Till recently, British journalist, novelist, and critic Rebecca West (1892-1983) was another lacuna in my literary knowledge (one of the many that I have 'fessed up to on these pages).

But while we were travelling, I found my radar constantly alerted to a chunky book called Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which draws on West's 1937 visit to what was then Yugoslavia, and offers an in-depth examination of Balkans politics, culture, and history. It's sitting in my electronic to-read pile, and I will get to it in due course. But in the meantime, I was drawn to this novel -- a novella really -- published in 1918. It is West's first.

My audio-version was very nicely narrated by Nadia May (always a reliable reader). But I also downloaded the text from Gutenberg (which is the source of the illustrations, by Norman Price, apparently).

So, the characters:

Christopher Baldry (Chris) is fighting "somewhere in France". Kitty is his wife. She's a rather superficial young woman, but then she has had to suffer the death of their child, Oliver, and the absence of her husband. I guess we'd none of us be at our best. Jenny is Chris's cousin, and lives with the couple at Baldry Court. She longs for his return: "I wanted to snatch my Cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness." This is partly because she has recurrent bad dreams about the war. But also, we come to suspect, she once carried a bit of a torch for her cousin, and perhaps still does.


Kitty and Jenny

Jenny, who played with Chris as a child, recalls his "great faith in the imminence of the improbable". She also thinks this faith persisted into adult life: "He had exchanged his expectation of becoming a red Indian for the equally wistful aspiration of becoming completely reconciled to life. It was his hopeless hope that some time he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy, turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation he would go on his way with an inextinguishable joy. There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it." Before he joined the army, he had been saddled with many responsibilities -- for his late father's business, and for "a mob of female relatives". So the women -- Kitty and Jenny -- undertake to "compensate him for his lack of free adventure by arranging him a gracious life".

Into a routine afternoon of musing and hair-washing bursts one Mrs William Grey. She appears middle-aged (although we later discover she's in her 30s), and her shabby attire and the state of her hands instantly betray her class. Lower.

The young women of Baldry Court are repelled by her: "She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff."

The news she brings is startling. Chris has shell-shock. Kitty and Jenny find this difficult to believe. Surely the War Office would have told them? Could it be that this woman is plotting some fraud?

But Mrs Grey -- nee Margaret Allington -- has a telegram. She and Chris used to know each other, and although it's 15 years since they met, Chris thinks he still knows her because his shell-shock has caused significant memory loss.

Kitty is very shaken. "Either it means that he's mad, our Chris, our splendid, sane Chris, all broken and queer," or "there are bits of him we don't know". Whatever the answer is, for her the upshot is devastating: "If he could send that telegram, he is no longer ours."

But Chris is brought home. He has indeed forgotten the last 15 years. He remembers Kitty purely as a casual acquaintance, falls down the new stairs that were installed after his marriage, remembers Jenny as a much younger person, and asks after a servant who has been dead seven years.

He is determined to see Margaret Allington.

We learn that Margaret used to live in a rather idyllic-sounding place called Monkey Island, in the Thames, and he and she were indeed briefly an item. The description of this innocent little passion, and the rivery scenes that background it, is very beautiful.


"The whole world seemed melting into light. Cumulus-clouds floated very
high, like lumps of white light, against a deep, glowing sky, and
dropped dazzling reflections on the beaming Thames. The trees moved not
like timber, shocked by wind, but floatingly, like weeds at the bottom
of a well of sunshine..." The picture is of Whitchurch-on-Thames, a fair bit west of Monkey Island, 2023

Then there's a bit of a quarrel... Chris has to go overseas to sort out his family's business, but this silly spat means that they part on bad terms. And Margaret never hears from Chris. Her father dies, and she has to leave Monkey Island. Eventually, after five years of silence, she marries someone else.

Margaret now lives in an unprepossing red-brick house, with the very prosaic Mr Grey. But she's not one for repining, and has "accepted it as her mission to keep loveliness and excitement alive in his life". When she takes Mr Grey to visit Monkey Island, she is given a cache of Chris's letters, which were never forwarded to her at the time. All a terrible misunderstanding, then...

The current version of Margaret, and the current, 15-years-missing version of Chris, are sublimely and innocently happy in each other's company. They are "englobed in peace as in a crystal sphere".



But surely this is an artificial and untenable situation... Surely, something needs to be done.

Dr Gilbert Anderson is the family's last hope.

Jenny, meanwhile, though not Kitty, has come to an appreciation of Margaret Grey's qualities. She may be dowdy, but she is infinitely kind.

According to Dr Anderson, Chris's amnesia manifests a suppressed wish: "Quite obviously he has forgotten his life here because he is discontented with it." This is hard for Kitty to swallow, of course. "I tell you," she insists, "he was not discontented till he went mad." But Jenny understands a bit better: "Nothing and everything was wrong... I've always felt it."

Rohan Maitzen puts this very nicely: "As the novel progresses we realize, with Jenny (our narrator), that the fifteen years lost to his memory were, to him, years already lost in another way: lost to the love he had to give up, lost to the effort to maintain his family business and the family home, Baldry Court. Kitty and Jenny have never understood that the life they shared with him -- perfect, elegant, insulated against ugliness -- was for him a death of the soul... It’s Jenny and Kitty -- especially Kitty (eventually seen by Jenny as 'the falsest thing on earth') -- that have destroyed Chris, as much as the war has; it is his life with them, especially his marriage, which he wants to forget as much as anything he has seen in the trenches."

Margaret doesn't see that the doctor can do much good: "You can't cure him... -- make him happy, I mean. All you can do is make him ordinary." Dr Anderson replies: "It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself."

Despite her misgivings, Margaret comes up with a way to "bring him back". She suggests that they show him something connected with his little son. The doctor agrees, but insists that she must be the one to do this. She is the one Chris trusts at the moment.

Faced with the nursery, Margaret demurs. Jenny, too, is reluctant. She finds some appropriate baby items, but says she "wished, in the strangest way, that I had not". Ultimately, she concludes: "Of course it had to be."

It is Margaret who voices the other side of the story: "If anybody's happy, you ought to let them be... If you knew how happy he was just pottering round the garden... He could just go on. It can go on so easily." And it's not just that they would be taking him from his idyll. If Chris's memory returns, he will have to go back to the front. She is on her way to persuading Jenny: "Everything was going to be right. Chris was to live in the interminable enjoyment of his youth and love."

But Kitty's appearance at the nursery door reminds them that they can't suspend time like this, leaving Chris and Kitty and Margaret in a totally false situation that can never be satisfactorily resolved. Margaret concludes: "The truth's the truth... and he must know it."



And Margaret does the deed. Using the baby items, she wakes Chris up, as it were. Watching from the window, Jenny sees Chris turn to look up at the house "as though it were a hated place to which, against all his hopes, business had forced him to return... He wore a dreadful, decent smile; I knew how his voice would resolutely lift in greeting us... Bad as we were, we were yet not the worst circumstance of his return. When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders, under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No-Man's-Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead."

Jenny is pierced by all this. But Kitty has got what she wanted: "'He's cured!' she whispered slowly. 'He's cured.'"

The slight book therefore illustrates a neat little conundrum. What would we do with such an offer? Fifteen years of misery wiped out -- not thoroughgoing suffering, maybe, but a soul-destroying weight of dissatisfaction -- plus a chance to stay out of the damn war...? But this outcome is rejected for us in the cause of truth, normality, and convention... As Pericles Lewis points out, this giving up of an idyllic past, which is the choice of the rational, sensible mind, "seems to symbolize the entire nation’s loss of innocence in the war". Going back 15 years to blot out the horrors of the First World War is just not an option for a grown-up country.

I found it very powerful.

There are question-marks, of course. I'm not sure the psychology would stand up to much scrutiny (but that's not really the point). There are several plot points that could be interrogated.

And I think West overplays her hand a little in her depiction of the class divide (Jenny's classist stance moderates somewhat, but she starts out really quite outrageously obnoxious, as does Kitty, who doesn't seem to undergo any ephiphany of kindness). Then again, maybe it's all not so incredible... It's Britain, after all... (And I learnt, incidentally, that my cold-climate preference for slippers betrays my bad breeding: "All her life long Margaret, who in her time had partaken of the supreme dignity of a requited love, had lived with men who wore carpet slippers in the house." Poor dear...)

So, one or two wrinkles. Nevertheless, as the debut novel of someone in her early twenties, it's really very impressive.