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In July 1939, at Liverpool Street Station, Mollie Panter-Downes watched as 147 Jewish children, each wearing a numbered label, arrived from Berlin. Already an occasional contributor to The New Yorker at a time when Congress was in the process of rejecting the Wagner-Rogers bill which would have given refuge in the United States to 20 000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany, she submitted an article aimed at convincing American readers of the children’s potential. The bill was blocked by an anti-semitic Anglophobe senator but the article, ‘Amid the Alien Corn’, was published, and when, as war loomed, the editor needed a London correspondent, he cabled Mollie, asking her to ‘try out’ a regular ‘Letter from London’. The trial was a success, and the ‘letters’ were to continue until 1984. Opening with the declaration of war on  3rd September 1939 and ending with a dazzling account of VE Day, London War Notes reprints a selection of the first 153 letters, each an individual triumph of wartime communication, ‘transported by car or bicycle through the blackout to the guard on a London-bound train, where it would be met by a Western Union messenger who cabled it to New York’ – almost unimaginable in these days of emails and attached files.

 

 

Mollie’s wartime writing was divided, like her life, between London and country, the Lansdowne Club in Mayfair and home near Haslemere in Surrey.  Covering the same period as London War Notes, Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes (PB No. 8) focused tightly on the home front, on the domestic, and, with very few exceptions, on village rather than on city life.  Arrivals (unwelcome relations, erstwhile friends, billeted soldiers, and evacuees),  departures (children to America, young sons and daughters, into the services), rationing and shortages all impact on village life. The villagers’ war effort is useful but modest. Distant gunfire rattles the china, enemy planes fly over but hold their lethal cargo for the cities. The World War is filtered through the daily papers and radio broadcasts. The bigger picture is projected, partially and reduced, onto a tiny canvas.

In today’s terms, to read London War Notes is to watch Channel 4 News, followed by ‘the news where you are’, wonderfully enhanced by the addition of Mollie’s very personal commentary. She never loses sight of her rural characters, creating and populating a ‘typical’ English village for her American readers. With its resident retired army officer, Colonel Basing, Mugbourne is in safe hands: gas masks are distributed, evacuees and their mothers placed by Mrs Molyneux-Thring, the billeting officer, while her butler drills the staff, and Miss Molyneux-Thring prepares to drive the village ambulance in readiness for the first air raid practice (Mugbourne doesn’t have its own air raid siren – no matter). But Mollie had a wider brief: her American editor was looking for a London correspondent to report on what was still a European war but would later become a world war. His readers knew the raw facts, but wanted to know what it felt like, quite literally, on the ground. Mollie Panter-Downes more than met his requirements.

 

 

“Do you remember, during the war …?”,  the grown-ups would ask each other, often when I was a small child, and didn’t understand, then less and less, until finally, when I was old enough (much older) to ask my own questions, the memories, or their memory perhaps, had faded. The Important Facts had by then begun to be shaped into history,  but I wanted the detail, the daily round. What was it like for them,  what would it have been like for me? London War Notes provides answers, and surprises.

The first surprise for me was how swiftly everything changed. The opening letter is dated 3rd September, the day that Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. But already gas masks have been distributed, blackout has been enforced, sandbags and barrage balloons are in place, bomber squadrons are flying overhead, and hordes of London children are being labelled and dispatched to live with strangers, who have cleared their guest rooms of ‘Crown Derby knickknacks and the best guest towels’. London, and ‘Mugbournes’ across the country are ready for action.

Another month and Noël Coward and Ralph Richardson have joined the Navy, and Beatrice Lillie is singing to the troops. Soon, the National Gallery, stripped of its paintings for the duration, is advertising lunchtime concerts, and its director, Kenneth Clark, is naming the war artists, the first of whom, Rushbury, Kennington and Roberts had barely cleaned their brushes since doing the same job in the previous war. The poets Louis McNeice and C Day Lewis will work at the BBC, Stephen Spender will join the firemen. More importantly, Churchill, is back in the seat of power. Mollie’s admiration for him is unbounded, flagging only a little after the retreats in Libya and Malaya when she admits to an ‘uneasy suspicion that fine oratory may sometimes carry away the orator as well as his audience.’ Less importantly (but of interest presumably to royal watchers in the United States) the Duke and Duchess of Windsor returned home ‘in a blaze of apathy’.

 

 

Meanwhile, aliens, German and Austrian refugees, many filling the gaps left by departing cooks in the kitchens of the middle classes – ‘domestic servants are soon going to be as extinct as the mammoth’ – are being urged ‘to behave in a becomingly British manner’, to report at once to their local police stations and hand over ‘any explosives, motorcycles, seagoing craft … cameras, maps and nautical charts.’

MPD’s eye and ear for bureaucratic absurdity is unfailing. And she does not want for material. The shortage of paper that results in newspapers shrinking ‘to svelte proportions’, school children being deprived of textbooks, and a yearly diminution in the number and variety of Christmas cards, at no stage impeded the publication of Ministerial dictats, which she delights in gently mocking, even as the threat of imminent invasion shattered the fragile calm of the ‘phoney war’.  The Ministry of Transport ordered the precautionary disabling of private motor cars: ‘The magneto and the fuel injection pump must be smashed with a hammer, and in case non-mechanical owners should stand gaping and wondering which of the silly-looking things to smash first, the pamphlet recommends gently that “they should go to the nearest garage at once to find out.”’ She inveighs against the advertisements published by the Ministry of Information encouraging ‘correct behaviour under stress’ (were these the famous Keep Calm and Carry On posters?), pointing out that ‘under stress every charwoman reacts with the courage, restraint and humor [American spelling is used throughout] traditionally expected of aristocrats.’ An insult and a waste of precious paper. The shortage of paper, she has explained, was the result of the German invasion of Scandinavia. The following year fighting in Malaya, the source of Britain’s rubber, would strike at ‘the production of corsets, fly swatters, tobacco pouches, garden hose, rubber bones for dogs and golf-tees’, and bring about a dearth of hot water-bottles in the bitterly cold winter of 1942. The War was both far away and very close.

 

 

For Londoners it was very close indeed and cruelly so during the months of the Blitz. Behind Mollie’s cool understatement and wry wit is a serious commentary. The first tragic note is struck at the end of August 1940, when the announcements of the first air raid deaths appear in the obituary columns: ‘No mention is  made of the cause of death, but the conventional phrase ‘very suddenly’ is always used. Thousands of men, women and children are scheduled to die very suddenly, without any particular notice being taken of them in the obituary columns … ‘All that is best in the good life of civilised effort appears to be slowly and painfully keeling over in the chaos of man’s inhumanity to man.’ But with the same courage that she praises in the British people (tacitly urging New Yorker readers to do the same), she stiffens her upper lip, and describes the unexpected pleasure to be found in Oxford Street, which ‘now has all the charms of shopping in an open air market, with silk stockings and fragile underwear blowing in the breeze let in through paneless windows.’ Bomb damage is not told, but shown, and surprisingly enjoyed in its surreal result.

Rationing too is ‘personalised’. Clothes rationing affecting all but the very rich, whose wardrobes were ‘regulated by nothing but the depths of their pocketbooks’, caused early panic for most, ‘only a paltry sixty-six coupons between them and loincloths’ and penury for hundreds of small dress shops and tailors. For children it meant relying on hand-me-downs, so that boys and girls became ‘accustomed to meeting last winter’s coat walking down the street on someone else’s back.’ For five years food took the place of weather as the fall-back topic of conversation. Weekend guests would arrive with butter, and sugar was more welcome than flowers. Christmas was a dull affair, few presents, tinned turkey, maybe a second hand trike or dolls’ pram, toys that ‘look as though they had been knocked together out of an old sugar box by a ten year old with his first fret saw.’ This is what it would have been like for me.

 

 

London War Notes is not a diary, but a weekly record for a nation who would become our most important ally. The account is for the most part, to use a more modern word, upbeat. The war news is limited, because war news was limited – even the weather forecast was considered too secret to broadcast. It is, by default, an inward looking account. Only in the final months of the war does Mollie Panter-Downes learn of the food shortages suffered in France, in Holland and in Belgium. Not until March 1945 does she write of the photographs showing the results of Allied bombing of Germany, news of which two years earlier had been ‘a fine tonic to Londoners’: the ‘strategic bombing’ which Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg writes about in such agonising detail in On the Other Side: Letters to my Children from Germany 1940-46 (PB No. 75).

Mollie Panter-Downes covers the war from beginning to end: from the declaration, through conscription for women, evacuation, the Blitz and D Day, ‘the greatest day of our times’, which turned out unexpectedly to be ‘just the same ole London day, with men and women going to the office, queuing up for fish, getting haircuts, and scrambling for lunch’, to VE Day, when working girls ‘streamed out into the parks and streets like flocks of twittering, gaily plumaged cockney birds’, and ‘with their customary practicality housewives put bread before circuses [and] waited in the long bakery queues, the string bags of the common ground in one hand and the Union Jack of the glad occasion in the other.’ There are twenty-one books listed under the heading WW2 in the Persephone catalogue here. London War Notes is a companion volume not just to Mollie Panter-Downes’s Wartime Stories, but to each of the other twenty.

Is Dorothy Whipple too often dismissed by critics as ‘a woman’s writer’? The question was asked at a recent Persephone lunch. The obvious answer is ‘yes’, but then we ask, ‘why’? And who are these critics? And what is meant by ‘a woman’s writer’? And, why should it be somehow a term of derision?

 

 

Last week’s newspapers all carried the news of Philip Roth’s death. The ‘quality’ papers printed long obituaries. Though his most highly regarded novels feature his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, and the novel that brought him first to the public eye had for anti-hero Alexander Portnoy a compulsive teenage masturbator, not one suggested that Roth might have been ‘a man’s writer’. All lamented the fact that he had been unfairly overlooked for the Nobel Prize (Roth apparently was of the same mind). Another Nobel refusé was his fellow American John Updike, whose Rabbit novels are currently being adapted for television. Fiercely rebutting accusations of misogyny on Updike’s part, the scriptwriter Andrew Davies nevertheless admits that ‘to redress the gender imbalance and address contemporary concerns’, extra scenes have been written in for Rabbit’s wife and mistress. At risk of sounding like ‘a shrill feminist’ (heaven forbid), is there not some contradiction here? If Updike had been so minded, he would have written the missing scenes – many male writers write wonderful women. Would any (male, because statistics make that considerably more than likely) critic presume to summarise Updike as a ‘man’s writer’? I am tempted to do so myself, and not in a good way.

In the Guardian in 2017 (in a piece which was reprinted in the last Persephone Biannually) the Irish novelist John Boyne describes attending a literary festival, ‘where a trio of established male writers were referred to in the programme as “giants of world literature”, while a panel of female writers of equal stature were described as “wonderful storytellers”. Even her most devoted fans would not be so bold as to call Dorothy Whipple a ‘giant of world literature’,  but I warrant those three ‘male writers’ were no Titans, merely male.

Dorothy Whipple is a wonderful storyteller. She has absolute mastery of her material, her settings, her characters, and her plot, her control so delicate, her touch so light, that we are rarely conscious of an authorial voice, or hand. Because of the Lockwoods flows like her other novels so that we have the sensation of reading an assured, carefully paced account of events that have already happened. In her afterword to They Knew Mr Knight Terence Handley Macmath describes the ‘sense of order’ that characterises Whipple’s novels, which ‘are about wrongs being righted, people changing, sin being redeemed’ , but in which we cannot comfortably predict happy endings for all, nor can we know for sure who will be carrying the moral beacon. And so, we keep turning the pages, at times so eagerly that we miss the clues that Whipple has subtly planted, on which the plot and sub-plots will turn: the torn lining of a doctor’s bag, a pâtisserie owner unintentionally snubbed.

Because of the Lockwoods opens with a New Year’s Eve party. The Lockwoods are hosting the Hunters, somewhat ungraciously – ‘It would be one way of getting the food eaten up.’ We know the territory, a medium-sized northern town, where money and status are tightly bound, while not quite over-riding the more subtle distinctions of social class. Were it not for her wretched lack of funds, Mrs Hunter, the daughter of a doctor, and widow of an architect, would rank as the equal of the lawyer’s wife, Mrs Lockwood, rather than the abject recipient with her three children of turkey leftovers broken jellies, and ‘rather damaged bon-bons’ (that ‘rather’ is so ‘Whipple’), and cast-offs. Everything about the Lockwoods and their three daughters, exudes excess, and over-weaning self-confidence, while the Hunters appear forlorn. Mrs Hunter is ‘like a delicate plant drooping from lack of support’, her children left defenceless by the death of their father seven years earlier.

 

 

How quickly Mrs Lockwood damns herself out of her own mouth, as Dorothy Whipple moves seamlessly from her authorial voice to that of her character:  ‘they should all come to Oakfield on New Year’s Eve, thought Mrs Lockwood benevolently. The children should take sweets home and perhaps she could hunt up a blouse for Mrs Hunter. The blue silk probably; she’d really had all the wear she could get out of it. Yes, Mrs Hunter could have that. They must all come and enjoy themselves.’ Enjoying it or not, Mrs Hunter feels beholden to the Lockwoods, to Mrs Lockwood for this occasional entrée into a social milieu of which she considers herself and her children to be members by birth, exiled only by monetary misfortune to life in an ugly little house, where they eschew all contact with their neighbours; to Mr William Lockwood for taking on the role of financial adviser after the death of her husband. ‘The fact that he had secretly profited, in one comparatively trifling matter, from so doing did not incline him to suffer her more gladly.’

And there in one short chapter we have, dropped like a pin, the nub of the plot, and all but one of the principal characters. If there is a thread common to many of Whipple’s novels it is a lack of self-awareness in the worst of her women, and a lack of conscience in the worst of her men. We have spotted the villain – financiers in Dorothy Whipple’s world are rarely to be trusted, but William Lockwood has a redeeming feature: he is deeply attached to his children, and particularly to his youngest daughter. His wife is less obviously affectionate but ruthlessly competitive about her girls, and bursting with personal vanity, a bubble which Whipple, to our delight, is always keen to prick. Taking tea with Mrs Hunter: ‘Of course I have a very small foot,’ she would say, extending it for inspection. Thea inspected it. It was small and puffy; it was like a marshmallow.’ And hosting a charitable garden fête, ‘as she proceeded from table to table, bending in the tightly-fitting pink gown with the ospreys waving, Thea thought she looked like a boiled lobster walking on its tail.’ We hardly need telling that her bedroom slippers are pink and fluffy. If clothes make the man, they most certainly speak volumes about the woman. Do only women read these signs? Can men not understand the shorthand? Are such superficial details beneath them, or beyond them? Is it possible not to love Whipple’s description of the Lockwood twins dancing pumps whose soles ‘showed like two sponge -finger biscuits’? I suppose if you have never seen a pair of ballet pumps, or a sponge-finger …

‘Constance Hunter was not the sort of woman who stiffened to meet the blows of fate’, and the Hunters have found themselves relying on the counsel of a man who ‘had laid his strong, hairy hands to life and meant to wring from it the best of everything for his wife, his girls and himself.’ Her gratitude is craven and blind. He is willing to ‘help’ only because it would look bad if it got about that he’d refused – there are people above the Lockwoods in the social ladder whose approval might provide a leg-up – and his advice to the family as time goes on is cursory almost to the point of cruelty. Molly Hunter, a gentle girl whose one talent is for cooking, is forced at fifteen to take up a position as governess, a job to which she is wholly unsuited. Her brother’s hopes of becoming a doctor are dashed. Having been more or less auctioned off in Lockwood’s club – ‘anybody want a boy?’ – he must go to work in a bank.

Only Thea, the youngest of the Hunter children, the cleverest and the most determined, vows at the age of twelve not to do what the Lockwoods want: ‘If ever they want me to do a thing, that’ll be enough. I won’t do it.’ In her brilliant Preface, Harriet Evans rates her as possibly her favourite of Whipple’s heroines and it is hard not agree. She is certainly one of the most complex. Emerging comparatively slowly as the central character, pivotal to the interwoven plots, Thea is a fighter. Headstrong, often naïve, she is unimpressed by the Lockwoods, but has a strong streak of her mother’s snobbery. She is intelligent, reflective, perceived as secretive, and brave, a risk-taker, inclined to make powerful enemies.

 

 

Dorothy Whipple writes rooms and their furniture with the same deftness as she writes clothes. The dark clutter of the front room at Byron Place, looking ‘so much like a collection of job lots that one almost looked for the sale tickets’, contrasts pitifully with the scented ease of Oakfield. Most evocative and atmospheric are the French interiors, in the glorious middle section of the novel. Thea has fought to join the Lockwood girls, and their grander friend Angela Harvey, for a year in a French pensionnat. One can smell the stark réfectoire with its oilskin cloths, and the cold classroom where all the windows were closed, ‘and the air was moted with chalk from the blackboards’. How perfect is DW’s coining of ‘moted’. The office of the Directrice is so small that to be at close quarter with her ‘was like being in a cage with a tiger.’ The attic room that Thea shares with Jeanne, another young teacher – she is not being ‘finished’ like the other English girls, but earning her keep, au pair – recalls Gwen John’s room in Paris, but far shabbier: ‘The wallpaper was cracked and faded pink … there was a strip of carpet beside each bed, there were two chairs, two small tables, one piled with books, the other presumably for herself.’ That we are seeing the room through Thea’s eyes is so subtly conveyed in the final clause. Her reaction to the house where she is engaged to give private lessons to Jacques Farnet and his sister, Simone, is similarly vivid: ‘… the formal salon with stiff, tasteless furniture on which were arranged cushions no bigger than handkerchief sachets.’ Could only a woman grasp the absurdity?

Thea is an innocent abroad. She recklessly defies French convention and walks alone through the little town, unaware of the many pairs of eyes that are turned on her. She fails to heed Jeanne’s words of warning about the Directrice, ‘Méfiez-vous de Mademoiselle Duchêne’. She is careful with Mme Farnet, ‘but she often forgot Simone, and it was a mistake to forget Simone.’ A rare authorial intervention, and a plot marker: Whipple flags it with the opening ‘But’ and the comma. Brilliant once again, and so easily missed. An unfortunate combination of bad judgement and bad luck brings the French idyll to an abrupt end.

 

 

Our delightful heroine must grow up. She must cure herself of ‘the malady of the ideal’, diagnosed in Thea by Jeanne, a little older, wiser, and resigned to a less than perfect life. Her guide is the initially despised neighbour, market stall-holder, self-made, and self-educated, Oliver Reade, the fictional hard-working brother-under-the-skin of Carrie the barmaid in They Knew Mr Knight and Miss Vanne the hairdresser in The Priory.

Thea, the young perfectionist, in her first conversation with Oliver, had scorned his market merchandise, rightly supposing it ‘to have flaws in it’, a scorn extending by implication to the seller himself. Many months later he had not been ashamed to admit in a letter that he had been doing rather well one way and another ‘mostly with things with flaws in them, but most of us have to be content with the things with flaws in them.’ It is a powerful message, and one to which Thea bends only after much pain, and broken dreams, but Oliver with his strong work ethic, honesty, and ambition tempered by realism, proves to be the Hunters’ saviour, the surprising bearer of the moral beacon, and a fully realised, delightfully human, character.

The title of John Boyne’s Guardian article was ‘Women are better novelists than men’. ‘My female friends,’ he writes, ‘seem to have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in men’s heads most of the time. My male friends, on the other hand, haven’t got a clue what’s going on in women’s.’ He puts it down to ‘the historically subservient role women have played in society that has made them understand human nature more clearly, a necessity if one is trying to create authentic characters.’ It’s hard to forgive him for not mentioning any Persephone writers, but perhaps that can be remedied. Starting with Dorothy Whipple?