The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction: Secret Histories 9780748647507

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The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction

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The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction Secret Histories

Victoria Stewart

Edinburgh University Press

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© Victoria Stewart, 2011 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4099 7 (hardback) The right of Victoria Stewart to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

1

1.

Secret Work

20

2.

In the Family

55

3.

Collaboration and Resistance

90

4.

Women at War

Works Cited Index

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the College of Arts, Humanities and Law Research Committee, University of Leicester, for granting me a period of research leave which enabled me to complete this book. Early versions of Chapters 2 and 4 were presented as a visiting speaker paper at the School of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia in November 2007, as part of the Memory Studies Seminar Series at the University of Salford, March 2009, at ‘After the War: Post-War Structures of Feeling’, Birkbeck, University of London, May 2009, and at ‘Echoes of the Past: Women, History and Memory in Fiction and Film’, Newcastle University, June 2009, and I would like to thank those who organised and participated in these events. Dr Nick Freeman, Dr Emma Parker, Dr Petra Rau and Professor Martin Stannard generously took the time to read and comment on sections of the manuscript. I was extremely grateful for their advice and encouragement, and any glitches that remain are my own. Thanks also for support and help of various kinds to Vicky Dunne, Professor Phyllis Lassner and Dr Rod Mengham. Jackie Jones and her colleagues at Edinburgh University Press have been a pleasure to work with and supportive from the outset.

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Introduction

During the Second World War, the men and women based at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where the Government Code and Cipher School (GC and CS) undertook the task of deciphering intercepted German military communications, were warned of the importance of keeping their activities secret from those outside the organisation. Even within Bletchley, individuals were not always allowed to know how their particular work fitted into the operation as a whole. A former member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service explained: ‘We were not allowed to discuss each other’s jobs so that no-one could build up a complete picture of all that went on.’1 After the war ended, the secrecy surrounding the work of GC and CS continued. Joan Unwin, another WRNS recruit, recalled how, during a weekend visit to a stately home in the 1970s, her husband mentioned that the magnolia trees in the garden reminded him of the place where he was stationed for part of the war. She had a similar memory and, after thirty years of marriage, the couple realised that they had both been based at Bletchley: ‘In all those years, we had kept the secret from one another!’ (Page, We Kept, p. 71). This story emphasises the seriousness with which injunctions not to speak were taken, as well as the ways in which wartime secrecy could spill over into the peace. A politically motivated demand for concealment leads to individuals editing out certain aspects of their life stories and only belatedly being able to reveal their role in the war effort. A crucial aspect of Second World War military strategy, secrecy retained its importance during the ideological manoeuvrings of the post-war years, and this prevalence of secrecy at a political level inevitably had an impact on individual subjectivity which did not only affect those who had worked at Bletchley. The revelation of previously concealed information may be judged a socio-political good, helping to deepen our understanding of how historical events unfolded, but such revelations can shatter individuals’ carefully constructed life stories

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and self-perceptions. Joan Unwin makes light of the secret she and her husband kept from each other, but for others secrecy was a burden that was not necessarily lifted by the ending of official secrecy. In fictional narratives, the revelation of the secret can bring in its train a sense of loss; the reader’s questions may have been answered and enigmas untangled, but the pleasurable tension of ‘not knowing yet’ will necessarily be dissipated.2 The movement from obfuscation to clarity may bring resolution to the plot but there will often be aspects of the narrative that, either implicitly or explicitly, remain obscured. This book assesses the importance of secrecy as both a theme and a structural device in contemporary fiction, and in particular examines the emergence of secrecy as a key focal point for fictional depictions of the Second World War. In this introduction, I will consider how structures of secrecy and revelation affected the emergence and evolution of particular aspects of the representation and understanding of the war in British culture. Many of the novelists whose work I will be examining are interested in revisiting the events of wartime in the light of knowledge that only emerged later, or indeed in the light of attitudes that were not necessarily dominant during the conflict: the critique of the bombing of German civilians in Michael Frayn’s Spies (2002) is one example. Some novelists, like Frayn, incorporate the revision of attitudes towards the events of the war through the use of a narrator who remembers and, in remembering, becomes aware of the gap between what was known then and what is known now. Others, such as Sarah Waters, choose instead to focus on aspects of wartime experiences and narratives that have not been incorporated into what Mark Connelly describes as the ‘collective national memory’3 of the war, and can therefore be constructed as having been ‘hidden’. Certain narratives, like the lesbian experience of war that Waters considers, may have been actively concealed by individuals for fear of familial or social disapproval, and alternative versions have, for ideological reasons, taken prominence. Citing Marita Sturken’s definition of cultural memory as ‘a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history’,4 Wulf Kansteiner notes that in this process, ‘failure is the rule’.5 What this failure reflects is ‘a rarely acknowledged but not particularly surprising desire for cultural homogeneity, consistency and predictability’ (Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning’, p. 193). Thus part of the intention of authors such as Waters, or in a different context, William Boyd, is to defamiliarise collective memory and to disrupt this homogeneity by incorporating less familiar aspects of the war into their work and, in the process, asking why these have come to be concealed or neglected.

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Patterns of concealment and revelation can be discerned across the course of the development of the novel as a genre, but how secrecy is understood is dependent on particular socio-historical circumstances. What is deemed worthy of concealment at any given time can itself be an index of the social charge of the concealed or revealed matter. This returns us to the question of why the Second World War in particular should have become, in recent years, a locus for narratives of secrecy. It will be necessary, then, to consider how these novels relate to some of the broader concerns of late twentieth and early twenty-first century historical fiction. For the writers I will discuss in the first chapter of this book, the war was part of their own lived experience; for others, it is an event from the historical past beyond their own lifespan. A number of authors, including Boyd, Graham Swift and, as I have noted, Frayn, construct the war not just as an object of historical investigation, but as an event that individual protagonists remember, and construct through the act of memory. The frequent foregrounding of memory as a narrative device is one means by which these authors incorporate a postmodern sense of uncertainty about knowledge of the past, although I will suggest that in many of these novels there is an eschewal of radical uncertainty. Revealing the secret may not provide all the answers, but closure, albeit of a provisional form, is usually achieved.

Secrecy in Wartime and its Post-war Legacy As I have noted, secrecy was an important aspect of British government policy during wartime; those who worked in areas such as code-breaking and with the Special Operations Executive were required to keep the details of their work concealed, and the general public was warned that ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. In each of these instances, the individual, and what the individual does or knows, is constructed as inextricably enmeshed in the workings of government, or, more amorphously, ‘the war effort’. As Petra Rau has suggested, wartime posters warning against ‘Careless Talk’ were ambivalent in the objects of identification they offered to the viewer, and were also liable to produce ‘fear, panic and paranoia by suggesting that friends could not be trusted – nor could one trust oneself – not to become an unwitting fifth columnist’.6 Speculation about the whereabouts of family members in the services or complaints about one’s job were elevated from the level of gossip and thoroughly politicised, though in the mid-1940 the Ministry of Information drew back from the ‘Silent Column’ poster campaign, which it was felt encouraged members of the public ‘to distrust one another at a time

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when it was important for them to pull together’.7 If appeals to national pride failed, other kinds of coercion might succeed: Churchill famously dubbed the men and women who worked at Bletchley ‘the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled’,8 but this discretion is put in perspective by the account of a former RAF intelligence officer, who describes new recruits being told bluntly that they would be shot if they gave anything away.9 When the GC and CS did manage to decode German wireless traffic the intelligence gained, known as Ultra, had to be put to use in ways that kept the fact of its discovery hidden.10 These techniques of concealment appear to have succeeded; Jean Stengers describes ‘British activities during the Second World War in the field of cryptology’ as ‘the best guarded secret of the century’.11 In the immediate post-war, as Richard J. Aldrich describes, British intelligence organisations embarked on: a concerted programme for the management of history equivalent to a wartime deception operation in itself. [. . .] There was nothing for it but to ‘indoctrinate’ some historians [. . .] and ask them to work with the authorities on official accounts [. . .] The tens of thousands who worked on Ultra and in deception would also have to be bound by an iron code of secrecy.12

The end of hostilities, then, did not mean that wartime secrets could be revealed. This had consequences not only for the writing of history, but also, as I will show in Chapter 1, on how individuals constructed their own life stories. Some wartime activities were not so much secret as occluded. In the 1944 Preface to his novel Goon in the Block (1945), which depicts life in a German prisoner of war camp and the aftermath of a successful escape, Eric Williams notes: ‘For obvious reasons it has not been possible to tell of the escape, neither are any of the references made to escape strictly true.’13 Later, in the Preface to The Wooden Horse (1949), which fleshes out how he managed to make his getaway from Stalag Luft III, Williams reasserts that while prisoners were still in Germany, he ‘could not give details of the escape nor any information that would have helped the enemy’.14 The later text reveals the dramatic details that had to be elided in the earlier version, which, as a consequence, focused on the psychological effects of having escaped rather than the practical difficulties of getting out of the camp. On occasion, either implicit or explicit challenges to government secrecy precipitated the uncovering of secret operations. For example, Duff Cooper’s novel, Operation Heartbreak (1950), drew on details of Operation Mincemeat, during which, in April 1943, false papers planted on a corpse that was then dropped into the sea off the Spanish coast became the means of conveying disinformation to Germany. Although

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objections were raised to the novel, on the grounds that this method of deception could at some point be reused and that its workings should therefore be kept concealed, Cooper, who had been First Lord of the Admiralty until the time of the Munich crisis and was now a backbench MP, went ahead and published. The government response was to authorise the publication of an account by one of the leaders of the operation, and Ewen Montagu’s The Man Who Never Was appeared in 1953.15 However, the ban on revelations about certain aspects of the war persisted into the 1970s; as Brian Johnson notes, F. W. Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret was published in 1974 but the first ‘official disclosures were not made until October 1977’ (The Secret War, p. 305) when the texts of deciphered messages were made available by the Public Records Office, and restrictions remained in place concerning the ‘techniques and technology’16 used at Bletchley. J. C. Masterman’s The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939–1945, the first work to describe the ‘turning’ of German spies and their use as double agents, written as an internal government report at the end of the war, was eventually deemed safe to publish in 1972. Discussing a number of best-selling novels of the 1970s which aimed to ‘disclose hitherto “best-kept secrets of the war” ’, John Sutherland sees these texts as reacting to such belated revelations. Novels such as Jack Higgins’s The Eagle has Landed (1975), which ‘reveals’ a foiled German plot to assassinate Churchill, present ‘an “action packed” narrative’ which contrasts with the ‘slow mass-movements of “open” history’.17 The interest in secrecy in more recent fiction about the war can be seen as an ongoing reaction to the revisions of the historical record that the opening up of archives produces, a desire to revisit the events of wartime from a position of knowingness. However, authors also often acknowledge the extent to which secrecy continued – and continues – as an organising principle of government in the post-war period. Considering the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Robert Colls notes that: ‘In it, there is a general and presumed right of access [to information]. But there is also plenty of room for exemption and discretion.’18 As Aldrich argues, in relation to accounts of the Cold War period, the ‘prevailing distortion is the result of omission. This follows the precedent of the hiding of Ultra and deception techniques after the Second World War’ (The Hidden Hand, p. 8). A narrative of the past is constructed which omits certain elements but smoothes over the joins so that the extent of the omission is not immediately discernible. Some novelists in the post-war period, then, react against constraints that were in operation during the war years. Considering writing for children, Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig suggest that during the 1940s, authors were

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‘hedged in by many restrictions that no longer operate; the most obvious of these was the necessity for euphemism in relation to the effects of aerial bombardment’.19 The issue in this instance is perhaps as much about changing attitudes towards children as about the concealment of the truth; in other cases, revisiting certain aspects of the war has more complicated motivations. In his discussion of the manner in which the fate of victims of Nazi persecution was conveyed to the British public in the immediate post-war years, David Cesarani argues that the ‘occlusion of [the] memory’ of the events we now call the Holocaust resulted from a combination of factors including the nature of British involvement in the opening up of the camps. Cesarani suggests that: ‘It was common for the press to telescope the concentration camps of the early 1930s into those overrun [by British troops] in April–May 1945, with little awareness of the radical difference between their functions or the gulf between them and the extermination centres in Poland.’20 The fact that the majority of victims were Jewish was not foregrounded in news reports, ‘in line with the Ministry of Information’s policy of not specifying atrocities against the Jews’ (‘Lacking’, p. 29). This policy had evolved because, ‘[a]pprehensive about the level of domestic anti-Semitism, which could feed off antiwar and profascist sentiment, the government was keen to interdict anything that could give the impression that Britain was at war on behalf of the Jews’.21 During the 1960s and 1970s, the Holocaust was often constructed as a secret to be revealed in genre fiction. Part way through Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin (1964), Johnnie Vulkan admits that he was a concentration camp guard, explaining that this was considered a ‘plum job’, and claiming that he ‘never tortured anyone, or killed anyone’.22 He does acknowledge that even this role meant that he was part of ‘the system’ but asserts that anyone other than ‘the crackpots in the SS’ wanted ‘a job a long way from the fighting’ (Funeral, p. 119). The action of the novel hinges on one individual adopting another’s identity in the camp, in order to claim an inheritance; Deighton transplants a plot familiar from detective fiction into the confusion of wartime, and Johnnie’s confession echoes the emerging orthodoxy of the ‘good German’ as a figure apparently distinct from the Nazi; this figure also features in more recent fiction, as I will show in Chapter 3. Other examples of genre fiction show an interest in the problems posed by gaps in the archival records of the war. John Le Carré’s A Small Town in Germany (1968) dramatises the search for documentary proof of Nazism. What starts as the hunt for a defector, Leo Harting, takes a new twist when it is discovered that Harting, employed by the British, has managed to build up his own archive of evidence for Nazi crimes, housing it, appropriately, in a

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hidden room ‘in the heart or womb’23 of the British embassy in Bonn. This idea of a ‘counter-archive’, here enclosed within the official archive, and exploiting the stereotypically Germanic desire for record keeping, is taken to its logical conclusion in Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992). In a version of the early 1960s in which Hitler has won the Second World War, the Nazis’ plan to conceal the Holocaust has been a success.24 The plot of the novel hinges on the protagonist, a disaffected police officer called Xavier March, finding the missing minutes of the Wannsee Conference, the January 1942 meeting at which the implementation of the systematic destruction of Europe’s Jews was decided. The prevalence of the Holocaust in novels of this type can be understood as echoing the ‘revelation’ or discovery of the Holocaust that was occurring more widely, albeit as Cesarani notes, selectively, from the 1960s onwards (‘Lacking’, p. 33). If not guilt then anxiety about how the Holocaust might figure in British narratives of the Second World War is expressed in these novels. I have chosen to examine novels which for the most part consider the conduct of the war on the ‘Home Front’ rather than on mainland Europe, not least because this is the prevalent focus of recent warrelated literary fiction. Lucy Noakes has argued that ‘the Blitz is often privileged over other events of the war years’ in popular cultural representations, suggesting that this implies a preference for narratives of the so-called ‘people’s war’ over ‘information about diplomatic or political manoeuvring or military tactics in wartime’.25 Despite the fact that aerial bombardment was ‘by no means [a] universal experience’, it has become central to ‘public memories of the war’ (‘Making Histories’, p. 89). In the context of a discussion of how the Blitz is represented in London museums, Noakes suggests that this focus on the Blitz might have come about because it is not as difficult to understand the horror of being bombed as it is to understand military tactics; bombing affected both men and women, and was socially indiscriminate (‘Making Histories’, p. 90). Recent examinations of the civilian experience, taking their cue from Angus Calder’s still influential study The People’s War (1969), attempt to produce a more nuanced picture, with, for example, Ian McEwan alluding to the 1940 bombing of Balham underground station in Atonement (2001), and Frayn incorporating the impact of area bombing on German civilians in Spies. The consideration of what Robert Holton terms ‘jarring witnesses with discrepant narrations’26 can facilitate the defamiliarisation of narratives of both the Blitz and the Home Front more generally, although as Sonya O. Rose notes, the ‘hegemonic cultural formation’27 picturing Britain as a unified wartime community still persists. It is an open secret, knowledge shared but not

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explicitly acknowledged, that such ‘hegemonic cultural formations’ do not tell the whole, complex, story. Novelists’ focus on the war at home is also a reminder of the changes in the nature of war that have happened since the Second World War ended. The historian Michael Howard commented in 1982 that: ‘War is now seen as being a matter for governments and not for peoples [. . .] Popular participation is considered neither necessary or desirable.’28 Since then there has been a further shift, away from wars of ‘mutual destruction inflicted at remote distances by technological specialists’ (‘Empires’, p. 47) and back towards face-to-face engagement, as in Afghanistan. The nature of any ‘popular participation’ has also shifted; local councils have been encouraged to stage ‘home coming parades’ for soldiers returning from active service.29 Whilst many of the novels I will be discussing are concerned to challenge entrenched perceptions about the nature of the Second World War, I will also consider whether, in the light of these changes in the nature of and motivations for war, it is possible to discern a degree of ambivalently expressed nostalgia for an apparently more comprehensible form of warfare.30 In his discussion of the cultural memory of the Second World War, Mark Connelly foregrounds the role played by film and television in both creating and perpetuating particular representations of the conduct of the war. He suggests that ‘the modern memory of the Second World War is made up in the main of elements sketched during the war itself’ (We Can Take It!, p. 227), with the exception being the aspects which were kept concealed during the war. So Connelly argues, for example, that the war in Italy failed to capture the public imagination at the time because of its attritional nature, and therefore has not gained prominence since. He believes that: ‘the elements [of the war] least known in the public consciousness are usually those that fail to fit the nation’s self-perception and these elements have spawned few myths’ (We Can Take It!, p. 248). One problem with this argument is the apparent all inclusivity of terms such as ‘public consciousness’ and even ‘nation’; Connelly vividly describes his own enthusiasm, as a child during the 1970s, for war films, but perhaps underestimates the extent to which some may feel themselves to be excluded from or alienated by such narratives. Representations of Home Front unity may ring hollow to those whose family homes were looted, for instance. What is occluded in the ‘public consciousness’ may be the central element of an individual’s experience and memory of the war; Christine Brooke-Rose is particularly aware of the impact of such occlusion, as I will show in Chapter 1. Considering the resurgence of interest in the Second World War at the

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time of the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day in 1995, Ashplant, Dawson and Roper note that this occasion was used by former prisoners of war of the Japanese to highlight their demands for reparations. This is one example of how the ‘enhanced public visibility of [. . .] anniversary occasions has created opportunities for contesting as well as celebrating received memories’.31 A number of recent novels do engage with the types of popular cultural representations that Connelly analyses, though often in a critical fashion; Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock (1981), for example, incorporates the subgenre of the prison camp escape memoir, while Andrew Greig’s That Summer (2000) draws attention to the kinds of mythologisation that occurred during the war when the staging of photographs of a group of RAF pilots is described. Two of the pilots, who are playing ludo, are asked to set up a chess board instead, ‘it being more . . . appropriate. The photo was taken, with the two men leaning forward, studying the pieces (which meant nothing to them) intently. It remains yet, still reproduced from time to time in books about that summer, another small untruth.’32 Other authors, such as Waters, look to literature written during the war itself in order to retrieve a sense of the variety of contemporary responses.

Secrecy and the Novel Waters’s novel The Night Watch reminds us of the historically and personally contingent nature of secrecy; what is kept concealed at one point in time may be spoken of freely at another. This suggestion needs to be set against the idea that throughout its history, the novel has served to assuage a readerly wish for revelation. Reading provokes, and is provoked by, a desire to know; as Ann Gaylin explains, ‘Readers read because they are curious. Vicarious experience of other lives enables them to learn and grow, to transfer the experiences of fiction to the world of their everyday reality.’33 Gaylin traces the emergence of eavesdropping as a powerful trope in nineteenth-century fiction and argues that it is not only a useful plot device, one which both reflects and is enabled by particular types of domestic architectural arrangement, but can also be a figure for reading more generally: As eavesdroppers set up to listen to a story, readers can indulge their yearning to discover secrets. The illicit listener figures readerly pleasure: secretly engaged in socially suspect activities (learning others’ secrets, close to yet not fully a part of intimate spaces and their stories), yet safe from being caught. (Eavesdropping, p. 8)

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A similar type of relationship between reader and narration is represented in a variety of ways in contemporary fiction. As these are novels dealing with events of the past – sometimes a past that an individual protagonist can remember, sometimes one which is the object of historical inquiry – testimony, either in oral or more often in written form, is central to many. Importantly, such uncovering of the past is, as Suzanne Keen suggests in her study of novelistic depictions of the archive, ‘consequential’.34 This knowledge is gained not for the sake of gaining knowledge, but to some end: ‘characters are transformed, wrongs righted’ (Romances, p. 4), even if the nature of such transformations is not immediately apparent. As Gaylin argues, changes in the configuration of domestic space also have an impact on the arrangement of fictional narratives, facilitating certain kinds of plot and suggesting particular interpersonal relationships. This is one aspect of the ‘contradiction’ that Mikhail Bakhtin identified between ‘the public nature of the literary form and private nature of its content [. . .]. The literature of private life is essentially a literature of snooping about.’35 Considering classical literature, Bakhtin notes various ways, including, for instance, the criminal trial, by which this private life can be made public. In the novels I will be considering here, the war has a similar function to that ascribed by Bakhtin to the trial: it acts to disturb the separation between public and private. This happens not just because individuals’ behaviour and beliefs come under closer scrutiny, but in wartime the domestic space can be quite literally opened up to the public gaze by being bombed. These different ways in which private life is made public in the novel may provoke anxieties in the reader about the security of their own domestic arrangements, but they also articulate the desire to know that is a central aspect of the reading process. This is one of the paradoxical dynamics of secrecy: we want to know other people’s secrets, but do not want them to know ours. In the narratives I will be examining, living arrangements have often been disturbed by the war, provoking a desire for seclusion that cannot always be fulfilled. Sometimes what is sought is a place in which illicit sexual activity can happen and the rearrangements and reconfigurations of the urban and suburban milieu produced by the war can either hamper or enable the discovery of such a location. Paradoxically, the war itself opens up the possibility for new kinds of personal relationship, but it does not always remove social or personal constraints on how they can be conducted. Contemporary authors acknowledge that although the war might have challenged certain social mores, particularly those around sexuality, the behaviour of individuals was still hemmed in by considerations of class, gender and social context. Any of these factors,

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or indeed a combination of them, can necessitate covert behaviour in these novels. Another important consideration is the effect on familial relations not just of the separations and losses that war brings in its train, but of the involvement of family members in work of a secret nature. Some authors, such as Boyd and Swift, use this scenario as a means of opening up for consideration the changes in the nature of family life that succeed, and to an extent proceed from, the war. But secrecy operates in varied and complex ways in these novels, and cannot be reduced to a system with uniform effects. Analyses of narrative secrecy tend to veer towards one of two poles, and focus either on the structural techniques of genre fiction or on the problems of interpreting modernist narrative. In some key instances, this apparent dichotomy is revealed to be a misleading one: Henry James’s ghost story and forerunner of modernism The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a notable example. One explanation for this link between modernism and genre fiction (in his example, detective fiction) is suggested by Jon Thompson. Identifying modernism as a literary form concerned with finding the ‘hidden truth’ of existence, he suggests that: Modernist literature [. . .] shares an analogous epistemological form with detective fiction: both are structured around the assumption that appearances disguise a deeper truth; both are organised around the attempt to decode and solve the mystery of existence.36

What is at stake in both these types of writing is how information is organised; techniques of suspense and revelation, though differently configured, are common to each. Similarly, James’s narratives can be seen either as the ultimate exposure of the hollowness of the secret or as secrecy’s narrative apogee. In relation to ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ (1896), Tzvetan Todorov comments: Henry James’s secret [. . .] resides precisely in the existence of a secret, of an absent and absolute cause, as well as in the effort to plumb this secret, to render the absent present. [. . .] This secret is by definition inviolable, for it consists in its own existence.37

Uncovering the content of the secret is much less important than the fact that the secret exists at all. Whilst Todorov’s comments have a specific resonance in relation to the complicated layering of the Jamesian narrative, they also point to the paradox that whilst the reader may have their own suspicions confirmed, and their own interpretative powers flattered, the point at which the nature of the secret is revealed is always a moment of loss. If the pleasure of narrative derives from its patterns of

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suspense, then the final revelation signals the curtailment, for the time being, of that pleasure. In Wolfgang Iser’s terms, James’s narratives contain not just gaps, which ‘function as a kind of pivot on which the whole text–reader relationship revolves’, but also indeterminacies, which do not demand ‘completion from our existing store of knowledge’.38 A gap in a narrative will not necessarily conceal information; it can, for example, mark the passage of time, which the reader infers from the temporal markers included on either side of the gap. But bridging the gap between ‘what is said and what is meant’ (Iser, The Act, p. 45) can require a more active level of engagement from the reader. This process is complicated if the narrative takes concealment as its explicit theme as well as exploiting its potential as an element of narrative structure. In his analysis of British spy fiction, Michael Denning describes these works as ‘stories of information, knowledge and secrets’;39 they are also narratives concerned with hierarchies, with who knows what, either within or without a particular organisation. Ian McEwan’s novel The Innocent (1990), set in Berlin in the aftermath of the Second World War, invokes these aspects of spy fiction in its exploration of British intelligence operations. Towards the climax of the novel, the ‘innocent’ protagonist, Leonard Marnham, finds himself in the position of having to dispose of two suitcases containing a dismembered corpse. He exploits his knowledge of the existence of hierarchies of secrecy to persuade the American officer Glass to stop his men from searching the cases, and allow him access to the communications tunnel, where he intends to hide them: ‘[. . .] I’m going to have to break with procedure to protect a more important matter. I have to tell you now that I have level four clearance here.’ Glass seemed to come to attention. ‘Level four?’ ‘It’s largely technical,’ Leonard said [. . .] ‘I’m level four and those chaps are messing about with highly sensitive material. [. . .] I want this search called off. What’s in those cases is beyond classification.’40

‘Level four clearance’ is an invention of Leonard’s, but whether it actually exists or not is less important than Glass’s continuing belief in the structures of secrecy that Leonard invokes. Notably, it is a secret in his personal life – his affair with a German woman and his murder of her estranged husband – that leads Leonard to exploit the hierarchical system. By this stage, he has little faith in the project in which he is involved, his cynicism neatly expressed when he disrupts its organisational structure for personal ends. In a number of the novels under discussion here, the question is not simply who knows what, but who knows what about the past. Writing

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in the late 1980s, Linda Hutcheon identified a particular strand of contemporary historical fiction which refused ‘the view that only history has a truth claim’ and demonstrated instead ‘that both history and fiction are  discourses’.41 Hutcheon coined the term ‘historiographic metafiction’ to describe a kind of writing which foregrounds the textuality – and therefore unreliability – of the historical record, aiming to ‘install and then blur the line between fiction and history’ (A Poetics, p. 113). According to Hutcheon, one of the ways in which this unreliability is emphasised in such fiction is through the manner of narration; historiographic metafiction prefers narrators who are not ‘confident of [their] ability to know the past with any certainty’ (A Poetics, p. 122). This type of analysis is certainly helpful in explaining the way in which the historical past is incorporated into a novel like Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), which features a disenchanted history teacher as its narrator and underlines the self-consciousness and uncertainty of his meditations on the past. What is discernible in more recent fiction, however, is the incorporation, and, to an extent, the naturalisation, of the kinds of questions about the reliability of the historical record that were anatomised by Hutcheon. As Amy J. Elias suggests, poststructuralist ideas have ‘become increasingly mainstreamed in literary culture’.42 The rise of memory as a powerful trope across genres and the related growth of interest in trauma have also been reflected in fictional treatments of the past. This shift is echoed in recent critical writing on contemporary historical fiction; Tim S. Gauthier notes, for example, the prevalence of haunting as a way of ‘signalling the ephemeral presence of the past’ in contemporary fiction, a device which ‘reflects the irresolution at the heart of the historiographic project’.43 Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s characterisation of history, Elias similarly lays an emphasis on, if not the failings, then the limits of what historiographic metafiction can reveal: ‘these novels imply that the most we can know about history is that it hurts: it is political, it is violent, it is material. It is also not satisfactory; we long for more of the past, more memory, than political history, empirically derived, can give’ (Sublime, p. 117). Peter Middleton and Tim Woods distinguish between the way in which postmodern historical fiction and realist fiction treat the past, with the former being ‘unconvinced that there is a single unitary truth of the past waiting to be recovered’, and the latter assuming that ‘literary narrative’ can provide ‘direct access to the thoughts, speech and events of [the] other time without distorting their significance’.44 They suggest that much current fiction dealing with the past has a different emphasis, being concerned with ‘the relation of the past to the present, with where the past is and how it persists in our lives, and how it can be experienced

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or resisted’ (Literatures, p. 22). Experience is a key factor here; what is in question is not the reliability of the historical record, but the manner in which an individual’s past experiences continue to affect him or her. Many of the novels to be considered here, then, take postmodern doubts about the reliability of both memory and documentary evidence as a given; in some respects, the questions about the nature of history that were asked in the 1980s have been reconfigured as a recognition of the failures and gaps in memory. What is at stake is how an individual’s memories can be related to, or are excluded from, a particular metanarrative – in the case of this study, the narrative of the Second World War. Middleton and Woods suggest, in a resonant phrase, that texts ‘are forms of prosthetic social memory’, providing a means ‘by which readers increase and correct their own limited cognitive strengths and participate in a public memorial space’ (Literatures, p. 5). This helps to further explain why a number of the texts I will be discussing focus on ‘neglected’ aspects of the Second World War. Suspicion of the metanarratives of history is displaced by a focus on narratives that appear not to have fallen within the purview of the ‘official’ historical record, and which can therefore provide a challenge to the claims that record might make to inclusivity. The extreme self-referentiality and metafictionality of postmodern fiction is refigured as an acceptance of the gaps in, and unreliability of, the historical record. The bringing into focus of the unfamiliar, via the narration of an individual’s experiences and memories, is, in this analysis, another means by which our understanding of the historical can be deepened. To illustrate the ‘mainstreaming’ process identified by Elias, it is interesting to compare a novel cited by Hutcheon as an example of historiographic metafiction (though not discussed by her in any detail) with a more recent text that shows evidence of the shift identified by Middleton and Woods. Nigel Williams’s Star Turn (1985) opens with a dateline: ‘9.30 a.m., 13 February 1945’;45 this is the narrative present, the point in time at which the first-person narrator, Amos Barking (also known as Henry Swansea), is situated. He is working for the Ministry of Information, but is also writing a memoir of his childhood and youth, focusing in particular on his friendship with Zak, the Jewish boy who arrives one day at his school. The reader is warned early on that Amos is an unreliable narrator: ‘My memory is appalling’ (Star Turn, p. 11). It soon becomes clear, however, that not just his memory, but his history, is ‘appalling’: Amos encounters a parodic version of D. H. Lawrence, who comes to inspect his school (pp. 30–6); he is ‘nutted’ by Virginia Woolf following an altercation when she is driving a tram during the General Strike, and remarks that, ‘it is probably not generally known

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that Virginia Woolf was an expert in hand-to-hand combat, but this lady was no slouch at the direct attack’ (p. 185). Most startlingly, Zak, who has shown a propensity for adopting different personae, denying his Jewishness or emphasising it as circumstances require, ends up being employed as Oswald Mosley’s double, standing in for the leader of the fascist New Party. Any sense that Amos’s memoirs are ‘a searingly truthful account’ (p. 282) of his pre-war experiences is thus soon dispelled. But this novel has a serious undertow. Amos, proving himself on each page to be a fabulist, is employed to give a positive spin to war stories, and the novel culminates in him trying to formulate a report on the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden. He reflects: ‘Well, go on, Amos. Use your talents. Explain last night away to the GBP [Great British Public]. Tell them it’s all right to murder thousands of civilians’ (p. 311). This is a novel about lies as much as secrets; the fabulation that seems playful and amusing in the account of Amos’s early life is shown being used for the purposes of deception, but, as the novel draws to a conclusion with extracts from several of his failed attempts at explaining Dresden, it seems that these events exceed even his creative powers. Williams intercuts Amos’s reflections on his work at the Ministry of Information in 1945 with passages from his autobiography; from time to time, the reader is reminded that the retrospective sections, like the 1945 frame, are indeed being written, rather than simply recalled, by the  narrator: ‘It is morning. I am writing this in the office’ (p. 237). Drawing attention to the textuality of the text reflects the extent to which the status of both history and fiction as texts is foregrounded in historiographic metafiction. This aspect of the narrative structure of Williams’s novel can be compared to the technique used in a more recent novel, Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001). Like Williams, McEwan looks back to the pre-war years, but, for much of its length, Atonement has a narrower temporal scope, moving from the events of a few days in 1934, described in a style which references modernism in its depiction of individual subjectivities, to the war years, with a coda set in 1999. McEwan does not indulge in the game playing with historical figures that interests Williams, and the centrepiece of the novel is a meticulous description of the evacuation of troops from Dunkirk which refutes, through its realism, attempts at mythologising this event. Towards the end of the novel, however, comes a metafictional moment: Briony Tallis, who has been one of several focalising characters for this third-person narrative, receives a letter from ‘C.C.’, presumably an encoded version of Cyril Connolly, offering a critique of some writing she has submitted to his journal Horizon. The reader can glean that the writing referred to is one of the earlier, pre-war sections of the novel,

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and that C.C.’s suggestions have indeed been incorporated (a Meissen vase has been substituted for a Ming one, for instance). The final twist comes when, in the last section of the novel, dated 1999, the reader is directly addressed by the elderly Briony, who reveals that what we have been reading is indeed a fictionalisation of events from her own youth, a version preferable to that which she hints at, but brackets off, towards the end of he novel: ‘The preceding drafts were pitiless.’46 McEwan presumably wishes to undermine the illusion of realism that has been built up over the preceding pages; the reader has been presented with one version, but there could be many others. But this is a much less radical questioning of notions of historical truth or fictional authority than that found in Williams’s novel. I would argue that McEwan’s novel is one example of the naturalising of postmodernism that Elias identifies. Briony’s ‘revelation’ that the preceding fiction is, indeed, fiction does not fundamentally invalidate or undermine its realism; notably, by the end of the novel, Briony is suffering from a failing memory, and the body of the novel can be understood as a personal wish-fulfilment fantasy.47 These two very different examples reflect some of the ways in which the works I will consider here engage with debates about the presentation of the past; as I have suggested, a shift is discernible, in the 1990s, towards a concern with issues of memory and trauma. Considering Williams and McEwan also foregrounds some of the other ways in which secrecy comes into play in narratives of the Second World War. The final part of McEwan’s novel contains a secret which has hitherto been concealed from the reader; only in re-reading the novel can the full import of certain of its earlier incidents be grasped. Knowingness operates differently in Star Turn; the reader is required to accept a narrative world in which historical figures, including Sigmund Freud and Hermann Goebbels, are encountered at every turn. The novel welcomes those who are prepared to accept this kind of anti-realist playfulness. For the reader who is in on the secret, each of these novels, in their diverse ways, has much to offer. Contemporary fictional representations of the Second World War like Williams’s and McEwan’s rely on the tension between what the reader is already likely to know about the Second World War, and what is constructed as known or not known within the fictional narrative. The reader may be able to position him- or herself as knowing more than the protagonists, but in reconfiguring or challenging widely recognisable images of the war, authors will often build a narrative that centres on the revelation of a secret. The force of this, for the reader, may depend on a presumed gap in the reader’s historical knowledge, or it might emerge through techniques of delay and revelation structuring the

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narrative itself. In either case, these authors recognise that the particular conditions of wartime fostered and produced secrets and infrastructures of secrecy that still retain their power for a contemporary reader. Secrets have an aura that is dispelled by revelation, but whilst these novels might appear to have disenchantment at their core, given the involutions of secrecy, the reader can perhaps never quite believe that all has really been revealed.

Notes 1. Page, We Kept, p. 57. 2. Wolfgang Iser suggests that that relationship between reading and experience can be characterised by loss. Iser cites George Bernard Shaw: ‘You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.’ Iser continues: the acquisition of experience is not a matter of adding on – it is a restructuring of what we already possess. This can be seen on an everyday level; we say for instance, that we have benefited from an experience when we mean that we have lost an illusion. (Iser, The Act, p. 132) 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Connelly, We Can Take It!, p. 3. Sturken, Tangled Memories, p. 1. Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning’, p. 193. Rau, ‘The Common Frontier’, p. 36. Balfour, Propaganda, p. 191. Lewin, Ultra, p. 183. Johnson, The Secret War, p. 335. In Bodyguard of Lies (1976), Anthony Cave Brown claimed: ‘Ultra gave Churchill and his advisers at least forty-eight, possibly sixty hours warning of the devastating raid planned for Coventry’ (p. 40) on the night of 14–15 November 1940, but that, in order to keep the source of this knowledge secret, Churchill did not order any extra defences to be put in place; Ultra material was only used if the information gleaned could be plausibly attributed to an alternative source. Churchill’s biographer Martin Gilbert suggests that the decrypts were not precise about which cities were to be targeted. It was only in the late afternoon when the X-gerät beams, used to guide German bombers, were seen to be intersecting above Coventry that the city was confirmed as a target and attempts at defence were instituted (Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, p. 913). R. A. Ratcliff notes that another factor enabling the preservation of secrecy around British code-breaking was German disbelief, which persisted into the 1970s, that the British could not only have found a way into Enigma but also have kept quiet about this achievement (Delusions, p. 5). 11. Stengers, ‘Enigma’, p. 133. It should be noted that whilst secrecy was preserved in relation to Nazi Germany, John Cairncross, who was at Bletchley Park during 1942–3, shared Ultra intelligence with the USSR; information

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction he supplied to the Soviets is believed to have influenced the outcome of the Battle of Kursk (Davenport-Hines, ‘John Cairncross’). Cairncross was only publicly named as the so-called ‘Fifth Man’ in the Cambridge spy ring in 1990, following the defection to Britain of former Soviet spy Oleg Gordievsky, although the identity of the ‘Fifth Man’ had been the subject of speculation since Anthony Blunt was named as the ‘Fourth Man’ in 1979. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, p. 3. Williams, Goon, p. 6. Williams, The Wooden Horse, p. 7. For an account of the whole operation and its aftermath, see Ben McIntyre, Operation Mincemeat. Hennessy, ‘Restrictions’, p. 1. Sutherland, Bestsellers, p. 166. Colls, Identity, p. 89 n. 37. Cadogan and Craig, Women and Children, p. 292. Cesarani, ‘Lacking’, p. 29. Cesarani, ‘Great Britain’, p. 605. Deighton, Funeral, pp. 119, 118. Barley, Taking Sides, p. 82. The urge to concealment on the part of the perpetrators is mirrored in Dori Laub’s discussion of the reluctance of some Holocaust survivors to discuss their pasts owing to feelings of shame and guilt. Laub comments that ‘survivors often claim that they experience the feeling of belonging to a “secret order” that is sworn to silence. Because of their “participation” they have become “bearers of a secret” (Geheimnisstraeger) never to be divulged’ (Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 82). Noakes, ‘Making Histories’, p. 89. Holton, Jarring, p. 48. Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 23. Howard, ‘Empires’, p. 47. In a speech delivered in September 2007, General Sir Richard Dannatt, then head of the army, argued in favour of homecoming parades, and also commented: When a young soldier has been fighting in Basra or Helmand he wants to know that the people in the local pub know and understand what he has been doing and why. [. . .] We must move from being a society that uses the military as a political and media football, and more towards seeing the military for what it is – the instrument of foreign policy conducted by a democratically elected government acting in the name of the people. (‘Address’, pp. 26–7) These remarks towards the end of the speech were the focus of a number of news reports, but Dannatt also reflected on the possible ways in which war will be waged in the future, suggesting that it may be necessary ‘to rediscover the old ways of war’ (p. 21). He drew a parallel between the current deployment of forces in Afghanistan and earlier imperialist activities in the area, comparing present-day troops to ‘the Soldier Sahibs who worked in the Tribal Areas in a previous generation’ (p. 23). In early 2009 in particular, the town of Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire, near to RAF Lyneham, where

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30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

19

the bodies of many of those killed in action in Afghanistan arrived back in Britain, became a focus of media attention, as the townspeople stopped and lined the streets when the funeral cortège for each soldier passed through. What George Bush termed the ‘war on terror’ adds another aspect to what Jay Winter has called the ‘degeneration of war’. Winter argues that the boundaries of war have expanded, and peace, correspondingly, has shrunk; the ‘war on terror’ appears to be a war in which no resolution, and therefore no end, can be reached (Winter, ‘The Degeneration’). Ashplant et al., ‘The Politics’, p. 4. Greig, That Summer, p. 68. Gaylin, Eavesdropping, p. 8. Keen, Romances, p. 4. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time’, p. 123. Thompson, Fiction, pp. 111, 112. Michael Holquist makes a similar point about the relationship between detective fiction and modernism, stressing the apparent ability of detective fiction to smooth over the uncertainties of post-First World War period, and explaining the propensity of ‘intellectuals’ to read detective fiction in their spare time: Is it not natural to assume [. . .] that during this period when rationalism is experiencing some of its most damaging attacks, that intellectuals, who experienced these attacks first and most deeply, would turn for relief and easy reassurance to the detective story [. . .]. The same people who spent their days with Joyce were reading Agatha Christie at night. (Holquist, ‘Whodunit’, pp. 163–4)

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Todorov, ‘The Secret’, p. 175. Iser, The Act, pp. 169, 177. Denning, Cover Stories, p. 135. McEwan, The Innocent, p. 203. Hutcheon, A Poetics, p. 93. Elias, Sublime, p. 75. Gauthier, Narrative, p. 15. Middleton and Woods, Literatures of Memory, p. 21. Williams, Star Turn, p. 11. McEwan, Atonement, p. 370. For the debate on Atonement’s relationship to modernism, postmodernism and realism, see Brian Finney, ‘Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion’, Richard Robinson, ‘The Modernism of Ian McEwan’s Atonement’ and Alistair Cormack, ‘Postmodernism and the Ethics of Fiction in Atonement’.

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Chapter 1

Secret Work

In the spring of 1944, having returned to London from Africa after the breakdown of her marriage, Muriel Spark ‘lost no time in finding a job.’1 In her autobiography, she describes going to ‘the local Employment Bureau [. . .] armed for a long wait’ with a copy of Ivy ComptonBurnett’s latest novel, Elders and Betters: My turn came. I went into a small office and was asked to sit at a desk, on the other side of which sat a sensible-looking middle-aged woman with a file of cards in front of her. These represented the jobs available. I handed over the completed form. The recruiting administrator, as she was called, meanwhile leaned over and turned my book, which I had laid on the desk, so that she could read the spine. “Ivy Compton-Burnett,” she said with great enthusiasm. We were soon embarked on a long session of literary talk. [. . .] My new friend thought Miss Compton-Burnett one of the most intelligent women writing in English. And so we went on. When it came to the question of my job, she slid aside her card-index box and took another card out of a drawer, remarking that she imagined I was looking for an interesting job. [. . .] She asked, would I like to do secret work for the Foreign Office? Long irregular hours. In the country. She rang up there and then and made an appointment for my interview. I was to go to the very top floor of Bush House in Aldwych. Tell no one. She wished me luck with a lovely smile. I believe I had cheered up her day; she had certainly enlivened mine. (Curriculum Vitae, pp. 145–6)

Spark’s choice of library book sends a signal to the recruiting administrator, the effects of which Spark could not have anticipated or predicted. Placing the book with its title away from her interviewer could be a deliberate gesture on Spark’s part but her act of concealment might be what prompts the administrator’s inquisitiveness, and it is debatable whether the interviewer or the interviewee has the upper hand during this exchange. The implications of Spark’s reported conversation with this woman are manifold. The administrator’s belief that Compton-Burnett is ‘one of the most intelligent women writing in English’ evidently

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influences her attitude towards the job-seeker, who, it seems, is indicating her own intelligence by reading this novel. The particular qualities of Compton-Burnett as an author, elusive and complex with an interest in the intrigues and betrayals of family life, may themselves have been taken as a sign by the administrator that secret work would be of interest to Spark, that she might be suited to the kind of job that is not kept in the ordinary card-index box.2 Indeed, it is also possible to discern here the ‘confusion between intelligent people, the acquisition of intelligence by fair or foul means, the organization of an intelligence service, and the distillation of intelligence for political or economic uses’3 that Andrew Sinclair identifies as characteristic of the British intelligence services. Quite apart from any nuances that might be gleaned from their narratives, in the context of secret work, novels could function at a material level as the means of enciphering and decoding information. In The Human Factor (1978), for instance, Graham Greene shows Castle, who is spying for the Soviets, using classics of English and Russian fiction, Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8) and Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–9), to encode material he wishes to communicate to his control. This trope is also referenced in Spark’s first novel The Comforters (1957), when Baron Stock recalls ‘a railway book for children’ being used to convey ‘a code message’.4 Besides these particular resonances, the ComptonBurnett novel acts as a means of forming a bond between the women, in the same way that an old school tie might form a bond between two previously unacquainted men in a similar situation. Spark went to work for the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), whose head offices were in Bush House, in London, and operational headquarters at Milton Bryan in Bedfordshire. Here, former newspaper journalist Sefton Delmer oversaw the production of ‘black’ propaganda, that is, material intended for consumption by Germans that disguised the fact that it originated from Britain. ‘White’ propaganda, on the other hand, did not hide its source; broadcasts on the German Service of the BBC would be classified as ‘white’, but there were also varying shades of ‘grey’ in between.5 As Martin Stannard notes, Spark joined PWE when Delmer was intensifying his efforts in advance of Operation Overlord.6 Her experiences there fed into her novel The Hothouse by the East River (1973), although as Bryan Cheyette suggests, her war work could also have had a more general influence on her later career as a writer; helping ‘to present a fictionalised version of the truth to the Germans’ left her ‘well aware of the effects of mythologizing the world’.7 Ian Rankin agrees that Spark’s war work ‘proved crucial to the writing career that followed’, seeing its influence in the ‘forgeries and fakes’ in her novels.8 Similarly, Christine Brooke-Rose, who became friendly with Spark in

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the post-war years, claimed that her own war work, reading decrypted German messages at Bletchley Park, formed her as a novelist: ‘Though she did not begin writing fiction until fifteen years later, the experience of witnessing a war from the enemy point of view gave her the “ability to imagine what it’s like to be the other”.’9 Part of my intention in this chapter is to consider how secret work and its impact are depicted in novels by these two authors. As the description of Spark’s ‘recruitment’ indicates, one important factor in these depictions is the notion of initiation, which can be linked, as it is in Spark’s account, to the literary. Those who are ‘in the know’ can appreciate the finer qualities of Compton-Burnett; to others, she may be little more than a name. Secrecy is not just a case of knowing, but a case of knowing what to do with your knowledge. For Spark and Brooke-Rose, secret work provided an apprenticeship in authorship, in judging the balance between concealment and revelation. Michael Bell’s exploration of the historical roots of the connection between apprenticeship and initiation is illuminating here. Discussing the German phrase ‘offenes Geheimnis’, open secret, which recurs in the work of Goethe, Bell notes that this implies not ‘a secret which everyone has discovered’, but rather ‘an utterance that few can understand’.10 ‘Ein Geheimnis’ can mean not just a secret, but also a mystery, a word which, as Bell points out, can refer to sacred knowledge, or ‘in the medieval trade sense’ to ‘a craft to which one can be apprenticed’ (Open Secrets, p. 4). Guarding the mystery ‘may require the veil of secrecy, or of deliberate mystification’ (Open Secrets, p. 4). There is a link, then, between secrecy and ‘initiation’, and this suggests that a secret becomes most powerful – or at least, most tantalising – if those excluded have some sense of the scope or nature of what they do not know. Gesturing towards the breadth of one’s knowledge without completely revealing it can be a means of communicating with the potential initiates in one’s audience.11 There is a parallel here to Frank Kermode’s forging of a connection between biblical exegesis and the analysis of literature; a story (or parable) is just a story unless your reading of it is informed by some sense either of context or of what its implicit resonance might be, and which aspects might therefore be most significant. Outsiders must content themselves with the manifest meaning: ‘Only [. . .] those who already know the mysteries – what the stories really mean – can discover what the stories really mean.’12 However, this demand for what Bell calls ‘fore-knowledge’ (Open Secrets, p. 3), the sense that there is a secret to be uncovered, can in turn place a limit on interpretation, or on what is considered interpretable or, indeed, worth interpreting. As Brooke-Rose puts it, in a literary

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context, ‘outside the canon, no interpretation’;13 for her, the canon is ‘a club or priesthood’, a ‘privileged caste’.14 In a similar vein, reflecting in a 1976 interview on her early years as a literary critic, and acknowledging her interest in the work of Ezra Pound, Brooke-Rose comments, ‘I wasn’t known as a Poundian. You see I’m very frightened of cults. I didn’t want to join the Pound cult.’15 One could argue that much of Brooke-Rose’s work, with its multilingual and multidisciplinary references, demands its own ‘privileged caste’ of readers, but this is at least partly because it does not fit within the classificatory parameters and interpretative strategies associated with the canon. What is required, then, in approaching Brooke-Rose’s work, is a different kind of foreknowledge, some of which can be pieced together from her own often self-referential essays. Looking back in 1990, Brooke-Rose suggested that critical reactions to her work were often influenced by assumptions relating to gender: [K]nowledge has long been unfashionable in fiction. [. . .] [T]his is particularly true of women writers, who are assumed to write only of their personal situations and problems, and I have often been blamed for parading my knowledge, although I have never seen this being regarded as a flaw in male writers; on the contrary.16

What becomes apparent in Remake (1996), the novel in which BrookeRose draws most directly and explicitly on her time at Bletchley Park, is that, for her, ‘knowledge’ and ‘personal situations’, specifically her wartime experiences, are inextricably entangled, and that gender relations are central to both. Both Brooke-Rose and Spark explore the process of becoming initiated into the world of secret war work, and its effects on individual subjectivity, both at the time of the initiation and later. The discretion that was demanded of those working at Bletchley Park or Milton Bryan was imposed from outside. Deployed at these locations, an individual was obliged to keep the nature of his or her activities concealed, not just for the duration of the war, but, in the case of Bletchley, for some decades afterwards. As I indicated in the Introduction, those who were bound by secrecy often rationalised this by recognising that national security was at stake. However, it is evident that, for Brooke-Rose at least, this was complicated by the fact that her work at Bletchley was not only part of the war effort but also closely bound up in her own development as an individual and a potential writer, specifically a woman writer. Brooke-Rose, like her representative in the novel, Tess, was brought up with a knowledge of several languages, thus qualifying her to work at Bletchley, and went on to begin her academic career in the area of

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philology. Linguistic codes are an important strand of the narrative of Remake, not only because of the code-breaking that is central to the action but also because of the narrator’s propensity to play on words, often across languages, adding to the sense that new circumstances and situations require new coinages. Revelation and initiation of other kinds are also explored in the section of the novel dealing with the events of the war; Bletchley provides an education of sorts in gender relations. Remake is therefore not only about revealing an individual’s involvement in hitherto covert aspects of the war effort; this secret work is itself shown to be inseparable from other formative moments of the female protagonist’s early life.

Christine Brooke-Rose: Remaking the War Discussing the issue of generic classification, and her resistance to it, Brooke-Rose describes Remake as her ‘autobiography’, noting in the next sentence that it was ‘presented by [her] publisher as an autobiographical novel’.17 Brooke-Rose is resistant to writing an autobiography; she initially produces ‘two hundred pages or so of rememoration’ (‘ReMaking’, p. 57). This term is found, as Brooke-Rose notes, in Plato (p. 56), and refers to a type of memory which requires some form of external support or validation. According to Brooke-Rose, the result was a text which, although ‘ “real” ’ (p. 56) to her, seemed inadequate. She eventually found a way of transforming this material, which appeared to have ‘produced no being [she] could recognize’ (p. 60). There were two aspects to this transformation. One was to remove the first-person narration associated with autobiography, except in an early section dealing with her mother’s death. Although her early non-realist novels were often discussed as nouveaux romans, Brooke-Rose describes the ‘objectified narratorless mode’ as ‘the only feature of [her] novels directly developed from [Alain] Robbe-Grillet’ (p. 58).18 What is striking here is the use of a variant of this technique in an autobiographical text. Further, ‘all personal pronouns and all possessive adjectives’ (p. 57) were avoided. For Brooke-Rose, the removal of ‘the most stable elements of language’, such as pronouns, ‘creates a certain floating instability of the narrative’ (p. 59). Remake is also written in the present tense, and this leads to a focus on what Brooke-Rose calls ‘the time of story’ (p. 59). The text seems to hover between the ‘floating instability’ described by Brooke-Rose and the particular, rooted in empirical observation. Here, for instance, is the description of Tess being interviewed for a job at Bletchley:

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The Wing Commander hands out a long paragraph pasted on cardboard for Tess to translate, full of unknown technical terms. One of these is Klappenschrank, a word not found in any dictionary since. Tess struggles through, guessing, stumbling only over Klappenschrank, admitting defeat. The Wing-Commander kindly explains: a Klappenschrank is a flap on a fieldtelephone. Tess is given a railway voucher, first-class now, and told to go to Euston tomorrow for the next train to Bletchley, Bucks, and there to ask for Bletchley Park.19

Because of Brooke-Rose’s decision not to use pronouns, Tess’s name is  repeated three times in this short extract, but this only seems to underline the arbitrariness of naming itself. Brooke-Rose uses names in an unusual way throughout the novel. Drawing on the use of the name ‘John’ in the examples employed by the linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky to explain grammatical structures, Brooke-Rose gives the name ‘John’ to her imagined interlocutor, sometimes distinguishing between his different incarnations using superscript numbers.20 All the key individuals who influence the central protagonist have variants on the name John: she crosses paths with Johnny, Jon, Janet, Ian, Jean, Joanne. She refers to her own younger self as Tess ‘not because of [Thomas] Hardy, but as a play on text [. . .] and a further play on tesselate, to build up with small tiles’ (‘ReMaking’, p. 60). Brooke-Rose’s explanation of the name here emphasises the constructed and textual nature of Tess. This particular use of names, together with the use of the present tense, which would not usually be found in a retrospective or historical narrative, and the other self-imposed constraints, allows Brooke-Rose to emphasise the extent to which ‘[i]dentity [. . .] is a fiction, made of language’ (p. 60). Indeed, as is revealed by Tess’s interview, words themselves can be elusive or merely functional; the word ‘Klappenschrank’ is remembered later because it was not known at the time, but the possibilities for making use of it beyond the confines of the wartime situation would seem to be restricted in the extreme. When the Wing-Commander ‘kindly’ explains the meaning of the word, the reader is reminded that the word, ‘not found in any dictionary since’ by either the narrator or Tess, could itself be a fiction, serving not only as a means of sifting out the best linguists but also as a way for the WingCommander to reinforce his own position of authority. The belief that identity is ‘made of language’ is foregrounded in Remake not only by Tess’s work at Bletchley, but also by the multilingual upbringing that precedes it. Punning across languages forms the core of an idiolect shared by Tess and her sister Joanne. ‘Childhood is strewn with mishearings and mistranslations [. . .] un fait divers is a winter fact [. . .] the flick of a coin is le flic du coin’ (Remake, p. 10). These examples

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are based either on intralinguistic puns or on the interlinguistic phenomenon of ‘false friends’, words in different languages which are spelt the same but have different meanings. Thus the ‘divers’ in ‘un fait divers’ (a news item, but literally a ‘diverse fact’) is understood as its homonym ‘d’hiver’ (‘of winter’) and, because the French for corner looks the same as the English ‘coin’, and the French slang for ‘policeman’ is similar to the English word ‘flick’, the phrase ‘le flic du coin’, literally ‘the cop on the corner’ is substituted for ‘the flick of a coin’. What are presented here as joking or playful uses of language also indicate the instability of the boundaries between languages for those who, like Brooke-Rose, have multilingual proficiency. Bi- or trilingualism is thus the means by which the binary opposition between friend and enemy is complicated. Indeed, an early and domestic example of this occurs when Tess and Joanne refer to their father as the ‘party nasty’, a corruption of the Latin ‘pater noster’, our father, reflecting their feeling that he is a ‘killjoy’ (Remake, p. 48). To have access to another language enables one to have access to both sides of the story, and this, as I have indicated, is the doubleness on which Tess’s work at Bletchley is founded. Remake is peppered with neologisms and puns, a challenge to the systematising of language on which decoding is founded, and an interpretative challenge to the reader. In Brooke-Rose’s earlier novel, Between (1968), which follows the travels of an unnamed simultaneous translator, linguistic proficiency becomes a means of guaranteeing both usefulness and loyalty. Having worked translating between French and German for the German government during the war, the translator afterwards points out to the American occupying forces that this meant she was able to ‘follow the war from the enemy point of view’,21 just as Brooke-Rose claims to have done. This may appear to be an advantage, although for the translator in Between to describe the material she translated as providing ‘the enemy point of view’ is, in peacetime, a tactical error; the wartime enemy must be an enemy no longer. In Remake, Tess recalls that, in late 1940, she and her mother receive a visit from an official after the family with whom they stayed on holiday become suspicious of their Frenchspeaking guests (Remake, p. 97). This is a slightly delayed and misdirected attack of ‘Fifth Column fever’, which Angus Calder identifies as having reached its height in the summer of 1940, in the wake of the evacuation from Dunkirk, with ‘[s]pies and parachutists [the] favourite subjects for rumour’.22 Tess and her mother laugh the incident off, although Tess acknowledges the efficiency of the system: ‘That’s the way real spies are caught’ (Remake, p. 97). (Despite the fact that she is later required to travel extensively to undertake her basic training, Tess does

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not mention another tactic that was used to confuse potential spies: the removal of signposts from roads and name-signs from railway stations, a literal detachment of the signifier from the signified.) Underlying the accusation against Tess and her mother, which evidences the insularity and over-zealousness of the English general public in wartime, is a more serious undertow; linguistic otherness, even of a sort that could prove useful to the war effort, is, in the first instance, a cause for suspicion.23 Notably, on a pre-war visit to a German relative, Tess responds to the greeting ‘Heil Hitler’ with ‘To Hell Hitler, swallowing the first T a bit just in case. But as a joke, out of a sense of the ridiculous, not from understanding’ (Remake, p. 76). Tess downplays the importance of this small act of rebellion but it illustrates how the kind of language games she has played as a child could take on a serious, indeed a political, meaning. Remake is structured partly through a series of interviews between the now-elderly Tess, referred to as ‘the old lady’ rather than by her name, and the several different ‘Johns’. The chapters containing her memories of past events are described as ‘Files’, implying both a document saved on a computer and a paper folder containing secret material, of the sort Tess encountered at Bletchley. Just as ‘intelligence’ has multiple meanings, so here we are reminded that ‘classification’ can mean the arrangement or ordering of information, or indeed its concealment; Tess’s job involves both.24 Similar language is used by Tess to describe memory: ‘The old lady’s fingers tap on the keyboard of erased memories, dead memories, retrievable memories, buffer memories’ (Remake, p. 14). This is not a form of memory that has narrative continuity; later Tess reflects: all these fragments tumbling pêle-mêle seem like forgotten photographs out of a drawer, each leading to another, static anecdotes with no narrative power, [. . .] having little to do with the middle-aged woman at mummy’s death, the wife of Janek, the young WAAF officer of the war, the old lady of today, a Greerly grey-invisible. Shown alien family photographs the old lady would just as easily claim these as real past, like the girl in Blade Runner. (Remake, p. 63)

This sense of distance from her own past is emphasised by the fact that there is a separation between ‘Tess’, the protagonist of the past events, and ‘the old lady’, who recalls these things; and the listing here of the different roles she has taken – as an officer, a wife, a middle-aged woman – reinforces the difficulty of forming a smoothly coherent narrative of her life. The influence of film in forming impressions of the past in general and the war in particular is condensed in the phrase ‘Greerly grey-invisible’, perhaps a nod towards Greer Garson, who played the

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heroine in a number of wartime films including, notably, Mrs Miniver (1942). The suggestion here seems to be that her memory of the past has taken on the black-and-white shades of films from that period. The reference to Blade Runner (1982), in which replicants are persuaded to believe they are human by being provided with artificial memories, complete with supporting ‘evidence’ in the form of photographs, underlines both the self-alienation that ageing has resulted in, and the fact that textual or visual evidence can itself prove unreliable. The suggestion that it might be possible to remember events which one did not experience has been explored by Alison Landsberg, who, in an echo of the terminology used by Peter Middleton and Tim Woods,25 defines ‘prosthetic memory’ as that which emerges ‘at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum [. . .] the person does not simply apprehend an historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live.’26 Whilst acknowledging that this type of memory is made possible by the commodification of history, Landsberg wishes to recuperate it as a valid and potentially politically engaged process. However, the difference in the old lady’s case is that she has lived through the historical period that is supposedly being shown in film representations but cannot reconcile these representations with her own experience. Indeed, the experiences that the old lady describes have only belatedly found their way into the ‘experiential sites’ Landsberg mentions, as the old lady herself acknowledges. At the end of the novel, an explicit parallel is drawn between memory and decryption. Memory is ‘like intercepting and decrypting, thousands of messages missed, or captured but not decrypted, and even the captured and decrypted now burnt or not released’ (Remake, p. 172). Individual memory is not only selective but a construct; its secret meanings may remain obscure, even to the individual who is remembering. But this description of messages ‘now burnt or not released’ also indicates the political aspect of this act of memory, reminding the reader of the explicit link between this image and wartime experience. The old lady notes that primary material relating to code-breaking has been destroyed (pp. 113–14), and this makes her own ability not just to recall but to contextualise her memories all the more important. By the time Tess arrives at Bletchley in late 1941, intercepted German intelligence traffic, sent by wireless telegraphy in Morse code after being encrypted using an Enigma machine, is being decrypted and translated, and she is initiated into this secret procedure.27 However, the task at Bletchley was not just to translate decoded information from German into English and to gauge the usefulness of the resulting material,

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themselves highly complicated tasks; Tess witnesses an earlier stage in the process when the decoded German is ‘emended’: Bob takes a message and a pencil and rapidly draws vertical strokes between certain letters, occasionally through a letter, putting in another above. Slight corruption, Bob explains, often much worse. Magically, once the fiveletter groups are redivided and linked, the message becomes German: EINSA TZBER EITSC HAFTS MELDU NGNOV EMBER DREIS SIG and so on. Don’t worry, says Jane, seeing Tess look terrified. Only the Watchboys do that, know German like English, plus the jargon. Tess gazes at this clever boy with respect. (Remake, p. 104)

Decoding is not simply about substitution, but also involves interpretation at every stage.28 Bob and his like have to be able to suggest possible alternatives for letters ‘corrupted’ at some stage in the transmission, and they also have to know ‘the jargon’, the non-standard language in which military commands might be expressed, words like ‘Klappenschrank’, perhaps. (The message he emends here, ‘Einsatzbereitschafts meldung November dreissig’ can be translated as ‘announcement of readiness for action 30 November’.) Bletchley also evolved its own jargon; for instance, ‘Banburismus’ was the word used to describe a stage in the analysis of intercepted letter groups, so called because the sheets of hole-punched paper used in the process were produced in Banbury. Such coinages are a reminder that the cryptographers at Bletchley were having to develop new analytical methods, and using a shared language in this way may also have reinforced the sense of communal purpose. After the war, when Tess goes to university, she wonders whether ‘the emenders on the Watch were philologists’ (p. 147), seeing parallels between the way in which someone like Bob can interpret German letter-groups, and the techniques used to ‘emend’ medieval manuscripts. This was indeed sometimes the case; for example, Dillwyn Knox, uncle of the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, had moved from deciphering papyri containing the texts of Herodas to deciphering German intelligence during the First World War, and was persuaded to remain at the Foreign Office as a cryptanalyst after the war ended. He was involved in helping to find a route into Enigma in the early years of the Second World War, before it was being routinely decrypted. Knox worked in particular on the ‘Spy Enigma’, used in occupied countries: One day a huge sack of torn and burnt papers came in, salvaged from a German vessel, and Dilly amazed the staff by the eager skill with which he pieced them together. He telephoned for colleagues from Cambridge, who hurried over to help him. In spirit he was back at the British Museum, among the papyri.29

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Knox’s work on papyri provided him with what would now be called a transferable skill, equally apt for working with the German material. This story might seem to stress that even the apparently arcane skills of the philologist could prove to be of vital importance to this aspect of the war effort; narratives about Bletchley often emphasise the ‘eccentric’ nature of its personnel, equipped with such out-of-the-way skills as the ability to complete cryptic crosswords in record time, or to solve complicated chess problems.30 In fact, as R. A. Ratcliff notes, like the ‘Egyptologists, antiquarian booksellers, [and] experts on porcelain’ recruited to Bletchley, such individuals ‘had in common the ability to recognize, categorize and contextualize unfamiliar material’.31 Eccentricity can also imply unpredictability or absent-mindedness, as in the myths that accumulated around the code-breaker Alan Turing: ‘Trousers held up by string, pyjama jacket under his sports coat – the stories , whether true or not, went the rounds.’32 But eccentricity often goes alongside ingenuity, an ability to think beyond existing paradigms and, implicitly, in a Second World War context, to counter what was perceived as the stereotypically rational German approach. As S. Gorley Putt, who also spent time at Bletchley during the war, noted in his memoirs, individuals such as Knox were being joined in code-breaking operations by a new type of eccentric, the mathematics ‘whizz’: ‘the reading of other people’s letters, which had formerly attracted the skills of crossword experts and the kind of archaeologist who can reconstruct a dinosaur or a city from the study of a few bones and pots, was demanding a new technique.’33 Brooke-Rose’s narrative implies that there was another side to this eccentricity, a product both of the unusual access that some of those at Bletchley had to information about the progress of the war, and of the fact that the work of Bletchley was itself necessarily marginalised in post-war national consciousness. The description I have quoted of Tess’s admiration as she watches Bob demonstrate the process of emendment is part of a longer passage in which she is shown around the Huts where she will be working. She herself is assigned to the Index in Hut 3, organising the information contained in decrypts so that the movements of different units, and even individuals within those units, can be tracked. Brooke-Rose here seems to be employing a narrative technique familiar from realist fiction, with the newcomer to an organisation learning about its workings, and the reader able to pick up this information simultaneously and to be introduced to complex systems alongside him or her. But in her present-day reflections, Tess emphasises how liberating it seems to her to reveal this information, kept concealed for so long: ‘Tess doesn’t begin to exist until the war and even that is effaced for years by the Official Secrets

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Act’ (Remake, p. 54). Tess is eighteen when she goes to Bletchley; she is therefore initiated not just into the world of official secrets, but into the mysteries of adulthood and patriarchy. Towards the end of her initial tour, Tess’s guide, Jane, mentions that she is studying for a ‘London degree by correspondence’ (p. 105). She has to explain what this is, and Tess ‘is at once fired to do the same’ (p. 105). Not only does this type of individual influence help to open up to Tess educational possibilities of which she was previously unaware, but the very nature of her work is viewed as an education. Bletchley is described as ‘a first university [. . .] Tess acquires a reverence for knowledge’ (p. 107). Thus, whereas individuals like Dillwyn Knox could bring their existing intellectual skills to bear on intelligence-related material, for Tess, being at Bletchley allows her to develop the kind of mindset required in academia. Given BrookeRose’s later comments about the gendering of knowledge (Brooke-Rose, ‘Palimpsest’, p. 188), it is evident that this is a predominantly masculine way of thinking, and both Bletchley and, later, Oxford, are depicted by Brooke-Rose as male-dominated institutions. Tess is tolerated because she adopts this way of thinking, though as Brooke-Rose implies when describing how she has been criticised for ‘parading [her] knowledge’ (‘Palimpsest’, p. 188), her acceptance of the customs of these institutions does not mean that she, as a woman, is considered to be on an equal standing with the men. The knowledge acquired at Bletchley, like any knowledge, is not neutral. Tess may feel that aspects of her work fit her to be a writer, but she is nevertheless ensnared in ideological complications: Reading the whole war, for example, every day, from the enemy viewpoint, the British being the enemy, like the hysterical sympathy with the enemy felt by soldiers suffering in the trenches. The writer does that, learning to imagine the other. [. . .] On the other hand, experiencing that same war as pure information on teleprints, index-cards and maps, well-protected in the peaceful Buckinghamshire countryside, helps to turn Tess into a detached intellectual, never experiencing the grime, the cold, the heat, the suffering, the corpses, the landmines, the tanks, except anodyned in newsreels. Tess’s present notion of war is still derived entirely from postwar films. (Remake, pp. 107–8)

There is a gap between the war as experienced textually, at a distance, as information, and the war on the ground, images of which reach Tess through retrospective fictions, but what Tess only seems to recognise belatedly is that her war is still the war. The war of grime, cold and heat, evoked indirectly by what she reads, and ‘anodyned’, that is, smoothed over and rendered more palatable in newsreels, is constructed, both at the time and later, as the ‘authentic’ war, but her ‘detached intellectual’ endeavours are nevertheless having a direct impact on its progress.34

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There is a tension here between a potentially troubling identification with the enemy and the distancing effect of her own situation, which militates against this type of response. Tess wonders whether, just as she tracks the movements of German soldiers via their intercepted messages, ‘some German girl is indexing Blair-Hayley, aircraft-woman, from Gloucester to Thornaby-on-Tees, ASO, Cadet School Loughborough, Bletchley Park’, but this thought does not seem troubling to her in the context of the ‘much more important stuff’ (Remake, pp. 105–6) she is dealing with on a daily basis. Similarly, in Andrew Greig’s novel That Summer (2000), Stella, who works as an RAF radar operator, and who begins an affair with Len, a fighter pilot, imagines her German opposite number: She could as well be my pal or my sister, this woman. We face each other across the miles as we watch our screens, trying to guide or forewarn our lovers so they will meet, and when they meet, both of us cannot be happy.35

Here, a kinship based on the common experience of emotional attachment to a man seems to transcend ideological difference so that the imagined German woman can be described by Stella as ‘my twin, my sister, my mirror’ (Greig, That Summer, p. 75). But if this recurrent motif in Greig’s novel underlines the common humanity beneath competing political systems, Brooke-Rose refuses to fall back on such ultimately reassuring tropes. Whilst Stella reflects in a melancholy fashion that the enemy are, in all probability, just like us in many respects, Brooke-Rose’s concern is that we might in fact be just like them. Part of the reason why Tess’s notion of war is derived from postwar films is that her own experience of the war does not have a place in popular understandings or representations until thirty years later; it cannot be freely articulated. Yet Tess is also suspicious, as is indicated by her reference to ‘anodyned [. . .] newsreels’, of the wartime media’s attempts to communicate the war to the public. An incident in her later life that brings this home is her viewing of a French television programme, Histoire parallèle, which shows wartime newsreels from countries on both sides of the conflict (Remake, p. 5). She notes differences of style between these extracts, but observes that they have in common ‘the naturalization of war’ (p. 5), that is, the act of representing the war and serving it up to the viewer normalises what should seem strange. A similar suspicion of media representations emerges even during wartime. Tess ‘learns not to believe a word the papers or the wireless say, and out of fear of being unable to distinguish inside from outside information stops reading the papers altogether, so as to be sure everything known is secret’ (p. 108). Tess does glean some information about what use

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is made – or not made – of material she passes on; her description of wanting to ensure that ‘everything known is secret’ seems based partly on her suspicion of the media, but is also a way of retaining a barrier between what can and what cannot be spoken about; in effect, nothing may be articulated: ‘Nobody talks about work at BP [Bletchley Park]’ (p. 111). As I noted in the Introduction, even within Bletchley, there are many ‘on peripheral work’ (p. 111) who do not know the nature of the organisation to which they are attached. The fact that Tess’s mother, who starts the war working in censorship for the Post Office, comes to join the staff at Bletchley, is mentioned almost in passing: ‘Mummy works in the Main Building, presumably on diplomatic stuff [. . .] Mother and daughter don’t meet much’ (p. 111). Perhaps unsurprisingly, these limitations on what can and cannot be said tend to exacerbate an already artificial situation; Tess comes to know a lot about her particular job, but in other respects remains unknowing or naïve. S. Gorley Putt reflected (anachronistically, given that Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, was not published until 1954) that: ‘In the hot-house secret confinement of Bletchley Park, personal relations were as grotesquely falsified as in an Iris Murdoch novel. Sexual infatuations and personality clashes alike became obsessional’ (Wings, p. 140). The artificiality of the situation at Bletchley, already indicated by Brooke-Rose in her account of her work there, is redoubled in her description of her relationship with Ian Crane, who eventually becomes her first husband.36 Tess has little knowledge and less experience to equip her for this precipitate courtship: One evening shift, back from the canteen, Ian follows Tess into the empty office and becomes gauche in the public school manner Tess has come to know from [her friend] Janet’s brother Peter, now in the RAF and once seen on leave. Ian stutters out some phrase about supposing Tess knows, well, Ian is in love. Yes. This is followed by a chaste kiss, captain to captain. In soldier-mimingfilm position. The next day that yes to a specific question has been silently metamorphosed by Ian into a much bigger yes to an unmade proposal. As if Ian had taken Tess’s arm to cross a street as code for asking Tess’s hand and wanting Tess’s all. Ian’s father is rung. An advertisement is put in The Times. (Remake, pp. 117–18)

The ‘soldier-miming-film position’ is a reference to what Tess saw during a train journey from Liverpool to London earlier in the war, before her appointment to Bletchley: ‘On every platform soldiers are kissing girl-friends or wives in uncomfortable-looking cinema-clinches, girl thrown back on one arm. Surely films can’t be influencing the real?’

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(Remake, p. 98). But as Tess herself reflects, she has at this point ‘never been kissed or seen grown-ups kiss’ (Remake, p. 98). Films are her only measure; for all she knows, rather than life imitating art, the films could simply be reflecting what actually happens. The kind of behaviour she sees on the railway platforms during her journey is a symptom of the erosion of the boundaries of public and private that the war produces; this type of behaviour would not usually be seen in public, or at least not to this extent. Comparing Tess and Ian’s kiss not only to a film representation, but to other people apparently imitating a film, compounds the sense that Tess is distanced from her own actions at this point. Tess’s only other reference point for Ian’s behaviour is Peter, ‘once seen on leave’. Ian, who appears to have equally scant experience of personal relationships, over-interprets Tess’s ‘Yes’, and the use of the passive voice in the final two sentences of this quotation serves to emphasise the extent to which events take on their own momentum. Even the relatively unknowing Tess perceives that the leap between a kiss and marriage has been made precipitately, and it is notable that the analogy used here is a code, one that operates metonymically: from arm to hand, with ‘hand’ here standing for marriage. The language of codebreaking is also used with regard to her later sexual relations with Ian. Sexually innocent at the age of twenty, Tess is enlightened by a book Ian buys her, but only later does she realise that her lack of sexual fulfilment with Ian could be owing to his own inexperience: she does not ‘decode as ignorance’ his ‘mechanical technique’, instead ‘assuming this is sex’ (Remake, p. 120). The word ‘decode’ is apt here because Tess lacks any useful key to help her interpret Ian’s actions. The fault, or rather the innocence, is on both sides. Her frank descriptions, at some years distance, of the genito-urinary problems which mean that for many years sexual intercourse is often something to be endured rather than enjoyed, illustrate that in personal as well as political matters, openness is only possible at a temporal distance. The secrecy in which Bletchley is shrouded in the ensuing years cannot exclude events and actions that might appear to have no direct bearing on code-breaking. There is no separation between personal and political; all behaviour is implicated and comes under the ban. The intersection of secrecy and sexuality, and its mapping onto the gender politics of code-breaking, is a theme that is taken up in other representations of Bletchley Park. Ian McEwan’s television play The Imitation Game (1980) was one of the earliest depictions of Bletchley in fictionalised form and focuses on the attempts of Cathy, who joins the ATS and works as a wireless operator at an intercept station, to find out more about the organisation of which she is a part. McEwan depicts

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the intelligence services as a world in which: ‘The closer you moved to the centre, the more men you found; the further you moved to the periphery, the more women.’37 McEwan was writing at a time when the general public knew little about the workings of Bletchley, and Cathy’s search for knowledge and her exclusion to some extent mirrors his own frustrations during his researches. Towards the end of the play, Cathy goes to bed with Turner, one of the code-breakers, presuming that he is not only more knowledgeable about the organisation than she is, but that he is also more experienced sexually: ‘You know all the secrets’, she tells him.38 After what is evidently an unhappy encounter, however, he throws this phrase back at her: ‘You wanted to humiliate me and you succeeded. You hate your own job and you’re jealous of me for mine. [. . .] “You know all the secrets” . . . You vindictive little bitch’ (McEwan, The Imitation Game, p. 139). The implication here is that she has shown or indicated a greater degree of sexual knowledge than is acceptable to him; the hierarchy of secret knowledge has implicitly to be mapped onto the hierarchy of sexual knowledge, with women always knowing less. There is also a reminder here that knowing, in the biblical sense, is coterminous with sexual knowledge. For a woman to have greater knowledge in either sphere is, for Turner, unacceptable. Fifteen years later, Robert Harris was able to give a more detailed and in some respects more nuanced portrayal of life at Bletchley in his novel Enigma (1995). Women are shown to have been excluded from the inner circle of cryptanalysis, although this was not quite the case in reality.39 One subplot of the novel concerns Hester, who arrives at Bletchley having won a crossword competition: ‘The two male finalists became cryptanalysts’ but Hester, ‘the woman who had beaten them’, is consigned to the role of ‘a glorified clerk’.40 Yet the central protagonist, Tom Jericho, one of the chosen few cryptanalysts, needs Hester to explain to him what happens further down the chain of command: the ‘need-to-know’ system works in both directions, and her help proves crucial to him. The plot of the novel centres round the disappearance of Claire, with whom Tom has become infatuated; he recalls that when she breaks off their relationship, his only bargaining tool in the attempt to win her back is to offer to tell her everything he knows – everything about code-breaking, that is (Harris, Enigma, p. 142). This is a different balance of power to that which McEwan implies; Jericho’s hard-won knowledge of cryptography seems meaningless in the face of Claire’s sexual allure. In both instances, however, female sexual knowledge and power are dangerous and ultimately destructive for the women concerned; Cathy ends The Imitation Game in prison, whilst Claire’s work as an undercover agent results in her disappearance.

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The masculine world of wartime intelligence cannot accommodate the too-knowledgeable woman. Having assumed that her experience with Ian ‘is sex’ (Brooke-Rose, Remake, p. 120), Tess learns otherwise when she embarks on an affair with one of the Americans who arrives at Bletchley in 1943, ‘the only too willing Colonel Jon J. Timson, sixteen years older at thirty-seven’ (p. 122).41 This relationship introduces Tess to ‘the new, astonishing experience of desire’, though it is evidently not without its intellectual rewards also: ‘Tess may well later complain of quenching by mentors, but has also learnt to use people as founts of knowledge, mentowers as mentors’ (p. 123). ‘Mentowers as mentors’: this phrase indicates a further convergence of different kinds of knowledge. If the word ‘mentowers’ implies that Tess is physically dominated by these men, and indeed that her most important mentors are male, she also feels that she is able to ‘use people as founts of knowledge’, that is, may actively seek knowledge from them rather than submitting to them passively. Earlier in the narrative, the old lady has agreed with John that such individuals are sometimes ‘tor-mentors’ (p. 12), that is, the relationship may be a troubled or combative one. Yet there is also a respect for the fact that they may, for the moment, know more than she does, an acceptance perhaps of the inequality that Cathy rails against in McEwan’s play. Using her relationship with Timson as a pretext to break with Ian, she is ultimately relieved when the married Colonel decides he will not seek a divorce to be with her: ‘alone at last, the war over, real life begins’ (p. 124).

Muriel Spark: In the Hothouse In Remake, the old lady expresses her disquiet at the extent to which the history of this aspect of the war has been kept occluded; as I have suggested, her early life is therefore also effaced by the Official Secrets Act (Remake, p. 54). Her response to this, and to the inadequacies she perceives in official history, is anger (pp. 113–14); the request from her publisher for an autobiography meets with ‘resistance’, but the ‘insistent request’ provokes reflections which prompt her to write (p. 6). Despite the difficulties of concealment, any therapeutic value of this belated expression of the past is downplayed. Remake is more concerned with the locating the individual in history than with the confessional aspects of autobiography. For other authors, the secrecy surrounding Bletchley was an even greater psychic burden than it is for the ‘old lady’. Putt admits in his 1990 memoir that ‘an instilled reluctance’ (Wings, p. 161) – officially instilled – meant that even after

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operations at Bletchley were officially acknowledged, he still found it difficult to write about his own time there. He alludes, rather blithely, to individuals at Bletchley going ‘off [their] rockers’ and being sent to ‘discreet rest-centres’ where they could ‘babble [. . .] without betraying secrets’ (Wings, p. 105). In her biography of Angus Wilson, another writer who spent part of the war working at Bletchley Park, Margaret Drabble indicates that Wilson appears to have experienced a nervous breakdown as a result of the ‘claustrophobic and unnameable nature of the work’, but that psychotherapy proved problematic: ‘Years of official secrecy inhibited analysis, and much is irrecoverable.’42 Wilson also had to keep his homosexuality concealed from the majority of his colleagues and acquaintances, and quite possibly from the therapist as well. Writing about Alan Turing, who was prosecuted for his homosexuality after the war, Hodges challenges the notion that the need for gay men at this period to conceal aspects of their personal lives might somehow equip them for secret work: It was difficult enough being a mathematician, this being the frightening subject of which even educated people knew nothing [. . .] His sexuality [. . .] was a matter on which society still demanded silence. Such silence was for him tantamount to an uneasy game of deceit, and he loathed pretence. But as chief consultant to GC and CS, he was [. . .] doing work that did not officially exist. Now there was almost nothing in his life he could talk about. (Alan Turing, p. 239)

In Hugh Whitemore’s play Breaking the Code (1987), Turing unburdens himself by describing his war work to a non-English speaking young Greek man with whom he has a sexual encounter while on holiday, a moment which dramatises the pressures produced by the demand for silence that Hodges describes. In this scenario, Turing can speak, but there can be no conversation. The psychotherapist ought to be the ultimate confidante, but Drabble implies that for Wilson at least, the bond of official secrecy could not be overcome, even within the confines of the therapeutic conversation.43 In the 1913 essay ‘On Beginning the Treatment’, Freud noted that his attempt to analyse ‘a high official who was bound by his oath of office not to communicate certain things because they were state secrets [. . .] came to grief as a consequence of this restriction’.44 The analytical relationship may revolve around the patient’s attempt to conceal, either consciously or not, particular facts about him- or herself, but there must always be the possibility that the analyst can bring the concealed matter to the surface. The high official’s politically dictated discretion disrupts irreparably this aspect of the analytical conversation. As I will show, Muriel Spark presents the analytic

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relationship in a manner that undermines the notion that the analysand must have no secrets from the analyst. Those who worked in the branch of the intelligence services to which Spark was attached were also sworn to secrecy but details about British propaganda operations were not kept so tightly concealed for so long as was information about decryption operations. As early as 1947, Robert Bruce Lockhart, appointed Director General of PWE in 1942, was able to describe the personnel of what he jokingly referred to as the ‘hot-air arm’45 in his memoir Comes the Reckoning, remarking that the organisation contained ‘a handful of professional soldiers and civil servants. The rest were drawn from almost every walk of life and included journalists, business men, advertising experts, schoolmasters, authors, literary agents, farmers, barristers, stockbrokers, psychologists, university dons, and a landscape gardener’ (Comes, p. 156). Bruce Lockhart expresses the view that the journalists were best equipped to produce material quickly and in an appropriate idiom (p. 156). Propaganda was an acknowledged element of the war effort during the conflict, but as David Garnett noted in his history of PWE (written in the late 1940s but not published until 2002), the actual content of propaganda material was kept concealed. This meant that that ‘the text of a leaflet which had been scattered in millions over enemy territory [was] withheld [from the British public] on the pretence that its publication would assist the enemy.’46 What Garnett refers to here would most likely have been ‘white’ propaganda, which did not conceal its origins; in a speech to the Royal United Service Institution in 1952, the Labour MP Richard Crossman, who was appointed Head of the German Department of the PWE’s successor organisation, MI (R), in 1940, but who was also involved with the BBC’s German Service, noted that he could not discuss black and grey propaganda ‘because officially we never did them’.47 He then went on to mention examples of each that would have been familiar to his military audience. Black Boomerang, the second volume of Sefton Delmer’s memoirs, which Spark draws on in her account of her war work in Curriculum Vitae, was published in 1962, five years before the bulk of papers relating to the PWE were released to the Public Records Office. In a review of Black Boomerang, Crossman compared ‘black’ propaganda to area bombing: ‘Like strategic bombing, [black propaganda] is nihilistic in purpose and solely destructive in effect.’48 One example of the type of campaign which Crossman condemned in these strong terms is succinctly described by Anna in David Hare’s 1978 television play Licking Hitler, which drew heavily on Delmer’s memoirs in its critical depiction of a wartime propaganda unit:

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Our idea [. . .] is to say that the [German blood transfusion] units [on the Eastern Front] are getting their supplies of blood not from good clean fellow Germans but from Polish and Russian prisoners who have not even had a Wasserman test [to check for syphilis]. In other words, our job is to convince an army which has just sustained the most appalling losses in the history of human warfare that those of them who have managed to escape death are on the point of being consumed with venereal disease.49

Delmer expressed no qualms when he described this particular campaign in his autobiography. For an author such as Hare, writing thirty or so years after the event, such an incident provides evidence that Britain could not claim moral superiority over the defeated forces of fascism. Commenting on the writing of Licking Hitler, Hare describes meeting Delmer by chance while researching the play at the Wiener Library, an encounter which prompted him to read Black Boomerang: ‘I took a less playful view of the unit’s activities than he had done. To me they seemed to speak not just of England then, but of England now.’50 Hare’s comment implies that the cold-blooded attitude evidenced by Delmer’s campaign cannot be sequestered within the period of the war but foreshadowed a more general lack of political scruples in the postwar. As Marina MacKay notes, whilst Spark’s autobiography might seem to provide, retrospectively, ‘an uncomplicated justification for the acts of treason that were both mimicked and elicited at Milton Bryan’,51 her earlier novel on this topic is much more ambivalent. On the surface, Spark’s attitude towards her wartime secret work, both in her autobiography and in The Hothouse by the East River (1973) is more playful than Brooke-Rose’s. In Curriculum Vitae, Spark describes being interviewed by Delmer at Bush House, which housed the London office of the PWE; he asks her about her journey from Africa: ‘Did you come in a convoy?’ asked Delmer. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, smiling a little. It was an elementary test: we had all been warned ‘not to know’ about the movements of ships and troops, past and present. Great signs were plastered over the walls of public buildings: ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. (Spark, Curriculum Vitae, p. 147)

Delmer’s question allows Spark to demonstrate her smartness; there is little of the concern about the impact on the individual’s subjectivity of such easy lies that is implicit, and at times explicit, in Brooke-Rose’s account. Similarly, whilst some of those at Bletchley were weighed down by the inability to talk freely even to a psychoanalyst, as Wilson is in Drabble’s account, in Hothouse, one of the protagonists suggests to her husband that they should speak French in front of her analyst

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(who is at this stage acting as their valet) so that he won’t be able to understand their conversation: ‘ “In many societies,” Elsa says, “It’s still usual to speak French in front of servants and young children.” ’52 In Spark’s novel, the psychological after-effects of having been involved in secret work are less explicit than in Remake, but I would argue that, like Brooke-Rose, Spark is attuned to the potential ethical problems of experiencing the war from the enemy’s point of view. There are evident points of contact between Spark’s account of her time at Milton Bryan in Curriculum Vitae and the description of wartime secret work in Hothouse, even though, as Cheyette has suggested, The Hothouse by the East River can be regarded as a point of transition between the autobiographical concerns of Spark’s early work and the more ‘impersonal’ settings of her later novels (Muriel Spark, p. 85). Spark admits that she ‘played a very small part’ (Curriculum Vitae, p. 147) in the PWE, but nevertheless conveys her awareness of the impact and importance of the organisation’s work. Delmer’s unit was to produce broadcasts which would seem to be emanating from within Germany, but which would aim to undermine the authority of the Nazi party hierarchy. To this end, volunteers were recruited from prisoner of war camps, ‘truly patriotic Germans’ (p. 151) who were keen to see the downfall of the Nazi regime. The material broadcast had to be plausible and not out of kilter with the ‘white’ broadcasts of the BBC, as it was realised early on in the operation that many radio listeners ‘cross listened’, that is, tuned in both to the ‘official’ BBC broadcasts and to clandestine stations, such as those developed by Delmer, which, although apparently produced by Germans, were offering an alternative angle on the events of the war. Whereas, as I have noted, Tess decides to stop reading the British newspapers while at Bletchley (BrookeRose, Remake, p. 108), Spark reports a rather different experience, as stories invented by Delmer would on occasion find their way into the British press; she remembers reading a ‘false’ story with ‘great enjoyment’ (Curriculum Vitae, p. 150). Spark does acknowledge that it could be dangerous to deceive your own side in this way (p. 150), but does not express, in Curriculum Vitae, the moral qualms that even Delmer occasionally allowed himself, and which formed the basis of Richard Crossman’s post-war critique of PWE. Spark evades interrogation of Delmer’s position by refocusing attention on the prisoners who volunteered to participate in the broadcasts, and her description of them as ‘truly patriotic Germans’ can be understood as a way of smoothing over some of the potential moral ambiguities of their situation. As Spark indicates, the broadcasts made by PWE relied on the involvement of native German speakers. Whilst

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acknowledging that it ‘goes without saying that the German and British causes were hardly morally equivalent’, MacKay notes that ‘Spark redefines German traitors as true German patriots’, suggesting that Spark ‘would have known perfectly well [that] British nationals who succumbed [. . .] to comparable inducements in the corresponding circumstances of German prison camps were put on trial for their lives at the end of the war’ (‘Muriel Spark’, p. 511). But Spark is here separating off Nazism from German national identity in a way which reflects some of the attitudes that informed wartime propaganda. Looked at this way, the British nationals to whom MacKay refers were betraying democracy in favour of fascism, as much as betraying Britain. During the war, certainly, the figure of the ‘good German’ – that is, the anti-Nazi German – was one whose existence was widely debated. Crossman notes that accurate suppositions about the nature of the audience being addressed were central to the success of propaganda: In 1939, I was one of the people who passionately believed that there was a big, good Germany that could be appealed to. I know there were many Germans who did not like the regime, but if you appealed to them as traitors, they did not take the propaganda. They were much more content to overhear you talking to a Nazi. If a democrat overheard you scoring off a Nazi he could enjoy it without feeling that he was a traitor, whereas if he heard you appealing to him direct, he often switched off his set. (‘Psychological Warfare’, p. 331)

Garnett suggests that the ‘good German’ was the target of early British propaganda, appealed to ‘over the head of the Nazi leaders’ (The Secret History, p. 3). But he goes on to describe the notion of the ‘good German’ as a myth; this view, reminiscent of that espoused by Lord Vansittart and consequently known as ‘Vansittartism’, persisted even at the time of the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, as I will show in Chapter 3. Concerns about how such judgements made in wartime might continue to resonate in the peace, and the effects of the personal burden of a past entangled with secrecy, are communicated obliquely in Hothouse. Like Brooke-Rose, Spark uses linguistic uncertainty or ambiguity, mishearing, misunderstandings and an excess or paucity of interpretation to indicate the contingency of meaning. In the opening of the novel, Elsa’s therapist, Garven, tells her that they have ‘a good bit of ground to cover yet’ (Spark, The Hothouse, p. 11), a comment which leads her to reply: ‘Why do you say “cover”? Isn’t that a peculiar word for you to use? I thought psychiatry was meant to uncover something’ (p. 12). The long-suffering Garven ‘explains the meaning of “cover up” in its

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current social usage; he explains bitterly with extreme care’ (p. 12). The double meaning of ‘cover’ – to conceal, or to encompass and explore – is reminiscent of one of the ‘false friends’ that Tess identifies in Remake, but this instance is all the more disconcerting because the doubleness exists within a single language. Later, in one of the wartime episodes in the novel, Elsa takes some of the German prisoners out for a walk: Perhaps it is because she speaks no German that these men tend to say more to her in English than they would do in their own language. It is a common misunderstanding that one who does not know another’s mother tongue is assumed to be less discerning and intelligent than he is. In this way, most of the handful of German prisoners whom Elsa takes for country walks underestimate her wits. (p. 54)

The blurring between intelligence, meaning cleverness, and intelligence, meaning information, is in evidence here. The German prisoners may think they have the advantage over Elsa because she cannot speak their language but as her demand for clarity from Garven shows, she has a high level of linguistic acuity and understands far more than they realise. In the wartime sections of the narrative, the narrator occasionally glosses the historically specific meaning of particular words, in one instance, ‘raspberry’: ‘a raspberry in these days being already an outdated expression meaning a reprimand’ (p. 69). A more up-to-date usage, we are told, would be to ‘call it a rocket in this English Spring of 1944 when rocket missiles are leaping on London’; one can choose, in these circumstances, to use the word as a ‘euphemism’ or ‘sit down, weep and give up’ (p. 69). Language not only encodes ambiguous or indeed contradictory meanings, like ‘cover’ and ‘cover up’, but can also be a way of masking or evading the truth. Using the word ‘rocket’ as a metaphor is an attempt to mask what it actually signifies. Elsa also grasps what her husband Paul struggles to understand, that they were killed in 1944 and that their New York life emanates from his ‘jealous dreams’ (p. 95). When Hothouse is reconsidered in the light of this revelation, the sense that, for Paul in particular, the events of wartime have never been fully assimilated, is reinforced. Paul tells his son Pierre of the critical incident in which Kiel, a former prisoner of war who has apparently resurfaced in New York, was involved: Do you know what he did? He got himself taken prisoner by us, then he got himself a job with our intelligence unit on the pretext of being anti-Nazi. After he’d been broadcasting for our outfit six months he picked a fight and got himself sent back to the prison camp. Three days later he went on the air in a prisoners of war exchange-of-greetings programme. He sent a simple message to his mother and sister. But his voice was recognisable, you see. He’d

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been broadcasting for us. We were supposed to be an authentic underground German station. His voice was recognisable. We weren’t sure, but it was definitely possible that Kiel did it deliberately to betray our identity. (p. 61)

Spark re-tells a version of this incident in Curriculum Vitae (pp. 158–9), where it is presented as a potentially disastrous security breech. If a listener to the ‘underground German station’ broadcast by the unit recognised the same voice on a prisoner of war broadcast, they would realise that the supposedly German station was not emanating from Germany at all; its credibility would be destroyed. The false identity of the speaker, in this case Kiel, has to be preserved, and the only way to achieve this is to try to ensure that his voice is not detached from the context that the unit creates for it. What Paul’s recounting of the incident illustrates is the difficulty of making sure that Kiel is ‘performing’ in a way that will not endanger the unit’s operation. In his repeated use of the phrase ‘got himself’ in relation to Kiel’s actions, Paul suggests that Kiel manipulated the British from the start, implying that Kiel’s antiNazi stance may itself have been ‘pretence’, but this doubt is only cast in the light of Kiel’s later apparent act of betrayal. Seen another way, Kiel’s message to his family is the most honest broadcast he makes, and his involvement with the unit, whether it reveals genuine anti-Nazi sentiments on his behalf or not, is an act of pretence. This is one of the ways in which Spark undermines the division between ‘good Germans’ and ‘Nazis’. In this example, these stances are shown to be completely contingent, rather than indicative of absolute and firmly held belief systems. The uncertainty about what Kiel may or may not have believed, and the difficulty of distinguishing between truth and duplicity, is reinforced by the fact that there is more than one ‘Kiel’. When Elsa claims to have seen Kiel working in a shoe shop – selling items which come in matching pairs – her husband Paul has to clarify which ‘Kiel’ she means, Helmut or Claus (The Hothouse, p. 6). In fact, neither man is really called Kiel, this being a ‘cover name’ (p. 58) they each adopt after undertaking their secret work. Later, Paul tells his son Pierre that he had believed Helmut Kiel was shot while trying to escape, but that ‘He must have had a body substituted for his [. . .] He’s here in New York’ (p. 62). There is an embedded reference here to the post-war pursuit of Nazis who fled from Germany and from Europe at the end of the war. Spark herself attended part of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, whom the Israeli secret services tracked down to Argentina, where he was living under a false identity, and took to Israel, where he was eventually executed in 1962. Elsa herself has a sort of double in the form of her shadow, which casts itself always in the wrong direction. To ‘shadow’, in espionage parlance,

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means to follow, but it is not always clear whether Kiel is tracking Elsa or vice versa. The odd detail of Elsa’s shadow is also a partial clue to the fact that the protagonists’ New York existence is not really an existence at all. Concerns about the stability of subjectivity are further compounded by the recurrence in the novel of disembodied voices like Kiel’s. This is a trope which recurs in Spark’s works. In The Girls of Slender Means (1963), the May of Teck Club is often filled with the sound of Joanna Childe giving elocution lessons, and her voice is sometimes described as though it might have an existence independent of Joanna herself: ‘Joanna’s voice was saying [. . .] Joanna’s voice followed her pupil’s.’53 This locution seems to allow the voice an existence separate from the body, but this suggestion is later undercut; Nicholas records Joanna reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland only to find, after her untimely death, that the tape has been recorded over (The Girls, pp. 131–2). If the non-existence of Joanna’s voice, even in recorded form, after her death would seem to reinforce the notion that the voice does ultimately need the body in order to signify, the description of Churchill’s election radio broadcast, when ‘the wirelesses spoke forth’ (p. 86), underlines a certain suspicion of voice-related technology, a suspicion implied by the all too easy erasure of Joanna’s voice from Nicholas’s tape. In a post-war context, the disembodied voice of a political leader has associations with the demagogue. The narrative of wartime events in this novel is punctuated by a series of present-day phone calls made by Jane Wright, in which she tells the former May of Teck ‘girls’ about Nicholas’s death. These telephone conversations are narrated as a series of de-contextualised exchanges between voices, with little or no sense of the physical situations of the speakers. Technology allows the transmission of the voice from place to place, collapsing certain spatial constraints on interaction, but the untethered and largely uninflected exchanges in The Girls of Slender Means also have a disorienting effect. The unsettling qualities of the telephone conversations in The Girls of Slender Means are a reminder of the telephone calls that deliver the message ‘Remember you will die’ in Memento Mori (1959). Here, indeed, there is apparently a voice without an origin, and as Rod Mengham suggests, emphasis is placed not on the discovery of the caller’s identity, but on ‘the variety of characters’ reactions to the same threatening message’.54 In Hothouse, Elsa claims to recognise her son Pierre’s ‘ring’ when the telephone sounds in her flat, a bizarre conflation of the technology with the voice it conveys. During the war, she avoids sharing a room at her billet by claiming that she has ‘supernatural

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communications’, but assures the billeting officer that she does not ‘use an instrument’; their exchange takes place next to a poster which ‘bears the motto, “Careless Talk Costs Lives” ’ (The Hothouse, p. 60). Elsa’s war work is all about ‘careless talk’, its regulation and direction. Her brazen claim to the billeting officer implies that if nothing else, her war work is teaching her when to speak and when to listen. In this novel, too, the telephone also represents the complicated effects of the unit’s work, and by extension the war, on interpersonal communication: Elsa’s main job at the Compound consists of taking messages and reports from military intelligence personnel on a special green telephone used everywhere during the war for secret communications. It is known as a scrambler, because the connection is heavily jammed with jangling caterwauls to protect the conversation against eavesdropping; this harrowing noise all but prevents the speakers from hearing each other, but once the knack is mastered it is easy to hear the voice at the other end. (pp. 53–4)

Just as those decoding messages at Bletchley learned to filter out corruptions made during transmission, or ‘filler’ material added in an attempt to mislead, so the scrambler, with its ‘harrowing noise’, impedes, but does not prevent, successful transmission of information.55 Peter Kemp suggests that the whole novel ‘somewhat resembles the wartime scrambler [. . .] It is never exactly easy to hear [Spark] giving information in this book.’56 Arguably, the most ‘scrambled’ conversations Elsa conducts in the course of the novel are those that are carried on over an ‘open’ line, when the intention is to convey more than just information about ‘newly-returned bomber missions’ (The Hothouse, p. 54). However, like the transmissions made by Kiel during the war, telephone conversations rely in large part on the credulity of the one receiving the message. Thus, Elsa phones Paul from Zurich (her location confirmed by the international operator) and claims that, having decided that the only way to definitively assess whether the man who has appeared in New York is Kiel would be to sleep with him, she has done just that. Admitting this (and concluding that the man is not Kiel), she also confirms Paul’s suspicions about what happened during the war: ‘I’m sleeping with him to check if he’s really Kiel. It’s the only way to identify him,’ she says. ‘Then you did sleep with him during the war?’ [Paul] yells. ‘Be careful on the phone Paul [. . .].’ (p. 71)

This final comment of Elsa’s reveals a lack of faith in the security of communications which could stem from wartime; but although this

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conversation is preceded by a description of Elsa meeting Kiel in Zurich, her supposed sexual encounter with him is not narrated, except in this phone conversation. Given the novel’s concern with the passage of time and its disruption or distortion, it is notable that Nicholas Rankin attributes Delmer’s success as a journalist in pre-war Germany to his exploitation of ‘the efficient German telephone system’, which ‘was the key to his scoops’,57 enabling him to be first on the scene at newsworthy events. The telephone becomes a means both of bridging distance and saving time, but in Hothouse, as elsewhere in Spark’s fiction, its uncanny, indeed sinister properties are also recognised. Communication and failures of communication, things overheard or misunderstood, recur throughout Hothouse and form a key thematic link between the events of wartime and what happens in overheated New York. The revelation that their New York life is a spectral one upsets the relationship between the past of the war and the present of New York, between which the narration of the novel has been split, refocusing wartime as reality. Notably, when Elsa goes for her walk with two of the prisoners of war, it is remarked that they talk ‘of their past as if they were middle-aged and not all in their young twenties. The war has given them a past. It will never be the same afterwards’ (The Hothouse, p. 56). For the Germans, the war is the point from which they will take their bearings for the rest of their lives; henceforward, there will be the pre-war past and the post-war future. Elsa and Paul’s New York present is largely concerned with reconsidering the war years, but the style of Spark’s narration means that the past is not usually presented as being remembered by the protagonists. At one juncture, for example, the transition from the New York present to the war is made in this way: ‘That was only three years ago. But now it is long years ago, when they are recently engaged and are working together in England’ (p. 22). The past is not delved into, or reconstructed through painstaking acts of recall; it is simply presented in narrative contiguity to the present. As in Remake, a continued confrontation with the past reveals how much was, and continues to be, hidden. The relationship between war and peace is also interrogated by these narratives. In The Girls of Slender Means, Nicholas sees a stabbing taking place even as the crowd gather to celebrate VJ Day, an indication of the spilling out of violence beyond the boundaries of the conflict, and in Hothouse and Remake, if not violence then suspicion and covert behaviour refuse to be contained within historical parameters. As the pursuit and prosecution of war criminals in the post-war period suggests, wartime behaviour has consequences that persist in the peace. This particular way of treating time can also be interpreted in the

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context of Spark’s interest in the nouveau roman, and in the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet in particular. In ‘Time and Description in Fiction Today’ (1963), Robbe-Grillet argues that current films and novels have in common the ‘construction of moments, of intervals, of sequences which no longer have anything to do with those of clocks or calendars’.58 In Robbe-Grillet’s analysis, this rethinking of the role of time in narrative undercuts the possibility, invited by novels in the realist tradition, of asking whether things might have turned out differently; it also undermines the notion that story can be separated from plot: ‘an elsewhere is no more possible than a formerly’ (‘Time and Description’, p. 153). Time ceases to be a unifying strand of narrative: ‘It no longer passes. [. . .] Moment denies continuity’ (‘Time and Description’, p. 155). Spark saw a connection between Robbe-Grillet’s wartime role and the style and form of his novels: ‘[He] is doing something new in his precision. I believe he was a sighter – a gunsighter during the war, where every little millimeter counted. And one does see this in his books: an obsession with exactitude’ (qtd in Stannard, Muriel Spark, p. 353). Like Brooke-Rose, Spark saw the omission of particular narrative and/ or lexical elements as providing a means of refining her writing, and this too she took from Robbe-Grillet: ‘[Y]ou leave out “he felt” [. . .] You’re just observing, that’s all. A sighter. You’re only seeing what people do. You read between the lines what they think’ (qtd in Stannard, Muriel Spark, p. xviii). In Hothouse, certainly, this tactic complicates the reader’s understanding of the narrative, because emotions and motivations are never clearly explicated, and dialogue becomes untrustworthy as a key to individual’s feelings. Gaps between what is thought and what is said, uncertainty about the consequences of one’s actions, and the need for the reader to interpret on scant evidence: all these characteristics seem suited to a novel dealing with wartime propaganda. In The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), however, Spark discusses the nouveau roman in a way that problematises or at least complicates her later comments on its influence. At the suggestion of her cousin, a Jewish lawyer who is involved in the prosecution, Barbara Vaughan, a Catholic convert with Jewish blood, attends part of the Eichmann trial during a visit to Jerusalem, as I have noted Spark herself did. Listening to Eichmann’s testimony in his own defence, Barbara turned the switch of her earphones to other simultaneous translations – French, Italian, then back to English. What was he talking about? The effect was the same in any language, and the terrible paradox remained, and the actual discourse was a dead mechanical tick, while its subject, the massacre, was living. She thought, it all feels like a familiar dream, and presently located the sensation as the one that the anti-novelists induce. [. . .] She thought,

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repetition, boredom, despair, going nowhere for nothing, all of which conditions are enclosed in a tight, unbreakable statement of the times at hand.59

What is startling here is not the suggestion that the bureaucratic language  in which Eichmann describes his activities signals the failure of representation in the wake of the Holocaust, but the fact that the narration implies that the effects of Eichmann’s ‘dead discourse’ echo the effects of the anti- or new novelists. Barbara’s reflections seem to indicate that the practitioners of the nouveau roman could take Eichmann’s ‘dead mechanical’ use of language as a model, and certainly this suggestion would be consonant with Spark’s later praise for the ‘exactitude’ of an author such as Robbe-Grillet. This is what is implied by Bryan Cheyette, who, having identified Spark’s anticipation of Hannah Arendt in her evocation of the ‘banality of evil’, suggests that Spark ‘utilizes the “anti-novel” or nouveau roman as a means of substituting conventional concerns with the inner self for a more chilling and dehumanized account of the “times at hand” ’ (Cheyette, Muriel Spark, pp. 108, 109). The problem here is the implication that Spark somehow learns from, or even imitates, Eichmann’s delivery, as much as she learns from the new novelists that their project is a shared one. It could be argued, however, that the conflation between the ‘new novel’ and Eichmann’s discourse is Barbara’s, rather than Spark’s, and that a key distinction made in the passage is that between the ‘dead’ discourse and the events it describes. If Eichmann is here characterised as attempting to conceal the awfulness of what happened through the use of bureaucratic language, Spark’s project, in novels such as The Public Image (1968), The Driver’s Seat (1970) and Not to Disturb (1971), which bear the stamp of the nouveau roman, is rather to invite the kind of reading between the lines which Eichmann was at pains to evade. Interpretation, not just of language, but of action, is also important in Hothouse. Spark emphasises the difficulty of assessing, as in the case of Kiel, whether particular kinds of behaviour are in fact performances designed to elicit a desired response. In 1944, Paul is asked by Colonel Tylden to account for Elsa’s movements, after being told of the Colonel’s belief that she slept with Kiel. During their conversation, Paul, who is already engaged in a relationship with Elsa himself, watches as Colonel Tylden checks his records, in order to confirm whether Elsa volunteered for late-duty, as he claims, or, as Paul believes, did not: The officer opens a desk and takes out a bunch of keys, then he rises and goes over to the filing cabinet, where he inserts and turns a key. Paul is not sure if the cabinet drawer has not opened a little too easily, he is not sure if it was locked in the first place. The man has removed a blue cardboard file and is

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flipping through the papers inside it. [. . .] Then he [. . .] replaces the folder, shuts the drawer, locks it, tries it, and returns to his desk. There, he opens the drawer and replaces the keys. (Spark, The Hothouse, p. 26)

After these manoeuvres, the Colonel confirms that Elsa did request lateduty, thus incriminating her; but Paul assesses this careful extraction of the correct paperwork as a ‘performance’ (p. 26). Paul’s personal feelings and convictions are one thing; the evidence in the blue cardboard file is another. It is notable here also that the Colonel does not send Paul out of the room while he looks for the file; the very fact that Paul suspects that the filing cabinet might not even have been locked in the first place is a sign that being able to demonstrate the mechanisms of concealment is a crucial way of exercising the power that concealed knowledge can convey. Later, Paul and Elsa are called in together to see Tylden for a further discussion about Kiel. This time, his performance of secrecy and revelation is even more explicit: [H]e takes a small dark green government-issue metal box. This he sets before him with due system. He opens the mysterious object. It is nothing but a card-index. Putting his fingers behind the last card at the back he brings forth the key. With this key he opens the locked drawer in his desk, saying with a smile, ‘Now you know where we keep our secret of secrets.’ He opens the drawer, pulls out a file, lays it before him [. . .]. He thinks we are school-children, Paul thinks, because he himself has the brain of a school-boy. (p. 114)

By this stage the Colonel’s performance has lost any mystique or power that it might have had. A repository that can so readily be revealed is unlikely to contain anything of note, and the Colonel’s attempt to ingratiate himself with Paul and Elsa by including them in his secret falls on stony ground, not least because they are both keen to conceal anything that might incriminate them or otherwise connect them to Kiel’s betrayal of the unit. Yet at the same time, Paul is still unclear as to what exactly has happened between Kiel and Elsa. Tylden’s concern is with ensuring that neither of them encouraged or knew about Kiel’s impending betrayal; having given their official account to Tylden, Paul realises, they will never be able to ‘talk sincerely’ (p. 117) about Kiel to each other. Tylden’s performance of secrecy seems to point to secrecy’s hollowness, but Paul’s reflections, and his suspicions of Elsa throughout the novel, show that disdain for the hierarchies of secrecy does not diminish the power of secrecy to provoke division where it once provided commonality of purpose. The difficulty that Paul and Elsa have in incorporating Kiel’s reappearance seems indicative of the unassimilated nature of the past.

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Another way of understanding the relationship between the ‘present’ and wartime in this novel is to see wartime events as those which have been (unsuccessfully) repressed by the main protagonists. For Paul and Elsa, revelations about and reconsiderations of wartime have dramatic consequences, ultimately leading to the restaging of their encounter with death, which Paul seems to have forgotten. In Remake, being able, finally, to narrate the past is liberating, albeit belatedly, but in Spark’s novel the past seems to re-impose itself and cannot be assimilated. The inevitable entanglement of professional and political secrecy with the personal and the interpersonal is further complicated by the fact that in neither of these scenarios does the end of the conflict mean that complete revelation can occur. Initiation might offer the opportunity to share in a rarefied community of knowledge, but as these writers show, once the community is disbanded, that knowledge can come to constitute a burden. The need for secrecy persists in peacetime, and so does its distorting effect on individual subjectivity.

Notes 1. Spark, Curriculum Vitae, p. 145. 2. In Elders and Betters Anna ensures that she will inherit by destroying a version of her Aunt Sukey’s will, against the advice of another aunt, who hoped to prevent Anna from becoming embroiled in a family feud. As she burns the will, we are told, Anna ‘maintained her natural air; she [. . .] remembered that walls have ears and eyes’ (Compton-Burnett, Elders, p. 101). Later, she reflects on growing up: ‘I wonder how many of us escape a guilty feeling, that our maturity ought to mean some secrets or mysteries or something’ (Elders, p. 188). 3. Sinclair, The Red and the Blue, p. 2. 4. Spark, The Comforters, p. 49. 5. In a 1952 talk, Richard Crossman gives an example of propaganda that could be described as ‘grey’: ‘one may run a radio station which is not a “black” station – because no German would be so foolish as to believe that a medium-wave station could be a secret station in Germany – but which is certainly not a B. B. C. station. Certain things can be said by such a station for which no British Government could take the responsibility’ (‘Psychological Warfare’, p. 321). 6. Stannard, Muriel Spark, p. 63. 7. Cheyette, Muriel Spark, p. 6. 8. Rankin, ‘The Deliberate Cunning’, p. 45. 9. Birch, Christine Brooke-Rose, p. 2. 10. Bell, Open Secrets, p.4. 11. Citing the example of the classical author Taccola, Pamela O. Long notes that in his technical writings he describes some of his inventions, but ‘there are occasional instances when he explicitly states that he is withholding

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

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information’ (Openness, p. 115). He wishes to encourage potential patrons to hire him, but does not want to divulge all the details of his learning in case others exploit it. Kermode, The Genesis, p. 3. Brooke-Rose, ‘Stories’, p. 4. Brooke-Rose, ‘Illiterations’, pp. 250–1. Hayman and Cohen, ‘An Interview’, p. 10. Brooke-Rose, ‘Palimpsest History’, p. 188. Brooke-Rose, ‘ReMaking’, p. 53. Hayman and Cohen note that Brooke-Rose’s work ‘took a sharp turn toward experimentation with the publication of Out in 1964’ (‘An Interview’, p. 1). The novels published prior to this, including The Languages of Love (1957) and The Sycamore Tree (1958), however, show Brooke-Rose already pushing at the boundaries of realist narration. Brooke-Rose, Remake, p. 102. As Brooke-Rose notes in ‘ReMaking’, Chomsky uses subscript numbers when explaining the rule of reflexivity: in the sentence ‘John1 killed John1’, with the numbers indicating an identity between the two subjects, the second John should be replaced with the reflexive pronoun, in this case ‘himself’. Because Brooke-Rose eschews all pronouns in the novel, the reader is occasionally confronted with sentences that serve to foreground such grammatical conventions, though Brooke-Rose uses superscript, rather  than subscript, numbers: ‘Unbelievable, mutters John1 to John1’ (Remake, p. 119). The reader is thus reminded constantly of the constructed nature of the text. Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 487. Calder, The People’s War, p. 155. In the late 1940s, after the break-up of her first marriage, Christine BrookeRose married Jerzy Peterkiewicz, who had come to Britain in June 1940 as a refugee from Poland, unable to speak English, but who established a reputation as a poet and novelist writing in the language of his adopted country. In his 1993 autobiography, he recalled the linguistic difficulties facing him at this period: When you don’t know a foreign language and still want to communicate, you are aware of the truth, a simple and undiluted truth which pushes you towards words, and there are few words, you realize, you can choose from. Years later, studying in the British Museum Library, I came across a remark in [mid-nineteenth-century German dramatist] Friedrich Hebbel’s diaries to the effect that we cannot lie successfully in a foreign language. Fluency in language increases the ability to lie. (Peterkiewicz, In the Scales, p. 155)

24. Thomas Richards identifies the late nineteenth century as the point at which ‘classification’ came to mean not just the organisation of information, but ‘knowledge placed under the special jurisdiction of the state’, and connects this shift to the ‘fantasy of the imperial archive’ in which the ‘state actually succeeds in superintending all knowledge, particularly the great reams of knowledge coming in from all parts of the Empire’ (The Imperial Archive, p. 6).

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25. Middleton and Woods, Literatures of Memory, p. 5. 26. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, p. 2. 27. As Brian Johnson notes, ‘ “Enigma” [is] the generic term for the German ciphers [. . .] “Ultra” was the British code-name for the intelligence which was derived from Enigma and other machine ciphers during World War Two’ (The Secret War, p. 305). As it was a machine-code based on complicated permutations of substitution, the way into Enigma was largely mathematical, but the code-breakers were helped by human fallibility. Required to start messages with randomly chosen groups of letters, some radio-operators fell back on the same three letter groups each time; one operator in Italy ‘used the initials of his girlfriend to whom he was conveniently faithful’ (Calvocoressi, Top Secret, p. 66); ‘Rommel’s Quartermaster at Tripoli is particularly remembered for his habit of starting all message to his commander with the same formal introduction’ (Lewin, Ultra, p. 118). This not only provided a stable element in the message, which could help in deciphering the message, but also provided a way of tracking the movements of particular army groups. 28. Peter Calvocoressi gives an example of a ‘corrupted’ message which emphasises the difficulty of the emender’s task (Top Secret, pp. 72–3); Ronald Lewin appends examples of decrypted and translated messages to his study of wartime cryptography, serving to emphasise how much glossing these messages required (Ultra, pp. 372–8). 29. Fitzgerald, The Knox Brothers, p. 233. 30. A number of members of the British team which was forced to return home early from the International Chess Olympiad in Buenos Aires in September 1939, despite having qualified for the final, worked at Bletchley during the war, including Stuart Milner-Barry, Harry Golumbek and Hugh Alexander. 31. Ratcliff, Delusions, p. 80. 32. Hodges, Alan Turing, p. 209. 33. Putt, Wings, pp. 137–8. 34. According to an account by Gordon Welchman, one of the key figures in Bletchley’s cryptanalytical work, this consciousness of the gap between the war as experienced at Bletchley and the war being described in decrypted material was also felt by others involved in decryption: Those of us who knew through the Enigma decodes what the Germans were saying about their military successes had some faint idea of what hell our troops went through. [. . .] No wonder many of the brightest young men in Hut 6 [which dealt with the military and air force Enigma] pleaded to be allowed to get into the fighting. (The Hut Six Story, p. 188) However, such pleas, according to Welchman, were ignored; those who had worked in Hut 6 ‘knew too much about our success with the Enigma for their capture by the enemy to be risked’ (The Hut Six Story, p. 86). 35. Greig, That Summer, p. 75. 36. Like Ian Crane, Brooke-Rose’s first husband, Rodney Bax, whom she

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37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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met while working at Bletchley, was a sometime music scholar who later trained as a lawyer, eventually becoming a circuit judge. He died in 1983. McEwan, ‘Introduction’, p. 17. McEwan, The Imitation Game, p. 138. Brooke-Rose’s account shows that women did attain positions in or near the ‘inner circle’ at Bletchley. Further, in his biography of Alan Turing, Hodges quotes a letter written in September 1939 by the director of the GC and CS, Alastair Denniston, in which he reports that several ‘men of the Professor type’ (Alan Turing, p. 161) have been recruited to the organisation. However, as Hodges later notes, several of these ‘men of the Professor type’ were in fact women (Alan Turing, p. 195); there were female codebreakers, such as Mavis Lever, who, as Hugh Sebag-Montefiore notes, took a key role in breaking the Italian Enigma (Enigma, pp. 120–1). Harris, Enigma, pp. 214–15. Like Colonel Jon J. Timson, Telford Taylor, who acted as liaison officer at Bletchley after the American entry into the war, was a lawyer who went on to play a key role at the Nuremburg trials. See Michael Smith, Station X, pp. 137–9, for an account by Brooke-Rose of the impact of the arrival of the Americans on life at Bletchley. Drabble, Angus Wilson, p. 111. The short story ‘Christmas Day in the Workhouse’ from Such Darling Dodos (1959) is the only fictional work of Wilson’s that seems to draw on his time at Bletchley, evoking as it does the claustrophobic atmosphere of a wartime department. Freud, ‘On Beginning’, p. 136. Bruce Lockhart, Comes, p. 198. Garnett, The Secret History, p. 29. Crossman, ‘Psychological Warfare’, p. 321. Crossman, ‘Black Prima Donna’, p. 677. In his account of the work of the Political Warfare Executive, Ellic Howe cites accounts by Crossman’s and Delmer’s contemporaries which stress the temperamental differences, and the clashes, between the two men (The Black Game, pp. 95–7). In his biography of Crossman, however, Anthony Howard emphasises that Crossman often defended Delmer’s work to their superiors in London: Crossman ‘always seems to have been prepared to throw a protective cloak around his more unorthodox colleague’ and, according to Howard, it was Crossman who took ‘the political flak’ (Howard, Crossman, p. 92). Describing the atmosphere at Woburn Abbey in 1939–40, before the relocation of Delmer’s unit to Milton Bryan, Garnett suggests that: The maintenance of good morale among the staff [. . .] was a difficult matter, and required continual adjustments. It arose partly from the conditions of enforced secrecy and segregation; partly from the strain of continual preoccupation with enemy conditions which combined to generate a rather unreal mental atmosphere’. (Garnett, The Secret History, p. 31)

49. Hare, Licking Hitler, p. 122. 50. Hare, ‘Introduction’, p. 13. 51. MacKay, ‘Muriel Spark’, p. 511.

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The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction Spark, The Hothouse, p. 57. Spark, The Girls, pp. 43, 86. Mengham, ‘The Cold War’, p. 158. For the working of scramblers, see Kahn, The Codebreakers, pp. 551–60. Kemp, Muriel Spark, p. 148. Rankin, Churchill’s Wizards, p. 272. Robbe-Grillet, ‘Time and Description’, p. 151. Spark, The Mandelbaum Gate, p. 177.

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Chapter 2

In the Family

In Graham Swift’s novel Shuttlecock (1981), the narrator, Prentis, invites the reader to recall a particular moment in the creation of the cultural memory of the war: ‘You remember in the early and midfifties, when the actual after-effects of the war were fading, rationing was ending, there was a whole spate of war books and war films.’1 Prentis’s Dad’s memoir, also called ‘Shuttlecock’, is part of this ‘spate’, and Swift’s novel focuses on the son’s attempts to grasp what it might mean to have ‘a war hero for a father’ (Shuttlecock, p. 50). Over the course of the novel, Dad’s status as a hero, and therefore the status of ‘Shuttlecock’ as a text, is brought into question; this questioning is hinted at when Prentis distinguishes between the ‘actual after-effects’ of the war and representations of the conflict. Whereas Tess in Remake sees widely circulated representations of the war as having no real bearing on her own wartime experiences, Dad is able to situate his story within a burgeoning cultural imaginary. That Prentis, whose only knowledge of the war comes second-hand, is placed in the position of weighing the truth claims of his father’s story has an impact not just on Prentis’s understanding of the war, but, of course, on the father–son relationship. Involvement in secret war work is thus seen to have effects that leak down to the next generation. Thematising secrecy in this way serves as a reminder that the impact of the war, and of secret war work, was not confined to those who lived through it. It also emphasises the extent to which the rhetoric of secrecy infiltrates the domestic sphere in wartime and afterwards, and how it intersects with privacy. Common wartime experiences such as conscription, evacuation and the aerial bombardment of residential areas had divisive effects on the family group, but they also necessitated forms of regulation and bureaucratisation that made privacy more difficult to maintain. As I suggested in the Introduction, at certain points in the war, mutual surveillance by the civilian population was actively

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encouraged; this, like the investigators of the Wartime Social Survey, ‘denounced as “Cooper’s Snoopers” ’, was resisted, but it had precedents in a peacetime context.2 David Vincent has argued that as the middle class increased in size in the late nineteenth century, a distinction emerged between ‘acceptable and unacceptable forms of social seclusion’.3 ‘Closed’ working-class communities were seen as threatening, and Vincent suggests that the consequence of this was ‘the development of a strategy of urban development that sought maximum privacy for the civilized, and complete publicity for the unwashed’ (The Culture of Secrecy, p. 22). He cites aspects of British social work, such as the home visitor movement, as part of this strategy. These in turn evolved from the social surveys undertaken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by individuals such as William Booth and Seebohm Rowntree. Opening up certain sections of society to public scrutiny in this way presumed that these ‘closed’ communities might be keeping secrets, but it also compromised their privacy; privacy is reconfigured as both a privilege and a signifier of social propriety. In Michael Frayn’s novel Spies (2002), however, the wartime ‘espionage’ activities of the narrator and his friend Keith take place in a middle-class setting in which mutual surveillance by neighbours is implicitly legitimised as a means of reinforcing propriety of both a personal and a political kind. Whereas Swift shows a son attempting to understand the relationship between his father’s memoir and other narratives of the war, Frayn’s adult narrator is able to grasp more clearly than his younger self could the complex interrelation between personal and political in the events that were played out by his neighbours in wartime. What is at stake in these novels, and in the others to be discussed here, including William Boyd’s Restless (2006) and Georgina Harding’s The Spy Game (2009), is not just the effect that involvement in events of historical import might have on the parent and their post-war life. These texts are also concerned with how the aftershocks of war experience influence the thinking and behaviour of a generation whose knowledge of the war comes not just from their parents, but from cultural products of various kinds, and who therefore have, to use Alison Landsberg’s term, a prosthetic memory of the war. The impossibility of insulating even the youngest members of the family from the ideological effects of the conflict is precisely what is played out in Spies, where the origins of the cultural mythology of the war are exposed through the activity of children at play during wartime. What these novels invite us to contemplate, among other things, are the consequences of growing up in a society where war, and its concomitant surveillance activity, has, in this way, been normalised.

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War Stories Part of the impact of Shuttlecock relies on an awareness of the type of narrative that ‘Shuttlecock’, Dad’s memoir, is supposed to be, although in appealing to his readers’ memories of the 1950s, Prentis conveys his own sense that this was a time when representations of the war became particularly prevalent. As I have shown, in the post-war period some aspects of the war could be discussed more freely than others, and this inevitably had an impact on the versions of the war that began to circulate. Richard J. Aldrich notes that: the end of the Second World War was quickly followed by a litany of secret service stories, often concerning the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain’s wartime sabotage organisation, which suggested that now that the war was over its stories of clandestine activity could be told.4

Aldrich is referring here to texts such as Peter Churchill’s Of Their Own Choice (1952), an account, written in the third person, of the author’s experiences as an agent in France, or They Fought Alone (1958) by Maurice Buckmaster, one of the London-based organisers of SOE operations in France, which describes how SOE came into being. Notably, these texts, like many others in this genre, are what could be described as ‘novelised’, that is, although based on historical events, they employ dialogue and other narrative techniques that would more usually be associated with the novel. This can serve as a reminder that, although narrated by individuals who had a direct involvement in the events described, these narratives were not, and could not be, comprehensive in their accounts of SOE’s wartime activities; like novels, they are selective in their focus. Whilst SOE is not named in ‘Shuttlecock’, which is a relative latecomer to the genre, having been published in 1957, Dad’s mission to France is reminiscent of operations undertaken by SOE. This organisation, which had as its task the support of resistance to the Nazis both in Europe and beyond, was disbanded in January 1946 and, as Aldrich indicates, its former members were allowed to reveal some aspects of their wartime activities in print. Sarah Helm notes that official files on SOE were closed after the war, but that Buckmaster, together with Vera Atkins, who had overseen the training of many female agents, some of whom did not return from their missions, promulgated stories about ‘glamorous SOE agents’5 throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. What this emphasis on a ‘reassuring “enemy-led” view of the secret services’ (Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, p.  8) masked was that there were less palatable aspects to Britain’s secret activities. The tales of covert derring-do contained in books such

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as ‘Shuttlecock’ could not reveal that other areas of wartime intelligence remained hidden from view. Michael Paris notes that war-related popular adventure writing – including Eric Williams’s prison camp escape story The Wooden Horse (1949), Stanley Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight (1950), based on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s experiences on Crete, and Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters (1951), an account of the development and deployment of the ‘bouncing bomb’ – enjoyed popular success rather than ‘critical acclaim’.6 As Paris suggests, film adaptations increased the audience for such works, as did their reappearance in cheap paperback editions. Pan Books, founded in 1944, had a non-fiction paperback list comprised largely of reprints of works such as these, with eye-catching illustrated covers. Indeed, Prentis is struck at one point by the dust-jacket illustration on his copy of ‘Shuttlecock’: ‘the original edition has the picture of a man, in silhouette, dangling from an opening parachute. [. . .] [T]he artist [has attempted] to make the image resemble a shuttlecock’ (Shuttlecock, pp. 83–4). Discussing the film versions of these narratives, Paris characterises the image of the war that they produce as ‘largely depoliticized’, with a lack of emphasis on the nature of Nazism, meaning that the war also became dehistoricised, ‘without beginning or end, and the stories [the films] tell have little more rationale than “beating the Jerries” ’ (Warrior Nation, p. 226). This is a narrative of war in which there is ‘no place for Dachau, Dresden or even the horrors of the battlefield’ (Warrior Nation, p. 226). Paris is not suggesting that references to such events or places should have been shoe-horned into these films for the sake of inclusiveness, rather that their focus on ideologically simplified heroics contributed to a cultural memory of the war from which its more politically dubious or horrific aspects were excised. As Peter Middleton and Tim Woods have noted in their discussion of Sebastian Faulks’s Charlotte Gray (1998), which depicts SOE activity in France, in order for a broadly realist text to incorporate a sense of the historical importance of events in which its protagonists are involved, there can be a tendency for the author to ‘allow a character [. . .] implausibly abstract hindsight’.7 The split timescale of Shuttlecock, on the other hand, allows for reflection on the manner in which this version of the war was constructed. Charlotte Gray provides a reminder that, although Shuttlecock’s focus is on issues of masculinity and father–son relationships, a number of memoirs published in the late 1940s and early 1950s focused on women’s stories. Best known are R. J. Minney’s Carve Her Name with Pride (1956), telling the story of Violette Szabo, an agent who was executed at Ravensbruck, and Jerrard Tickell’s Odette (1949), about

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Odette Sansom, later Peter Churchill’s wife, who survived despite being captured and tortured by the Gestapo. Both these books were subsequently filmed, and, although Carve Her Name with Pride does not shy away from depicting Szabo’s death, the moral complexities of the work in which Szabo and others were engaged, and with which Swift grapples, are not to the fore.8 Szabo’s story was given revisionary treatment in Howard Brenton’s play Hitler Dances (1972); echoing Brenton’s views, the director of the play, Max Stafford-Clark, suggested at the time of its first production that: ‘In order to fight fascism [Britain] had to become fascist itself.’9 This is a type of argument that emerged partly in the wake of Angus Calder’s The People’s War (1969) and had a particular impact on theatrical representations of the war.10 The interrogation of Britain’s claims to moral rectitude in relation to the conduct of the war reemerges in relation to area bombing, and its echoes are also discernible in Shuttlecock.11 Part of what Swift recognises is that autobiographical accounts of wartime experience could have as their raison d’être the construction of a narrative which, in dealing with horrors, may switch the focus elsewhere, creating a form of screen memory. Whilst Brenton’s play uses Brechtian alienation techniques in order to challenge the naturalistic framework of a text such as Carve Her Name with Pride, Swift defamiliarises Dad’s narrative in a different way. Notably, Swift eschews parody. Linda Hutcheon suggests that in a parody, ‘critical distance is implied between the backgrounded text being parodied and the new incorporating work, a distance usually signaled by irony’.12 Pastiche, meanwhile, stresses ‘similarity rather than distance’ (A Theory, p. 33). By these criteria, the extracts from ‘Shuttlecock’ included in Shuttlecock are pastiche rather than parody, and the result is to embed within Shuttlecock not only a particular depiction of wartime masculinity, but also a particular model of realistic representation. Hutcheon’s definitions imply that pastiche does not have the incisive potential of parody, but a ‘critical distance’ does arise between Dad’s narration and Prentis’s own. One striking incident in ‘Shuttlecock’ concerns Dad’s killing of a German sentry, which occurs after Dad has stolen some documents from a factory in Caen. The sentry is caught off-guard when he stops for a smoke: Experience had taught me that where there is a choice between several possibilities which cannot be calculated exactly, and cold steel, then cold steel is the better choice. [. . .] As his right hand was engaged, returning the match-box to his pocket, I struck – my left hand covering his mouth, fingers pinching the nose, the blade entering left of the spine: a text-book application of my close combat training. The only thing I had forgotten was the cigarette.

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My hand rammed most of it into the sentry’s mouth, but I was left with an angry burn in the centre of my palm . . . . (Shuttlecock, pp. 61–2)

Prentis sums the incident up succinctly: ‘My Dad. Cold steel. A man’s back’ (p. 62). The choice of articles in Dad’s account is telling: ‘the blade’ enters near ‘the spine’, rather than ‘my blade’ entering near ‘his spine’, distancing these events from individual agency, whilst the notion that this is a ‘text-book application’ of ‘training’ serves to legitimise what might otherwise be seen as brutal actions. Men trained in close-combat, such as SOE agents and commandoes, were a particular source of both anxiety and fascination during and immediately after the war years; these were the men who, it was believed, would find it most difficult to reintegrate themselves into peacetime society. The burn Dad receives from the sentry’s cigarette could be turned to blackly humorous effect but it serves here to disrupt the notion that there can be a ‘text-book’ killing. Dad’s confession, delivered in such a way as to abrogate guilt, is supplemented and undermined by this nasty detail. Prentis has an ambivalent relationship to ‘Shuttlecock’. Thinking back to the period when the book was published, he comments: ‘Oh, it wasn’t that I didn’t find the book extraordinary, amazing – terrific stuff – that I didn’t admire Dad. But having a war hero for a father [. . .] this is bad news if you’re an only son’ (p. 50). Prentis does not wish to bathe ‘in reflected glory’ (p. 50). When he is an adolescent, the book divides him from his father, rather than providing a bond between them. Then, when Prentis is a grown man with sons of his own, he turns to the memoir again. Prentis works as ‘a sort of specialized clerk, an archivist’ (p. 14) for the London police and, although keen to stress the mundane nature of his occupation, accedes that: ‘We sit in a strong-room of secrets. We are custodians. Though custodians of what is often as much a mystery to us as to the public’ (p. 16). At the start of the novel, Prentis is informed that he has been chosen to replace his boss, Quinn, who is due to retire, but Prentis decides to conceal this news from his wife Marian. He continues his twice-weekly visits to see Dad at a residential hospital. Dad has not spoken for almost two years, the cause of his silence remaining obscure: ‘he had some sort of sudden breakdown, as a result of which he went into, for want of a better word, a kind of language-coma’ (p. 40). It is this silence that leads Prentis to re-read ‘Shuttlecock’, this time becoming frustrated at its gaps and deficiencies; at the office, he puzzles over some case files that have been given to him by Quinn. Quinn eventually reveals that Dad is the subject of the files and offers Prentis a final document that may assist in the recovery of a more accurate version of Dad’s

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war record. Prentis chooses to burn this without reading it. He finally tells his family about the promotion and achieves a reconciliation of sorts with his wife. The narration foregrounds issues of masculinity, and particularly father–son relations. Dad no longer speaks to Prentis, except indirectly, via ‘Shuttlecock’. Prentis is excessively aggressive and even violent towards his sons, who are more interested in watching The Bionic Man on television than in reading about their grandfather’s wartime exploits. Their preference for invented heroics is criticised by Prentis, who is at this point in the novel unable to acknowledge the extent to which ‘Shuttlecock’ might itself be an imaginative construct. Quinn acts as a benevolent-dictatorial father substitute, and, as Adrian Poole has noted, like Dad, he seems ‘to hide a secret story, partly embodied in a text or texts’.13 Early on in the narrative, Prentis notices a photograph in Quinn’s office ‘showing several lined-up army officers [. . .] and dated April ’44. It’s about the only personal item in Quinn’s whole office’ (Shuttlecock, p. 28). Prentis presumes that one of these officers is Quinn; perhaps Quinn’s army service provides an explanation for Quinn’s limp, a characteristic which from the outset serves not to emasculate Prentis’s boss but to hint at some unspecified past bravery. In fact, as Quinn reveals towards the end of the novel, his injury occurred when he panicked during a German attack, and he interprets the loss of his foot as a punishment for treading on the face of another wounded soldier (pp. 191–2). Quinn’s insight into his own psychology, shared with Prentis partly in order to enable him to understand Dad’s actions, is not reciprocated by Prentis himself. For Poole, the novel is weakened by Prentis’s reticence, and the fact that he ‘is given so little grounding in the past, apart from the hamster he once tormented, and his father’s memoir’ (‘Graham Swift’, p. 155). However, this apparent absence of ‘grounding’ is itself notable; Prentis’s sadistic treatment of his childhood pet, and his wilfully cruel behaviour towards his children, coupled with the fact that ‘Shuttlecock’ is all that is heard of his father’s voice in the novel, all point towards the inadequacy of the models of behaviour available to Prentis. It could further be implied that Prentis is indeed repeating, in his treatment of his own children, the parenting that he himself received from Dad. Having a hero for a father is ‘bad news’ because it sets a standard of behaviour that, given Prentis’s situation, cannot be imitated. When Prentis re-examines ‘Shuttlecock’, he is drawn to the ‘rare betrayals of feeling; those rare moments of self-scrutiny, of speculation’ (Shuttlecock, p. 60). Dad admits within the text that he has omitted some details, particularly the details of his interrogation; it is not just these acknowledged

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gaps that intrigue Prentis. Reflecting on the book’s conclusion, he remarks: These [final] pages are more vivid, more real, more believable than any other part of the book. And yet, strangely enough, this is because the style of Dad’s writing becomes – how shall I put it? – more literary, more speculative. In the main body of the book – so I’ve explained – only the occasional brief passage of reflection, of emotion, breaks the brisk, adventure-book flow of the narrative. But in these final chapters it is as though the philosophic note is always there [. . .] and Dad’s words seem ever ready to take on a quieter, sadder, even eloquent tone. (pp. 106–7)

Where ‘Shuttlecock’ fails for Prentis is as an account of a (to him) recognisable individual. Its generic aspects, imitative of earlier examples, fail to individuate Dad, serving rather to install him in the category, albeit relatively rarefied, of ‘war hero’. In his reading of ‘Shuttlecock’, Prentis wishes to go beyond the ostensible, surface meaning to another, covert meaning: What was it like, Dad? What was it really like? [. . .] I have been straining to read without a light. But it is as though I have been straining not so much against the dark but to discern some hidden things behind the words. (p. 145)

The ‘hidden things behind the words’ are the markers of Dad’s individual subjectivity, but partly because of Dad’s silence, and partly because of the recalcitrance of the written text, these can only ever be glimpsed. Lewis MacLeod suggests that Dad’s silence ‘demonstrates the final incompatibility between epic masculine performance and communicable interiority’;14 certainly the effort towards a ‘quieter, sadder, even eloquent tone’ that Prentis identifies appears to show the difficulty that Dad has in welding performance and interiority together in ‘Shuttlecock’. Prentis takes notes from the book, watching for ‘those little additional comments, those inconsistencies, which most seem to draw me into the mystery – and closer to Dad’ (Shuttlecock, p. 147). He becomes what Frank Kermode calls an ‘overreader’; overreaders are ‘usually members of a special academic class that has the time to pry into secrets’.15 But Prentis is not attempting to unpick the complexities of a modernist novel or lay bare the narrative structure of ‘Shuttlecock’. In the absence of direct communication with his father, he hopes that the autobiography will reveal the truth about Dad’s character. What Prentis jots down are phrases that appear to transcend the purely referential, revealing the emotions that lie behind his father’s heroic actions, and he finally decides that the key lies in Dad’s admission of the effect of being deprived of his clothes during his imprisonment: ‘. . . of all the humiliations and

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cruelties . . . none . . . was more demoralizing, more appalling than this nakedness’ (Shuttlecock, p. 147). When Dad admits to having felt dehumanised and vulnerable, Prentis feels ‘closer’ to him. His attempt to strip away the rhetorical flourishes or generic markers of ‘Shuttlecock’ is thus revealed as a desire to refashion the text in his own image. Prentis wants not only to uncover some ‘truer’ version of his father in the book, but also to find some phrase or sentiment that offers the possibility of self-identification; troublingly, he discovers this when Dad is at his lowest point, and is denied the fragile protection represented by clothing. Indeed, Prentis over-identifies with Dad in what amounts to a form of trauma-envy. When Quinn proffers evidence that Dad’s account of his imprisonment may conceal his betrayal, under torture, of fellow agents, ‘Shuttlecock’, initially presented as, in Stef Craps’s terms, an attempt to ‘gain access to a traumatic reality’, is refigured as ‘an instrument of deception and bad faith’.16 That Prentis ultimately chooses the ‘bad faith’ version of his father’s war emphasises the ambivalence of the legacy of the war that is uncovered by the novel. Concealment, rather than revelation, is ultimately the novel’s keynote. If the extent and veracity of Dad’s admissions within ‘Shuttlecock’ are to be doubted, then Prentis’s own narration cannot be immune to scrutiny. As Craps has suggested, the diary-like aspects of Prentis’s narrative imply honesty and openness but Prentis is not immune to self-deception and admits early on that his depiction of family life is fanciful (Craps, Trauma, p. 64; Swift, Shuttlecock, p. 53). Similarly, as an archivist, Prentis might be expected to be rigorous in the pursuit of facts. Throughout the novel, he has attempted to piece together a narrative from the files Quinn gives him. Extracts from these are embedded, like the extracts from ‘Shuttlecock’, within Prentis’s narration, and they initially seem to have no connection to Dad. Written in a tersely bureaucratic style, this material is a further reminder of how language can obfuscate rather than reveal: Subject: Z [. . .] University career curtailed by outbreak of war. Joined R.A.F., 1940. Trained as fighter-pilot. Sqdns 80, 225; N. Africa, 1941–2. Grounded after accident in training exercise during which one flying officer killed and subject injured. R.A.F. Intelligence, London, 1942–5. (Shuttlecock, p. 102)

These documents too must be decoded, identities ascribed to those designated X, Y and Z, the relevance of dates, places and events uncovered, but this is a parody of a detective investigation as Quinn can reveal at least some of the missing information by simply producing another file. Even when he does, it is implied that facts must still be verified, and formed into a narrative, in order to become meaningful. The destruction

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of the file can prevent the construction of a different and more troubling narrative; in their bare form, the facts cannot compete with ‘Shuttlecock’. What Quinn offers Prentis is not a truer version of Dad’s experience but a potential counter-narrative; the file reveals that a fellow former soldier claimed that Dad’s story was inaccurate, also accusing Dad of having an affair with his wife. Prentis, Quinn suggests, has the choice of whether or not to ‘preserve the father that is in that book of his’ (p. 197). Prentis decides that he will preserve this version, and thinks of a line from the book even as he and Quinn burn the potentially damaging file at the bottom of Quinn’s garden: The smoke curled up through the overhanging leaves. The evening shadows had lengthened and the branches and foliage seemed to press round us in complicity. . . . the woods and the trees are always on the side of the fugitive. . . Quinn crouched by the incinerator, poking the fire with a stick. (p. 200)

There is bathos in the juxtaposition of a moment from Dad’s escape with Quinn and Prentis’s subterfuge in the back garden; later Prentis wonders whether he and Quinn will meet ‘like secret agents at some seemingly innocent rendezvous’ (p. 206), pointing to one of the generic stereotypes of post-war espionage narratives. ‘Shuttlecock’’s heroic version of wartime masculinity may be undermined by the accusations revealed in Quinn’s files, and indeed by Dad’s silence, but it remains a powerful, if only sporadically usable, model for Prentis. In the closing scene of the novel, Prentis goes to Camber Sands with his wife and children, having seemingly reached a truce with them. But this place too has martial associations: Prentis recalls visiting as a child, when it was still ‘littered’ with the ‘relics of war [. . .] Rusting tangles of metal to waylay landing-craft; huge, zigzagging rows of concrete teeth waiting to snap at German tanks; pill-boxes marking the dykes on Romney Marsh’ (p. 216). Whilst the resonance of these things is heightened for the young Prentis by his father’s recent involvement in the war, his attitude is one of awe and excitement rather than horror. He believes that his parents probably made love in the dunes during their family visits here in his childhood years, just as he surreptitiously does with his own wife; but whether such love-making, in the shadow of destruction, is a redemptive or a desperate act remains open to question. Prentis’s comparison of himself and Quinn to ‘secret agents’ is a reminder of a new paradigm of international conflict that has arisen by

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the time Shuttlecock is set. The man of action will be displaced, Prentis hints, by paper shufflers like himself. This comment is also a reminder of the non-comparability between Dad’s socio-historical context and Prentis’s, and this is a factor which further complicates Prentis’s desire to learn from Dad’s experiences. William Boyd’s novel Restless has a similar temporal gap between the parent’s war and the child’s reading of their life story but the relationship between parent and child – here a mother and daughter – is a much less fraught one than in Swift’s novel. It could be argued that for Swift, Dad’s war experience is the vehicle through which the father–son relationship is explored, while for Boyd, the effects on the intergenerational relationship are less important than the reconsideration of the historical record. Restless alternates between chapters set in the present – in this case 1976 – and narrated in the first person by Ruth, and an account of wartime espionage activities written by Eva, as Ruth learns her mother is actually called, and given to her daughter piecemeal. Structurally then, Boyd’s novel is similar to Shuttlecock, with the key difference that Eva’s narrative has not been released into public circulation. Where Prentis attempts to distil a personal meaning from a public document, Eva’s account is, implicitly, written for Ruth alone, although there are few markers of this intention in the text itself, which is written in the third person, thus creating a distance between the narrated subject and the document’s author. In this respect, Restless resembles Spies, which, as I will show, also uses third-person narration to signal both temporal distance and a degree of self-alienation on the part of the subject. Ruth’s attitude towards her mother’s revelation is almost comically matter-of-fact; she tells Eva’s long-hoarded secret to a school-gate acquaintance within days of hearing it. Then she explains her decision: I felt I had to share this with at least one person before I talked to my mother: that act of retelling it would make the new facts in my life more real for me – easier to confront. And easier to confront my mother too. It wouldn’t be kept a secret between us because Veronica was party to it as well – I needed one extra-familial buttress to hold me steady.17

Ruth seems immediately to recognise the potentially destructive nature of the secret, and her response to this is to share it with another. Once the story has an existence beyond the dyad of herself and her mother, it becomes, as Ruth puts it, ‘more real’. This can be compared to Prentis’s experience in Shuttlecock; in that novel, the publicly shared version of Dad’s story, in the published text, is presumed to mask some deeper truth. For Ruth, this new supplement to her knowledge of her mother has to be brought into public circulation, if only shared with one other

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person, in order to gain legitimacy as part of both her mother’s story and indeed her own. However, her decision to tell Veronica also indicates that the facts of the matter are now, in a sense, politically null. Although Eva wants to take revenge for a wrong done against her in the past, she is a spy no longer, and no operational reasons exist for concealing the nature of her former job.18 Part of what interests Boyd is whether espionage could ever be considered simply a job; the implication of the novel is that its effects on individual subjectivity are deep-rooted, because it implies not simply a particular activity – spying – but a performative subterfuge that cannot be sequestered from daily life. Whereas Michael Denning argues that post-war espionage fictions ‘are not really about spies at all; they are the representation and narration of the bureaucratic white-collar routine of information handling and office politics’,19 Boyd seems to suggest the reverse: that everyday life, even in peacetime, involves the subterfuges associated with espionage. As I have noted, this link between espionage and bureaucracy is also present in Shuttlecock: Prentis’s desk-job bears no resemblance to the kind of work done in wartime by his father but, with its basis in information gathering and interpretation is probably closer to contemporary espionage than Dad’s exploits are. Whilst ‘Shuttlecock’ is connected by Swift to a recognisable post-war subgenre of war memoir, Boyd is concerned with defamiliarising narratives of wartime espionage. An Anglo-Russian émigré, Eva initially works in Belgium, but for the bulk of the novel, she is attached to a research group that is in turn attached to British Security Co-ordination (BSC), an American-based secret service organisation. Boyd draws on two actual but relatively obscure wartime events. On 9 November 1939, two British MI6 agents went to Venlo, on the Dutch–German border, together with a Dutch intelligence officer, to meet with a senior officer representing the German opposition to Hitler, who had made contact via the Dutch secret services. However, this apparent envoy of anti-Hitlerism was in fact Walter Schellenberg, head of Gestapo counter-intelligence; only later did the British government learn that its intelligence network in the Netherlands had been infiltrated by a Nazi agent, and that the meeting had been a set-up. Transferring the action from Venlo to the invented ‘Prenslo’, Boyd interpolates Eva into these events, making her a witness to the kidnap of three Allied agents, and in the process gratifying those readers who can recognise his historical source. He also adds a further layer to the scenario in the novel, as Eva is at the meeting to monitor the activities of Secret Intelligence Service agents, and is therefore engaged in spying on another branch of her own country’s secret service.

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Later in the novel, Boyd draws on the early work of BSC, which had a threefold intention: ‘to investigate enemy activities, to institute adequate security measures against the threat of sabotage to British property and to organise American public opinion in aid of Britain’.20 It is this latter element of BSC’s remit that is of most interest to Boyd; Eva works at a news agency which is in fact a front for the circulation of rumours that might encourage American public opinion to favour American intervention in the war. Boyd focuses in particular on an incident from March 1941, when a document which the British claimed to have found in a German courier’s despatch case was handed to the American government. This was a map of South America which ‘showed the subcontinent radically redistributed into four areas and one colony, all under German domination’.21 The notion that the Germans might take control of a region on the United States’s doorstep was of course highly unpalatable to the USA, and the discovery of the map resulted in the stepping-up of intelligence activity in South America. However, the map ‘had been produced rather than procured by the BSC [. . .] From the BSC’s point of view, the map was a daring gambit that resulted in a propaganda coup.’22 Roosevelt described the map in a radio broadcast, leading Germany to deny its authenticity, and indeed his speech is reported in Restless (Boyd, Restless, p. 171). A second map of South America, apparently intended to reinforce the impact of the first, is almost the cause of Eva’s death. Sent to pass this map on to a courier, she examines it first, and doubts its authenticity; she eventually has to commit murder in order to extricate herself from a highly dangerous situation. It is this incident, and particularly her belief that her boss and lover Lucas Romer would have been able to predict her behaviour, that leads to her fleeing the organisation and the country, and eventually incriminates Romer as a Soviet spy. Writing in the Guardian shortly before the novel’s publication, Boyd ‘revealed’ the truth-basis of this aspect of the narrative, suggesting that the reason why the activities of BSC are still little known is that the attitudes towards America exposed by documents from the time are ‘deeply embarrassing’, emphasising as they do ‘American gullibility’.23 Anti-American rhetoric of this type could not be allowed to infect the post-war ‘Special Relationship’. At around this time, shortly before the publication of Restless, Boyd also published an article about Kim Philby,24 citing his life story as another influence on the depiction of the spies in Restless, and this type of journalistic intervention by the author is interesting not only for what it reveals about the process by which history might be incorporated in the novel. Boyd is evidently pleased with himself for ‘revealing’ or ‘discovering’ events that were hitherto ‘lost’, and is clearly drawn towards the treatment, in his fiction,

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of aspects of the historical record that are likely to be unfamiliar to the general reader. The action of his First World War novel, An IceCream War (1982), takes place partly in England and partly in a setting unusual for British First World War fiction, East Africa; whilst Any Human Heart (2002), a novel written in diary form, traces its narrator’s progress through the twentieth century, stationing him in the Bahamas for part of the Second World War, in order that he can observe the Duke of Windsor, who was governor of the islands. As Boyd himself indicates, it is important to consider, in relation to particular historical events, whether ‘lost’ actually means actively hidden, or whether it indicates that authors and readers gravitate towards those aspects of the war, such as the ‘Home Front’, that seem to speak most clearly to them. Boyd’s divergence from more familiar narratives of war itself presumes a knowledge of those narratives; Swift’s novel does not bear the same signs of historical research, relying instead on narratives that, even now, are still in wide circulation. Each author, then, questions recognisable versions of the war, but in different ways and with different results. Swift’s novel invites the reader to share a suspicion of all narrative, including that constructed by the narrator, while Restless is less subversive than supplementary. In choosing to make Lucas Romer a Soviet agent, Boyd writes back into a wartime narrative later revelations about the infiltration of British intelligence operations by the so-called ‘Cambridge spies’, including Kim Philby. Boyd’s wartime narrative thus anticipates the anti-Soviet sentiments of the Cold War, as well as providing a reminder of the fragility of wartime alliances. The Second World War is reinscribed, and is not so much a battle against fascism, as a pre-echo of the battle against communism that informs the Cold War. Given the novel’s focus on Anglo– American relations, it is not hard to forget that Eva is involved, albeit peripherally, in fighting Nazism. The 1970s present of the narrative, a present that is described much more precisely than the 1980s present of Swift’s novel, not least because it is at a temporal distance for the reader, reflects this refocusing of attention; Ruth is a single parent, having met the father of her son while studying in Germany. To support her son, Jochen, she teaches English as a foreign language whilst attempting to complete her PhD on post-First World War German politics. Making Ruth a language teacher allows Boyd to reflect on the difficulties of interlinguistic communication: at one point the language textbook she uses seems to take a sinister turn: We spent our time on a new chapter with the Ambersons – now returned from their unsatisfactory holiday at Corfe Castle only to have [their dog]

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Rasputin run away – and explored the mysteries of the present perfect progressive. ‘Rasputin has been acting a little strangely lately.’ ‘The neighbours have been complaining about his barking.’ The fear of poisoning entered the cloistered world of Darlington Crescent. (Restless, p. 180)

Just as it was for her mother during her years as a spy, language is not simply a means of communicating information, but a way of establishing – or indeed misrepresenting – one’s identity. Even the apparently neutral grammatical examples that form the narrative of the textbook can have hidden meanings. Language, and proficiency at the other languages, places one in a potentially powerful position. But Ruth is not able to control the uses to which her students might put their new-found knowledge. Ruth lives in a world where RAF stands not for Royal Air Force, but for Red Army Faction, and reads newspaper reports of the long-running trial of some of that group’s members, wondering whether her uninvited German lodgers, Jochen’s uncle and his girlfriend, might be involved in terrorism. A future threat is gestured towards when she witnesses a demonstration against a visit to Oxford by the sister of the Shah of Iran. It was the shooting of the student Benno Ohnesorg during protests against the Shah’s own visit to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1967 that was one of the catalysts for the formation of the RAF: ‘Gunter Grass said that the killing of Ohnesorg was “the first political murder in the Federal Republic”.’25 After the Shah’s deposition in 1979, the new Islamic state was established under Ayatollah Khomeini. In reminding the reader that many on the left welcomed the deposition of the Shah, Boyd also indicates how the stakes of terrorist threat have shifted in the past thirty years, with Islamic extremism having displaced communism as the key focus for anxiety. Ruth notices that walls around Oxford are covered with ‘meaningless Euro-agitprop slogans [. . .] meaningless to the English that is’ (Restless, p. 261). The political protests that originated in West Germany have implications that spread across international boundaries, just as terrorism is a form of warfare that is carried out in the cause of ideologies – communism, or Islamic fundamentalism – that do not have a solely national basis. The disruption of the boundaries of war and peace represented by terrorism in the novel is a reminder that the ideological war carried on through espionage is also no respecter of the distinction between wartime and peacetime. Ruth herself is asked by the police to report any suspicious behaviour on the part of her students, and searches the belongings of the West Germans who are staying with her: ‘Is this how it begins? I thought. Is this how your life as a spy begins?’ (p. 261). Given that the historical reference

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point constructed for espionage in the novel is a wartime one, Boyd implies that the continuation of espionage after the war is one factor encouraging the erosion of the distinction between wartime and peacetime which is encapsulated by the phrase ‘Cold War’ and is also implicit in the concept of ‘war on terror’. However, in order to attempt to bring to justice her mother’s wartime adversary, Romer, now Baron Mansfield and a respected member of the establishment, Ruth finds herself engaging if not in espionage, then in deception, claiming to be a journalist to obtain an audience with Romer, but unable to maintain her act for long. This is a more explicit repetition across the generations than in Shuttlecock; Prentis’s desk-bound concealment of information seems to have displaced his father’s active and indeed visceral attempts to keep secrets to himself, but Ruth appears to replicate, or at least tries to replicate, the kind of deception described by her mother. Boyd suggests that despite Ruth’s efforts to resist being drawn into, for example, reporting her students’ suspicious behaviour to the police, there cannot be a life lived without concealment of some kind; it is a necessary aspect of individual subjectivity. In terms of what Boyd might be saying about secrecy beyond the particular historical context he chooses as his focus, the description of what happens after Eva, in America in 1941, realises the truth about Romer, is significant. Deciding to go on the run, she considers what the best course of action will be: She had to remember this – she could never forget this – she was dealing with Lucas Romer, a man who knew her all too well, as well as anybody had ever known her in her life, it seemed. [. . .] So think, she urged herself – double-think, triple-think. [. . .] She had two clear simple choices: south to Mexico or north to Canada. As she deliberated she found herself wondering what Romer would expect her to do. She had just come from the Mexican border – would he assume she would head back, or go north, the other way? [. . .] south [. . .] made sense – she knew how and where to cross the border. (Restless, p. 249)

She goes to the train station, and buys a ticket for the north, starting an argument at the ticket office, claiming that she has been short-changed. Then she reflects: What would he think about the kerfuffle at Grand Central? He would know it was staged – it was an old training plot to deliberately draw attention to yourself: you make a fuss which buying a ticket to the Canadian border because that’s precisely where you’re not heading. But Romer wouldn’t buy that – too easy – he wouldn’t be looking south at all, now. [. . .] Romer would intuit the double bluff immediately, but then [. . .] doubts would creep in:

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he would start thinking, no, no . . . maybe it’s a triple bluff. That’s precisely what Eva wants me to think, to conclude that she was going to Canada when in actual fact she was going south to Mexico. She hoped she was right: Romer’s mind was devious enough – would her quadruple bluff be sufficient to fool him? (pp. 250–1)

A choice between two alternatives, north and south, becomes an intricate web of possibilities because of the secret training that Romer himself provided. Whilst Eva satisfies herself in constructing a rationale for her final choice, this complicated pattern of thinking opens up a kind of abyss, in which any choice becomes so highly over-determined as to become almost meaningless: she might just as well decide by tossing a coin. This moment can be read as a parody of the convoluted thought processes dictated by the exigencies of trade-craft that are often a feature of genre fiction; the complex switching between travel documents that the maverick agent Ricky Tarr describes to Smiley and Guillam in John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) is one example.26 The protagonists of espionage fiction such as Le Carré’s are almost invariably men and Boyd could therefore be seen as defamiliarising this genre through his choice of protagonist, just as he attempts to defamiliarise the war itself; Restless certainly seems to owe more to post-war espionage narratives that it does to the stories of, for example, Violette Szabo or Odette Sansom. The incident at the railway station is deadly serious, because if Eva does not make the right decision, she may be killed. The skills that made her a spy enable her to escape from her new enemy, Romer, but the very fact that he taught her those skills points to the moral ambiguity of this world organised around secrecy. It also recalls one of the jokes discussed by Freud: Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. ‘Where are you going?’ asked one. ‘To Cracow’, was the answer. ‘If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?’27

Freud glosses this as an example of a joke that combines absurdity with ‘representation by the opposite [. . .] the second [Jew] is lying when he tells the truth and is telling the truth by means of a lie’ (Jokes, p. 115). But as he also notes, the joke has ‘serious substance’; it brings to light ‘the problem of what determines the truth’. What jokes such as this attack is ‘not a person or an institution but the certainty of our knowledge itself’ (Jokes, p. 115). What cuts against the expression of this radical uncertainty in Boyd’s

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novel is the nature of Eva’s account of her past. In reading Shuttlecock, the reader has a strong sense of Prentis as a reader and interpreter of ‘Shuttlecock’; phrases from ‘Shuttlecock’ are repeated in Prentis’s narrative, doubts expressed about apparent gaps in Dad’s account. The conceit of Restless is that Ruth is given the chapters of her mother’s story piecemeal when she goes to visit her. Although references are made, in Ruth’s first-person narration, to her having read Eva’s narrative, the scene of reading is not depicted as strongly and as frequently as it is in Shuttlecock. Whilst she initially feels ‘incredulous’ about her mother’s revelations, she soon comes to accept that her mother’s narrative is true and that her previous beliefs about her mother’s early life were ‘a cleverly constructed fantasy’ (Boyd, Restless, pp. 31, 32). Once this original version is placed in question, Ruth expresses no real doubts about the veracity of the alternative version that her mother has written; in contrast to Shuttlecock, the wartime memoir is here accepted as straightforwardly referential, despite the outlandish nature of some of the action it describes. Moreover, the contrast between the narrative voices of Ruth’s and her mother’s narration is much less pronounced than that between Prentis’s and his father’s. There is little sense in Eva’s narrative that she is a woman in her seventies or that she is writing this material for her daughter. Whilst ‘Shuttlecock’ thematises the manner in which aspects of the Second World War have become part of a cultural mythology, Boyd seems less interested in making explicit formal references to familiar depictions of the war, not least because, in many respects, this novel is not interested in the conduct of the war in itself, but rather in locating the roots of the Cold War within it. Eva’s indecision at the railway station is echoed when, after locating Romer but being unable to persuade him to admit to his wartime activities, Ruth visits her mother and becomes uneasy about some small details that seem incongruous: I noticed there was a small assembly of packaged foodstuffs on the table: a thermos flask, a Tupperware container with sandwiches inside, two apples and a packet of biscuits. Odd, I thought [. . .] anyone would think she was about to go off on a picnic. (Restless, p. 298)

Eva has been minding Ruth’s son Jochen for the afternoon and he reports some other odd behaviour on Eva’s part: what has she been cutting up in the garage? Ruth feels compelled to return to her mother’s cottage the next day and discovers apparent preparations for an assassination attempt on Romer, including the barrels that she has sawn off a shotgun in the garage.

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I understood, now, that I was beginning to think like her: she had wanted me to come back this Sunday morning to find her gone; she had wanted me to search her house and find these things and now she expected me to draw the obvious conclusion. (p. 301)

This comment perhaps helps make sense of what might otherwise seem a contrived narrative structure. Ruth has not just been learning about her mother by reading her memoir, but has been learning the techniques of espionage. In fact, Eva’s intention is not to kill Romer, or at least not directly; after a confrontation with him at his home, she tells Ruth what she believes – or, even, knows – will happen next: Romer will kill himself tonight. He’ll inject himself, take a pill. He’ll have had the method ready for years. It’ll look exactly like a heart attack, or a fatal stroke – something that looks natural, anyway. [. . .] Romer’s dead. I didn’t need to shoot him with that gun. The second he saw me he knew that he was dead. He knew his life was over. (p. 312)

These remarks not only blur the question of who is responsible for Romer’s death, but also introduce an element of determinism into the plot: Eva has evidently foreseen this end from the outset. But excising this malign influence from her life cannot mask the extent to which Eva’s own life has been infected by her earlier experiences. Although, as in Spies, an attempt is made to separate younger from older selves, through the use of the third person to narrate the younger self, it is clear that, despite transforming her identity and taking a new name since the war, Eva has not forgotten what she learned then and is prepared to go to extreme lengths to retain a semblance of peace.

Keeping an Eye Open Prentis’s knowledge of his father’s wartime activities remains, partly through choice, incomplete. If not preferable to the reality, the myth of Dad’s war, represented by ‘Shuttlecock’, is more easily absorbed because of its consonance with other cultural productions. In Boyd’s novel, Ruth seems more accepting of both her own personal failures and her mother’s shocking revelations. These authors raise the question of how one might reconsider, as an adult, the life and influences of a parent, and how this might affect relationships with the next generation; other authors have addressed the question of how the war might affect child–parent relationships from a different perspective. The extent to which young children might incorporate wartime ideology or themselves be drawn

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into the war effort is an issue which also concerned writers during the war, and considering children’s wartime experience can provide a different slant on the production and reception of narratives about the war in the 1950s.28 Like Shuttlecock, Michael Frayn’s Spies is in part concerned with the interrogation of images of masculinity that came to dominance in wartime and formed part of post-war mythology. In the case of Spies, the cultural status of the ‘brave airman’ is scrutinised, but the centrality of this figure to the action is occluded for much of the novel, displaced by a narrative that has espionage as its focus. The exigencies of the first- (and sometimes third-) person narrator’s memory structure this novel. In the opening pages, the narrator is reminded of his childhood: a particular smell has sparked his memories, the smell of a plant called ‘Liguster’.29 What ‘Liguster’ is and why it is significant only becomes apparent later (except to German-speaking readers). Initially, it simply provides the spur for the narrator to make a journey back to the suburb where he grew up and to try to recreate a coherent narrative of a particular series of events that happened there during the war. The account which follows proceeds by association and reiteration, rather than in a straightforward chronological fashion, but the wartime starting point for the central events of the narrative is a revelation, made to the narrator by his friend Keith: ‘ “My mother”, [Keith] said reflectively, almost regretfully, “is a German spy” ’ (Spies, p. 33). In what follows, the two boys investigate this possibility, with the reader often piecing together the clues ahead of them, whilst the grown-up narrator is also able to retrospectively reinterpret what happened then. Perhaps not surprisingly, Keith’s accusation proves to be untrue; the spies of the novel’s title are Keith and the narrator, who in relating past events uses the third person, distancing himself as a grown-up from Stephen, himself as a boy. The boys themselves, as the narrator realises, are not party to the intricacies of the adult relationships in which they interfere. Keith and Stephen keep their investigation secret, and the adults on whom they spy, principally Keith’s mother, are at pains to ensure that their own actions are covert. But Frayn weaves secrecy into the plot in other ways as well, as the small enigma of ‘Liguster’ indicates. Language is a slippery medium, and Frayn questions the adequacy of even ‘plaintext’ to communicate clearly. During his period of National Service in the 1950s, Frayn attended the Russian language course run by the Joint Services School for Linguists, having applied for this because of a ‘schoolboy fixation with Russian politics and language’.30 The course was intended to provide linguists to work on signals intelligence, as well as a pool of interpreters in case of future war with the Soviet Union, although Frayn claimed not to recall hearing ‘a single mention

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of “GCHQ” [Government Communication Headquarters, the successor organisation to GC and GS] during his entire time at JSSL’ (Secret Classrooms, pp. 170–1). Nevertheless, the existence of the school from 1950–61 is one indication of how clandestine government work developed in the post-war and Cold War, focusing now on a new enemy. Like his fellow JSSL student D. M. Thomas, Frayn was enabled by his time at the school to undertake translations of Russian literature later in his writing career, and an interest in interlinguistic communication finds its way into his novels and plays.31 The slipperiness of the relationship between signifier and signified is indicated in a series of examples that recur in Spies. Stephen at one point asks his father what ‘Juice’ means. There are some ‘juice’ living in one of the neighbouring houses, apparently, and Stephen has heard this word used as a taunt at school. This is his mishearing of the word ‘Jews’, and its significance is fully revealed towards the end of the novel, but the reader may also pick up other linguistic clues that are opaque to Stephen, but which complicate this story of English schoolboys at play. Several times in the novel, Stephen’s father uses expressions that do not sound English. These are transcribed phonetically as ‘coddle-moddle’ and ‘schnick-schnack’ (Spies, p. 27) and what they encode is the fact that his father is a German. Kuddelmuddel means mess or confusion, whilst Schnickschnack translates as twaddle or poppycock. Unbeknown to his younger self, then, Stephen is a ‘German spy’. This covert story, clues to which are dropped through the course of the narrative, is pieced together towards the end of the novel; his father has been involved in an organisation to help Jewish refugees, and Stephen has in adulthood embraced his German ancestry and built a new life for himself in that country, changing his name from its anglicised form, Stephen Wheatley, back to its German equivalent, ‘Stefan Weitzler’, in the process. This explains why he refers to his younger self as ‘Stephen’; he is not Stephen any more. As an adult, the narrator has become a translator between English and German, and the plant that he remembers as ‘Liguster’ is nothing more exotic than privet. But as well as having a distinctive smell that evokes his childhood, this particular plant plays a part in the past events that the narrator recalls. Stephen and Keith have a den inside an overgrown privet hedge in the garden of a bombed-out house in their street; this place is important for a number of reasons, but in relation to the question of bilingual naming, the sign that Keith fixes up at the entrance to the den is notable: He takes out a plain white bathroom tile that we found in the rubble of the house, and the stub of the coloured pencil. With the red end he neatly prints

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a single word on the tile, and wedges it in the fork of a bush at the entrance to the passageway. PRIVET, it says. I don’t like to query this, now that he’s written it so neatly and authoritatively. In any case, the sense of it is plain enough – that we’re commencing on a long journey on a lonely road where no one else can follow. (Spies, p. 57)

Keith thinks he has written ‘Private’, but instead of indicating the status of the den in the bushes as a sanctum not to be entered, he has simply put a sign on it saying what it literally is: privet. However, putting a sign up saying ‘Private’ is itself a paradoxical thing to do, drawing attention to precisely that which they wish to conceal, and relying on the sign itself to prevent invasion; there are no locks to bar entry into the bushes, after all. In order for Keith to feel empowered by his secret, he has to communicate its existence to others. The secret becomes more powerful when another person knows it exists, but does not know what it is, or what it contains. Unless the existence of the missing or omitted information is marked in some way, it is simply absent rather than actively concealed. Similarly, in Shuttlecock, Quinn makes it clear that the missing file in the sequence Prentis is examining could be relevant to the case but that he, Quinn, is choosing, at this point, to retain it (Swift, Shuttlecock, p. 92). In (covertly) announcing the existence of their secret den in this way, Keith and Stephen, as the narrator notes, immediately mark what they are doing as important, more than simply a game; this is perhaps the implication of the narrator’s comment about the ‘lonely road’ that the co-conspirators must now travel. One of the consequences of the boys’ investigations is to foreground the politicisation of the domestic space. Their spy hunt leads them to interpret domestic actions as having potentially world-historical implications. But what their often comic misunderstandings overlook is the extent to which the war has already infiltrated and disrupted everyday life. A foray into Keith’s parents’ front room uncovers material that seems to support Keith’s allegation against his mother. Faint figures left on the blotting paper must surely be ‘code’ but the decisive evidence comes in Keith’s mother’s diary: At the back of the drawer Keith has found a little pocket diary. I feel a fresh wave of alarm. We’re not going to look at her diary, are we? Diaries are private . . . But already he’s opened it, and already I’m looking over his shoulder as he turns the pages. [. . .] I don’t know how Keith notices the first of the secret signs. [. . .] He hands the diary to me, and points to the space for a Friday in January. It seems at first to be empty. Then I see that there’s some kind of handwritten mark [. . .] nestling inconspicuously in the little gap between the date itself and the current phase of the moon: a tiny x. (Spies, p. 48)

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The boys rapidly decide that these x-es, and some mysterious exclamation marks on other dates, must mark secret meetings; significantly, the x-es seem to occur at particular phases of the moon, which they immediately associate with parachute drops. That these marks most likely signify menstruation and (so-to-speak) marital relations is never explicitly stated: the reader has the advantage over the protagonists in this regard. Children’s misunderstandings of adult behaviour, fuelled by misdirected inquisitiveness, and a keen desire to contribute to the war effort, also feature in Mick Jackson’s novel Five Boys (2002), which focuses on the effects of war on a rural community, and in its opening chapters, on the integration of an evacuee called Bobby into the five boys’ gang. On one occasion, they spy on ‘the Captain’, a local eccentric, whom they see in the window of his attic, looking through a telescope and flinging his arms about energetically: Bobby knew that they were all meant to be keeping quiet, but after watching the Captain wave his arms around for a couple of minutes suddenly he couldn’t stop himself. ‘What’s he doing?’ he said. ‘Signalling,’ said Hector. Bobby carried on watching. ‘What’s he saying?’ he said. Lewis shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nobody knows,’ he said.32

After a German aircraft is seen flying low over the village, the boys decide  that there must be a connection between this event and the Captain’s signalling. When Bobby breaks into the Captain’s house, however, he finds ‘no radios, no charts, no Nazi banners’ (Five Boys, p. 88). After narrowly avoiding being caught in the attic by the Captain, Bobby reports back about what he could see through the Captain’s telescope: ‘Ladies,’ he said, at last. The Boys looked at one another. ‘What sort of ladies?’ said Hector. Bobby rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Ladies,’ he said, ‘like your mums.’ The Boys were dumbfounded. They had never imagined that their mothers might be caught up in a spy ring. It was almost inconceivable. ‘At the keep-fit class,’ said Bobby, ‘at the village hall.’ The Boys still didn’t understand. Bobby reached out his arms and mimed some of the spins and twirls he’d seen through the telescope. Without the Indian clubs, they looked remarkably like the Captain’s semaphore. The Boys sat in silence and considered the implications. (Five Boys, p. 91)

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Although, like Keith and Stephen’s misunderstanding of Keith’s mother’s diary, this scene has a comic edge, the excess of zeal on the part of these children also has more serious implications. Through the eagerness with which their protagonists attempt to contribute to the war effort, both Frayn and Jackson imply not only the malleability and suggestibility of children, but also the complete infiltration of their lives by the war and, in this case, by the suspicious mindset it fosters and even encourages. Something similar occurs in June Oldham’s 1977 children’s novel, Wraggle Taggle War, when a gang of boys decide that one of evacuees who has recently arrived in the village is a spy, on the grounds that when teased she emits a ‘quick, choking exclamation’33 which they interpret as German. She turns out to be a Kindertransport child, causing her tormentors to reconsider their conflation of ‘German’ and ‘Nazi’. Children’s suggestibility stands as an emblem for the long-lasting effects of such inculcated attitudes of suspicion. These novels also recall the children of Winston Smith’s neighbours, the Parsons, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). There, the directing outwards, towards ‘foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals’,34 of children’s aggression is interpreted by Smith as a way of neutering any potential opposition towards the Party. When Parsons himself is betrayed by his daughter, who overhears him saying ‘Down with Big Brother’ in his sleep, he can only console himself by reflecting: ‘It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway’ (Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 245). Whilst Orwell’s depiction of the children’s organisations the Spies and the Youth League point to the militarisation of children under totalitarianism through organisations such as the Hitler Youth, the League of German Maidens and, in the USSR, the Pioneers, it also finds an echo in depictions of British children’s Second World War experience. Mobilisation of children does not necessarily involve putting them in uniform. The war-mindedness of Stephen and Keith blinds them to the personal and familial aspects of the ‘plot’ into which they have blundered. Apart from their misunderstanding about the diary, there is another important moment in their investigation of the front room, which implies the extent of their misapprehension; this is when Stephen looks at the photographs arrayed on the mantelpiece, showing Keith’s mother and father, and Keith’s Auntie Dee and Uncle Peter before their respective marriages and on their wedding days: [. . .] a serious young bride standing in front of a church door, shyly holding her veil back from her face [. . .] Keith’s mother, her arm tucked demurely through the arm of a grey tailcoat with an ironic smile above it.

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Next to this last one, arranged beside it so as to make a pair, another bride, almost identical with the first [. . .] the arm she’s holding is encased in a shade of grey that I know represents not grey at all but air-force blue [. . .] Mother and father, aunt and uncle – all four of them watch us out of the past as we work to penetrate the secrets of the present and dismantle their future. (Frayn, Spies, p. 47)

This proves to be the real clue to explaining Keith’s mother’s mysterious behaviour but the importance of the photographs, or rather, what they represent, only emerges much later: Uncle Peter, now ‘a bomber pilot’ (p. 25) treated as a war hero on his last home leave, has deserted and is in hiding on some waste ground near by. As Auntie Dee has a small child to care for, Keith’s mother has been taking him supplies, her involvement being explained not just by family ties, but by her own love for her sister’s husband, a narrative that the photographs on the mantelpiece reveal to the knowing viewer, and which the narrator only grasps belatedly. The terms of the sequence ‘mother and father, aunt and uncle’ can be rearranged and, notably, it appears from the photographs with their ‘almost identical’ brides that it is the women who are interchangeable, the men unique. In Liz Jensen’s War Crimes for the Home (2002), Gloria tries to turn this interchangeability to her advantage when she claims her sister’s wedding photographs as her own, and in Frayn’s novel it is the women, and in particular Keith’s mother, who take the initiative in the plot that unfolds. Keith’s mother’s activities are circumscribed by her domestic role, but legitimate tasks such as popping out to the shops provide cover for her illicit visits to her brother-in-law. Keith’s mother’s actions also disrupt the binary opposition that underpins the boys’ investigation, that one must be either a loyal citizen or a German spy. In assisting a deserter, Keith’s mother is working against the war effort but in support of a family member, and Uncle Peter’s desertion is itself refigured, problematically as I will show, as a form of belated conscientious objection. The boys’ incursion into the sitting room is important not just because of the apparent evidence it provides, but also because this room, with its desk, is one of a number of private spaces, spaces that are often also gendered, within which secrets are concealed in the novel. If the sitting room is marked as the realm of Keith’s mother, her sudden arrival disturbing the boys’ investigation (Spies, p. 51), Keith’s father lays claim to the garage: The headquarters of Keith’s father’s operations [. . .] were the garage. The double doors at the front were never opened, but there was a small door in

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the side [. . .] and occasionally [. . .] Stephen would catch a glimpse of the wonderful private kingdom inside, Keith’s father would be intent upon some piece of wood or metal held fast in the get vice on his workbench, dextrously filing or sawing or planing. (p. 21)

In one sense this is a way of reinforcing a particular set of gender stereotypes, but the fascination exercised by the garage is limited by the somewhat sinister figure that Keith’s father cuts: ‘ “If that toy aeroplane of yours touches the greenhouse, old bean,” he’d smile, “I’ll cane you” ’ (p. 22). On at least one occasion he physically assaults his wife behind closed doors. Keith’s father is a First World War veteran: ‘He’d won a medal in the Great War, Keith had told Stephen, for killing five Germans’ (p. 22). Implicitly, he has been brutalised by his war, bringing its violence into the home, and he stands as a contrast to Uncle Peter whose actions are a form of protest against war. Yet although Keith’s father inspires fear rather than affection, his war record evokes awe in the two boys. In this regard, Frayn echoes writers from the late 1930s and 1940s who recalled that an emphasis on the ‘pity’ of the First World War had been displaced by a fascination with its more violent aspects.35 While Keith’s mother conceals her secrets – or attempts to – in her pocket diary, itself kept in her desk, the boys hide their most precious possessions in a make-shift ‘strong box’ inside the den: At one side of the chamber is a dented black tin trunk [. . .] closed with the padlock I was given last birthday for my bicycle. [Keith] unlocks it, and puts away the logbook among the other things we keep in there [. . .] There’s a piece of twisted grey metal from a shot-down German plane; the stub of a coloured pencil, of the sort used by teachers for correcting, that writes blue at one end and red at the other [. . .] ; a candle stub and a box of matches [. . .] Out of the trunk he takes our most secret and sacred possession – the bayonet with which [Keith’s] father killed [. . .] five Germans. (Spies, pp. 54–5)

This proves in fact to be only a symbolic bayonet, the sharpened blade of a handle-less bread-knife, ordinary household rubbish imbued by the boys with a ‘secret and sacred’ meaning. It takes the incursion into the  den of Barbara Berrill, a girl their own age, to cut through some of the mystification, relating to both wars, within which the boys have become enveloped. Boldly entering the den, Barbara immediately unpicks the ambiguity of the ‘Privet’ sign, and also decodes Keith’s mother’s behaviour as having a domestic, rather than political explanation, getting close to the truth when she suggests that Keith’s mother is taking messages to her sister’s boyfriend, a conclusion she reaches partly through listening to gossip among the older women in the Close

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(p. 100). Barbara’s retailing of this rumour recalls wartime propaganda posters in which, as Petra Rau suggests, ‘it is the women who are the leaking vessels of gossip’, guilty of (albeit unwittingly) passing information to the enemy. Women appear to be damned ‘whether they talk too much, not at all or to the wrong people’.36 However, some posters, such the image captioned ‘Keep mum, she’s not so dumb’, which showed a glamorous woman winning the attentions, and implicitly the confidences, of men, characterise listening as a dangerous and indeed powerful female trait. In Frayn’s novel, whilst the gossip does not tell the full story, Stephen recognises, even if he is not prepared to fully acknowledge it, that Barbara’s more mundane version is likely to be truer than the conspiracy that he and Keith have woven around Keith’s mother’s actions. Ultimately, the dichotomy between Barbara’s ‘domestic’ version of events and Stephen and Keith’s ‘political’ version is eroded and Keith’s mother’s secret is shown to partake of both. A gender-inflected understanding of secrecy is also explored in Georgina Harding’s novel The Spy Game (2009). Anna and her brother Peter are told that their mother, who was German, has died, but this news comes at the same time as revelations about the Portland Spy Ring.37 This leads Peter to suggest that their mother was a spy, trained by the Russians at the end of the war, shortly before meeting their father, a British soldier posted in Germany in 1947, and that rather than dying she has been called back to Moscow. Anna suggests that her brother ‘lived in a boy’s sure world of knowledge and facts, names and dates and numbers’.38 Both children are exposed to narratives of the Second World War, with Anna reading Carve Her Name with Pride and Peter watching The Dam Busters, but it is only belatedly that Anna recognises that the Second World War, rather than the Cold War, could offer the key to her mother’s identity, and, as an adult, she discovers that her mother was probably the daughter of an SS officer, a secret hitherto concealed. Yet ambiguity remains; after her father’s death, Anna discovers a pocket diary of her mother’s dating from shortly before her disappearance: ‘There was only one line written there that was personal in any way. That line. At the back, in the spare pages for notes, a phrase that I recognised at once: lilacs out of the dead land’ (The Spy Game, p. 178). When, soon after this, Anna sees the film version of Carve Her Name with Pride, she wonders whether this line, from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), is ‘a recognition code’ (p. 181) of the type used by Violette Szabo, and it is her discovery of the diary that prompts her to go to investigate her mother’s past. However, the line about lilac could also have a less sinister resonance; Anna remembers her mother telling her that she had lilac at her wedding, despite it being winter, and reads that

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lilac had a second flowering in Hamburg following the 1943 firestorm (pp. 297–8). Yet given the timescale of her parents’ courtship and their marriage in 1947 in what is now Kaliningrad, Anna cannot completely dismiss the possibility that her mother agreed to work for the Soviets in order to facilitate her move back to the West (p. 286). Whilst other examples of spies in the novel – Violette Szabo or Gordon Lonsdale – are shown to have been motivated by their particular political beliefs, in Anna’s mother’s case, the choice, if it occurred, seems simply to have been out of personal expediency. Whilst it is Anna who decides, as a grown-up, that she must make the journey to Kaliningrad to uncover what she can about her mother’s past, it is her brother Peter who is the more fervent spy hunter when they are children. During their ‘investigations’ after their mother’s disappearance, the children go, with Anna’s friend Sarah, to spy on a neighbour, a widowed German-Jewish piano teacher called Mrs Cahn who arrived in England on a Kindertransport. Taking what he has read about spy networks as a model, Peter has decided that Mrs Cahn could have been his mother’s contact. The three children watch Mrs Cahn through her window as she embraces her visitor, a violinist called Istvan Kiss, and as Peter moves to try to get a better view, the girls see the man ‘put his hand up the skirt of her dress [. . .] Then he knelt down before her and put his head between her stockinged legs and dropped the skirt down over it’ (p. 133). When Peter rejoins them, puzzled that Kiss has ‘disappeared’, the girls refuse to tell him what they have seen. Harding implies that, although younger than Peter, the girls are already more attuned to the mysteries of adult behaviour and do not share his need to politicise personal relations. However, Peter’s search for a political explanation for his mother’s disappearance eventually appears to have been a mask for the hurt he suffered when bullied at school for being half-German (p. 289). To have a mother who is a Soviet spy is preferable to having one who can be branded a ‘Nazi’, and Peter’s elaborate plotting can be seen as a way for him to displace the grief felt in his mother’s absence. Even when their father eventually takes them to see their mother’s memorial tablet in a churchyard in Oxford, Peter reminds Anna of the film The Third Man (1949), in which a funeral takes place for a man who has not actually died: ‘People went to Harry Lime’s funeral but he wasn’t dead’ (p. 232). This is not just a case of confusing reality with invention, but a further indication of the manner in which such narratives have shaped both children’s understanding of wartime. Like Harding, Frayn shows how sexuality can take the form of secret to be revealed. Barbara provokes in Stephen a precocious, half-formed sexual awakening, which, not fully expressible, is encoded by Stephen

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in the name of Barbara’s house, ‘Lamorna’ (Frayn, Spies, p. 168). This word encapsulates ‘the softness of Barbara Berrill’s dress as she leaned across me. [It is] also the name of the softness in Keith’s mother’s voice when she called to me through the leaves’ (pp. 168–9). ‘Lamorna’ is a not uncommon suburban house name, derived from Lamorna Valley, a popular holiday destination in Cornwall, and was also the pseudonym of S. J. Birch, a painter of romanticised Cornish landscapes and seascapes, and in having Stephen use the word in this way, Frayn implicitly draws on these nostalgic and pastoral resonances. Barbara’s parents’ house name is, for Stephen, a fortuitous metonymy, and it has a counterpart, in terms of the oblique representation of sexuality, in the blue leather purse that Barbara wears on a cord around her neck. This item takes on a quasi-fetishistic role in Stephen’s mind. At one point, Barbara sits ‘catching at the flap of her purse with her lower lip, making the popper pop and unpop’ (p. 162); later, she reaches across to try to open the mysterious trunk: ‘The blue purse has come to rest on top of my hand. I can feel the bobbliness of the leather and the shininess of the popper against my skin, the wetness on the edge of the flap where she was catching it against her lip’ (pp. 164–5). Barbara’s purse is like a junior version of Dora’s reticule, in Freud’s case-study;39 in Spies, the purse does not express unease on sexual matters on Barbara’s part, but signifies something that the boy can only half-understand. Stephen’s feelings towards Barbara, the feelings evoked by the word ‘Lamorna’, are also associated with Keith’s mother after she too invades the den and enlists Stephen as an ally in her attempt to help her brotherin-law. Some of Keith’s mother’s unsettling presence is displaced back onto Barbara, but what the reader, and the narrator, also grasp is that Stephen has been caught in a position similar to that of the boy Leo in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), forced to be an agent in a plot the complexity of which he can barely glimpse, and which comes to signify the loss of innocence and the entry into adulthood. But Barbara’s purse, the boys’ trunk, the box from a croquet set in which supplies for Uncle Peter are hidden, all these places of concealment can be read in another way, as means of attempting to preserve some place of privacy at a time when the domestic space was in danger of being blown apart. These containers serve as a sort of externalisation of particular aspects of subjectivity, something occluded yet on display: Barbara’s purse is hung conspicuously round her neck, not hidden in her pocket; seeing the padlock on the trunk, she immediately guesses that this is a repository for secret things. The existence of these secrets is not concealed, but the content is revealed only to select few, a means of declaring: this is who I am, but you do not have the automatic right to know me.

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The most significant hiding place in the novel is the place where Uncle Peter is eventually hidden, and where Stephen takes supplies for him after being emotionally blackmailed by Keith’s mother. Uncle Peter is concealed in a shaft near a disused chalk pit: I begin to distinguish the brickwork, and the corrugated iron over the steps that lead down into the earth. [. . .] The steps have crumbled and fallen away. At the bottom, under the corrugated iron, they vanish into darkness. In that darkness, I know, his eyes are watching me. (Spies, p. 196)

Stephen conducts a conversation with the man whom he still, apparently, believes to be a German; a silk RAF-issue map of Germany provides a clue to the truth, which he cannot bring himself to tell his friend Keith. The reasons for Uncle Peter’s desertion are never made completely clear, but in the final pages of the novel, the narrator suggests that it was his part in the attacks on Germany that left him broken: I think of the uncontrollable terror seizing him, ten thousand feet up there in the dark emptiness, and five hundred miles from here. And I think of the terror that must have seized my aunt and her children, too, as the unbreathable gases from the burning house filled the dark cellar ten thousand feet below him, or someone like him. I think of the shame that pursued him afterwards, from which he fled into that dark pit. (p. 234)

The narrator here voices an argument which is now not unfamiliar about the immorality of bombing civilians, depicting Uncle Peter as seized with an attack of conscience. Although this fits with a revisionary view of the war, one which refigures German civilians, in this case Stephen’s relatives, as victims, Stephen could seem to be anachronistically imputing such sentiments to Uncle Peter. Keith Lowe suggests that debates about the morality of area bombing have been principally the concern of civilian commentators: The airmen themselves are among the few of us who seem to have thought about it, understood what they were doing, and either come to terms with it or made a conscious decision not to try to square the impossible: there was a war on, and they know what we don’t, that war is a terrible thing out of which no one escapes looking good.40

In his emotive study of this topic, the German historian Jörg Friedrich suggests that airmen did on occasion express misgivings about targets that were described as having military significance, and quotes one airman’s view: ‘But to whom could you express such doubts? If we believed it morally wrong, should we have spoken to our squadron commanders

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and refused to participate? What would have been the result? Court martial!’41 Like other commentators, Friedrich blames not the airmen but those who ordered the missions in the first place, a view shared by A. C. Grayling in his trenchant attack on the practice of bombing civilians. Grayling suggests that in a ‘hypothetical ideal world’, airmen ‘should have insisted on being sent against genuine industrial and military targets’. In the real world, those directly involved in bombing raids had a range of reactions; many ‘knew full well what they were doing, and accepted it, or suffered silently because of it, or regretted it’. Ultimately, Grayling argues that bomber crews needed the ‘conviction that they were fighting a just war [. . .] to give them the courage to go and do a job which, whatever else might be said about it with this comfort of hindsight, was a very dangerous one’.42 Frayn’s depiction of the conscience-stricken airman can be contrasted to A. L. Kennedy’s in her novel Day (2007), which centres on the experiences of Alfred Day, the rear gunner of a bomber crew. Kennedy depicts a protagonist who appears traumatised by his experiences, not merely because of an awareness that civilians may be among those killed but also because of exposure to the danger that Grayling highlights. For Day, attempting to make a new start involves going over what came before, including his responsibility for the death of his father. Kennedy uses this act of violence, perpetrated within the domestic sphere and itself a reprisal for violence inflicted by his father on his mother, as a counter to the ‘legitimate’ violence that Day is responsible for in his job. The description of Day’s murder of his father is closely followed in the novel by the description of his crew’s participation in a raid on Hamburg. In one of the passages of second-person reflection with which the third-person narration of the novel is interspersed, Day expresses an awareness of the contradictions of his own position: sometimes you dream of the men and the bombs and the targets all learning from each other, testing and perfecting, changing – except that they really stay the same – are built around numbers and burning, which is to say, around death. But you don’t ever talk about death. You only ever say you have knowledge of the working of bombs.43

His attempt to control what is remembered necessarily encompasses the expression of what he is trying to exclude: death. Day’s involvement with the bombing of Hamburg culminates in him having to bail out of the plane, to be confronted when he hits the ground by ‘three men [. . .] peaked caps elegantly tilted and pencil moustaches – makes you think of a movie, the comic-opera type of thing – gleaming boots and dapper

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greatcoats. Fucking Germans of course’ (Day, p. 252). It is notable that this climactic confrontation with the enemy should already be mediated; they look like their filmic representation. This reminds us that Day has, at the end of the conflict, become an extra in a feature film which is using the camp where he was previously incarcerated as a set, indicating how difficult it is for him to incorporate the events of the war. It also suggests that the process of transforming the war into a series of tropes and images began even while the war was ongoing. Day’s war has been conducted at a distance, not against Germans but against targets, although notably, on a climactic raid, he reflects, ‘It must surely be done after this. Who could stand this?’ (p. 237). Frayn seems to go even further than Kennedy in his attempt to deconstruct the image of the heroic airman, which Uncle Peter, with his ‘cheerful bravery’ (Frayn, Spies, p. 25) has earlier embodied. Uncle Peter himself is depicted as a victim, experiencing ‘uncontrollable terror’, but the novel can only guess at what he has been through prior to his arrival back at The Close, and there is no space here for the moral complexity that Kennedy acknowledges. Described by the narrator as hiding in an underground bunker and receiving supplies smuggled to him secretly, Uncle Peter is reliant on not being betrayed to the authorities. His situation is therefore highly reminiscent of the plight of Jews in hiding on mainland Europe. Stephen’s German-Jewish relatives were, the narrator tells us, ‘taken and murdered’ (p. 227) save for the aunt and her children who somehow survived only to be killed by bombing; it is notable that ‘unbreathable gases’ are mentioned in this connection, drawing an implicit parallel between their deaths and the deaths of those who died in extermination camps. But Uncle Peter, whose predicament appears to encode the fate of many Jews in Europe, is more vividly drawn than the victims of Nazism. In co-opting imagery with strong Holocaust associations to depict the situation of a British airman, Frayn makes an attempt, though not a satisfactory one, to address the difficulty of representing, within a wartime narrative, what only became widely known later: the extent and nature of the suffering of Jews and other victims of the Nazis in Europe. It could be argued that reading any novel involves the uncovering of secrets and the decoding of enigmas; these authors reinforce this characteristic of the novel by making explicit the political, social and personal ramifications of wartime secrecy and its after-effects on the lives of their protagonists. This sort of historical secrecy stands as a place-holder, in some respects for an apparently existential secrecy, one which, as in Freud’s joke, challenges the very basis of what we know and who we are. But the historical aspects of these novels are not simply a backdrop

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for more generalised meditations on ‘human nature’; the protagonists are completely rooted in the versions of wartime experience that these narratives imply. The reader is asked to consider a particular aspect of the war’s legacy – secrecy – that is highly ambivalent, and that cannot be contained in narratives of espionage. Though we may not wish secrets to be kept from us by those in power, the right for individuals to keep aspects of their lives secret is a characteristic of democracy; in a totalitarian state, those in power have a monopoly on secrets. These novels seem to recognise this paradox of the necessary secret, conjuring up situations, specifically wartime situations, in which the tension between repression and freedom becomes most pronounced.

Notes 1. Swift, Shuttlecock, pp. 49–50. 2. Calder, The People’s War, p. 157. Although Calder links the nickname ‘Cooper’s Snoopers’ to the Wartime Social Survey carried out by the Ministry of Information, which was headed at the time by Duff Cooper, in an article on Mass-Observation, who undertook survey work relating to civilian morale on behalf of the Ministry, Penny Summerfield comments that it was ‘Mass-Observation personnel’ who ‘were slated as “Cooper’s Snoopers” ’ (‘Mass-Observation’, pp. 446–7) in a parliamentary debate in the summer of 1940. By the time the existence of the survey team became public knowledge, the fine distinctions between these groups were blurred; the biographer of Tom Harrisson, one of the founders of MassObservation, reports an M-O surveyor being asked if she was ‘one of Cooper’s Snoopers’, replying that she was, and being welcomed in by the eager householder (Heimann, The Most Offending, p. 158). 3. Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy, p. 22. 4. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, p. 1. 5. Helm, A Life, p. 357. 6. Paris, Warrior Nation, p. 225. 7. Middleton and Woods, Literatures of Memory, p. 21. 8. Helm describes Vera Atkins’s struggle to establish the fate of agents including Szabo, and notes the contribution to the making public of some of SOE’s failings of Jean Overton Fuller. Fuller initially set out to discover what had happened to ‘Madeleine’, Nora Inayat Khan, one of the agents who did not return, and, as Helm notes, her determination meant that, from this point, Atkins ‘lost control of the SOE story’ (A Life, p. 359). Like Helm’s own study, Fuller’s works, such as Double Agent? (1961), foreground the process of research, undertaken in the latter’s case without access to official British records, and involving the drawing-out of British, German and French contacts, as well as a good deal of foot-slogging. 9. Qtd in Ansorge, Disrupting, p. 16. 10. See Stewart, ‘The Second World War in British Drama since 1968’, in

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11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

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The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature (forthcoming). The suggestion that Britain did not have an unsmirched war record was also expressed much earlier, in relation to war crimes trials of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kerstin von Lingen cites the example of Maurice Hankey, who campaigned behind the scenes for the release of Field Marshall Kesselring, found guilty of war crimes in 1947: ‘[Hankey] repeatedly referred to the crimes committed by the victors’ (Kesselring’s Last Battle, p. 161). Hutcheon, A Theory, p. 32. Poole, ‘Graham Swift’, p. 154. MacLeod, ‘Our Lost’, p. 380. Kermode, ‘Secrets’, p. 138. Craps, Trauma, pp. 63–4. Boyd, Restless, p. 35. The revelation that a respectable granny had a secret life as a spy could also remind a British reader of the case of Melita Norwood, dubbed by tabloid newspapers ‘the spy who came in from the Co-op’ (a pun on Le Carré’s ‘spy who came in from the cold’, playing on Norwood’s preference in supermarket). In 1999, Norwood, then aged 87, was named as a spy in transcripts of Soviet government documents smuggled to Britain by the defector Vasili Mitrokhin. During the 1940s, she had worked as a secretary for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, an organisation involved in the development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and was therefore in a position to pass on valuable information to the Soviets. Jack Straw, Home Secretary at the time of the revelations, decided that Norwood should not be prosecuted, but her biographer claims that this decision was at least partly influenced by a desire not to bring to light the earlier ‘intelligence blunder’ (Burke, The Spy, p. 13) that had led to Norwood remaining undetected. Melita Norwood died in June 2005. Denning, Cover Stories, p. 35. West, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxvii–iii. British Security Coordination, p. 276. Conant, The Irregulars, p. 95. Boyd, ‘The Secret Persuaders’, p. 26. Boyd, ‘Old School Spy’, p. 21. Becker, Hitler’s Children, p. 27. Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, pp. 69–70. Freud, Jokes, p. 115. As in much post-war literature, the figure of the evacuee was often used in wartime fiction as a means of opening up for discussion issues of class division; see, for instance, Joyce Cary’s Charley is My Darling (1940) and Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags (1942). Other writers showed a concern with the socio-psychological effects of the war on children: Phyllis Bottome’s London Pride (1941) focuses on the effects of war on a workingclass child, and Noel Streatfeild’s Saplings (1945) shows the disintegration of an upper-middle-class family in wartime. In the immediate post-war, the Ealing comedy Hue and Cry (1947) features a gang of children who make their dens on bomb sites and whose spy-mindedness fuels the film’s plot. Frayn, Spies, p. 4.

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30. Elliott and Shukman, Secret Classrooms, p. 60. 31. Just as Brooke-Rose uses ‘false friends’ to play on the interrelations between languages, in his novel The Russian Interpreter Frayn makes use of the fact that certain Cyrillic characters look like their Latin counterparts but represent different sounds. Thus a Russian-speaking character leaves an initially baffling note, in answer to a question, reading ‘EC’. This proves to be a phonetic rendering into Cyrillics of the word ‘Yes’ (Frayn, The Russian Interpreter, p. 83). 32. Jackson, Five Boys, p. 63. 33. Oldham, Wraggle Taggle War, p. 5. 34. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 26. 35. See Stewart, Narratives of Memory, pp. 23–4. 36. Rau, ‘The Common Frontier’, p. 36. 37. In early 1961, the arrests were made of Harry Houghton and Ethel Gee, Peter and Helen Kroger and Gordon Lonsdale. Gee was a current and Houghton a former employee of the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment, based at Portland in Dorset, the Krogers were Soviet spies posing as second-hand book dealers, and Lonsdale, although claiming to be Canadian, was a Soviet agent who used the Krogers’ bungalow in Ruislip to radio messages to his control. All were found guilty of espionage and imprisoned; Lonsdale, whose real name was Konon Molody, was eventually exchanged for Greville Wynne, a British spy imprisoned by the Soviets, who had acted as the conduit for information about Soviet weapons development provided by Oleg Penkovsky. 38. Harding, The Spy Game, pp. 25–6. 39. At one session, Dora wears a reticule at her waist and compulsively dips her fingers into it whilst denying to her analyst that she has ever masturbated. Freud comments on the reticule: ‘He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his [sic] lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore’ (‘Fragment of an Analysis’, pp. 77–8). In the analytic context, having ‘eyes to see and ears to hear’ is only part of the explanation; one has to be on the look-out for interpretable gestures, and more, one has to have the key to explaining these gestures in a meaningful way. Uncovering and revealing what has been concealed are deemed ultimately to have a positive yield in this context. However, as Neil Hertz argues, neither Freud nor Dora tells all. In Dora’s case it would seem to be because she simply cannot: how could she either reveal or intentionally conceal secrets she does not know she has? As for Freud, he would seem to be consciously [. . .] choosing what he will communicate to his readers. (‘Dora’s Secrets’, p. 228) 40. 41. 42. 43.

Lowe, Inferno, p. xv. Friedrich, The Fire, p. 46. Grayling, Among, p. 277. Kennedy, Day, p. 203.

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Chapter 3

Collaboration and Resistance

Reflecting on his involvement, as head of the Political Warfare Executive, in the production of wartime propaganda directed at Germany, Robert Bruce Lockhart noted the difficulty posed by the fact that in the early years of the war ‘there was no official policy about the future of Germany’.1 This meant that it was not possible to suggest to potential resisters what an Allied victory might mean for them. According to Bruce Lockhart: The problem with which the Government were faced was: ‘Were there sufficient so-called “good Germans” to justify a promise of a reasonable peace provided that they turned against Hitler before the end of the war?’ [. . .] Certainly nearly all members of Parliament [. . .] held strong views on the subject, and more often than not had their own pet German émigré. (Comes, pp. 158–9)

As I noted in Chapter 1, views on this issue were polarised. The work that Muriel Spark was involved with during her time with the PWE relied on the belief that there were ‘good Germans’; for his own part, Bruce Lockhart implies that he did believe in the existence of ‘good Germans’ but felt that their ability to take action against the regime was severely constrained so long as German victory still seemed possible (Comes, p. 159). Speaking on 1 September 1939, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain asserted that Britain had ‘no quarrel with the German people’,2 rather with their leadership, although as Balfour suggests, by the start of the following year he had admitted ‘that there was a quarrel with the German people in that they had allowed Hitler to gain power’ (Propaganda, p. 169). Sir Robert Vansittart, who expressed widely circulated views on this issue, had a ‘mistrust of Germans’ dating back to his time as a student in Germany in the 1890s and viewed Nazism as the latest proof that ‘the Germans never wanted or cared for democracy’.3 Germans could not, in this analysis, be viewed as victims of Nazism,

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and this led him to call for Germany to be ‘completely disarmed for a generation and re-educated’ (Goldman, ‘Germans and Nazis’, p. 167). Vansittart accused German exiles who spoke out against the regime of being naive in their assessment of the level of opposition within Germany, or, at worst, of ‘trying to fool the British people by pretending the German nation was not involved in Nazi crimes’ (‘Germans and Nazis’, pp. 171–2).4 Vansittart’s suspicion even of those who had fled Nazi persecution seems to be echoed in Bruce Lockhart’s reference to the figure of the ‘pet German émigré’. His sardonic tone implies that any MP who had a ‘pet German émigré’ would focus on individual examples but be blind to the wider picture. Read now, this passage also has an uncomfortable echo of another speech which mocks the making of exceptions in a situation that appears to demand absolutism. In his so-called ‘Secret Speech’, delivered to a group of SS leaders at Posen in October 1943, Heinrich Himmler compared the experiences of the men he was addressing to the attitude adopted by the general public, who speak of their support for anti-Jewish measures, but who, according to Himmler, each have what he describes as a ‘ “decent” Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is a first-rate Jew.’ Himmler went on to praise the SS for not succumbing to such a focus on the fate of the individual, and for carrying out their task while remaining ‘decent fellows’ themselves.5 The logic underlying the dismissal of the appeal to the ‘pet German émigré’ is similar to that which rejects the concept of the ‘first-rate Jew’; victory is much more easily achieved if the enemy is simply the enemy, if there are no exceptions. Bruce Lockhart does allow for exceptions, though these are a less easily identifiable group, and less easily invoked or addressed, than the ‘pet German émigrés’; he recognises the danger of both absolutism and a form of exceptionality that is not representative of a strong evidence base. A desire not to equate ‘German’ with ‘Nazi’ becomes increasingly pressing in the post-war period; as Robert Murphy notes in his discussion of post-war British film, ‘Germany might be the defeated enemy, but it also acted as an essential buffer between the West and the vastly expanded Soviet empire.’6 Recent authors have been concerned to demonstrate that ‘German’ and ‘Nazi’ were not coterminous during the war either, and the danger here lies in the temptation to map the ‘good German’ onto the British or Allied position, that is, to identify the ‘good Germans’ as the ones who believed what the war’s eventual victors believed. Some authors use anti-war sentiments held in common as a means of forming a bond between German soldiers and British civilians. Encounters between these individuals tend to take place in circumstances

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which allow the German soldier to be cast as a victim of the regime for which he is ostensibly fighting, and the reasons for, and results of, this narrative manoeuvre are complex. Protagonists’ stated convictions may not always match their inwardly held beliefs, and the progress to narrative resolution can therefore require the stripping away of pretence and an attempt to uncover the secrets of an individual’s subjectivity. In attempting to explore issues of guilt, responsibility and victimhood, some literary texts seem to draw, implicitly, on a model of categorisation that developed specifically in relation to the study of the Holocaust. Raul Hilberg’s influential work supplemented the categories of victim and perpetrator, representing two of the key focal points in research on the Holocaust, with a third, that of bystander. As he explained: In the course of the onslaught on European Jewry, some people in the non-Jewish population helped their Jewish neighbours, many more did or obtained something at the expense of other Jews, and countless others watched what had come to pass.7

Exploring this category of bystander should lead to a fuller and more nuanced picture of the period in question, but the historians David Cesarani and Paul A. Levine have suggested that Hilberg in fact ‘decisively established a previously diverse subject matter in one of three monolithic blocs’.8 According to this argument, rather than opening up for scrutiny the possible blurring of boundaries between perpetrator, victim and bystander, Hilberg offers three clearly delineated alternatives. This is important because, as Tony Kushner has argued, on the surface, the bystander category offers the easiest point of identification for those approaching these events from a historical distance: ‘The moral concern about bystanders comes out of the rather complacent assumption that few of us will become perpetrators, and an equal optimism that we will not become victims.’9 At its most extreme, this identification, or over-identification, with the bystander can lead to ‘a fantasmic “we” of common humanity figured variously as powerless, numbed or passively complicit witnesses to suffering they did not directly cause.’ 10 This tactical avoidance of what present themselves as more emotionally complicated or morally fraught subject positions can also be traced in some of the representations of encounters with fascism that I will examine here; however, correcting this through a focus on other forms of identification can itself be problematic. As well as addressing the question of how it might be possible to distinguish the ‘good German’ from the Nazi, some novelists have investigated instances of ambivalence and equivocation among the British protagonists of their narratives. The moral complexities, even

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the degrees, of collaboration and resistance are complicated subject positions to evoke from a British perspective; mainland Britain was not invaded and its people did not therefore face the perilous moral choices that confronted the citizens of occupied Europe on a daily basis. Indeed, between collaboration and resistance lies an area that Martin Conway, writing about wartime Belgium, describes as ‘accommodation’, a position which could itself be punctuated by ‘the dramatic choices symbolised by collaboration or resistance’.11 In order to confront British readers with the question of whether they would have collaborated, resisted or accommodated, some authors, including Tim Binding, have chosen to focus on the one part of the British Isles that was subject to German rule, the Channel Islands, which, from a mainland perspective, stand as a liminal space between Britain and mainland Europe;12 other writers find different ways, more or less contrived, to stage a confrontation between British citizens and Nazis. Often, by their nature, such encounters have to be kept secret, and this secret contact can reveal unexpected and often uncomfortable consonances between the beliefs and values of erstwhile enemies. Depicting the Germans involves projecting a particular vision of British subjectivity; this subjectivity may be located in the wartime past in narrative terms, but will also encode various kinds of belated understanding of that past. As I suggested in Chapter 2, A. L. Kennedy’s novel Day brings many of these issues into focus. The rear gunner Alfred Day displaces the knowledge that he himself is causing the deaths of civilians and could therefore be considered a perpetrator by focusing on ‘knowledge of the working of bombs’ rather than on what the ‘numbers’13 and targets might actually signify. Day’s semi-comprehension of the reality of the events in which he has been involved, and his numbed attempt, in the film set at the former camp, to piece together an understanding of what has happened, is placed in contrast with the behaviour of the displaced person, Vasyl. Day’s suspicions about Vasyl are raised when he witnesses Vasyl participating in an attack on another man, but does not feel he can intervene: ‘Alfred could have helped him, but didn’t. The man [being attacked] wasn’t crew and he looked like a German. So there was nothing to be done’ (Day, p. 138). The use of free indirect discourse to evoke Day’s perspective here allows the reader to question whether Day’s justifications for not taking action to defend the man are really valid. The reader is aware that when confronted with the consequences of violence in a domestic setting, Day was willing to act, to the extent of killing his own father; implicitly, this attack could have its own justification and ends, regardless of any wider belief that such violence, one man being attacked by two, should be prevented. Vasyl initially claims to

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have been forced into joining the German army following the invasion of the Ukraine, but when Day eventually challenges him about his story, he reveals that he is in fact Latvian, and describes his participation in a pogrom, explicitly inviting Day to see a parallel between their actions, as combatants, in wartime: ‘Our type. We kill their type’ (p.  229). When Day attempts to bring Vasyl’s deception to the attention of the authorities, he is told that it would be unmerciful to send Vasyl back to his homeland – whichever that may be – because ‘the Communists will murder him’ (p. 262). Vasyl’s adoption of an alternative nationality is shown to have been dictated by expediency, and the official response that Day receives indicates that such expedient action continues, with the immediate post-war political situation both at home and in Europe, rather than past events, as the principal concern; Day is told that an immigrant like Vasyl, ‘misled in his youth’, would at least keep Britain ‘Christian and white’ (p. 263). Kennedy thus indicts this tendency to forget too quickly as Day himself continues to struggle with the legacy of his own involvement in the war. Day’s encounter with Vasyl can stand as a limit case for encounters with fascism and fascists in contemporary British fiction; Vasyl’s confession may place him clearly in the perpetrator camp, but changing political circumstances reconfigure him as a potential victim. Vasyl’s confession also stands in contrast to the attempt by another individual Day meets in the camp to tell his story: this character is referred to only as the ‘Good German’, and Day resents his attempt to gain a sympathetic hearing: ‘If they wanted to be innocent, to never have gone wrong, then they’d have to tell you, talk it away. It made them happy’ (p. 163). Kennedy’s use of the epithet ‘Good German’ here is a reference both to the man’s assertions that he is sorry for anything reprehensible he may have done in the past, but also to the role he is taking in the film: ‘The chap had been hired to play a stern but ridiculous Unteroffizier’ (p. 162). Kennedy thus captures the moment at which the individual who has renounced fascism, the good German, collapses into the filmic trope of the ‘Good German’. As I will show, being an anti-Nazi is often supplemented by older stereotypes in representations of the good German; positive characteristics which S. Benyon John identifies in pre-twentieth-century literature, serving to counter Prussian militarism, such as an appreciation of music or more general cultural literacy, recur in contemporary literature.14 In other novels I will examine here, conciliation is set against demands for justice; good Germans stand as figures of hope for the future, but the question remains of how to differentiate between the good and the others, and, indeed, between the others and ourselves.

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War Games Writing in the late 1970s, Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig suggested that ‘the current fascination with the years between 1939 and 1945 [in children’s fiction] is derived partly from a wish to look back at the areas that were completely ignored in fiction written at the time.’15 Writers who turned to the depiction of the Second World War at this period were often reflecting on their own or their families’ experiences, and can therefore be seen as offering a corrective to literature written during the war which, as Cadogan and Craig note, may have reflected authors’ desire to shield child readers from the worst, even if this was what they were themselves living through. Much of the 1970s children’s fiction examined by Cadogan and Craig serves to provide a sombre corrective to the previous representations – Susan Cooper’s bleakly realistic Dawn of Fear (1972) is one example – but other texts show that the promulgation of war-related mythology that Michael Paris identifies in books and films aimed at adults was also carried through in literature aimed at juvenile readers. Paris links the emergence of war-focused comics such as Warlord and Battle during the 1970s as marking a shift from ‘intellectual enlightenment’ to ‘emotional intensity’16 in representations of the war aimed at children. To some extent, the tension between these two aims can also be seen in literary fiction for children in this period, particularly as regards the depiction of Germans; in the novels to be examined here, however, an educative (or in Paris’s terms, ‘intellectual’) aspect retains its importance, with the particular historical situation used as a means of prompting reflections on interpersonal relations more generally. Cooper’s novel depicts children as the victims of bombing; novels based around evacuation, such as Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War (1973) or Noel Streatfeild’s When the Siren Wailed (1974), focus on the anxieties of separation from the family but do not necessarily confront death and loss directly. Winifred Whitehead suggests that in many narratives about evacuation, ‘though the children are clearly under stress, their problems have as much to do with growing up and adjusting to the expectations of the adult world as with the trauma of evacuation.’17 For Whitehead, evacuation seems to provide a pretext for the consideration of experiences that contemporary child readers may well share. To some extent, such shared experiences also underpin two striking and contrasting examples of children’s war stories from this period, Robert Westall’s The Machine-Gunners (1975) and Gabriel Alington’s Willow’s Luck (1977), both of which depict encounters with German airmen whose planes have been shot down. These narratives centre on children keeping

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this encounter secret from adults, and, in Westall’s case, the gang or group of children also becomes a mutually supportive alternative to the family. In this novel, Chas McGill’s recovery of a machine gun from a downed German plane is the first secret he shares with a small group of friends and they construct a machine gun post in the garden of the house of one of their school mates, Nicky. When Nicky’s house is bombed and his mother killed, he survives, and secretly takes up residence in the den, with an evacuee called Clogger, who manages to slip away from adult care, to keep him company. The pilot of the plane from which they take the gun has been killed, but the children are soon joined by Rudi, another downed German pilot, who stumbles on their den. Initially, their behaviour towards Rudi is governed by codes learned from films, as Chas’s immediate reaction illustrates: ‘ “Quick, it’s a Jerry. Get his gun.” The phrase sprang to [Chas’s] lips from so many war films.’18 Rudi, for his part, tries to fit the sight of the children in their dugout into the propaganda narratives to which he has been exposed, wondering whether, short of men following Dunkirk, the British have resorted to enlisting children: ‘Was England one vast armed camp, waiting to massacre any poor German who landed?’ (The Machine-Gunners, p. 117). The switching between Rudi’s and the children’s perspective in this initial encounter reinforces the sense that Rudi is never a real threat to them, confused and bewildered as he is, and that the children are in charge of the situation. It also underlines the speed with which they have internalised the ideology of the war film; it is likely that these representations would also have been familiar to Westall’s first readers in the 1970s through repeated television screenings. The children’s initial hostility does not prevent them from forming a bond with Rudi and eventually, as a threatened German invasion seems imminent, trying to arrange for him to escape by boat. This fantastical scenario, drawn in a realistic style, sees the enemy humanised; Chas reflects that Rudi looks like ‘somebody’s dad; a bit fed-up and tired’ (p. 118). Similarly, in Michael Morpurgo’s Friend or Foe (1977), aimed at a younger readership, the downed airmen encountered by evacuees Tucky and David have ‘nothing threatening or frightening about them. They were just two exhausted, pale-looking men with sad eyes and kind faces.’19 David is rescued from drowning by one of the men and this complicates his reaction to the airmen, who may be the very ones who ‘shot down his father over the French coast [. . .] These were the men who had bombed London and Plymouth and killed thousands. Yet one of them had saved his life’ (Friend or Foe, p. 69). David is persuaded by Tucky that, having had his life saved, he owes it to the airmen to help them rather than to give them up; a secondary consideration is

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that the boys’ claim to have seen the Germans’ plane come down over the moor is not believed by the local children, and keeping the secret of their contact with the men allows them to cope with being teased: ‘they knew they were right’ (p. 76). Contact with the enemy is complicated when, as both a child and an evacuee, the protagonist feels isolated, and the officially sanctioned enemy is one of the few to show kindness. The relationship between the children and Rudi in The MachineGunners is also complicated, not least because they work together as a group. The narrative shows the danger of taking government exhortations to ‘do your bit’ to their logical extreme; the Home Front ideology implicitly co-opts children, but they need Rudi’s advice to operate the gun, which is itself, of course, a German weapon. The children’s relationship to the war effort is exposed in a notable scene in which one of the gang, Cem, persuades his sister’s boyfriend, Andrew, to draw him a plan of a gun emplacement, claiming that he wants to build a toy replica, when in fact a full-size one will be constructed in Nicky’s garden. Andrew accedes to a minor act of bribery, as Cem says he will leave Andrew and his girlfriend alone if the requested information is forthcoming: Andy sighed. He knew all about the designing of emplacements, being newly commissioned in the Durham Light Infantry. But that pamphlet had been marked secret. He hesitated. [. . .] Drawing a child a gun emplacement couldn’t possibly harm the War Effort. (Westall, The Machine-Gunners, pp. 82–3)

This scene has a comic undertow but it also constructs the children as an infant Fifth Column, and in this case Cem is already aware of the potential to gain knowledge in return for allowing his sister and Andy the opportunity for sexual contact. Although the friendly and unthreatening figure of Rudi seems to point to the reality beneath the dehumanising rhetoric of wartime, the novel does not completely dispel the fascination of violence or the allure of acting in secret. Rudi may give a face and personality to ‘Jerry’ but this individualisation does not extend to the other men the children are attempting to shoot down. As Whitehead suggests, the novel is ultimately ‘weighted in favour of toughness’ (Old Lies, p. 12). Alington’s Willow’s Luck provides, in many respects, a stark contrast to Westall’s depiction of children forming a supportive group with a corporate purpose. Willow’s isolation when she is sent for safety’s sake to live with her Great Uncle in his remote country house is emphasised from the outset. It is hardly surprising then that, encountering a downed airman in the nearby woods, her first move is to help him;

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indeed Alington expresses it even more strongly: ‘Willow’s instinct was to protect the German.’20 Again, the human bonds between individuals are set against ideological differences. Willow’s Great Uncle, a prisoner of war during the First World War, takes a Vansittartist stance: ‘The Germans are an extremely cruel race. I dislike them intensely’ (Willow’s Luck, p. 26). This dislike, based on his own experience but nevertheless rooted in a national stereotype, is countered, somewhat precociously, by Willow: ‘There are probably lots of men who have to join up because there’s a war, like they do here, but who don’t really want to fight’ (p. 26). This view is constructed by the narrative as the more reasonable one, opposed as it is to her Great Uncle’s desire for the Germans as a race to be wiped from the map. Willow becomes the German’s carer, secretly obtaining food and clothes for him; unable to pronounce his name, she calls him ‘Von’. He tells her that she reminds him of his sister, and thus counters her Great Uncle’s stereotype. Yet underpinning the narrative, and undercutting this ideological debate, is the repeatedly reinforced sense that Willow is desperate for friendship. When Von asserts: ‘I am German, an enemy to your country. So it is best for you that I go away’, she replies: ‘You’re the only friend I’ve got’ (pp. 73, 74). In some respects then, the fact that Von is a German is quite secondary to the fact that he could be her friend; the scenario is comparable to that of Bryan Forbes’s film Whistle Down the Wind (1961), in which children living on a farm secretly give shelter to an injured escaped convict, persuading themselves that the bearded and suffering man is in fact Jesus. In both cases, the children see the human being where the adults see the enemy, and each narrative, like Friend or Foe, reinforces the difficulty of shaking yourself of the belief that an individual is good when they have not behaved badly towards you personally. Secret contact with the enemy becomes a way for children, either corporately or individually, to assert a degree of agency, even though these narratives ultimately reveal its limits. Such a reconfiguration and humanisation of the enemy, particularly as it is articulated in children’s fiction, can be viewed as an attempt at reparation. By the 1970s, when Alington, Westall and Morpurgo are writing, it was increasingly important to remind the next generation that ‘Nazi’ and ‘German’ were not synonymous. After Von is shot and killed, having broken cover during an air-raid, Willow’s Great Uncle glosses her actions as ‘humanitarian rather than treacherous [. . .] You helped the German because you were sorry for him, not because he was an enemy’ (Willow’s Luck, p. 120). Willow’s humanitarianism has in turn a humanising effect on her Great Uncle, serving at least to bring home to him how lonely she has been, and also causing him to reflect again on

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his own earlier wartime captivity. One of the problems with this humanist reframing of the war, however, is that it can act as a way of masking both the political specificities of the conflict and the violence that took place on both sides during it, not challenging a binary opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’, but allowing some of ‘them’ to be like ‘us’ – that is, to be ‘good’. In Paris’s terms, emotional rather than intellectual engagement is ultimately preferred. This also serves as a way of attempting to efface the extent to which the ‘bad German’, that is, the Nazi, may in turn be a seductive figure. The ‘good German’ thus becomes a way of distracting attention from the difficulties of engaging with the highly problematic figure of the Nazi.

Horizontal Collaboration Like Uncle Peter in Frayn’s Spies, the downed and injured airman who finds himself dependent on children for help is an emasculated figure, his martial prowess undermined. He is therefore made safe, an unthreatening friend who, like the children with whom he comes into contact, is in an oppositional position towards authority. Keeping contact with the enemy secret is constructed as empowering for the children, giving them agency. In Westall’s novel, the pseudo-adult behaviour of the children is mirrored by the infantilisation of Rudi. Alliances between German soldiers and women could, equally, be seen as the forming of bonds between the marginalised, but can be similarly problematic, not least in the scenario of occupation. Staging the encounter with the Germans in this context multiplies the ethical problems. Tim Binding’s Island Madness (1998) shows women on occupied Guernsey choosing to associate with Germans out of expediency. Molly, in particular, sees this decision in purely pragmatic terms: ‘Well, what else are we supposed to do? Stay in purdah until it’s all over? What’s the point of that? All the good ones will have been snapped up by then.’21 It is Major Lentsch, who is not a fervent Nazi, who asks Molly what she will do if the Germans lose: ‘Then I’ll have to pack my bags and skedaddle’ (Island Madness, p. 55). The attitude of women such as Molly is shown to be influenced, if not dictated, by the fact that their movements – their ability to ‘skedaddle’ – are severely restricted by the war. Molly’s comments, and, indeed, Lentsch’s willingness to suggest that he may not end up on the winning side, echo the view expressed in Madeleine Bunting’s history of the occupation of the Channel Islands, A Model Occupation: The Channel Islands under German Rule (1995). She notes a ‘striking’ tendency on the part of the German occupiers to

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confide ‘to the islanders their misgivings about Hitler and their reluctance to be fighting this war’.22 Although she acknowledges that this could have been a tactic designed to earn the islanders’ trust, she argues that German soldiers had other ‘powerful attractions’ for women on the islands, with some ‘won over by the chivalrous courtesy of the Germans’ who could provide ‘the only release from the boredom and the constant scraping, scrimping and scrounging of life during the Occupation’ (A Model Occupation, p. 59). In offering a revisionary depiction of women who had relationships with Germans, Bunting sees fraternisation as distinct from collaboration, suggesting that fraternising had pragmatic, immediate and material goals and implying that few women reflected on the ideological or indeed future consequences of their actions. In Binding’s novel, Molly’s happy-go-lucky attitude is countered when she attends her friend Isobel’s funeral in the company of German officers and is called a ‘Jerrybag’ by one of the crowd: ‘ “Look at that bitch [. . .] We’ll get our own back when the time comes” ’ (Island Madness, pp. 234, 233). Binding’s novel is in part a murder mystery, with Isobel’s death at its centre and black marketeering and blackmail at its fringes. Lentsch, who has been Isobel’s lover, in many respects fits the pattern of the good German. He sees himself as having been held in the island’s ‘captive embrace’, counting himself fortunate ‘that there should have been a war strong enough to carry him this far’ (p. 3), as though proximity to Berlin can be equated with level of adherence to Nazi ideology. The suggestion that it is his time on Guernsey that has resulted in the diminishment of his belief in Hitler’s power has to be weighed against his display, soon after his arrival, of his artistic credentials. He refuses to remove the Russell Flint paintings from the Havillands’ house in which he has been billeted (p. 47), protesting later when an attempt is made to replace these with portraits of the Führer and Albert Speer (p. 285), and he is keen to protect the contents of the house where Victor Hugo lived on the island from being ‘shipped off to Karinhall’ (p. 49), to become part of Göring’s art collection. Being on the island may itself have had a civilising effect but Lentsch is shown from the outset to be aesthetically discriminate. The notion that an appreciation of art is a civilised trait that can provide insulation against the influence of Nazi ideology builds on the stereotype of Germans as lovers of classical music and Shakespeare; this view is echoed in Geoffrey Trease’s children’s novel, Tomorrow is a Stranger (1987), based partly on the author’s own childhood experience.23 In Trease’s novel, a German soldier called Fischer promises not to tell anyone that the church organist has been playing Mendelssohn, a composer frowned upon by the regime because of his Jewishness. The

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mild-mannered Fischer is later sent into action on the Eastern Front and eventually returns to the island suffering from severe frostbite in his hands, announcing somewhat bathetically, ‘I shall never play the piano again.’24 The narration effects a separation between the ordinary soldiers like Fischer and the regime that has sent them into action, or, more specifically, its figurehead: ‘It had been wonderful to think of Hitler being humiliated at Stalingrad and all those other strange-sounding places. Only Hitler himself hadn’t been lying there, bleeding on the snow. Men like Fischer had’ (Tomorrow, p. 108). The construction of the German soldier as a victim in the context of the campaign on the Eastern Front is one that also emerged in comics such as Battle during the 1970s; Ronald Smelser sees such images of ‘valiant soldiers fighting for their Fatherland against a malevolent foe’25 as symptomatic of Cold War anxieties. The isolation of the individual soldier, such as Lentsch or Fischer, from the regime reflects some of the attitudes that were expressed by in the British press in the immediate aftermath of war, when war crimes prosecutions were underway. It was believed that, so far as punishing the aggressors was concerned, a distinction should be retained between career soldiers and conscripts, and the political ideologues, as represented by the SS and Gestapo.26 This divide between the honest German soldier and the politically and morally suspect SS man is one which also emerges in post-war British literary representations of the conflict, and can be a means of providing the reader with an apparently less problematic object of identification.27 In Binding’s novel, Lentsch forms a bond with Isobel’s former boyfriend, the policeman Ned Luscombe, eventually fleeing the island with him, and both are set in contrast to the Secret Police chief Captain Zepernick, known as Zep, a fervent womaniser. So far as the exposure of the sexual economy of occupation is concerned, one of the most interesting figures in the novel is Veronica, who is Zep’s increasingly reluctant girlfriend for much of the narrative. In one key scene, Veronica, who is having sex with Zep in her father’s workshop after leaving a party with him, thinks she can hear her friend Tommy outside and imagines what might happen if Tommy discovered them: Tommy would step out and split [Zep’s] skull open like a walnut, and they would have to drag the body away and bury him in some faraway field! The island would be turned upside down in the hunt for him. And Lentsch knew the Captain had left with her! She would be the first person they would interrogate. This could be the end of her life! She began to shake uncontrollably, in her thighs and her arms and the muscles deep within her belly. The Captain lifted her clear and, grinning, urged her on. (Binding, Island Madness, p. 91)

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Whether thinking about Zep’s murder excites Veronica, or it is some other emotion, perhaps fear, which causes her to ‘shake uncontrollably’, is left in suspense, though Zep clearly reads her bodily response as sexual excitement. Either way, the intersection of sex and death here is disturbing, not least because it is impossible to discern whether Veronica’s sexual imagination has itself been led in this direction by her contact with the occupiers, or whether Binding is attempting to anatomise the linking of sex and death at some more fundamental level. Laura Frost accounts for the accumulation of sexual fantasy around fascism by looking to how fascism is depicted in propaganda, and suggesting that these depictions construct ‘prohibitions that then become eroticized in [. . .] fictions’.28 Notably, Veronica’s excitement (if such it is) is provoked by the thought of the punishment that could ensue for her wrongdoing. But if Binding appears to indulge in the eroticisation of fascism here, other aspects of the narrative pull against this. Veronica fantasises about being punished for killing Zep, but this could itself be seen as a way for her to displace the guilt she feels about what she is actually doing: having sex with him, an act which is itself frowned on in the community, hence the resort to the workshop, outside the confines of her family’s home, for their meeting. It is soon revealed that the intruder she hears is not Tommy, but a boy who has escaped from one of the Forced Labour Battalions on the island. Veronica takes the boy in and feeds him, providing him with clothes, and for a time plays a double game: She went from [. . .] secret life to secret life, from the Captain’s athletic and addictive attentions [. . .] to the boy’s eloquent and exiled embraces [. . .] two lives buried in her folds, both there by reason of capricious war, both nurturing her own needs. (Binding, Island Madness, p. 273)

If Zep fulfils a sexual need, the boy fulfils a maternal one; this essentialising of Veronica’s femininity, focusing as it does on biological ‘needs’, sexual and maternal, downplays the political context of her actions, creating the impression that she is at the mercy of her womanliness. This tallies with a reading of fraternisation which sees it as a form of emotional and sexual expediency; according to Bunting, one reason women slept with Germans was simply because many of the Channel Islands’ men were away for the duration (A Model Occupation, p. 57). In this analysis, both men and women have sexual desires that demand expression regardless of political contexts.29 This is certainly part of what drives the plot of Island Madness. Towards the end of the novel, in a partial fulfilment of Veronica’s earlier fantasy, the boy kills Zep when he sees the Captain forcing himself on Veronica, his protector (Island

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Madness, p. 336). It is apt that the figure who has been subject to the most severe victimisation should be the one to deal the fatal blow, but this also means that questions about the moral responsibility of those who have accommodated, rather than resisted, are left unexplored. The absent Isobel forms a shadow to Veronica; where Veronica is situated between the boy and Zep, Isobel switches her attentions from Ned to Lentsch. However, it is to Ned that she turns just before her death; his investigations into her murder are fuelled by a note he receives, asking to meet him, implying that she had something to tell him that she could not tell Lentsch, but she is killed before the meeting can take place. It eventually transpires that Isobel’s death was a consequence of her uncovering a smuggling ring on the island, but, whilst acknowledging that Isobel was probably out of his league sexually, Ned cherishes the knowledge that she wished to confide in him. Lentsch tells Ned that one of his and Isobel’s favourite songs was ‘Liebe Ist Ein Geheimnis’, ‘Love is a Secret’, revealing: ‘She found it difficult sometimes, feeling for me, our countries at war, of what others might think of her’ (Island Madness, p. 154). Isobel could not close herself off from public attitudes, but the implication here is that love could be transcendent if only ideology and political context did not get in the way. Lentsch’s essential humanity is further reinforced at the end of the novel when he and Ned leave the island together. A figure such as Lentsch, with his artistic sensibilities and distaste for the project of Nazism, could be viewed as an important narrative counter-weight to the sexually rapacious and brutal Zep, but it is Zep who is at the centre of the novel’s sexual economy. This division of sexual labour between the loving Lentsch and the brutal Zep is echoed in other texts, including, for instance, Guy Walters’s The Occupation (2004) which weaves together the development of a secret weapon on Alderney during the war and a present-day property development scheme. Here, the contrast between the high-minded and honourable von Luck and the sadistic Gestapo officer Bouhler is starkly drawn; although von Luck kills Bouhler, he does so in response to witnessing Bouhler’s torture of a civilian woman, Mrs Campbell, with whose daughter von Luck is becoming romantically involved. Von Luck’s violent action is therefore seen as justified and morally right, as opposed to Bouhler’s sadism. More problematically, however, in order to infiltrate the weapons plant on Alderney, von Luck adopts the guise of a forced labourer. This gesture echoes a moment in Binding’s novel, when Isobel’s grief-stricken father Van Dielen also mixes with, and eventually dies among, a group of forced labourers. But this is seen as a guilt-ridden gesture, expressive of Van Dielen’s sense that his accommodations to the regime may have contributed to his daughter’s death;

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in Walters’s novel, adopting the guise of the victim becomes merely a pretext for heroism. Island Madness appeared in the wake of the release, in 1992, of government papers relating to the occupation of the Channel Islands that were originally not to be made public until 2045. This material facilitated Bunting’s book, which also draws on oral testimony of islanders and their former occupiers and which evidently influenced Binding’s treatment of these events. In his study of novels which imagine alternative outcomes to the Second World War, Gavriel Rosenfeld places A Model Occupation alongside fictional works such as Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992), suggesting that, like counterfactual fictions such as Harris’s, Bunting’s book challenges ‘the notion, central to the myth of the finest hour, of British moral exceptionalism’.30 Bunting sees no substantial differences between the patterns of behaviour in the occupied Channel Islands and what happened in other occupied countries on mainland Europe. According to Rosenfeld, ‘If this hypothesis put forward a less than heroic view of the British, its attendant effect was to humanize the Germans’ (The World, p. 82). Similar in its effects is Owen Sheers’s Resistance (2007). This novel, like Fatherland, is based on positing an alternative ending to the Second World War, but it fantasises the invasion of Wales in ways that bear comparison with Binding’s novel, given that it takes as its focus a location that tends to be marginalised in the cultural mythology of Britain at war. Sheers’s novel draws on an occluded aspect of the war, the little-known ‘Auxiliary Units’, a covert organisation which, through the use of guerrilla tactics, would have spearheaded resistance in the event of an invasion.31 Rosenfeld has argued that British counter-factual narratives of German victory have often ‘speculated as to whether the British people would have resisted or collaborated with the Germans after being conquered by them’ (The World, p. 30). He suggests that during the 1960s and 1970s, authors critical of the myth of the ‘Finest Hour’ tended to ‘portray the British unheroically as likely collaborators with the Germans’ (p. 72). In the changing European political climate of the 1990s, ‘the victorious Third Reich’ is depicted ‘as a much more vulnerable and far less fearsome entity than in earlier narratives’ (p. 72). As in Bunting’s case, Rosenfeld sees this shift as signalling the interrogation of ‘the nation’s self-congratulatory myths’ (p. 83), but he also suggests that this attitude re-emerges in the late 1990s, perhaps as a response to the reunification of Germany (p. 90). Sheers seems sceptical of narratives that view the war as Britain’s ‘Finest Hour’, but, unlike Peter Ho Davies in his novel The Welsh Girl (2007), which I will discuss in the next chapter, Sheers does not use Welsh–English antagonism as a means of exposing this

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scepticism; notably, his protagonist Sarah is unable to speak Welsh. Rather, the German soldiers are wooed by the humanistic values of the women. Sheers rather optimistically implies that an attachment to an appropriate female object of desire and an enduring appreciation of highbrow artistic production would enable the sloughing off of the legacy of Nazism. In Resistance, the German soldiers all too easily inhabit the gaps left by the absent husbands. The real acts of resistance are happening outside the boundaries of the valley; displacing the focus to the women left behind is only partially successful as a narrative device precisely because the absent husbands are immediately replaced by more intriguing substitutes. Like Lentsch in Tim Binding’s novel, Albrecht, the commanding officer of the small German unit in Resistance, is marked as a ‘good German’; he has studied for a year at Oxford, speaks fluent English, and has an appreciation of music and art. At first, Sarah, the principal female focalising character, is immune to Albrecht’s charms. When he tries to form a bond with her by playing her gramophone records of Bach as a birthday present, she responds angrily: ‘I read, you know. I read books. So don’ come here with your music. I know what you’ve done. We all heard the wireless. In Belgium an’ Holland. Them Jews weren’t just taken to new homes, were they?’32 But having undercut, through Sarah’s accusation, the transcendent effects of the music, Sheers uses another kind of artwork, and their secret sharing of it, to unite them. Albrecht has been sent to recover a Mappa Mundi, evacuated from Hereford Cathedral and hidden in a cave nearby for safe-keeping, but he reveals to Sarah that he does not want the map to sit alongside the ‘museum of weapons and Masonic regalia’ (Resistance, p. 190) at Himmler’s castle, echoing Lentsch’s desire not to send artefacts to Karinhall. Sarah does not tell the other women that Albrecht has shown her the map: ‘The shared knowledge of the map created something of an understanding between them’ (p. 203). Sharing this secret creates the momentum for this ‘understanding’ to grow, and for the bond between the pair to be cemented; in return, Sarah offers to take Albrecht to see Walter Savage Landor’s house: ‘If we went early no one would see us’ (p. 217). By this point, Albrecht has replaced the top half of his uniform with civilian clothes, and appears to Sarah as ‘half-soldier, half-farmer’ (p. 224); he admits to Sarah that he cannot imagine going back to Germany: ‘I am German [. . .] But Germany is not my home anymore’ (p. 227). Albrecht lays claim to German-ness, but distances himself, psychologically and physically, from the Nazi state. In common with other art- and musicloving Germans in these novels, Albrecht seems to provide a riposte to George Steiner’s statement of the failure of the humanising project of

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art. Writing in the early 1960s, Steiner suggested that recent history seemed to suggest that a sensitive response to literature might block, rather than facilitate, an individual’s understanding of his or her lived situation: ‘We come to respond more acutely to literary sorrow than to the misery next door. [. . .] Men who wept at Werther or Chopin moved, unrealizing, through literal hell.’33 Steiner suggests that an overimmersion in the world of the literary ‘diminishes the immediacy, the hard edge, of actual circumstances’ (‘Humane Literacy’, p. 23). Certain kinds of engagement with art, in this analysis, distance one from reality rather than equipping one to understand it. The representations I have been considering here, however, seem to retain a trust in the humanising potential of art; notably, however, none of these protagonists is placed in the ‘literal hell’ that Steiner invokes. In common with the other women, Sarah holds on to the belief that her husband is still alive and may return, but aside from her growing bond with Albrecht, there are other indications that her separation from her husband has irrevocably changed their relationship. Sarah keeps an account of her activities on the farm, addressed to Tom, her husband, but she edits out the contribution of the German soldiers: ‘She had no way of telling him without it sounding wrong. So she left it out instead, as though it never happened’ (Sheers, Resistance, p. 176). This first keeping of a secret opens up a gap between her and the absent Tom, and at the end of the novel, Sarah allows Albrecht to make the decision about their (apparently joint) future. With the war ending and the Gestapo approaching, Albrecht persuades her that they are all equally at danger from British collaborators, and that leaving is the only option; she agrees, but only after inscribing her own death in the family bible, and setting fire to the Mappa Mundi to prevent it falling into Nazi hands (p. 278). Through Sarah’s actions, Sheers suggests the impact a single individual might have on the later historical record; not only does she destroy a historical artefact, but Sarah’s omissions from her diary and false record of her own death can be understood as an act of resistance against any future official version of events in the valley. However, the isolated setting of the action and the expressed anti-Nazism of Albrecht mean that the novel is as much about the soldiers’ deviation from their duty, and the implicit lure of the women’s way of life, as it is about the women betraying their absent – indeed, never seen – husbands. Discussing the depiction of wartime collaboration and resistance in France, Claire Duchen suggests that, typically, resistance is seen as male, ‘collaboration as female; male as heroic, female as guilty; male as combative, female as passive’.34 These categorisations are not challenged to any great extent in Sheers’s novel. We do glimpse the activities of

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George, one of the members of the Auxiliary Unit, but by this point the boundaries between resistance and collaboration have been confused by the fact that the particular occupiers with whom the women have had contact are benign in their intentions. Ultimately, the Germans seem to want to join with the women in resisting, or rather fleeing from, the approaching ‘SS Albion Division’, formed of pro-Nazi English soldiers. This separation of the SS from the German army in order to preserve the army and, by extension, regular soldiers of any nationality, from the smirch of crimes associated with, but not in fact perpetrated only by, the SS, itself follows a pattern set in earlier representations, as I have noted. The permeability of boundaries between friend and enemy is shown to work in both directions, but moving from one category to the other seems a relatively unproblematic manoeuvre.

‘. . . no subterfuge implied . . .’: The Remains of the Day In both Binding’s and Sheers’s novels, protagonists ultimately demonstrate their allegiances by their actions, and flee; the contradictions of their positions remain unconfronted within these narratives. Other authors have taken rather different approaches to the problem of matching beliefs to actions. Introducing a historical distance between the events narrated and the act of narration can mean that protagonists are forced to reflect on, and attempt to justify, choices that may, at a temporal distance, appear to be morally dubious. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) focuses on covert interwar political negotiations taking place behind the closed doors of Lord Darlington’s English country house, thus opening up for scrutiny the grey area between a desire to avert war and sympathy with Nazi aims. These events are narrated by Darlington’s butler Stevens, with the degree of Stevens’s understanding of overheard conversations, and the progress of his master from intermediary to anti-Semite, revealed only gradually. Rather than evading the kind of direct engagement with the enemy that is central to the novels I have discussed so far, this narrative structure allows Ishiguro to suggest that accommodation and collaboration could take place in mundane circumstances, far removed from the front line of the conflict. In interview, Ishiguro has suggested that he usually chooses a historical setting to serve the purposes of his plot, rather than starting with the intention of illuminating a particular historical period,35 but Stevens’s master, Lord Darlington, evidently ‘condenses traits’36 of historical figures including Lord Lothian and Lord Londonderry. Richard Griffiths has distinguished between supporters of appeasement, who

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‘were convinced that it was essential to seek an accommodation with Germany’ but who ‘were not necessarily friendly towards Germany herself in abstract or in favour of the Nazi régime’, and ‘enthusiasts’, those who also wished to avoid war, but who were favourably disposed towards Germany and, in some cases, towards Nazism.37 Lothian took the view that ‘[h]owever much he and others loathed the brutality of the Nazi regime [. . .] Britain had no choice but to work for a better understanding with Germany for the sake of European peace and the future of the empire.’38 However, Ian Kershaw suggests that Lothian was perceived to have a ‘certain gullibility about him’ (Making Friends, p. 61); the actions of Lord Londonderry, who received Hitler’s Foreign Minister Ribbentrop as a house guest in 1936, attracted greater opprobrium. Londonderry did not have ‘strong sympathies for the ideology of Nazism’ (Making Friends, p. 289), though in the later 1930s he often defended Hitler’s actions on the grounds that the post-First World War Versailles Treaty had been too harsh towards Germany. During 1938–9, expressions of ‘enthusiasm’ for Nazi Germany ‘became more and more confined to extremist movements’ (Griffiths, Fellow Travellers, p. 292), but part of Ishiguro’s concern is with whether such alterations of publicly declared allegiance are necessarily matched by reconsiderations of inwardly held belief. Stevens has difficulty in reaching an honest assessment of his master’s actions, precisely because Darlington is his master. Implicit in this domestic narrative is a recognition of both the comforts and the dangers of an unquestioning respect for hierarchies. In attempting to absolve Lord Darlington of the smirch of fascism, Stevens not only, paradoxically, brings these accusations to the reader’s attention, but also implicates himself. Ishiguro may assert that the historical setting of the novel is just that, a setting, but it inevitably gives historical specificity to the issues of loyalty and conviction that are explored. What emerges through Stevens’s narration is that even those at the margins, the bystanders and accommodators, are historical subjects with a responsibility for their own actions. The first-person narration of the novel has a double timescale. In 1956, Stevens sets out on a journey to visit the former housekeeper of Darlington Hall, Miss Kenton, and the novel’s sections mark his daily progress across England. As well as reflecting in travelogue style on the places he sees and people he meets, Stevens thinks back to the period when Miss Kenton was housekeeper at the Hall, between the wars. His attachment to Miss Kenton, evident to the reader but barely acknowledged by Stevens himself, is one of what Deborah Guth has called the ‘submerged narratives’39 of the novel; the other narrative which emerges, through Stevens’s ostensible admiration for Lord Darlington,

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is of reprehensible actions on Darlington’s part. The two meetings which take place at Darlington Hall, one in the early 1920s and the other in the late 1930s, are exemplary in this respect. Stevens is revealed to be not so much a marginal figure as a liminal one,40 a suggestion supported by his absorption of information through the practice of eavesdropping. The meetings occur in what, from the point of narration, is the interwar period, although the earlier of the two is more properly postwar, concerned with considering the aftermath of the 1914–18 conflict. The second meeting is interested in averting an oncoming renewal of war, and Ishiguro therefore addresses the development of Germany, the defeated opponent, into Nazi Germany, the resurgent aggressor. Yet, apart from considering whether, and to what extent, Darlington was a Nazi sympathiser, the narrative also raises the question of whether Darlington’s domestic paternalism is fascist ‘political paternalism’ writ small.41 Gillian Rose has argued that: The attractions of German Nazism are present in microcosm in the organization of the aristocratic household as a fascist corporation. The members of that corporation are free in their initial pledge of loyalty, but become unfree in their consequent total rescinding of the right to criticise.42

In this analysis, Stevens’s pride in his work and assertions of loyalty to Darlington, and also his treatment of Miss Kenton, take on a sinister twist. The blind devotion that Stevens asserts is not merely the adherence to a quaint and outdated sense of servility, but replicates the logic of unquestioning loyalty to political causes. In excusing his master’s faults, Stevens is also confessing, unwittingly, to his own. The initial spur for the 1923 conference is Darlington’s friendship with a German, Herr Bremann, ‘a gentleman of great decency’.43 Despite having fought against Bremann in the First World War, Darlington bears him ‘no malice’: ‘I said to him, “Look here, we’re enemies now, and I’ll fight you with all I’ve got. But when this wretched business is over, we shan’t have to be enemies anymore and we’ll have a drink together” ’ (The Remains, p. 76). Yet it is difficult, Darlington discovers, for personal kindness to compensate for the hardships that result from the Versailles Treaty. Bremann leaves the army but on subsequent visits has a ‘hunted look’, and he eventually commits suicide (pp. 74, 77). There are echoes here of the friendship between Clive Candy and the German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff which is a key narrative strand in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). In the film, Candy meets Theo prior to the First World War, and despite having briefly been his rival in love, becomes his friend. Candy and his fellow officers welcome Theo, who,

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during the 1914–18 conflict, has been a prisoner of war in England, to their dinner table; as in Ishiguro’s novel, the recognition of a ‘decent chap’ transcends national boundaries. Theo is embittered and later vows revenge for the humiliations of defeat, but he is eventually forced to flee Germany, repelled by the Nazi regime, and seeks out his old friend again. Theo is thus representative of anti-Nazi Germany, loving his country but hating the regime and turning his back on his former militarism, whilst nevertheless feeling righteous indignation at the humiliations of war.44 By having Bremann commit suicide, Ishiguro provides a strong personal spur for Darlington to organise a conference to reconsider the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and also marks a symbolic separation between the old and the new – in 1923, nascent – German nationalisms. During the course of the conference, it is French nationalism, embodied in the figure of Monsieur Dupont, which, in Stevens’s view, is the sticking point. Dupont is invited because ‘the French were the most intransigent as regards releasing Germany from the cruelties of the Versailles treaty’ (The Remains, p. 79). Stevens here ventriloquises his master’s opinion, and the demands that Dupont makes on Stevens during the conference, and which compete with the demands of Stevens’s ailing father, show how closely entangled personal and political concerns become in the narrative, all the more so when Stevens endeavours to keep them separate. In the lead-up to the conference, Stevens has alienated Miss Kenton sufficiently for her to ask him to give her messages only through an intermediary, a domestic spat which foreshadows a series of interrupted or indirect communications during the conference itself. In a blackly comic scene, Stevens is charged by Darlington with telling Reginald Cardinal the facts of life, a task which has already been handed to Darlington by Reginald’s father, Sir David. Both Darlington and Sir David discharge their duty in this respect only by passing it to another; the blame for any failure will therefore lie not with them but with Stevens, the ultimate recipient of the message. The information that Stevens is required to convey is itself, if not secret, then at least personal; Ishiguro is nodding towards the stereotype of the buttoned-up aristocrat, unable to be on intimate terms even with his own family. Ironically, Stevens partakes of this reserve, and he is no more able than Darlington or Sir David to speak frankly to Reginald (who of course may already be well apprised of the relevant information). Stevens’s opening gambit, ‘ “Sir David wishes you to know, sir, that ladies and gentlemen differ in several key respects” ’ (The Remains, p. 87), is taken by Reginald to be a reference to his research for the conference. Stevens’s circumspection combines with Reginald’s perception of the likely nature of a message from his

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father, communicated via the butler. Reginald tells Stevens that his attaché case is ‘ “chock-full of notes on every possible angle one can imagine” ’ (p. 88), an unfortunate, though to Stevens apparently unnoticed, double entendre. Stevens comes away with no clearer sense of what Reginald knows or does not know, the political secret and the secret of sexual knowledge condensed in the carefully guarded attaché case. This failed communication can be compared with a later incident when, during the conference, Stevens listens in on Dupont talking to the American senator, Lewis: I had for some reason gone up to M. Dupont’s room and was about to knock, but before doing so, as is my custom, I paused for a second to listen at the door. You may not yourself be in the habit of taking this small precaution to avoid knocking at some highly inappropriate moment, but I always have been and can vouch that it is common practice amongst many professionals. That is to say, there is no subterfuge implied in such an action [. . .] The bedroom doors of Darlington Hall are of a certain thickness and I could by no means hear complete exchanges; consequently, it is hard for me now to recall precisely what I overheard, just as, indeed, it was for me later that same evening when I reported to his lordship on the matter. (p. 99)

The substance of the conversation is Lewis’s revelation that the other participants in the conference are manipulating Dupont, and excluding him from key discussions. He also repeats to Dupont derogatory comments that other delegates have made about the French as a nation. There are a number of notable points about Stevens’s narration of this incident. He is keen to defend the eavesdropping as a legitimate part of professional practice, not questioning the basis of such ‘professionalism’, but he does not explain, perhaps has no sense of needing to explain, why he immediately reports what he has heard to Lord Darlington. If having a secret implies having a degree of power or agency, then in sharing what he knows, Stevens reasserts his willingness to remain subordinate in the household. Stevens’s intervention on this matter is more than an issue of domestic loyalty owed by himself to Darlington, however, because it radically alters the course of the conference, and therefore, implicitly, of history. Lewis’s desire to reveal a more accurate picture of events to Dupont is turned back on him; Dupont publicly denounces his tactics in an after-dinner speech, and when Lewis responds by accusing Darlington of amateurism, Darlington condemns the American for ‘cheating and manipulating’ (p. 107). In Stevens’s view, passing on what he overheard to Lord Darlington was his duty and therefore right, regardless of Darlington’s exploitation of the intelligence communicated to him and the wider consequences of his actions. Whereas

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encounters between Germans and others can be a means of attempting to explore marginalised subject positions, Ishiguro here shows the physically marginal protagonist to be extremely powerful, because of what he can choose to reveal or conceal. Stevens, however, will always pass the information on. He has no secrets from Lord Darlington. Prior to the description of Ribbentrop’s visit, the centrepiece of the second meeting at the Hall, Stevens alludes to the tainting of Lord Darlington’s name by his association with anti-Semitism, and his attempt to clear Darlington of this accusation serves only to compound the ambivalence of his own position. Having asserted that there were ‘many Jewish persons’ employed at Darlington Hall, Stevens then admits that the ‘absurd allegations’ levelled against Lord Darlington may stem from his association with Mrs Carolyn Barnet, during an ‘entirely insignificant few weeks in the early thirties’ (p. 153). In discussing the influence on Lord Darlington of Mrs Barnet, who seems to be a sort of composite of Mrs Simpson and a Mitford sister, Stevens attempts to imply that Darlington’s contact with British fascism was only ever by proxy: ‘the very little contact his lordship ever had with Sir Oswald [Mosley]’ occurred during the period when Mrs Barnet was also a frequent guest (p. 154). When Stevens is told that he must dismiss two Jewish maids who are on the staff of the Hall, he has qualms, or, rather, expresses qualms in retrospect: ‘the maids had been perfectly satisfactory employees and – I may as well say this since the Jewish issue has become so sensitive of late – my every instinct opposed the idea of their dismissal’ (p. 156). But of course, this is not a matter of instincts but of duty, and the dismissal of the maids is converted from a morally obnoxious request into a ‘difficult task’ that must be carried out with ‘dignity’ (p. 156). It is still questionable, though, whether Ishiguro intends the reader to condemn Stevens for not, albeit anachronistically, speaking out against this latest request. Miss Kenton expresses anger at Lord Darlington’s demand, affirming that if it is carried, it will be ‘a sin as any sin ever was one’ (p. 157), and that she will leave. This threat, though, is not carried out; she later admits to Stevens that she had simply nowhere to go: ‘I was so frightened, Mr Stevens. Whenever I thought of leaving, I just saw myself going out there and finding nobody who knew or cared about me’ (p. 161). These remarks also, indirectly, provide an alibi for Stevens; to protest, to leave even, would mean contemplating a life beyond the codified security of the hall’s routines. Ishiguro is here both indicting and to an extent explaining individuals’ adherence to the calls of what might ordinarily seem noxious ideologies. In worrying about the consequences of leaving the albeit compromised safety of the hall, however, Miss Kenton reminds us that loneliness and exclusion

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is precisely what the maids have been condemned to. Stevens, and by extension Miss Kenton, might be able to take refuge behind the notion that they are ‘only following orders’. Theorising the concept of mediated action, in which those at the top of a chain of command pass blame to those who carry out their orders, whilst those at the bottom of the chain blame those who give the order in the first place, John Lachs argues that responsibility does not lie exclusively with one group or another: ‘we must collapse the chain of mediation in two directions at once.’45 The blame is Darlington’s, but Miss Kenton and Stevens have a share in it. It is Reginald Cardinal who reveals to Stevens the extent of Darlington’s  fallibility. He arrives propitiously and unexpectedly on the evening when Darlington has arranged a meeting with Ribbentrop, and Stevens overhears heated exchanges between Darlington and his untimely guest: In the course of clearing the dining room [. . .] I was obliged to walk repeatedly past the smoking-room doors. It was inevitable, then, that I would notice how the gentlemen [. . .] had begun to exchange words with some urgency. (The Remains, p. 227)

During this further incident of eavesdropping, masked by the phrases ‘I was obliged’ and ‘I would notice’, Stevens overhears Darlington telling Reginald to mind his own business (p. 227). He politely replicates this blocking of Reginald’s views when, ironically given Stevens’s earlier failure to impart the facts of life to Reginald, Reginald attempts to communicate to Stevens some home truths about Darlington’s position: Haven’t you ever had a suspicion? The smallest suspicion that Herr Hitler, through our dear friend Herr Ribbentrop, has been manoeuvring his lordship like a pawn, just as easily as he manoeuvres any of his other pawns back in Berlin? (p. 233)

Reginald’s drunkenness provides cause enough for Stevens to refuse to engage with these suggestions, to refuse to contemplate that Darlington might either be not doing the right thing or not acting of his own volition. To question Lord Darlington in this way would be to question the whole basis of his own behaviour and his own subjectivity. From the narrative perspective of 1956, Stevens refuses to allow the later vindication of Reginald Cardinal’s views to interfere with his own pre-Second World War belief in the rightness of Darlington’s actions. James M. Lang sees this as an attempt on Ishiguro’s part to critique backshadowing, the deterministic reading back onto earlier events of knowledge that could only have come later: ‘To privilege the perspective of the

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present, at the expense of the perspective of the past [. . .] is backshadowing.’46 But the fact that Ishiguro chooses a first-person narrative, and that Stevens clings so stubbornly to the view that, whatever came after, Darlington was at least in the right then, suggests that this rejection of backshadowing is itself problematised, because it also excuses actions, such as the dismissal of the maids, that are wrong in and of themselves and not just because of their foreshadowing of more widespread anti-Semitism.

‘Secret Germany’: The Song Before it is Sung In a discussion of Ishiguro’s novels, Rebecca L. Walkowitz characterises the ‘unreliable narrator’ in this way: The unreliable narrator emerges in a contested or troubled identification between narrator and reader. In this sense, unreliable narrators are an effect of cultural and conventional disjunction: we know that the narrator’s world is not ours, not because we perceive the content of this difference, but because we perceive the fact of difference at all. This difference is marked: unlike the ‘reliable’ narrator, the unreliable narrator is perceived as being the story rather than merely having one.47

In this analysis, the manner of the narration and the nature of what is narrated are reciprocal; not only are fictions that employ an unreliable narrator self-referential, but they remind us that even a supposedly reliable narrator does not have a neutral relationship to the narration. Justin Cartwright’s novel The Song Before it is Sung is not a first-person narrative, but it too considers the relationship between ‘being’ and ‘having’ a story. Rather than structuring the narrative through an act of remembering, with the concomitant gaps and silences that are characteristic of The Remains of the Day, Cartwright focuses on the investigations of a researcher who finds it impossible not to become emotionally involved in the material he is uncovering. Like Stevens, Conrad Senior is more than simply the conduit for a story from the past, and what Cartwright thematises, like Ishiguro, is something that remains implicit in the other representations I have been examining here, that is, the extent to which stories about the past are shaped both by the circumstances of their telling in the present and by the continuing inaccessibility of individuals’ motivations and beliefs. An attempt to deduce beliefs from actions at a historical distance is also a concern in Cartwright’s novel, which draws on the often uneasy friendship that developed between the Oxford philosopher, Isaiah

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Berlin, and the German student, and later diplomat and conspirator against Hitler, Adam von Trott. A rift opened up between Berlin and Trott when Berlin objected to a letter his friend had published in the Manchester Guardian in 1934. In the letter, Trott, who was in legal training in Germany at this time, defended the German legal system against accusations of anti-Semitism: Whilst some of Trott’s English friends argued that the letter served as cover to protect him from suspicion by the Nazi authorities, as he was already beginning to work against the regime, Isaiah was outraged. The facts of Nazi persecution were too obvious to be denied.48

During a visit to England in 1939, Trott was taken by his friend David Astor to the Astor family home at Cliveden. The ‘Cliveden Set’, as the Astors and their like-minded weekend guests were labelled by the journalist Claud Cockburn, were among those who hoped to ‘establish good relations with the Hitler and Mussolini regimes’ and avoid an armed conflict;49 Ekelund suggests that Cliveden is also a point of reference for Ishiguro in his depiction of Darlington Hall (‘Misrecognizing’, p. 78). According to Cesarani, David Astor ‘rejected all that his parents represented’,50 and took Trott to Cliveden because Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was also among the guests. However, the fact of having associated, albeit in good faith, with individuals who were felt not just to be pro-German but pro-Nazi, did not help when Trott attempted to obtain British support against Hitler once the war had begun, nor did the fact that he had advocated allowing Hitler to retain the Sudetenland. In the novel, Axel von Gottberg attempts, as Trott did, to act as an intermediary between anti-Nazi German officers and the British and American governments, but his sometime friend Elya Mendel throws doubt on his trustworthiness. The relationship between the two men is framed by the present-day biographical investigations of Mendel’s former student Conrad, and part of what is at stake is the extent to which Mendel’s actions are dictated not by a belief that he is, politically speaking, in the right, but by his personal envy of the more worldly von Gottberg. Cartwright’s novel is structured by Conrad’s researches. He is given the task, by Mendel, his former, and at the start of the novel deceased, tutor, of investigating von Gottberg’s life. Mendel, in later years, ‘felt guilty about his repudiation of his friend von Gottberg’,51 a repudiation that took the form of casting doubt on the authenticity of von Gottberg’s anti-Nazi stance, effectively denying him access to potentially important contacts in Britain and America. Von Gottberg is executed for his part in the 20 July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, and towards the end of the novel, Conrad reflects that:

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Mendel wanted [him] to determine in what state von Gottberg died. Did he die a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel’s people? For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten. (The Song, p. 207)

Cartwright focuses on events that challenge the binary opposition of victim and perpetrator, and again the problem of retrieving an individual’s motivation for actions taken at a historical distance is central. Revealing a secret plot, Cartwright, like Ishiguro, also considers the ‘secret’ of subjectivity, inaccessible except in glimpses. These glimpses are provided by various texts, particularly letters and memoirs, which are scattered throughout the novel. Conrad also conducts interviews with elderly acquaintances of von Gottberg. However, the contemporary frame of the novel is also broken by occasional passages reconstructing incidents from the friendship of Mendel and von Gottberg. These are also written in the third person, but from Mendel’s perspective, and often describe events, or reveal emotions, that would not be contained within documents intended for the public record. Thus, for instance, it is shown that Mendel’s sentiments towards von Gottberg are to some extent clouded by his resentment at the other man’s sexual prowess. One way of understanding these passages, which, like the rest of the novel, are written in the present tense, is to read them as Conrad’s imaginative recreations of past events, although they are not explicitly marked as such in the novel. The novel’s inclusion of documents such as letters, which are framed as being discovered or read by Conrad, perhaps encourages an attempt to incorporate these descriptions of the men’s friendship in this way, that is, as textual fragments emanating from Conrad rather than as a parallel narrative to his own. The uncertain status of these passages echoes the slippages that occasionally occur between Conrad’s own life and the events he is researching. At the start of the novel, Conrad’s wife, Francine, who is a hospital doctor, tells him that she has been having a relationship with a colleague and is going to leave him, citing Conrad’s over-investment in his research project and his lack of productivity as part of the reason. As Conrad continues his research through the course of the narrative, he also attempts to repair his relationship with Francine, but at times these two strands of his life – his investigations into von Gottberg and his sentiments about his failing marriage – are brought into uncomfortable proximity. For example, going to meet Francine at a café in Soho, he reflects that: it was in Frith Street, not twenty metres away, that Elizabeth Partridge and Elya Mendel met, and she told him about her visit to Sachsenhausen. They

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didn’t know then that more than fifty thousand were to be hanged or gassed. (The Song, p. 154)52

Conrad is here instated as an authoritative figure, knowing what Elya and his friend Elizabeth ‘didn’t know then’, but this authority is based only on his temporal position rather than particular historical insight. The fact that von Gottberg drives Elizabeth out to Sachsenhausen at all, drawing the attention of the guards by sitting outside in the car, could itself indicate that he at least knows that there are things being deliberately concealed behind the wire (pp. 94–5). When Conrad and Francine part, Conrad ‘stops himself from pointing out the spot where Mendel and Elizabeth met to talk about Axel von Gottberg’ (p. 156). Such often abrupt shifts from reflections about his work to the intricacies of his private life partly serve to confirm Francine’s belief that Conrad is absorbed in the past to the detriment of the present. However, they also emphasise the difficulty of drawing a line between the personal and political; as I have noted, Mendel’s guilt about von Gottberg’s fate stems at least in part from his belief that he let his personal feelings cloud his political judgement. But these often jarring moments also seem to place in doubt Conrad’s hope that his investigations will lead to conclusions that can be applied more widely, to other historical circumstances, even to his own. This in turn raises the question of whether it is ever possible to draw ‘lessons from history’ without reshaping that history in our own image. Part of what is addressed in the novel is the tension between von Gottberg’s belief in an ideal image of German nationhood, and his attitude towards the actuality of the Nazi regime. In a chapter that is dated as taking place in March 1939, in Oxford, von Gottberg reflects on how the changed political circumstances of their two countries have effected a rift between himself and Mendel: Now we Germans have created a cordon sanitaire around the word Jew. As if Jew is something like bacillus. Just as he, Axel, cannot use the word Jew any longer without shame, Elya cannot speak of Germany or Germans without contempt. But there is a secret Germany. One lunatic cannot destroy that in a few years. This Germany that Hölderlin and George describe as Geheimes Deutschland is a Germany of the mind. (p. 100)

According to von Gottberg, Nazism has appropriated both ‘Jew’ and ‘Germany’ for its own ends, leaving each of these words tainted. Embedded in these musings is an uncomfortable parallel between being named a ‘Jew’ within Germany and being named a ‘German’ outside Germany, between prejudice against Jews and prejudice against

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Germans. However, if von Gottberg places himself in the position of victim, his thoughts about ‘Geheimes Deutschland’, ‘secret Germany’, point towards a potential means by which Germany might be recovered from the taint of Nazism. As is indicated in this passage, the concept of ‘secret Germany’ derives from the works of Hölderlin and was promulgated by the German writer Stefan George, who from the 1890s onwards gathered around himself a like-minded group of followers, sharing his desire to recover an authentic, pre-modern vision of German culture, a project that gained new urgency after the First World War. George’s attitude towards German nationalism, the Jews and war make him an ambivalent and problematic figure. According to Metzger and Metzger, in the poem ‘Geheimes Deutschland’, first published in 1928: The ‘secret Germany,’ which the poet discovers, ‘the space within space,’ is the capacity of certain of the poet’s contemporaries, amidst the deadened world of man’s civilization, to feel and live life with mythic immediacy, on an experiential level that is supposed to have long disappeared.53

The capacity to live life in this way is not available to the masses, of course; the George circle was characterised by its cliquishness. The Stauffenberg brothers were among those associated with the George circle in the years prior to George’s death in 1933. The youngest brother, Claus, who had lost an eye and the use of a hand whilst serving in North Africa in early 1943, took on the task of carrying a bomb concealed in a briefcase into the Wolfschanze, the Eastern Command Centre, for a meeting with Hitler on 20 July 1944. Cartwright imagines the aftermath of this failed assassination attempt: Just before he is shot, von Stauffenberg shouts, ‘Long live our sacred Germany.’ Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland. One person reports that he shouts, ‘Long live secret Germany,’ and that is possible, because the words heiliges and the unfamiliar geheimes could easily have been confused. (Cartwright, The Song, pp. 202–3)

Whether or not Stauffenberg proclaimed his allegiance to George’s ideal in his final breath, it is notable that Cartwright, both here and in von Gottberg’s earlier musings, makes reference to ‘secret Germany’. What the link, embodied by Stauffenberg, between the George circle and the 20 July plotters reminds us is that Stauffenberg ‘did not die in the name of democracy’.54 As Brian Ladd bluntly puts it: ‘The leading conspirators [on 20 July] were conservative officers and aristocrats. Many of them supported the Third Reich until it began to lose the war.’55 The conservatism of the plotters is echoed in the phrase ‘secret Germany’,

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which implies coterie politics rather than openness. John Simon suggests that: Some of George’s ideas [. . .] were indeed close to those of National Socialism, but on a more elevated intellectual plane, and were co-opted [. . .] by the Nazis. George was neither the innocent his champions have tried to make of him, nor was he completely seduced by the Nazis, without, however, openly rejecting them.56

Simon perhaps implies that because they remained on an ‘elevated intellectual plane’, George’s ideas were relatively speaking, harmless, but in Cartwright’s novel, Mendel suggests that von Gottberg’s ideals prevent him from a realistic assessment of events in his country: ‘Axel is unable to distinguish this secret Germany from the actual Germany that is spinning into the abyss’ (Cartwright, The Song, p. 107). The issue of how to separate Germany – or an idea of Germany – from the German state under Nazism is also central to another historical incident that is reconfigured in Cartwright’s novel. Prior to a visit to America, von Gottberg asks Mendel to provide a letter of introduction to Michael Hamburger, ‘the President’s counsel and Supreme Court judge’ (p. 113). Von Gottberg claims that he wishes to elicit American support for internal German opposition to Hitler, but although the agrees to write the letter, Mendel warns Hamburger that von Gottberg is at best: a German patriot of the old school, a fact that makes him antipathetic to Hitler, if not to all of the ideas behind Hitler [. . .] he should be treated with caution. He has a taste for high-level intrigue. (p. 112)

Shortly before this incident, von Gottberg explains that, partly for expediency, he is going to marry a German woman, Liselotte, rather than Rosamund, the Englishwoman he met during his trip to Israel with Mendel, and the letter to Hamburger shows Mendel’s personal resentments infecting his attitude towards von Gottberg’s politics; Mendel himself had a brief affair with Rosamund, although, unknown to him, her actions later prove to have been instigated by von Gottberg. This in turn raises the question of whether personal and political morality are separable. A perceived sexual humiliation on Mendel’s part becomes the spur for an act of resentment that has historical consequences. This letter, a private communication with public effects, echoes the earlier letter sent by von Gottberg to the Manchester Guardian, in which he attempts to claim that Nazism has not infiltrated public life. In the terms of the novel, von Gottberg’s letter is sent in good faith, but Mendel’s

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communication with Hamburger is in bad faith, involving the deception of the unwitting von Gottberg. Implicit in these suspicions and accusations is the question of whether it is plausible that von Gottberg could be holding a public position in Nazi Germany whilst simultaneously working against the regime. Similar questions were raised in relation to Trott; according to Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin could not accept that Trott’s letter to the Manchester Guardian was intended to ‘serve as cover to protect him from suspicion by the Nazi authorities, as he was already beginning to work against the regime’ (Isaiah Berlin, p. 74). However, in the matter of the letter of ‘recommendation’ that von Gottberg takes to America in 1939, Cartwright draws on the involvement of another Oxford acquaintance of Trott’s, Maurice Bowra. Learning of Trott’s forthcoming visit to America, Bowra wrote a letter to the Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter, casting doubt on Trott’s motives; this communication was intercepted by the postal censor and did not reach the judge, but it may have contributed to the failure of Trott’s later attempt to make contact with the British secret service (Isaiah Berlin, p. 76). In his 1966 memoirs, Bowra explains his actions, asserting that he ‘could not believe that the Gestapo would allow so obvious an adversary to go about the world expressing his views in this free manner’, and claiming also to have been offended by Trott’s suggestion that Hitler should be allowed to ‘keep all his conquests’57 to facilitate appeasement. Bowra admits that this led to him receiving the opprobrium of ‘Trott’s rich friends in England’ (Memories, p. 306), possibly a reference to David Astor, and claims that the news of Trott’s execution led him to regret his interference. Gray notes that, ‘On hearing of von Trott’s execution in 1944, Bowra remarked brutishly: “That’s one Nazi who was hanged.” ’58 It could be argued that, in his memoirs, Bowra expressed belated regrets for having taken this line, but his biographer suggests that Bowra ‘almost certainly never changed his mind about Trott’, viewing him as ‘an unrepentant German nationalist whose objections to Hitler were less that he was a tyrant than that his policies threatened the destruction of Germany’.59 Bowra’s views seem to echo those of Vansittart: in the early 1950s he attributed the rise of Nazism to ‘some deep disease in the German character’ (qtd in Mitchell, Maurice Bowra, p. 220). This judgement hinges on a belief that what Trott openly enunciated was simply a mask for covertly held beliefs. Cartwright uses this incident to attempt to recreate the uncertainties of a period in history that, even with the benefit of hindsight, cannot be seen with clarity, not least because it involves actions taken covertly. Discussing the manner in which historical material is reconfigured in the novel, Cartwright expresses a belief that: ‘The only obligation a writer

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has to the truth is, in the end, to artistic truth, and this is a very fluid category.’60 However, he immediately qualifies this claim, continuing, ‘in relation to the second world war, writers have some obligation to the facts, which is not necessarily the same thing as truth.’ Specifically, given the detailed documentation available about the events of 20 July 1944, Cartwright did not feel able to invent ‘new facts’ (Cartwright, ‘Commentary’, p. 3). Instead, he inserts von Gottberg in Trott’s place in a narrative of Stauffenberg’s activities around the date in question. His self-imposed strictures about ‘the facts’ in this instance perhaps explain why, in the description of the final meeting between Stauffenberg and von Gottberg, we are told, ‘Nobody knows what von Stauffenberg and von Trott discussed’ (Cartwright, The Song, p. 192). If Cartwright appears needlessly coy in his distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘facts’, gaps such as this one indicate that, for all the freedom of invention that literature might supply, it cannot necessarily serve as a means of compensating for deficiencies in the historical record. Adam Mars-Jones objected to the omission of this discussion, seeing it as an ‘odd qualm’ given that ‘no conversation could have taken place between a real person and a made-up character’, but his principle criticism of the novel centres on the overlap of values between the conspirators and those they opposed, and an apparent neglect of the fact that the Jews were the real victims: It’s worth remembering that the cult of sacrifice was something that permeated Nazism. One person’s stormtrooper is another’s grail knight, and vice versa [. . .] Veneration for sacrifice, for purely symbolic victory, can distort the most well-meaning enterprise, and risks insulting the dead, who had no options.61

The question here is to what extent the novel either endorses or critiques the fascination that von Gottberg’s story exercises on Conrad. Perhaps the most striking indictment of Conrad’s fascination with von Gottberg occurs when Conrad finally locates the film of von Gottberg’s trial and execution which he has searched for throughout the novel, believing it will help him understand von Gottberg. Conrad is contacted by Fritsch, a German Jew who managed to hide his identity during the war and was protected by his employer, but who was charged with filming the conspirators’ executions. Explaining why he kept this grisly evidence, Fritsch remarks: ‘I could not destroy the film or tell anyone about it’ (Cartwright, The Song, p. 223). That this meeting takes place at Berlin’s Jewish cemetery brings into focus what has been largely absent in the novel’s account of the plotters’ aims and intentions: that shortening the war would have brought to a quicker end the persecution of the Jews.

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Taking the film back home to London, Conrad watches it and becomes a belated witness to von Gottberg’s death. The reader is presented with the events immediately preceding this in the film, and with Conrad’s reaction: he ‘lurches from the building [where he has been viewing the footage]. He is sick in the street’ (p. 237). Shocked at what he has seen, he destroys the film; this is implicitly a secret that should not have been uncovered.62 It takes six months for him to recover, and to realise that: he had been expecting something from the indifferent dead that they were unwilling to offer him. [. . .] Gradually his account [of von Gottberg and Mendel’s friendship] took shape and at the same time he saw himself slipping back into his own life, as if he had been away, inhabiting the life of another. (p. 269)

The novel appears to offer a caution against the kind of over-immersion in other people’s stories that Conrad’s quest has illustrated. Witnessing von Gottberg’s death, albeit at a distance, does not give Conrad the moral authority to speak of this event. In imagining encounters from the past being enacted before him in the streets of London, and in his desire to view the film, Conrad attempts to situate himself as a belated eyewitness; in ‘slipping back into his own life’, he resituates himself as a temporally removed bystander. But if Conrad ends the novel a bystander, then, in including von Gottberg’s trial and death at the climax of the narrative, Cartwright implies that von Gottberg was himself a victim. Whilst this is true at the moment of his death, foregrounding his victimhood undercuts the extent to which, prior to this, he, unlike other victims, had relative freedom of movement and freedom of choice. Each of these works of fiction recognises the need to create a more nuanced depiction of how loyalty, belief and conviction operated and interacted during the Second World War. However, whilst works such as Cartwright’s and Ishiguro’s recognise the danger of over-identification with subject positions that appear, at a historical distance, to offer the least problematic moral choice, more typical are those novels that seem simply to redistribute individuals between the categories of perpetrator, victim and bystander without interrogating these categories themselves. Although novels such as Island Madness or Resistance may appear, therefore, to complicate existing depictions of the war, in that they break down the binary opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’, such narratives in fact tend to replicate stereotypes, such as the ‘good German’, that have been in existence since the war itself. In novels involving covert contact between German soldiers and British civilians, the shared beliefs of the two groups outweigh their ostensible differences; their authors suggest a network of commonalities beneath the surface of apparently clear-cut

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and distinct ideologies. But what Cartwright and Ishiguro show is that such essentially depoliticised depictions of wartime relationships suppress more complex kinds of intersubjective relationship, and more risky declarations of allegiance.

Notes 1. Bruce Lockhart, Comes, p. 158. Bruce Lockhart is referring to the fact that the unconditional surrender of Germany (and Japan) was not announced as a war aim until the Casablanca conference in January 1943. 2. Qtd in Balfour, Propaganda, p. 167. 3. Goldman, ‘Germans and Nazis’, p. 158. 4. Whilst acknowledging the extremism of Vansittart’s views, Aaron Goldman suggests that they were echoed in BBC policy and the mainstream British press in the early 1940s (‘Germans and Nazis’, p. 161). Nicholas Pronay identifies similar attitudes in British newsreels from the end of the conflict (‘The British Post Bellum Cinema’, pp. 41–2). 5. Noakes and Pridham, Documents, p. 492. 6. Murphy, British Cinema, p. 183. 7. Hilberg, Perpetrators, p. 212. 8. Cesarani and Levine, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 9. Kushner, ‘ “Pissing” ’, p. 60. 10. Dean, The Fragility, p. 80. 11. Conway, Collaboration, p. 286. 12. The Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey (the latter including the islands of Sark, Herm and Alderney), are the survivals of the Duchy of Normandy, and although geographically closer to France than to Britain, they are British Crown Dependencies. (In the first episode of the LWT drama series Enemy at the Door (1978–80), the anger of one of the citizens of Jersey is roused when one of the occupying troops, the SS officer Reineike, pronounces his surname with a French accent, prompting him to assert his and his fellow islanders’ Britishness.) Not believed to be of strategic significance, the Channel Islands were demilitarised by the British government in June 1940 and invaded by Germany shortly after. 13. Kennedy, Day, p. 203. 14. John, ‘The Ambiguous Invader’, p. 187. 15. Cadogan and Craig, Women and Children, p. 292. 16. Paris, Warrior Nation, p. 231. 17. Whitehead, Old Lies, p. 98. 18. Westall, The Machine-Gunners, p. 116. 19. Morpurgo, Friend or Foe, p. 69. 20. Alington, Willow’s Luck, p. 14. 21. Binding, Island Madness, p. 55. 22. Bunting, The Model Occupation, p. 53. 23. The urtext for representations of the occupation of the Channel Islands in children’s literature is Mary Treadgold’s We Couldn’t Leave Dinah (1941), set on the imaginary island of Clerinel. Caroline and her brother Mick accidentally get left behind when most of the islanders are evacuated

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24. 25. 26. 27.

The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction to England as the German army approaches. They live surreptitiously in a cave on the island, and become involved in espionage activities masterminded by the Frenchman Monsieur Beaumarchais, after initially believing him to be collaborating with the occupiers. Having managed to prevent the planned invasion of the mainland, Caroline and Mick prepare to be smuggled off the island, leaving Dinah, Caroline’s pony, in the care of the daughter of the German Commandant; the pony serves as a bond between the girls, thus functioning in a similar way to music and art in the other occupation texts. Trease, Tomorrow, p. 108. Smelser, ‘The Holocaust’, p. 272. Lingen, Kesselring’s Last Battle, p. 132. Bill Niven notes the importance of the exhibition ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941–44’, which toured Austria and Germany in 1995 in changing public attitudes in those countries: Millions visited this exhibition or read about it in the media, shocked at its message – namely that crimes against humanity had been committed not just by the SS in concentration and annihilation camps, but also by run-of-the-mill soldiers hitherto thought by many post-war Germans to have been fighting a ‘clean’ war quite unrelated to the Holocaust. (‘Introduction’, p. 2)

28. Frost, Sex Drives, p. 12. 29. In his autobiographical account of life of Guernsey during the occupation, Frank Falla notes that, partly in an attempt to prevent the spread of venereal disease, brothels were established for the use of German troops (The Silent War, pp. 115–16). 30. Rosenfeld, The World, p. 82. 31. Sheers, ‘Guerrillas’, pp. 65–7. 32. Sheers, Resistance, p. 184. 33. Steiner, ‘Humane Literacy’, p. 23. 34. Duchen, ‘Crime’, p. 240. 35. Ishiguro and Oe, ‘The Novelist’, p. 115. 36. Ekelund, ‘Misrecognizing’, p. 78. 37. Griffiths, Fellow Travellers, p. 1. 38. Kershaw, Making Friends, p. 62. 39. Guth, ‘Submerged’, p. 126. 40. See Karen Scherzinger for a further discussion of how liminality structures the novel; considering liminality as the passage from one state to another, she suggests that ‘both literally and figuratively, The Remains of the Day is a novel set in passage(s)’ (‘The Butler’, p. 2). 41. O’Brien, ‘Serving’, p. 791. 42. Rose, Mourning, p. 52. 43. Ishiguro, The Remains, p. 74. 44. The film evidently ran into problems in the production stage as its depiction of the outdated attitudes of Clive Candy was considered defeatist. See Ian Christie’s examination of archive material relating to the film’s production in ‘Blimp, Churchill and the State’. Robert Murphy suggests Theo is the

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45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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sole example of a ‘good German’ in British film of the period 1941–45 (British Cinema, p. 90). Lachs, Responsibility, p. 72. Lang, ‘Public Memory’, p. 153. Walkowitz, ‘Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds’, p. 1067. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, p. 74. Goldman, ‘Claud Cockburn’, p. 723. Cesarani, ‘Mad Dogs’, p. 43. Cartwright, The Song, p. 6. Elizabeth and Gottberg’s visit to Sachsenhausen seems to draw on an incident that took place in July 1939 during a visit David Astor made to Adam von Trott. Richard Cockett describes what happened, citing Astor’s own unpublished account: On his last day in Berlin, David and Adam went driving in Adam’s extremely small car to the northern outskirts of the city, principally so they could talk out of microphone-range of the Gestapo. After some time, Adam drove beyond the suburbs until they came to a long, straight road only one field’s distance from the main road, ‘at the end of which was a concentration camp’. Adam stopped the car at the beginning of the road leading to the gates, and the two just sat for a while, much to David’s initial alarm, in front of the ugly, forced-labour-built prison gates surrounded by tidy turnip fields. Adam remarked on the complete silence of the place and said that ‘this is what Nazism amounts to’. (David Astor, p. 55)

53. Metzger and Metzger, Stefan George, p. 182. 54. Norton, Secret Germany, p. 745. 55. Ladd, The Ghosts, p. 150. Before Parliament was dissolved for the summer recess in August 1944, Churchill gave a speech in which he assessed the progress of the war on all fronts. Towards the end, he alluded to the July plot in terms which made it clear that he was not inclined to make any meaningful distinction between the plotters and their intended victims: Not only are those once proud German armies being beaten back on every front and by every one of the many nations who are in fighting contact with them – every single one – but in their homeland in Germany, tremendous efforts have occurred which must shake to their foundations the confidence of the people and the loyalty of the troops. The highest personalities in the German Reich are murdering one another, or trying to, while the avenging armies of the allies close upon the doomed and ever-narrowing circle of their power. We have never based ourselves on the weakness of our enemy, but only on the righteousness of our cause. Therefore, potent as may be these manifestations of internal disease, decisive as they may be one of these days, it is not in them that we should put our trust, but in our own strong arms and the justice of our cause. (‘The War Situation’, p. 6985) 56. Simon, ‘The Poet’, p. 20. Mark Elliott notes that in the period post-1933, George’s work was ‘appropriated’ by the Nazis and rejected by exiles

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57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction outside Germany (‘Beyond’, p. 908). However, George’s pre-First World War writings were ‘denigrated’ (p. 914) within Germany on the grounds of their perceived decadence. Bowra, Memories, p. 306. Gray, ‘Freedom Fighter’. Mitchell, Maurice Bowra, p. 217. Cartwright, ‘Commentary’, p. 3. Mars-Jones, ‘Enough’, p. 24. There is an echo here of the view expressed by Claude Lanzmann, during a discussion about his film Shoah: I used to say that if there had been – by sheer obscenity or miracle – a film actually shot in the past of three thousand people dying together in a gas chamber, first of all, I think that no one human being would have been able to look at this. Anyhow, I would have never included this in the film. I would have preferred to destroy it. It is not visible. You cannot look at this. (Lanzmann, ‘Seminar’, p. 99)

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Chapter 4

Women at War

In the final section of Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch (2006), which describes events taking place in 1941, Viv has her first encounter with Reggie, who at this point is in the army, attached to an Officer Cadet Training Unit. The dated sections of this novel are organised in reverse chronological order, with 1947 followed by 1944 and 1941, and so the reader is already aware that this meeting between a young single woman and a married man will develop into a relationship that, by 1947, when the novel begins, is proving difficult for Viv to sustain. Her initial conversation with Reggie takes place through the door of the toilet cubicle on a train, and, being told that he has lost his travel permit, she lets him in and shelters him from the ticket inspector. She is ‘self-consciously aware of the smallness of the space’ they are occupying but ‘like everyone else she’d had to get used to sharing odd spaces with strangers recently.’1 Her pretence to the guard that she is alone in the cubicle immediately reminds the reader that her relationship with Reggie, here just beginning, will have to be conducted clandestinely. Throughout the novel Waters is concerned with how illicit relationships might have been conducted during the war; the conditions of wartime appear to facilitate such dalliances, offering opportunities for couples to be thrown together, as Viv discovers. But, as Viv also finds out, any apparent freedom comes at the price of an intensified surveillance of private life. This first meeting with Reggie in the enclosure of the toilet cubicle, itself contained within the public space of the train, is not only significant as an illustration of how a pocket of privacy might be created in the most unlikely of circumstances; the pair are also thrown together by the fact that Reggie has been separated from his wife by army service. Although in the first instance the army creates the conditions for his meeting with Viv, at other points in the narrative it places constraints on his movements. But the problems of being involved with a soldier are not just practical ones. In many novels that, like The Night Watch, focus

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on civilian women’s experiences of war, covert encounters with soldiers become both a way of problematising the apparent sexual freedom that wartime seemed to offer, and a means of considering particular kinds of boundary. The concept of the ‘Home Front’ itself challenged any absolute distinction between the civilian and the soldier, and a number of authors have gone further by depicting not just contact between British soldiers and British civilians, as Waters does, but by introducing American, and, as Chapter 3 showed, German soldiers into their narratives. This means that the dichotomy between friend and enemy, and the problem of how to reconfigure the former enemy as a friend, are also subject to scrutiny, particularly in novels that, like The Night Watch, trace a different sort of boundary, the transition between war and peace. Not all wartime behaviour can be admitted in the peace. Like Waters, authors including Maureen Duffy, Liz Jensen and Peter Ho Davies also show that, for women in particular, the apparent freedoms of wartime are not sustained with the return of peace. While acknowledging that, paradoxically, the crisis of war could offer new opportunities for women, many of these authors weigh this against the extent to which women’s actions were still hemmed in by cultural expectations and, indeed, biological factors. The description of Viv’s botched abortion in The Night Watch is one among a number of instances of thwarted maternity in recent representations of women’s experiences of the Second World War. The prevalence of unwanted and illegitimate children and illegal abortion in novels including Stevie Davies’s Boy Blue (1987) and Jensen’s War Crimes for the Home (2002) means that motherhood and potential motherhood, like sex and sexuality, become entangled with secrecy. The circumstances of wartime both precipitate the situations in which these protagonists find themselves and also dictate their responses, which often involve covert behaviour. Concealing pregnancy is possible, albeit only as a temporary measure, and novelists also exploit the fact that, until relatively recently, definitively identifying the father of a child was not possible. Paternity might be accepted, denied or not even known about; the absence of the father leads the woman to fall back on her own resources. New life should be an antidote to the death war brings in its wake, but war cannot be excluded from the domestic sphere, and this is part of what complicates the countering of death with birth.

Secret Babies The shrouding of pregnancy in secrecy – the concealment either of illegal abortion or of the identity of the baby’s father or even of the

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fact of having had a child at all – is in part a reflection of what historical accounts of the mid-twentieth century reveal. Like Viv in Waters’s novel, women removed from their family homes for war work could find themselves exposed to new opportunities for meeting men. Deirdre Beddoe notes that between 1939 and 1945, illegitimacy rates for England and Wales doubled, but she argues that ‘rather than showing a “moral decline” the figures demonstrate the disruption of life caused by the war.’2 For example, during wartime, it was not always possible for a couple to marry between the pregnancy being discovered and the child being born, thus legitimising it. Beddoe’s comments on illegitimacy rates can be supplemented by Wendy Webster’s estimation that, ‘in some towns in 1945, almost half of all illegitimate children were born to married women.’3 Men who had been away at war were thus put in the position of having to adopt the child in question if they wished to preserve their marriage.4 ‘Irregular’ sexual encounters and unplanned or unwanted pregnancy ran counter to an ideology in which the ‘rebuilding of homes, physically and emotionally, and the birth of children within the security of the family gender order’ were seen as ‘essential to postwar reconstruction’.5 The prevailing climate was one of pronatalism, which Denise Riley defines as ‘that despondency and alarm over the low birthrate, both past and as anticipated by demographers, which took the “solution” to be the encouraging of women to have more children [. . .] This anxiety and this proposal for its remedy [. . .] had been building up in the 1930s, but became more generally diffused towards the end of the war.’6 As Riley argues elsewhere, by 1945, ‘the dominant rhetoric described the figures of woman as mother and woman as worker as diametrically opposed.’7 Wartime social reforms might have been designed to assist women in balancing (war) work and family life, but as Clare Hanson notes, in the immediate post-war, when the birth rate initially declined further, women’s desire for social mobility or a ‘ “full-life” ’8 was often blamed. Equally, working, both during the war and later, was generally a supplement rather than an alternative to women’s expected domestic role: ‘the housewife was now a financial as well as a moral, material and emotional cornerstone.’9 Women’s attempts to either adhere to or resist often contrary demands – that they should contribute to the war effort, but that they should also, simultaneously, retain their homemaking role – thus continue, in differently configured form, in the post-war period, when the expectation that women should be able to balance paid work with domestic work, including motherhood, persisted and such dilemmas are therefore recognisable to contemporary readers. Underpinning the particular socio-political demands made on women

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in wartime and after is a network of psycho-social issues expressing anxieties about the intersection of sexuality, particularly women’s sexuality, and war. In novels set in wartime, sexual relationships are sometimes constructed as affirmatory acts in the context of the prevalence of death and destruction, an expression, in Freudian terms, of how the pleasure principle might attempt to combat the death drive. But this attempt is never without its complications and rarely a success. In Jensen’s novel, the narrator Gloria notices battle scars on her boyfriend Ron’s body when they are in bed together, but remembers her relationship with Ron at its height: ‘we couldn’t keep our hands off each other, we were so full of life.’10 However, any idealisation or nostalgia expressed here is undercut by the constant threat of loss. Her sister Marje’s plans to marry are abruptly thwarted when her boyfriend Bobby is killed in action, and it is in the aftermath of his death that Marje herself turns to Ron (War Crimes, p. 216). Although Ron’s position as a soldier might logically discourage Marje from becoming involved with him, for fear of suffering a further loss (quite aside from considerations of loyalty to her sister), instead Ron’s experience of witnessing deaths seems to enable him to understand Marje’s feelings after her bereavement; they both know loss, whether of a lover or a comrade, and this unites them. Like sexuality, maternity is shadowed by violence and its aftermath. The kinds of anxieties about wartime motherhood described in Stevie Davies’s Boy Blue can be understood as expressing a deep-rooted ambivalence about bringing a new life into a dangerous world. Davies was writing in the mid-1980s, when such dangers were still very present, exemplified by the Peace Camps established in the early 1980s at Greenham Common airbase in Berkshire in protest against the stationing there of American Cruise missiles, which arrived in November 1983. Davies’s protagonist Chrissie is reluctant to become involved in war work and associates the war so strongly with masculine aggression that she is revolted at the idea of having a male child. Before she becomes pregnant, she dreams ‘of giving birth to a ten-pound bomb, which slid out from between her legs in a trail of cold slime’;11 this disturbing image echoes another distortion of pregnancy and birth described by Evelyn Fox Keller: The Manhattan Project was a project in which the most privileged secret belonged not to the women, but to the men. It was a scientific venture predicated not on openness, but on its opposite, on absolute secrecy. [. . .] And what was produced [. . .] was ‘Oppenheimer’s baby’ – a baby with a father, but no mother. [. . .] [T]he metaphor of pregnancy and birth became the prevailing metaphor surrounding the production and testing, first of the atomic bomb, and, later, of the hydrogen bomb.12

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Not only, as Keller notes, ‘a precautionary code’, this metaphor was ‘embraced by the physicists at Los Alamos, by the government, and ultimately by the public at large’ (‘From Secrets of Life’, p. 44); the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was referred to by the code name ‘Little Boy’. This appropriation of the imagery of procreation, and according to Keller, of the maternal role – the bomb has ‘a father but no mother’ – brings into focus the paradox of wartime maternity that Davies also identifies, that maternity should be antithetical to war but can be difficult to separate from it, either literally or symbolically.13 Davies and the other authors discussed here attempt to reclaim motherhood from the kinds of rhetorical usage that Keller identifies, often through a focus on the physical experience of pregnancy or birth. In this regard, abortion can be reinscribed as a blow against the patriarchal appropriation of birth, rather than a negative or destructive action. Davies is aware that a straightforward identification of women with peace and men with war would be an oversimplification; it is in part this mistake which leads her protagonist Chrissie into difficulties. Sent from her Wiltshire home to work in a factory in Bristol, Chrissie is unable to accept her work as ‘necessary’ (Davies, Boy Blue, p. 8) in the way that her co-workers do. In late 1944, she has a whirlwind romance with Jim, an airman, drawn to him because he could offer an escape from her hated work: ‘shelter, marriage, a Baby’ (p. 9). He is almost immediately posted to Italy, but their single night together, their wedding night, leaves her pregnant and she hopes that this will provide her with a pretext to leave her war work behind for good. Interviewed by a woman from the Ministry of Labour, she claims that her husband would not allow her to go to work; in line with the current policy, it is suggested to her that the as-yet-unborn baby could be placed in a nursery: ‘He’ll be very happy there, you know. Away from the claustrophobic atmosphere of home, with lots of other children to play with’ (p. 13). Quite apart from the official’s default presumption that the child will be male, itself a source of anxiety for Chrissie, Davies shows here how the economic imperatives of wartime demanded an expedient rethinking of the status of the home, which becomes ‘claustrophobic’ rather than nurturing. Chrissie is unaware at this point that she is pregnant with twins. After a difficult labour she delivers a girl, only to be told that she must make a renewed ‘effort’, her labour reconfigured as war work: ‘So it was war, was it: so it was shells, and gas masks, and bombs bursting that called for this endeavour. [. . .] So she was contributing to the war effort, was she: labouring for victory’ (p. 32). The boy’s arrival in the world is thus completely bound up with her negative feelings about the war; she

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cannot believe that her child, like her husband, might be an exception to the linking of masculinity, war and violence. Contemplating the baby, she sees it only as a symbol of destruction: ‘I see it as mortal and capable of causing mortality’ (p. 48). She renounces all claim to her son, handing him over to one of the nursing home staff for an unofficial adoption and pretending to friends and family that he died at birth. However, the news that Jim is missing in action leads her to identify the child with her absent husband, and she returns to the nursing home, wanting to know if she can reverse her decision. Keen to cover up her own wrongdoing in the matter, the nurse persuades Chrissie that she is suffering from a ‘psychotic reaction’, and that the child was stillborn: ‘Remember? You’ve got the death certificate’ (pp. 77, 76). This attempt to artificially replace one memory of events with another has a parallel in Jensen’s novel; in Boy Blue, Chrissie secretly rebels against what she has been told by adding the boy’s date of birth to the family bible, an act which has consequences much later in the novel when her daughter discovers the inscription. Jim, having been hidden under the floorboards of an Italian farmhouse, ‘a feverish underworld’ (p. 89), eventually re-emerges into the land of the living, his rebirth from the hiding place countering an official declaration of his death, and echoing therefore his son’s survival in defiance of the death certificate. Chrissie seems to see the myth of the war effort as one particular historical manifestation of the death drive, but in having her doubt her decision to renounce her son, and, later, in showing the effects of this on her other child, Florence, Davies implies that Chrissie’s essentialist view of the war is itself mistaken. Liz Jensen’s narrator Gloria appears to comply with, whilst simultaneously recognising the artificiality of, the demand to ‘pull together’ and contribute to the ‘war effort’, but in War Crimes for the Home, as in Davies’s novel, the question of how to protect oneself from the consequences of over-determined wartime actions looms large. Like Davies, Jensen appears to challenge the imperative that would resituate women in the domestic sphere and the nuclear family in the post-war period. Gloria, the elderly narrator of War Crimes for the Home, looks back in her old age on the time she spent as a munitions worker during the war, remembering also her affair with Ron, who is a GI. But what emerges through the narrative is much more complicated than what appears on the surface to be the story of her abandonment by Ron, when pregnant with her son Hank. Where Chrissie in Davies’s novel holds on to her memory of her son in the face of denials that he even exists, with her daughter Florence eventually piecing together the truth some years later, Jensen uses a first-person narrator who is doubly unreliable, in that she both wishes to conceal

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particular pieces of information, and is also suffering from memory loss associated with old age. The narration is further complicated by the fact that Gloria has also been subjected to artificially induced memory loss at the hands of a stage hypnotist called Zedorro. He removes from her memory the events surrounding the birth of her twins, events that she asks him to help her forget, but which gradually begin to re-emerge and trouble Gloria as she tries to construct a version of the past for her son. As the title of the novel suggests, having embraced the notion of the ‘Home Front’ through her work in the factory, Gloria fears that her wrongdoing during the war is therefore a form of ‘war crime’. Her concern is compounded by the fact that, in the present of the narration, she is situated within the early twenty-first-century culture of confession. Passing asides to media reports of the fate of tragic celebrity Marty Lone, and to a television game show called ‘I Confess’, as well as to the ongoing trial of a man accused of war crimes relating to the Second World War, invite the reader to consider whether confession and revelation are always necessarily for the good. Ultimately, in Jensen’s novel, Hank and his new-found sister Jill’s discovery of their true parentage is constructed as positive, although for the positive to be remembered, other, more problematic incidents from the past have to be de-emphasised. The revelations here can be contrasted with Florence’s reaction to the discovery, in Davies’s novel that she has – or at least had – a twin brother. This makes sense of her childhood belief in an imaginary friend, and it is also constructed as a means for Florence to cement her bond with her mother’s family. But Davies does not reunite Florence with her brother, and Florence dismisses her new knowledge as ‘not as significant as [she] took it to be’ (Boy Blue, p. 170), choosing not to tell her mother what she has found out. Davies is therefore more circumspect than Jensen about the need for secrets to be shared. Jensen’s novel alternates between two points in time: the present, when Gloria is visited at her nursing home by her son Hank, and later by Jill, who claims to be her daughter, and wartime; both temporal strands progress towards the construction of a narrative of Gloria’s war and post-war experience. Having believed that Gloria was married to and then divorced from an American serviceman, Hank begins to question this when he discovers a box containing letters and photographs belonging to Gloria; he has access to her belongings because she is no longer living in her own home and has made him her executor. Her desire to keep the past concealed clashes with Hank’s desire to know the truth about his genealogy. A clue to part of what Gloria might be concealing appears early on in the novel when, on a fishing trip with Hank, she sees a child in the water:

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She is stark naked and covered in mud and weeds. She’s clutching a mush of fabric in one fat hand, maybe parachute silk, and in the other fat hand a string of whitey-pink glass beads what is mine, I recognise them. [. . .] You might think a baby don’t feel no hate, babies only feel love. But you are wrong because she is feeling hate all right this one. Then she slips away again and all I can hear is the murmur of Zedorro, his voice all calm and quiet, going, Imagine a stretch of water. (Jensen, War Crimes, p. 24)

This figure begins to haunt Gloria, appearing in the curtains at the nursing  home; the reader might initially imagine that Gloria has had an abortion or caused the death of a baby. As the narrative progresses, this intertwining of death and birth continues. When Gloria goes into labour, she describes the pain as ‘violence swarming through me’ (p. 142); moving to London after the war, she sees ‘rubble everywhere, and when the rubble was cleared away there were big empty spaces with puddles in, and pregnant women sprouting like mushrooms in a field’ (p. 168). Discussing what she considers importunate questions posed by Hank and Jill with a fellow resident of the home, Gloria asserts: ‘No one can force me to remember stuff, can they?’ Her friend agrees: ‘No, Gloria, your mind’s the one thing you’ve got left that’s your own, and you keep it that way’ (p. 153). But the re-emergence into her consciousness of the little girl with the string of beads implies that Gloria’s attempt to impose forgetfulness has been only partially successful. When she does eventually remember the events of VE Day, it is through a repetition of the mechanism that caused her to forget them. At first, there is a gap in Gloria’s memory between VE Day and waking up in what is apparently a military hospital some time later. The outcome of her pregnancy, and even the fact of having been pregnant, are inaccessible to her consciousness, though her body ‘remembers’. She compares herself to the injured men alongside her in the hospital, remarking: ‘I feel like [them]. Like I have had something blown off or scooped out’ (p. 160). In the present, Gloria agrees to allow Dr Kaplan to re-hypnotise her and help her retrieve what she has forgotten about this period, finally persuaded that she owes it to Jill. His intervention reinstates memories that were obscured by Zedorro, revealing the secrets that Gloria has been keeping not only from herself, but also from her children. Gloria first encounters Zedorro when Ron takes her to his stage show and she volunteers to go on stage and be hypnotised. Later, when pregnant with Ron’s child, she meets Zedorro, known off-stage as Bill Farraday, and his wife-cum-assistant Grace, in the street and it is to them that she turns when, as the cessation of the conflict is announced on the radio, she goes into labour. What happens next is described by

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Gloria in dialogue with Dr Kaplan, whilst in a trance state. Left alone in the Farradays’ kitchen while Grace fetches Bill, she gives birth to a baby girl, but immediately strangles it, transferring onto the newborn child the anger she feels at having been betrayed by her sister: ‘How could I love it when I know what Ron’s been up to with my sister?’ (p. 172). But this is not the conclusion; Gloria has been carrying twins and there is another child, a girl, still to be born. This baby, adopted by the childless Farradays, grows up to be Jill. It is after handing her over to them that Gloria asks Bill to exercise his powers and allow her to forget what has happened. She reflects: Hypnotism works like this. You get a man, it is usually a man, who has a way of looking into your eyes that reaches right clear to your soul. He tells you to do a thing you want to do anyway. You do it. And when it’s done, who takes the blame? Him? You? The war? No one? (p. 179)

The question of responsibility, which is not completely resolved in the novel, is important because of Gloria’s conception of her actions as a ‘war crime’; eventually, after recovering her memory, she decides: ‘I ain’t no war criminal. I was just a girl made mistakes’ (p. 213). This perhaps flippant dismissal of an act of infanticide is to some extent undercut by the fact that Gloria’s attempt to forget has in any case never been a complete success. After her spell in hospital, the Farradays invite her to visit; she does not recognise their child as her own, though she feels an unexplainable visceral reaction to it: ‘I took against this baby cos every time it cried my tits tingled and I felt sick’ (p. 164). Thinking the Farradays to be distant cousins, she later sends their/her daughter some beads she finds on a bombsite, and it is these that are clutched by the apparition that appears from the lake. Gloria is therefore haunted by a figure condensing both the living and the dead twin, and the apparition is a materialisation not only of her own killing of the child but also of the imagery of drowning that Zedorro uses to enable her to push the surviving child out of her consciousness. Notably, although Zedorro uses his hypnotic powers for illicit effect when he accedes to Gloria’s request, he is also involved in legitimate but covert work with traumatised soldiers. But Jill’s memory of the long-term after-effects of this treatment on a former patient she knew as ‘Uncle Ned’ cast doubt on its efficacy; although well for a number of years, Ned later ‘went strange. It started slowly, then it got worse

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and worse. [. . .] Ned was furious with Dad. Said he’d made his life hell’ (p. 185). The use of hypnosis to induce the forgetting of traumatic events is associated with the work of the late-nineteenth-century French practitioner Pierre Janet. As well as encouraging patients to ‘convert “traumatic memory,” which merely and unconsciously repeats the past’ into ‘ “narrative memory,” which narrates the past as past’,14 Janet also advocated suggesting to the hypnotised patient an alternative version of events to that which has traumatised them. This technique has been reconsidered more recently by clinicians working in the area of posttraumatic stress disorder,15 but can seem ethically problematic in that it deprives the subject of access to their memory of an experience, albeit that this experience has negative associations. For Jensen, Zedorro’s work for the army is a convenient means of eliciting comparisons between Gloria and the war veterans. Implicitly, some of Zedorro’s military patients were trying, like Gloria, to forget not things they saw, but things they did. Gloria’s experiences reflect a late-twentieth-century concern with the management of trauma and the boundaries of war, not least the idea that combatants on both sides could be subject to war trauma. Jensen is also concerned to reconfigure the relationship between war and gender; though not a warrior like the men, Gloria is traumatised by her own war experience. In this regard, a comparison can be drawn with Jennifer Dawson’s The Upstairs People, published in 1988. In Dawson’s novel, there is also rivalry between two women over the affections of a soldier, though in this case, the women concerned are the mother, Cossey, and her daughter Vivian. The novel’s narrator, Vivian’s sister Alma, is evacuated with Vivian to a convent in Wales, and they are visited by their Cousin Jim, with whom Vivian has a relationship, eventually giving birth to a daughter, Thomasa. But having had her own romance with Jim thwarted, the manipulative Cossey persuades him not to marry Vivian. This is the start of Vivian’s descent into madness; she neglects Thomasa and eventually kills her, shutting her in a trunk in the attic of the convent, a symbolic reversing of the child’s birth and a crime which is concealed from the authorities by Alma, and deemed to have been an accident. Taken alongside Jensen’s and Davies’s novel, The Upstairs People is highly pessimistic about the possibility that war might be the engine of social change. For Alma, Vivian, lobotomised and permanently hospitalised in the immediate aftermath of the war, seems to be a model for post-war behaviour: People were talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it seemed now that we must all lie as close to the ground as possible lest we attract the notice of

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restless powers. [. . .] it was not just us women who would have to lie so low and compliant.16

Writing before the end of the Cold War, Dawson does not offer the possibility of cathartic release from past events – and indeed past crimes – that Jensen advocates. That Gloria undergoes the same treatment as Farraday’s male patients implies a parallel between her crime and theirs, but at other points in the narrative, Gloria casts doubt on the possibility of comparing her war with the men’s. During her later visit to America, she meets an exserviceman called Izzi, who describes the traumatic experience of being adrift on a raft for three months, causing her to reflect: I didn’t have no war like Izzi’s war, or any man’s war [. . .] The war I had, it was my little war, a woman’s war, a nobody’s war. There were millions of us living that war [. . .] We queued for potatoes and we went to the flicks and we heard bombs fall so often it was background noise [. . .] My war, it was a tiny little war compared to some. But mine stayed with me, and the things it made me do, they stayed with me too, but hidden. (Jensen, War Crimes, pp. 212–13)

Whilst her war might have been ‘tiny’ in comparison with Izzi’s, it has nevertheless left indelible, albeit at this stage obfuscated, marks. The war is here constructed as having eroded individual agency (‘the things it made me do’) for civilians as much as servicemen. Like the men, Gloria has had to encounter violence – the novel opens with a description of her friend Iris being badly injured at the factory – but although Gloria has an incentive to forget, there is in any case no space, either historical or legal, in which her stories could be articulated. She listens to Ron’s and Izzi’s stories, but her ‘tiny war’ provides her with nothing of significance to offer in return. It is during the visit to America when she hears Izzi’s story that Gloria, ostensibly on a mission to make peace with her sister, becomes pregnant again by Ron. Hank does then have a GI – or former GI – for his father, but his conception acts as a coda to the intense wartime relationship between his parents. It is also, although Gloria is not fully aware at the time, a form of compensation both for the loss of Ron to Marje and for the thwarting of her earlier attempt at having his child: ‘It was like there was a space inside me, a space where only his baby belonged’ (War Crimes, p. 191). Having once, though she does not know it now, been pregnant, Gloria seems unable to challenge what appears to her as a biological imperative. Gloria was unable to compose a letter to tell Ron about her first pregnancy, not afraid of the censor, but unable to

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integrate the news into the usual romantic and sexual content of their correspondence, and she also keeps her second pregnancy a secret from him. This means that although she falls in line with post-war pronatalist ideology, she does so in full knowledge that she and Hank will be a family without a father. The absent GI father becomes a shared fantasy between her and her son. By the end of the novel, Gloria has made peace with Hank and with her newly discovered daughter, who both now know the identities of their parents; Gloria’s narrative of the war, which had confusing gaps, has been completed by the recovery of her memory. As I have suggested, revealing secrets would appear to have had a positive outcome, with Gloria assuaged of the guilt that concealment produced, and part, once again, of a family. But the fate of her first-born child casts a shadow over this conclusion. Gloria might ultimately feel vindicated, but the relationship between war, individual agency and responsibility remains unreconciled in this novel, despite the apparently satisfactory unravelling of the different strands of the narrative. Stevie Davies’s novel, meanwhile, having exposed a network of secrets within the family, with Chrissie’s daughter and sister both aware that she has a son, and Chrissie herself unaware of their knowledge, concludes by shifting focus to this son, Eric, now grown up. Eric visits Salisbury Plain on a camping holiday, feeling a kinship to the place and wondering if this might be where he originally came from, which indeed it is (Davies, Boy Blue, p. 176). Having been associated with the military throughout the course of the novel, this area now shifts in significance, as Eric focuses on its deeper, archaeological past. Whilst even this remote past bears evidence of war, the ‘hillfort’ and ‘Norman fortifications’ being among the sites of interest (Boy Blue, p. 177), the depiction of Eric closing his ears to the sound of fighter jets overhead implies that it is possible to uncouple masculinity and violence. Further, Eric has a sense of belonging without having to have this confirmed by decisive knowledge of where he was born and who his real parents are. Identity seems, then, to be much less over-determined than is the case in Jensen’s novel. Beliefs about where one comes from need not be limited to immediate antecedents, and destinations may be as important as origins.

Ending Pregnancy: Wartime Abortion Despite the difficult circumstances of their births, and their need to uncover aspects of family history, a need which can conflict with the mother’s desire to forget the past, the children in these novels are

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ultimately positive, forward-looking figures. In both Jensen’s and Davies’s novels, the family is depicted as a unit that can be reconfigured, and is therefore a supportive group rather than simply a means of keeping up appearances socially. However, depictions of wartime maternity do not shy away from the fact that not all women who became pregnant at this time became mothers. Except in the case of very restricted medical circumstances, abortion was illegal in Britain until 1967, and estimating how many abortions took place at any particular time prior to legalisation is extremely difficult. Juliet Gardiner notes that in 1939, a government Committee examining this issue ‘estimated that between 16 and 20 per cent of pregnancies ended in abortion, that is, up to 150,000 abortions a year, and a quarter of these were probably criminal’.17 Whatever the precise figures may have been, the fact that this procedure was both difficult to obtain and potentially very dangerous helps to explain why many women who became pregnant went ahead and had the baby, despite often adverse personal and social circumstances; it is also an aspect of women’s experience in wartime that could not be dealt with explicitly in literature at the time and has therefore been ‘uncovered’ by recent authors. This is not to say that depictions of abortion are completely absent from novels written during the period when abortion was illegal; F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934) and Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets (1936) are two novels from the immediate pre-war period that contain still shocking accounts of women seeking out abortions. In line with present-day attitudes, authors such as Waters attempt to construct abortion as a choice, and to shear away its associations with guilt, irresponsibility and promiscuity. One means of achieving this is to focus on how women might support each other through the experience. As Judy Simons points out in her discussion of The Weather in the Streets: ‘Shameful, unwanted pregnancy is a condition that unites women in a submerged network of communication, a condition unspoken and concealed from the superstructure of polite social relations.’18 As Simons’s phrase ‘polite social relations’ implies, there is also a class aspect to this issue. Whereas Julia, Tennyson Jesse’s lower-middle-class protagonist, goes to a female ‘back-street’ abortionist, in Lehmann’s novel, a male doctor, concerned more with the fee than with making a statement against an unjust legal situation, is called on by the upper-middle-class but impoverished Olivia, who pawns her jewellery to pay the fee.19 The way in which this ‘network’ might function is shown in Peter Ho Davies’s novel The Welsh Girl (2007). Esther, who lives in a small North Wales village, becomes pregnant as the result of an unconsensual encounter with an English soldier called Colin, who is temporarily

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stationed in the area. What happens between them is an incident that Esther ‘can’t quite bring herself to call [. . .] rape’ but only because of her hazy understanding of what the word means: ‘Rape, as she understands it, is a particular form of murder, when a man kills a woman. It’s connected to sex, but the main thing is the murder.’20 By the time Esther realises that she is pregnant, the soldiers have moved on, and Esther considers confiding in Mary, one of the radio actors billeted nearby who frequents the pub where Esther works. Mary notices a change in Esther’s behaviour and her hesitation when asked if anything is the matter: That’s no way to keep a secret! [. . .] The only way to keep a secret is not to let  on you’ve got one, see. Soon as someone knows you’ve got one, pretty thing like you, they’ll come up with all kinds of ideas! (The Welsh Girl, pp. 158–9)

But Esther’s secret is one which must eventually be shared, and, if not shared, will announce itself. Esther eventually confides her trouble to Mary, who takes her to Liverpool in search of an abortion, only for Esther to be told by the doctor that he is ‘not in that line any more’ (p. 287). Instead, he is engaged in treating the survivors of ships torpedoed in the North Atlantic. This incident is important for a number of reasons. Esther has to rely on a sympathetic female acquaintance to put her in touch with someone who might perform an abortion for her; she is not a close friend of Mary’s up until this point, and her need for help cements a bond with the older woman. As Mary is from outside the village and has contacts outside the immediate locale, Esther is also spared having to seek a solution to her problem locally as young Mary does in Graham Swift’s Waterland. On a practical level, as a child living in rural circumstances, Swift’s Mary has no option than to turn to the unsavoury Martha Clay, the local wise woman, when her own attempt to induce a miscarriage goes wrong. All too predictably, given that Mary’s pregnancy has been constructed as a punishment for her over-inquisitiveness, Martha’s intervention results in Mary’s infertility.21 The doctor Esther is taken to meet in Liverpool describes his current occupation partly in order to prevent Mary from blackmailing him; his war work is so important that his past misdemeanours must be forgiven. The juxtaposition of this war work, attempting to save gravely injured men, with Esther’s desire to have an abortion, also implies that preserving rather than curtailing life is more appropriate in wartime. Similarly, in Francis King’s Cold Snap (2010), when, in 1947, Oxford undergraduate Christine becomes pregnant by her boyfriend, a German prisoner of war, she believes that Dr Graff, whose husband is an invalid, will be susceptible to her pleas

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for help. Despite admitting that she needs the money, the doctor suggests that Christine should have the baby and give it up for adoption, a suggestion given extra point by the fact that the doctor’s own adopted son has died.22 The female network is differently inflected here; Dr Graff, weighed down by her own grief, appeals to Christine emotionally, suggesting that she could altruistically give another woman a chance of motherhood. Christine eventually goes through with the pregnancy and marries her lover, though at the cost of her academic aspirations. In Davies’s novel, having decided that she will keep the baby, Esther claims that her childhood sweetheart Rhys, who is missing presumed dead in Europe, is the child’s father, and her ‘slip’ is forgiven. Esther’s only partial understanding of the seriousness of Colin’s assault assuages, for the reader, the sense that she deals unjustly with the innocent, and perhaps deceased, Rhys in naming him as the father, and the child is seen as a consolation by Rhys’s mother. As I will show, matters become more complicated for Esther, but her failure to obtain an abortion is ultimately constructed as having a positive outcome and as representing the affirmation of life in the face of death; like Liz Jensen and Stevie Davies, Peter Ho Davies seems to suggest that the difficult circumstances of wartime maternity could lead to a positive reconfiguration of the traditional family group. A darker treatment of wartime abortion is found in Joseph Connolly’s Jack the Lad and Bloody Mary (2007), although here too the depiction of abortion contributes not only to the realism of the novel’s portrayal of wartime but to its symbolic consideration of the family. Jack and Mary, who share the narration of the novel between them, are a working-class couple with a young child, Jeremy. As war approaches, Jack falls in with black-marketeers. Mary is bereft when circumstances mean that Jeremy has to be evacuated away from London and when she becomes pregnant again, Jack initially refuses to believe the child is his. He was drunk on the evening of the conception and, claiming to be unable to remember the act, insists that Mary should ‘[g]et rid of it’.23 Mary believes that if she refuses to accede to his demand, she will lose her family. She tells her friend Sheila: I know he’s wrong, and he’s making me do an evil thing that I shall never get over [. . .] I am innocent in this, and yet I must bear for ever the guilt of what he is forcing me to do. (Jack the Lad, p. 368)

The male doctor who performs the procedure tells her afterwards that she could have been saved ‘all this unpleasantness’ (p. 381) if she had had higher moral standards. The rather heavy-handed irony of this

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situation, with the doctor taking money with one hand whilst decrying a decline in moral standards with the other, serves as a spur to Mary’s crusade, which structures the second half of the narrative. While Jack continues to be involved in illegal activity, including the faking of medical exemption certificates for those who wish to avoid army service, Mary sets herself up as an abortionist, but one who provides the service for free, and with no questions asked. Notably, she sees her patients in the absent Jeremy’s bedroom and thus what she describes as her ‘donation to the war effort’ (p. 535) is located firmly in the domestic sphere, an illustration of how the war has crossed the boundaries of public and private. Mary’s actions can be seen as a form of repetition of the trauma of her own abortion, as well as echoing her sadness at her separation from Jeremy; when Jack finds out what she has been doing, however, he insists that she should charge a fee for her services, corralling her into the covert economy in which he operates. Indeed, her implication in this is shown to have been deeper than either of them knew, as Jack’s boss Jonathan Leakey reveals that his attempts to bring about Jack’s downfall have been governed by his own desire for Mary. Thus women’s bodies are literally and metaphorically a part of the war economy; it is only when both Jack and Jonathan are apparently killed in an air raid that Mary, reunited with her son, can start to look to the future. This overt thematising of abortion can be contrasted with the reference to a working-class woman’s experience of abortion in Maureen Duffy’s experimental and panoramic novel Change (1987), which, in a disjointed narrative, offers glimpses of the war as lived by men and women of a range of social classes, ages and occupations. Whilst many more recent novelists are concerned, like Connolly, to expose, and implicitly protest at, the plight in which many women found themselves before the legalisation of abortion, Duffy takes the opposite approach and, in an epistolary section of the novel, has one of her protagonists allude to abortion in passing: Dear Gracie, I am in the club. Can you fix something up for me. I’ll be down in London next weekend and come round your house to see whats what. Its a Yank. Its early days but I missed this time and Im always regular as clockwork. Hes a nice boy. I havent toled him nothing nor no one else. Milly24

Later, at another meeting with her lover, who is a black GI, Milly reflects  that she ‘had never told him about their little slip-up, never would now’ (Change, p. 171). In the context of the other representations I am considering here, which stress the practical and emotional difficulty

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faced by women who found themselves pregnant during the war years, Duffy might seem to make light of Milly’s situation, her ‘little slip-up’. But in not dwelling on the detailed practicalities of the situation (and indeed the narrative of Change moves rapidly between more than half a dozen different plot strands), Duffy can be seen to be making a feminist point about Milly’s resilience, as well as the strength of the bonds between women; it is possible for her to confide in a female friend but not in her lover, nor indeed, later, the errant husband with whom she resumes a relationship after the war. Twenty years after the legalisation of abortion, Duffy’s determination not to make Milly’s abortion a set piece in the novel implicitly re-asserts Milly’s right to deal with her ‘slip-up’ in this way. In Jack the Lad and Bloody Mary, Mary manages to keep her war work secret for a time because although he does not have regular employment, Jack is generally away from their flat in the daytime and for much of the evening; she is thus able to annexe Jeremy’s room for her own purposes. Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch also places importance on wartime reconfigurations of space and how these might affect individual behaviour, especially so far as concerns activities which it is necessary to keep concealed. Toilets and bathrooms are among the few places within the public realm in which a degree of privacy can be obtained. As Emily Martin suggests, workplace toilets in particular are a ‘complex backstage area’ and can be used ‘not only as places [for women] to keep their menstrual blood from showing but as places to preserve a bit of autonomy and room for themselves in a context where their physical movements are often rigidly controlled.’25 That said, in 1944, Viv cannot go to this place at will; her toilet visits are policed by her supervisor. Expecting her period to start, she recalls a girl who ‘had been seen all over the building with blood on her skirt’ (Waters, The Night Watch, p. 234), but she is nevertheless chided for asking permission to leave her desk and visit the lavatory. It is here, in the toilets at her place of work, that Viv realises that she could be pregnant. Locked in the cubicle, she checks in her diary to see when she last had a period. Like Keith’s mother’s diary in Spies, Viv’s looks ‘cryptic, like a spy’s, for there were all sorts of codes [. . .]: a symbol for the days she’d visited Duncan, another for her Saturdays with Reggie; and a discreet little asterisk, every twenty-eight or twenty-nine days’ (p. 235). Her visits to her brother Duncan in prison are as clandestine as her meetings with her lover; the pattern of her menstrual cycle can remain concealed only as long as it continues as it should. In the same toilets some time later, Viv lies to one of her work colleagues when, suffering from morning sickness, she is overheard vomiting: ‘It’s nothing [. . .] Just – Just a

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hangover’ (p. 267). It is in the bathroom at a shabby show-flat, a kind of anti-home, that she experiences the traumatic aftermath of her illegal abortion, abandoned by Reggie and eventually saved by Kay. Having been taken by Reggie to the borrowed flat to recover, Viv begins to haemorrhage. Reggie’s immediate concern is that the illegal procedure should be kept secret; he only concedes that an ambulance should be called when the elderly female caretaker of the building assures him that it is ‘a matter of life and death’ (p. 379). During the ambulance journey to hospital, having realised that, despite their masculine appearance, her rescuers are women rather than men, Viv reveals her fear of the legal consequences should the abortion be revealed. Kay and Mickey debate whether the doctors should in any case be told the truth, but Kay eventually takes the initiative and presents Viv to the hospital as ‘Mrs Pearce’ who has had a fall and is suffering from a miscarriage. To complete the masquerade, Kay gives Viv her ring to wear, to replace the cheap one that Reggie gave her, which was left behind at the flat. This ring, which to the knowing observer could signal Kay’s sexual orientation,26 serves instead to allow Viv to pass as married. As Mickey points out, there is a danger that Viv’s body will reveal the truth of what has happened, that the doctors will ‘know anyway’ (p. 386), but Kay’s intervention nevertheless allows Viv to keep the true nature of her condition concealed. The physical and psychological injuries inflicted by Mr Imrie the abortionist and by Reggie, who vanishes when the ambulance arrives, are salved by Kay’s sympathy for Viv’s predicament. The ring cements a pact between them, and notably it is when Viv sees Kay again and decides to try to return the ring to her that her relationship with Reggie begins to deteriorate. The long-held secret of her relationship with him, a relationship borne out of the displacement and uncertainty of wartime, loses part of its sense in the peace, its consolations no longer so important. Implicitly, her brief contact with Kay is almost as important as her six-year relationship with Reggie.

Enemies Within: Wartime Relationships I have suggested that Reggie’s wartime enlistment is a factor which precipitates and to some extent enables his extra-marital affair with Viv. Just as the choice between having a baby and having an abortion is often used in these novels to signal a fundamental relationship to life and death in wartime, so the manner in which soldiers are characterised and figure within plots is also an important aspect of how the war is conceptualised in contemporary fiction. In the novels considered so far,

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the apparently ‘friendly’ soldier becomes an ambivalent figure, either through an explicit act of personal betrayal or simply through an association with wartime violence. Ron, the GI who features in Jensen’s novel, manages to fulfil one stereotype of the visiting soldier by impregnating Gloria and then leaving her, but he does provide an apparently happy home in America for her sister. The American soldiers who arrived en masse in Britain from 1942 onwards encountered British civilians whose perceptions of the United States were often influenced by cinematic representations: ‘A young civil servant, working at the Air Ministry, was aware that the United States consisted of “a mixture of slaves in the South, gangsters in Chicago and musicals with Fred Astaire”.’27 In Jensen’s novel, Gloria remembers encountering the Yanks for the first time: ‘You can’t help thinking Clark Gable when you see them, no matter how hard you try’ (Jensen, War Crimes, p. 11). Writing in December 1943, George Orwell took a less benevolent view, suggesting that the behaviour of American troops provoked anti-American feeling: ‘it is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory.’28 In a study published in the mid-1970s, and based largely on individual recollections of the war years, Norman Longmate notes that the attitude of British forces towards the Americans, who were seen to be more smartly uniformed, better fed and living in better conditions, was tinged with envy (The GI’s, p. 101); this could only be compounded by the fact that, despite Orwell’s reservations, these material advantages, together with their lack of war-weariness, increased the Americans’ appeal to the local communities near which they were stationed. It is also possible to read back onto wartime the dominant position of America in the post-war world. American forces symbolise a future in which America’s political and economic power comprehensively overshadows Britain’s.29 Jensen’s depiction of Gloria’s relationship with Ron, a relationship which allows both to escape albeit temporarily from the claims made on them by the war, can be contrasted with Beryl Bainbridge’s treatment of a romance between a British civilian and a GI in her 1973 novel The Dressmaker, a dark depiction of the tensions attendant on wartime alliances. Set in wartime Liverpool, the novel charts the relationship between the young and inexperienced Rita, and Ira, a GI; the narrative begins with the word ‘Afterwards’, but it is only at the very end that the nature of the act of violence that has taken place in the home Rita shares with her two aunts, Nellie and Marge, is revealed. Rita is self-conscious about the illicit nature of her relationship with Ira, initially keeping their meetings secret from her family, even though Valerie Mander, their neighbour up the road, has openly become engaged to another

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American, called Chuck. Notably, the house where Valerie lives with her parents has been modernised: Marge notices: A recess lit by a lamp where the cupboard under the stairs would have been; a whole window of glass put in the hall at the side of the front door. To give more light, Mrs Mander said. Light was meant to be outside – that was the point of living inside.30

This introduction of light into the Manders’s home could, Marge reflects, have practical consequences: ‘There might be doodlebugs, and they’d be sorry they hadn’t kept the bricks’ (The Dressmaker, p. 37). But its light and openness stand in contrast to Nellie and Marge’s house, in which physical proximity is countered by concealed fears and desires. Rita’s feelings about being seen out with Ira when she takes him for a day in the country can be partly explained by her lack of experience and poise. When they pass by a squad of British soldiers, she reflects: ‘It was like being caught fraternising with the enemy, alone on a country road with an American’ (p. 53). This view is echoed in Bainbridge’s A Quiet Life (1976), when Alan reflects that fraternising with Germans is ‘worse than going with Yanks’,31 which, implicitly, is bad enough in itself. Although the British and Americans are Allies, Rita feels she is being disloyal in having an American boyfriend. She also alludes to violent clashes between, ‘Our Tommies’ and the ‘Yanks’: ‘It’s the money you get [. . .] they have fights in Liverpool, down by Exchange Station. Everybody knows’ (The Dressmaker, pp. 53–4). But Ira claims not to know; later, desperate to get in touch with him after a falling out, Rita asks Valerie to get a letter to Ira via Chuck, only to learn that Chuck had to read her last missive out loud to Ira, who is illiterate. When Nellie discovers Ira in bed with the widowed and unstable Marge, she interprets his actions as a violation of her home, flying into a rage when she believes he has damaged some of her carefully stored furniture, and ‘[l]ike an angel of the hearth avenging the final collapse of the domestic moral order, Nellie stabs the invader with her scissors’;32 it is with the aftermath of the murder that the novel opens. Nellie’s action can be read as a protest against a kind of invasion, the upsetting of the domestic space that the war has brought in its train, and, implicitly, as a revolt against the kind of modernisation that the Manders have embraced. As an American, Ira might superficially embody progress and adventure, but the glimpses the family receive of his home life, and his illiterate and uninformed state, imply that, in attracting Rita’s attention, he is simply benefitting from a reflected myth. Bainbridge encodes here disillusionment with the post-war détente, as well as echoing the wartime

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cultural perception of the American forces as both allies and invaders. In this regard, Valerie’s Chuck represents the positive stereotype of the American as offering glamour and plenty, whilst Ira encodes a more backward-looking, insular and sexually exploitative version of the Yank. Although Jensen also addresses and self-consciously incorporates references to these types – in an attempt to fashion him an American genealogy, for instance, Gloria names her son ‘Hank’ – she is perhaps more concerned than Bainbridge is with exploring the dissonances between kinds of war experience that are, ideologically speaking, bracketed together as elements of ‘the war effort’. Any such interrogation of the ideology of war is implicit, rather than explicitly articulated, in Bainbridge’s work; the aftermath of Ira’s murder initially reads like the aftermath of a bombing raid, and rather than identifying commonalities between gendered experiences of war, Bainbridge sees the arrival of the Americans as disruptive of the gendered economy of the home, a principally feminine space. It is notable, then, that in A Quiet Life, set in the immediate aftermath of the war, Bainbridge depicts contact with a soldier as a legitimate form of escape from a claustrophobic home life, and that here, the soldier in question is a German prisoner of war. However, the teenage Madge’s meetings with her lover in the sand-hills near her parents’ house serve to emphasise the dysfunctional nature of her home life. The focalising protagonist, her brother Alan, condemns Madge for her rash actions, but his thoughts about Madge increasingly seem to be a way of distracting his own attention from the increasingly bizarre behaviour of his parents, his  mother’s obsessive cleaning and tidying of the house existing in tension with his father’s secrecy about his business dealings. Appearances can only be kept up with the collusion of Madge, who eventually discovers that her bankrupt father has signed the family home over to her. Once again, a woman is central in holding together the illusion of domestic harmony. In this context, Madge’s rebellious gesture, which she claims is rooted in genuine affection for the prisoner, is at least more honest than the façade of normality which her brother anxiously attempts to keep in place. Madge’s German is not strongly characterised in this novel, but he emphasises the difficulties of attempting to make the shift from war to peace, which are also emblematised by the fact that her father continues to wear battledress around the house: He’d been issued with the uniform during the war when he was supposed to be an air raid warden, going from house to house to make sure everyone had drawn their black-out curtains. Mostly when the siren went, he’d hidden under the dining-room table. (A Quiet Life, p. 12)33

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As I noted in the last chapter, the figure of the German soldier can signify in many different ways in British fictions dealing with the Second World War. The prisoner of war is notable partly because, like the American, he is stranded, temporarily at least, on British territory, and therefore, in certain ways, disempowered. As in Bainbridge’s novel, he can also serve as a means of tracing the transition from war to peace, as he moves from being a captive enemy to being a free citizen again. In fact, this distinction between ‘captive’ and ‘free’ immediately has to be qualified, because even during the war itself, prisoners did have the opportunity to mix, albeit in constrained circumstances, with British civilians. Peter Ho Davies’s The Welsh Girl, which I have already mentioned in relation to the depiction of abortion, is a notable example here. Like Bainbridge, Davies explores the extent to which experiences of war within Britain were subject to regional variation. Indeed, the location of the action is central to the events that unfold, as the encounter here is between Esther, a farmer’s daughter, and Karsten, an inmate from a nearby prisoner of war camp. Another narrative strand traces the attempts of Captain Rotheram, a German-Jewish refugee working for British intelligence, to ascertain whether Rudolf Hess, also at this point held captive in Wales, has genuinely lost his memory or is merely feigning. The adversarial relationship between Rotheram and Hess, complicated by Rotheram’s conflicted relationship to his own Jewishness, is paralleled by the friendship that develops between Karsten and Esther. Karsten is explicitly not a supporter of the Nazis, and in depicting the different shades of conviction among the prisoners, Davies both evokes the turn from blame to re-education that was characteristic of British attitudes towards the captive Germans, especially towards the end of the war, whilst also showing, through the Welsh protagonists, the complicated nature of the ‘Home Front’. The novel’s engagement with secrecy is many-layered: Rotheram represents ‘official’ secrecy; the villagers pick up various rumours and half-secrets about the progress of the war from the sappers sent to build the camp; and Esther has not only the secret of her pregnancy but also of her contact with the escaped Karsten. The narrative is overlaid with the suspicion of the Welsh towards the English, and the gap between the two cultures is expressed by Davies through a focus on language and especially the culturally embedded meanings of particular words. The novel thus echoes Sonya O. Rose’s observation that, ‘[a]mong Welsh nationalists there apparently was concern that Welsh culture would be weakened by wartime efforts at national unification, as well as by increased contact between Welsh people and those from outside Wales.’34 But Davies also at times questions the stability of an identity

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based on language. The title of the novel points to a linguistic puzzle: the derivation of the verb ‘to welsh’, meaning to lie, or to go back on an agreement. Esther’s father Arthur explains that, in the time when children were forbidden to speak Welsh in school, they would be punished if caught doing so by having a sign hung round their neck: ‘The real devilishness, though, was that if the boy caught another lad speaking Welsh, and informed on him, he could hand the sign on’ (Davies, The Welsh Girl, p. 94). Thus, according to Arthur, the English managed to divide and therefore rule the Welsh-speaking children by encouraging them to practise linguistic surveillance on each other. However, later, Esther’s former English teacher, Mrs Roberts, the mother of her erstwhile boyfriend Rhys, reveals another definition. According to Mrs Roberts, the term relates to ‘Welsh courtship’, a practice whereby ‘a betrothed couple who couldn’t yet afford to marry’ would share a bed ‘before the wedding day’ (p. 309). She adds that the negative connotations of the term come from the fact that ‘there’s some what abused it, reneged on the deal, which gave it a bad name’ (p. 309). These competing definitions, one seeing the Welsh victimised by the English, the other seeing them victimised by each other, illustrate how language can be appropriated for particular cultural purposes; the derivation of the term is in fact unknown. Within the narrative, however, Mrs Roberts’s definition strikes home when Esther claims Rhys as the father of her child; the story is Mrs Roberts’s way of expressing her acceptance of what might in other circumstances might be seen as an inappropriate relationship. Lying about her child’s paternity in order to hide the shame of her encounter with the violent, and English, Colin ultimately makes Esther feel that the child is ‘hers alone’ (p. 313). The different inflections of the words ‘mothering’ and ‘fathering’ are noted by Nancy Chodorow: ‘Being a mother [. . .] is not only bearing a child – it is being a person who socializes and nurtures.’35 This asymmetry is also implicit in Jensen’s novel; it seems odd that a woman might have forgotten having had a child, much odder than if a man claimed to forget having fathered one. The substituting of one father for another, facilitated by the removal of Colin and Rhys as a result of the war, is constructed as Esther’s prerogative as the mother left behind. In fact, there is yet another proxy father, whose unlikely appearance serves to underline the extent to which Esther’s pregnancy leaves her feeling isolated from her father and neighbours. This is Karsten, the German prisoner of war, who is the focalising character for about half the novel. Karsten and his men are captured after the D-day landings in May 1944. This was the point at which the prisoner of war population in Britain began to expand dramatically and it continued to do so even

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after the end of hostilities. Miriam Kochan records that until March 1944 there were fewer than 2,000 German prisoners in Britain; by July of the same year, there were almost 8,000, and the high point was reached in September 1946, with over 400,000 officers and men in camps scattered all over the British Isles.36 Fraternisation – contact between prisoners and locals exceeding that required for prisoners to carry out their allotted work – was forbidden but, as Henry Faulk notes, it did occur, and was dependent on ‘local conditions [. . .] In general, contact was best where intellectual liberalism and Church humanity set the tone, as in Cambridge, and least satisfactory in rural areas with large estates.’37 In the area around Swansea in South Wales, which was badly blitzed, locals were hostile to the prisoners, whilst Faulk quotes a member of camp staff from elsewhere in rural Wales who noted the preference of ‘village girls’ for prisoners of war: I asked a group of girls why they preferred the prisoners. There was no hesitation in the reply. ‘We grew up with the lads in the village and know them like brothers. That’s not interesting any more. And it’s too dangerous to go steady. Every one knows about it and thinks there’s going to be a wedding. So you have to watch it. But no-one takes the prisoners seriously. That’s just being friendly. Besides, you want to know what they are like.’ (Group Captives, p. 169)

The notion of prisoners being more ‘interesting’ echoes attitudes expressed towards the ‘exoticism’ of the GIs but is surprising to hear in relation to German prisoners, given the language barrier and prevalent cultural perceptions of Germany, very different from the image of America as a land of plenty. Difference in and of itself seems to be the lure for these ‘village girls’; about 800 British women eventually married prisoners of war, an act which required them to give up British nationality (Group Captives, p. 169).38 The laws about fraternisation changed following a test case in July 1947 when a German prisoner was sentenced to 12 months for associating with a British girl. Notably, in the challenge to this sentence, it was pointed out that there was no ban on British troops stationed on the continent marrying German women (Kochan, Prisoners, p. 179). This levelling of the playing field between female German civilians and soldiers is interesting as it could be seen as ‘de-criminalising’ the prisoner of war, suggesting that, like civilians at home in Germany, he may have been a victim of the regime. Davies evokes some of the variety of attitudes towards prisoners of war found in the historical record whilst depicting Karsten as a sympathetic, anti-Nazi figure. The fact that Karsten’s father was in the military during the First World War is given more emphasis, as a factor

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influencing Karsten’s own attitude to military service, than any belief in Nazi ideology: Karsten recalls his father’s contempt for Hitler: ‘A corporal? Might as well be led by a cinema usher, a bus conductor, a park warden!’ (Davies, The Welsh Girl, p. 152). Prisoners of war were categorised as ‘White’, ‘Grey’ or ‘Black’, depending on their ‘degree of identification [. . .] with the National Socialist group outlook’ (Faulk, Group Captives, p. 62). Davies echoes this type of categorisation in his description of the ‘150-percenters’ (Davies, The Welsh Girl, p. 143), prisoners intent on maintaining Nazi-style discipline and continuing to promote Nazi beliefs within the camp, and Karsten is clearly situated outside this group. This makes it easier for Davies to align Karsten with Esther, who herself has an ambivalent attitude towards issues of national identity and their relation to the war effort. Esther is glad when the Germans arrive because it means that the English soldiers who have been building the camp – including her attacker Colin – will be leaving (The Welsh Girl, p. 123). Like the central protagonist of Sheers’s Resistance, Karsten speaks good English, enabling him to win the trust of Esther. Esther’s own attitude seems to echo the liberal humanist view that Faulk attributes to the Cambridge intelligentsia: ‘She ought to hate them, she thinks, and she supposes she does, but she can’t quite muster the heat of anger. She doesn’t know them, after all; whatever they’ve done, it doesn’t feel like they’ve done it to her’ (p. 130). What has been ‘done’ to her has been done by Colin, a British soldier and supposedly a friend. When she first suspects she is pregnant, Esther, like Gloria in Jensen’s novel, rejects the idea of writing a letter to the child’s father, Colin: ‘I’ve missed, she tries, but all that comes is I’ve missed . . . you’ (p. 191). Like Gloria’s imagined letters, in which the declaration of pregnancy sits uneasily beside sexual fantasies, this letter veers from what has really been missed – a menstrual period – to a cliché which is simply untrue, that Esther has missed Colin. She fantasises about Colin being captured: she thinks of him surrendering, hands raised, pictures him in solitary confinement, curled up in a dark cell, but even as she smiles grimly to herself, the very word “confinement” turns on her [. . .] she’s the one who’ll be in her confinement soon enough. (p. 191)

This evocation of the double meaning of confinement is not subtle, but Davies’s bluntness does serve to foreground the notion that Esther, unwillingly impregnated, is now trapped by her body, and Colin’s confinement, especially this description of him ‘curled up’ in the ‘dark cell’, is shown to infantilise and disempower him. In placing the two meanings side by side, Davies also foregrounds the political aspect of Esther’s

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fate, seeing it, like the fate of the men, as a consequence of the war; to use the term in the way Jensen uses it, Esther is a victim of a ‘war crime’. Later, after his escape, when Karsten realises that he will not be able to get away from Wales and will probably have to go back to the camp, Esther reveals that she interpreted his escape as a way for him to ‘redeem [his] honour’ (p. 268). Like ‘confinement’, this word ‘honour’ takes on a double, and gendered, meaning. Karsten retorts that she ‘can’t know what it is to lose your honour’ (p. 269) only for Esther to assert that she can. In different contexts, they have each experienced loss of honour as the erosion of agency and subjection to the will of others. Again Davies politicises Esther’s fate through the parallel with Karsten; her revelation of this secret to Karsten leads to a sexual encounter between them which is constructed as a form of ‘surrender’ (p. 271) on his part, preceding a further surrender when he gives himself up to be returned to the camp. Having constructed Colin as the enemy, Esther proceeds by the logic that the enemy of one’s enemy is a friend and her act also reinforces the parallel between Karsten and Rhys, as though by having sex with Karsten she has sex with the absent Rhys by proxy. She later thinks that ‘she’s been clinging to some shameful, superstitious hope of the German’s seed driving out Colin’s, of the war being fought in her womb. Of bloodshed’ (p. 279). It is at this point that she attempts, and fails, to obtain an abortion and sleeping with Karsten thus becomes a way of re-fathering the child, or at least of effacing the link between Colin and the baby. But Esther’s body is also refigured as the site of an ideological battle; the notion of war being fought ‘in her womb’ is perhaps the ultimate politicisation of Esther’s pregnancy. The novel’s epilogue reveals that Karsten has returned to Germany after two years living with Esther and her son and working on the farm but that Rhys has never returned. Rhys’s continuing absence means that Esther does not to have to admit that her son has been fathered by an Englishman, but it is appropriate that she ends the narrative as his ‘widow’, and alone. These post-war events are observed by Rotheram, whose attempted interrogation of Hess has acted as a counterpoint to Esther’s and Karsten’s narrative. Rotheram, classified as Jewish by the Nazis and forbidden by them to describe himself as German, ends the novel feeling a degree of freedom in this lack of national identity, and reflects that ‘as much as he understood it to be a source of their victimisation, it seemed at once such pure freedom [for the Jews] to be without a country’ (p. 332). Rotheram’s preference for ‘routes’ rather than ‘roots’ may be the result of exile and humiliation but it is also a view most easily adopted by one who, now at least, has the privilege of relative freedom of movement.

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In order to try to ascertain whether Hess’s memory loss is genuine or feigned, Rotheram confronts Hess with evidence of his past actions; the novel opens with Rotheram showing Hess Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will (1935). Hess’s guilt can be imputed from evidence other than his own admission, but his inability or refusal to remember complicates the intention that, eventually, he should stand trial. As the novel records, Hess emerged from his mental confusion for long enough to be deemed fit to stand trial, though as Richard Overy notes, Hess’s own ‘claim that his memory loss was merely tactical was misleading. A substantial part of the amnesia was not feigned. [. . .] Hess took weeks to recover his memory and then never fully.’39 Rotheram interprets Hess’s refusal to listen to court proceedings as a tactic for the abnegation of responsibility: ‘He’s getting away [. . .] Can’t you see?’ (Davies, The Welsh Girl, p. 327). The Nuremberg process, and the concept of ‘war crime’ on which it rested, were developed post hoc, and Davies seems to suggest that such a framework becomes meaningless if those accused refused to accept its standards of right and wrong, even if they are eventually found guilty. At the very end of the novel, Rotheram recalls that, interrogated after his recapture, Karsten, who, like Hess and other prisoners has seen the newsreels of concentration camps, expresses shame at having fought ‘for that’ (p. 332). This is the admission that Hess does not enunciate, and it persuades Rotheram to be lenient towards Karsten. Despite his uneasy relationship towards his Jewishness, Rotheram can only forgive those who acknowledge their part in the crimes against the Jews. Karsten situates himself within a network of responsibility, despite his physical and ideological removal from the crimes themselves. In fact, this very removal takes the edge off his expression of shame, which stands as the inverse of Hess’s refusal to confess his own guilt. Hess will not admit his involvement; Karsten will admit his, but this serves only to reinforce his credentials as, within the novel, a ‘good German’, rather than to pin down the questions of guilt and responsibility that are ostensibly at stake.

Post-war It is evident that a focus on the transition from wartime to peacetime can offer the opportunity for contemporary authors to assess, either implicitly or explicitly, the social aftermath of the war for particular groups. Some of the novels I have discussed so far hark back to debates about the reintegration of the returning soldier that were, understandably, to the fore in representations of the war from the second half of

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the 1940s.40 However, in line with the ongoing process of uncovering less canonical stories about this period, others have chosen to reconsider the Home Front experience, and in particular, the experience of women, in the light of the debates I have outlined about whether the war can be seen to have had a lasting effect on women’s social roles and opportunities. A key example here, with which I will conclude this study, is Waters’s The Night Watch. Both formally and thematically, this novel engages with secrecy and revelation, even though it eschews the use of memory as a structuring device that characterises many of the novels considered so far. It also weaves narratives of lesbian wartime and postwar experience into familiar scenarios such as bombing raids, offering a corrective to the glossing over or marginalising of such experiences in other accounts. Despite its reverse chronology, The Night Watch is marked by the paucity of retrospection on the part of the protagonists, and this is one of the features of the novel which encourages the reader to continue; the explanation of particular exchanges and encounters can only be found later in the novel, when effect fleshes out cause. Knowing that in 1947, key protagonists – Helen and Julia, who are covertly living as a couple, Viv, who is involved with the married Reggie, her brother Duncan, a young man recently out of prison, and Kay, a solitary lesbian – have lived through the war, the reader’s attention is centred, not on whether they will survive, but how. As in a forward-moving narrative, suspense functions through the concealment and later revelation of particular pieces of information. For example, when Viv gives Kay her ring back after seeing her in the street in 1947, the significance of this gesture is obscure, and the nature of the bond between the two women only becomes clear towards the end of the 1944 section. The tangled relationships between Kay, Helen and Julia are also clarified the further on into the novel and the further back in time the reader progresses. Having begun by depicting relationships that seem to be endangered, Waters ends in 1941 with relationships about to start; the disappointments and betrayal to follow have already been anatomised. The implications for the reader of ending on this point of optimism are complicated. On the one hand, this optimism has already been undercut, but on the other, it is, in this ending, nostalgically recalled. The climax of the novel, when Kay, working as an auxiliary ambulance driver, comforts Helen, who is trapped in the rubble of a collapsed house, also contributes to the pattern of imagery about confinement which runs throughout the novel and which serves to bring into focus issues of privacy and secrecy. As a boy is removed from the ruins by the rescue team, he is described appearing ‘head-first, as he must have come

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out of the womb’ (Waters, The Night Watch, p. 469), an image which anticipates the notion of Helen’s rescue as a rebirth. Watching Helen being rescued, Kay, who will, as the reader knows, become her lover, is ‘unable to believe that something so fresh and so unmarked could have emerged from so much chaos’ (p. 470), a comment that envisages the bond between the two women as a counter to the death and destruction that surrounds them. Yet the image of Helen trapped, dependent on Kay for help and support, also has negative connotations, emblematising as it does how their relationship will develop. The reader has already seen that Helen will eventually feel the need to break free from Kay, making secret visits to Julia while Kay is out on duty, and that Kay, one of the few characters to look back to the past, feels, in 1947, that she will never be able to ‘get over’ (p. 101) her wartime experiences. Despite the horrors she witnesses as an ambulance driver, during the war Kay feels a sense of purpose then that is lacking to her in peacetime. Kay, who continues to dress in men’s clothes as she did during the war, is jokingly referred to by Duncan as ‘Colonel Barker’ (p. 6) in a reference to Valerie Arkell-Smith, the subject of an interwar cause célèbre, who lived as a man for much of her adult life. A shop-keeper tells Kay, ‘Don’t you know the war’s over?’ (p. 94), implying that whilst her masculine appearance might have been acceptable then, it is not suitable any more. Colonel Barker, who as Valerie Barker delivered horses to France during the First World War, drew on this direct knowledge of the front to give an account of his war experience which temporarily at least convinced male war veterans.41 Waters’s portrayal of Kay also echoes Radclyffe Hall’s Stephen in The Well of Loneliness (1928), who drives an ambulance in France during the First World War and is awarded the Croix de Guerre. Describing the involvement in the first war of women such as Stephen, the narrator of The Well of Loneliness comments: War and death had given them a right to life, and life tasted sweet, very sweet to their palates. Later on would come bitterness, disillusion, but never again would such women submit to being driven back to their holes and corners.42

In having Kay dwell on the traumatic aspects of her war experience, Waters exposes the ambivalence of a situation in which ‘war and death’ apparently give ‘a right to life’.43 This echoes the findings of social historians, who, as I have shown, also see wartime as providing some women at least with hitherto unavailable opportunities, only for these to be withdrawn when the war ends. Kay’s continuing link to the war is expressed partly through her appearance, Viv’s secret will eventually reveal itself through changes to

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her body and Helen’s paranoia about her possible betrayal by Julia leads her to a sudden, shocking and, initially, secret form of bodily self-harm. After Julia has suggested that Helen’s own earlier affair is the cause of her suspicion, Helen is left alone: she’d sometimes thought, in moments like this, I’ll burn myself, or I’ll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem. I won’t be doing it, she said to herself, like some hysterical girl. I won’t be doing it for Julia, hoping she’ll come and catch me at it. It won’t be like lying on the sitting-room floor. I’ll be doing it for myself, as a secret. (Waters, The Night Watch, pp. 143–4, emphasis in original)

Helen wants to transform internal, psychological pain, into a visible scar. Given the physical dangers that she has survived, this appears paradoxical, but Helen seems to believe that materialising her feelings in the form of a mark or scar will somehow neutralise or cancel out the painful emotions she is enduring inwardly. Having made her jealousy all too apparent to Julia, Helen cannot recant; although a razor mark will be ‘a very poor secret’ (p. 144), it is a means of compensating herself for her earlier humiliating exposure to Julia. Helen seems at this point to have reached the limit of what can be articulated verbally; swiping at her thigh with a razor blade becomes an expression of self-reproach, not only for accusing Julia of betrayal, but also for her own betrayal of Kay. By the end of the novel, when Helen is shown being rescued, her gesture of self-harm can also be understood as a belated form of survivor guilt. She has faced the ultimate secret, an encounter with death, itself echoed when she and Julia shelter together during a raid in 1944. Love and death are too closely entwined for Helen, and the pain she inflicts on herself in the cold bathroom in 1947 is another version of the confusion Kay experiences in relation to the events of wartime. Like Viv, Helen seeks privacy in the bathroom; she and Julia have their own flat, but the audible presence of their downstairs neighbours, and the need to mask their relationship with a decoy second bedroom, shows how public propriety invades what should be a private space. Perhaps paradoxically, a certain freedom from surveillance can also be found out in the open. When Viv decides to confide in her workmate Betty about her pregnancy, she does not want to return to the hostel where they live, and ‘can’t face’ (p. 272) going to a café. Instead they go into the garden of a ‘residential square [. . .] the sort of place that would have been locked to them in the years before the war; now, of

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course, the railings had gone and they went straight in’ (p. 272). The war has led to a democratisation of public spaces, and Viv and Betty’s conversation on a park bench is redolent of meetings between spies and their controllers, which, in literary representations at least, also typically take place in public.44 Although Viv meets Reggie at a cheap hotel, contemporary accounts reported the frequency of couples having sex out of doors under cover of the blackout (Jivani, It’s Not Unusual, p. 56). The bond between Julia and Helen is cemented when they go out walking in blacked-out London together, but their daring is countered by a fear of physical danger when an air raid begins. Notably, rather than going into a shelter, they hide behind the ‘baffle-wall’ which screens the entrance of a public building, their ‘two opened coats’ forming ‘what seemed to Helen to be a second baffle-wall, darker even than the first’ (The Night Watch, p. 349). They fashion their own shelter from the bombing, managing to annexe their own space and making themselves ‘invisible’ (p. 349), a gesture that echoes their later cohabitation, as well as marking ‘their social invisibility as lesbian lovers’.45 Their first sexual encounter occurs in these inauspicious circumstances, and sexuality is thus constructed as a response to the danger that they are experiencing, with the blackout facilitating their intimate contact by providing a cloak of secrecy. In 1947, Reggie and Viv go out into the countryside to be together for the afternoon, but Viv is nervous about having sex in the open, demanding that Reggie cover them both with a blanket because, ‘Someone might see’ (p. 66). Peace sees the return of the self-consciousness and sense of propriety that Viv was able to put to one side in wartime. Waters herself notes the contrast between this incident, and Helen and Julia’s picnic in the park in the same section of the novel: ‘[Viv and Reggie] are instantly recognizable as a couple in a way that Helen and Julia aren’t, but there are different pressures on them to be secret. Everybody’s got to be secret for different reasons’.46 In a heteronormative society, for Viv and Reggie to be seen together at all would be dangerous, whilst Helen and Julia can ‘pass’ as friends, though they still have to be circumspect in both their living arrangements and their public displays of affection.47 The difficulties of conducting relationships that would be frowned on by society are not just spatial. In 1947, Helen torments herself by imagining where Julia might be when her phone-call to her from work gets no reply. ‘At last, after almost a minute, Helen put the receiver down, unable to bear the image of the telephone shrieking, forlorn and abandoned, in her own empty house’ (The Night Watch, p. 116). The telephone is a way for the suspicious Helen to keep tabs on Julia’s

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movements, but here its impotent ringing, ‘forlorn and abandoned’, is metonymic for how Helen feels when it appears that Julia is not there to answer the call. Helen does not want Julia to have retained the freedom of movement that she had during the war, but wishes her to remain fixed in place in her study in the flat. In 1944, Helen takes surreptitious phone calls from Kay while she is at work; they have to be reticent, for fear that ‘the switchboard girl’ (p. 264) might be listening in. On one occasion, feeling guilty at having been brusque towards her lover, after ending the conversation, Helen phones Kay back to tell her, ‘that thing’ (p. 266), their coded way of declaring their love for each other. Their anxiety about the possible consequences of the switchboard girl’s surveillance is shared by Viv. She does not write to Reggie about her pregnancy, for fear of ‘the Censor’ (p. 351) and eventually decides to phone him at his barracks, placing the call when the other women at the hostel have gone down to the basement in response to an air raid warning. ‘Think Before You Speak’ (p. 352), a label on the telephone tells her. This warning reminds Viv, should she need reminding, that even if the other residents of the hostel cannot overhear her call, there is always the danger of the girl at the Exchange. Robert Mackay notes that telephone lines were tapped partly to provide a source of information about public morale;48 the injunction on the telephone is aimed at preventing loose talk that might be of use to the enemy, re-focusing attention away from the possibility of governmental surveillance, as well serving as a reminder that the telephone is principally intended for the delivery of information rather than social chat. Viv’s fears of being overheard indicate a collapsing of political and personal. As in Muriel Spark’s novels, surveillance may be presented as having principally political intentions, but it also intrudes into personal exchanges, implicitly policing the types of behaviour that the war has itself licensed. In the work of Waters, Jensen and others, a gender-related paradox of wartime identified by Sonya O. Rose is brought in focus. Discussing the various demands placed on women in relation to the home, war work, and the combination of the domestic and public which constitutes the ‘war effort’, Rose suggests that the message for women was that they ‘should participate, yes, but not become transformed by that participation’ (Which People’s War?, p. 123). The ongoing interest in the war displayed by these writers shows the continuing need to come to terms with both the nature of women’s participation in the war and the transformation this undoubtedly wrought. As readers, we are licensed to overhear, to listen in on covert conversations and to have access to the private thoughts of protagonists. Authors such as those whose work I have considered here attempt, by allowing unfamiliar and taboo narratives to be

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articulated, to defuse the association of secrecy with political power and to construct counter-narratives to the official record.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Waters, The Night Watch, pp. 433, 435. Beddoe, Out of the Shadows, p. 131. Webster, Imagining Home, p. 13. Julie Summers cites the experience of the novelist Barbara Cartland, who worked as a welfare officer during the war and counselled couples who found themselves in this situation. Cartland noted that many, although initially determined to give the child up for adoption, would eventually admit: ‘ “The poor little devil can’t help itself, and after all it’s one of hers, isn’t it?” ’ (Summers, Strangers, p. 156). At the conclusion of Andrew Greig’s novel, That Summer (2000), after Stella’s RAF pilot boyfriend Len is killed in action, she marries a former suitor in order to give the child a father. In this instance, the substitution of one man for another reinforces the extent to which the excitement of the wartime affair with Len cannot be licensed once the war is over; a semblance of normality must be resumed. Summerfield, ‘It Did Me Good’, p. 16. Riley, ‘ “The Free Mothers” ’, p. 60. Riley, ‘Some Peculiarities’, p. 260. Hanson, A Cultural History, p. 120. Summerfield, ‘The Girl’, p. 50. Jensen, War Crimes, pp. 50–1, 65. Davies, Boy Blue, p. 9. Keller, ‘From Secrets of Life’, p. 44. Riley points out that pronatalist ideas were not confined to one end or the other of the political spectrum, and notes that efforts were made in the  1949 Population Commission Report to distance British policy from the ‘reactionary pronatalism’ (‘ “The Free Mothers” ’, p. 91) of Germany and Italy. The emphasis was to be on planning: ‘Fascism and the refusal of birth control were well enough associated in the general imagination from the early 1940s on’ (‘ “The Free Mothers” ’, p. 92). Leys, Trauma, p. 105. Van der Kolk and van der Hart, ‘The Intrusive Past’, pp. 158–82. Dawson, The Upstairs People, pp. 183–4. Gardiner, Wartime, p. 96. Simons, Rosamond Lehmann, p. 86. Notably, in Tennyson Jesse’s novel, Julia, who has become pregnant by her husband while having an affair with another man, Leo, feels unable to ask her female friends for help, and turns to Leo, a sailor, who obtains the name and address of an abortionist from one of his shipmates (Jesse, A Pin, p. 277). Whilst acknowledging that Mrs Humble probably believes she is ‘helping girls out of difficult places’, Julia feels that she displays a ‘casual acceptance of depravity’ (A Pin, p. 288). In Lehmann’s novel, Olivia, who becomes pregnant during her affair with her sister’s husband, wants to keep the affair secret and so when she makes inquiries of a female friend,

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20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction pretends to be doing so on behalf of a third party, refusing to ‘[e]nter into the feminine conspiracy [and] be received with tact, sympathy, pills and hot-water bottles’ (Lehmann, The Weather, p. 239). Despite her determination to get through the procedure alone, Olivia later has to call on the help of her ex-husband Ivor when the after-effects prove difficult to deal with. Like Viv in The Night Watch, Olivia pretends to be married to Ivor when he has to call a doctor, persuading both men that she is suffering a miscarriage (The Weather, pp. 297–9). Davies, The Welsh Girl, p. 86. The depiction of this incident is problematic, partly because it seems to be over-determined, introduced to augment a thematic chain to do with endings and entropy that runs throughout the novel and linking in this regard to the fact that Tom’s brother Dick is the product of an incestuous liaison between their mother and her own father. Such incidents certainly undercut the consolatory power of the fairy tale – and Martha’s resemblance to a fairy-tale witch is alluded to only to be undercut in the description of the abortion (Swift, Waterland, p. 301) – but Swift nevertheless falls back on narrative clichés about inbred country folk, clichés that are rendered no less simplistic by being embedded in a self-reflexive literary novel. King, Cold Snap, p. 203. Connolly, Jack the Lad, p. 364. Duffy, Change, p. 156. Martin, The Woman, p. 94. Jivani, It’s Not Unusual, p. 50. Longmate, The GI’s, p. 27. Orwell, ‘As I Please’, p. 12. One exception to this perception of America as forward-looking was racial segregation. After much public debate over this issue, the War Cabinet decided in late 1942 that although ‘it was desirable that the people of this country should avoid becoming too friendly with coloured American troops’, the Americans must not expect our authorities civil or military to assist them in enforcing a policy of segregation [. . .] So far as concerned admission to canteens, public houses, theatres, cinemas and so forth, there would, and must, be no restriction of the facilities hitherto extended to coloured persons. (Qtd in Longmate, The GI’s, pp. 122–3) Black troops do not seem to have been treated with any greater suspicion than white American troops, on the whole, but were nevertheless considered something of a ‘novelty’ among the civilian population of many parts of Britain, particularly in rural areas, so that some of the comments about them which Longmate quotes now sound patronising rather than friendly. David Reynolds cites Eisenhower as commenting, after a visit to Britain in September 1942, that the British know nothing at all about the conventions and habits of polite society that have been developed in the U. S. in order to preserve a segregation in social activity without making the matter one of official or public notice

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[. . .] Our own white soldiers, seeing a girl walk down the street with a negro, frequently see themselves as protectors of the weaker sex and believe it necessary to intervene even to the extent of using force, to let her know what she’s doing. (Reynolds, Rich Relations, p. 218)

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

This chivalrous behaviour became especially problematic when the focus of white American intervention was not a black American but a black Commonwealth or indeed black British citizen: ‘On Merseyside [home to one of the oldest established black communities in Britain] a West Indian technician was beaten up by GIs when he refused to leave a cinema queue’ (Rich Relations, p. 306). In post-war film and television representations, attitudes to race are often a flashpoint between the GIs and the British, with white women fraternising with black soldiers in defiance of white American attempts to retain segregation: see, for example, John Schlesinger’s film Yanks (1979) and the BBC drama series Land Girls (2009). Bainbridge, The Dressmaker, p. 37. Bainbridge, A Quiet Life, p. 42. Lassner, ‘Fiction’, p. 19. The events of this novel evidently draw on Bainbridge’s own early home life: see Watts, ‘Dame Beryl Bainbridge’, p. 39. Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 222. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, p. 11. Kochan, Prisoners, p. 40. Faulk, Group Captives, p. 168. This figure can be compare with Longmate’s estimate that there were eventually about 70,000 GI brides, if a GI bride is defined as ‘someone who married an American serviceman who had been stationed in the British Isles at some time before mid August 1945 – although the actual wedding might not have taken place until later’ (Longmate, The GI’s, p. 345). Overy, Interrogations, p. 127. Anxieties about the returning servicemen, and particularly about the integration into peacetime society of men who had encountered extreme violence, who had, indeed, been trained to kill, were often expressed directly and indirectly in both literary and genre fiction: see Stewart, Narratives of Memory. Collis, Colonel Barker’s Monstrous Regiment, pp. 131–3. Hall, The Well, p. 275. In a book chapter which focuses on Colonel Barker’s involvement with the National Fascisti, a British Fascist movement of the interwar years, Julie Wheelwright points to an important difference between Arkell-Smith’s and Hall’s adoption of male dress: Hall and other feminists of the period wore male clothes as a statement of their scepticism towards gender categories. It was a rebellion against male order. Although the “Colonel” shared Hall’s need to shed the trappings of femininity, politically they were diametrically opposed. The “Colonel” denied her lesbianism by embracing an extreme right-wing ideology that actually reinforced women’s role as mother and helpmate. (Wheelwright, ‘ “Colonel” Barker’, p. 47)

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44. Yuri Modin, controller of John Cairncross, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, notes that he tended to arrange meetings for the evening, when parks would not necessarily have been accessible (Modin, My Five, p. 25). He had a strict rule, broken by his predecessor, of not meeting in pubs: ‘we met only in streets, parks and squares, never in bars or pubs, and I imposed my preference for locations well away from central London’ (My Five, p. 196). 45. Palmer, ‘She began’, p. 83. 46. Armitt, ‘Interview’, p. 122. 47. In Change, Hilary, a Land Girl, is able to share a cottage with her lover Gwen without raising their employer’s concern. Notably, in view of the allusions to the difficulty of keeping menstruation secret in The Night Watch, having the cottage to themselves also allows the two women to manage this in privacy (Duffy, Change, pp. 176–7). This relationship, however, does not survive the war. 48. Mackay, Half the Battle, p. 10.

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McEwan, Ian, The Imitation Game (1980), in The Imitation Game: Three Plays for Television (London: Picador, [1981] 1982), pp. 79–142. McEwan, Ian, The Innocent (London: Picador, 1990). McEwan, Ian, ‘Introduction’, in The Imitation Game: Three Plays for Television (London: Picador, [1981] 1982), pp. 9–18. McIntyre, Ben, Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). MacKay, Marina, ‘Muriel Spark and the Meaning of Treason’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 54.3 (2008), pp. 505–22. Mackay, Robert, Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain during the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). MacLeod, Lewis, ‘ “Our Lost, Discredited Souls”: Narrating the Masculine Interior in Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock and Ever After’, Critique 47.4 (2006), pp. 375–88. Mars-Jones, Adam, ‘Enough of this Nazi Martyrdom’, The Observer, 4 February 2007 http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0..2005283.00. html (Accessed 1 November 2007). Martin, Emily, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (London: Open University Press, 1987). Masterman, J. C., The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). Mengham, Rod, ‘The Cold War Way of Death: Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori’, in Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge (eds), British Fiction after Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 157–65. Metzger, Michael M. and Erika A. Metzger, Stefan George (New York: Twayne, 1972). Middleton, Peter and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Minney, R. J., Carve her Name with Pride: The Story of Violette Szabo (London: Pan, 1956). Mitchell, Leslie, Maurice Bowra: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Modin, Yuri, with Jean-Charles Deniau and Aguieszka Ziarek, My Five Cambridge Friends trans. by Anthony Roberts (London: Headline, 1994). Montagu, Ewen, The Man Who Never Was (1953), with Alfred Duff Cooper, Operation Heartbreak (1950) (Stroud: Spellmount, 2007). Morpurgo, Michael, Friend or Foe (London: Mammoth, [1977] 1999). Moss, Stanley, Ill Met by Moonlight (London: Harrap, 1950). Murphy, Robert, British Cinema and the Second World War (London: Continuum, 2000). Niven, Bill, ‘Introduction: German Victimhood at the Turn of the Millennium’, in Bill Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 1–25. Noakes, Jeremy and Geoffrey Pridham (eds), Documents on Nazism, 1919– 1944 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974). Noakes, Lucy, ‘Making Histories: Experiencing the Blitz in London’s Museums in the 1990s’, in Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1997), pp. 89–104.

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Norton, Richard E., Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002). O’Brien, Susie, ‘Serving a New World Order: Postcolonial Politics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 42.4 (1996), pp. 787–806. Oldham, June, Wraggle Taggle War (London: Abelard, 1977). Orwell, George, ‘As I Please, Tribune, 3 December 1943’, in Peter Davison (ed.), The Complete Works of George Orwell Volume XVI: I Have Tried to Tell the Truth (London: Secker and Warburg, 1998), pp. 12–14. Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1949] 2000). Overy, Richard, Interrogations: Inside the Minds of the Nazi Elite (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002). Page, Gwendoline, We Kept the Secret, Now it Can be Told: Some Memories of Pembroke V Wrens (Wymondham: Geo. R. Reeve, 2002). Palmer, Paulina, ‘ “She began to show me the words she had written, one by one”: Lesbian Reading and Writing Practices in the Fiction of Sarah Waters’, Women: A Cultural Review 19.1 (2008), pp. 69–86. Paris, Michael, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000). Peterkiewicz, Jerzy, In the Scales of Fate: An Autobiography (London: Marion Boyars, 1993). Poole, Adrian, ‘Graham Swift and the Mourning After’, in Rod Mengham (ed.), An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). Pronay, Nicholas, ‘The British Post Bellum Cinema: A Survey of Films relating to World War II in Britain between 1945 and 1960’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 8.1 (1988), pp. 39–54. Putt, S. Gorley, Wings of a Man’s Life (London and Lexington: Claridge Press, 1990). Rankin, Ian, ‘The Deliberate Cunning of Muriel Spark’, in Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson (eds), The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp. 41–53. Rankin, Nicholas, Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception 1914–1945 (London: Faber and Faber, [2008] 2009). Ratcliff, R. A., Delusions of Intelligence: Enigma, Ultra, and the End of Secure Ciphers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Rau, Petra-Utta, ‘The Common Frontier: Fictions of Alterity in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day and Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear’, Literature and History 14.1 (2005), pp. 31–55. Reynolds, David, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945 (London: HarperCollins, 1995). Richards, Thomas, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993). Riley, Denise, ‘Some Peculiarities of Social Policy concerning Women in Wartime and Postwar Britain’, in M. Higonnet et al. (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 260–71. Riley, Denise, ‘ “The Free Mothers”: Pronatalism and working women in industry at the end of the last war in Britain’, History Workshop Journal 11 (1981), pp. 59–118.

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Robbe-Grillet, Alain, ‘Time and Description in Fiction Today’ (1963), in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. by Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), pp. 145–56. Robinson, Richard, ‘The Modernism of Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 56.3 (2010), pp. 473–95. Rose, Gillian, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Rose, Sonya O. Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Rosenfeld, Gavriel D., The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Scherzinger, Karen, ‘The Butler in (the) Passage: The Liminal Narrative of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’, Literator 25.1 (2004), pp. 1–21. Sebag-Montefiore, Hugh, Enigma: The Battle for the Code (London: John Wiley, 2004). Sheers, Owen, ‘Guerrillas in Waiting’, Guardian Weekend, 20 October 2007, pp. 65–7. Sheers, Owen, Resistance (London: Faber and Faber, 2007). Simon, John, ‘The Poet of the Reich’, The New Criterion, October 2003, pp. 20–6. Simons, Judy, Rosamond Lehmann (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). Sinclair, Andrew, The Red and the Blue: Intelligence, Treason and the Universities (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986). Smelser, Ronald, ‘The Holocaust in Popular Cultures: Master-Narrative and Counter-Narratives in the Gray Zone’, in Jonathan Petropoulos and John K.  Roth (eds), Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and  its Aftermath (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), pp. 270–85. Smith, Michal, Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (London: Channel 4 Books, 1998). Spark, Muriel, The Comforters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1957] 1963). Spark, Muriel, Curriculum Vitae: A Volume of Autobiography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1992] 1993). Spark, Muriel, The Driver’s Seat (London: Macmillan, 1970). Spark, Muriel, The Girls of Slender Means (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1963] 1975). Spark, Muriel, The Hothouse by the East River (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1973] 1975). Spark, Muriel, The Mandelbaum Gate (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1965] 1982). Spark, Muriel, Memento Mori (London: Macmillan, 1959). Spark, Muriel, Not to Disturb (London: Macmillan, 1971). Spark, Muriel, The Public Image (London: Macmillan, 1968). Stannard, Martin, Muriel Spark: The Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009). Steiner, George, ‘Humane Literacy’ (1963), in Language and Silence: Essays, 1958–1966 (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), pp. 21–9. Stengers, Jean, ‘Enigma, the French, the Poles and the British, 1931–1940’, in Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (eds), The Missing Dimension:

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Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 126–37. Stewart, Victoria, Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). Streatfeild, Noel, Saplings (London: Persephone, [1945] 2000). Streatfeild, Noel, When the Siren Wailed (London: Collins, 1974). Sturken, Marita, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Summerfield, Penny, ‘ “The Girl that makes the thing that drills the hole that holds the spring . . .”: Discourses of Women and Work in the Second World War’ in Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson (eds), Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1996), pp. 35–52. Summerfield, Penny, ‘ “It did me good in lots of ways”: British Women in Transition from War to Peace’, in Claire Duchen and Irene BandhauerSchöffmann (eds), When the War was Over: Women, War, and Peace in Europe, 1940–1956 (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), pp. 13–28. Summerfield, Penny, ‘Mass-Observation: Social Research or Social Movement?’, Journal of Contemporary History 20.3 (1985), pp. 439–52. Summers, Julie, Strangers in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War (London: Simon and Schuster, 2008). Sutherland, John, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). Swift, Graham, Shuttlecock (London: Picador, [1981] 1997). Swift, Graham, Waterland (London: Picador, [1983] 1992). Thompson, Jon, Fiction, Crime and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). Tickell, Jerrard, Odette: The Story of a British Agent (London: Pan Books, [1949] 1955). Todorov, Tzvetan, ‘The Secret of Narrative’ (1969), in The Poetics of Prose, trans. by Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, [1971] 1977), pp. 143–78. Treadgold, Mary, We Couldn’t Leave Dinah (London: Jonathan Cape, 1941). Trease, Geoffrey, Tomorrow is a Stranger (London: Heinemann, 1987). Vincent, David, The Culture of Secrecy in Britain, 1832–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Walkowitz, Rebecca L., ‘Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds’, ELH 68 (2001), pp. 1049–76. Walters, Guy, The Occupation (London: Headline, [2004] 2005). Waters, Sarah, The Night Watch (London: Virago, 2006). Watts, Janet, ‘Dame Beryl Bainbridge’, Guardian, 3 July 2010, p. 39. Waugh, Evelyn, Put out more Flags (London: Chapman and Hall, 1942). Webster, Wendy, Imagining Home: Gender, “Race” and National Identity 1945–1964 (London: UCL Press, 1998). Welchman, Gordon, The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes, rev. edn (Cleobury Mortimer: M. & M. Baldwin, 2005). West, Nigel, ‘Introduction’, in British Security Coordination: The Secret

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History of British Intelligence in the Americas (London: St Ermin’s Press, 1998), pp. i–xxxvi. Westall, Robert, The Machine-Gunners (London: Macmillan, [1975] 1994). Wheelwright, Julie, ‘ “Colonel” Barker: A Case Study in the Contradictions of Fascism’, in Tony Kushner and Kenneth Lunn (eds), The Politics of Marginality: Race, the Political Right and Minorities in the Twentieth Century (London: Frank Cass, 1990), pp. 40–8. Whitehead, Winifred, Old Lies Revisited: Young Readers and the Literature of War and Violence (London: Pluto, 1991). Whitemore, Hugh, Breaking the Code (Oxford: Amber Lane Press, 1987). Williams, Eric, Goon in the Block (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945). Williams, Eric, The Wooden Horse (London: Collins, 1949). Williams, Nigel, Star Turn (London: Faber and Faber, [1985] 1986). Wilson, Angus, ‘Christmas Day in the Workhouse’, in Such Darling Dodos and Other Stories (London: Secker and Warburg 1959), pp. 121–43. Winter, Jay, ‘The Degeneration of War’, talk delivered as part of the Wiener/ Birkbeck series on ‘War and Race’, Birkbeck, University of London, 11 June 2008. Winterbotham, F. W., The Ultra Secret (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974).

Films and Television Blade Runner, film, directed by Ridley Scott. USA: Warner Bros., 1982. Carve Her Name with Pride, film, directed by Lewis Gilbert. GB: Rank, 1958. Enemy at the Door, television series, directed by Bill Bain et al. GB: LWT, 1978–80. Hue and Cry, film, directed by Charles Crichton. GB: Ealing Studios, 1947. Land Girls, television series, directed by Steve Hughes et al. GB: BBC, 2009. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, film, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. GB: The Archers, 1943. Mrs Miniver, film, directed by William Wyler. USA: MCM, 1942. Odette, film, directed by Herbert Wilcox. GB: Herbert Wilcox Productions, 1950. Triumph of the Will, film, directed by Leni Reifenstahl. Germany: Leni Reifenstahl-Produktion, 1935. Whistle Down the Wind, film, directed by Bryan Forbes. GB: Rank/Allied Film Makers/Beaver, 1961. Yanks, film, directed by John Schlesinger. GB/USA/West Germany: United Artists/CIP, 1979.

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Index

abortion, representations of in fiction, 128, 138–44, 159n, 160n Aldrich, Richard J., 4, 5, 57 Alexander, Hugh, 52n Alington, Gabriel, Willow’s Luck, 95, 97–9 Arendt, Hannah, 48 Arkell-Smith, Valerie see Colonel Barker Ashplant, T. G., 9 Astor, David, 115, 120, 125n Atkins, Vera, 57, 87n Auxiliary Units, 104 Bainbridge, Beryl The Dressmaker, 145–7 A Quiet Life, 146–8 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10 Bawden, Nina, Carrie’s War, 95 Bax, Rodney, 52n Beddoe, Deirdre, 129 Bell, Michael, 22 Berlin, Isaiah, 114–15, 120 Binding, Tim, 93 Island Madness, 99–104, 105, 107 Birch, S. J., 83 Bladerunner, 27, 28 Bletchley Park, 1, 4, 5, 17n, 22, 23, 24–5, 26, 27, 28–36, 37, 39, 40, 45, 52n, 53n Blitz, 7, 150 Blunt, Anthony, 18n, 162n Bottome, Phyllis, London Pride, 88n Bowra, Maurice, 120 Boyd, William, 2, 3, 11 Any Human Heart, 68 An Ice-Cream War, 68 Restless, 56, 65–73 Brenton, Howard, Hitler Dances, 59

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Brickhill, Paul, The Dam Busters, 58 British Security Co-ordination, 66, 67 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 8, 21–2, 22–4, 39, 40, 41, 47, 51n, 52n, 53n, 89n Between, 26 Languages of Love, 51n Out, 51n Remake, 23, 24–34, 36, 40 The Sycamore Tree, 51n Brown, Antony Cave, 17n Buckmaster, Maurice, 57 They Fought Alone, 57 Bunting, Madeleine, A Model Occupation, 99–100, 102, 104 Burgess, Guy, 162n Bush, George, 19n Cadogan, Mary, 5–6, 95 Cairncross, John, 17n, 162n Calder, Angus, 26 The People’s War, 7, 59, 87n Cartland, Barbara, 159n Cartwright, Justin, The Song Before it is Sung, 114–23 Cary, Joyce, Charley is my Darling, 88n Cesarani, David, 92, 115 Chamberlain, Neville, 90 Cheyette, Bryan, 21, 40, 48 children, 5–6, 61, 64, 73–84, 86, 95–9; see also individual children’s authors Chodorow, Nancy, 149 Chomsky, Noam, 25, 51n Christie, Agatha, 19n Christie, Ian, 124n Churchill, Peter, Of Their Own Choice, 57, 59 Churchill, Sir Winston, 4, 5, 17n, 44, 125n

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Cockett, Richard, 125n Cohen, Keith, 51n Colls, Robert, 5 Colonel Barker (Valerie Arkell-Smith), 155 Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 22 Elders and Betters, 20–1, 50n Connelly, Mark, 2, 8, 9 Connolly, Cyril, 15 Connolly, Joseph, Jack the Lad and Bloody Mary, 141–2, 143 Conway, Martin, 93 Cooper, Alfred Duff, 87n Operation Heartbreak, 4 Cooper, Susan, Dawn of Fear, 95 Cormack, Alastair, 19n Craig, Patricia, 5, 95 Craps, Stef, 63 Crossman, Richard, 38, 40, 41, 50n, 53n Dannatt, General Sir Richard, 18n Davies, Peter Ho, The Welsh Girl, 104, 128, 139–41, 148–53 Davies, Stevie, Boy Blue, 128, 130–2, 133, 136, 138, 139 Dawson, Graham, 9 Dawson, Jennifer, The Upstairs People, 136–7 Deighton, Len, Funeral in Berlin, 6 Delmer, D. Sefton, 21, 38–9, 40, 46, 53n Denning, Michael, 12, 66 Denniston, Alastair, 53n Drabble, Margaret, 37, 39 Duchen, Clare, 106 Duffy, Maureen, 128 Change, 142–3, 162n Eichmann, Adolf, 43, 47–8 Ekelund, Bo, 115 Elias, Amy J., 13, 14, 16 Elliott, Mark, 125n Enemy at the Door, 123n Enigma, 17n, 29, 52n, 53n Enigma machine, 28 Falla, Frank, 124n Faulk, Henry, 150, 151 Faulks, Sebastian, Charlotte Gray, 58 Finney, Brian, 19n Fitzgerald, Penelope, 29 Frankfurter, Felix, 120 Frayn, Michael, 3 The Russian Interpreter, 89n Spies, 2, 7, 56, 74–7, 78–81, 82–6, 99

STEWART PRINT.indd 176

Freedom of Information Act (2000), 5 Freud, Sigmund, 16 ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, 83, 89n Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 71 ‘On Beginning the Treatment’, 37 Friedrich, Jörg, The Fire, 84–5 Frost, Laura, 102 Gardiner, Juliet, 139 Garnett, David, 38, 41, 53n Garson, Greer, 27–8 Gauthier, Tim S., 13 Gaylin, Ann, 9–10 George, Stefan, 117–19, 125n GIs British perceptions of, 150 marriages of British women to, 161 race relations and, 160n representations of in film and fiction, 145–7, 161n see also Jensen, Liz Gilbert, Martin, 17n Goldman, Aaron, 123n Golumbek, Harry, 52n Gordievsky, Oleg, 18n Government Code and Cipher School see Bletchley Park Gray, John, 120 Grayling, A. C., 85 Greene, Graham, The Human Factor, 21 Grieg, Andrew, That Summer, 9, 32, 159n Griffiths, Richard, 107 Halifax, Lord, 115 Hall, Radclyffe, The Well of Loneliness, 155 Hankey, Maurice, 88n Hanson, Clare, 129 Harding, Georgina, The Spy Game, 56, 81–2 Hare, David, Licking Hitler, 38–9 Harris, Robert Enigma, 35 Fatherland, 104 Hayman, David, 51n Helm, Sarah, 57, 87n Hess, Rudolf, 148, 152–3 Higgins, Jack, The Eagle has Landed, 5 Hilberg, Raoul, 92 Himmler, Heinrich, 91, 105

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Index Holocaust, 6, 18n, 48, 91, 92, 124n representations of in fiction, 6–7, 86, 121 Holquist, Michel, 19n Holton, Robert, 7 Howard, Anthony, 53n Howard, Michael, 8 Howe, Ellic, 53n Hue and Cry, 88n Hutcheon, Linda, 13, 14, 59 Ignatieff, Michael, 120 Iser, Wolfgang, 12, 17n Ishiguro, Kazuo, Remains of the Day, 107–14, 115, 116, 122, 123n Jackson, Mike, Five Boys, 77–8 James, Henry, 11–12 Jameson, Fredric, 13 Janet, Pierre, 136 Jensen, Liz, War Crimes for the Home, 79, 128, 130, 132–6, 137–8, 139, 145, 147, 149, 151 Jesse, F. Tennyson, A Pin to See the Peepshow, 139, 159n Johnson, Brian, 5 Joint Services School for Linguists, 74–5 July plot, 41, 115, 118, 121, 125n; see also Stauffenberg, Claus von Kansteiner, Wulf, 2 Keen, Suzanne, 10 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 130–1 Kemp, Peter, 45 Kennedy, A. L., Day, 85–6, 93–4 Kermode, Frank, 22, 62 Kershaw, Ian, 108 Kesselring, Albert, 88n King, Francis, Cold Snap, 140–1 Knox, Dillwyn, 29–30, 31 Kochan, Miriam, 150 Kushner, Tony, 92 Lachs, John, 113 Land Girls, 161n Landsberg, Alison, 28, 56 Lang, James M., 113–14 Lanzmann, Claude, 126n Lassner, Phyllis, 161n Laub, Dori, 18n Le Carré, John, 88n A Small Town in Germany, 6–7 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 71 Lehmann, Rosamond, The Weather in the Streets, 139, 159n

STEWART PRINT.indd 177

177

Levine, Paul A., 92 Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The, 109, 124n Lingen, Kerstin von, 88n Lockhart, Robert Bruce, 38, 90, 91, 123n Londonderry, Lord, 107, 108 Long, Pamela O., 50n Longmate, Norman, 145, 160n, 161n Lonsdale, Gordon, 82, 89n Lothian, Lord, 107, 108 Lowe, Keith, 84 McEwan, Ian Atonement, 7, 15–16, 19n The Imitation Game, 34–5, 36 The Innocent, 12 McIntyre, Ben, 18n MacKay, Marina, 39, 41 Mackay, Robert, 158 MacLeod, Lewis, 62 Mars-Jones, Adam, 121 Masterman, J. C., 5 Mengham, Rod, 44 Middleton, Peter, 13, 14, 28, 58 Milner-Barry, Stuart, 52n Milton Bryan, 21, 23, 39, 40, 53n; see also Political Warfare Executive Ministry of Information, 3–4, 6, 14, 15, 87n Minney, R. J., Carve her Name with Pride, 58 Modin, Yuri, 162n Montagu, Ewen, The Man who Never Was, 5 Morpurgo, Michael, Friend or Foe, 96–7 Moss, Stanley, Ill Met by Moonlight, 58 Mrs Miniver, 28 Murdoch, Iris, 33 Murphy, Robert, 91, 124n Niven, Bill, 124n Noakes, Lucy, 7 Norwood, Marita, 88n Oldham, June, Wraggle Taggle War, 78 Orwell, George, 145 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 78 Overy, Richard, 153 Paris, Michael, 58, 95, 99 Peterkiewicz, Jerzy, 51n Philby, Kim, 67, 68 Political Warfare Executive, 21, 38–9, 40–1; see also Milton Bryan

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Poole, Adrian, 61 Portland Spy Ring, 81, 89n Pound, Ezra, 23 prisoners of war British in Germany, 4, 98 German in Britain, 40, 42–3, 110, 140, 147, 148, 149–50 Pronay, Nicholas, 123n Putt, S. Gorley, 30, 33, 36–7 Rankin, Ian, 21 Rankin, Nicholas, 46 Ratcliff, R. A., 17n, 30 Rau, Petra, 3, 81 Red Army Faction, 69 Reynolds, David, 160n Richards, Thomas, 51n Riley, Denise, 129 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 24, 47, 48 Robinson, Richard, 19n Roper, Michael, 9 Rose, Gillian, 109 Rose, Sonya O., 7, 148, 158 Rosenfeld, Gavriel, 104 Sansom, Odette, 59, 71 Scherzinger, Karen, 124n Sebag-Montefiore, Hugh, 53n Shaw, George Bernard, 17n Sheers, Owen, Resistance, 104–7, 151 Simons, Judy, 139 Sinclair, Andrew, 21 Spark, Muriel, 23, 37–8 The Comforters, 21 Curriculum Vitae, 20–1, 38, 39, 40–1, 43 The Driver’s Seat, 48 The Girls of Slender Means, 44 The Hothouse by the East River, 21, 39, 40, 41–7, 48–50 The Mandelbaum Gate, 47 Not to Disturb, 48 The Public Image, 48 Special Operations Executive, 3, 57, 58, 60, 87n Stafford-Clark, Max, 59 Stannard, Martin, 21, 47 Stauffenberg, Claus von, 118, 121 Stengers, Jean, 4 Streatfeild, Noel Saplings, 88n When the Siren Wailed, 95 Sturken, Marita, 2 Summers, Julie, 159n

STEWART PRINT.indd 178

Sutherland, John, 5 Swift, Graham, 3, 11 Shuttlecock, 9, 55, 56, 57–65, 66, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76 Waterland, 13, 140, 160n Szabo, Violette, 58, 59, 71, 81, 82, 87n Taylor, Telford, 53n Thomas, D. M., 75 Thompson, Jon, 11 Tickell, Jerrard, Odette, 58 Todorov, Tzvetan, 11 Treadgold, Mary, We Couldn’t Leave Dinah, 123n Trease, Geoffrey, Tomorrow is a Stranger, 100–1 Triumph of the Will, 153 Trott, Adam von, 115, 120, 125n; see also July plot; Stauffenberg, Claus von Turing, Alan, 30, 37, 53n Ultra, 4, 5, 17n, 52n; see also Bletchley Park; Enigma Unwin, Joan, 1, 2 Vansittart, Sir Robert, 41, 90, 91, 120, 123n Vansittartism, 41, 98 Venlo Incident, 66 Vincent, David, 56 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 114 Wartime Social Survey, 56, 87n Waters, Sarah, 2, 9, 139 The Night Watch, 9, 127–8, 129, 143–4, 154–8, 160n, 162n Waugh, Evelyn, Put out more Flags, 88n Webster, Wendy, 129 Westall, Robert, 98 The Machine-Gunners, 95–7, 99 Wheelwright, Julie, 161n Whistle Down the Wind, 98 Whitehead, Winifred, 95, 97 Whitemore, Hugh, Breaking the Code, 37 Williams, Eric Goon in the Block, 4 The Wooden Horse, 4, 58 Williams, Nigel, Star Turn, 14–15, 16 Wilson, Angus, 37, 39, 53n Winter, Jay, 19n Winterbotham, F. W., The Ultra Secret, 5 Women’s Royal Naval Service, 1 Woods, Tim, 13, 14, 28, 58

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