After the war was over

[callmemadam]

I bought this book because I liked the cover. It is written in the first person by Sir Roger Marrion of Wynyates, Surrey, and purports to be his war journals. He and his wife Richenda, one of those Dresden porcelain invalids with an unspecified complaint and always described as ‘a great lady', make Wynyates self sufficient for the war, never forgetting the cottagers. The book is an unconvincing defence of an old, feudal rural order and full of astonishing assertions such as that The Battle of Britain was won by men wearing ‘the old school tie’ and that ‘Eton never surrenders’. It is quite dreadful. I had never before read a book by Warwick Deeping and looking at the long list of titles on the back, the only one I recognized was Sorrell and Son. I now burn to read Mad Barbara.


Warwick Deeping died in 1950 and The Old World Dies was published posthumously in 1954. This set me thinking about other popular authors who were nearing the ends of their writing lives by 1945 and my first thought was of Dornford Yates, who died in 1960. Lower Than Vermin, published in 1949, made me shriek when I first read it as a teenager. The title, of course, comes from Aneurin Bevan’s notorious description of the Tories, made at a meeting of the Labour party in 1948. Yates’s book is another defence of the old ways, showing how a noble family had sacrificed generations of young men for its country, only to be rewarded with the loss of everything they possessed and stood for. Unfortunately the book is full of wildly intemperate and ludicrous statements and the Socialist (Boo!) character turns out to be a murderer. Poor old Yates. He couldn’t stand the new order, which he observed from afar in Southern Rhodesia.


Angela Thirkell is another author who ruined her post war books by constant references to THEM, by which she meant the Labour government. In one she even refers to ‘the happy days of the war’ when England stood alone. Sadly, these writers blamed the new government for what was really the result of five years of total war. Just as unhappy but braver about it was that remarkable woman, Flora Klickmann. Best known today as the editor of the Girl’s Own Paper, she was very popular in her lifetime for her Flower Patch books, about her cottage and garden in Worcestershire. The last of these, Weeding the Flower Patch, was published in 1948. Klickmann was already in her seventies when war broke out and she spent the war years in the country looking after two guests described as ‘evacuees’, two women who seem to have needed a great deal of care. In this book, typically, rather than moaning she cracks on with life, her main complaints being about food and the difficulty of supplying the household.


Two of the most popular writers of the early twentieth century happily ignored the war in their writings and went on with the fantasies which had so delighted their public before the war. Georgette Heyer scarcely modified her style and Arabella, published in 1949, is one of my favourites. Jeffery Farnol (died 1952) brought out The 'Piping Times' in 1945 and made it an idyll of a rural England which never existed even before 1914, full of rolling English roads and foaming pints. I must admit I found it very enjoyable.

The queen of all ‘everything has changed for the worse and nothing will ever be the same again’ books is of course Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. That is so much in a class of its own that I can’t include it here.



Next up, I will be thinking about the writers who saw a brave new world beginning in 1945.

Comments

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

Then there was Richmal Crompton, who put a few Nazis and bombs into the wartime books then pretended nothing at all had changed when it was over.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there are many, many examples.

Does this comment mean you're not in Norfolk?

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

'Fraid not. Too bitter to talk about it on Friday. Bike allegedly ready Tues/Weds.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

I'm really sorry. Mail on its way.

[debodacious.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed this post.
I am going to seek out the works of Warwick Deeping and Flora Klickmann forthwith.
Have you read The Village by Marghanita Laski - it's an old order changeth following the war sort of book.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I love Flora Klickmann's books and you can get them cheaply if you do without dustwrappers.

Yes, I've read The Village. It was one of the books I was thinking of for the opposite point of view i.e. the old order changes and a good thing too.

[coughingbear]

I have read Angela Thirkell's postwar books but only got through them by thinking 'hmmm, interesting example of this mindset' all the time, and would never re-read them, whereas some of the earlier ones I go back to on occasion. Funnily enough I was thinking about her earlier, because I was re-reading Priorsford, which is 1932, and thinking that although O Douglas's characters are obviously pretty conservative, there is an awareness among the best ones that things are grim for an awful lot of people, and it's in no sense their fault, which one never gets in any Thirkell, pre-, during or post-war. Except when it's all the fault of providing education for the masses.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Angela Thirkell's immediately post-war books are stil readable, I find, but her very last ones are dreadful, full of what we call EBD-isms and despising her public. I like O Douglas a lot. I only discovered her last year and managed to acquire and read all the books very quickly. A definite social conscience there, perhaps influenced by her brother? and the political discussions they probably had. Also the lowland Scot religion and actually
knowing what an industrial area looked like.

The perils of universal education actually feature in The Old World Dies. According to Sir Roger, a man has no need to be literate as long as he can pleach a hedge.

[coughingbear]

I think the first of her postwar ones I read was Happy Return, which is certainly fairly grumpy. And yes, she gets horribly mixed up with ages and characters. To be honest so do I by that point, struggling to remember which tomboy/gentle widow/quietly elegant woman is/has been paired off with which man. Probably not helped that I haven't read them all, and those out of order. I'm rather fond of the war ones, The Headmistress and Growing Up in particular.

There's one family, I can't remember which book, where she proudly describes how they had thrown off all attempts at education and were so much the happier for it.

I think I only found O Douglas a couple of years ago, and I still haven't got them all, though I look forward to finding the rest. I really want to read the two biographical ones.

[gghost.livejournal.com]

I'm making my way through Thirkell's Barsetshire series, and I definitely agree that her tone gets grumpier after the end of the war. Frankly, I nearly fell out of my chair (or bed, wherever I was reading) the first time that I read her feeling that the war years had been happier than the postwar period. My favorite of the series is 'Pomfret Towers', and I also liked 'The Headmistress' and 'Growing Up'.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Yes, she was quite unreasonable about it. My favourite is High Rising: I love Tony Morland! I also like Summer Half and the other school-based ones. I am put off several of the books by not being able to stand that stuffed shirt Noel Merton.

[oldnarkoverian.livejournal.com]

Evelyn Waugh famously said that living under the Attlee government was like being a subject in an occupied country*. A pity he didn't stop to think of the experience of those who elected that government. Whose lives had been under occupation for centuries before.

*It couldn't have been all that bad; the local gauleiter didn't confiscate his banana.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Evelyn Waugh said a lot of dreadful things. The one which makes me most angry is his saying that the Butler Education Act 'provided for the free distribution of university degrees to the deserving poor'.

His opinions on various matters, however objectionable, do not to my mind detract in the slightest from his greatness as a writer. And he was often teasing.