The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Yet any of his pupils in Kidd Street school nearly thirty years ago would have recognised him at once. Even the least sensitive of us then had been aware that though he wanted to love us he could not: not because of our academic shortcomings, or because some of us stank through not washing often enough, but because he had seen us developing into eager conformists, indolent and cowardly acquiescers in the iniquities and inequalities of society.

  The two drink whisky. Calderwood tells Lamont, ‘The best thing that could happen to our beloved native town, Fergus, is for a few bombs to fall on it.’ He cites the recent case of a back-street abortionist jailed for three months by a sheriff who ‘chose the occasion to deliver an impassioned harangue about the sanctity of human life, and this in the midst of a war which he thoroughly approves of …’ Pressed by Lamont to agree that ‘humanity is not all stupid and vile’, Calderwood will only concede, ‘You could never have written such good poetry if you had been able to think things out to their nihilistic conclusion. Then you would have had to remain silent. Like me.’

  When guns begin to fire, bombs to fall, Calderwood argues that as a patriot, Fergus should desire that the Germans should miss the shipyards – important for victory – ‘even if it means that they hit instead tenements crowded with women and children, some of them known to you’. Lamont rushes out of the house and stands shaking his fist: ‘I did not know at whom or what. I felt no hatred of the young German airmen doing their loathsome duty, and for the people of Gantock, at that moment suffering terror and pain and death, I felt only pity and love.’ Throughout the novel, Lamont seems to embody problematic, divided Scottish ‘identity’. ‘Love’, the last word of his memoirs, seems to redeem both poet and people at the moment of Blitz. But after that there is nothing in the life of Lamont except the eccentric loneliness reported in asides during his narrative. Between 1941 and 1963, either Scotland has no history or Lamont has ceased to relate to it.

  Interpreting this strange novel is difficult. It is typical of Jenkins’s rigorous approach to abiding moral problems that he should leave Calderwood’s cynical logic – ‘war is the greatest abortionist of all’ – unquenched by Lamont’s irrational love for Gantock people, who, he says, ‘believe that the war is being fought for something more important than life itself’. This, it could be argued, takes the Clydeside Blitz outside the paradigm of Myth and makes it merely an instance, suitable as the basis for a debate about philosophical questions long troublesome within Western culture.

  But the implication that Scotland’s history is concluded by its integration, through the Clydeside Blitz, into the UK’s ‘people’s war’ is naggingly present. As basis of closure, the bombing of Gantock seems involved with the positive significance, the fulfilment, of the book’s puzzling yet representative narrator: the moment might be compared with Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s withdrawal from history, in the early thirties, of his representative Scots heroine Chris Guthrie, ‘Chris Caledonia’, at the end of his great Scots Quair, as another case where a major Scottish novelist seems to leave his nation without a meaningful independent future. In such a reading, Jenkins’s book acknowledges the Myth’s power to integrate all the UK with metropolitan experience: Gantock, Taking It, is inspirational, as London’s ordeal had been inspirational. That human fineness is revealed by and excited by night bombing is taken for granted, because London’s response proved it.

  Most differently, R. F. Delderfield’s The Avenue Goes to War (1964), the second volume of the immensely popular Avenue saga, attempts to incorporate 1940–41 incident of mythical stature into the mesmeric, unstoppable soap-opera-like flow of incident among the outer-suburban middle classes who are, in Delderfield’s eyes, the quintessential continuators of Englishness and English history. The book, which takes Avenue-dwellers from 1940 to 1947, is based on a blatant sleight of hand: the Avenue, literally a long road of semi-detached houses stretching away on the edge of London, the city to which many of its people commute, is purported to constitute a ‘community’. Furtive covert lives, adulteries, black market operations, which give rise to lively incidents, confirm that in fact people here don’t really have much in common or know much about each other. A random bomb, bringing ARP into action, is insufficient to create a community where none has existed, as Delderfield unwittingly shows by the way he summarises the carnage: ‘Soon the casualties were tabbed, and driven away, two from Number Thirteen, three from Number Fifteen, three more in Number Seventeen, four from the remaining houses, a total of twelve human sacrifices to a madman’s dream of world conquest.’

  If the Avenue can be said to have its own higher values, they are probably distilled in the reverie of nice young Judy, resuming, now that his wife has left him, her childhood romance with rather tragic Esme – ‘that dear familiar dream, of a white wedding in Shirley Church, the ecstatic honeymoon in Bournemouth, or Felixstowe, and the triumphant return to the semi-detached on the Wickham housing estate, with the baby in the pram on the lawn, the lawn that Esme would mow each Saturday afternoon, while she prepared his tea in the trim little kitchen’.

  Delderfield’s optimistic sensibility, which converts the RAF in which Esme serves into ‘one huge, sprawling, joke-cracking, grousing family’, invests a bereaved city clerk with the tradition of Alfred the Great and Agincourt:

  People like Harold, who had worked thirty years in one job and carried their modest salaries back to the Avenue every Friday, were not likely to be bowled over by a single, personal tragedy … Harold would survive, and so would all the other people of the Avenue, and crescents of the suburb, no matter how battered and scattered were their homes and possessions, when madness had run its course across the Channel.23

  Delderfield’s rhetoric has the sickly flavour of complete, obtuse sincerity. An enormous readership could accept it because they, like him, took the Myth for granted. Of course a commuter was naturally heroic. The valour of such men, struggling in to work, had been duly celebrated by writers and film-makers during the Blitz. London’s suburbs had been, somehow, glorious in war. As we shall see when we inspect John Boorman’s vastly more intelligent Hope and Glory, a film set in very similar territory to Delderfield’s Avenue, the Myth is at its least destructible where it might seem rather weak, in its incorporation of areas only lightly scattered with bombs, where communities could not rise to confront challenges because communities didn’t exist.

  ‘Suburban values’ and the suburban life-style, created in the new housing estates of the interwar period, did have in 1940 a flourishing future ahead of them. Ravaged by the Luftwaffe or not, the working-class areas of British cities were due to be devastated by town-planners; while, in the sixties, poor people were shifted from ‘communities’ into tower blocks, the suburbanites who despised them continued to mow the lawn every Saturday, make tea in trim little kitchens, and keep up with the ever-more-affluent Joneses. More successful elements in the working class sought and acquired similar private amenities. The role assigned by the Myth to the ‘Heroic Commuter’, whether picking his way, briefcase in hand through the rubble or donning the warden’s tin helmet, the Home Guard’s uniform, related to a thriving stratum of society. Delderfield flattered this stratum with his optimism about its historic destiny.

  Boorman grew up in this stratum and by his own account, prefacing the script of his film, detested its values:

  I was born at No. 50 Rosehill Avenue, Carshalton, a monotonous street of those semi-detached suburban houses of which four million were built between the wars. My father bought the house with a deposit of £50 …

  To shoot his autobiographical film, Boorman reconstructed Rosehill Avenue on a disused airfield at a cost of three-quarters of a million pounds:

  In point of fact, our ‘Street’ set looked much more like one we moved into in Ewell when I was two years old, such are the composites of movies and memory. Council estates were springing up around Rosehill Avenue, rehousing London’s slum dwellers. My parents, like other home-owning semi-dwellers, had only
a murky view of their place in the class system, but an acute sense of gentility which was affronted by council houses … My father … was not a snob, certainly never despised those below him, but he deeply respected his superiors, felt threatened if things and people were not properly in their places. He was a sentimental patriot, a passionate royalist, a dogged Tory … Voting Conservative was a way of reassuring himself that he was not slipping into the dreaded pit of the working class.

  Boorman goes on to meditate about the historic implications of ‘the rise of this semi-suburbia’ in which he is still ashamed to have been born:

  They all missed it (or got it wrong) – the academics, the politicians, the upper classes. While they worried about Socialism and Fascism, the cuckoo had laid its egg in their nest and Margaret Thatcher would hatch out of it … Where did it come from, this new class? Some had slipped down from the middle class; most were dragging themselves up from the working class … Most of the children I knew had no interest in where they came from, no memory of family history. We viewed each other with suspicion, kept ourselves to ourselves. Privacy protected our uncertainty about how to behave … The private, inward looking world of the nuclear family was taking shape … In these streets there were no places of work, no schools, no shops, no churches, no sport, no pubs. During the day the men and the young were syphoned out to business and to learn; the wives were left to clean and polish, listen to the wireless and dream.

  War, as Boorman shrewdly suggests, gave frustrated, uncertain suburbanites a chance to ‘vault over their embarrassments into the arms of patriotism’. And the ever-generous Myth had plenty of room for them.24

  Hope and Glory (1987) is a very well-made film, scrupulously produced, splendidly cast, beautifully photographed. And the hedonistic fullness and credibility of its reconstruction is one reason why it does nothing to counter the Myth, of which Boorman, as his preface shows, is fully aware. Reconstruction generates nostalgia for periods wholly out of reach of living memory: when many in the audience can still remember the period, and all can still see streets much like that in Boorman’s set, this effect is bound to be even stronger. Those Were, indeed, The Days.

  Furthermore, the beautiful young boy, Sebastian Rice Edwards, who plays ‘Bill’ (Boorman himself) so touchingly, is the witness whose point of view controls ours. He can sense, as children do, adult inanity and hypocrisy; but he cannot pass comment on suburban values, convey the points which Boorman makes so sharply in his preface. Consider one delicious sequence. ‘Clive’ (Boorman’s Tory, ex-Indian army father) has volunteered to fight again. The performance of Clive is superbly ‘alienated’: the actor cast, David Hayman, is well known to be in fact a working class Glaswegian and committed socialist. He is seen teaching Bill, with solemn fervour, how to bowl the cricketer’s ‘googly’, a famously deceptive ball disguised as a leg break but spinning in the other direction:

  BILL: It’s like telling fibs.

  CLIVE: That’s it. When you tell a lie you hope to get away with it. When someone else does, you want to find them out. A good batsman will spot a googly. A good bowler will hide it. Always remember that, son.

  The next scene shows Clive going away to war. As his mother closes the door, Bill stays outside:

  BILL: Dad! Dad!

  (CLIVE, now some twenty yards away, looks back. BILL throws the cricket ball and CLIVE catches it neatly. He smiles and marches off down Rosehill Avenue. BILL is puzzled as CLIVE shows no sign of returning the ball. He calls after him.) Dad!

  (CLIVE is now eighty yards down the street. He suddenly turns, smiling broadly, and with a prodigious throw he sends the ball in a high arc towards his son. BILL juggles his position, cups his hands, gets under it as the hard, heavy ball hurtles downwards. At the last moment he loses his nerve and jumps back, letting the ball thump into the lawn. He looks towards CLIVE, full of shame. BILL is relieved to see that his father has turned the corner.)25

  From an adult viewpoint, Hayman/Clive’s behaviour could be seen satirically, or even made sinister. His talk about lying casts doubt on the supposed code of gallant sportsmanship integral to the sacred game of cricket; to throw a hard ball towards a small boy whom it might hurt quite seriously and then to turn and stride on hardly shows due paternal care. This is the kind of man who might, in the British Expeditionary Force, have shot Belgian civilians as suspected fifth columnists, not out of viciousness but from ethical and mental confusion. But from Bill’s point of view he is Dad, whom he lets down by muffing the catch. The effect of the sequence is gently comic. Later in the film, the boy will get his father out with a googly and all will be artistically and emotionally harmonised. (‘CLIVE: I’m proud of you.’)

  The flow of wartime incident in Hope and Glory is clearly not intended to show Rosehill Avenue in any heroic light. The patriotism of schoolteachers is held up for mockery. Bill’s sister becomes pregnant by a Canadian soldier (who will eventually go AWOL to marry her, so that, too, will be harmonised). When bombs fall, this is both exciting and very frightening: one neighbour is killed. In the aftermath, Boorman provides some remarkable scenes involving what might be called ‘juvenile delinquency’, in which young Bill is caught up.

  Here it is worth mentioning one of the very best post-war fictions about the Blitz, Robert Westall’s The Machine-Gunners, published as a ‘children’s story’, but not fairly to be imprisoned in that category. It confronts with great imagination and wit the serious problem of ‘juvenile delinquency’, a rise of which was only to be expected when war disrupted schooling, preoccupied adults, fractured families and broke down social control. Westall himself, pursuing the matter after publication of The Machine-Gunners had brought him a large number of letters from adults, edited a volume of reminiscences, Children of the Blitz. His own memories are particularly interesting on the subject of the Prime Minister:

  Churchill – big Winnie – was the lad for us. We all wished we could be Winnie. What our gang-leader did for our gang, Winnie did for Britain. It was the marvellous way he insulted the enemy gang-leaders …

  Winnie appeared in the comic strips, too (though King George VI never did), always smiling, two fingers up, entirely in control. He frequently colluded with ever-victorious comic-strip heroes like ‘Big Eggo’, ‘Desperate Dan’ and ‘Lord Snooty’ …

  We saw him not as a great, distant war leader, but as a naughty irrepressible super-child who could do anything.26

  This puts into interesting perspective the ‘antisocial’ behaviour of children in Boorman’s film and Westall’s novel. On the face of it, juvenile bad behaviour must be non-mythical, if not counter-mythical: its existence seems to defy the Myth’s insistence that bombs enhanced caring and social cohesion. Yet in so far as children were caught up in the war in their own way, and mimicked adult militancy, their actions might be reconciled with the Myth. Some of Richmal Crompton’s stories about the wartime exploits of her ageless naughty boy William could be republished in 1972 in a collection called William the Hero … The title isn’t quite ironic.

  The Machine-Gunners is set in a vividly realised Tyneside in a phase of heavy bombardment and fear of German invasion. (Effectual chronological telescoping is neatly managed, and admissible in a work of fiction.) A souvenir-hunting schoolboy and a gang of his friends take illegal possession of a machine gun with live ammunition from a crashed German bomber. Stealing material from various places, they build with great care and success an emplacement for it. They are ready to fight German invaders, but as their gang loyalty deepens, the whole adult world also becomes a ‘kind of enemy’. Their only adult allies are a simpleton and a German flier, Rudi, who parachutes unnoticed from a shot-down plane and is drawn into their alternative family. (One of the gang is a ‘motherly’, though tomboy, girl.) They are eventually flushed out, in a moment of dangerous farce, by Polish soldiers whom they mistake for Germans and on whom they fire. As the Poles hand over to British authority, the bemused children prepare to fire their gun at the advancing local adults, an
d are brought to reality only when one of their members, with a pistol, wounds Rudi, who is going forward to explain the position. The gang are taken into custody by their parents, ‘never to be all together again …’

  Westall, most admirably, refuses to harmonise what has happened with a predictable closure on Just William lines. It is true that the children have built a fine emplacement, and, as one father defiantly says, shown lots of guts: their preparedness to meet the foe is in its way a model demonstration of the ‘fight them on the beaches’ spirit. But one of them, Clogger, an incomer from Glasgow, has displayed, to their disturbance and awe, the ‘hard’ ethos of that city’s violent underworld. They have all been deceitful, disobedient and dangerous. If we continue to side with them it is because we can sympathise with their alienation from pompous, incompetent and hypocritical adults.

  At the very end, one adult turns to Nicky, in hiding, at first presumed dead, since a bomb killed his widowed mother – a child with no parent to take him into custody:

  ‘C’mon son’, said the police sergeant to Nicky. ‘You’re going to tell me all about this. You’re a cut above the rest of this riff-raff, you know. Your father was a ship’s captain. God knows what he’d have said.’

  Nicky took a deep breath.

  ‘Get stuffed,’ he said.27

  Nicky’s words, the last in the book, refuse the reader permission to incorporate ‘the machine-gunners’ into the Myth. With its sympathetically-portrayed German character and its anarchistic play with received ideas and conventional values, Westall’s book achieves a mid-war closure which leaves us free to see, behind the Myth, problematic human nature. As with mythical narratives, the action has been so intense that the future could enter only anti-climactically. Respectable lives lie ahead, one assumes, for most of the gang. But the values of ‘respectability’ are contested, provocatively, by the ‘Churchillian’ gang spirit of the delinquents. A ‘Churchillian’ element is detached from the Myth and redirected to wreck the ideal of social coherence and self-disciplined good behaviour at the Myth’s centre.