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)

All McCartney’ed Out

Barry Miles, Many Years From Now

Tom Doyle, Man On The Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s

I have spent the summer with Paul McCartney. I don’t pretend I will ever be privileged enough to spend time in the presence of Macca, but in preparation for reading Philip Norman’s 864 pages on him that appeared in the Spring, I thought I would return to some of the other popular books written in the last twenty years. All of this, of course, is no more than window dressing and biding my time for the main event, which will be Volume 2 of Mark Lewisohn’s magnum opus about The Beatles, due sometime in the next decade.

Barry Miles’ book, from 1998, is a curious read now, being that it was written when Paul’s wife Linda was still alive, when he was untroubled by the ‘armageddon’ of his messy and expensive divorce of Heather Mills. The passing of Linda is a touching coda.

Barry Miles – or just plain ‘Miles’ to his friends – was around McCartney at the more exciting points of the sixties in London, and as a result he writes best about this time. He was a co-conspirator at the Indica Gallery, and his commentary on how fresh and exciting it all was it a pleasure to read. He knew McCartney the Everyman, who stayed on in The Smoke when the other three Beatles retreated to country mansions and white Rolls Royce motor cars with chauffeurs.

A curious omission is the ending of McCartney’s relationship with Jane Asher. She was a large part of his life for a long time. Miles writes about the domesticity of Paul and Jane, but then glosses over the end of the relationship.

He writes much better about the beginning of Paul’s life with Linda, including a well-crafted section about their time together in New York City. John Lennon is so firmly embedded in the memory in NYC that it is easy to forget that McCartney, too, has an important history in the city.

Miles writes well about the genesis of many Beatles songs, with quotes directly from the horse’s mouth. He is careful to counter-balance Paul’s voice with that of John Lennon. In a way this biography is hung on the music, and it forms the parts of the jigsaw puzzle that create a deeper vision of who McCartney was in the sixties and what he was trying to achieve.

He addresses some well-pedalled Beatles myths, and puts them to bed in a common sense way.

It’s a long book, and gives a good broad-brushed approach to the childhood of the McCartney boys, the early days of the Beatles and then the explosion of insanity in 1963. However, it almost stops dead in 1970. Perhaps Miles knows that he could not do the next third of the famous life justice, and perhaps he thought it would just be too long. Whatever the reason, McCartney is left dangling at the end of ‘Let It Be’, as if permanently paused. The last section appears as an after-thought.

For that reason, Tom Doyle’s book is a useful companion. It more or less picks up where Miles left off, and is an easier read. McCartney in the 1970s is overlooked. It was a complicated, often dark and often unpleasant decade for lots of people, and Paul McCartney was not above the brown-ness of it all.

Doyle is faithful to the well-known facts, and does well to describe McCartney’s control of everything without appearing over-critical. He describes the revolving door of Wings band members precisely and gives a good idea what it must have been like to work for the workaholic, often in a cold barn in the west of Scotland. He is particularly interesting describing quite how enamoured McCartney was with weed, and all the ‘heavy’ problems it got him into in the seventies. It seems that the Beatles, when crossing borders, had a sort of quasi-diplomatic immunity. It came as quite a shock to McCartney when he realised that this way of being treated evaporated as hopes of a Beatles reunion vanished over the horizon.

Tom Doyle resists the temptation to speculate about the Beatles in the seventies. A reunion came pretty close on a couple of occasions. He leaves the reader to wonder if they would have been any good, or whether the gold-plated copper-bottomed platinum-disc reputation would have been tarnished. Instead, he asks the reader to imagine an album containing ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ by McCartney (which he contends would not sound out of place on the White Album – I am inclined to agree), ‘Imagine’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’.

Admit it, you are thinking about putting them all together and having a listen.

There is a lot to say for taking a focus and sticking to it, and Doyle has done well not to stray too far out of the confines of the seventies. It makes it an interesting addition to the hundreds already written about Paul McCartney. I wish in a way that Miles had been more explicit in his introduction and told us all it was mostly about Swinging London. Either way, they are both good books that have helped be to understand Beatle / ex-Beatle / former-Beatle Paul a bit better.

Next stop is Philip Norman, and then a wait for the main event of another big, big Beatles book by Mark Lewisohn.

I thought by now I might be McCartney-ed out. I am not. I just feel spoiled for choice.