An Uneasy Peace

The World My Wilderness strikes me as an instance of fiction that reveals as much about time and place as bald historical facts. The novel is set in 1946, when countries, societies and most of all individuals are forced to adjust from a state of total war to an uneasy peace. Treachery, betrayal, death have cast long shadows; families or couples separated for years meet across chasms of national and personal difference. Morals are twisted and corrupted; everyone is compromised by their character, circumstances and reactions to where they find themselves, which is rarely where they thought they were. The narrative is dark, complex and subtle, with much crucial information implied obliquely or imparted as it were off-screen.

I came to this late novel by Rose Macaulay via her outstanding wartime short story ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’, which packs into a few pages the agonizing loss of her lover’s letters in a bombing raid that will torment poor Miss Anstruther for the rest of her life. Both works of fiction bear the stamp of total authenticity in their recall of the ‘war climate’, as Macaulay’s friend Elizabeth Bowen described it. The World My Wilderness was published in 1950, her first novel in nearly ten years: an exceptional silence after her inter-war record as acclaimed author of a succession of well-received satirical novels. After her final novel The Towers of Trebizond (1956, see SF no.70), which is generally considered her finest work (though I prefer Wilderness), her fiction became less popular as public tastes changed. There are neither heroes nor out-and-out villains in this evenhanded drama. The central character is Barbary, a waiflike 17-year-old loved and neglected in equal measure by her mother Helen, with whom she survived the war stranded on the Côte d’Azur during the German occupation. Helen, a worldly creature of the senses, is typically found gambling at cards or lounging in a hammock strung outside the strawberry-pink villa that belonged to her genial, beloved second husband Maurice, who ‘had collaborated mildly but prosperously from 1940 to ’45 and had been thereafter found drowned in the bay’. Meanwhile Barbary and her younger stepbrother Raoul, running wild in the hinterland, have joined the fringes of the Resistance and learned the ways of sabotage and subterfuge. Since Maurice’s murder, Barbary (was she involved?) has been packed off to her lawyer father Sir Gulliver and his new wife in London to learn to be civilized, together with Raoul, who will stay with relations in the city. They will travel to London with Barbary’s urbane older brother Richie, visiting his mother after three years at war and returning with relief to an orderly future as a diplomat. Postwar London is grey and mean-spirited under rationing. Barbary is bereft, homesick for the seductive Mediterranean paradise of her adored mother, whose grief for Maurice is no less for being kept well hidden; to the girl, Sir Gulliver’s sporty young wife Pamela and their small son David are ‘interlopers’. After mornings studying at the Slade she bunks off to meet Raoul in the devastated City of London, along with other strays – deserters, crooks, rats and rabbits surviving in the shattered wrecks of buildings engulfed by brambles and nettles, willow-herb and bracken. Barbary sets up a shelter with Raoul, painting and selling postcards to tourists and exploring the wharves and river. Their longstanding habits of pilfering and evading the Gestapo on the Côte d’Azur transfer unthinkingly to shoplifting and dodging the City police. In Penelope Fitzgerald’s masterly introduction to Virago’s 1983 reprint she observes that Rose Macaulay ‘liked to insist that ideas for novels came to her as places’ – she remembered scrambling after Macaulay ‘as she shinned undaunted down a crater’ and waved through broken windows amid the ruined jungle of the City, where much of the novel evolves. (Macaulay, a historian, was drawn to decay and dilapidation – her next book, much reprinted, was the non-fiction Pleasure of Ruins.) This wilderness is both surreal and specific; I was reminded of J. G. Ballard’s lost cities and drowned worlds, evoked decades later. You can still follow the route the ‘children’ (teenagers not yet having been invented) took from St Paul’s via Cheapside, Foster Lane, across Gresham Street into Noble Street. Within the Square Mile, today’s ingeniously landscaped sudden drops to lower levels (as at twelfth-century St Alphage’s and the Salters’ Garden) are breath-taking proof of ancient histories layered far beneath the towers of high finance. Across London Wall the little streets and squares, bomb-blasted into oblivion, were later subsumed under the vast development of the Barbican where St Giles Cripplegate, across the water from the concert halls and cafés, stands proudly restored to use. Barbary’s damaged soul is at home among the rubble and debris but not assuaged by them; guilt is gnawing at her. She is hiding something from the world and from herself. Careless of her own safety and of her father’s and Pamela’s disapproval, she courts risk. Sir Gulliver senses a problem but is busy; Pamela, meeting silent non-cooperation, avoids her until the summer when they are all to join Gulliver’s brother-in-law’s family on their Scottish estate for a season of shooting and fishing. Barbary is fitted for a tweed suit: ‘“I don’t suppose you shoot, do you?” Pamela said. That’s all you know, Barbary . . . silently said. I don’t suppose, she added to herself, you’ve ever sniped at Gestapo in forests. I bet you’ve no Gestapo suit.’ Once in Scotland, she is sulky with her cousins, catapults the gamekeeper, steals money from her hostess’s desk and hitchhikes back to London to avoid her psychiatrist uncle’s sympathetic probing. Sir Gulliver follows this parental nightmare to London; but, losing patience with her obstinate insistence that he reunite with her mother (we can infer he is still in love with Helen), he returns to Scotland, leaving Barbary to her dubious companions among the ruins, courting disaster. No easy solution follows. All are capable of behaving appallingly yet remain sympathetic. When crisis forces Helen to descend on her former husband’s house with her young son by Maurice, the ensuing scenes between the flinty, controlled father and the painfully jealous second wife are compassionately observed – she is ‘so dull’, Pamela realizes, aghast, compared with Helen, ‘the courtesan now come up out of the south like a ship in full sail, singing her siren song’. Both parents concede blame for neglecting their child. Helen, who when married to Sir Gulliver had cut his dinner parties if they bored her and gone out to gamble, freely admits she has ‘no conscience of any kind . . . it seems to have been left out of me’. But she is not without feeling and, realizing that her love for Barbary is unconditional whatever her daughter has done, she will use every weapon to reclaim her. It must be said that some significant events are so glancingly mentioned you can miss them, as I did, on a first reading; and Helen as a character is an improbably gifted amalgam of artist, latter-day Georgiana at the gaming table, and even scholarly forger. But these are minor quibbles. The ending is suitably unresolved. Here is no triumphalist postwar denouement but a dishonest world where everyone (except Sir Gulliver) smuggles goods through customs and cheats on petrol and clothes rations; in the enchanting French village of Collioure, murder happens. Personal grievance is reinforced by festering animosity between the French (to the unoccupied British, corrupt collaborators) and the British (who, according to the French, ran away from the Boches in 1940). Yet a hint of redemption is to be found in love. The nearest we get to closure is in the final scene when Richie, tramping through the wrecked City, sickened by ‘the squalor of ruin’, takes ‘the track across the wilderness towards St Paul’s’. Rose Macaulay was 67 when she wrote this atypical work. Her public face was of a clever, donnish writer, broadcaster and critic: lifelong singleton, wild swimmer, thin, rangy, much travelled, friend to many. Her family background of academics and clergymen and women ‘of intelligence and conscience’ was conventional enough, but not her childhood. Her mother’s ill health and exhaustion from coping with six small children led the family to decamp to a fishing village near Genoa, where living was cheap and the climate gentle. The home-schooled tribe lived in and out of the sea, ‘passionate and ecstatic, like a wilderness of monkeys’, Macaulay remembered. Emily Rose, the second child, saw herself as a boy – as her parents had hoped – until their return to late Victorian England, shoes and stockings and Oxford High School for Girls, for which the 13-year-old, dreaming of a sailor’s life, found herself hopelessly unsuited. Thanks to a benevolent uncle she went on to study at Somerville College, Oxford; thereafter her writing developed, along with hard-won independence in London from her mother after her father’s death. An admired conversationalist, Macaulay was also deeply reticent. The 1940s brought heavy loss and grief which remained mostly hidden. In 1939 Gerald O’Donovan, the married man and former priest she had loved for twenty years, was seriously injured in a car accident while she was driving and lay unconscious for many days. As an ambulance driver during the Blitz she saw terrible injury and loss of life. Her favourite sister Margaret died in early 1941. In May 1942 her flat and all her possessions were destroyed in a night of terrible bombing. The following month O’Donovan died from cancer after lingering illness. Haunted by guilt and remorse for the hurt done to Gerald’s wife, Macaulay turned to the Anglo-Catholic Church of her childhood. At the same time, she could not regret their relationship (did it remain illicit partly because she preferred her unfettered life as a single woman, free to travel and maintain herself?). Their longstanding commitment to each other became public only after her death in 1958. The postwar atmosphere in this late novel is flawlessly evoked, while the cinematic scene-setting and perceptive tracing of the traumatic buried effects of guilt and grief are surprisingly modern. Here is a fine writer operating at full stretch, well capable of exploiting and transforming the grievous insights of personal tragedy into art. In The World My Wilderness hidden strands of love and loss, jealousy and remorse, shaken to the surface, are traced like layers of the city’s past blasted open to the world, to reveal another sort of war damage that is harder to repair.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 7 © Anne Boston 2022