Literary Representations of Safety in British Fiction of the Long Decade 1939–1950

ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Literary Representations of Safety in British Fiction of the Long Decade 1939–1950 https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40207/ Version: Full Version Citation: Kyte, Jacqueline (2017) Literary Representations of Safety in British Fiction of the Long Decade 1939–1950. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email 1 Literary Representations of Safety in British Fiction of the Long Decade 1939–1950 Jacqueline Kyte PhD Thesis Birkbeck, University of London, English and Humanities, 2016 . 2 Declaration I, Jacqueline Kyte, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this is indicated in the thesis. 3 Acknowledgements My profound thanks go to my supervisor, Kate McLoughlin, for sharing her knowledge and expertise through many productive discussions and for her meticulous feedback, advice and guidance. Thanks also go to fellow students at Birkbeck, who have given their precious time to read my work. Conversations with them have been invaluable to the development of this thesis and have enriched the process; testing out ideas in our sessions has been a joyous experience, stimulating and supportive. Deep and special thanks go to my family – Ray, Abby, Zoe and Holly – who have encouraged me in this undertaking. I celebrate the love we have for each other, which strengthens and endures. Finally, I dedicate this work to my parents, June (1926–1987) and Jim (1923–1984). Their childhood and youth were shaped by the war and postwar years and they are always in my thoughts. 4 Table of Contents Introduction 6 Chapter One: Safekeeping Introduction 33 1.1: Defence Mechanisms in Saplings (1947) by Noel Streatfeild 50 1.2: Contested Safety – Attachments in Doreen (1946) by Barbara Noble 61 1.3: Safety, Risk and the Imagination of the Child in Charley is My Darling (1940) by Joyce Cary 70 Chapter Two: Safe Home Introduction 88 2.1: Dirt and Cleanliness – Safety at Home in House-Bound (1942) by Winifred Peck 100 2.2: Reaching Home in Pied Piper (1942) by Nevil Shute 115 2.3: A Fantasy of ‘utter safety’ in Hangover Square (1941) by Patrick Hamilton 130 Chapter Three: Safe Talk Introduction 145 3.1: ‘Double-Telling’ in Pretend I am a Stranger (1949) by Jack Aistrop 158 3.2: Crises of Survival in Mine Own Executioner (1945) by Nigel Balchin 171 3.3: Safety and Connectivity in Tell It to a Stranger (1947) by Elizabeth Berridge 184 Chapter Four: Safety and Grief Introduction 202 4.1: Unsafe Fantasy in Back (1946) by Henry Green 219 4.2: Ruin and Salvage in The World My Wilderness (1950) by Rose Macaulay 232 4.3: Grief, Self-Listening and Safe Conviction in Little Boy Lost (1949) by Marghanita Laski 243 Conclusion 257 Works Cited 263 . 5 Literary Representations of Safety in British Fiction of the Long Decade 1939 –1950 Abstract During and after the Second World War – a time of acute national danger – British authors reflected the huge premium placed on safety, exploring and expressing it in various manifestations. Safety is a fundamental human need, and yet it is a contingent concept. A major component of being safe is not being endangered – and the novelists addressed in this thesis were alert to the reciprocal relationship between the safe and the unsafe, between the desire for safety and the presence of danger. Critical work has largely been concerned with the crisis of conflict, with depictions of heroic combat or the impact of bombing raids on the Home Front; safety and its cognates have received little, if any, attention. This thesis investigates the protean representations of safety during the long decade, 1939–1950, in four key manifestations. Safekeeping: psychological and emotional safety may not be coincident with physical safety. The novels selected – Saplings (1945) by Noel Streatfeild, Doreen (1946) by Barbara Noble and Charley is My Darling (1940) by Joyce Cary – assimilate the ground-breaking advances in child developmental psychology to represent the contingency of safety in the figure of the child evacuee. Safe home: home is widely construed as safe and unsafe. Winifred Peck depicts how safe home is destabilised in wartime in House-Bound (1942), while Pied Piper (1942) by Nevil Shute and Hangover Square (1941) by Patrick Hamilton narrate safety in relation to rescue, homecoming and states of interior exile. Safe talk: talking can be safe, as in the therapeutic talking cure, and unsafe (‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’). Pretend I Am a Stranger (1949) by Jack Aistrop and Mine Own Executioner (1945) by Nigel Balchin represent conflicted experiences of talk for the war veteran and the lay analyst respectively. In Tell It to a Stranger (1947), Elizabeth Berridge captures the powerful currency of talk, juxtaposing its operations of openness and secrecy, which are compromised when mediated by technology. Safety and grief: grieving can be a disorderly, unsafe process but also a way back to psychological and emotional safety. Back (1946) by Henry Green, The World My Wilderness (1950) by Rose Macaulay and Little Boy Lost (1949) by Marghanita Laski are read in relation to models of healthy (safe) and unhealthy (unsafe) grieving. Building on the work of David Bromwich in Skeptical Music (2001), this thesis also engages with larger questions of representational intent, in which the desire for safety is often commingled with the allure of danger. Exploring fictional representations of safety enables us to think about literature’s specific and heightened response to wartime and postwar conditions and its resonances for contemporary readings in our own time. 6 Literary Representations of Safety in British Fiction of the Long Decade 1939–1950 Introduction ‘Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’1 In the short story ‘Fear of Death’ (1943), F. J. Salfeld’s narrator describes the experience of being under enemy bombardment on a warship in the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean. Hoping to survive the onslaught, the men – off-watch when the alarm is sounded – gather below decks, surrounded by dangerous explosives in the ship’s magazine: So there we were, a dozen blue-overalled men in this chilly cavern stacked from deck to deckhead with cordite and shells – safe so long as no bomb struck or, if the magazine had to be flooded, we could get out before the water rose; and with some prospect of escape if the ship, supposing her torpedoed, did not sink too quickly.2 The physical safety of Salfeld’s mariners is frighteningly and explicitly conditional on the events of the next few moments – ‘so long as’, ‘if’ there is time or ‘if’ escape back up the ladder to the turret, remains clear and, finally, ‘if’ the ship does not sink. The syntax itself conveys the men’s collective mental drive to weigh safety against imminent danger, experiencing the two states as close correlatives. In Salfeld’s story, the unnamed narrator reflects on the precariousness of the lives of his comrades and on his own threshold of fear, which is the primal danger-reaction needed to maximise safety – ‘We had our first lull and I 1 Henry IV, Part 1, II, 3, 8–9, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. by David Scott Kastan (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 198. 2 F. J. Salfeld, ‘Fear of Death’, in Short Stories from the Second World War, ed. by Dan Davin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 121–26 (p. 123). 7 the glad relief of not having been too much afraid’, he says, testing the strength of an instinct for survival hitherto unknown to him.3 The fictional manifestations of safety are widely construed in this thesis as physical, psychological and emotional; its forms occur as a locus, as an idea (ideologically and culturally determined) and as a feeling (affect). These representations are discussed as a neglected but significant aspect of literature’s response to the unprecedented crises encountered during the elongated decade of the 1940s. In acknowledging that the manifestations of safety range well beyond the individual’s basic need for physical protection, this thesis engages safety’s cognates of health, wellbeing, intactness, deliverance, sanity and completeness. In addition, the literary formulations of safety are frequently coincident with its opposite, danger. In an inescapable commingling of the two, the prose fiction of this period features unsettling juxtapositions, best revealed by grouping the texts thematically rather than chronologically; this is a structural decision to which I will return when addressing methodology. This thesis therefore acknowledges that alongside representations of safety, the literature of the 1940s engages explicitly with the presence and the allure of danger, both as heightened experience and to counteract the maddening inertia of an extended lull, unique to the Blitz experience. For instance, in Henry Green’s short story, ‘The Lull’ (1943), diverse firemen visit the station bar and reprise their stories of fires past ‘seeking to justify the waiting life’ they are currently living. In this period of safety and inactivity, one fireman asks another, ‘d’you think there’ll ever be another blitz?’; the reply comes, ‘if he doesn’t put one on soon we shall all be crackers’.4 The men may go mad with waiting, for when they are not fighting fires, their raison d’être is lost and their masculinity diminished; passers-by have only contempt for their uniform that ‘two years ago, was good in any pub for a drink from a 3 Salfeld, ‘Fear’, p.

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