The only criticism I make of the wartime generation is that they have subsequently died, or are planning to. I think we’d all have preferred them to become a permanent fixture, staying to remind us of the difference between dissatisfaction and shrapnel.
But the generation that won the war has surrendered to us, and all we have left of them now is their obituaries. The golden generation is fading out in the black and white of critics and columnists, but I wanted to write their lives in colour, while I could still learn from the last living witnesses. That’s Everyone Brave Is Forgiven and I hope you enjoy it.
As a novelist who had always insisted on the contemporary, I turned 40 and pretty much instantly started enjoying death notices more than news. I like the wartime generation’s obituaries. I can read “VC winner who once jumped his MG sports car over a five-bar gate” and it will make me happy for days. I prefer autumn to spring, breakages to purchases, funerals to weddings. I find that I warm to people who’ve had breakdowns, who wrangle demons, who are haunted by the ghosts of their forebears. I like those people’s sense of humour.
I anchored Everyone Brave to the real lives of my grandparents. They were complex characters who learned the simple trick of being happy whenever bombs weren’t falling on them. When a man who my grandmother was dating was killed at her side in an air raid, and she discovered that he’d been married all along, she began referring to that bomb – and to her consequent escape from the bigamist – as “a near miss”. Besieged on Malta, my grandfather built a dinghy from packing cases, and he and his friends sailed it around a course marked out by floating mines. Even if it all went wrong, he said, they’d still have a blast.
My grandparents were fun, but they weren’t unusual. That’s just what people were like in those days when lunch was rationed, rather than Instagrammed. They made lives for themselves out of spine and Brasso and a default assumption that we should go in to bat for each other.
How – because it would be useful to know exactly – have we lost their habits of mind? Of contentment, of collectivism and, most of all, of courage? When did we begin to confuse confidence with competence, virtue-signalling with virtue itself, social mobility with solidarity? What were the specific, reversible steps on the 70-year journey that has led us to this era, where we do less and less to help ourselves, enabling the world’s usurpers to simply help themselves?
I’m not the first writer to learn the lesson that historical fiction is the most exquisitely precise instrument for writing about our own times.
I researched for two years before I began to write. I had survivors to interview in London and Malta. I had miles of archival corridors to roam. I had 1,000 pages of my grandparents’ wartime letters to read. I enjoyed all of it; the more time I spent in the early 1940s, the less I liked the look of us now. I suppose you can detect that in the novel. In the collision between me and modern mores, only one of us comes away feeling flat.
At the start of the war, people were just like us: frightened and funny, irreverent and disunited, unprepared and often unpatriotic. They had the same social problems and divisions that we have now. It’s all in the book: the racism, the class system, the haves and the have nots. And yet, they found a way to function together. They became willing to stand up for one another – even when, for too many of them, fate made it a last stand.
Standing up requires two things now in short supply: bravery and forgiveness. The first is not something any of us were born with, then or now. The people who fought the war were 10 or 20 years younger than the people who play them in war movies, and they were scared most of the time. Courage is a muscle that develops through use, and I hope I have truthfully narrated the steps of their journey into bravery.
The other thing that generation needed was forgiveness. They learned to give each other a break, to accommodate dissenting views, to find a role for everyone. They had to.
I’m not saying they were perfect: I like the wartime generation too much to idolise them. They were a hot mess most of the time, just as we are. Nostalgia is foolish, empty stuff, of interest only to the kind of people who wave the little plastic flags they are issued with at rallies. Instead, we should venerate the wartime generation in the same way we would cherish a speck of DNA fossilised in amber, or a seed found in a bog man’s belly. If we feel instinctively drawn to preserve that generation’s deep psychology, maybe it is because we know it contains something immutable, something human and infectious: something that can one day be brought back to life.
Extract
War was declared at 11.15 and Mary North signed up at noon. She did it at lunch, before telegrams came, in case her mother said no. She left finishing school unfinished. Skiing down from Mont-Choisi, she ditched her equipment at the foot of the slope and telegraphed the War Office from Lausanne. Nineteen hours later she reached St Pancras, in clouds of steam, still wearing her alpine sweater. The train’s whistle screamed. London, then. It was a city in love with beginnings.
She went straight to the War Office. The ink still smelled of salt on the map they issued her. She rushed across town to her assignment, desperate not to miss a minute of the war but anxious she already had. As she ran through Trafalgar Square waving for a taxi, the pigeons flew up before her and their clacking wings were a thousand knives tapped against claret glasses, praying silence. Any moment now it would start – this dreaded and wonderful thing – and could never be won without her.
What was war, after all, but morale in helmets and Jeeps? And what was morale if not 100m little conversations, the sum of which might leave men brave enough to advance? The true heart of war was small talk, in which Mary was wonderfully expert. The morning matched her mood, without cloud or equivalence in memory. In London under lucent skies 10,000 young women were hurrying to their new positions, on orders from Whitehall, from chambers unknowable in the old marble heart of the beast. Mary joined gladly the great flow of the willing.
More on Everyone Brave Is Forgiven
With Everyone Brave Is Forgiven Cleave cements his reputation as a skilful storyteller, and a sensitive chronicler of the interplay between the political and the personal. - Hannah Beckerman, The Observer
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