{wishlist} cecil beaton

Want, want, want...

Cecil Beaton Theatre of War

the book accompanying 

an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum

Wren officers framed by 

Sir Christopher Wren's Colonnade 

at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, 

London, 1941 (source)

{review} this republic of suffering

Drew Gilpin Faust This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008)

Another soldier, asked by a doctor for his last words to send home, responded by requesting the doctor to provide them. "I do not know what to say. Well, tell them only just such a message as you would like to send if you were dying."

I read this book a long time ago, but it has stuck with me and I would really like to read it again one day. I almost didn't want to share it, I liked it so much. That isn't a great help for a blogger! I was attracted by a review in the LRB (a terrible source of temptation) and sought it out because, first of all, I'm interested in ways of memorializing both the living and the dead in the ancient world; second, I don't know nearly enough about the American Civil War (apart from Gone With The Wind). It seemed a good kill-two-birds choice. And it was: this is an excellent book and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is an academic book which is also accessible to the lay reader, and this is a rare combination in my opinion: many academic titles are branded in catchy ways to bump up sales, but prove, on exploration, as impenetrable as the Rosetta Stone to a non-specialist. 

This book charts the transition from the individual management of death to what might be termed the professionalization, even the industrialisation, of the management of war dead. Gilpin Faust (incidentally, the first woman president of Harvard) brings her subject to life by threading her historical narrative with extracts from letters and diaries and records of personal - often heartbreaking - experience from the battlefields. The core of the book concerns the ways in which both the military, the soldiers' families and the soldiers themselves dealt with the mammoth task of managing the Civil War's huge death tolls. 

Gilpin Faust explores how this necessity establishes, by trial and error almost, future management of mass war casualties - how the dead are identified (and how the living seek to mark themselves against future misidentification as a consequence); who buries the dead; how the graves are marked; record-keeping; transport of the dead (and innovations in the accoutrements required); repatriation of remains. How do the victors treat the remains of the vanquished? Can the establishment of national organisations to commemorate (and, sadly, just to find) the dead assist in healing the wounds of a country torn apart by civil war? What happens to the families, the widows, the children of soldiers presumed dead? 

The author makes use of a fascinating range of primary sources: diaries and letters as well as some chilling photographs, along with local and national archival sources. One thing I found terribly moving was the presence of members of the family at the scene of battles seeking their dead. One instance is that of Oliver Wendall Holmes Snr., seeking his son's body after the Battle of Antietam (23,000 casualties in one day). Holmes Jnr. had been shot and as he lay wounded he scrawled his name, rank and family on a scrap of paper. He survived and kept the little note, commenting, "I wrote the above when I was lying in a little house on the field of Antietam which was for a while within the enemy's lines, as I thought I might faint & so be unable to tell who I was." Walt Whitman was another visitor to the battlefield whose life (the "very centre, circumference, umbilicus") was changed by his experience in search of his brother George. 

Others were not so fortunate as the younger Holmes or George Whitman, and there are many profoundly moving stories in this book of parents who never gave up the search to find their sons' final resting places. There is a particularly well constructed section on condolence letters and the presentation of the 'Good Death' which "structured the imperatives of Christianity, military courage, and masculinity into a hierarchy of solace." 

Rating: wonderful. Hugely informative and moving. (I've given up numerical ratings)

{review} the small back room

Nigel Balchin The Small Back Room (1943)

I found this book as the author sits next to Beryl Bainbridge on the library shelves (and I'm thinking about Beryl Bainbridge Week). Also, the name rang a faint bell. A quick search of google reader (far more reliable than my memory) revealed that I'd flagged it to track down after reading the excellent review on futile preoccupations and that Balchin had been discussed (so recently that I should be ashamed of forgetting) by beauty is a sleeping cat and a work in progress.  

The Small Back Room is a shortish and very intense book, set during the Second World War. The protagonist is a 'backroom boy' - a scientist working in a small team which basically throws up ideas and sees if they'll work: new types of silent guns, odd fuses, ways to stop things freezing, and so on. The novel offers a deeply depressing look at how individual egos can dominate to the detriment of the big picture - the actual war and, more specifically, the men on the front who will have to use these new inventions. 

The separation in distance and mind-set between the back room boys and their masters and the men on the front is beautifully brought out when the protagonist - prevented from active service by the loss of a foot in the First World War - has to become actively involved in defusing a deadly new type of bomb. I liked the uneasy atmosphere evoked by this book: the impression that the war was intended to feather certain men's nests; the arguments between the 'old boy' scientists who want to maintain their little fiefdoms without regard to efficiency or making a difference to the war; the go-betweens in cushy safe jobs which they intend to keep. 

"But I don't think you understand," I said rather desperately. "That stuff matters. His own people know that it's good and say it's never been tackled before. There's stuff there that I was working on before the war. What's going to happen to it?"

Waring said, "That's entirely up to Hereward. After what's happened, you can't expect him to be very enthusiastic, can you?"

I felt myself shaking a bit. I said, "It isn't a question of whether Hereward is enthusiastic or not. That idea might make all the difference to operating transport and guns in cold climates. Why should it be stopped because of his bloody dignity? The war isn't his private show."

...

Mair said gently, "You're being logical, Sammy, and I'm afraid it isn't a matter of logic."

This is not a book about heroes (apart from one very brave and determined bomb disposal expert). The protagonist is not particularly likeable and spends a goodly amount of time feeling sorry for himself and making the life of his lover hellish. This doesn't sound promising, but nevertheless, Balchin's grim (and grimy) assessment of human nature at play on the home front offers much revisional food for thought. Incidentally, Balchin's wikipedia entry offers some interesting parallels between his life and his writing. 

Rating: 8/10; disheartening but great writing. It's been made into a film that sounds rather more redemptive than the book. 

source

{review} paris in july: americans in paris

This is a post for Paris in July, hosted by BookBath and Thyme for Tea.

 

Charles Glass Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940-1944 (2009)

This book is doubly relevant to Paris for me, since I bought it in 2010 in the W.H. Smith bookshop on Rue de Rivoli as I was on my way to Angelina for a(nother) Mont Blanc and a hot chocolate. It was pouring with rain that day, so I ducked inside W.H. Smith to check out the books before continuing to Paradise Angelina.

Too greedy to take a before shot. Angelina's Mont Blanc. 

Strictly speaking this may not have been the one consumed on the visit above, 

since I am a bit of a Mont Blanc slut.

Now I'm going to find it impossible to find a sensitive segue from my stuffing my face with cream cakes to the plight of the citizens of Paris during the Second World War.

In Americans in Paris, Charles Glass provides a very readable account of what happened to the American citizens who were in Paris during the fall of France and her subsequent occupation. Book-loving Francophiles will know one of these Americans very well, I imagine - Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Co. - but many of the other figures in this book were quite unknown to this reader. As France fell, some were fortunate enough to escape the country; others were not so lucky; and there were also the courageous (or foolhardy) who were determined to stay regardless of the consequences. This was doubly problematical if they were Jewish or black Americans. Until America entered the war, those who remained were not in any great danger unless they actively conspired against the occupiers, but they certainly shared the privations of their Parisian neighbours. After America became involved in the conflict, their situation was dire and they suffered internship or worse.

Glass has selected an interesting cross-section of people to recreate life in occupied Paris: a diplomat with intelligence connections (Robert Murphy), the bookseller Sylvia Beach, a doctor (Dr Sumner Jackson), a black veteran of the First World War American voluntary air squadron the Lafayette Escadrille (Eugene Bullard), a countess born in Ohio (Clara Longworth de Chambrun) and - certainly the most intriguing figure for Glass - the elusive millionaire Charles Bedaux.

America had a strong presence in Paris before the war, and two institutions in particular dominate Glass' narrative - the American Library in Paris and the American Hospital of Paris (at Neuilly). When America came into the war these institutions could have been taken over lock, stock and barrel by the Germans but both were saved by the extraordinary efforts of a small group of patriots. The Library was kept going by the Countess de Chambrun, who had been born plain (but rich) Clara Longworth in Ohio. The Hospital - by a strange twist of fate - fell to her French husband, General de Chambrun's care. The de Chambrun's war was a politically tricky one: their son René had married Josée Laval, the daughter of Pierre Laval who was twice head of the Vichy government. 

Dr Sumner Jackson with his son Philip (c1930): source

General de Chambrun oversaw the administrative survival of the American Hospital. It was Dr Sumner Jackson who attempted to maintain medical standards, something he managed while simultaneously actively assisting the French Resistance to smuggle downed Allied airmen out of occupied France with the assistance of his French wife and young son. 

Charles Bedaux occupies a very large part of Glass' narrative (indeed, I sometimes thought that this book may have originally been intended to be solely about his immensely complex war). Bedaux was born in Paris but emigrated to the US in his twenties, becoming an American citizen. He was a self-made millionaire thanks to his time management business which consulted with big industrial firms to improve worker productivity. Bedaux moved back to France and is best known in the 1930s for hosting the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at his French chateau. As Glass demonstrates, Bedaux is a very tricky figure to pin down. In the interests of business he may have made some dodgy deals with Vichy and the Germans, and his behaviour raised flags with the American intelligence community: when an opportunity presented he was arrested in North Africa and clandestinely transported back to America to face a treason charge.

The fates of Glass' subjects were not, in general, good: Sylvia Beach survived internment and privation but her already shaky health was broken by her ordeals. The de Chambrun's post-war life was clouded by their links with Pierre Laval. Bedaux committed suicide in Miami before there was a verdict on his case. The Jacksons were picked up by German intelligence: Mrs Jackson survived Ravensbrück concentration camp; her husband and son survived Neuengamme camp only to be bombed by the RAF on a German prison ship. Dr Jackson - an extraordinarily heroic figure - died in this raid, five days before Germany fell.

In sum? This most interesting book is a well-written, well-researched and eminently readable survey of a group of Americans who loved Paris and were prepared to pay whatever it cost to preserve her freedom.

Rating: 7/10.

If you liked this... Colette's Evening Star is a very different personal memoir of her life in Paris during this period. I have reviewed it here.

{review} doctors from hell

Vivien Spitz Doctors from Hell (2004)

"How nice it would be if we could drive the whole pack of them [the Poles] through such ovens. Yesterday two wagonloads of Polish ashes were taken away. Outside my office, the robinias are blooming beautifully, just as in Leipzig." (Diary of Dr Hermann Voss, professor of anatomy at the university in Posen, Poland)

Vivien Spitz was only twenty-two years old in 1946 when she was sent from America to the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 as a court reporter (stenographer). Her job involved recording the proceedings against doctors accused of war crimes in the Nazi concentration camps.

Source

What she heard at the Trials - what she had to write down word for gruesome word - changed her life forever. But it was not until the late 1980s, when she began to hear stories about Holocaust deniers, that she was able to face the nightmarish visions she retained from her two years in Germany. The result, based on the transcripts on which she worked, is a frightening and horrible catalogue of crimes against humanity committed by men (and one woman) who had been trained to heal but chose to participate in something altogether less salubrious.

This litany of sins against the Hippocratic Oath is a painful and gruesome read and one wonders how Spitz (whose own German heritage speaks plainly in her name) had the courage to face these horrors for a second time. She is, obviously, an extraordinary woman, as the details of her subsequent career attest here).

The organisation of Doctors from Hell is a practical one: Spitz has divided her material into types of 'scientific' investigations undertaken on concentration camp inmates. These included experiments with high altitudes; freezing; malaria; bone, muscle and nerve regeneration; bone transplants; mustard gas; sulphanilamide; sea water drinking; epidemic jaundice; sterilization; typhus; poisons; incendiary bombs; infections and inflammations; phenol; coagulation; euthanasia; and skeleton collecting. The testimonies provided by survivors and witnesses are graphic and horrifying - a "barrage of horror", as Spitz notes. The defences provided by the treating doctors are very weak, not least because of the Nazi love of obsessive documentation.

Herta Oberheuser

"In administering therapeutical care, following established medical principles, as a woman in a difficult position, I did the best I could." (Herta Oberheuser, physician at Ravensbrück camp; sentenced to 20 years imprisonment but released in 1952 (!) for good behaviour, she practised as a GP until a survivor recognised her and she was finally struck off in 1958).

Karl Brandt

"It is immaterial for the experiment whether it is done with or against the will of the person concerned... The meaning is the motive—devotion to the community... ethics of every form are decided by an order or obedience." (Karl Brandt; Hitler's personal physician and head of his euthanasia program; executed 1948)

It is never far from the surface in these testimonia that the concentration camps provided a once in a lifetime opportunity to advance one's own research on the "useless eaters" without fear of consequences. At the medical trials held at Dachau prior to those at Nuremberg, one defendent, Dr Schilling, offered the defense that, "his work was part of his duty; that it was unfinished; and that the Dachau court should do what it could to help him finish his experiments for the benefit of science." Terrifying stuff.

Doctors from Hell is saved from being a simple catalogue of evil by Spitz's alternation of the trials with details of her life at the time, as a young American woman in Nuremberg. The description of the wartime destruction of Nuremberg by the Allied forces underlines that encounters between good and evil are far from ethically simplistic.

Witness: There were only three types of resistance possible. First of all, emigration for a person who was able; second, open resistance which meant a concentration camp or the death penalty, and to my knowledge, never met with any success; third, passive resistance by apparent yielding, misplacing and delaying orders, criticism among one’s friends, in short, what writers today call "internal emigration."

What Spitz took from Nuremberg was an understanding that responsibility and accountability would be the foundations that underpinned her sense of personal duty. Quirkily, she aligns these with Bob Dylan's lines from 'Blowin’ in the Wind': How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?

Doctors from Hell is in places a tad overwrought and incongruously anecdotal - "As I looked at Karl Brandt, his eyes locked onto mine—boring into me with such deep, evil intensity that I shuddered with a chill that went down my spine and froze me to my seat" - but it amply fulfils Spitz's "hope that this record will not be forgotten by history."

She quotes Martin Niemöller (a somewhat problematic figure):

In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.

This is a powerful, horrifying book and not one for the weak of stomach.

Rating: 9/10.

If you liked this... the introduction to this book was written by Elie Wiesel, and reminded me that I have put off reading Night for too long.

{review} the return of the soldier

Rebecca West The Return of the Soldier (1918)

That day its beauty was an affront to me, because, like most Englishwomen of my time, I was wishing for the return of a soldier. Disregarding the national interest and everything else except the keen prehensile gesture of our hearts toward him, I wanted to snatch my Cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness his wife and I now looked upon.

I've read hardly any Rebecca West - apart from bits of her The Meaning of Treason (1949: specifically, on Lord Haw-Haw) - and I approached The Return of the Soldier with some [fear of politics-disguised-as-literature-inspired] trepidation. Could I have been more wrong? Yes, we are not allowed to forget class difference, but what a wonderful, beautifully written book.

Source

Published in 1918, The Return of the Soldier is the story of Chris - the beloved but stifled head of a family of adoring women - who returns from the Great War shellshocked and amnesiac. He has lost fifteen years of his life and believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he is the carefree 22 year old who had yet to assume the mantle of responsibility for caring for his family and the family home. Worse still - for his wife Kitty and doting cousin Jenny [the narrator] - he remembers only his first, great love. But nowadays Margaret is a seemingly broken housewife struggling with borderline poverty and a husband unable to work.

The star of the book is Chris' family home which has remained a sort of pre-war Edwardian sanctuary for the women who have devoted themselves to Chris' comfort. The women's world has not been "infected with the squalor of war". So, how shocking not to be recognised. 

The women respond differently: Jenny, who has always carried a torch for her cousin (and would, to paraphrase The Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviewer, benefit from the Hitachi magic wand: "We kissed not as women, but as lovers do; I think we each embraced that part of Chris the other had absorbed by her love."), realises that he has never seen her as anything other than friend and cousin. However, because she loves him, she is willing to do anything to restore his memory, even if it means that she loses any chance to begin over with him. Kitty, the wife, is horrified at how Chris' loss of memory, which she believes is just a trick, affects her as his wife: what will society think of her with a mad husband in an asylum? What will become of their lavish Edwardian lifestyle? Will - horror! - he leave her for his old, first love? Kitty's responses to these worries demonstrate that she is, indeed, well-named, with "[h]er irony... as faintly acrid as a caraway-seed".

There came suddenly a thud at the door. We heard Chris swear and stumble to his feet, while one of the servants spoke helpfully. Kitty knitted her brows, for she hates gracelessness, and a failure of physical adjustment is the worst indignity she can conceive. "He’s fallen down those three steps from the hall," I whispered. "They’re new."

…

His fall had ruffled him and made him look very large and red, and he breathed hard, like an animal pursued into a strange place by night, and to his hot consciousness of his disorder the sight of Kitty, her face and hands and bosom shining like the snow, her gown enfolding her, and her gold hair crowning her with radiance, and the white fire of jewels giving passion to the spectacle, was a deep refreshment. She sat still for a time, so that he might feel this well, then raised her ringed hand to her necklaces. "It seems so strange that you should not remember me," she said. "You gave me all these." He answered kindly: "I am glad I did that. You look very beautiful in them." But as he spoke his gaze shifted to the shadows in the corners of the room, and the blood ran hot under his skin. He was thinking of another woman, of another beauty. Kitty put up her hands as if to defend her jewels.

And what of Margaret, the old lover: could she dare to snatch back her lost love, life and happiness? Or will she make a supreme sacrifice for Chris and his womenfolk and return to her common life (with her umbrella with an "unveracious tortoiseshell handle"!)? 

The characterisation is wonderful, particularly that of Chris whom we see only through the different viewpoints of his family as they discover that he was not at all the man they thought they know. As the safe, luxurious sanctuary of the house disintegrates, the inhabitants become aware that their perfect little world is over forever, regardless of whether Chris' memory can be restored.

"Kitty! Kitty! How can you!" But her little pink mouth went on manufacturing malice. "This is all a blind," she said at the end of an unpardonable sentence. "He’s pretending." I, who had felt his agony all the evening like a wound in my own body, was past speech then, and I did not care what I did to stop her. I gripped her small shoulders with my large hands, and shook her till her jewels rattled and she scratched my fingers and gasped for breath. But I did not mind so long as she was silent.

The narrator, Jenny, stays in one's mind long after the narrative has ended. She is such a sad figure ("a lonely life gives one opportunities of thinking these things out"), living with her dreams of Chris as putative lover, the realisation of the loss of her youth, and the new awareness that her constant companion Kitty has never liked her and that, contrary to her first impression, Margaret cuts the best figure of them all, despite her social commonness:

I pushed the purse away from me with my toe, and hated her as the rich hate the poor as insect things that will struggle out of the crannies which are their decent home and introduce ugliness to the light of day.

Even the house cannot save its occupants, as they become aware that it is "not so much a house as a vast piece of space partitioned off from the universe and decorated partly for beauty and partly to make our privacy more insolent". War has changed things forever and the bitter irony of their trying to save Chris only to send him back "to that flooded trench in Flanders, under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No-Man's-Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead" is never far from the surface of this extraordinary book.

BTW, I read this as a free book from girlebooks (although I have the Virago classic too). I think girlebooks is marvellous.

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this... the evocation of the 'perfect summer' in The Return of the Soldier is somewhat earlier than the norm, but reminded me that I have - still - yet to finish The Perfect Summer.

{misc.} anzac day

Today is Anzac Day. 

Lest We Forget.

c1943. Artist unknown. Information from the Australian War Memorial archive: "2nd Australian Imperial Force; poster appealing for donations of reading matter (books and magazines) for distribution by the ACF to soldiers, depicts soldiers in jungle reading brown paper, bark and cigarette papers." Credit: Australian War Memorial (public domain)

{review} spitfire women

Giles Whittell Spitfire Women of World War II (2007)

I recently caught the tail-end of a TV documentary based on this book and it reminded me that I had it on the TBR. 

This is a very readable history of some of the women who volunteered to join the Air Transport Auxiliary during the Second World War in Britain. The ATA was responsible for the transporting of military aircraft around Britain to wherever they were needed: from factory to squadron, squadron to squadron, squadron to wreckers' yard. As able-bodied male flyers were needed in the RAF for fighter duty, the ATA was filled with the left-overs, gaining a reputation - deserved - for the eccentricity of its aviators: the one-armed, one-eyed and generally physically disqualified.

The other one-armed men were First Officer R. A. Corrie and the Honourable Charles Dutton, later Lord Sherborne, who was once interrupted by a woman pilot in the White Waltham common room arguing over which arm it was better for a pilot to be without. The answer was not clear, but Dutton did explain that he could take off in a Spitfire only with the control column clenched between his legs. And he could land only with the throttle pulled right back in advance. Every landing was effectively a forced one, with no second chances.

The other ATA source - ineligible for the RAF - was, of course, women. Almost all ATA flyers had flown prior to the war in a private capacity, and this is telling, since flying was not a poor (wo)man's game. Many of the ATA were high-living, wealthy, It-girls. Some were not, but had formidable pre-war reputations: Amy Johnson, for instance, the long-distance aviatrix whose gruesome death on ATA duty makes one realise the high level of personal courage required to fly aeroplanes in wartime in horrendous weather conditions and entirely without armaments and radios. Consider, too, the 'Mayfair Minx' Mona Friedlander who used to earn an incredible ten pounds an hour pre-war in the air: she towed targets for anti-aircraft gunnery practice!

Maureen Dunlop of the ATA on the cover of Picture Post, Sept. 1944. 

Source: ask.com

These women were astoundingly brave, entirely belying the ATA's nickname of the "Always Terrified Airwomen".

Ferrying aircraft around well-defended Britain was, bizarrely, one of the most lethal activities on offer to either men or women in this war. Nearly one in ten of the ATA’s women pilots died. None of them ever fired a shot in anger because they flew unarmed, so they were sitting ducks should the Luftwaffe happen on them. They could also be shot at by friendly ack-ack units, ensnared by barrage balloons and, at any moment, ambushed by the weather. They flew without radio, and this was tightrope-walking without a safety net: no weather ‘actuals’, no check calls to the nearest RAF or met station, no radio beam to home in on.

This group of highly motivated, intelligent, hard-partying, privately funded airwomen - and some of the only women to earn the same wage as their male counterparts - still had a lot to prove. There was much inter-service jealousy about their abilities (and their pay).

Rosemary Rees explained briskly to one of them after joining the women’s Class V elite in 1943: 'I remember having quite an argument with a Wing Commander about an [Avro] York I was collecting,' she wrote. 'He said it was so heavy compared with my five foot three and seven stone weight. I pointed out that I was not proposing to attempt to carry it after all, but on the contrary to make it carry me.'

As one critic wrote:

But the trouble is that so many of them insist on wanting to do jobs which they are quite incapable of doing. The menace is the woman who thinks that she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly, or who wants to nose round as an Air Raid Warden and yet can't cook her husband's dinner.

And there was also a fair amount of discord within their own ranks as abrasive personalities were forced to rub up against each other in an enforced team in which each thought herself the Queen Bee. This was further exacerbated when they were joined by a corps of American volunteers. Even their leaders didn't see eye to eye.

My favourite aviatrix was Mary de Bunsen who managed to get into the ATA despite her medical history of a polio-weakened leg, lousy eyesight and a hole in her heart. Other sparkling personalities were Diana Barnato Walker, the first woman to fly a Spitfire to Europe and, post-war, the first British woman to go supersonic. 

Initially the ATA women were confined to flying lesser aircraft. But they proved themselves (interestingly, "the 'wastage rate' of female pilots was fewer than one in ten, twice as economical as the men") and eventually were able to fly the ultimate flying machine of the war, the Spitfire, and the huge multi-engined bombers. 

Joan Hughes of the ATA next to a Short Stirling bomber. 

Source: daily mail.

As a gauge of just how astonishing this achievement was, Whittell notes: 

Statistically, it was unusual for a woman in wartime Britain to set out to fly fighters and bombers and succeed. One hundred and seventeen British women managed it, or about one in every 200,000.

Ironically, the Spitfire turned out to be "the perfect lady's aeroplane" with its narrow cockpit and light controls. 

Whittell is very good at describing flying-related terms in layperson's language - this book never overwhelms with technicalities. It is a well-written book about a group of extraordinary women - "young, hopeful and ridiculously brave": 

Apart from a week’s rest at Cliveden hospital after a crash that almost killed her, [Lettice] Curtis flew continuously from July 1940 to September 1945; thirteen days on, two off, for sixty-two consecutive months. In that time she ferried nearly 1,500 aircraft including 331 four-engined bombers.

There is a real sense of personal despondency about the post-war fates of these remarkable women, defined, as Whittell has it, by their "toughness". Few were able to make the transition to peacetime flying owing to the huge numbers of demobbed male pilots. For many it seemed that the war was the only time they truly lived. Some, however, maintained their hair-raising standards:

Joan Hughes, the second woman cleared to fly four-engined aircraft, received an MBE after the war – and an acquittal in 1968 from the Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions at Aylesbury, after facing seven charges there of endangering people and property while flying under a motorway bridge during the filming of Thunderbirds.

Rating: 8/10.

Incidentally, I read this on my Kindle but I also own a paper copy. There are no images in the Kindle copy. This is my dilemma: the Kindle is great for non-fiction since one can make copious highlights and notes. The Kindle is lousy for non-fiction as the editions generally lack images. Grrr.

If you liked this... The ATA women actually flew, unlike their sworn foes in the WAAF. As someone brought up on 'Worrals of the WAAF' (by Capt. W. E. Johns, the author of the 'Biggles' series), this came as something of a shock, and I want to find out more.

Worrals on the Warpath (1943).

Source: wejohns.com.

{review} the evening star

Colette The Evening Star: Recollections (1946; English tr. 1973)

This is such a sad book: the ageing Colette is almost entirely confined to her Paris apartment by physical infirmity. She is also, for much of the memoir, wracked with anxiety about her husband ("my best friend") who is on the run from the Germans in occupied Paris.

The Evening Star (L'Étoile Vesper) is the second volume of Colette's meandering reminiscences and covers Paris during the Nazi occupation and the years immediately following. Colette's war was a painful one - her husband Maurice Goudeket, a Jew, was sent to the Compiègne concentration camp and although released he then spent the rest of the occupation in hiding for fear of further imprisonment (and worse). Every time there was a knock at the door of her apartment in the Palais-Royal, Colette assumed that the axe was about to fall. 

Colette (found here)

Colette was nearly completely confined to her apartment during these years by her failing health but there is no doubt that the confinement of her room was no confinement to her imagination. Certain things did, however, assume a great significance for her. Some of these are rooted in the physical, such as the all-important view from the window into the gardens of the Palais-Royal. Others are in the nature of recurring reflections about, for example, the passing of time per se. Colette is nothing if not consistently self-reflexive: at one point she notes that her publisher is pressuring her to finish her memoirs; but she cannot stop writing and must continue to put down anecdotes both from the past ("My publishers are all younger than I am. On the evidence of their elders who witnessed my beginnings... I believe that their juniors have formed a confused but highly-coloured impression of my life.") and what might be considered minutiae of the present: "Haven't I anything better to write today? I doubt it. No part of this miscellany is intended towards a peroration or an apotheosis." 

This is indeed a miscellany - it is almost a stream of consciousness in places as Colette's mind skips nimbly about while her arthritic frame remains trapped in her rooms. 

I recall a woman I once used to know... She used to maintain that the preserved love-letter gives no one pleasure, that it can give rise to a thousand irritations, and that, rather than create posthumous difficulties, she had destroyed all her own. . .

'What, all of them?'

She winked her little old lady's eye, which still shone with the colour of a great sapphire.

'No. I've kept one.'

'It must have been a very beautiful letter?

'For me. I know it by heart. Shall I tell it to you?'

She let her gaze, not devoid of majesty, wander over her well-kept gardens, her overflowing kitchen-gardens, her luminous sheets of water, and recited:

'The key will be hanging behind the shutter.'

'What's next?'

'That's all.'

She paused before adding:

'Believe me, it was enough.'

Colette recalls lost friends and lovers, pets, objéts, her writing and reading, childbirth, two world wars and the seemingly endless waiting for the time when it will be safe for her beloved to return home to the little community of the Palais-Royal from "the perfect and classical nightmare of absence".

Fifteen hundred days. A thousand days and then more than five hundred on top of that. As many days and nights as it takes for a child to be born, grow, speak, become an intelligent and ravishing human being; days sufficient for mature blooming creatures to descend, in frightening numbers, into the grave. In fifteen hundred days of war and oppression, of organized destruction, may not a people abandon even hope itself?... Humbly, I am one of those who did nothing but wait.

This melancholy survey of the declining years of a once-glittering and scandal-filled life  is not a happy read but Colette's descriptive powers are certainly far from being in decline and The Evening Star offers moments of great beauty. Don't read it if you're feeling miserable.

Rating: 8/10.

If you liked this: I want to read more Claudine.

 Colette's gravestone  

(Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris). Author, 2009.

{review} a mixed batch

There are a few books I've read which don't really run to a full review. The sort of 'yes, I'd probably read the next one in the series eventually' or 'hmmm. I enjoyed it but it's not going to stick in my mind...' or 'everyone else's read that ages ago and what can I add?'. That sort of thing.

For example, Lauren Willig's The Secret History of the Pink Carnation (2005) was an amusing take on historical fiction slash chick lit slash mystery. There are many more in the series and I'll probably read another one at the very least. Willig favours the parallel narrative. Her modern day historian's search for the identity of an elusive contemporary of the Scarlet Pimpernel encases an inner narrative of the story of a feisty young woman's search for adventure and love in Revolutionary Paris. So strong was the internal narrative (in a Georgette Heyer fashion) that I sometimes thought that the more chick-lit type external narrative could have been ditched. It's an interesting combination and I'm probably not going to be able to resist finding out what comes next.

Imogen Robertson's Instruments of Darkness (2009) is the first in a series as well and I'll definitely be reading the second one. Who is the dead man in the woods? Is he the missing heir to the nearby manor house? What secret is the anatomist Gabriel Crowther hiding from the strong-minded, independent heroine? This is a straightforward historical crime novel with another feisty heroine determined to demonstrate that her intellect is by no means inferior to that of a man. I sometimes thought, 'too feisty for 1780', but, hey, it's fiction. There's a lot of good work in the setting of this book, with various historical borrowings used to set the scenes. I thought her dark, dirty and dangerous London was particularly well drawn.

I'd heard good things about Rosy Thornton's The Tapestry of Love (2010) - but it didn't really grab me. It was a 'nice' book: lovely setting in the Cévannes, but a bit plotless, slow and romantic for me. Good writing with a fine eye for details of everyday life. Apart from loving France, I was clearly the wrong audience. One bit did grab me: the heroine was able to sort of 'free-hand' her tapestries without any plan except a picture in her head of what it should look like. I'm in awe.

More historical fiction: Katharine McMahon The Rose of Sebastopol (2007). Such a disappointment - I didn't enjoy it at all. I kept wanting to smack the hero(es), the heroine(s), etc. Where's a well-timed cannon shot when you need one? Even the decent historical setting couldn't win back my love. And I found a typo... I'd been expecting something as good as The Crimson Rooms. Now I'm not sure I want to check out the sequel to that. Dear oh dear. I'm not sure I like historical fiction, actually (at least at this point!). ;-)

"She was my first, and last". I'll end on a positive note: Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel (1951). That's how to do historical mystery/fiction. It is 100% perfect and if I can't get the word "frape" into conversation this week I shan't let myself read any more du Maurier although I crave a return to Rebecca. I also adored the short stories in Don't Look Now (so spooky). I think I'll add Justine Picardie's Daphne to the TBR.