Blitz Writing

Night Shift & It Was Different At The Time

Inez Holden

• Publisher: Handheld Classics
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912766079
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

Blitz Writing emerges out of the 1940-1941 London Blitz. The drama of these two short works—a novella and a memoir—comes from the courage and endurance of ordinary people met in the factories, streets and lodging houses of a city under bombardment.

Night Shift follows a largely working-class cast of characters for five night shifts in a factory that produces camera parts for war planes. It Was Different At The Time is Holden's account of wartime life from April 1938 to August 1941, drawn from her own diary. The latter was intended to be a joint project written with her friend George Orwell and includes disguised appearances of Orwell, Stevie Smith and other notable literary figures of the period. The experiences recorded in It Was Different At The Time overlap in period and subject with Night Shift, setting up a vibrant dialogue between the two texts.

The introduction and notes are by Kristin Bluemel, Professor of English at Monmouth University NJ, exploring how these short prose texts work as multiple stories: of Inez Holden herself, the history of the Blitz, of middlebrow women's writing, of Second World War fiction, and of the world of work.

It Was Different At The Time

by Inez Holden

1938

April

My sitting-room window looks out on to the well-kept grass of the rich woman’s lawn. Most of the morning a gardener, wearing a green baize apron, ambles round the flower beds keeping everything up to a high pitch of excellence. My bedroom window looks out on to the street, and to-day a boy is bicycling towards us, whistling, steering with one hand and holding, in the other, a false foot in a black leather boot. He is bringing this to the lame refugee who lives on the ground floor.

My limping neighbour is ‘a business man in a small way’, but since escaping from central Europe he has found it increasingly difficult to keep up his connections abroad. A few weeks ago he got married to a tall, thin woman from the Balkans. She tries to earn a living by selling face creams. They keep a small black kitten which gets lost every night, and after dark I can hear them calling out in the street, ‘Kitty, Kitty, Kitty, kom here’, and after a while one of them wails, ‘Our katchen ist lost once more.’

The man with the false foot limps down the road to the post-box, but whatever he sends out he is disappointed at not getting much back, because when I go down to get my letters from the ledge in the hall he opens the door of his room to see if there is anything for him. ‘Oh, Madame, you have so many letters continually komming to you — always so many — I am quite jealous of them.’

The letters which ‘continually came to me’ yesterday were of the kind which are sent out alphabetically. Some from the deathly sweet centres of charity printed on shiny paper, gold-edged — a ball was to be given in aid of this or that, So-and-so’s well-known band would blare out, and some of the balance from the evening’s high boredom would finally filter through to an institution named at the bottom of the announcement. These announcements of supper and champagne came at one like maniacal laughter from behind dry-rotting wainscoting in a collapsed castle.

When the street door opened the boy handed the refugee his false foot and then remounting his bicycle he went whistling away. The sun shone through into my room. The large house on the other side of the lawn had the sun blinds drawn down, the long windows were blinkered.

From Friday to Sunday last week I stayed at J’s country house. Acquaintances in the four-figured income class gyrated round the grounds to slow conversation. They seem to think a great deal about money, to talk money, and to brood over it. The possibility of the money getting any less preoccupies them, but on this subject the conversation is always kept within a certain radius — far outside the poverty of the mining districts. Distressed areas, malnutrition, and unemployment are all subjects before which the blinds of the mind must be drawn down quick. But to these members of a chain-gang of house parties there is a kind of money-lack which seems romantic and worthy of talk; this is the gay Bohemian thanklessness⁴⁵ of artists, writers, musicians, and the like. The well-set-up guests at J’s country house last week seemed very interested in some sort of slightly removed stratum of existence; they troubled about how it could be made to work, while semi-enjoying their own incomes — only semi-enjoying because there seem to flicker at the back of their minds disturbing doubts. ‘After all, one never knows these days, there’s all this Communism, Fascism, Nazi-ism, Radicalism, and the Reds’ — a vast international army these Reds, who won’t take off their shoes in the sacred presence of private property. All these Bolsheviks are menacing the future so it’s as well to be on the safe side, although there may come a day when no side is completely safe and where will the income go then, poor thing? This sort of thinking brings the bright landowners to a quick search through their acquaintance list for the names of those of good up-bringing with no fixed incomes. ‘After all, old So-and-so has no apparent means of subsistence and he gets on all right, he was down here last week-end, and as for Such-and-such he also lives in good style without any regulated rate of pay, if we can get a few tips from them about how it’s done it may be all right on the night of reckoning.’ So much for the ideological outlook of J’s guests.

Two days ago Felicity⁴⁶ came to see me here. She wore a straight black dress and some sandal-shaped shoes; she has a forehead fringe and when she talks her eyes move restlessly from side to side. It was as if I had a girl-Eddie Cantor⁴⁷ galloping round my room. She told me that her sister Sally⁴⁸ goes to a gymnasium class for health and beauty. ‘She takes a terrible attaché case with her and changes in the boot-hole and then goes bending and high-kicking round an immense hall. They have a magazine too, full of bright chat about pupil-teachers and old girls. When I got hold of it the other day the very first sentence I saw was something like this: “Tilline, our instructress, is adored by all her pupils. As soon as you see her you feel that at any moment there is going to burst upon you a happy, hearty laugh, and then Tilline will be gone with a leap and a skip, leaving behind her an impression of two blue eyes set in that smiling face ‘neath a sheer bedlam of golden curls.”’

Felicity, I suppose, is almost an average girl of chaos, but it is difficult to be clear about the compulsion under which she acts. She is seldom free from something phoney — fortune teller, quack medico, meretricious magician, cheap mystic, lecturer on the occult or what-not. Even for Sally, Felicity’s sister, contemporary life seems such a strain that she is transforming herself into a whimsical Amazon.

May

To-day I was in a bus with Felicity. A brown-hatted man was in the next seat. He had thin long hands and a sheep-like face. He was well-groomed and wore a black beard — probably a psycho-analyst, genuine or self styled. Beside him there was a thin, clean Cosmopolitan woman pouring into the well-washed ears of Black-beard-sheep-face the subterranean stuff of her subconscious. Preferring some Latin form of release she was using French as a medium. ‘J’ai l’impression de vivre ma vie en arrière.’ She was explaining how this was like existing inside traffic which was shunting backwards while she herself was being carried forward. It was very complicated. We only heard half sentences here and there. ‘Crossed swords … music at night … and death the only goal.’ Sheep-face listened, crossed his long thin legs left over right and then uncrossed them and again the recross right over left. In a little while he got up and with his elegant companion went walking down the whole distance of the bus. They went out like people leaving a restaurant.

Felicity suddenly said: ‘Oh, look at that — a banner with a strange device, if ever there was one!’ A white banner was hanging from a high window. ‘Exhibition of Mystic and Clairvoyant Pictures’ was red-embroidered on it. Felicity’s brown button eyes lit up. She was after the occult again. Out of curiosity we went into this gallery, but even Felicity took a step backwards before taking one forward, for here was such a hotchpotch of a hundred old maids’ fancies, the inside of a thousand spinsters’ skulls.

On the walls were water-colours painted, so it was claimed, in vision, trance, clairvoyance — and especially dreams. But what a bad advertisement for dreaming, trancing, and the having of anaemic visions! Tall poppies grew from nowhere and without grass; golden-haired children gazed into the future from one vacuum into another; purple and green had been generously splashed about within ornate frames, and a tall, Norfolk-jacketed man⁴⁹ with skin the colour and texture of an undercooked and tepid potato was pacing the gallery and talking, talking, talking to a woman wearing a woollen dress and a knee-length feather boa. ‘I said to her, madam, I said, “your conversation only gives away the interior of your mind.” And, Madam, I said to her, “let me tell you it’s no credit to you, madam, it’s a crowd mind you’ve got.”’ He went on talking of some public holiday as he had seen it from inside his psychic sedan. ‘Everybody was wonderful, and everybody behaved. And why, yew may ask? “Influence,” I answered. “Influence again and again. That’s how it works. We know these things, others don’t. Why not? Because they’ve never drawn back the psychic veil. They’ve never seen the vast beyond as we have. But there it is — the whole vast scheme of things and life, life, life.”’

We moved on quickly to another part of the room, but here it was not much better. We found a gentle knitting lunatic who had painted some garden scenes, vaguely washing into them pixies, nymphs, elves, and every other hopping whimsy. She said: ‘That’s a beautiful garden, isn’t it?’

Felicity asked: ‘Where is it?’ and got back the answer, ‘Venus — I go there every night.’

‘Do you really?’

‘In my dreams of course.’

‘Of course.’

The knitter stopped a little while, peered short-sightedly to pick up a dropped stitch, and when she had got the hooked wool back on to her wooden needles, she went on: ‘There’s music in that picture, you know — the bells of dancing pixies. Can you hear them?’

We made towards the door, but Norfolk-jacket was too quick for us.

‘Is there anything you ladies would like me to explain?’

Felicity said: ‘Explain? I don’t think so. You see we’re late for an appointment, but we’ll come back another day.’

Felicity’s voice was getting up on a high note of hysteria, different altogether from most of the voices in the gallery, which were droning on now, gentle, drowsy, never high, never low, no sense and no silence.

‘Yes,’ said Norfolk-jacket, his teeth passionately in the argument, but in his pale blue eyes an elsewhere expression. ‘Yes, yes, I shall be happy to tell you everything about the real meaning of life. Every Tue...