This is a very nice and cohesive collection of short stories, written by Sylvia Townsend Warner between 1940 and 1946 for the New Yorker, and put together by Persephone Books. The stories centre on the Domestic Front: an ideal location for STW since domestic realism is one of her fortes and with most of the men out of the way she can concentrate on the women and the elderly, characters who always attract her attention.
The stories are stuffed with the detail of everyday life in wartime: the salvage drives (including Bone Salvage?!), the rations, the rabbit-breeding, the mouldy jam (not enough sugar). Mrs Campion, in ‘From Above’, is evacuated – liberated? – when a time bomb is discovered in Albion Terrace. A tobacconist hides the last packet of cigarettes from a customer, to keep for his own wife. In ‘England, Home and Beauty’, Mr Sillery and Major Puncheon are training the local women in how to use a machine gun:
‘Well,’ said Mrs Johnson, the last to rise. ‘Well, thank you very much, I’m sure. I daresay we could all manage that, at a pinch.’ Which was one of the comforts, Mrs Goose was murmuring to Miss Cutler, about being a woman. One had to turn one’s hand to anything, almost. One thing more or less didn’t make much difference. Miss Cutler replied that, speaking for herself, she’d always had quite a liking for machinery. Once you got the hang of it, you must admit it was very reasonable. ‘Though I’d be scared stiff if I had to drive a car,’ she said. ‘Think how you’d feel if you hurt someone accidentally.’
This training is not without controversy among the local men, and the women, having had their turn with the gun, are directed to fill ammunition belts – dull but useful work, more appropriate to them, as the men fondly imagine, until they overhear them discussing the merits of Sten guns with savage relish.
Many of the stories are very funny social comedies. In ‘It’s What We’re Here For’, two nice middle-class ladies at the Women’s Voluntary Services, eager to help the deserving poor, struggle with Mrs Leopard, who is not quite as deserving as she might be. At first it seems that Mrs Larpent and Mrs Bogle are just obtuse and patronising, but this is not it. Is it that they take their job of helping very, very seriously (as implied in the title)? Is it that Mrs Leopard is too much for them? That they wish to protect her?
(Stanley Spencer, Village Gossip, 1939; Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum; found here)
This social comedy tips easily into pathos, however. In ‘Bow to the Rising Sun’, how quickly Colonel Prowse switches his allegiance in the Fuel Control Office! He brings in flowers for pretty young Button which he then bestows upon the older Mrs Stanley, who will replace Button as the Fuel Controller’s assistant. Button tries to save face:
‘Don’t you think he’s rather sweet? So touching, the way he brings his flowers along and then gets all shy about them and dumps them down anywhere. Well, thank God it’s lunchtime! We’ll go to the Old World, shall we? Want to wash your hands? You go first.’
In the cloakroom Mrs Stanley found herself crying, weeping unavailing tears for the desperate idiot valour of the young.
There is sadness too for Gunner Brock in the title story, whose happy expectations of homecoming on leave are dashed by discoveries in the town’s salvage drive which cause him to reassess his relationship with his family. The argument about differences in risk perception in ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ will be familiar to many of us after the last year of pandemic. More darkly, ‘The Mothers’ seethes with frustration and dislike. In ‘Arsace, Il Faut Partir’, actual combat comes frighteningly close to Odette de Boulay in her night-time orchard, apples pattering down about her like the parachuting soldiers just a few miles away.
Etiquette can come under strain in a wartime situation, as in ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’. Attending a funeral, the mourners are forced to jump into the open grave as a landmine is dropped on the cemetery. Fortunately, Mr Kedge the funeral director rises to the occasion:
Reg seized Alan, and dropped him into the grave. The he grabbed Cathie, and dropped her in beside the child.
‘Jump in, jump in! It’s a landmine coming down.’
One after another the mourners got into the grave. The mutes came to the edge, hesitated, seemed inclined to follow. Mr Kedge, with a recalling gesture, pointed them to some bushes. Remembering their position they retired there, and lay down. The clergyman still remained standing. Mr Kedge touched his elbow, pointed to the grave. The clergyman, on such an occasion, would rank as one of the family.
In other stories, we see shifts in social relations. ‘Poor Mary’ is about a serving officer on home leave – but the officer is Mary, who is in the ATS, and the spouse at home is Nicholas, a conscientious objector. The war has highlighted their differences, which in peacetime had seemed so refreshing. One of my favourite stories is ‘Sweethearts and Wives’, in which three women set up house together with their children. One of the husbands, William, coming home on leave, is appalled at their slovenly housekeeping, opportunistic behaviour and failure to feed him well. Bearing no useful gifts for them and lacking any practical skills, he seems – surplus to requirements.
(Leonora Carrington, The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot, 1946; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; found here)
In STW’s fiction, the elderly are frequent causes for concern – you never quite know whether they’re going to behave themselves – they haven’t much to lose any more and care little for convention. There is Miss Gauntlett, daughter of the famous writer, who is kindly invited into her childhood home by its present resident, Mrs Hawley. Mrs Hawley feels that Miss Gauntlett is ‘not quite worthy’ of her father and her reactions as she’s shown around are not quite what they should be. Then there are the elderly Ryders in ‘The Cold’, who have taken to their beds because they are unwell. Their daughter-in-law ruminates:
It is very nice to be cultivated, of course, but somehow in wartime it does jar to labour upstairs with a heavy supper tray and hear, beyond the door, two animated voices discussing Savanorola; and then to hear the voices silenced, like mice when one throws a shoe in their direction, as one knocked on the door and called out brightly, ‘Supper, darlings!’ and to know, as clearly as if one had seen it, that old Mrs Ryder was stubbing out one of her cigarettes. That jarred too, especially as she smoked such very heavy ones.
And in another of my favourite stories, ‘Scorched Earth’, the ‘septuagenarian fogies’ Colonel Pomeroy and his wife have enthusiastically devoted themselves to self-sufficiency: digging up the lawn for potatoes, raising mushrooms in the air raid shelter, turning everything into jam and saving ‘heeltaps from soap, and tobacco pried from cigarette stubs’. But there is one thing that gives them even greater pleasure than all of this – fantasising how to destroy it all.
I could drone on for ever about the stories in English Climate: it would be better if you just read them. All of STW’s formidable talents are on display here and it’s a pleasure to read, full of subtleties, humour and sadness. If you haven’t yet read any of STW’s work, this is an excellent place to start.