The Captive Reader

Following Miss Bunting, Peace Breaks Out by Angela Thirkell begins in the spring of 1945.  After years of war, the end is finally here and the people of Barsetshire are not at all ready for the “Brave and Revolting New World” that awaits them.

For me, this is the most moving of Thrikell’s books dealing with the war.  All of the wartime books are fascinating (as well as simply entertaining) but what makes this so special is seeing how everyone cracks now that the wartime facade of calm and unquestioning compliance with government dictates is no longer necessary.   They are finally able to openly voice their frustration and their anger and their pain – in typically subdued Barsetshire style, but nonetheless – and it can be quite painful to witness.

With Miss Bunting’s death in 1944, the older generation began to feel the coming end of the world they knew.  Now, finally, it is here.  After years of anxiety and deprivation, of fear and grief, the war has been won but at what cost?  They behaved so well, “conscientiously doing their duty in a world they didn’t understand, a world which did not want them” but they are not to be rewarded with a return to the gracious style of living they so enjoyed.  A Labour government has been elected by a thankless nation, there is no end in sight for rationing, and the only thing that seems to have happened over the past six years is that too many boys have died and everyone else has grown older with nothing to show for those years but grey hairs and wrinkles.  It is not an inspiring sight and there are few optimists left in Barsetshire.  Mr Birkett, headmaster of Southbridge School, is horrified by the homogenized new world being promised them:

 ‘Soon there will be practically no eccentrics left in England, and the mediocre will have it all their own communal way.  I hope I’ll be dead then.  And I’ll blow up the school before I go.’

Laura Morland, in her own daft, dramatic way, is equally pessimistic (and, since Thirkell was writing with the benefit of hindsight, completely correct):

 ‘It is really good-bye to everything nice forever,’ said Mrs Morland in her deepest tragedy voice, ‘from today onward.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Laura,’ said Lord Stoke, who had happened to hear her.  ‘World’s got to go on somehow.’

‘But it is all going to be horrid forever,’ said Mrs Morland.  ‘We shall have a horrid winter and probably the Government will send all our coal and all our food to the Russians or the Mixo-Lydians, and there will be millions of conferences with millions of foreigners eating what’s left and commandeering all the hotels.  And no clothes, and everyone being rude.  And we shall be so tired,’ said Mrs Morland sadly, ‘that we shan’t even try to protest.’

The moment that really got me was not one of these glib speeches but a quiet scene: Lady Fielding alone with a cup of tea, daring to imagine just for a moment that none of it had ever happened:

The sights and sounds were much as they had always been and Lady Fielding thought that if she sat quite still, never moving, hardly breathing, the war and the more dreadful peace would turn out to have been a dream.

She wants so badly to erase those awful years.  But then a plane flies overhead and her fantasy is destroyed and for one awful, incredibly painful moment, she snaps.  The young adults, like Lady Fielding’s daughter Anne, are mostly ignorant or at least careless of what has been lost.  Not the older generation.  They trusted that all their suffering during the war, the endless anxiety of having children and spouses in uniform and overseas, the exhausting efforts to make do, and the cheerlessness of a life without even the smallest pleasures of a new outfit or a good meal, would be rewarded.  What they are instead presented with is a world none of them are particularly eager to live in.  Their innate sense of fairness has been violated.  They felt that they were being asked to put their real lives on hold and would be allowed to return to them once the war was won.  As long as the war continued, there was at least a glimmer of the pre-war world.  With the arrival of the peace, it vanishes.

It is not everyone who is so pessimistic.  The young people – and the not-so-young, in David Leslie’s case – are happily rushing about the county, entangling themselves in delightful flirtations.  David, despite his receding hairline, is still happily and cold-bloodedly breaking young hearts, though he is really far too old to have any business doing so, a fact his niece Clarissa enjoys callously reminding him of.  But David is always entertaining whenever he shows up and it is particularly nice to see him cut down to size by women of varying ages.  Suitable matches are made and yet another young man falls in love with a beautiful older woman and it is all very nice.  Particularly delightful, for me at least, is the engagement of Anne Fielding and Robin Dale.  If Lydia (Keith) Merton is my favourite Thirkell character (and she undoubtedly is), then Anne and Robin are my favourite couple.  We got to know them both so well on their own in Miss Bunting and to see how perfectly-suited they are that there was never really any doubt of how things would end up between them.  Still, it is immensely satisfying to get to that ending after two books.

This is a much more fun book than I have perhaps made it sound, though dissatisfaction with the new world is a major theme.  But with so many romantic pairings to juggle and so many important events to be dryly commented on, this book does not lack for amusing moments.  I am particularly fond of Thirkell’s description of the multicultural V-J Day celebrations in London (probably also an excellent illustration of why Thirkell may not agree with politically correct readers):

They then walked aimlessly about London, swelling the already gigantic crowd of Esquimaux, Tibetans, Americans, Free French, Tierra de Fuegans, Poles (who owing to each supporting a different kind of Government seemed even more numerous than they were), Mixo-Lydians, Canadians, Slavo-Lydians, Australians, Indians (which to the English mind roughly included any Persians, Arabs or South Sea Islanders who happened to be about), Argentines who had loyally come into the war the day before, Chileans who were all called Eduardo O’Coughlin or Ignacio Macalister, a clergyman who had once lived on Tristan da Cunka, Irish labourers out of whose large wages paid by the Saxon Oppressor Dark Rosaleen was doing very nicely while her sons pursued a divil-may-care policy of sitting on doorsteps all day smoking and contemplating the repairing jobs they had been imported to do, Lapps, Swedes, Broccoli, Calabresi, Chinese who being used to three million people dying of famine or being drowned in floods were unimpressed by crowds, some Russians one supposes, practically the whole of the Balkan states, the head chief of Mngangaland, who was in England with a large retinue to put his eightieth and favourite son to Balliol, and the President of the Republic of Sangrado, so-called from the great Liberator Shaun O’Grady (murdered 1843).  And all these people walked up and down London all day, with very little to drink and little or nothing to eat, and squashed each other loyally in front of Buckingham Palace, irritably in the Strand, angrily in Trafalgar Square, furiously in the Tubes as long as they were open, and drove the long-suffering Metropolitan Police nearly demented by being funny at night in Piccadilly Circus.