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An astonished figure in striped pyjamas and a red beret surveys a scene of rural devastation. In front of his (remarkably unscathed) house stands a large (equally unscathed) topiary cockerel, behind it a vast ocean liner lies on its side. This was the cover of the 1941 edition of Le Manuscrit Hopkins (Sherriff’s fame spread quickly across the Channel). The faintly humorous note was picked up more recently (2009) by another French publisher. On this cover a rather paunchy Nelson looks down on a tidal wave rolling just below his feet. What appears to be a drowned Bonapartist soldier floats by, while a moustached figure holding a clipboard, and presumably frantically treading water, takes notes, with stereotypical Anglo-Saxon sang froid. On his head lies a large white chicken, which is clearly dead. The first English editions were stark by comparison: just the title, a reference to Journey’s End, a ‘puff’ from The Spectator, favourable comparison with H.G. Wells. Only in 1958 in an abridged, re-titled (The Cataclysm) version did The Hopkins Manuscript receive the full ‘Pan’ treatment: a terrifying image of buses and cars swept along in a roaring rush of water which is about to engulf St Paul’s cathedral. No hint of a joke. (By curious coincidence there is an alarming poster currently displayed in the London Underground: floodwater lapping around Big Ben, within inches of the clock, a stark warning of the effects of climate change. No joke there either.)

 

 

 

Pan cut out many of the references to Edgar Hopkins and his Bantams, while the French publishers seem to have relished them. A contemporary Spectator praised The Hopkins Manuscript for ‘its strangeness and suspense’, and also for its ‘equally outstanding humour and character drawing’. Surely it is this, unusual, combination that makes it such an enjoyable, funny, exciting and, yes, moving read: the convincing, if not scientifically accurate (do we mind?), account of a global catastrophe presented by a small man, with a small mind, who nonetheless attains something close to tragic status. For over-weaning self-importance and an almost total inability to see himself as others see him Hopkins rivals Charles Pooter, but I have to admit that I did occasionally feel tears welling as this bumptious, self-centred man slowly and incompletely began to discover his own emotions, to appreciate something of the needs of others, to warm towards his fellow human beings, and to confront the horror of his fate.

We meet him first in a post Apocalyptic London, in between lonely and ever less productive scavenging expeditions, writing his memoirs, by the light of a piece of string soaked in bacon fat. Anticipating a gloomy read, we are immediately reassured by his description of tea with an old lady who has taken up residence in the National Gallery and survives by cooking pigeons on a fire built up from Old Dutch masterpieces. Hopkins, who likes to dot Is and cross Ts, explains that she dislikes Dutch paintings, and ‘enjoys the fire as much as the pigeons’.

The population of London has been reduced to seven hundred people, but Hopkins, showing no false modesty, meets death in the certainty that, unlike the other six hundred and ninety-nine, he will leave behind a document that will one day be valued as highly as the Rosetta Stone, while he will stand amongst the immortals, with Tacitus, Ptolomy and the Venerable Bede.

With astonishing skill Sherriff makes this vain, snobbish individual, with the relentless concern for detail, everything from railway timetables to bridge winnings, of the archetypal club bore, both funny and endearing. He is forty-seven at the start of the events he is recording, not far off in age from Sherriff himself. Hopkins lets slip few details about his past but we pick up that his childhood was happy, that like Sherriff he fought in the 1914-18 war and that he has spent some miserable years after Cambridge as an assistant arithmetic master – the job description is precise and rather sad – Sherriff had wanted to be a games master, and went to Oxford in his thirties the better to fulfil this ambition!  Like his creator, although with no interludes writing successful Hollywood scripts, he lives a quiet life, unmarried, in a small village. Though he confesses to being no politician, having ‘always preferred to leave politics to those who had no poultry’, he proves to hold strong, and quite radical views, which may reflect Sherriff’s.  He has inherited a small legacy, and once went on a cruise to the Canary Islands, for which he purchased a suit, which he wears on special occasions. He has a stamp collection, a good cellar, unrivalled expertise in poultry rearing and few friends, which given the hauteur with which he treats his fellow villagers and his tendency to bear grudges is not surprising.

So far so semi autobiographical – the life that Sherriff might have led? What shifts The Hopkins Manuscript right out of the genre of English social comedy into the realms of end-of-world science fiction is Hopkins’ membership of the British Lunar Society, at whose Extraordinary meeting he learns that the moon will shortly be colliding with the Earth, information to which only members are privy, and which must be kept from the wider public until the government sees fit to order preparations. For a man already imbued with a hefty measure of self-importance what could be more gratifying than to have a really important, world class piece of knowledge to keep to himself?  And meanwhile life must appear carry on as normal.

 

 

There are some blissfully comic set pieces, more than one featuring the cut throat world of the Widgeley poultry show, the possible cancellation of which, in Hopkins unusually calibrated scale of importance, is equal in weight to the approaching end of the world. A disastrous exercise in topiary, where a last minute (last days) decision to alter a sitting hen into a gamecock ends in ‘the disappointing result of a small fat man, with his trouser legs turned up, paddling in the sea’, is ‘redeemed’ by a most successful bridge party, recalled seven years later (and for posterity) in gloriously redundant detail. The Spectator reviewer was right too about the characters, mostly remembered by Hopkins for the various minor ways in which they caused him major offence: he expresses no regret at their most unfortunate end. If he misses anyone it is his London aunt and uncle, a jolly theatre-going pair in their seventies, ‘connoisseurs of happiness’ (what a brilliant phrase), whose claims to fame he proudly records: ‘During his [Uncle Henry] prime he did much to add dignity and decorum to the public spaces of London, and it was through his untiring endeavours that the hands which pointed to the public conveniences in Hyde Park had a short length of sleeve and white cuffs painted onto their naked wrists. Aunt Rose had grown stout in recent years, but she possessed the finest collection in England of old coloured prints of stage-coaches that had overturned in snowdrifts.’

 

 

 

Thanks to the time shifts in the novel, we know right from the start that life of a sort continues after the cataclysm, but turn the pages rapidly to discover who survives and how and where. There is a poignancy in the waiting: lyrical passages describe burgeoning spring flowers, and innocent nesting birds and, once the order goes out to prepare, a new sense of community develops and social barriers begin to break down as shelter digging parties are formed – Hopkins is ‘almost tempted to tell John Briggs, the carpenter, that my Christian name was Edgar’, but resists the temptation. New friendships are forged. Edgar, having late in life recognised his loneliness, tentatively and awkwardly accepts the overtures of the family at the Manor House; the reader understands more clearly than he does himself his feeling for twenty-year-old Pat, and her younger brother Robin. To all three Parkers on the night of the moon crash he bids a sad farewell, ‘my last meeting with three people whom I loved’. The prospect of catastrophe has been an emotional epiphany for Edgar.

 

Michael Moorcock explains in the Introduction, ‘We write such books [science-fiction] not because we are convinced that they describe the future, but because we hope they do not.’ ‘The terrors of [the moon’s] arrival,’ warns Hopkins, ‘were trivial beside the horrors that it held in store for us.’ There are horrors to come but, and this is the most charming and uplifting section of the novel, for two short years the little band of survivors enjoy a magical ‘Epoch of Recovery’, ‘a precious span of happiness that nestled between cataclysm and final disaster.’ At first the resourceful little group, Pat, Robin and Edgar, with one old retainer, who lives in the apple store, because he prefers it that way (and so does Edgar) make do on their own in what remains of their village, eventually finding  their way to the small local town, considerably smaller since the cataclysm – from a population of 3000, Hopkins makes a precise, and seemingly unconcerned note (the experience has not made him noticeably more sensitive to human tragedy), 436 have survived. All have jobs, and Mulcaster is able to rebuild itself according to sound nineteenth century principles, allotting half an acre to each house, no more ticky tacky little boxes. This is a golden age, a Utopia of self-sufficiency, co-operation, of old-fashioned values and a reliance on individual skills and crafts, where barter has replaced money and the true value of things is established. Fair shares for all.

 

 

 

From the first inklings of the impending catastrophe, small communities had coped better than cities: while the sturdy villagers of Beadle dug shelters, organised sing-songs and arranged moonlight cricket matches, London’s prisons filled with lunatics and the river with suicides. Post cataclysm, for a while, the new ethos seems about to embrace not only the villages, but cities and even the entire continent. ‘From the ashes had risen the United States of Europe.’ Has the human race, Europe at any rate, been given a second chance? Hopkins has told us it can’t last. The ‘final disaster’ is not altogether surprising, and bizarrely prescient.

And is there just a glimmer of hope for Edgar on the last page?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘There was something strange and deep about being sisters’. Three sisters, three marriages, two families producing two more pairs of sisters, as different from one another as their mothers and aunts, the cast of They Were Sisters is wide and varied, in personality, in age and in back history. Dorothy Whipple who rightly prided herself on ‘doing people’, gradually reveals her characters, turning a forensic eye on their flaws. In his nightly monologue to his eldest daughter Mr Field regularly refers to what he calls ‘a strain of wildness and of weakness in the family’. ‘From your mother’s side, you understand,’ he insists  ‘Not from mine. My people, Lucy, are and always have been a steady, upright, God-fearing lot.’

 

 

The novel opens a year or two before the start of the First World War, when the nature v. nurture debate was very much in the air. Lucy Field’s father’s talk of ‘strains’ suggests that he is not unaware of it. The First International Congress of Eugenics took place in 1912. When Dorothy Whipple began writing They Were Sisters in 1939, the works of Sigmund Freud were becoming known in England. The novel encompasses both, suggesting that while destiny is largely determined by heredity, childhood experience has its part to play for better or worse in forming the adult character.

Mr Field is convinced that his younger daughters have inherited the ‘bad’ maternal genes. Following the sudden, untimely death of their mother, he requires of Lucy that she share with him the ‘necessity of watching continually over the girls’. Lucy is eighteen, Charlotte thirteen and Vera eleven. It is a heavy responsibility and she must bear it for the rest of her life. Her father believes her to be the steady one. She was certainly strong: defying convention and against his will, perhaps encouraged by her mother (and in a fleeting display of wildness?), she had chosen to work for a scholarship to Oxford, rather than peg her future to marriage. Her mother’s death put paid to the dream, forcing her to become a surrogate mother to her siblings, and reluctant companion to her widowed father.

 

 

 

No such sacrifice was demanded of the three boys. Their father did not consider it necessary that they be watched, merely ‘kept straight’. When even that proves impossible for the two eldest, pleasure-seeking ne’er-do-wells, too similar in character to their maternal forbears, or perhaps shaken by the war, they are dispatched to Canada, with a large lump sum each. Out of sight out of mind. Wild or weak? The youngest, and steadiest, is chosen to head the family law firm, but not the family.  Jack is not asked to share in the watching of his sisters and remains a shadowy, possibly lonely, figure throughout the novel. If he has needs, they are none of Lucy’s concern.

Her enduring commitment is to her sisters. Charlotte, pretty but weak, and Vera, beautiful and wild, would be ‘her responsibility, her anxiety and her happiness.’ Would Charlotte have been stronger, or Vera more measured had they not been bereaved so young, had their mother lived, gently to guide their growing up? Lucy does her best, but not without some resentment.  As a young woman, during their dancing years, she finds herself more chaperone than contemporary, ‘like a barn-door fowl watching two swans she had brought up take to the water.’ Eclipsed by her prettily shod, fair-haired sisters, Lucy, whose hair is dark, untidy and unfashionably long, deliberately deters her (few) potential partners by sticking her feet in brogues.

Much later, nearing middle-age, she is still wearing them; ‘it was as if she had remained stationary in her brogues while they had moved on and away.’ But if they have moved on and away, it is in disastrously wrong directions; if she has remained stationary it is because she has settled in the right place, with the right person. The ‘oddest man she had ever met’, scruffy, undemonstrative, and uncommunicative (something of a relief after the verbosity of her father), William is kind, and loyal and loving and (relatively) tolerant of his sisters-in-law.  Childless and outwardly lacking in passion, it is nevertheless a marriage seemingly made in heaven  – Lucy, a devout Anglican, would surely think it so. Good luck, or good management? Lucy does not venture an explanation of how people select their partners, but fiercely contends that the conduct of our lives depends on the people we live with.

Although he differs with Lucy as to the extent to which our choice of partner determines our lives, William agrees that Brian Sargent is ‘too good’ for Vera – he doesn’t ask  why, from an incalculably large field of suitors, she picked a man who was tall and handsome but, even by his own mother’s reckoning, dull – and admits that Charlotte’s husband is ‘not good enough’ – a startling understatement which comes nowhere near describing Geoffrey Leigh’s sadistic cruelty. Whipple doesn’t spare her reader. The graphic depiction of the home life (if it can be called that) of Charlotte and Geoffrey, and of his calculated cruelty towards his children, is almost unbearable.

 

 

She leaves us in no doubt about the evil in Geoffrey’s soul, but she searches for its roots, exposing behind the attention-seeking, domineering bully, a fatherless child, doted on by his mother and sister. On the surface he and Charlotte make an obvious fit: the weak woman seeks a strong man, the strong man with a desire to dominate looks for a weak woman. But there is a deeper similarity between them: an element of arrested development. Both lost a parent in childhood. Geoffrey hates the fact that the time for pranks and boyish japes is over, that his contemporaries have outgrown him, that mood swings, forgiven by a fond mother, are unacceptable in an adult. Though not the youngest, Charlotte liked to be thought of as the baby of the family. Only after more than ten years in an abusive marriage does she become an adult, ‘but at what cost!’, writes Whipple. ‘It doesn’t do for some people to see clear; they can’t stand it.’

Brian and Vera, too, are examined through the ‘post-Freudian’ lens. Raised by a strong mother who, we later discover, finds him boring, he marries a strong woman (who also finds him boring), and turns into a weak husband, but a (sporadically and ineffectively) dominant father. Vera, wild Vera, believes she wants the freedom offered by a doting husband. Was she allowed too much freedom as a girl? Did her beauty make life too easy for too long? Her mother-in-law considers her too beautiful: ‘Brian would have been better, we should all have been better with somebody plainer. They say beauty is a gift, she thought, but it makes a lot of trouble. It sows dissatisfaction, a kind of yearning all around it …’  Only when Vera’s looks begin to fade is she forced to bend to the will of a man she loves (for the first time) more than he loves her: to grow up, in short – still with a chance of happiness, unlike poor Charlotte.

 

In spite of what he sees of the lives of his in-laws, William does not share Lucy’s belief that our happiness hangs on those we live with. He holds that ‘there are other things in life’. For men maybe, but in the 1930s precious little else for women. For those who didn’t marry, the future could be bleak indeed; those who did, discovered that the right choice meant a happy life, the wrong choice a wretchedly unhappy one, from which there might be no escape. Things were different for men. Just as Lucy’s wayward brothers were able to forge new lives in Canada, so Brian, having, predictably, lost one wife finds another, far more suitable (more boring), and resettles in America. Even the dreadful Geoffrey, having driven Charlotte to drink, drugs and an early grave, can take off with the daughter he loves (and tyrannises).  Even in the next generation, the daughters must mostly struggle to get within striking distance of their dreams, while  the one boy is able to break free early. Running away to sea was nowhere on the list of options for Stephen Leigh’s sisters. Would it be now?

For good or ill, and limited though their choices might be by circumstance and their own characters, women choose their husbands, but they don’t choose their sisters. Considering the yawning gap between herself and her older sister, Margaret, Charlotte’s daughter, Judith, reflects that ‘when the time came to part, they felt an almost painful tenderness for each other.’ Her mother and her aunts might have said just the same. Between the Field sisters, widely different as they are, widely as their paths diverge, however infrequently they meet as adults, and however unequal they are when it comes to giving and taking, the ties remain, strained but unbroken. Vera who goes reluctantly and late to Charlotte’s deathbed, nevertheless spends long hours on her knees holding the dead woman’s hand, and she and Lucy are able to hold and comfort each other – a comfort that will not be extended to (or expected by) their brother Jack.

 

 

And what of the sisters of the next generation? Judith and Margaret find an unexpected closeness, but face a far wider physical separation than their mothers, living like Sarah and Meriel, Vera’s daughters, on different continents. Will Lucy, the only childless sister, manage to forge a new family, bringing together under her roof her two nieces, the cousins Judith and Sarah? What genes do they carry? Has the weakness or the wildness taken hold? Has Judith inherited her mother’s fatal flaw, her alcoholism, or her drug habit? Worse still, could her father’s sadistic streak be in her? Is Sarah, so clearly her ‘mother’s child’, demanding and difficult (her staid, dull sister, so obviously their ‘father’s child’ ), still young enough to benefit from Lucy’s steady focused fostering? Will nurture prove stronger than nature?