Post-war life

We are living in a world of anniversaries, and this year there are plenty – nine hundred and fifty years since Hastings, three hundred and fifty since the Great Fire of London. Perhaps most significant for British people as a nation is the hundredth anniversary of the First World War; and the acceptance that now, ten years after the last veterans died, the terrible national tragedy is passing into history. It cannot be lived any more. We will never meet the likes of Henry Allingham (1896-2009) and Harry Patch (1898-2009) again. 2016 marks one hundred years since the Battle of the Somme, and it is right that the anniversary is marked and that the sacrifices are remembered.

There is a raft of new writing about the conflict, and that is right and appropriate as well. It was such an extreme event that it has taken one hundred years of perspective for the people of Europe to really understand it.

In 1980, when some veterans were still alive, J.L. Carr, a one-time headteacher and publisher of lovely maps and booklets at Quince Tree Press, wrote a touching and poignant book about the aftermath of the First World War. Carr, born in 1912, did not experience the conflict first hand. He did, however, live alongside many of the damaged men and women who had lived through the horror.

What was Britain like in 1920? In his beautiful book, Carr writes about a sleepy northern village called Oxgodby, and the tranquillity if rural life. Despite the emptiness and the pictures of departed sons in many living rooms, little else had changed since Victorian times. The Great War came and went, took away sons, and life returned to the rhythm of the seasons.

There was a whole generation of young men who survived, but barely. Carr created two for his book – the protagonist Tom Birkin, and a troubled archaeologist called Moon.

He describes with subtle compassion Tom Birkin’s facial tick as he arrives on the train, and the willingness of this young man to sleep on the wooden floor of a bell tower, which was luxury after four years in the trenches. These were tough men, and anything approaching civilisation for them must have been quietly appreciated. If you have slept standing up in a trench for years, a bell tower must have been like a palace.

Moon remains close to the earth that protected him, and even pitched his archaeologist tent in the churchyard he was digging over one of his excavation holes. It is still safer to dig down into the earth instead of lying above it, exposed and vulnerable.

J.L. Carr manages to describe a timelessness in the village. There seemed no future. It is certain that everyone appreciated that they were living in a post-War world, but the emotions of previous experiences had exhausted them so much that his characters seem to just float along. Not here the elation of the men of Sassoon’s poem ‘Everyone Sang’. Everyone is just relieved to wake up each day, and sleep undisturbed.

It was a world unknowing of Hitler and Nazism and what was to come. For all they knew, the residents of the village would live peacefully after the War to end all Wars. How much more distressing for twenty-first century readers to know the truth.

The Yorkshire described is constant, insular, and warm. It is a chocolate-box existence. In fact, this book is the closest modern equivalent in novel form of Gray’s Elegy. The villagers are passing through ‘the cool sequester'd Vale of Life’.

It is also a novel about a man’s redemption. Tom Birkin, freshly demobilised, returns to his calling as a restorer of art work. He spends his summer slowly removing the whitewash from a mediaeval masterpiece behind the altar in the village church. His work is solace for him, and with the support and gratitude of the villagers, and their generosity, the nervous twitch gradually ebbs away, and he rebuilds his shattered mind.

We keep looking back. Whilst knowing and teaching our children about the horror or war, it is also useful to consider the post-War period, and how people put their lives back together. This is not a dark book. It is optimistic, and leaves you with the sense that the lost generation, or those who survived at any rate, did sometimes manage to reclaim some happiness.

AMonth in the Country, J.L. Carr, Penguin Modern Classics (first published 1980)