Get Me Out of Here!
Albert Brent… could not
understand… how they could have ever reached, and could continue to suffer,
such a condition of dullness, torpidity, inactivity, stupidity, and silence…
They didn’t talk, they didn’t
laugh, they didn’t seem to enjoy their food, they didn’t seem to go out, they
didn’t seem to have any interests, they didn’t seem to like each other much,
they didn’t even seem to hate each other much, they didn’t seem to do
anything. All they seemed to do
was to crawl in one by one, murmur a little to the waitress, mutter little
requests to pass the salt, shift in their chairs, occasionally modestly cough
or blow their noses, sit, eat, wait, eat, and at last crawl out again, one by
one, without a word, to heaven knew where to do heaven knew what…
Most of them, he thought,
were pretty ordinary boarding-house specimens… The two younger women also, he supposed, were of a type.
He studied these two – one of
whom, he observed, was a foreigner.
Plain women, both of them, though the darker one had a “nice” face. Not likely to marry, either of them –
the spinster type – not likely to marry unless a bit of luck came their way –
which might not be impossible with all these Americans about. What puzzled him was the way the awful
atmosphere of the place seemed to have got these two women down as well. They were comparatively young – young
enough to talk and laugh, to exhibit some sign of vivacity, of response to
life. But no – instead of this
they seemed to be, in some way, duller, dumber, more deadly quiet and lifeless
than all the others.
Imagine this. Then imagine you live alone, with plenty of habits, which you have come to rely on, including
the fifteen-minute chat with your neighbours at the end of each work busy
day. Think about this. Now imagine the community in which you
live. It is a tightly squeezed
small-minded place that has the power to ostracise you for once and forever if
it thinks you aloof or strange.
One fundamental disagreement and poof! gone is your daily fix. And although these conversations will
be banal and repetitive, mostly about the weather and “those beastly Germans”,
and the “greasy spivs” who are making a fortune “while our lads are losing
their legs and limbs”, they are as necessary for you as a hit is for a heroin
addict. Heroin! “A vile practice the social scum do in
back alleys…”
Think about this; and then imagine that your experience of
the uncommon rarely extends beyond the crude simplicities of the cheapest
press, whose metaphors have to be obvious and transparently readable. Too complicated and they’ll be
dismissed as “fancy stuff” the "stupid highbrows" have “dreamt up”; their heads too high in the air to see the ground at their
feet. “No common sense with that lot”, is the regular refrain. To the unsophisticated mind an unusual
metaphor, especially one that is opaque at first sight, is as suspicious as a
foreign national in time of war.
“Well, if they can’t speak our language there must be something dodgy
about them, mustn’t there?” And of
course you will agree. You
couldn’t risk being called “a pointy-headed inter-lect-choo-al”, for you’d be
treated as some sort of spy, which in a way you are. Prejudices not necessarily false; just too narrow and
one-sided.
Crammed tight with conventional opinions imagine you have
little talent, plain features, and a retiring personality made stultifying by
the local environment. You are insignificant, you know. A nobody! The dowdy
dress the family beauty never wears, and leaves forgotten at the bottom of the
wardrobe... You lack the toughness
and sparkle to rise above the barren social landscape of this boarding house in
time of war. Full of others’ dull
stupidities, that nevertheless reflect you own quite different ones, you feel
their weight only because they are foreign to you. Too weak to resist other people’s clichés they drag you down
until you cannot see beyond them; helpless in the face of inanity you become
“deadly quiet and lifeless”; a sort of zombie. Imagine! Trapped amongst a crowd of inarticulate
adolescents too dense to walk through; such are the phrases you use.
Of course you think this doesn’t apply to you. This is just a game. A little fantasy. You have more life than this. Of course you do.
Of course you wouldn’t let such a desolate countryside suffocate your joie
de vivre. You’d laugh and joke and run around, do cartwheels and the
splits. Out comes the wine and
you’d tell a funny story against yourself about that time you were half-way
down the drainpipe when Matron popped her head out of the third floor window,
and said “you’ve forgotten your Matthew Arnold, dear.” How you’d enjoy yourself! Pretending to queen it over these
marshes that lie on the grey margins of England; unconcerned when you slip into
a boggy pond. The pink shoes
ruined, and the yellow tights sodden, and the dandelion dress covered in
mud… What should you do? The answer is surely simple. Who cares what this place thinks? It exists only for you to rule; you
know, because you have said so, and yet…
Would you take the dress off and walk back to the car just in your
underwear? It would be the
easiest, the most comfortable, the most sensible thing to do, but then… what if
someone were to see you? You
imagine an old couple in tweeds and small rucksacks; she with a ferociously
disapproving grin. Already you
feel the force of this place, even though there are only two of you in it. The squelchy shoes, the mud all over
your fingers after you tried to wipe it away… It is not so easy to do the
simplest of things; you are a child no more. You’ve also been silly. Self-conscious about the knickers whose design is a life
size print of your “bum” and “cunt” (your expressions); they seemed such a
laugh when Avril first mentioned them; and today you so wanted to trick
Andrew. But of course he guessed
the truth at once: “But darling you never put your bra on first.” She sees an old couple walking towards
them. “I was right!” No longer the Lady of the Marsh you
give your story a contemporary setting, as you joke about the abstract quality
of the muddy patterns, while pretending the shoes don’t matter at all; even
though your recall the woman who sold them; a bobbed redhead in Selfridges, who
wore a short velvet dress; black with a rounded neckline… “Hallo.” “How are you?” The old couple pass, and you feel sad,
and somehow let down; the once bright white sky now smudged with grey, as you
think about her turquoise shoes.
The moral is simple.
Even if you do have plenty of vital life the environment will defeat you. Stupid people make you stupid; it is
the situation Albert Brent describes, even though he doesn’t know any of these
characters. And so you suffer the
monotony of this place you do not have the energy to leave; condemned to accept
the inane routines, and oppressed by the petty slights, that occupational
hazard of a boarding house; where the person with the thickest skin wins. Boredom is king in the Rosamund Tea
Rooms. And Irritation is his
second-in-command. How this places
ages you: each month you acquire an additional year, or at least that is how it
mostly feels. The longer you stay
the worse it gets. All you
liveliness squeezed away until you are nothing more than an “ordinary
boarding-house specimen.” A museum
piece to be labelled, pinned, and left to gather dust in some forgotten annex.
Can Miss Roach really endure for the rest of the war in this
place? We fear she will have
no choice. She lacks the strength
to overcome the inertia.
You’ve imagined such a world. Now go further.
Imagine a place where all your neighbours live in the same house, and
share the dining room for breakfast and dinner; later collecting in the lounge
to drift through a few semi-conscious hours of rest before going to bed. You have very little in common. There are no shared obsessions to get excited
about. While the dullard who dominates this house makes sure that nobody is
more interesting than he. To
survive in this place you have to be boring, and you become even more so over
time; you cannot help it. There is
nothing to talk about, and so you struggle to fill the oppressive silences with
the few clichés everyone can accept; controversy too
dangerous for those who are almost strangers - better a dull atmosphere than a hostile and aggressive
one. This is a boring life, and
the people are bored by it; even though there’s a war going on in the skies
above them.
You have imagined all of this. Do you feel just a little cramped and uncomfortable? Would you have the energy to transform
this place or even the will to leave it?
Only, I assure you, if you stayed here for a few days. Easier to simply
ignore it; an option that gets more attractive over time; otherwise you must
every day fight to change it, a thankless and tiresome task. Even then its atmosphere will seep into
you, those flickers of vital interest snuffed out and strangled by the routine
chat about the weather, “our boys”, and the latest murder in the Sunday papers,
which elicits the inevitable: “there are some cruel people about, aren’t
there?”
Miss Roach is a Londoner bombed out in the Blitz. One would expect her to have at least a
smidgen of sophistication. Indeed,
she works for a publisher, and is refined in a modest way, with a tiny bit of
culture; the dandruff blowing off her employer’s shoulders. She is quiet, polite, and well-dressed;
just a little too reserved, a little too refined, in that strange way of
servants and personal assistants; too buttoned up to let herself go, to have
lots of boyfriends, and to be conspicuously loud in nights out with the
girls. Squashed tight inside the
prejudices of her own social class she defends herself against the vulgar
pleasures of life. Unfortunately
the Rosamund Team Rooms squashes her even tighter as she protects herself
against the cheap bullying of a man she cannot abide. Her isolation overwhelms her, and she is closed up inside
herself. She’d be all right if she
had her own flat. Protected from
the force of communal banality and the coarseness of Mr Thwaites Enid could
relax, and act without self-consciousness, and so be a tiny bit more expansive
and alive. But the German bombs
have destroyed that; and she is forced to live with a group of strangers; all
respectable and nondescript except for one who is a fool and a bully, and who
bosses the guests about with his stupid witticisms, his sarcasm, and his
ceaseless inanities. She’d be all
right if she didn’t have to listen to all of that all of the time. Unfortunately Miss Roach is not
strong enough to maintain her independence; unable to subdue Mr Thwaites she lets him
provoke her, and thinks too much about his bombast which if she were more vital she could ignore with disdain.
If only she had vivacity and charm she could treat him with
indifference, or seduce him with her femininity; she could show him up as the fool that he really is. These options are not open to Miss
Roach. Too reserved and
small-minded she is not that much different from him; two fish caught in the
same net... It is the reason why
she turns a silly fool into a tyrant, and allows him to rule the table that
they share. You are too weak Enid
Roach! As she herself recognises,
when she recalls her awful schooldays and realises that they have
returned. Oh Enid! If only you were just a little more
interesting. She is not, and the
atmosphere of the Rosamund Tea Rooms overwhelms her.
Albert Brent is right, although he gets the facts wrong;
being an outsider who only stays for a short time he doesn’t know all the
social intricacies even if he does recognise the essential qualities of what he
sees – a pervasive dullness that is drowning the occupants of this dining room.
Living permanently inside a group you have to adapt to it,
unless, that is, you are strong enough to be its ruler. Few can be completely indifferent to
their surroundings, and we should suspect those that are – they will suffer
from some pathology. We are social
creatures, and we find it difficult to be indifferent to people we know
intimately; something in our senses responds automatically to the presence of family
and friends, and those of our immediate circle. In some situations - work is one, Mrs Payne’s boarding house
is another - we are forced to respond to people for whom we have little or no
feeling, and so are confronted with an atmosphere of indifference, a kind of
anti-matter that annihilates our energy.
We lack the will to be expansive, and though polite we are also
reserved, and a little uncomfortable, especially when the room contains people
we do not like. We feel
constrained and inhibited, all too aware that this environment has taken on its
own life, forcing us to submit to its rituals and banalities. Like the inhabitants of this dining
room we become aware that we are not free. Even a loose collection of boarders can form a group with
its own compulsive social pressure; it is what Albert Brent describes
here. Although such groups are
brittle ones, and are easily destabilised by those who rebel against them. There is not enough shared feeling to
bind these people together in times of crisis; the social bond is one of ritual
and atmosphere; powerful but limited forces that imposes a code of emotional
restraint on its members who use it to protect their own weaknesses, which are
mostly fears of failure and embarrassment; how you appear more important than
what you are when you live closely with strangers. Miss Roach has become part of such a community through force
of circumstance, and normally she would be polite and self-effacing, sharing
with the others the minimum amount of conduct necessary to keep the atmosphere
stable and secure. Her bad luck is
to share a house with Mr Thwaites, who uses her presence to increase his own
power. Because he is
so different, of a lower more vulgar social class, and because she still has
some spark, after all she is not yet forty, she disagrees with him from time to
time. However, she lacks the
strength of personality to overcome his petty boorishness and so change the
climate of the dining room, which has become a place of ritual torture for
her. Mr Thwaites dominates,
even though he is also a non-entity; his poor verbalisms (at times he talks in
mock Elizabethan) left unchallenged by the lethargy of the others.
So much energy wasted!
All that pointless effort to maintain their self-control as they use
their willpower to curb their natural desires to freely gesture and talk. For we are like animals, our instinct
to respond naturally to all incoming stimuli; and there is nothing more
stimulating than people. But the
company has to be congenial.
Otherwise we are forced to resist these impulses to communicate. So tiring! It wears us out, while the group grows strong on the energy
that should be used for our own self-expression. Once the identity of the group has been formed, in this
place it will be based on the lowest common denominators, the members will have
to adapt to it, suppressing those aspects of their being that could undermine
its (fragile) cohesion. Usually
there is a leader, the person who most powerfully expresses its banalities.
Mr Thwaites is the boss of this boarding house. Everyone accepts his role, and listens
to his silly jokes and diatribes.
Even Enid. Being socially a
little distant from the other guests – she works in London everyday -, while
also somewhat reserved and timid, she has become the focus of Mr Thwaites’
attention, who picks out the small points that highlight her differences - her
liberal paper, her German friend, her supposed sympathies for the Soviet Union
– to provoke and bully her. These
differences are “eccentricities” that have to be rubbed away so that Miss Roach
can be fitted comfortably inside Mr Thwaites’ prejudices, which shape the views
of this dining room. And of course
they also irritate him, for like all opinionated people he is an authoritarian
at heart. He also finds them
useful. By concentrating on her
“quirks” he can exercise his power; Mr Thwaites needing a victim who he can
crush but not annihilate. Enid Roach is his foil.
One evening the atmosphere changes, and Mr Thwaites is
vanquished. It is the day Vicki
Kugelmann arrives. She is Enid’s
German friend who immediately wins everyone’s favour. The dining room is suddenly alive! She is so friendly, and so active, and so flirtatious with
Mr Thwaites; who is smitten. She
fits in perfectly! And so over
time the familiar ambience returns, although there are subtle changes, which
Miss Steel notices: if anything Vicki has made the environment somewhat duller,
and certainly more ugly, encouraging Mr Thwaites to add a sexual element to his
sarcasm. It is duller because now
Enid has to suffer the weight of two people’s dislike - she has fallen out with
Vicki -, and so lacks the strength to lighten up the room even in the small ways
of before. Miss Steele can feel
something is wrong, but she is unsure what is happening; another problem of
this boarding house – everyone lives inside themselves. They are not an intimate group, who can
confide in each other; the reason for the oppressive atmosphere. They cannot speak out, because
conscious of their weakness, which only encourages their isolation. These are lonely people whose company
makes them even lonelier.
Mr Thwaites continues to dominate the dining room, but the
nature of his domination has changed; Vicki subtly influencing him as he
absorbs her opinions about Miss Roach.
These changes are well described by the author; who shows how a strong
personality like Vicki’s can both transform a place – that first night, the
behaviour of Mr Thwaites, the Christmas revelry -, and succumb to its
atmosphere, which will subdue and defeat her too. Her vivaciousness is not enough to overcome the stifling
climate that has already been engendered.
It has a dullness that requires too much energy to transform; such a
transformation needing qualities that are far greater than those she
possesses. In the Rosamund Tea
Rooms second-rate lives are defeated by the second rate. Larkin knew these places well.
‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’
Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered.
‘Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.’
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook
Behind the door, no room for books or bags –
‘I’ll take it.’
so it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try
Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits – what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why
He kept on plugging at the four aways –
Likewise their yearly frame: Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.
But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.
Miss Roach is going out with an American lieutenant; a
womanizer who has barged his way past her reticence and reserve, although
she senses his real character, which she euphemistically calls his
“inconsequence”. He is new
territory for her, and she likes it: walking arm in arm, sitting next to him,
“her American”, in the cinema, kissing in the park by the river; it excites and
stimulates her; and seems to offer the possibility of a married future; even
though she knows this is a vain hope.
The relationship ends suddenly when he responds to the
advances of Vicki, who highly sexed quickly seduces him. The friendship between the two women is
broken; Vicki incandescent with rage because Enid won’t stay out to share the
fun. It is an interesting scene,
for it captures the stolid, conventional and civilised nature of Miss Roach,
for whom sex is a private and mysterious activity, and the shamelessness of
Vicki, who cannot bear to be confronted with her own vulgarity. She has no sensitivity, believing it is
all right to kiss and grope a friend’s lover in public, and then to act as if
nothing is wrong. “Fair Shares For Everyone!” Vicki is all animal passion that expends itself in the
moment; although we suspect there are deeper motives to her behaviour. She is jealous of woman who has no
sexual charisma.
Are they also fighting because they are German and
English? Is it is a cultural
clash, the more communal Vicki Kugelmann against the reserved individuality of
Enid Roach? There are suggestions
of this, but they are not explored, in large part because we see very little of
the world from Vicki’s perspective.
She is seen from the outside; mostly from a vantage point just above
Enid’s shoulders.i
There are only a few passages where we are given some
distance, and thus some objectivity.
Albert Brent’s quoted above, and a short passage from another minor
character who has much more insight.
Mr. Prest, alone in his
corner, sent to Coventry, and apparently mentally deaf to all that took place
in the boarding-house, in fact observed and understood more than any other spectator.
Mr. Prest thought that the
old man was a noisy, nattering, messy piece of work who ought to be in a mental
home. He liked and pitied Miss
Roach. He thought that the German
woman was about as frightful a bitch as you were likely to find anywhere, and
that something pretty nasty was going on, at that table, and between those
three, one way and another.
When a group takes on its own identity it subtly changes the
behaviour of its members, who assume part of its personality, at least in
public. Mr Prest, genuinely
estranged from the others, is able to stand completely outside such a community
and so maintain his freedom.
Self-contained he does not engage with any of the residents who,
tellingly, assume he is a non-entity like themselves. He is an intruder into this world. An old entertainer.
He thus belongs to a separate species that lives within the interstices
of the social classes; acquiring an aloofness and detachment that is closest to
that of the aristocracy. He is an
exile. An alien. A foreigner, even though he is as
British as the rest of them; Vicki Kugelmann, albeit a German, is more native
than he.
Vicki Kugelmann’s behaviour to Miss Roach becomes
increasingly ugly and petty. She
calls her rude names, such as “Miss Prim” or “The English Miss”, which imply
her frigidity; while she also encourages Mr Thwaites to continue his campaign,
adding her own lascivious asides.
It is Vicki’s suggestion of sexual impropriety between Enid and a nephew
that is the climax of the book – she confides in Mr Thwaites who then makes an
innuendo about a possible liaison between her and the boy. It has the force of an electric
shock! Transgressing the bounds of
Miss Roach’s sensibility, who for a brief few moments loses all control. It is a revolution! And a significant shift in the
composition of the Rosamund Tea Rooms takes place.
It is very well done, the action arising naturally from out
of the texture of the book, which captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of the
war years; where an individual’s privacy was compromised, as we have seen. It was a time when there was a
change in the nature of personal space.
A shift away from a private to a public world that had suddenly become
crammed with people – the pubs and cinemas in this book are full to
overflowing. So many men and
women, and who mostly strangers to each other are from all the social classes. It was a
socially promiscuous period. This
can create a sense of claustrophobia, of which the dining room is both a fact
and a symbol. It is an atmosphere
that will oppress some but enliven others. Vicki grows wild in such an environment, thriving on this
looser, more intense, “hotter” kind of society; where the barriers that protect
people have become weaker and more transparent. How much easier to break them down! Because the convivial instincts of
collective life pushes against them so powerfully… We hear them splinter and crack, and see them collapse onto
the ground as the crowd rushes past... It was a time when it was not so easy to be on your own, to
maintain the usual decencies, and keep up the individual freedoms. The pubs are always full, and even the
women are drinking. Life has
become richer, more exciting, and the old risks no longer seem risks at all; while
those Americans are very attractive and so direct; believing that lips exist to
be kissed and thighs squeezed and stroked….
Miss Roach prefers a cooler climate. However, she is not strong enough to
resist the pressure of her surroundings; the reason why she goes out with an
American soldier. She has to
adapt, and then she finds she likes it, although of course she has misgivings –
thus her boyfriend’s “inconsequence”.
Enid can only go so far.
She is not a Vicki Kugelmann who can surrender herself entirely to this
wartime world. She lacks her
shameless promiscuity; Vicki’s desire for them to share the American lieutenant
a curious metaphor for this communal life. Enid retains her own pre-war code of honour, which although
arising in her weakness also protects it.
Miss Roach is too weak to rule the Rosamund Tea Rooms but her morality
is strong enough to sustain her peace time persona; thus her resistance to Mr
Thwaites. The old Enid will not be
destroyed! And so she aggressively
confronts Vicki Kugelmann when she believes she has gone too far. The references to Nazi Germany in the
following passage feels like a defence against a sort of linguistic invasion,
and which stands in for the eroticism that Vicki is forcing into Edith’s
consciousness.
“Yes,” said Mr. Thwaites,
summing up. “A complicated world
we live in, my masters.”
Whenever Mr. Thwaites alluded
thus to the world in general terms, calling it “funny” or “strange” or
“wicked”, he always said “My masters” afterwards.
“Yes,” said Vicki, and that
curious tone was in her voice again.
“A very complicated world…
A very complicated situation altogether.”
Miss Roach knew exactly what
she was getting at. This “Yes,
Peace – and understanding” all over again. Her suggestion behind the stress she laid upon the
complication of the situation was as clear as day. She meant that the world was in a state of complication
owing to misunderstanding generally, and of Nazi Germany in particular.
Now Miss Roach was not going
to stand for this…
This style is characteristic of the author: the thought,
then the repetition of the thought in slightly different language (Ella does a
lot of this in The
Plains of Cement). The effect is curious. For when the thought is repeated it
seems to simplify it, making it somehow more mechanical. It signals, of course, an obsession,
with that repeated stress on a received idea. But the impression we receive is slightly different: we are
left with a sense of the littleness of the person who thinks such thoughts; the
initial idea repeated not to be developed and expanded but to be closed down,
where it is made small and hard; and turned into a kind of bullet. Indeed, what follows is not a
discussion where different ideas are explored but a shooting range where
opinions are fired across it.
Someone could get killed.
We begin to wonder about Enid Roach. Isn’t she exaggerating things just a
tad? An expressionist drama
created out of material ripe for an Ealing Comedy… Vicki may have “snatched” (the horror Hamilton is able to
invoke in Miss Roach when Vicki uses this world is very very good) Joe, and she
may use old phrases from the 1920s, and she may be a little too free with the
men and the drink, and she may be small-minded and petty, but these are minor
traits that a more robust person would ignore as beneath them. Why worry about them so much? Why get so worked up about these silly
banalities, which only a trivially obsessive mind could take seriously;
twisting them around to discover hidden meanings that may be irrelevantly
true. Then notice how quickly Enid
turns current affairs into personal affronts. She has no culture.
She lives inside cramped quarters, her ego a tiny first floor flat.
One begins to wonder.
Perhaps it is really Miss Roach that is the problem. It is she who is the morally ugly one;
although this is disguised in typical English style. Such “refined” reserve can hide vast acres of
small-mindedness… When Mr Thwaites
uses the same words as Vicki to describe her Enid has a shock of revelation:
they are talking about me! A
normal enough reaction, no doubt, as suddenly we see ourselves from a
disorientating perspective, which to us can look like caricature. What follows, though, is surely
extreme.
…but to learn that two people
of this sort had been talking about her, and in this way – she believed it was
more than she could stand…
Really, she had thought she
had gained experience of the lowest depths of this woman: she had thought she
knew where she was and could just stand it. But now these depths had collapsed, opening up shifting,
endless depths. She would have to
get out of this place: she would have to leave, go somewhere.
Enid is closed up tight, her personality a well-guarded
fortress whose gates only she can open.
People may look at the castle walls, but no one, no one, must go inside; and to talk about it is strictly verboten.
Hamilton has captured something particularly English here – the opaque
nature of their national character.
No one must know what exists inside their being, neither their emotions
nor their thoughts, unless it is they who reveal them through carefully
calibrated disclosures.ii We can look through the peephole only
after they have removed the cover.
Vicki’s cruel title, Miss Prim, is accurate; although
typically unfair; too simple to capture the complexities of a human being;
especially of one who has relaxed under wartime conditions, although at the
same time resisting what excites her; thus Enid’s ambivalent feelings about
Joe. Indeed, the initial
attraction of Vicki may have been the slightly transgressive quality of the
friendship, even if the main impetus was a sense of liberal superiority; that
high-minded tolerance we associate with the upper classes who employ her. She would like to remain aloof
but the Blitz won’t allow it.
Pushed into a social promiscuity to which she is not used Enid loses her
way, and overreacts when jealousy and her own tender sensibilities are hurt and
mocked.
We now realise what an odd book this is: the most convivial
character in it is a German slut.
The strength of the novel lies in its ability to make this seem real and
plausible, while the vitality of Vicki
Kugelmann suggests she is a symbol that represents the breakdown of class
boundaries that occurred during the war. A time when middle classes were invaded from all
sides. Of course social divisions
didn’t disappear, that is a wartime myth, but the walls that demarcated them
became more porous and fragile; and were at times dangerously exposed... Like the private parks of London when
the iron railings were removed anyone could enter them. Even a German!
(Review of The
Slaves of Solitude)
[i] Is this a fault in Hamilton’s technique? That he can’t capture the thoughts and
feelings of women that are different from the ordinary; particularly those that are highly sexed, and live mostly through their senses? See my discussion of Jenny in The
Siege of Pleasure.
[ii] For a brilliant discussion of this idea in relation to
the political economy of Britain see David Marquand’s The
Unprincipled Society.
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