We walk on the bones of the dead
Novelist Kate Atkinson is particularly good at bringing the past to life through ordinary objects, habits, food and personal recollections. She has written some great criminal capers featuring her detective Jackson Brodie, but it’s the history-drenched novels that appeal most to me.
And so to her latest, Our Noble Selves, where she revisits the world of before, during and, primarily, just after WW2. It’s territory she has mined before, and especially in Transcription. This is London 1951, and she brings it to life with humour, warmth, poignancy, comic mayhem, and an exquisite attention to detail that never feels clunky.
Harry Flynn is back in London from a war that doesn’t count for much glory-wise: he’s a journalist captured at Singapore and a survivor of the Burma Railway. His emotions have been “cauterized” by war. He comes home to learn that his parents have died and that his brother was lost when his submarine, the Tigris, disappeared off the coast of Italy in ‘43. Flynn left Glasgow on a troop ship a son and a brother, and returned an only child and an orphan.
Six years on, he is recruited to an eccentric team preparing for the Festival of Britain, the government effort to boost morale: a celebration of past glory and a hopeful vision of a brighter future. Flynn works in the Department of Rooms, tracking down items from the past for displays of British life.
In those days Britain still made things. The names and addresses of British manufacturers become a refrain, at once reassuring and quaintly comic.
When sleep didn’t come, which was often, Flynn found the Stock List provided a useful soporific with its cricket bats (Stuart Surridge and Co, Ltd, 210 Borough High Street, London SE1) and ‘a Pyrex heat-resisting pudding dish’ (James A. Jobling and Co, Ltd, Sunderland.) These were the kind of words that did not fail. They were sturdy and useful. They stirred neither memory nor imagination. Why bother with poetry when you could have a no-nonsense stainless-steel sink from W. & G. Sissons Ltd. of Sheffield to lullaby you to sleep.
As Atkinson says in her Author’s Note, much of the weird and eccentric material in the novel isn’t her invention but comes straight out of the records.
There are dead bodies, fellow-travelling fascists, spies, double-crossers, police from the days before sensitivity training, and a battered London that is home to all and sundry. For the recovering Flynn, help and redemption come from an unexpected source: Veronica, an ungovernable and scheming child who lands in his life with a voracious appetite, a lurid taste for crime fiction, and a wire-haired terrier named Mrs Betty. Veronica clearly has a future.
The past has a way of breaking through into the present, “usually in the form of nightmares or recurrent malaria, but Flynn had determined to cast off both quickly.” The novel’s characters are survivors. There is the redoubtable and enigmatic Maud Ogilvie, who carries a toffee hammer among many other practical items in her capacious handbag. There is teenage Terence, known as The Boy, who sorts the tea and does all manner of useful things. He once spent a day in Ramsgate, and has never eaten chicken or a banana or seen a cow. And there is the lugubrious Welshman Evans-Jones (Evans for short), who retained his sanity after a week adrift in an open lifeboat in the dark of a freezing Arctic winter, watching everyone around him die.
Flynn and Evans put their own suffering into a larger perspective. Both know that others had it worse.
“We walk on the bones of the dead, boyo,” Evans says, “Not many people had it worse than we did, but the Jews in the camps did.”
“The Malays, the Chinese, the Tamils,” Flynn said, “they had it worse than anyone on the Railway, and there were a lot more of them. I doubt their story’s ever going to be told.”
Much Ado About Food
Food is not incidental to the novel. Sweets, biscuits, meals and drink are the threads that hold the narrative together, revealing more than a longing for the end of rationing. The novel opens with Flynn eating a corned beef sandwich in St James’s Park; what follows is a saga of deprivation, appetite, memory and the first glimpse of a future opening up again.
We see his good nature early on, when he goes out of his way to buy milk for his elderly neighbours’ evening Horlicks. and feeds their gas meter with threepenny bits.
The confident and well-connected Lydia’s invitation to eat omelette aux fine herbs turns out to be a sexual encounter.
And who knew that biscuits could say so much: the custard creams at the 3 pm tea, where The Boy is too lavish with the sugar ration, and later chocolate bourbons, Rich Tea, and mythical Garibaldis handed out at Bow Street police station.
“No working kettle, I’m afraid … We’ve got biscuits though.”
“Suits me,” said Veronica.
There are Festival fruit gums from Rowntree’s, and Festival Rock purloined by The Boy, broken into pieces with Maud’s toffee hammer. There is a kipper at a Kardomah on Southampton Row, the childhood memories of hot salty chips on Scarborough Pier, and a high tea at the Black Swan in Helmsley of gammon, scones and clotted cream. At Luigi’s, Flynn eats meatballs and spaghetti with Maud and drinks Chianti with the Wednesday army toast, “To our noble selves,” remembering a pre-war cycling holiday and ripe figs eaten by a dusty road.
The comic centrepiece is the Festival Cake, a recipe competition rigged in favour of the entirely over-the-top Mitzi Blinkhorn. In her Note, Atkinson confirms that Mitzi is a caricature of TV celebrity cook Fanny Cradock, who with her monocled husband Johnny was a fixture of British television for decades. Cradock’s own life was extraordinary, and Mitzi is a grotesque pantomime fraud and a dreadful cook.
Mitzi’s winning cake is a ghastly concoction:
an extraordinarily bombastic affair, reminiscent of a cathedral dome and embellished in a baroque manner, swagged and garlanded with icing, studded with angelica and sugared almonds, and dotted with glacé cherries in garish traffic light colours.
The dinner she cooks for Flynn is a triumph of awfulness: vol-au-vents stuffed with smoked haddock, champagne cocktails, a plateau de fruits de mer (a tiny winkle inching away), le rosbif oozing blood, a tureen of mashed potatoes, cabbage and carrots, and no peas. Pudding is a cold, slightly curdled egg custard with yet more glacé cherries.
Transcription evoked the sophistication of Elizabeth David; Our Noble Selves gives us Fanny Cradock by way of the grotesque Mitzi Blinkhorn: culinary theatre at its most preposterous.
And there’s drink: port and lemon, gin and ginger, Ricard, pints of Worthington Mild and Fuller’s London Pride, coffee that tastes like engine oil, and many, many cups of tea. Flynn drinks whisky. Rather a lot of it.
Food is also a reminder of the war. At breakfast, Maud orders buttered toast with Marmite, not marmalade, and “the mention of Marmite plunged Flynn unexpectedly down memory lane. It was the one thing they were always desperate to get on the Railway as it was the only weapon they had against beriberi.”
Then there is the American troop ship that carried him and other starvation survivors part of the way home, with its heavenly bacon, gallons of milk and unimaginably soft white bread: “To the Yanks’ horror a couple of them died, their stomachs unable to take this bounty.”
“Same thing happened when they liberated Belsen,” Evans says.
The war haunts the book and its characters. Amid all the comic mayhem, it surfaces in clipped references to experience and shared loss:
I had a son… tail gunner on a Lancaster
standing on a land mine somewhere outside Tobruk
a cousin killed in the Sheffield raids
a boyfriend who went down on HMS Hermione
he took part in the D-Day landings. First wave
I was on ack-acks in Hyde Park
I spent the war in a hut
propositioned a man in the gents on Oxford Circus. Just his luck it was a policeman undercover… he was in special ops during the war.
Against that collective history, the Festival becomes the tonic it was meant to be for a war-, rationing- and austerity-weary nation. The novel ends with an assessment of its success:
For the first time the British public had experienced open-air cafes, spaghetti, hot dogs, ice-cold drinks, soft toilet rolls, and the opportunity to drink wine with meals. So continental. So modern. The glimpse of a possible future.
For the group photo, before they all go off into their separate futures, there’s the cry of “Say cheese.” But which cheese? Red Leicester, Cheshire, Stilton, Brie, Caerphilly, Wensleydale?
“We walk on the bones of the dead, boyo.”
Atkinson knows the weight of those bones, but she also shows how the grimness of Memory Lane can give way to the hope of the Road Ahead. Her novel is funny, humane, and rich in the details that make the past live again.
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NOTE: Atkinson’s Maud Ogilvie reminded me of the steely, ruthless Miss Marjorie Murrin in Lauden McVey’s Death Comes to Kellings. Is Atkinson tipping her hat to a queen of Golden Age crime fiction? Hardly. Lauden McVey is not merely a novelist; she is entirely fictional. The likelier explanation is that both writers reached for the same stock character of espionage and official skullduggery. See what you think:
Miss Marjorie Murrin is traveling by train on the 4.50 from Paddington. Given the sudden drop in temperature, she is pleased with her decision to wear her Vyella liberty bodice for the journey. A linen handkerchief is tucked into the sleeve of her tweed jacket and in her handbag are a bottle of smelling salts and – wrapped in parachute silk and hidden in the lining – a small revolver. She never travels without either.
Miss Murrin knows the major from France and indeed went to school with his late wife. She is slight in stature, deferential in demeanor, quiet, and self-possessed. But do not be beguiled. Seated next to Stadtmuller at dinner, she is quite capable of requesting the gravy boat and – without another word – pouring the contents down his starched white shirt and dinner jacket. Or indeed of quietly standing to her full height of five feet two, gripping the tablecloth and pulling it until the entire contents of the table – the fish pie in its brown earthenware dish, the silver chafers of braised mutton, roasted potatoes, and Brussels sprouts, cutlery, wine glasses, water glasses, mint sauce, mustard pot, salt shaker and all – are on the worn red Wilton of the dining room. – Death Comes to Kellings.