Mr Britling Sees it Through by H. G. Wells

I couldn't read the last Book Group choice. It was Dr Thorne by Trollope and I struggled through about three chapters and gave it up. So I missed the meeting.

Instead I took up a book which has been on my shelf for ages. In fact, I think it was on the grandparents' bookshelves in Walton-on-Thames. (Do you remember we grew up in my grandparents house? They had gone, but when we moved in their books were still on the bookshelves and their old coats and hats were in the cupboards, old tennis rackets and hockey sticks in the hall. They were proper people with a history. But maybe I haven't written about this here.)

The book is Mr Britling Sees it Through and it is a novel, but one with no real plot; it is more like a thinly fictionalised record of how it felt to live through the first two years of the First World War. The main character, Mr Britling, is a writer like H. G. Wells, and he has a certain fame and a certain degree of comfort, and he fools around with women who are not his wife and tells himself some good reasons for this philandering - only, of course, he never calls it philandering; but he admits these serial relationships are a kind of game. A game of ego on two sides.

As well as a wife and another woman a motor-ride away, he has a young secretary, who has a young wife and sister-in-law; Mr B also has a teenage son and two younger sons, and a live-in German tutor for his son. And at the outset, he has a visiting American who is keen to gain understanding of the British way of life. All these people are caught unawares by the war and the drama comes in the way the war treats them all. The book was published in the deepest days of the war before the United States came into it. I shall type up some extracts but I believe it is all worth reading. There is a freshness and vividness about Wells, an honesty that's fresh air in a fuggy room; a shot of hard stuff.

I love the picture of the Georgians before the war - the world of rose gardens and no central heating, when women were struggling for the vote and exhilarating in a degree of independence. It's the moment that Mrs Dalloway's daughter (Mrs Dalloway: Virginia Woolf) catches a bus on her own and goes riding up the Strand just because she can; and suddenly freedom is just possible for her... she starts to envision possible careers, possible professions...

Anyway, to set the scene there's a terrific description of a hockey match involving both sexes, very like one of those old school stories, and you imagine what fun they had in the days before we all got scared of being outside.

After the war breaks out, the people of the village start a run on the village shop (Hickson's), amongst them the well-to-do neighbour Mrs Faber.

" And would you believe me," she went on, going back to Mrs Britling, "that man Hickson stood behind his counter - where I've dealt with him for years, and refused absolutely to let me have more than a dozen tins of sardines. Refused! Point-blank!

"I was there before nine, and even then Hickson's shop was crowded - crowded, my dear!"

Mr Britling is just disgusted with women who just want to be dramatic, like this. But then he starts to worry that there will be "a tremendous change in values"; he worries that all his investments will be worthless and there will be bankruptcy. He tells his wife that they may have to leave home and go somewhere safer. But he, too, is as excited as the neighbour.

"Now I am afraid - and at the same time I feel that the spell is broken. The magic prison is suddenly all doors. You may call this ruin, bankruptcy, invasion, flight; they are doors out of habit and routine ... I have been doing nothing for so long, except idle things and discursive things."

"... Writing is recording, not living. But now I feel suddenly that we are living intensely. ...There are times when the spirit of life changes altogether..."

"They speculated about the possible intervention of United States. Mr Britling thought that the attack on Belgium demanded the intervention of every civilised power, that all the best instincts of America would be for intervention. ...

"It would be strange if the last power left out to mediate were to be China," said Mr. Carmine. "The one people in the world who really believe in peace .... I wish I had your confidence, Britling."

For a time they contemplated a sort of Grand Inquest on Germany and militarism, presided over by the Wisdom of the East. Militarism was, as it were, to be buried as a suicide at four crossroads, with a stake through its body to prevent any untimely resuscitation."

Then there are reports of the atrocities in Belgium. Mr Britling's American visitor, Mr Direck, has been on the continent to see for himself, and has returned, shocked.

 "They have started in to be deliberately frightful. You do not begin to understand ... Well....Outrages. The sort of outrages Americans have never heard of. That one doesn't speak of.... Well... Rape. ....They have been raping women for disciplinary purposes on tables in the market-place of Liege. Yes, sir. It's a fact. I was told it by a man who had just come out of Belgium.

 Meanwhile, the British are unprepared and unarmed. Germany expects to win the war in weeks. Direck says:

"Germany today is one big armed camp. It's all crawling with soldiers. And every soldier has his uniform and his boots and his arms and his kit."

"And they're as sure of winning as if they had got London now. They mean to get London. ... They say it's England they are after, in this invasion of Belgium. They'll just down France by the way. ... They know for certain you can't arm your troops. They know you can't turn out ten thousand rifles a  week."

So Mr Britling's thoughts take a different turn. He stops being excited at the new world order he dreams of. The English start retreating in disorder. There are rumours of corruption in high places. And Mr Britling decides his country needs him and takes the train to London where he has contacts; he tries hard to find a role in the war machine. He wants to be of service to his threatened country, and finds that he is not alone; other men men of thirty-eight and fifty-four proclaim themselves fit enough to serve and lobby to learn to shoot and use a bayonet. But they are not wanted: the war machine can't cope with them. They have nothing to do. They feel "left out."

"The great "Business as Usual" phase was already passing away, and London was in the full tide of recruiting enthusiasm. That tide was breaking against the most miserable arrangements for enlistment it is possible to imagine. Overtaxed and not very competent officers, whose one idea of being efficient was to refuse civilian help and be very, very slow and circumspect and very dignified and overbearing, sat in dirty little rooms and snarled at this unheard-of England that pressed at door and window for enrolment. Outside every recruiting office crowds of men and youths waited, leaning against walls, sitting upon the pavements, waiting for long hours, waiting to the end of the day and returning next morning, without shelter, without food, many sick with hunger; men who had hurried up from the country, men who had thrown up jobs of every kind, clerks and shopmen, anxious only to serve England and "teach those damned Germans a lesson."

"Everywhere there were the flags of the Allies; [in London] in shop-windows, over doors, on the bonnets of automobiles, on people's breasts, and there was a great quantity of recruiting posters on the hoarding and in windows.. There were also placards calling for men on nearly all the taxicabs. "

Later on the German population in London come under suspicion and some are badly treated, but not so badly, it seems, as the English population in Germany. Mr Britling is really shocked when he reads a bale of German comic papers in the study of a friend in London. They were filled with caricatures of the Allies and more particularly of the English...

"One incredible craving was manifest in every one of them. The German caricaturist seemed unable to represent his enemies except in extremely tight trousers or in none; he was equally unable to present them without thrusting a sword or bayonet, spluttering blood, into the more indelicate parts of their persons. "... "But it's blind fury - at the dirt-throwing stage."

His friend points out: "They want to foam at the mouth. They do their utmost to foam more." and Wells incudes the lyrics of a "Hymn of Hate" which the Germans sing about England. It is extraordinary - but Britling's friend points out that this is war. "We pretend war does not hurt. They know better..."

The important character at this point is the German tutor who had taught Britling's son Hugh before the war, and had been an earnest and loveable character in the household - whenever Britling is inclined to hate the Germans he remembers Heinrich (who has gone back to his country), who "became a sort of advocate for his people before the tribunal of Mr. Britling's mind." He also remembered happy holidays in the hospitable village of the Odenwald. And then he is told of young German soldiers who have shot women and babies. In short, Mr Britling tries hard to be reasonable and understand the Germans, but at the same time the war becomes more and more savage; there is the torture of "gas", the use of flame jets...

I think I won't write more - all this is prelude to the moment that Britling's son Hugh goes to fight at the age of seventeen, and the forthright letters he sends home about the experience of fighting in the trenches form a large part of the middle of the book.

But this book has been written to record the truth as Wells saw it and felt it and experienced it; he meant it to be representative, and he meant it for posterity. It was published a hundred years ago and it still has interesting things to say. I recommend it. I shall be pressing it one everyone. It's not a great story or a great book - but there is a boldness to it that makes it remarkable. Good old Wells! what a long time he lived and how hard he worked.

Memorials in London: Charles Sargeant Jagger

I have probably been thinking too much about World War 1 recently, but I was glad, anyway, to see some war memorials on our walk in London at the weekend. We have a ridiculous number of memorials and plaques in London, but hey, it's an old place, and interesting if you have some knowledge of history.

Recently, on a programme about Great Lives, a sculptor called Martin Jennings (I wonder if he is related to the Jennings family of Ampleforth?) suggesting another sculptor called Charles Sargeant Jagger, who made a great sculpture in memoriam to the Royal Artillery after the war. It was "direct and honest about the horrors of war". There's an anonymity about the soldiers. He wanted to make a sculpture for the people like himself who had survived the war, and knew the truth of it. It was a new form of art.

 

 

Tens of thousands of people went to see the unveiling of the memorial after the war.

Platform 1 of Paddington station.

A soldier reading a letter from home.

Jagger's father apprenticed him as a silver engraver for Mappin and Webb. In the evenings he studied drawing and modelling.

Then the war started and Jagger went to fight in Gallipoli; it was a terrible, terrible experience. He spent two days digging a trench with his hands in very hard ground. His platoon sergeant was shot and died in his arms. He was wounded soon afterwards and shipped to Malta. He soon went back to the western front and fought until the end of the war.

Later, he could be very intolerant of those who had not contributed to the war effort.

He went back to sculpture immediately after the war, even though he had not been able to practise his art for all the years of the war. He produced one large sculpture every three months or so for about six years. (1919-25) Once he ceased to make war memorials his work became less interesting (according to Martin Jennings).

The design for this memorial had to be approved by various committees and by the King, because of course it changed Hyde Park corner, an important landmark.

Jagger was perhaps disappointed that he didn't get more letters of admiration. He had critics. Lord Curzon hated the Artillery memorial and called it a "hideous" and "a toad".

Jagger died at the age of 48. In the war he had been shot twice and gassed. His very hard work had perhaps weakened his lungs with dust, and he died of pneumonia.

Exhibition - New Zealand Hospital Community Tapestry - Mount Felix

I walked down to the Riverside Barn Arts Centre to work on the tapestry (embroidery) in the gallery, where it is on display. There was lots going on - a few people coming in to see the exhibition and quite a few stitchers working on panels. Linda showed me how to do a nice, flat stem stitch and I got on with our third panel (the Plunket family) and Linda got on with our second (the last one showing the barn and some leaves with the names of the stitchers). Here are some pictures from the exhibition.

This is the exhibition with lots of information and photographs.
 

The designer came down from Scotland to look at our progress.

Linda and Helen working in the gallery

Rydens School is working on this panel showing a "lemon Squeezer"- shaped hat with a Kiwi dreaming of Cooktown.
 

Our finished panel: Gallipoli

Detail from our finished panel (I did this bit)

A really lovely design showing Christmas at the hospital
 

Nurses with the Old Manor House - some were billeted there

One Kiwi soldier married a local girl - Miss Rosewell of Rosewell's boatyard - they met over an ivy-clad wall.

The King and Queen came to visit Mount Felix hospital (an expert sewer did this - it's amazing).

I was working on this one today - it shows the Plunket family and their servants - Michele did this. I don't know what the flowers are.

Linda is working on this one - trying hard to make the clinkers and tiles look interesting

A community tapestry is a great idea - I feel part of a community - a Walton community rather than a Weybridge one, but never mind.

Here is a link to a site with the history of the hospital

Gerald Brenan - South from Grenada

This is an extraordinary book which tells about the culture of southern Spain in the early 19th century, just after World War 1. The writer goes to live in Spain because it is cheap and he wants to be a writer. I think, after the horror of the war (he went through the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele) , he feels that the world owes him a living, and is quite frank about writing hopefully to various uncles and asking them for money. Sometimes he gets money, not always.

Carrington painted him

Carrington painted him more than once. This should be in the NPG.

He plays host to Lytton Strachey and Carrington, and he narrates their visit amusingly - he was in love with Carrington for a very long time. Later Virginia and Leonard Woolf also pay a visit and are very struck with this part of Spain - which has a character like something from the Middle Ages. The Spanish are great at keeping their festivals and culture alive today but they are nothing like they were, simply because the belief in the efficacy of the rites has been lost. Here is an account of a village Easter.

The Easter ceremonies had a peculiar vividness. From the morning of Palm Sunday a silence fell on the village and lasted till the end of the week. During this time no one shouted or sang, and the sound of the pestle and mortar, that gay prelude to every Andalusian meal, ceased to be heard. Then on the night of Holy Thursday the figure of the Crucified Christ was borne in slow procession with torches and candles as far as the stone Calvary that stands among the olive trees a little below the village. At every halt a low, sad copla was sung. On the following evening there was a yet more lugubrious procession, when his dead body was carried in silence in a glass coffin to the same place and then brought back to the church to be interred....

The fast was now ended, but the final scene of the drama had yet to be played. At daybreak on Easter Sunday the young men got the church key from the sacristan, took out the figure of the Risen Christ, and carried it to the square at the lower end of the village, He was represented as a young man in a green dress and, as if to associate him with Adonis and Osiris and all the man-gods who had died in order that the corn might spring again and the sap rise yet once more in the stems, he was crowned with leaves; a bunch of flowers was placed in his right hand and a sheaf of barley in his left. He was set up on a platform in the humble square with its low unplastered houses, and the villagers - especially the poorer families - collected round with cries of Viva, viva el Senor

.

I have chosen a picture of Easter in a Colombian village because
the pictures I can find of Easter in Spain are so stagey, grand and impressive
and show people dressed up like the Ku Klux Klan, which Brenan
never mentioned.

.... at nine o'clock when the Virgin was carried out in her green, star-spangled dress they fell into line behind her and formed a procession. This was the dramatic moment of the Easter ceremonies, which even the simplest of the shepherd boys understood, for the Virgin had found the grave open and missed her son, and was sallying out to seek for him. ... As soon as the figure of the Virgin arrived in front of that of the Christ, she curtsied to him three times: the priest stepped forward to sprinkle him with holy water and incense him, and she was brought up tottering to the edge of the platform on which he stood. Then, when she was only a couple of feet away, his arms, which moved on strings, were raised in a jerky movement to touch her shoulders. This was the signal for the silence to break.

This is from the introduction (by Chris Stewart) to the Penguin Modern Classic edition:

"And it is precisely in this amateur and eclectic approach, embellished with meticulously crafted discourses on subjects as diverse as toxicology and Sufism, Mediterranean agriculture and prehistoric archaeology, that the pleasure of South from Granada lies."

"There are those who would criticise the book for a certain lack of organisation, and it is true that there is an element of rambling to it, but for me rambling is in the very nature of a discursive book; it is redeemed though, and its sometimes tangled threads given cohesion, by the illuminating and all-pervading presence of it author. This is achieved by the wit and warmth as well as the penetrating intelligence he brings to bear on any subject he approaches, and its couching in what seems like effortlessly graceful prose, although in fact he spared no pains in honing and polishing his writing - two and a half years in the case of this book."

"He read French, German and Spanish, as well as Latin and Greek, and during the writing of The Literature of the Spanish People read no fewer than two hundred and fifty books in two and a half years... He was as happy, or perhaps happier, striding high in the mountains with shepherds as he was in earnest discussion with the luminaries of Bloomsbury. He was also a brilliant and generous conversationalist."

(I don't think I have ever met a brilliant and generous conversationalist.)

The extract below is translated by Google and copied from a webpage on Gerald Brenan Spanish course here- this is the kind of English I correct. Sometimes the misuse of words is quite funny. My Spanish students actually write better English than this so it is easy to tell when they try to cheat by using Google translate.

The April 23 was chosen by UNESCO as World Book Day, since it coincides with the death of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. On this day we remember Gerald Brenan, specialist writer on issues of Spain.

Gerald Brenan (1894) was the eldest son of a British soldier who was destined to continue the family tradition by desire of his father, when he began to have use of reason, he discovered he did not like the games in which he had to show his strength but he preferred the quiet of reading a book. Brenan studied up to 18 years in England to enter the military academy. At this age, he realized that he was being prepared for a profession that was not attractive way of life as to what he rebelled and fled with a friend. The First World War forced him to fight and was decorated. He got a pension with the help of his family, allowed him to find a place in Spain (Yegen) where he could devote himself to what he liked: study of literature, botany, philosophy, arts in general, etc .. since did not go to college like most of his friends (Circle Bloomsbory). his passion was poetry, but he knew he could not make a living as a poet. His father demanded to live a useful profession. For this reason, he decided to write novels and married an American novelist Gamel Woolsey; she corrected and typed his works. They had no children, Brenan adopted a daughter who was the result of a love affair with a young Spanish. Brenan realized that the dwelling place was idyllic but was held incommunicado to continue his career. They moved to a place of great beauty, strategically located. Churriana (Málaga), next to the airport and relatively close to Gibraltar This is where your dream comes true. Brenan is on site and at the right time when exploding Spanish civil war. England was very interested in this confrontation, he would report through their stories about what happened and later wrote a book about the causes of the Spanish war. Brenan that had gone unnoticed, began to be heard and recognized internationally, especially in Spain where his book "The Spanish Labyrinth" was banned, becoming a symbol of freedom for dissidents dictator Franco.Tras this book, wrote others about Spain:  "the History of Spanish Literature" and "the Face of Spain", the result of a trip in 1950. the war had given him the epithet of specialist Spain writer but he was forced to leave his house with a lovely garden in Churriana, where he left the service staff (cook, gardener). on his return to Malaga (1953), he returned to his beloved Brenan lifestyle in which he wrote for the morning and walking in the evenings; he enjoyed the climate, diet and people. He wore an intense social life, made ​​contact with writers like Hemingway or Caro Baroja, etc. Here wrote one of his most famous stories "South of Granada" A Life of one's Own (autobiography) and The Lighthouse Always Says Yes they came to light in 1962 and in 1966. in 1968, killed his wife and collaborator, though he was shocked, he joined his fate to a young woman (Linda Nicholson-Price) that helped to continue its vital objective: writing. They felt they had to start in a new place within the province so they decided to sell the house and fire service. At this stage he published Personal Memory, John of the Cross, The Best Moments: Poems; Thoughts in a Dry Season. Aphorisms In 1987, died at 92 years old. His body was donated to the Faculty of Medicine, some nerve cells were taken for the study of longevity. In 2001 he was cremated and buried in the English Cemetery in Malaga with his wife.

Community tapestry - Mount Felix Military hospital

When I was a girl and I lived in Walton, by the river, there was a derelict site at the end of the road called Mount Felix, where there had been a Big House - which had been used as a military hospital during "the War". In fact, the hospital had housed so many injured New Zealanders that it had had to be extended into "huts" along a row which became called New Zealand Avenue and which is now a main road in Walton-on-Thames. (The adults meant the war which they couldn't remember - although Grannie and Grandad could - the Great War.) The building was Italianate in style with a square tower which was quite a landmark, but eventually it was razed to the ground and we used the stony ground, with its patches of concrete (probably originally the driveway) to play football, and we also used to slide down amongst the trees on the muddy bank to the pond. There was plenty of room for a few groups of children to play there.

This is the "land" side of Mount Felix, with its tower.

This is the river side with its pond (now a marina).

One of the other groups of children came from Ridgeway (a road on the bridge side of Mount Felix), and I met one of them at a meeting of the stitchers who are making the community tapestry to mark the centenary of World War 1. We are now women firmly into middle age and yet she shared my childhood!

 I have to say that it's not really a tapestry - it's an embroidery. I came together with three other women who have done some embroidery but not much - to form a group, and now we call ourselves "Stitched Up" because we never knew each other before this project. But now we meet every two weeks.

The history is probably not that interesting unless you are a local or otherwise interested in World War 1, but if you are please find a link to the website

We have just finished our first panel! Here it is!






Our panel is number 11 (or 14) and it shows trench warfare in Gallipoli.
I did a lot of flies and stray bullets. We had a lot of dull sand and
sandbags to do, but we tried to make it as bright as we could.

 

The end of the Great War, recorded by Virginia Woolf

Before I go on to "To the Lighthouse" I want to write about this. This is where Virginia W, in her diary, starts to write for posterity, because she knew she was living in Interesting Times. It's also rather sickening, because the troops were fighting right to the very end, even though the war had been won -   they had to carry on killing and being killed. This should NEVER happen. Surely a ceasefire could have been called?

Sat 12th October
Whatever we have done this week has this extraordinary background of hope; a tremendously enlarged version of the feeling I can remember as a child as Christmas approached. the Northcliffe papers do all they can to insist upon the indispensability and delight of war. They magnify our victories to make our mouths water for more; they shout with joy when the Germans sink the Irish mail; but they do also show some signs of apprehension that Wilson's terms may be accepted. L. has just come in from Staines with a paper which says, with obvious gloom, that the rumour is that Germany agrees to evacuation. She is not, of course, they add, to be allowed to make any sort of terms.

Tuesday 15th October
I did not think I should so soon have to describe a meeting with a cabinet minister ... Herbert Fisher's visit... was very obviously due to old family affection.  ... Was I nervous or proud, or anything but interested & anxious to pick his brains for news? I don't think I felt a moment's agitation. ... he has lost his lean intellectual look; his hollow cheeks are filled; ... the number of deaths in his house caused this perhaps; but I can't help thinking that London life has rid him of his desire to say clever things to undergraduates all the time.

"We've won the war today" he said at once. " I saw Milner this morning, & he says we shall have peace by Christmas. The Germans have made up their minds they can't fight a retreat...Of course we can't accept their present terms. Why, that would leave them still the greatest military power in Europe. they could begin again in ten years time. But it rests with the French. Lloyd George is going to Paris on Monday; but they are holding out for the evacuation of Alsace Lorraine as a guarantee. We shall probably demand the disarmament of certain regiments too. But we've won the war."

There is now a good prospect of a complete defeat of the German army; Foch says "I have not yet had my battle". Despite the extreme vindictiveness of our press and the French press, Herbert believed that we are going to baulk Foch of his battle, partly because the Germans will accept any terms to avoid it. "Lloyd George has told me again and again that he means to be generous to the Germans. "We want a strong Germany" he says. the Kaiser will probably go.... they've been taught to be brutal. But it hasn't paid. Each one of their crimes has turned out badly. ... it cost us £1,000 to kill a German at the battle of the Somme [1916]; now it costs £3,000. "

... in a little room in Downing Street, where, as he said, the wireless messages are racing in from all over the world, ... where you have to settle off hand questions of enormous difficulty and importance - where the fate of armies does more or less hang upon what two or three elderly gentlemen decide. Herbert thinks there are 2 or 3 geniuses in the cabinet (L. George, Balfour, & possibly Winston Churchill - his definition being that they make everything appear different) & a number of mediocrities.

Friday 18th October

... Wilson's second note came out on Tuesday, in which he used the word 'peradventure'; so far the Germans have not answered. But their Retreat goes on, & last night, beautiful, cloudless, still & moonlit, was to my thinking he first of peace, since one went to bed fairly positive that never again in all our lives need we dread the moonlight. [the irony could break your heart.]

24th October
We took tram to Kingston & there heard the paper boys shouting out about the President's message, which we bought & devoured in the train. The main points are that he is keeping negotiations going, though the Times came out with a great headline "No parley" this morning. He discriminates too, between the German people & the Kaiser; he will consider an armistice with the one but only complete surrender with the other.

...avoiding London, because of the influenza - (we are, by the way, in the midst of a plague unmatched since the Black Death, according to the Times, who seem to tremble lest it may seize upon Lord Northcliffe, & thus precipitate us into peace).

Saturday 9th November
Lord Mayor's day among other things, & one of the two last of war, I suppose. It's just possible that Lottie may bring us news that the armistice is signed within an hour. People buy papers at a great rate; but except for an occasional buzz round a newspaper boy & a number of shop girls provided with the Evening News in the train one feels nothing different in the atmosphere.. the general state perhaps is one of dazed surfeit; here we've had one great relief after another; you hear the paper boys calling out that Turkey has surrendered, or Austria given up, ..

but apparently Katherine Murry had heard someone say "we're giving them everything and getting nothing". Since then it is difficult to see how the most bloodthirsty citizens can squeeze anything more out of Germany.

Monday 11 November
Twenty five minutes ago the guns went off, announcing peace. A siren hooted on the river, They are hooting still. A few people ran to look out of windows. ...so far neither bells nor flags, but the wailing of sirens & intermittent guns.

Tuesday 12 November
...we were both conscious of a restlessness which made it seem natural to be going up to London. Disillusionment began after 10 minutes in the train. A fat slovenly woman in black velvet and feathers with the bad teeth of the poor insisted upon shaking hands with two soldiers ... she was half drunk already, & soon produced a large bottle of beer which she made them drink of; & then she kissed them ...but she and her like possessed London, & alone celebrated peace in their sordid way, staggering up the muddy pavements in the rain, decked with flags themselves, & voluble at sight of other people's flags. The Heavens disapproved and did their utmost to extinguish, but only succeeded in making feathers flop & flags languish. Taxicabs were crowded with whole families, grandmothers and babies, showing off; & yet there was no centre, no form for all this wandering emotion to take. The crowds had nowhere to go, nothing to do; they were in the state of children with too long a holiday. ..there seemed to be no mean between tipsy ribaldry & rather sour disapproval. Besides the discomfort tried every one's temper. it took us from 4 to 6 to get home; standing in queues, every one wet, many shops shut...

Friday 15 November
You can go to London without meeting more than two drunk soldiers; only an occasional crowd blocks the street. In a day or two it will be impossible for a private to threaten to knock out the brains of an officer, as I saw done the other day in Shaftesbury Avenue.

Sandham Memorial Chapel: paintings by Stanley Spencer

Sandham Memorial Chapel. Although I am a big Stanley Spencer fan I haven’t seen this before. It is a long way to drive and quite small but the pictures are full of love. They must have been Spencer’s way of coping with his memories of WWI. Although it is ostensibly a memorial to a chap called Sandham who died of disease after fighting in the Macedonian campaign, it doesn't show Sandham's experiences as Spencer could really show only his own memories: he had been a medical orderly in the UK (in Beaufort hospital near Bristol) and then? in Macedonia.

In this picture the orderlies are washing the wooden lockers (open shelves) in the baths and Spencer shows himself finding a moment of peace and calm between the baths, which were magenta in colour, and he liked them.

 He shows views of orderlies making beds, fetching tea urns, sorting the laundry, tending to frostbitten feet – and he shows the soldiers resting on the ground, getting water from a stream and filling their bottles, putting up tents, shaving under mosquito nets. And this being Spencer, there’s also a big picture of the Resurrection of the Soldiers. The soldiers get up and see their plain white crosses and some of them hand them back to Jesus, some just heap them up, the mules (that did all the heavy work) come back to life too, and the soldiers start to roll up their puttees (canvas bandages around their lower legs). For some people, the Great War destroyed their faith (how could a good God allow it to happen?) and for Spencer it was the other way (God must have more in store for us than this mess!)

The pictures of his hospital orderly experiences seem the most calming and organized. He had tried to see his menial daily tasks as a devotion to God and his faith was such that he remembered the time as very spiritual, mentioning “the progress of my soul” in these surroundings. It was very hard work and the shifts were long, between 10 and 14 hours, and he was at the hospital (in Bristol) for three years and was not able to paint in all that time. Obviously, he was unhappy, frustrated and lonely, but he was helped by his religious desire to please God by performing these menial tasks with love.  With Spencer the compositions are very complicated. Individual figures are simplified into curves and straight lines, but the design as a whole is difficult to see, with the eye being led all about the picture.

Stanley Spencer: Oh, how I could paint this feeling I have in me if only there was no war, the feeling of that corridor, the sergeant-major and his dog - anything so long as it gave me the feeling and the circumstance gave me! If I was Deborah, the lunatic who doesn't know there is a war on, I could do it. I envied him the mental agony of being cut off completely from my soul. I thought in agony how marvellously I could paint this moment in the corridor now. And I will paint it, with all the conviction I feel now, in a belief in peace being the essential need for creative work, not a peace that is merely the accidental lapse between wars, but a peace that whether war is on or not is the imperturbable and right state of the human soul.

This picture is called Ablutions. It shows the patients washing themselves and in the middle there's an orderly (prob a self-portrait), with an apron that ties up at the back, painting a man's wounds with iodine. It looks a little like a scene from Christ's life in renaissance painting - the man with the towel could be wearing a toga. The man at the back is pulling up his braces - something most men today have never done. 

In his Beaufort days Stanley had not yet formulated his ideas on the meaning of what he came to know as love, nor were the inspiring mental transformations he later experienced possible in his circumstances then. His current inability to master the significance of the atmospheres he was meeting or to discern the connections in them so vital to his creativity not only alarmed him but turned eventually into a source of desperation for him.
He was so disconnected that he became convinced in later life that the war had damaged beyond repair the cherished pre-war Cookham-feelings which had sourced the pristine glory of his early work. 

the above quotation is from a well-researched website with plenty of interesting thoughts about Stanley Spencer.

In this picture Spencer is on the right front, scraping dead skin off the feet of the man who is suffering from frostbitten feet. Another orderly has round slop pails over his shoulders making him look a little like an angel. There are eggs in nests all over the wallpaper, and this is probably something Spencer remembered as he liked to be precise about details.It is unlikely to be a conscious allusion to sex as this was something Spencer tried not to think about. There is a rare female presence in this picture: the sister right at the back through the doorway.

Stanley Spencer: I would like to explain what was at the back of my mind when I began to want to do these pictures. Well, when I first enlisted I began to feel I was dying of starvation, spiritual starvation, and this feeling intensified my desire for spiritual life, and then suddenly I began to see and catch hold of little particles of this life in the scrubbing of a floor or the making of a bed; and so everything I did meant a spiritual revelation to me. Everything at the hospital became a key to my conception of spiritual life, and so it came about at last that tea urns, bathrooms, beds etc all became symbols of my spiritual thoughts, things sacred to me by association.

when I am seeking the Kingdom of Heaven I shall tell God to take into consideration the number of men I have cleaned and the number of floors I have scrubbed, as well as the excellence of my pictures, so as to let me in.