hid him and his fellow soldiers for so many months.

"I finally decided to write the book because I felt that comparatively little had been written about the ordinary Italian people who helped prisoners of war at great personal risk and without thought of personal gain, purely out of kindness of heart."

He is clear about the risks.   Both the doctor who got Newby into the hospital and Wanda's father were arrested, as were scores of others; some of them were sent north to Nazi concentration camps.  These civilians were already suffering the deprivations of the war.  Food was scarce, and other necessities, some as basic as salt, were in short supply.  Some found the strain of helping was too great.  Newby was refused refuge in one house because the family "had fear."  The word paura (fear) was constantly in the air.  Yet people moved beyond that fear, to do what they could, to help.  Many who had sons fighting on the Russian front offered help hoping that their sons would in turn find help, not knowing that few would ever return.  It was humbling and inspiring to read about their generosity, like the "righteous" who at the same time were risking their lives to save Jews, and to wonder how I would meet that challenge.  This book is a wonderful tribute to them.

Newby has no intention of presenting himself as a hero, however.  He is completely and disarmingly candid about his own incompetencies.  He freely admits his fear of horses and his general wimpiness:

"I invariably faint away during performances of King Lear, Coriolanus, any Greek tragedy worthy of the name, and in any film in the course of which operating theatres and torture chambers form part of the mise en scène . . ." 

More seriously, he was not immune to paura, not just for himself but also for Wanda.  At times it was only the sense that he owed something to the people risking their lives to protect him that kept him going.  But he did keep going, and that persistence, that stubborn unwillingness to give in, is itself heroic.

I'm glad that I had already read Eric Newby's A Traveller's Life, which I posted about back in February.  Though not a full-scale biography, it gave me an overview of his life (at least up to 1982), so that I could put this book into context.  It continues this story with two chapters on his experiences as a POW in Germany, after his re-capture.  What neither book tells me is how he was able to keep in contact with Wanda during those years, and what they were like for her, before he returned to Italy in December of 1945 to propose.  The romantic in me hopes maybe that story will be told in one of his other books.

Caught in a new kind of war

What Happened to the Corbetts, Nevil Shute

My branch library has some shelves and carts in the lobby with books for sale, the proceeds of which benefit the library.  I can never resist stopping to browse, and it's always interesting to see what people have donated.  (I've given them quite a few myself.)  One week there were several shelves of film and TV screenplays, another week a complete set of the Hornblower series.  Last week, there was a whole row of Nevil Shute novels.  Other than A Town Like Alice or On the Beach, I rarely come across his books  in the used book stores, and here were four that I had never read.  I love that kind of lagniappe.

The Corbetts of the title are Peter, his wife Joan, and their three children. The family lives in Southampton, where Peter works as a solicitor.  As the story opens, they have taken shelter in their garage after a night of what one of the children describes as "loud bangs."  These were actually bombs, at least 1,000 of them, dropped in a night raid, part of a coordinated surprise attack across England.  Later that day, Peter learns that England is now at war, though we the readers are never told with whom or exactly how the war started.  The massive bombing raids continue, destroying the infrastructure of the city, leaving residents without water or power, halting the delivery of food and other necessities, making homes uninhabitable.  This part reminded me very much of life in Houston after Hurricane Ike.  Though the damage was less extensive than what Shute describes, we were left without power and in some areas water for weeks.  Even the simplest tasks of daily life were unbelievably complicated, and we learned very quickly how spoiled we had become.

What Happened to the Corbetts follows Peter and Joan through the first days of the new war, as they cope with the daily difficulties of life, faced with life and death decisions about their family's future, as the bombs continue to fall.

Nevil Shute wrote this book in 1938, and it was published in April of 1939.  As he explains in a Preface to later editions, part of his aim in writing the book was to make people aware of the dangers England would face from bombing, if the war that he saw looming became a reality.  A pilot and aeronautical engineer, he understood the role that aerial warfare would play.  He was therefore writing his expectations about what kind of war it would be.  He wrote a similar kind of speculative book with In the Wet, published in 1953, where much of the story takes place in the 1980s.  But with What Happened to the Corbetts, the real war would come only a matter of months later.  It took a different form than Shute predicted, but he believed that his book had still done something toward preparing the people of England.  His publishers must have thought so as well; they had donated a thousand copies to air raid workers.

Besides all that, though, What Happened to the Corbetts is just a good story, full of action and suspense.  I've enjoyed most of the Shute novels that I have read, especially the World War II novels such as A Town Like Alice and Pied Piper (though not Requiem for a Wren).  Now I still have the three other new ones to look forward to.

A difficult journal of World War II

War Within and Without, Anne Morrow Lindbergh

This is the fifth and final volume of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's published diaries and letters, covering the years 1939-1944.  This has been on my TBR pile for years, along with the fourth volume, The Flower and the Nettle, which I read and posted about back in June.  This volume opens as the Lindberghs return to the United States following several years' residence in England and France.

I really struggled with this book and almost gave up on it more than once.  All her books have been challenging reads for me.  Each covers dark times in her life, especially Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, with the death of her father and the kidnapping and murder of her first child.  But this was a different type of challenge.

The first part of the book is consumed, as her life was at the time, with her involvement in the isolationist movement, aimed at keeping America out of the war in Europe.  Charles Lindbergh of course became one of the most prominent spokesmen for the isolationists, through his involvement in America First.  Anne insists in her letters and diary entries that she is not just following in his wake, that her beliefs are her own and differ at times from his.  One of my problems was that I couldn't figure out exactly what her beliefs were, what lay behind her isolationism.  In 1940, she published a book, Wave to the Future, an attempt to to explain her position, which led many people to label her a fascist or Nazi sympathizer.  Perhaps in preparing her diaries and letters for publication, she felt it unnecessary to explain herself again, but I found the lack of context very frustrating (and I have no interest in reading Wave of the Future).  In the Introduction, she says that she was converted to pacifism in college, after reading Erich Maria Remarque.  From the earlier diaries, pacifism didn't seem to play much of a part in her life in those years, compared to someone like Vera Brittain (whose Testament of Experience I read back in May). 

This first part of the book is difficult to read, with the Lindberghs divided by their opinions from most of their friends and even family.  Anne attempts to tone down some of Charles' more extreme statements, particularly his disastrous speech claiming that "Jewish elements" were one of the main influences dragging America into war.  Yet she writes constantly of her belief in Charles, his essential rightness and integrity.  As in the earlier volume, she is clearly concerned to defend them both against charges of anti-semitism and fascism.  In the Introduction she says, "Rereading the diaries almost forty years later, I am appalled at my innocence of politics and the violence of my indignation," a reaction the reader is likely to share.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the war, Charles goes to work for the Ford company as a consultant at a bomber plant near Detroit, Michigan.  The second part of the book is the chronicle of their lives there.  It includes the birth of two more children, a daughter and a son; their writing careers, as Charles begins work on The Spirit of St. Louis; and Anne's sudden decision to take courses in art at nearby Cranbook Academy, where she immerses herself in clay modeling.  Though Anne constantly discusses war news in her diaries, at least of the European theater (there is almost no mention of the Pacific theater), this is not the account of the home front that I expected, unlike again Vera Brittain's book.  It chronicles Anne's struggle to care for home, husband, children, while finding the time and mental space to write.  As she says, "One writes not to be read, but to breathe." 

A constant theme in this book is Anne's search for "her" kind of people, artists, writers, thinkers, as opposed to Charles' people, who are practical men of action.  Anne's kind is exemplified by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whom she meets in 1939, and who is the first person to discuss her writing as "craft."  It is almost like love at first sight for her, and though she never meets him again (due in part to her politics), she mentions him frequently in her diaries.  This book ends in 1944, soon after his death.   Though it comes also at a turning point for the family, as they move to Connecticut, it feels like the real end of the book is his death, and the end of her hopes that the conversation begun in 1939 might continue some time in the future.

There is no explanation for why this volume ends in October 1944, and none for why it was the last such volume that she published.  It seems an odd place to stop, leaving the story of her life half-told, but perhaps that is a fitting end to this odd, uncomfortable, often difficult book.

A last testament

Testament of Experience, Vera Brittain

I can just remember watching some part of Testament of Youth on PBS, probably in the early 1980s.  Though I didn't watch the whole series, I always remembered Vera Brittain, and in the back of my mind was the idea that someday I would read Testament of Youth.  Then, last year, I found her book England's Hour, about the Battle of Britain, at Half-Price Books.  That prompted me to check Youth out from the library, because of course I had to read her books in order; but I didn't get much past the first chapter.  That didn't stop me from buying my own copy of Youth a few days later, again at HPB. 

On starting Youth a second time, I was immediately swept up into the story.  And when I learned there were two other testaments, of Friendship and Experience, I went on-line to find copies before I'd even finished the first. I read both Testament of Friendship and England's Hour and then put the last book aside for the moment to read other things.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I finally read E.M. Delafield's I Visit the Soviets, and that reminded me that I still had Testament of Experience on the TBR pile.  Experience picks up just where Youth ended, with Vera Brittain's marriage to "G" (political scientist George Caitlin). Marriage is one of the main themes of Experience, as she struggles to balance her work, the demands of her aging parents, her husband's career first in America, and later their two children.  Their unconventional solution was to spend part of each year apart. Vera remained in England, sharing a home with her closest friend and fellow writer Winifred Holtby (the subject of Testament of Friendship), which made all three the focus of gossip ("Too, too Chelsea," Winifred would say).  I found it incredibly poignant that "G" believed for so many years that Vera's love was buried with her first fiancé Roland Leighton, killed in France in 1915; and that Vera, who had mourned Roland but moved on in life, was unaware of this chasm in their marriage.

A second major theme is Vera Brittain's writing career. A poet and a journalist, she became famous with the publication of Testament of Youth in 1933.  But her conversion to pacifism, and her increasing prominence in the cause, meant a loss of reputation even before World War II began. Thus pacifism is a third major theme of her book, and I found those parts sometimes difficult reading.  I kept wanting to argue with her that Hitler had to be stopped, that pacifism could not be an option in the face of Nazi evil.  But I have to concede her point that statesmanship failed in the 1920s and 1930s, that the League of Nations on which she pinned such hopes was betrayed by politicians who might have prevented what came later.

I have a suspicion that Vera Brittain would have found me frivolous and light-minded.  I find her inspiring, energizing, and very good company.