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Letter
The shop buzzed with activity this past fortnight
as we continued to grapple with design options
for next year’s Persephone Classics; set
up and sorted out the software programme Constant
Contact which allows us to send out emails
to everyone (if you are not on our email list,
do sign up in the new box on our homepage); sent
off review copies of our spring books, The
Shuttle and House-Bound; arranged
the summer events; and held our ninth book group.
However, the bustling streets around Persephone
Books seem a world away now, as I sit by a floor-to-ceiling
window in Williams College library, the Berkshire
mountains looming in the distance. I am here in
western Massachusetts on a short holiday visiting
my sister and am eagerly absorbing the fresh mountain
air, blinding sun reflecting off deep snow drifts,
clear blue skies, dark green firs and invigorating
wind found in the rural New England landscape
(see the picture below). Yesterday, as I crunched
along snowy trails in a nearby forest to watch
maple trees being tapped, and then enjoyed freshly
brewed maple sugar on ice (it is the annual ‘Maple
Sugar Festival’). I wondered if Susan
Glaspell, who wrote Persephone books No 4
& No 26 and lived on Cape Cod in Massachusetts,
ever did the same.
Last week, the first Wednesday of the month,
eighteen of us gathered around a table laid with
bread, cheese, and madeira to discuss Persephone
Book No 9, Few
Eggs and No Oranges, or a ‘Diary
Showing How Unimportant People in London and Birmingham
Lived Through the War Years 1940-45’. Vere
Hodgson’s diary, which is set in Notting
Hill, is particularly resonant because it is based,
like us, in London. When I introduced the book
I remarked on this, and several people said their
bus or tube journeys to work suddenly became more
poignant when they passed St Paul’s Cathedral,
for instance, and recalled its damage during the
Blitz; or waited in the Underground amidst a crush
of commuters and visualised the hundreds who bedded
down there during air raids. We agreed that our
lives seemed far easier when viewed in the light
of those living in England in a time of rationing,
black-outs, and incessant bombings.
All were amazed at people’s nonchalance.
I read an excerpt from 31st January 1941: ‘A
lady in the Mercury café told me she was
having lunch in Oxford St. Suddenly a terrific
wonk shook the place; all the cups and saucers
danced and rattled about on the table. The man
opposite her said calmly: “That was a bomb,
wasn’t it?” She replied: “I’m
sure it was.” And they all continued to
eat their meal.’ Shocking to our peacetime
eyes, we agreed, but as I had heard in previous
weeks from Persephone readers who lived through
the war, they just had to ‘get on with it’.
But the daily fear that Londoners lived with
should not be under-estimated, and the reader
must look past Vere Hodgson’s matter-of-fact,
often dispassionate style. For instance, in characteristic
understatement she ends an entry during the Blitz
on 27th September 1940 with the following lines:
‘Bad news everywhere. Dakar failure. Japan
joining the Axis. Military divisions of Germans
going to Spain. I do not expect such another happy
night as last. It will be incendiaries, or time
bombs – which? So I close my diary for tonight,
and hope the morning will come with me alive to
see it...’
Going to bed fearing that one might not wake
up again made us glad indeed to be living in 2007,
when a noisy neighbour or the revving of a motorbike
might be the biggest threat to a peaceful night’s
sleep. Furthermore, propping our eyes open late
at night as we read about what happened to Vere
Hodgson during the nightly air-raids, we were
humbled by the thought of her then getting up
the next day to be at work by nine.
Vere Hodgson describes herself as a ‘recorder
rather than a writer, a diarist of ordinary rather
than extraordinary people’, and we discussed
how this style gave her broad appeal. She manages
to encapsulate a whole society on a very human
level with her mix of personal and public anecdotes.
Although many could not relate to her personally,
because she kept her inner dreams and desires
private, she still captivated us. We entirely
sympathised with her public persona and the daily
events that told a story of human suffering and
coping in a crisis.
And we loved her brilliant, humorous anecdotes.
I described the best, in my opinion, which was
on 11th August, 1940. Vere writes about three
Scotsman who escaped from the Germans, are recaptured,
start speaking in strongly accented Gaelic, the
top interpreters are brought in yet none can decipher
their words, the Scots are given a world map and,
pointing to a far-flung Russian outpost as their
home, they are let go!
Speaking about anecdotes raised the question:
does one need to read the book straight through
(it is the longest Persephone book, at 624 pages)?
Interestingly, half the group read bits and pieces
while the other half read it in one go. We concluded
it could be done either way; just dipping in one
gives one a sense of what it was like to live
in wartime England and the reader is certainly
absorbed by the anecdotes; yet one does lose the
larger thread of the story. When Vere finds a
flat, or finally gets an orange, or when her mother
falls ill – these small triumphs or tragedies
are lost when not read chronologically, and so
too the greater sense of a life lived.
I shall end with a point Jenny Hartley made in
her preface to the book – that Vere’s
experiences and emotions in her diary reflect
those of many other women from other countries,
even those ‘on the other side’ (the
title of a book Persephone will soon republish).
This common experience is forefront in my mind
as I have just watched Clint Eastwood’s
excellent Letters from Iwo Jimo, a film
that portrays the war from the Japanese soldiers’
perspective. The central message is the same:
these soldiers are, at heart, feeling the very
same emotions as their American adversaries.
Emily Hill
Massachusetts
15 March 2007
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