By Canon James Mustard
Elizabeth Bowen’s 1949 novel, set in Blitz-besieged London is one of the most shocking novels I have read.
It’s not a novel that delights in gore or dystopia, but rather its depiction of human response to trauma, and the consequence of that oh-so-English habit of “putting a lid on it”. The opening chapters still shock with their description of female desire, a young woman, Louie, walking through a dusky Regents Park with the intention of finding an anonymous soldier-on-leave with whom she may (sparing any more innocent readers) be quickly and wordlessly intimate. This scene of female “cruising” is shocking enough, but the whole novel describes characters, notably its protagonist, Stella, occupying many covert identities and deceits: in covert government agencies, in affairs, in love-triangles, as spies for and against the British, as feigning mental illness for advantage, of seeking refuge from conflict in neutral Ireland (or is it?), of honey-traps. Throughout the novel, we read of behaviour which startles our peacetime sensibilities, but which, in the chaos and uncertainty of war is presented as common currency. Bowen peels back the polished veneer of upper-middle-class London to reveal the rough and ready chipboard beneath.
The trauma, of course, is that of two wars. The echo of the Great War in the younger characters, of families extinguished, of the mass-grief of the Trenches that could never be understood, certainly not “processed”. Then the trauma of middle-war, of bombs, of civilian suffering, of existential threat, of unexpected death and the threat of unexpected death, of espionage, of information gathering, and notably of radicalisation. One character is so traumatised by his experiences on the beaches of Dunkirk, that he cannot accept the lie of “freedom” and becomes a spy for the Nazi regime.
In the week after we have commemorated the 80th anniversary of VE Day, I think Bowen’s novel still lifts the lid on many unvoiced civilian experiences of war and the human condition. The horror and the trauma were felt by those at home as well as those at war. But their experiences were often difficult to share – both because of a sense of “survivors’ guilt” and because they were not of the military. And there were of course opportunities presented by war. My own Grandmother was able to work in London and the BBC precisely because so many men were at war. Bathwater, she told me once, was rationed, but the Turkish Baths remained open. So that is where she and her colleagues bathed during the Blitz. And during the Blitz, she would go to the attic of her house and watch the fires across London. It was both a devastating and astonishing spectacle.
All of which is to say that what I find so commendable in Bowen’s writing is her embrace of war-trauma upon a wide range of people, people trying to live their lives at the height of war, when London, when Britain, could easily have been lost, of keeping a lid on that existential threat. The trauma exposing truths in all of us that we prefer to veil under various guises and uniforms. We have so much to be thankful for, when we consider the lives of those who gave everything for peace, but we give much less time and consideration to those who were left behind, those whose lives were in a limbo between battle-chaos and home-fires, for whom VE Day was no less pivotal.