Rose Macaulay is one of those authors whose name seems always to have been familiar to me but who I had never read until yesterday, when I started and finished it more or less in a sitting (a long day travelling, a delayed flight...). I enjoyed it quite a lot, and thought it interestingly and well written, but I'm not exactly raving about it.
Published in 1950 but set in 1945-6, this is the story of seventeen-year-old Barbary, who, at the beginning of the novel, is uprooted from her beloved home in the South of France and sent to live in London with her barrister father and his new young wife. She remembers him hardly at all, having left with her mother ten years before, and is most unwilling to go. Fortunately for her, her step-brother Raoul, aged fifteen, is sent to London at the same time, to live with an uncle. The two children have run wild in the war, joining the junior branch of the guerilla maquis, and spending most of their days running from the Gestapo in the countryside or by the sea. When they get to London, they are both appalled by the restrictions and expectations of their respective new households, and set themselves up with an alternative lifestyle in the bombed out flats, offices and churches of the war-torn city, going home only to sleep. Barbary, a talented artist, makes a little money selling hand-painted postcards of bombsites to tourists, and they are befriended by a group of highly dodgy deserters, who live by stealing ration books and shoplifting. Barbary herself eventually ventures into shoplifting, but everything goes badly wrong and... well you'll have to read it yourself if you want to know how it all turns out.
I read a comment somewhere saying that post-war London is really the main character in this novel. While I don't actually agree, as it's full of fascinating people, I must say that in my opinion you will never find another novel that depicts so brilliantly not only the deserted, ravaged city but also the effect the war has had on the minds and hearts of those who inhabit it. Macaulay seems peculiarly capable of creating characters whose views may differ from her own (though I have no idea what those might have been) without in any way judging or condemning them. So the deserters -- Horace, who reads Aristotle, and Jock, who kisses Barbary, and their friend Mavis, who's out of a job because her firm was bombed out -- have carved out a reasonable life for themselves, though they live in fear of getting caught, and all have their sad, limited, unfulfillable dreams:
Horace looked wistful; but for that blasted army, he too might have been a rescue man, hurrying to incidents, working away in dungarees with great deep pockets. When he had escaped from the army, incidents had been over, but for a few V2s, and anyhow, to join Civil Defence would have been to make himself much too noticeable. Life was bitterly unfair.
But it's not just these outlaws who have been changed by the war. Barbary's older brother Richie, who fought in France, is now in his final year at Cambridge. He has become 'one of those returned warriors whose hang-over was not toughness, but an ardent and delighted reaction towards the exquisite niceities of civilisation'. He has become a Tory, wants to join the Foreign Office, is attracted to Catholicism, but admits to his mother that he has no problems with the sort of stealing, smuggling and other illegal practices he acquired during the war. As for beautiful Helen, Richie and Barbary's mother, it seems at first that neither the war nor anything else could have any effect on her lazy, sybaritic way of life. A talented painter, she prefers to loll around in her delightful French house, playing chess, translating a little Greek poetry, chatting with the neighbouring abbe. Though apparently devastated by the death of her second husband Maurice, she soon takes up with his married cousin, and seems terrifyingly unmoved by her daughter's distress at being sent away to England. But there's a mystery surrouding Maurice's death by drowning, and the resolution of it makes a great deal of sense of her troubled relationship with Barbary as well as of her apparent inability to start painting again. Then of course there's Barbary herself, whose inner life is so secret from even those she loves the most. Scruffy, dirty, badly dressed, rebellious, she shocks her father and hostile stepmother by her refusal to conform to their highly conventional way of life. A trip to Scotland to meet her cousins is a disaster from which she runs away, stealing money from her aunt in order to do so. For Barbary has fully absorbed the ethos of the maquis, and living outside the law seems wholly right and desirable to her. The British police are, for her, the equivalent of the Gestapo, with whom she had a very unpleasant encounter that has certainly left her with scars, though she has never told anyone about it.
But yes, war damaged London does figure in the most evocative way here too. Not only the ruined buildings, now overgrown with brambles and weeds, but also the ghosts of the old inhabitants whose presence lingers unseen in the places where they once lived and worked:
Still the glosts of the centuries-oldmerchant cunning crept and murmured among weeds and broken stones, flitted like bats about dust-heaped, gaping rooms. But their companion ghosts, ghosts of an ancient probity, honourable and mercantile and proud and tough, that had lived side by side with cunning in the stone ways, and in the great blocks of warehouses and offices and halls, had deserted and fled without trace, leaving their broken dwellings to the creeping jungle and the crafty shades.
Barbary is particularly drawn to the ruined churches -- though she doesn't believe in religion, she believes in hell, and one of her projects is a mural of the Last Judgment which she is painting on a still-standing wall. There's a wonderful short scene where a distressed vicar, his mind disturbed by terrible experiences in the blitz, bursts in one day and flings himself on the ground crying out incoherent prayers until he is rescued by a kindly younger priest who takes him home to be comforted.
Well -- I said at the beginning that I wasn't exactly raving about this novel but now I have talked myself into thinking that it actually is a rather remarkable piece of work. My copy came from Simon of Stuck-in-a-Book, whose review of it you can read here. I don't think I have read the last of Rose Macaulay.