by Phillip Rock
He took out a cigar, found a lone match in a pocket crease and lit it, holding the cigar to the tiny flame until it nearly touched his finger.
He’d be at sea in two days. The gray channel, England and the Continent slipping away beyond the curving wake. So much left behind. All the happiness he had ever known buried forever in a Flanders grave.
He blew a thin stream of smoke and watched it drift beyond the stone balustrade into the dark gardens. He could see lights far off across the snow-covered lawns, winking through the trees that flanked the drive; could hear the faint sound of many voices singing. He thought of Munich and the cold, wet snow, the lanterns and the flags. Thought of marching men singing of blood, terror, and death. Leaning against a carved granite post, he watched the oncoming procession wend its way closer to the house—people from Abingdon, singing, their strong voices carrying in the still air …
God rest ye merry, gentlemen!
Let nothing you dismay....
He walked slowly toward the front steps and the approaching carolers, toward the marching ranks and the lanterns swinging blotches of light on the dark ground, and he whispered: God. Oh, God … let the marching always be to glad song—to tidings of comfort and joy.
P.S.
Insights, Interviews & More …
About the author
Phillip Rock
About the book
The Passing Bells Series
Discussion Questions
Read on
Thomas Hardy’s “The Souls of the Slain,” 1899
An Excerpt from A Future Arrived
About the author
Phillip Rock
BORN IN HOLLYWOOD, California, in 1927, Phillip Rock was the son of Academy Award–winning silent film producer Joe Rock. Phillip moved to England with his family when he was seven, attending school there for six years until the blitz of 1940, when he returned to America. He served with the U.S. Navy toward the end of World War II. He spent most of his adult life in Los Angeles, and was the author of three previous novels before the Passing Bells series: Flickers, The Dead in Guanajuato, and The Extraordinary Seaman. He died in 2004.
Of The Passing Bells, Phillip Rock wrote, “The idea came to me when I was a boy and stood with my father in a London street at the hour of eleven on the eleventh day of November and first heard that awful minute of total silence as the entire nation stood with bowed heads remembering their dead. It took a long time to put it on paper.”
About the book
The Passing Bells Series
THE GUNS OF AUGUST are rumbling throughout Europe in the summer of 1914, but war has not yet touched Abingdon Pryory. Here, at the grand summer home of the Greville family, the parties, dances, and romances play on. Alexandra Greville embarks on her debutante season, while brother Charles remains hopelessly in love with the beautiful, untitled Lydia Foxe, knowing his father, the Earl of Stanmore, will never approve of the match. Downstairs, the new servant Ivy struggles to adjust to the routines of the well-oiled household staff while shrugging off unwelcome attentions, and the arrival of American cousin Martin Rilke, a Chicago newspaperman, threatens to disrupt the daily routine.
But ultimately, the Great War will not be denied, shattering the social season and household tranquility, crumbling class barriers, and bringing its myriad horrors home—when what begins for the high-bred Grevilles as a glorious adventure soon begins unraveling the very fabric of British high society.
He drove up to Flanders in the early summer of 1921 knowing that it would be for the last time. He had finally, after nearly four years, reconciled himself to the unalterable fact that she was dead.
So begins this haunting novel of war’s aftermath and the search for love and hope in a world totally changed. A generation has been lost on the Western Front. The dead have been buried, a harsh peace forged, and the howl of shells replaced by the wail of saxophones as the Jazz Age begins. But ghosts linger—that long-ago golden summer of 1914 tugging at the memory of Martin Rilke and his British cousins, the Grevilles.
From the countess to the chauffeur, the inhabitants of Abingdon Pryory seek to forget the past and adjust their lives to a new era in which old values have been irretrievably swept away. Charles Greville suffers from acute shell shock and his friend Colonel Wood-Lacy is exiled to faraway army outposts, while Alexandra Greville finds new love with an unlikely suitor; and to overcome the loss of his wife, Martin Rilke throws himself into reporting, discovering unsettling currents in the German political scene. Their stories unfold against England’s most gracious manor house, the steamy nightclubs of London’s Soho, and the despair of Germany. Lives are renewed, new loves found, and a future of peace and happiness is glimpsed—for the moment.
The final installment of the saga of the Grevilles of Abingdon begins in the early 1930s, as the dizzy gaiety of the Jazz Age comes to a shattering end. What follows is a decade of change and uncertainty, as the younger generation, born during or just after “the war to end all wars,” comes of age: the beautiful Wood-Lacy twins, Jennifer and Victoria, and their passionate younger sister, Kate; Derek Ramsey, born only weeks after his father fell in France; and the American writer Martin Rilke, who will overcome his questionable heritage with the worldwide fame that will soon come to him. In their heady youth and bittersweet growth to adulthood, they are the future—but the shadows that touched the lives of the generation before are destined to reach out to their own, as German bombers course toward England.
Discussion Questions
Throughout Circles of Time, how are the established social codes of the characters’ worlds changing? Which characters seem to embrace the changes, and which resist?
At the beginning of the novel, Martin Rilke makes his last visit to Ivy’s grave, resolving that he “had faced the reality of the war and cut the knot that bound him to the past.” Is his attempt to move on successful? How does this attitude about the war’s costs compare to that of other characters?
Martin Rilke has achieved success as a result of the Great War, building a name for himself as a journalist, though his book A Killing Ground has ruffled the feathers of powerful people. What do you think motivates him—especially after the loss of Ivy?
William seems adrift at the beginning of the novel, unsure of his place in the world. What troubles him? What holds him back from following his father’s wishes? Does he blame Charles for the injury that kept him out of the war?
Before Martin Rilke’s visit, the earl and Hanna seem resolved that Charles should remain in the mental institution. Why are they so resigned to his situation? What do Fenton and Martin seem to see about Charles’s condition that they don’t?
Following is Thomas Hardy’s “The Souls of the Slain.” Why do you think this poem stuck in Charles’s mind? What does it say about life and death in wartime?
Fenton knows that the army is trying to push him out, but even with everyone in his life urging him to quit, he resists the pressure and follows orders. Why do you think he refuses to quit?
Circles of Time focuses on characters from various social backgrounds. Who are the most successful? Is it because of, or in spite of, their background? How have their fortunes changed as a result of the shifting social landscape?
What difficult lessons have the Grevilles and the other characters in this novel learned as a result of the war? What opportunities have been seized as a result of it? How has living in the shadow of war fundamentally changed their attitudes and approach to life?
Charles Greville eventually recovers from his shell shock, and as he rejuvenates, he stumbles across the opportunity to teach at Burgate House—which feels like “the proper place” for him. How have his war experiences—even the most tragic—brought him to a different place than he had expected in life?
The earl just refuses to understand the new world created by the war. Is there still a place for old-world manners and values? Or should they fall to the inevitable changes?
Lord Stanmore often has trouble
adjusting to change—but sometimes, as when he brings Charles home, he does admit to being wrong. In what other ways do his viewpoints and attitudes evolve throughout Circles of Time?
As Martin spends time in Germany and learns more about the political unrest there, he is uncomfortable to learn that his uncle Werner is providing financial backing to an incendiary new political party. With these signs of trouble ahead, do you think that Martin and Hanna will maintain ties with their German relations?
Throughout Circles of Time, in this period after the Great War, there seems to be an impulse to put the war behind—to make merry in jazz clubs and forget the ugliness of the war years. Is it possible to forget? How do the characters in the novel try to move on, and when do they choose to remember?
Read on
Thomas Hardy’s “The Souls of the Slain,” 1899
I
The thick lids of Night closed upon me
Alone at the Bill
Of the Isle by the Race—
Many-caverned, bald, wrinkled of face—
And with darkness and silence the spirit was on me
To brood and be still.
II
No wind fanned the flats of the ocean,
Or promontory sides,
Or the ooze by the strand,
Or the bent-bearded slope of the land,
Whose base took its rest amid everlong motion
Of criss-crossing tides.
III
Soon from out of the Southward seemed nearing
A whirr, as of wings
Waved by mighty-vanned flies,
Or by night-moths of measureless size,
And in softness and smoothness well-nigh beyond hearing
Of corporal things.
IV
And they bore to the bluff, and alighted—
A dim-discerned train
Of sprites without mould,
Frameless souls none might touch or might hold—
On the ledge by the turreted lantern, farsighted
By men of the main.
V
And I heard them say “Home!” and I knew them
For souls of the felled
On the earth’s nether bord
Under Capricorn, whither they’d warred,
And I neared in my awe, and gave heedfulness to them
With breathings inheld.
VI
Then, it seemed, there approached from the northward
A senior soul-flame
Of the like filmy hue:
And he met them and spake: “Is it you,
O my men?” Said they, “Aye! We bear homeward and hearthward
To list to our fame!”
VII
“I’ve flown there before you,” he said then:
“Your households are well;
But—your kin linger less
On your glory arid war-mightiness
Than on dearer things.”—“Dearer?” cried these from the dead then,
“Of what do they tell?”
VIII
“Some mothers muse sadly, and murmur
Your doings as boys—
Recall the quaint ways
Of your babyhood’s innocent days.
Some pray that, ere dying, your faith had grown firmer,
And higher your joys.
IX
“A father broods: ‘Would I had set him
To some humble trade,
And so slacked his high fire,
And his passionate martial desire;
Had told him no stories to woo him and whet him
To this due crusade!”
X
“And, General, how hold out our sweethearts,
Sworn loyal as doves?”
—“Many mourn; many think
It is not unattractive to prink
Them in sables for heroes. Some fickle and fleet hearts
Have found them new loves.”
XI
“And our wives?” quoth another resignedly,
“Dwell they on our deeds?”
—“Deeds of home; that live yet
Fresh as new—deeds of fondness or fret;
Ancient words that were kindly expressed or unkindly,
These, these have their heeds.”
XII
—“Alas! then it seems that our glory
Weighs less in their thought
Than our old homely acts,
And the long-ago commonplace facts
Of our lives—held by us as scarce part of our story,
And rated as nought!”
XIII
Then bitterly some: “Was it wise now
To raise the tomb-door
For such knowledge? Away!”
But the rest: “Fame we prized till to-day;
Yet that hearts keep us green for old kindness we prize now
A thousand times more!”
XIV
Thus speaking, the trooped apparitions
Began to disband
And resolve them in two:
Those whose record was lovely and true
Bore to northward for home: those of bitter traditions
Again left the land,
XV
And, towering to seaward in legions,
They paused at a spot
Overbending the Race—
That engulphing, ghast, sinister place—
Whither headlong they plunged, to the fathomless regions
Of myriads forgot.
XVI
And the spirits of those who were homing
Passed on, rushingly,
Like the Pentecost Wind;
And the whirr of their wayfaring thinned
And surceased on the sky, and but left in the gloaming
Sea-mutterings and me.
An Excerpt from A Future Arrived
The conclusion of the epic Greville family saga—while the dizzy gaiety of the Jazz Age fades, the younger generation of Grevilles come of age in a time of uncertainty, seeking to reconcile their past with hopes for the future as the shadow of war threatens again.
1
MARTIN RILKE AWOKE a few minutes before the alarm clock would have shattered sleep and nerves. Reaching out from under the covers he groped for the clock on the nightstand and depressed the alarm button. He fought the urge to sink back into the bliss of morning slumber and sat up with a groan. Six thirty. He wasn’t used to getting up so early, but he had promised Albert he would take him to King’s Cross. The 8:05 train to Peterborough. Plenty of time. He swung his legs out of bed and winced at the cold creeping along the floor. For Let. Fully furnished. Elegant small house in Knightsbridge with fine view of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. There had been no mention of drafts in the advertisement. He stood up with a sharp intake of breath as though plunging into a cold pool. His heavy wool bathrobe was draped over a chair and he padded across to put it on. His carpet slippers were nowhere to be seen. Under the bed probably, but he didn’t feel like groping for them.
A pale yellow light filtered through drawn curtains and he walked over to the windows in his bare feet and pulled the cord. A clear sky again, thank God. Perhaps winter was over at last. He stood for a moment gazing out across Kensington Road at the park. A thin, patchy mist drifted through the trees and clung to the ground. Emerging from it in blocks of dark gray came ordered ranks of horsemen, row after row at the trot along Carriage Road; the Horse Guards on an early morning exercise. It was the kind of enchanting sight that made London worth living in. Martin watched until the cavalcade passed Rutland Gate and then he turned away and hurried into the bathroom to bathe and shave.
He was thirty-nine, a man of medium height and stocky build. His body, viewed naked in the full-length mirror streaked with steam, was compact and sturdy, the chest large and the stomach reasonably flat. Rilke males were inclined to stoutness and Martin fought the proclivity by watching his diet and playing furious games of squash three afternoons a week at a club in St.
James’s Street. He gave his middle an approving slap and then stepped across to the washbasin. He sharpened and honed a Rolls razor in its silver-plated box and then whipped lather in a bowl with a badger-hair brush. The face in the mirror was youthful and unlined with a thin, high-bridged nose, wide mouth, and pale blue eyes. The hair, parted in the center, was thick and flaxen. It was a face that women thought of as “nice looking” rather than handsome.
Martin paid no attention to his face other than to shave it and pat his cheeks with cologne. When he went back into the bedroom, Mary, the young Welsh maid, had lit the fire in the grate—the coals spreading a meager warmth into the room. He thought of his apartment in New York, the good old Yankee know-how of double-glazed windows and central heating. A lot to be said for it, but he had never seen cavalry riding through the morning mist on West 64th Street.
He looked into the spare bedroom before going downstairs. The bed was made and his brother-in-law’s small suitcase was packed and strapped and set on the floor. Albert, he assumed, was used to getting up at ungodly hours.
“Good morning, sir.”
Albert Edward Thaxton stepped out of the dining room into the hall as Martin was coming down the stairs. He was a tall, dark-haired boy of sixteen dressed in gray flannels and a school blazer.
“Good morning, Albert,” Martin said cheerfully. “Sleep well?”
The boy smiled, a smile that was so reminiscent of his sister’s that Martin could not witness it without feeling a tug of the heart.
“Oh, yes, sir. They don’t have beds like that at Morborne.”
“Hard, angry little cots, eh?”
“Well, not quite that bad, but jolly close to it.”
“Have your breakfast yet?”
“Rashers and eggs, fried bread and tomatoes. Super grub.”
Martin glanced at his wristwatch. ‘‘I’ll just have some toast and coffee and then we’ll grab a taxi and get you to the station.”
“May I sit with you and read the newspaper, sir?”
“Of course. And please stop calling me sir.”
“Yes, sir.”