Second World War – Kate Macdonald

Rachel Ferguson’s A Footman for the Peacock: a hatchet job

There is a good novel buried in this sprawling, self-indulgent fantasy of irony and class consciousness. Rachel Ferguson wrote A Footman for the Peacock (1940) right at the beginning of the Second World War: it was her eighth novel and fourteenth book. Comparing it to its immediate predecessor, Alas Poor Lady (1937), one can only assume that the frustration and gloom of impending war had addled her sense of proportion. Her earlier novel, the triumphant, magnificent The Brontes Went to Woolworths (1931) is now her most well-known novel due to the Virago reprint of 1988, and rightly so: it is a work of pure fantastical genius. Alas Poor Lady, also snapped up by the unerring eye of a successful reprint publisher, is one of the novels that epitomises Persephone Books’ project of rescuing unjustly neglected novels for their literary quality and the gifts of their social commentary. Both novels are written with control and sensitivity, matching Ferguson’s precise observations to her magical ability to conjure pathos out of the ludicrous by showing the power of human feelings over all social considerations.

Compared to these novels, A Footman for the Peacock fails embarrassingly. I haven’t always been too enthusiastic with what the Dean Street Press have kindly sent me to review (A Chelsea Concerto was the dazzling exception). My impression has been that either my taste in books is very different to their collective taste, or they are reprinting novels that other reprint houses are not bothering with for good reason. Of course, it could just be me. Earlier reviews of A Footman for the Peacock had me wondering if I had read the same book. But its publicity is also bizarrely at odds with what I actually read, so much so that I seriously considered whether their back cover blurb had been written by a marketing person who had been told about the book, but hadn’t read it for themselves. This is the first offender:

‘The peacock … Waiting? Listening? Guiding. No. Signalling.’

What utter, utter tosh. There is a peacock. It prowls the lawns of the English country mansion, Delaye, and keeps an eye on the Roundelay family and its servants. It attacks Angela, the younger Roundelay daughter, when she offers it half a hard-boiled egg, but the alert reader will already have spotted the reason for that when it occurs. The peacock has a close connection to the eighteenth-century family’s running footman Thomas Picocke, who died bloodily in the top attic bedroom, due to his murderously exhausting job. It waits, presumably; listens, possibly; but it does not guide, and it certainly does not signal. As for the succeeding line, ‘may be aiding the Nazi cause’, this interpretation comes from the original Furrowed Middlebrow review of this novel, which is a straightforward misreading. It’s undoubtedly useful in the blurb, to pull in readers attracted to a plot about Nazi avian espionage. The niche readership will be disappointed, but they’ll already have bought the book.

Other assertions in the blurb may be due to the Furrowed Middlebrow’s knowledge of British social and literary history. It says that the novel was ‘controversial when first published’: well, no, it wasn’t. It was peculiar, Margery Allingham gave it a ‘guarded’ review (not unusual for her), and Punch loved it. If there is any evidence to prove the ‘controversial’ tag (so useful for whipping up sales), Dean Street Press don’t prove it.

The next phrase mentions ‘a loathsome upper-crust family dodging wartime responsibility’. Yes, they’re upper-class; yes, they’re dodging war-time responsibility by resisting billeting of evacuees, but most novels of the war written before the Blitz will depict this. So are the Roundelays ‘loathsome?’ No, I don’t think they are. Ferguson spends the entire novel making us feel how dear and charming and nice these people are, as well as vague, eccentric and exceedingly old-fashioned. She creates people, and shows us their lives, makes them live with human preoccupations, tirednesses, aggravations and struggles, and then presents them in wartime, struggling to cope as everybody had to cope, in peculiarly individual ways. Not loathsome, no: just human. The blurb and I will have to disagree on this one.

Getting into Ferguson’s plot, the novel’s fantasy elements of the strange other-worldly village of Rohan, Angela’s shuddering sensitivity to the haunted room with the glass inscription, the mystery of Sue Privett’s relationship with the peacock, and the eighteenth-century mysteries of the running footman’s death, the sacking of Polly Privett and Marguerite Roundelay’s fatal self-exile to Revolutionary France: all these belong in a potentially excellent mystery novel that Ferguson never allowed herself to write. Instead, she clarted her plot with a slapped-on morass of witticisms, as if she were clearing out a hoard of old jokes, clever take-offs and satirical interjections (some are very good). She romps for pages and pages, sending-up high society and its ways, forgetting that she’s supposed to be writing a novel with a plot. Characters appear and then wither away, forgotten. Tag-ends of plot lines multiply as if seeded by an anxious editor, hoping to pull some of this farrago together. The chaos is frustrating, because there is so much here that could have been so good. But Ferguson decided (or perhaps just needed to get something published) to throw everything she had into the pot. It’s a mess.

The novel is ill-served by its Introduction, which is expected to cover all three Ferguson novels reprinted in the Furrowed Middlebrow series, and is presumably reprinted in all three. This approach is needlessly cheapskate, and fails the novels by only giving them half a page each. Why wasn’t Elizabeth Crawford given the space to do the job properly?

You’ll detect that my exasperation with a good novel wasted is exacerbated by the publishing decisions for this edition, and that this is not a happy review. Many of you will think this beside the point, or needlessly pernickety. But these things matter: if you’re going to do reprints, you should take them seriously as novels, not just sales opportunities, consider their merits objectively, and not fob readers off with material that is so much less than it could have been. I don’t say that A Footman for the Peacock should not have been reprinted, but I would only recommend it for Ferguson completists.

Now posting on Vulpes Libris: A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt

I was persuaded by the excellent word of mouth praise for A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt, which is an unlikely-sounding smash hit. I was delighted. Also appalled by its weight and size: this is NOT a book for taking on holiday unless you do the ebook thing. A very absorbing, moving and impressive read, but over on Vulpes Libris I have views about the editorial choices made to get 45 diaries down to two inches of book.

The outbreak of war: Angela Thirkell’s Cheerfulness Breaks In

a lush modern cover with costumes almost from the right decade

Today’s letter in the Really Like This Book podcast series script catch-up is T, so it has to be Angela Thirkell. I’ve spent several years writing about Thirkell, so I need to remind myself that although she used to be really famous, now she is hardly known at all, unless you’re in the Angela Thirkell Society in the UK, or the US branch, or have discovered Virago Press’s recent reissue of several of her excellent novels.

During the Second World War Angela Thirkell was a best-seller, publishing a novel every year for most of her career. This isn’t always a mark of literary quality, but it certainly tells you about her self-discipline, and the demands of her readers, who clamoured for more every year. She began publishing in the early 1930s, and published her last novel in the year before she died, in 1960. She wrote about the same thing for thirty years: the small-town and country lives of a group of upper-class characters and their servants, tenants and neighbours. This sounds pretty dull, but it was the way she wrote that hooked her readers.

probably the best of the covers for this title because it doesn't make any fashion clangers — probably the best of the covers for this title because it doesn’t make any fashion clangers

First, she was very funny. She was a great comic novelist in the sharp-toothed pastoral tradition of Jane Austen. She could be vitriolic: she was described, by a very perceptive American reviewer after the war, as being a good hater (no British reviewer would have dared). Her novels are marinaded in Victorian literature, and she quite clearly loathed the bad manners and slovenly standards of her own day. Most fascinating of all, she uses the fictional landscape invented by the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, setting his Barsetshire in the twentieth century. She used his character names, his topographical features, his family histories, and the events of his novels to construct a brilliant parallel universe in which to enact her saga. Her purpose was to satirise modern county life with an affectionate eye, and to be very unpleasant about character types and modern institutions that she could not abide.

Her readers loved her because she was a raconteur and a mimic. She filled her novels with literary allusions to obscure Victorian fairy tales, and was scathing about the habits of the modern young. Her nice characters detested the radio and all other modern inventions. She expressed her contempt for the cinema by allowing only one film to come to Barchester in each novel, which stars the same actress each time. Glamora Tudor (for it is she) is quite clearly in the same sort of film each time, but has a different leading man each time, with the most improbable but yet wickedly plausible names: Hash Gobbet, Croke Hosskiss, Crab Doker, Croke Scumpter, Hake Codman, Washington Swop, Buck Follanbee, Buck Pickaback, Hick Pilldozer. Very few of these would look out of place on a Hollywood film poster today.

a notoriously inappropriate cover from the early US reprints by Moyer Bell, for which fans are grateful for making the novels available, while they hate the cover art — a notoriously inappropriate cover from the early US reprints by Moyer Bell, to whom AT fans are grateful for making the novels available again, while hating their ideas about cover art

Thirkell made a virtue of her scatty plotting, and huge cast of recurring characters, but she maintained good control over her stories. She was particularly good at encouraging the reader to feel the excitement of what in another writer’s hands would have been very mundane events. People meet at each others’ houses, to have lunch, or dinner, and sometimes they go to a county event, like a Pig-Breeders’ Association Show, or the church fete. Such were the thrills of English country life before the Second World War. The banality of Thirkell’s subjects might have defeated her ingenuity in time, if it hadn’t been for the war. Most of her novels were aggressively anti- something. Before the war she was anti-Communist, anti-sloppy dressing, anti-rudeness-to-parents, and she ripped apart a set of fondly created character types: the pretentious lady writer, the pompous modern artist, the irritatingly frugal housewife who insists on feeding guests with leftover scraps, the tedious bullying husband who needs to orate at his wife and guests. This could so easily have become too repetitive, even for Thirkell fans, but the war saved her.

The war gave her much better material to be bitter about, and her fiction really shows this. It gained depth, conviction and a vastly increased moral strength. A middle-class housewife in an industrial town who does her own cleaning would probably find it hard to feel sympathetic about a 1930s Thirkell housewife whose chief grief is that her parlour-maid and her cook are always squabbling. The war put the British on a much more even footing, in terms of economics and status: rationing applied to everybody, everybody had to queue for food, and everybody living in the countryside had to entertain refugees and evacuees. This communalised living brought about the best in Angela Thirkell’s humour and let her write passionately about self-reliance and endurance instead of the tyranny of the parlour-maid. She wrote six novels during the war, which are a fascinating way to read how it unfolded over time on the British Home Front. The first in this series is Cheerfulness Breaks In, and it is one of her best.

does this suggest the outbreak of WW2 to you? Me neither.

Cheerfulness Breaks In begins with the marriage of Rose Birkett, which sorts out the problem daughter from an earlier novel by marrying her off to the one man who can control her and make her behave properly. Thus we see that Thirkell was not in favour of children who do not obey their parents, and disapproved of wives who do not obey their husbands. If this has made your hackles rise, take it from me, a committed feminist, that reading Thirkell is a joy and a treat precisely because she articulates such attitudes so entertainingly. Her politics are on her sleeve, and that’s absolutely fine. Just get on and enjoy the story. This wedding is a good way to meet the characters who will populate the novel, and also to encounter the early signs of trouble in Europe. It is August 1939, and evacuees are already being spoken of. Refugees have arrived, and speak incomprehensibly, causing much anguish for their hostesses. The young men of the county are poised to leap into uniform: there is no place for pacifism here. When war does break out, six weeks later, the population of Barsetshire starts shuffling into different houses as evacuees pour in from London, and they’re not just grubby children from the East End. Well-to-do families evacuate themselves from London, just in case, and a lot of schools get out too.

The focus in Cheerfulness Breaks In is the integration of the Hosiers’ Boys School from London – an invented day school for boys from poor backgrounds funded by one of the City of London Guilds – into the private and upper-class Southbridge School, a Barsetshire public school and county institution. The Hosiers’ Boys School has ancestry, and historical status (which is important for Thirkell), but it is also crammed with lower-class boys and, far worse, lower-class teachers. This is where Thirkell is very interesting indeed. The Hosiers’ Boys headmaster, Mr Bissell, is an East End socialist, and struggles to enjoy his first sherry at the Southbridge School headmaster’s house because it is a Capittleist affectation. We see his bewilderment at actually meeting the upper classes in their natural habitat, and at enjoying their food and drink. He also wrestles with completely new ways of thinking, and talking, and indeed conversing at dinner, where the upper-class ladies say what they like to whoever they like, and everyone is polite and friendly above all things. Thirkell simplifies Mr Bissell’s background to caricature, and the effect of this part of the novel is the upper-classes’ revenge against Socialist propaganda, but it surprisingly effective. Class is finally speaking to class, and it isn’t as bad as either might have thought.

why did no publisher do a cover with Miss Hampton the radical lesbian novelist on it?

When Mrs Bissell arrives, we are plunged into a feminine world where Thirkell really shines. She has already proved in earlier novels how good she is at writing goofy, adolescent, exuberant, eccentric, affected, tiresome, crashingly rude and snobbish women. In this novel she extends her collection to include Miss Hampton, a magnificent lesbian radical novelist in a perfectly tailored suit. There is also Eileen, the impervious blonde stunner serving at the bar of the Red Lion; Mrs Warbury, a vile and ingratiating enemy alien displaying a fine obliviousness to how appallingly she is behaving; Mrs and Miss Phelps, a bouncing Admiral’s wife and her even more bouncing daughter who do good works all day long for the sake of the Navy; Lydia Keith, a thoroughly good girl who has resisted the call to go and nurse like all her friends, to stay at home with her invalid mother and run the farm as well as war relief working parties and the communal canteen for evacuee children’s meals. There is also Thirkell’s own alter ego, the dotty but successful detective novelist Mrs Morland, who sheds hairpins wherever she goes and cannot think in a straight line.

Mrs Bissell confounds all local expectations by being a child psychologist as well as a teacher, and is also an expert on tax law for married women. Most unexpectedly of all, she and Mr Bissell become part of the Wiple Terrace set, which seem to spend all their evenings drinking heavily at the Red Lion or at each others’ houses. The Bissells’ joint integration into Southbridge society mirrors the successful and painless integration of the schools, and it also reflects the unsuccessful integration of other incomers into Barsetshire. All the hostesses take evacuee children as a fervent war duty, but hate them because they smell, they are greedy and horrible, they have no manners. The local ladies also resent the evacuees’ parents still in London, whom Thirkell insists are having a holiday from parenting while their children are looked after at other people’s expense. Her facts and history are a bit muddled here, but you don’t read Thirkell for precise details of history, you read her for a general impression written at the time, which is thus a valid piece of contemporary evidence of how one part of the population was feeling about the Home Front. She certainly doesn’t speak for everyone in Britain during the war, or even a majority, but she does speak for her own class, who, oddly, don’t get quite as specific in their disgruntlement as Thirkell does. If you want to read about real class resentment, as well as noblesse oblige, read it here.

my book! which is about Thirkell, and John Buchan and Dornford Yates

Cheerfulness Breaks In is also about engagements, as are all of Thirkell’s novels. This one has a score of two, whereas some, for instance The Duke’s Daughter, end with four. Geraldine Birkett, the gawky sister of the appalling Rose, is rescued from the misery of falling in love with an absolute bounder by Rose’s new brother-in-law, who is just as brisk and high-handed as his brother, and so her fate is settled, and Mr and Mrs Birkett have the joy of being rid of both their tiresome children in little under twelve chapters. The more endearing love story in the novel is between Lydia and the urbane barrister Noel Merton. This is a romance in the perfect tradition of Brief Encounter, packed with inarticulate utterances, stiff upper lips, fleeting glances, and misunderstandings. Just as we think it has all ended happily, we realise that Noel has gone off to Dunkirk, and the novel ends on a cliff-hanger telegram. Do read it: it’s terrific.

Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Ursula Buchan’s A Green and Pleasant Land

I met Ursula Buchan a few weeks back, after corresponding by email on and off over a year, and we got on like a house on fire, since we are both researching the same subject but from different angles. She sent me a copy of her most recent book – A Green and Pleasant Land: How England’s Gardeners Fought the Second World War – and I liked it so much I reviewed it for Vulpes Libris. Gardening history, social history, the history of how Britain managed to learn to feed itself during the Second World War, and how horticulture and the science of food was revolutionised under pressure, how could anyone not be fascinated by that? Highly commended reading.

You May Well Ask: Naomi Mitchison’s roaring twenties

‘But my baby died’. That’s the last line in Naomi Mitchison’s second volume of memoirs, You May Well Ask. It’s a grim cliff-hanger that isn’t, because this happened in 1940 when she was running a small Scottish estate in Carradale, on a dangling arm of land off western Scotland that snuggles up to Arran in the Firth of Clyde. War was well and truly upon her. What with a crowd of evacuated school children and their teachers to feed and house, and her friends in the village who were either getting ready to go to war or watching their men go to war, and her own eldest son working out what to do while her husband was waiting in London to be given a job that could be overseas, it was a hell of a time to be pregnant at the age of 43 with no doctor nearer than Glasgow.

But Naomi Mitchison is nothing if not tough and resilient. She died in 1999 at the age of 102, and this last baby was her seventh child. She thought that she had written over 100 books though online sources say 90: let’s not quibble. She was a great Scottish literary figure, a pioneering historical novelist, she was a determined campaigner for the causes she believed in, mostly feminist, socialist and scientific. She was devoted to her husband but open-eyed about his failings, and her own, and she revelled in taking lovers. Her friends were some of the most wonderful writers and politicians of the twentieth century. She is a fierce and plain-speaking recorder of masculine pig-headedness, and looks with a feminist eye at how people live, and what the women have to put up with. She is matter-of-fact and helpful with her homosexual friends, dancing with lesbian ladies of the night in Louise’s bar in Paris before they start work for the evening. She once stole a car in Oxford to drive Dick Crossman and his friend of the moment out to the woods where they could commune in peace, and then returned the car unscathed where it belonged.

You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940 is a terrific dip into the period, mainly because Mitchison is relentlessly open and truthful. The book is packed with unforgettable one-liners that open up startling vistas in her public and private life. One of her lovers once threw her across a room because he was so angry with her. When Mitchison was travelling by train with the daughter of a friend, she slapped the girl unexpectedly across the face because she needed to see the facial expression that such an abrupt and violent act would produce for a novel she was writing (The Corn King and The Spring Queen, 1931). She explained and apologised afterwards, but I do wonder if the girl ever wanted to be in a railway carriage with her ever again.

Mitchison was a passionate campaigner for birth control and sex education, and struggled hard in the 1930s to publish modern novels that used honest descriptions of modern sex, rubber condoms and all. Her publishers refused, and she bitterly wrote that ‘apparently it’s all right when people wear wolfskins and togas’. As several of her friends attested at the time, her historical novels – brilliantly innovative in using modern speech without slang to bring the past alive – contained many quite erotic passages about sex between her characters, much of it homosexual, but none of this was objected to since, as she says, they usually wore wolfskins or togas. Mary Renault would have learned much from Mitchison’s 1920s and 1930s novels and short stories set in classical Greek and Roman history.

This memoir’s particular strength is her account of her long friendships with E M Forster, W H Auden, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Stella Benson, Olaf Stapledon and Stevie Smith. Their letters and her stories of what they did and said and fed on and talked about are riveting, a master-class in memoirising, and an evocative read. It’s packed with the details that the biographies miss because the biographers hadn’t lived the life they were writing. She recalls that Anita Loos’ best-seller Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a terrific hit with the highbrows, who made a fashion out of speaking like Lorelei Lee: who knew?

You can browse through a good range of modern editions of Naomi Mitchison’s books at Kennedy & Boyd’s Naomi Mitchson Library, many of them with scholarly introductions.

My review of Mitchison’s science fiction novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman is here.

Monica Dickens, One Pair of Feet

The lovely chirpy Penguin cover on my mum's bookshelf, no hint of tragedy, just the promise of jolly comic mishaps — The lovely chirpy Penguin cover on my mum’s bookshelf, no hint of tragedy, just the promise of jolly comic mishaps

Today’s letter is D, for Monica Dickens. She’s the great-grand-daughter of Charles Dickens, and she too was very prolific, publishing about 30 novels and memoirs, including the Follyfoot horse stories. I’m not very interested in horse novels, so I didn’t discover Monica Dickens until I found her on my mother’s bookshelf some time in my teens.

One Pair of Feet was published in 1942. It’s a novel-memoir, in that it’s fiction, but based on her experiences training as a nurse during the Second World War. Like all good funny books it draws its humour from the infinite variety of the human character. Like all good comedies, in the classical sense, it is not afraid to show the nasty side of people, and the terrible aspects of life. Working in a hospital puts you close to the edges of life, but you might think that writing about working in a hospital in wartime would tip the balance of humour and tragedy, and make this a pretty gloomy novel. But somehow, she manages to keep the war in the background. Air raids happen elsewhere, and bomb and burns victims are brought in, but so are motorbike accidents, and gastric cases, and common broken bones. Nurse Dickens’ ward had to be on standby for hours, expecting the dramatic arrival of wounded bomb victims during the Blitz, only to receive a flock of homeless old men ejected from their nursing home. Rationing is important, but not actually mentioned. Instead, there’s only one pot of jam left in Sister’s cupboard to last the ward for 2 weeks. Nurses scramble to eat leftovers on the plates, but this is because they are always hungry, and always tired, rather than because there’s a shortage of food. The hospital food appears to have been horrible, mostly stodge, but the exhausted nurse has no palate, only hunger.

Slightly later 1960s cover, less fun, more irony

I love the descriptions of nursing in the 1940s: they seem so archaic and domestic. Nurse Dickens sews splints onto broken limbs, but worries about her herringbone stitches not being approved by Sister rather than whether the splint will keep the bones in place. She is perpetually cooking small meals for special patients, and cutting up bread and butter for the patients’ teas, as well as scrubbing all the surfaces Sister can find. Occasionally she has to check a syringe, or struggle with a drip, but she makes beds more often than anything else. As Dickens says, nursing is much more about hard graft than wafting about saving lives by the power of a uniform. When she works in the private wards she is no more than a slave parlourmaid, with hardly any nursing knowledge required. All this compelling domestic detail leavens the medical details. She makes us laugh over her terror of working shifts in Theatre, where she gets things wrong almost all the time. But then we get told about the drama of perky Mr Siddons nearly choking to death on the anaesthetic, because the anaesthetist didn’t bother telling him what kind of gas he was going under; and then the exasperation of the surgeon who needed to get to a Caesarean in time. It’s the way Dickens contrasts her stories, since she can write in so many different kinds of humour.

vintage 1940s edition? Looks a bit South Pacific to me.

Set against all the stories that make me laugh out loud spontaneously are the sudden, unstressed tragedies. The torture of Maisie’s broken legs in traction is made worse because Nurse Dickens can hear her sobbing in the night and can’t do anything to help the pain. Saving Granny Chisholm’s life by wrestling with her blood pressure all night, and persuading the junior night surgeon to give her an intravenous drip is uplifting and exhausting. Knowing that Irene Hicks won’t be able to have another baby after the abortionist killed her first one, is agonising. This is why we need the comedy. Dickens knew that if the book were filled with the edges of life, of deaths and babies and near misses, it would be pretty unbearable.

Each time I read this novel I am appalled, and fascinated, by the petty tyrannies of the hospital system, and the bizarre dictatorships on the wards, historical though they are now. How can so many nasty, petty human beings exist, and why are so many of them women? Reading the conditions under which the nurses work, it seems quite obvious that a constant lack of sleep and dreadful food, and being treated like schoolgirls, make them grumpy and snappy. Oddly, the many portraits of vile people are the bits I want to read again. My favourites are the patients who try to make themselves interesting by causing trouble for the nurses, and the monstrous ward sisters who either do nothing or everything, and complain about the nurses. Delphine Lorrimer is the world’s most selfish nurse, as well as the most glamorous, and (disgracefully) can’t hold her drink. In contrast, there are the darlings, the people who make nursing worth doing. I love the cheerful old roué in the private room who talks perpetually of wild goings on in his youth, and drops hints of planned seductions, but when an old girlfriend comes to see him for a special romantic tea, he can hardly make his wobbling legs walk to meet her.

Mermaid Press edition using cutting-edge b/w photograph of aching nursing feet

Stepping back a bit, this novel is an unusual picture of women’s wartime living. It’s unusual because it’s about real hard work, and being in a treadmill system with almost no personal freedom, rather than the more common wartime story of dithering about in a country village, which has become a fashionable revival lately. So many of these ‘me and my war experience’ novels or memoirs are about the upper classes who essentially just have trouble with the servants and can’t find enough sherry for their dinner parties. This novel is about being a servant, a state servant, and is given a fascinating twist by Dickens being from a well-off background herself. One Pair of Feet is also satisfying because it isn’t centred on a single home or family: it’s about living in a community and having to live with them. It’s still about the recognisable details of ordinary life. Nurse Dickens bicycles everywhere, and seems to keep missing her last chance to get to the one teashop in town that does lemon curd tarts on a Saturday. She goes out with servicemen, falls out with drunken Nurse Lorrimer, and rips her stockings by tripping over her bike in the dark. But, even though she is a grown woman in charge of life and death, she still has to sneak into the nurses’ dormitories through an open bathroom window after the curfew. The rules that have to be obeyed, quite apart from wartime regulations, are breathtakingly backward. No nurse may run. No nurse may go without wearing stockings. Clean caps and aprons, and the correct way of making hospital corners on a bed are more important than getting hold of a doctor when the ward needs one.

Nurse Dickens’ highly unusual movement between the social layers is riveting. She goes for tea with a senior consultant and his wife, whom she happens to know through her family. Sister cannot understand this: ‘But you’re only a nurse.’ She is invited to lunch in a grand house by a strange woman who stops her in the street when she’s in uniform, but she is almost too sleepy to eat because she’s just come off night shift. She can’t quite understand the graciousness of her hostess, or the distant interest of the other guests, who treat her almost like a wild animal, until she realises that this is a charitable gesture, this is her hostess’s war work, feeding a nurse to show her how nice people still live. Nurse Dickens has a perfectly nice life of her own: she goes up to London on a rare weekend off, where she has decent food, goes out with her friends, and then descends again into what must have seemed like hell, back to the day job. She loves her job, but she also hates the petty tyrannies and stupid rules that make no sense. This dichotomy, a split between love and hate, is matched by the piercingly funny writing, and the pathos laid on lightly. It’s a marvellous book.

Tag: Second World War

Rachel Ferguson’s A Footman for the Peacock: a hatchet job

Monica Dickens, One Pair of Feet

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