The Captive Reader

I am slowly coming to love short stories and the more books I read like Good Evening, Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes, the faster that conversion will happen.  Published in 1999, this is Persephone Book No. 8, a collection of stories that Panter-Downes, an Englishwoman, wrote for The New Yorker during the Second World War.  Panter-Downes’ wartime journalism has been collected and published (as Letters from England and London War Notes, 1939-1945) but almost all of the stories in this book had never been printed outside of the magazine until Persephone gathered them in this collection.  And what a service they did us readers by doing so.

The stories are focused on ordinary men and women, examining how their lives and views of the world are disrupted by the war.  This kind of quiet, domestic approach to the effects of war suits my tastes exactly; it is why I am drawn to Angela Thirkell’s wartime novels, diaries from women like Nella Last and Clara Milburn, and Persephone’s other WWII-era offerings (House-Bound being one excellent example).  Panter-Downes’ focus is never on the overtly dramatic – there are no dreaded telegrams or major personal tragedies – but that does not make the suffering or disappointments of her characters any less wrenching.  Two mothers brought together through their shared fear for their children in America and Asia in the days after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour; a wife trying to hold herself together through the last days of her husband’s leave; a long-term mistress who has no way of knowing her lover’s fate since “the War Office doesn’t have a service for sending telegrams to mistresses”: these are the sorts of stories that the book is made up of.  Evacuees, rationing, work parties, the home guard…Panter-Downes addresses a wide variety of homefront experiences in a perceptive and direct style that I found irresistible.

The collection is not without humour.  The frustration felt by those hosting evacuees or friends whose London homes were blitzed can be most amusing, as can the gossipy conversations held during Red Cross sewing parties.  To me, though, the most amusing story was the very first one: “A Date with Romance” from October 1939.  Mrs Ramsay, who features in a number of the stories, has come to London to meet an old admirer recently back from Malaya.  Feeling intensely romantic and nostalgic, her fantasy of a tender reunion is quickly dashed by his jolly greeting:

‘Gerald, dear,’ said Mrs Ramsay softly.  She held out both her hands, which Gerald pumped up and down.

‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘old Helen.’  Mrs Ramsay felt a slight but definite chill.

I found the pieces about those saddled with evacuees the most interesting.  Panter-Downes uses a number of stories to address the tensions these situations created and the way lives and households were upset by the addition of outsiders.  “In Clover” is probably the most intriguing, looking at how a young upper-middle class wife’s innocent ignorance is upset by the arrival of a slovenly evacuee and her three children:

Little Mrs Fletcher…had two babies of her own and a husband in the Guards, but her notions about all three were pretty innocent.  On the afternoon her nurse went out, the harsher facts of infant life were concealed from her by the nursery maid, who let her have fun pretending to fool around with two little dears who were always perfectly dry, perfectly sweet-smelling, and done up in frilly organdie tied with ribbons.

By the time the story ends, Mrs Fletcher is no longer quite so unaware of the harsher facts her household had spent years trying to shield her from.

But the story that touched me the most, the one that upset me and actually brought angry tears to my eyes, was “It’s the Reaction” from July 1943.  It is a glimpse into the life of Miss Birch, a lonely ministry employee in London who longs for the friendly camaraderie that had existed between her and her neighbours during the Blitz, when they spent night after night together huddled in their apartment building’s shelter.  Now, they barely even acknowledge one another in the hallways.  Determined not to give up so easily, Miss Birch makes a cheerful and determined attempt to rekindle one of those Blitz-era friendships.  Her effort falls horribly flat and it is heart-breaking.

I found Panter-Downes’ willingness to address such a wide range of reactions to the changes brought on by the war – from earnest enthusiasm to petty but sympathetically-portrayed selfishness – most appealing and, sadly, surprising.  My expectations have been so lowered by other WWII-era books and diaries brimming with patriotic zeal, whose characters or authors would never dare to express any skepticism about the necessity of the discomfort and upheaval the war brought into their lives, that I no longer expect to find anything else.  I am not doubting that there were people – millions! – who exemplified the much-praised wartime spirit but I find it irritating when that kind of sustained optimism and enthusiastic collectivism is treated as the only way to have felt, or, worse yet, the only correct way to have felt.  It is the ability to capture and describe the range of emotions beyong that and to do so without implying any judgment that gives this book so much appeal today, sixty- and seventy-odd years after the stories were written.

The twenty-one stories in this collection are all quite short – most are only around ten pages long – so should theoretically be perfect for those looking for something to dip in and out of.  I say theoretically because I did not dip: I plunged.  Once I started reading, I did not let this book out of my hands.   I now count it as one of my favourite Persephone books and I cannot wait to read Minnie’s Room, a collection of Panter-Downes’ peacetime stories.