Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald - the BBC in the War

When you read a novel like this it reminds you that a novel can do all sorts of things. It consists of characters interacting, usually. Usually, there is a main character whose sensibility is made clear to the reader or several such characters, and things happen to the characters and they change, possibly.

I am not sure this book is about any of the characters, who are employed by the BBC in the war. There are young women who act as assistants in the department of a middle-aged man, Sam, who is brilliant but not aware as he is obsessed with the technical difficulties of recording outside broadcasts. He never seems to go home. "Pacing to and fro like a bear astray, in a grove of the BBC's pale furniture... He wore a tweed jacket, grey trousers and one of the BBC's frightful house ties... Much of the room was taken up with a bank of turntables and a cupboard full of clean shirts." He likes holding the hands of the female assistants and telling them his troubles (his obsession with recording the life of the nation, the human voice) and he goes to sleep with his head on Vi's shoulder. Vi is the most reliable of the young girl assistants.

 He has a friend, Jeff, who is the Director of programme planning and is under terrible stress. We first meet him drinking double whiskies in the BBC canteen. He is described like this: "His face, with its dark eyebrows, like a comedian's but one who had to be taken seriously, was the best known in the BBC... DPP was homeless, in the sense of having several homes, none of which he cared about more than the others. There was a room he could use at the Langham, and then there were two or three women with whom his relationship was quite unsentimental, but who were not sorry to see him when he came. He never went to his house, because his third wife was still in it."

There is a war on, London is very hazardous, and someone gets pregnant. There are young female employees worried about boyfriends in the forces, and male employees waiting to be called up. They spend the day chatting, of course they do, and gossiping.

Broadcasting House in Langham Place

The BBC, in this novel, is sometimes a single entity. "The BBC knew that for a fact." It is housed in a building that looks like a ship, a great cruise liner.

Jeff, early in the novel, finds that his place at the BBC is liable to a re-shuffle, and he may be sent out of London, because he is invited to welcome a French general who wants to address the British nation, and surmising that the General wants to tell Britain to give up fighting the Germans, pulls the plugs on him, so the nation hears 10 minutes of silence instead. In a way, his action is entirely admirable, and if the Ministry of Information or the War Office had heard the French General's address they might well have stepped in to control the BBC themselves, which they never did.

"The BBC, in the face of the grave doubts of the Services, persisted obstinately in telling the truth in their own way."

But the Ministries want to blame Jeff for stepping in and pulling the plugs without any consultation with anyone.

"The BBC loyally defended their own. As a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn't too sure where next week's money was coming from, they had several different kinds of language, and could guarantee to come out best from almost any discussion. Determined to go on doing what they thought best without official interference, ..."

The Assistant Deputy Director-General feels that Jeff's nerves have been strained by planning the whole of the Home and the Forces Programming, and suggests he reads Cranford to soothe himself to sleep every night. "The whole notion was comforting, but in fact Jeff had never been nervous and was now arguably the calmest person in the whole building."

(It's strange to think that Hyde Park was full of young people lounging about, (as usual) specifically the Free French, who came in two groups which fought with each other, and at the same time there was an anti-aircraft battery there.)

Sam is furious with Jeff for not getting a recording of the General for the archives. All the political stuff passes him by. He's worried about the Archives - they have no recordings of Stukas, for example. Jeff has no secretary which allows him to ignore half his correspondence as not worth a reply.

I found myself researching to find out who might have been the original for "Jeff", but I found nothing. 

On the trail, in "Broadcasts from the Blitz" I find: 

"On the afternoon of September 7, 1940, nearly a thousand German planes, bombers escorted by fighters, darkened the skies over London. After a two-hour attack, another wave arrived. The principal targets were the docks along the Thames, and the Ministry of Home Security reported that 430 persons were killed and 1,600 were badly injured...

...For the next fifty-seven nights, London was hit again and again. For a while, the bombers came by day as well, but the Royal Air Force destroyed so many planes by daytime that by October a day-time raid was a rarity. When darkness fell, however, London was blasted. London had been heavily bombed earlier,...It was the relentlessness of the blitz that set it apart. It was the real test of Britain's ability to stand alone and survive. An estimated 20,000 tons of high explosive were dropped on London within nine months."

Quantities of metal beds are brought into the concert hall, which becomes a dormitory for staff who never go home, and tickets are issued to staff who need a bed for the night. People of all grades climb on each other's bunks. The snoring echoes off the walls.

You find first-hand descriptions of this here.

Here is the most beautiful paragraph in the novel, and indeed, in most books there are no paragraphs as beautiful.

As an institution that could not tell a lie, they were unique in the contrivances of gods and men since the Oracle of Delphi. As office managers, they were no more than adequate, but now, as autumn approached, with the exiles [the French, the Poles, the Czechs etc] crowded awkwardly into their new sections, they were broadcasting in the strictest sense of the word, scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe, in the certainty that more than half must be lost, some for the rook, some for the crow, for the sake of a few that made their mark. And everyone who worked there, bitterly complaining about the short-sightedness of their colleagues, the vanity of the newsreaders, the remoteness of the Controllers and the restrictive nature of the canteen's one teaspoon, felt a certain pride which they had no way to express, either then or since.

This comes about halfway through the novel. After this, a new character is introduced, and there is a romance. But before this romance, the novel is about a lowly BBC employee's view of London in wartime and it is a portrait of an organisation, which is unusual for a novel, and has that light, masterly touch one sometimes finds in Graham Greene or Muriel Spark.

There are two literary allusions which come to the surface right at the end of the novel. One is about Shakespeare's The Tempest, which had me casting about trying to see the novel as a reworking of the story of Prospero and Aerial, and the other is an allusion to T.S. Eliot - the main character says that Eliot (he knows him by sight) walks "in measure, like a dancer" and the title  of the book is from one of his great poems:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each

I do not think they will sing to me

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

In 1945 it had been bombed a few times and patched up.

There is also an American character called Mac, who broadcasts to the US, telling the Amercians how the English behave in the Blitz, and it is possible to cast him as Aerial, because of the way he magically turns up scattering oranges and cheeses amongst the staff, going on air to evoke the scenes of ravaged London, even broadcasting the sound of the bombing from the roof of the BBC, and breezes out again - and this made me research the BBC during the war. There was a famous young US broadcaster called Ed Murrow, who played this role in the Blitz, but he wasn't the only one, and Murrow actually lived in London for a couple of years before the war, so he didn't "fly in" the way this character does.
You can hear one of Ed Murrow's broadcasts on the BBC page here
Another possibility for the original of Mac is Quentin Reynolds.

Berlin, Warsaw, and Krakow, part 4 - the Jewish quarter

The Jews had a long history in Krakow. They came in 1380-ish and through the early modern period they had a small area with a synagogue and a wall around it. After a couple of hundred years the wall came down and they were allowed to expand their area. Gradually they acquired more synagogues and more businesses and graveyards.

Then the Nazis... In Krakow the Jews amounted to up to 25% of the citizens! according to the museum in one of the old synagogues. This means that they had deep roots here and considered themselves Polish, and contributed to political and military life. They weren't in danger until the Nazis occupied ... and then the Poles seemed to have been "enforcers" of the Nazi rules... You need to come and see the old pictures and photographs to see how strange it was. It was the same in the Czech Republic. For example, Franz Kafka was a Jew and he lived a very integrated life in Prague, utterly unremarkable. Had he lived any longer, the Nazis would have murdered him and his family nevertheless.

When Spielberg wanted to film the story that became Schindler's List, he came to the original Jewish quarter, which was run down. Well, it isn't now. After the famous film, with its final captions saying that fewer than 400 Jews live in Poland today, Jews came back to Krakow, to start again in the Jewish Quarter. Some came from Israel. Hebrew is spoken here (I heard a waiter). I don't know what the Poles think about the Jews coming back. It is bizarre that this tragic area should be a magnet to tourists. But in the evenings the restaurants put on Klezmer bands,  and the music gives the place atmosphere. They do great trade. Our room is three floors up from a restaurant in this quarter. The tree outside our room is a willow, blowing in the breeze. Cars and mini-buses are parked down there on the cobbles. Tours come to visit the memorial to the Jewish community. Tourists come in little private taxis, like milk floats.

Outside the violinist and a cellist are playing "if I were a rich man". They vary the speed of the verses. I can hear the sound of cutlery on plates. A little tiny bit of applause for the musicians. Earlier they played the theme from "Schindler" and it was beautiful, but got no applause. None for "Air on a G string" either. The musicians have a very large repertoire and are very talented - I hope the restaurant owners pay them well.

One night we heard the theme from Schindler's List 4 times.

Schindler's factory building survives, and is a tourist attraction - a long queue for it. We nearly went  - then decided to go to the art gallery next door, because it is weird to go on holiday and visit a site of mass murder as though it was just another thing. "So! That was Auschwitz? Bad! Let's have lunch!" No. These places need more thought, formal clothing, special trips as pilgrims, more respect.

Synagogue

Jewish quarter, morning, synagogue at the end.

Berlin, Warsaw and Kracow - part 2, Warsaw

 

I think I had trouble coping with Warsaw because we didn't buy tickets for the public transport and we should have done. The distances between the areas you want to see are deceptive and the walking is very uncomfortable. We stayed in a famous Communist-built hotel called the MDM. This is the view from our fifth floor room. Alas, the hotel has swapped its long-standing sign, MDM, for SAMSUNG and stands opposite a building called ZTE.

The hotel inside was modern and very smartly furnished, and the breakfast was wonderful. We could have had breakfast all day. The trouble was that the room was very very hot and I couldn't sleep at all, which made me feel increasingly unhappy. We went to see some old churches in the hotel district, and then we went to see the old town. The Old Town is a marvellous tourist attraction and is only about 20 years old. We were not fooled by the Old Town. It has been built on the footprint of the old town and it may look very similar, the churches and sculptures and quaint old inns are a marvellous piece of work, but we didn't buy it. We didn't visit the castle because it was quaintly new and again, we weren't fooled and felt it was like Epcot, the Disney version of Europe. We went to the new town which was also destroyed in the war and has been recently rebuilt. We enjoyed an ice cream. We were pleased to see where Marie Curie was born, or a reconstruction of the house where she was born.

Churches seem to have survived the war.

This is the square in the new town. Which is quite new.



A square in the "old town" - with carriage ride for the tourists.

As we walked around we did sort-of admire the Soviet style architecture and many sculptures showing the heroic workers.

The People's Palace - town hall with exhibition centre. It
is the most peculiar style.

Soviet -era building alongside modern capitalist buildings in Warsaw. We went to the national museum and admired some art, and found a great place to have coffee - the café even supplied double hammocks for lazing in!  but more popular with the Polish public was the army museum, and the poor Soviet-era Poles had spent a large proportion of their GDP on all this old rubbish.

There were loads of these machines standing around in rows.

The roads were very busy and there seemed to be a lot of work involved in finding underpasses where we could cross. We seemed to walk such a long way. Nothing was as cheap as we had been led to expect. Many Polish people had enough money to splash out in the few interesting venues and there were "butiks" with luxury goods in. I found as we walked around and looked at information boards about the history of Warsaw I just felt incredibly sad. Hitler wanted Poland as Lebensraum for his people. He despised the Poles. He always intended to kill them. After the Warsaw uprising in which only a handful of people, really, rose up against the Germans, Hitler ordered that Warsaw be razed to the ground and that all the people should be killed. The SS were sent in with orders to kill men, women and children. They killed 200,000 and destroyed the whole city. I feel as though no-one has recovered from the shock and the blow, except the very young people who possibly don't know about it or can't relate to it. They are happy dressing up and going out to be seen, and quite right, of course. It's time to get over it. But the current city of Warsaw doesn't work as a city. It hasn't been planned to the right scale. If you look at the top photograph again, and wonder what was that like before WWII, you can see the problem of Warsaw.

But finally, on our last evening in Warsaw, we found one thing that's lovely and has been well-restored. It's a royal park. It was a magical place to spend an evening and we even ate in a café /restaurant there. There were a lot of people there (Poles) enjoying the memorial to Chopin and the lakes and woodland walks.



Memorial to Chopin

 



Evening peace and calm.



Berlin, Warsaw and Kracow - part 1, Berlin

Our holiday was a quite spontaneous choice. Suddenly, we wanted to go to Berlin, and then catch trains to Poland, because you can. The novelty of catching trains to other countries hasn't worn off, in spite of having done this a few years ago in Germany, Austria, CzechRep, Slovakia and Hungary.

We stayed in the dreariest hotel in Berlin. It was in a good area, but Oh, there was no attempt at decor, there was no personality in evidence as the receptionists spoke no English and had nothing to say. The breakfast was served in a small room and seemed to be the least the hotel could get away with - you could have scrambled egg and frankfurter, or cheese and ham and tomato and cucumber. I became used to the cheese salad breakfast. I chose the hotel because it was in an old building with very high ceilings in the commercial district. The stair case was impressive (there was no lift) and the doors were very tall and solid.

The place next door had the distinction of being a Jewish hotel with signs in Hebrew. (The Jewish history was to become the theme of our holiday and this wasn't a conscious choice; it's just inevitable) The ground floor of our hotel housed a restaurant - quite a nice one.

We bought 3 days of metro tickets, which turned out to be a really good idea, as we used the metro (and the S-bahn) a lot. From the airport we went to the Hauptbahnhof which was quite exciting in itself as it is on 5 levels.

On our first day we walked to town through the Tiergarten, which A kept calling the tea gardens although it actually means animal garden, and was a hunting park. It is the loveliest inner city park I have experienced, as it is very shady and quiet. Good for cycling and jogging. Mainly trees, and guess what? They are all quite new. The Berliners tore up the Tiergarten for firewood after WWII. All the decorative features which had been spoilt are being restored and replaced, with no expense spared. Good to see.

On the other side of the Tiergarten is an important monument - The Siegessaule - a gilded angel of Victory on a column. You can cross over the road and head to the Bundestag. My guide book calls it the Reichstag and perhaps the Germans do too? The Reichstag was hardly used from 1933 to 1999. It was the scene of the Nazi's last battle - 1,500 Nazi soldiers made their last stand here against the Soviet troops - extending WWII by 2 days. In 1995 rebuilding by British architect Sir Norman Foster commenced. In 1999 the German parliament convened here for the first time in 66 years. It must have been such a happy day. We made an appointment via the internet before we left England so we could go up to the dome and see the view. There are two ramps - one to go up and one to go down. Inside the dome a come of 360 mirrors reflects natural light into the chamber below. There is also a ventilation hole which allows the hot air from the chamber below to escape but the rain can't get in. Very clever - the commentary through the audio guide is very congratulatory of Sir Norman Foster which makes one wonder if he wrote it himself. Most of all we admired the view of the city.

Ventilation

Light reflector



Revolving sunshade

The Brandenburg gate was the grandest of 14 gates in Berlin's old city wall. It is a monumental size but was designed as an arch of peace, crowned by the Goddess of Peace and showing Mars sheathing his sword. Knowing that it used to be walled up, knowing its history, is incredibly important and there are information boards all around it with photographs showing how it used to look at different times. The line of the wall is also incised into the pavement - one looks at it and marvels at how profoundly it ruined the city of Berlin. The Gate represents struggles for freedom, past and present. There is a room built into the gate called the Room of Silence, where you may contemplate the idea of peace on the planet.

Through the wall is the Pariser Platz. After Napoleon this square was full of important government buildings all bombed to smithereens in WWII. For decades, it was an unrecognisable, deserted no-man's land. But now it has been rebuilt with prestigious embassies, fountains and flower gardens. Unfortunately these come with a large branch of Starbucks and the scary face of Colonel Sanders. There is also a reconstruction of the Hotel Adlon, which was famous between the wars, and more recently it was here on the second floor that Michael Jackson dangled his baby from the balcony.

Across the square is a historic street called Unter den Linden. Sadly, the trees are rather small - perhaps a small variety of lime, but in the good old days, this was one of Europe's grand boulevards. It stretches towards Alexanderplatz with its TV tower. Down here we realised we wanted a refresher in German history and went into the Deutsches Historical Museum. This is a large, well-planned and well-stocked narrative of German history. I particularly loved some of the paintings. A family portrait showed the rise of the educated middle class in 19th century Germany - and this in spite of the fact that Germany was late to industrialise and yet! the education system seems to have been good. Then I was also most impressed by a picture of King Wilhelm 1 on his horse, looking down at the potatoes some peasants are digging up. He is very interested in the size of their potatoes. No wonder they loved him. The history of Germany mirrors our own - Germany seems to be our annoying younger brother in Europe up until, and during, WWI. After the first World War their history, of a country broken up between the victors and heavily in debt, becomes very black, and Germans were clearly looking for ways out of the mess and the humiliation. Looking for a new beginning - Someone who will stand up for them. Someone who doesn't believe they lost a war. Step forward, A Hitler. This part was very well-explained.

Further on up the road there is a group of museums long-established, on an island, and a cathedral. It is pleasant to lie on the grass outside the cathedral and have a rest. Eventually we dragged ourselves around the buildings but none of the museums appealed very much - full of antiquities. Another time, perhaps, because I would like to go back to Berlin.

Outside the Cathedral

The next day we went on the S-bahn to the Berlin Wall Museum. We got off at Nordbahnhof, which was one of the "ghost stations" of  Cold War Berlin. It was built in 1926, closed in 1961, and open again in 1989. As it was a dogleg of the East mostly surrounded by the West, Western subway trains had permission to go through this station without stopping. The station steps were bricked up with two walls but at street level they were still visible. Guards surveyed the tunnels to make sure no-one got on or off,  - but in case they were tempted to abscond they were locked into a little room and watched the tracks through small windows. Down there the original wall tiles and the old German script survive, which is rather wonderful to see. We rose to the street rather stunned that the station stairs had been bricked up for so long. Almost immediately you come across the Wall park - the museum is outside where the wall used to be - a wide strip of grass with metal posts and pictures of the wall. Here the Berlin Wall, which was erected virtually overnight in 1961, ran right along Bernauer Strasse. People were suddenly separated from their neighbours across the street. I bought a postcard of bricklayers making the wall under armed guard. At gunpoint. It is the oddest thing.



Section of wall at the wall museum

There is a section of wall to look at from above, exactly where it used to be. Two walls, with no-man's land in between, and a watchtower. Apparently the watchtower was brought from elsewhere. The gravel in between meant that anyone trying to escape would leave footprints. A church, which had been in use since the late 19th century, ended up between the walls, and was torn down in 1985.

We didn't visit the Checkpoint Charlie Museum (something for next time) as we were a bit fed up with the wall after this, and we were disappointed with Checkpoint Charlie as it is only a reconstruction for tourists, a photo opportunity with flags and signs.



This is all very silly

We did stumble upon the Topography of Terror. This is an exhibit called Berlin 1933-45: Between Propaganda and Terror displayed outside behind a surviving stretch of wall - here are the ruins of the Gestapo headquarters and of the Nazi government. It's a museum of sorts - there are few artefacts; it's mostly written explanations and photos, like reading a good textbook standing up. You read about how the SS, the Gestapo (the secret police), and the SD (the Nazi intelligence agency) became a state within and state, with talons in every corner of German society. Here the Nazi machine planned the "racial purification" and the concentration camp system. The building was also equipped with dungeons, where the Gestapo detained and tortured thousands of prisoners. I thought about the characters in "Alone in Berlin". Poor old man, who ended up here, beaten up and playing chess while waiting for the death sentence to be carried out.

You have to hand it to the Germans, they aren't hiding anything. What happened is out there in the open, not hidden in a museum. There are photographs and documents.

The memorial to the murdered Jews is also outside in a prime position - it is an extraordinary maze of blocks which you walk up and down amongst without really understanding what it means. But this is lazy of me! What can I find out?

Rows of plain blocks, path goes up and down.

 Here is more information from Wikipedia:

According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.^[11] The Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe official English website^[2] states that the design represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because Eisenman said the number and design of the monument had no symbolic significance.^[12][13] However, observers have noted the memorial's resemblance to a cemetery.^[14][15][16] The abstract installation leaves room for interpretation. The most common being that of a graveyard. “The memorial evokes a graveyard for those who were unburied or thrown into unmarked pits, and several uneasily tilting stelae suggest an old, untended, or even desecrated cemetery^[17]”. The memorial's grid can be read as both an extension of the streets that surround the site and an unnerving evocation of the rigid discipline and bureaucratic order that kept the killing machine grinding along^[3]”. Wolfgang Thierse, the president of Germany's parliament described the piece as a place where people can grasp "what loneliness, powerlessness and despair mean".^[18] Mr. Thierse talked about the memorial as creating a type of mortal fear in the visitor. Visitors have described the monument as isolating, triggered by the massive blocks of concrete, barricading the visitor from street noise and sights of Berlin.^[18]

Ariel view of the memorial which was built on area previously occupied by the Wall.

Here is a review of the memorial from a recent visitor:

“Powerful Museum Underground ”

Reviewed 2 days ago

NEW

 via mobile

We initially went to just the above ground area only, which I did not find terribly compelling. However, we returned and went to the underground museum. I think the only way horrific events like the Holocaust don't get repeated is by making sure they are never forgotten. The museum begins with the broad strokes of how the concentration camps started and how widespread the crisis was. But the real impact of the exhibits is when they become personal. Pictures, diaries and personal accounts give a deeper meaning to the sheer numbers of people murdered. I can't say it's a pleasant museum, but I am very glad we went. Also, when you exit, the above ground area is more relatable.

Visited August 2017

https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g187323-d617423-r520342475-The_Holocaust_Memorial_Memorial_to_the_Murdered_Jews_of_Europe-Berlin.html#

Potsdamer Platz used to be partly in East Berlin and now it is a dazzling commercial square with busy roads, and some exciting cinemas and new buildings for Sony and Daimler - it celebrates the triumph of capitalism, if you like. We went there a few times as we were looking for an English film to see - but alas, English films are badly dubbed and unpleasant to watch.



Inside the Sony Centre - the dome

Inside the Sony Centre - whopping great mall

You have to walk a bit from Potsdamer Platz to get to the Kulturforum, where some major NEW art galleries and the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall is sited. This is the strangest part, because it isn't a popular place in spite of having those attractions. The spaces outside the galleries are desolate areas of concrete and the verges are full of weeds. The Gemaldegalerie houses great painting by Durer, Holbein, Brueghel, van Dyck, Vermeer, Giotto, Botticelli and a good number of Rembrandts. The collection is chronologically arranged in a purpose-built gallery, and is it popular? Really, no. So strange. It even has a good café with nice food and a good vibe. I took a photo of the basement because it is so extraordinarily empty.

I had the feeling that the Berliners themselves had somehow rejected this area, and I'd be interested to know why. I felt that it must have been very difficult, if you were about my age and had got used to the city the way it was with the wall in it, to have all the building work and the transformations of spaces into new spaces which reflect a mode of thought which you don't feel comfortable with. I mean, the dominance of the globalised corporations. I sympathised.

One space that hasn't been transformed, but which will be soon, is Alexanderplatz. This is a place that Berliners do enjoy. It is very concrete and East German, the buildings are very sixties and seventies, but the people go there in droves to hear buskers and buy crafts from stalls and see street entertainers and play with games and toys. It's great fun. But I think there are plans to improve it and perhaps this is something the Berliners don't really want. I think they might like more affordable rents and less glamourous rebuilding.


Alexanderplatz with communist buildings probably to be demolished - but should they be??

Famous 1960s clock



TV tower built by the communists - next time
we will go up!

Fountain outside the Rathaus - building works going on in front of the Rathaus.

Picture Archive, Stockton-on-Tees

Stockton on Tees is a small town near to Middlesbrough. My mother was born and grew up there, but although she would say she came from Stockton she actually came from a small village just North and West of there called Norton. My mother, Kathleen, was the youngest of five children - a Catholic family.

Recently I skimmed a Fabian tract on a shrinking birth-rate written by Sidney Webb in the early years of the 20th century - he was so concerned that only the Catholics and Jews were still having large families, but he needn't have worried! These are segments of society that take life seriously, when you think about it, and the children would do well. But he was a racist - he couldn't help it: he thought that the Anglo-Saxon race was about to be overwhelmed by the Jews and the Irish and that this was a terrible thing.

Early in the 20th century my Irish-named great grandfather, Michael O'Grady, was working on shipbuilding in Newcastle. In the census he specified that he worked on both iron and steel ships, I can imagine him being dogmatic about it; and the census return  shows he kept a servant as well as a wife, Isabella, and a daughter, also Isabella, and two sons. Perhaps at a time when there were fewer ships to build he did a strange thing: he left his wife and children and went to Australia. Did he promise to send them money? Did he write? I don't know. One of his sons fought and died in the Great war. The other went to visit him and eventually settled in Hastings, New Zealand, where he had a second-hand clothing shop that did quite well. He married a widow with two daughters and was comfortable. He often wrote to his sister, Isabella O'Grady the second, back in Stockton-on-Tees, and when my mother wrote to him he always sent her a Postal Order for five shillings. My mother remembers a little shrine by a window on the stairs to her other uncle, who joined the Durhams (the Durham Light Infantry) and died in France, along with rows and rows and rows of others. A photo, some medals, a prayer. His name is on the Menin Gate.

Isabella O'Grady married a veteran of the First World War. I think she might have thought herself lucky to get him, with the shortage of men about the country. His name was Harry Walker, a native of Stockton, and I think they met through church. She told my mother that he was always asking her to marry him, and she refused several times, until one day in 1919 he said to her, "You might as well marry me, you're not doing anything else." The truth of it hit home. She was already thirty one! She didn't have a job - perhaps she just helped her mother keep house, and went out each day to buy the meat and vegetables, flour and fat. They made cakes and bread; they didn't buy those. Once she dressed up in her best costume and had her picture taken, She wore a two piece costume in a light colour, a large hat, a rather vacant expression, and her Holy medals. He had been through the war and had been invalided out, gassed. He had a raking cough for the rest of his life. At this time he worked as a shop assistant, I think in a gentleman's outfitters, but the cough became a problem, and later he had to work as a gardener where the cough didn't matter so much.

After they married, babies came quickly. First Moira, a bright little girl, then three boys, Terence, Austin and Dennis. Then my mother, born twelve years after Moira, when her mother was about 45. So Isabella the second had the five children, a husband, her elderly mother, Mrs O'Grady living at home, and to make it more difficult, a prolapsed womb. My mother said she didn't think her mother paid much attention to her when she was a baby, because her mother was so busy, and that she was cared for by her Grandma and by Moira, that as soon as she could be pushed out in a pram with the other children, it was Moira who pushed her. The children, of course, played in the road, and at the end of the road was a council park, and they played there too. At night she slept with her grandma, a very pious Catholic, because, my mother said, she was a convert, "more Catholic than the Catholics". Grandma sang to her the "Guardian angel from heaven so bright" song as a lullaby.

Moira passed an exam and won a place at a posh school. She might have gone into an office to work after that but war broke out so soon after she joined the ATS. I imagine she was very good at the work she was given. What Terence did in the war I don't know. Terence and my mother didn't like each other. He was good at bursting other people's bubbles, and she wouldn't have liked that. Austin joined the Navy, until he had a nervous breakdown. Whatever happened to him in the Navy was deeply traumatic and he was never able to lead a fulfilling life afterwards. Dennis, the next brother, turned out to be C3 - he had a damaged ear-drum, and became very deaf later in life, but he was also reliable and always employed. I don't know what he did during the war. My mother was a schoolgirl in the war, and it was during this time that she became her mother's companion and pet, and she got all the attention she had wanted, and not had, from her in her early years.

Harry Walker, my mother's father, who coughed terribly, became very ill with his chest, and was hospitalised at intervals. In 1945 Isabella visited him in hospital and he said to her "I've always loved you, you know." My grandmother did not say she loved him. She had always refused to visit his family. My mother remembered walking to Thornaby with him to visit his sister, of whom he was very fond. On these walks he taught her the song of the Durham Light Infantry "We are the boys" and he also taught her music hall songs, such as - "You Can't Play in Our Back Yard Anymore" and "On Mother Kelly's Doorstep". I think he sang well. He had at times tried to lay the law down to Isabella, and she had somehow or other turned all his children against him. Although people said she was "a lovely person", my grandmother Isabella seems to me to have been spoilt and resentful. Anyway, after this hospital visit, my grandfather died, and Isabella regretted that she had not said anything kind to him, even, "I loved you, too." She had just made a face and a scornful noise. This is what she told my mother at the time, and my mother told me. He was 53 when he died and my grandmother got a war widow's pension, I believe. He has no memorial.

At some point the old lady, the first Isabella, contracted gangrene of the foot and couldn't be cared for at home any more, so she went into a hospital for old people. I don't think it was a workhouse, but it was like one. There were long wards full of the elderly. One day they visited her and there was an old lady looking miserable with a black eye and bruises. Mrs O'Grady nodded towards her and said: "She attacked one of the nurses". Nothing more was said. Mrs O'Grady was liked and respected, and was well-known in her Church. She died soon afterwards.

I look at the pictures that come up in the picture archive, Stockton-on-Tees, because I am interested in the world that my mother grew up in, and I see that the people who were her contemporaries, whose lives were documented in their schools and church outings and football teams, were amazing, cheerful people, somehow harder and sharper than we are, and it seems to me that my mother must have missed them all her life, these people who made up a society with a real sense of itself, defined in time by wars and other hardships.

A God In Ruins - by Kate Atkinson

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature

 

Summary:

The life of Teddy Todd - would-be poet, heroic World War II bomber pilot, husband, father, and grandfather - as he navigates the perils and progress of the twentieth century.

In "Life after Life"  Teddy was the brother that Ursula had prioritised and so through all her attempts at life, all the outcomes were wrong if Teddy died, so she would have to live again and again to make other decisions that ensured Teddy's survival. In this book we have the "What if?" of Teddy's survival, or I suppose, one of the many.
see my entry for Life after Life http://honhumcourcom.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/kate-atkinson-life-after-life.html

A God in Ruins is a fascinating book in that it contains more than one character who is simply unbearable. Not untrue, but insensitive and selfish and these people cause children to suffer, and that is what is hard to read about. From time to time I put the book away, and usually with a Kate Atkinson that can't be done.

Another difficult thing in this book is the non-chronological episodic narrative. One gets used to a time period (pre-war, wartime, post war, 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s) and the way the characters behave at that time, and suddenly they are juxtaposed with another time period, and the different characters and behaviours. Not that these seem in any way unlikely, it is all too believable, but it is frustrating to the reader. Did it have to be written this way? I wonder.

It was discussed at book group and we all rated it highly. I know Kate Atkinson, with this novel, was genuinely paying tribute to the heroism of the RAF (and the USAF) in the war, and to all the World War II generation, and I think the old people at book group were impressed with that aspect of the book, but found the author's decision to frame the novel as a fiction within a fiction - a double-fiction - unappealing, so they rated it less highly than the critics have. So it gets 10 for cleverness, and being right-on, but less from the common reader.

But altogether, it's a brilliant book that peeks in the heads of an array of characters and makes you care about them. It looks at generations of the same family and finds traits which re-occur from generation to generation, like themes in a symphony. She also touches on the way we care for old people in nursing homes and so forth. We keep them alive, and they are bewildered, and suffer. Poor, poor old things.

I think I found a couple of grammar errors in it which annoyed me. I don't mean errors of style, I mean errors of tense, for example, neglecting to use the past perfect.

We have a new Old Boy at the book group, who also likes the sound of his own voice, but he's not as arrogant as the other one, he just likes to hold the floor. (He said he really likes P.G. Wodehouse, and who doesn't? He compared Kate Atkinson with P.G. Wodehouse, which is like comparing a soufflé with a wedding cake.) Tom was back, - he's the intelligent one - grey hair with a fringe - he pointed out that you can't compare the two - and a new smart woman of my own age, I think,  who always says interesting things. What I'm waiting for is when the Irritating and Arrogant Old Boy (still on the cruise) meets the new Old Boy. Surely they will be rivals? I can imagine many interestingly abrasive confrontations. Hehe. The next book is Dr Thorne, by Trollope.