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| Carrie's War, first edition jacket |
I recently had the pleasure of teaching Nina Bawden's 1973
novel, Carrie's War, the story of a
girl who is evacuated to a south-Welsh village during the
Second World War (as Bawden was herself). Carrie’s time in Wales is reasonably eventful: she is billeted
with the strict Mr Evans and his kindly but downtrodden sister, and often visits the house of their relative, the wealthy Mrs Gotobed, with whom
Mr Evans has a feud. There, Carrie learns of a family legend concerning a
cursed skull, which becomes a plot point later in the story.
I won’t stray further into spoiler territory, but instead
let me tell you what isn’t in the
book. There are no air-raids, no mention of Hitler or
Churchill, no news from the front, no prisoners-of-war. The blackout and
rationing are both in force, but barely feature. A couple of soldiers appear as minor characters,
off-duty, with no talk of combat past or future.
Why then is it called Carrie’s
War, you may wonder? Is the war a metaphor for some almighty struggle of another
kind that Carrie faces? Perhaps – but I prefer to think that it’s simply Bawden’s
way of saying, “Many people spent the war in this undramatic way, and
their experience was as real as any other.” The jacket of the first edition of Carrie’s War (above) reflects the quiet nature
of the story, and shows Carrie and her younger brother Nick on the platform of
the station in Wales where they have just been decanted for the duration.
I was surprised, however, on looking at my own more recent copy, to find quite a different scene.
At one point in Carrie’s
War Carrie sees a house on fire from a train window – the result of a domestic
accident. The cover of my edition appears to show this conflagration, and a girl
- Carrie, presumably – looking back at it. But she's not looking from a
train window. She's running from the scene, hurried away by an adult couple for
whom the reader will search the book in vain. And, hang on – what’s that in
the sky? A bat-signal? No, for some reason this rural, air-raid-free part of
Wales is being raked by searchlights! Could it be that they're trying to make
it look like an air raid? To make it look, in fact, like the Blitz?
Of course. I forgot. The only thing that happened in Britain during the Second World War was the Blitz. When children “do” the war in school, the Blitz looms large; so everything, even rural Welsh valleys, must be Blitzed up. From 1939-45, houses never burned down for any other reason than aerial bombardment.
Naturally I began to look at some of the book's other jackets, and
discovered that the same thing had happened before. Here, for
example, is a jacket showing Carrie and Nick, with evacuee-style address labels, next to the Hogwarts
Express a steam train:
So far, so un-Blitzy; but steam isn’t very exciting, and other editions show that
same beret-wearing Carrie moved to another inferno, this time with added
bombers to emphasise the Blitziness.
On a third jacket she has fled (still clutching her suitcase) to the safety of a deserted hillside. Alas, the
Luftwaffe has apparently decided that she is a prime military target, and is even now
streaming across the sky in pursuit!
The good news for Carrie is that Goering’s planes then
apparently lost interest, and went off to strafe Mr Tom instead.
There are of course other covers of Carrie’s War. Several portray her looking meditatively at the skull, à la Hamlet; but my
favourites are probably the ones in which she is staring from the canonical train
window at the blazing house. In the story she is horrified at the sight, but somehow the
book jackets manage to give her the look of a telekinetic arsonist reflecting with malicious satisfaction on a job well done.
Carrie’s War was
published in 1973. A mere year later, Stephen King got his big break with Carrie.
10 comments:
Amusing and insightful!
Yes, really enjoyed this - thanks, Catherine.
Well, the Luftwaffe repeatedly bombed Cardiff and south Wales was certainly a target, so the planes are not too unlikely (and I know several now-elderly people who were chased across rural fields by German planes, presumably as some kind of sport, since they were small children at the time). But the fire - yes. Clearly the war is more exciting if it has a bit of bombing!
Oh, I don't say that the bombers never visited the valleys, and of course Cardiff as a major port was bombed heavily; but, going by the novel rather than the jackets, Carrie's valley remained unmolested. (I imagine the people you know were chased by fighter planes rather than bombers.)
Our local schools in Hampshire seem to concentrate on evacuation rather than bombing; my partner goes once a year - along with several other people who lived through the war - to tell the Year 6 pupils about their experiences (and have a 'Victory tea' of orange juice and 'spam' sandwiches!). He says the only question he is asked is 'Were you evacuated?' as if it's the only thing they know about. Though letters of thanks always mention the enjoyment of his tale of Eastbourne gasworks bursting into flame from a stray bomb - which conveniently happened while he and his classmates were in the playground at Willingdon!
Another aspect of looking at the wars.
I used to teach a memoir writing class, and what struck me was how traumatic evacuation was for many members of that generation. Some people had enjoyed it, but those were usually children who were evacuated with their mothers. In some cases, actual abuse had happened, from children being used as servants to worse.
Nina Bawden's account of her own evacuation is quite interesting from that point of view. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3656665/The-insider.html.
My mother was too old to be an evacuee in the classic sense, but she arrived in London from Wales to study at UCL, only to be promptly evacuated with the rest of the college to Aberystwyth. (They did let them return eventually, though, just in time for the doodlebugs and V2s.)
Interesting piece by her. It'd be interesting to hear about evacuation experiences from Germany, where many children were evacuated to institutions in 'safe' places. The institutions were then used to propagandise the children, of course. I use the inverted commas around 'safe' because some children were evacuated to Silesia, and then had to be evacuated back to escape the oncoming Soviet army. I've heard of children being frightened by German war planes in East Anglia. How lethal the intent was,I don't know. The Russian wooden 'Mosquito' planes attacked people in the streets in Graz, Austria, towards the end of the war, my mother told me, and that was definitely gunning them down. Come to think of it, we were walking in the Yorkshire Dales when the children were little and an RAF fighter plane came right down over our heads, which was pretty scary and disgusting. I wonder if there's something that flying such a machine does to the psyche. A friend who flew in the RAF at the beginning of his career described it as 'licensed vandalism.' If you add to that mentality the fact that you view the children in the fields as enemies, you get something pretty nasty.
I'd be amazed if there weren't a psychological effect, when you consider what a change comes over many people simply by getting behind the wheel of car. When people look tiny, perhaps you'd feel fewer qualms about crushing them (and no doubt you can get the same effect when you're seeing them on a screen 3,000 miles away, and controlling a drone).
Vittorio Mussolini writing about being a pilot during the Abyssinian war:
"I still remember the effect I produced on a small group of Galla tribesmen massed around a man in black clothes. I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the middle, and the group opened up like a rose. It was most entertaining."
Now, perhaps the son of a Fascist dictator isn't a typical pilot, but I bet he's not unique either.
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