This is by Mary Wesley (1912-2002), one of whose many claims to fame is that she published her first novel when she was 70, and went on to write nine more. This one came out in 1984, and was her breakthrough work.

We open in Cornwall, with World War II about to burst upon Europe. Converging on the clifftop home of old soldier Richard Cuthbertson and his short-suffering wife, Helena, is a whole tribe of Richard's nephews and nieces: Beautiful but cold-hearted Calypso, whom everyone falls in love with; handsome but confused Oliver, who is fresh back from the horrors of the Spanish civil war, and inspires a few heartbreaks himself; practical and unsentimental Polly; and kind Walter, her brother. Living with the Cuthbertsons, and unwanted and disliked by Helena, is Sophy (regularly described, to the discomfort of current readers, as "oriental"...); she is the illegitimate daughter of Richard's late half-sister. Joining the big family group for a candlelit dinner on the eponymous camomile lawn (which Victoria Glendinning, in an observant introduction, tells us is actually quite a difficult thing to lay) are David and Paul (the twin sons of the vicar and his wife), and Max and Monika Erstweiler (the two Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany now resident at the vicarage).

The superficially carefree bonhomie of the occasion hides subterranean tensions, and in any case, normality is about to be shattered. War breaks out, and the family is scattered to the four winds.



Calypso marries a rich man, as she always wanted (this particular rich man is old enough to be her father, but never mind). When he joins the forces, she lives the high life in London, and (like Polly) does a hush-hush war-related job. Polly, too, relishes her new freedom, but when her parents are killed in a random bomb attack, the darker tones of the war become much more apparent. Oliver doesn't land Calypso (and we later discover he is so upset about this that he fails to make either of his subsequent marriages work). Poor Walter is killed. The twins don't die, but are both shot down, an event that haunts them, and gives them nightmares. And Sophie is sent to school, to be out of Helena's hair.

Helena strikes up a relationship with Max, who goes on to have a dazzling musical career, and proves to be a total Lothario (as Glendinning notes, you pretty much lose count of the number of people Max sleeps with, and you do fairly soon stop caring...) Monika is well used to his ways, shrugs off his every dalliance, and takes over the household down in Cornwall, complete with Richard.

Framing the account of the war era is a contemporary narrative in which we see various family members returning to Cornwall for Max's funeral.


Not Cornwall, but two counties along, in Dorset. England's southern coast is magnificent

Also in attendance at that funeral is Pauli, Max and Monika's son. Throughout the war-time narrative, Pauli was in a concentration camp. His parents made it out of Germany, and entrusted their son to someone else to escort along in their wake, but the second pair were caught, leaving the parents racked by guilt and worry. We think Pauli has died, but it turns out he hasn't. I guess we don't expect concentration camps to exactly improve anyone's character. Still, it's something of a narrative surprise when Pauli turns out to be really pretty nasty.

Which brings me to the main thing about this book. It is regularly rather shocking. It's not the sex, or the occasional bad language. We're used to all that, and it doesn't really register. But at a number of junctures, you find yourself going: "Really?"

Starting at the milder end, we could mention the pro-Fascist sympathies of some of the upper classes. Richard, who lost a leg in World War I, cannot bring himself to believe there will be another conflict. Before the balloon goes up, therefore, he's all too happy to believe his friend General Peachum, and talks to the Erstweilers in sanguine terms about the effects of concentration camps: "Brace him up, do him good. The General says they are splendid places." From the vantage-point of 1984, Helena recollects: "There was quite a strong minority like the General, Conservative people who admired Mussolini for his trains. They didn't want to hear about Abyssinians being thrown out of aeroplanes." Not that the younger generation is initially any clearer-sighted. Some of the Nazis are "awfully nice", says Calypso: "All that lot we met skiing. I loved that lot in Kitzbuehel."

This commentator maintains: "The Camomile Lawn ... was critically acclaimed and an unexpected commercial success. In many ways, it slotted neatly into the nostalgia-obsessed Zeitgeist of the Thatcherite 1980s, delivering the kind of Tory comfort food that’s long been a staple of English literature: upper middle-class characters with cut-glass accents, moving nonchalantly between country houses, London apartments and private members’ clubs and outsourcing most of the requirements of domestic life to servants. Though the dreaded phrase Keep Calm and Carry On is never uttered, the characters of The Camomile Lawn embodied a much-cherished myth about English fortitude and bravery during World War II and the Blitz, typified in films and TV series of the period."

That's all true, but there is this darker angle, too. Not only do we meet the "Nazis-not-such-bad-chaps" wallahs, but we are also given unsettling details: About atrocities that Oliver saw in Spain, for example (of course, such a young lad couldn't be expected to stop them, but they certainly weren't the prerogative of one side); or about the grim treatment meted out to a German pilot picked up from the sea off Cornwall. On the latter incident, we get an illuminating little dialogue in which Sophy tells the vicar's wife: "Monika says both sides commit atrocities," and the lady replies: "What a funny thing to say. She's foreign, of course."



Somewhat shocking for me, as well, bordering on the repulsive even, was the way some of the characters revelled in the war. Of course, imminent danger upends people's normal principles, and pushes them to live for the moment. When war is declared, Helena looks round at the young people: "She read on their faces fear mixed with a sexual combustion she was to remember later." Those are the two strands that intertwine throughout.

In the present-day timeframe, James, Polly's son, suggests that there couldn't have been much time during the war for a private life. Not so, however: "'That's where you're wrong,' said Polly. 'We all lived intensely. We did things we would never have done otherwise. It was a very happy time... I was frightened and anxious all the time, but it made the delights even more so, the surprises more surprising.'" Calypso voices this juxtaposition right after the death of Polly's brother: "I'm enjoying the war, I find it exciting and frightening. I enjoy the raids, I like all the men taking me out. I like being a grass widow... But when something like this happens I hate it, Polly, I hate it."

There's more than a little autobiography in this depiction, it seems. A review of a biography of Mary Wesley notes that during the war she "led a life primly described on the dust jacket as 'rackety'. Anyone who knows Wesley's work will recognise in her novels the atmosphere of those days, with the dread of danger exhilaratingly offset by the fun of multiple love affairs." Another review of the same biography again outlines the shape of Wesley's war: "Slipping past her husband during the blackout, Lady Swinfen [aka Wesley] took a number of lovers, scandalised her family, worked for MI5 decoding German military radio call signs, and, dressed in a mink cape, biked off to the Ritz for lunch with her boyfriends. After much infidelity, undertaken with a heightened wartime awareness of her suitors' mortality, she fell in love with a Czech academic, Heinz Ziegler, and became deliberately pregnant with what she believed to be his son... Ziegler's death in action devastated her."


Mary Wesley in 1936

Ratcheting up the shock-scale still further, and so disconcerting that I won't even quote it, was Helena's unspoken thought about Pauli, when he inherits the Cornwall house after Max's death, and talks about digging up the camomile lawn...

Descriptions of domestic violence are likewise tossed off as just another occupational hazard of marriage. Calypso pretends to be incapable of loving anyone, but actually ends up loving her husband, Hector, despite the fact that he's often drunk and violent... (Helena: "You'd be surprised what people put up with when they are in love.")

And right up there, I suppose, is the discovery that Richard is a serial toucher of little girls... He's a long way from the very worst end of this disreputable spectrum. But we're now so sensitive to the grossness (and prevalence) of all such behaviour that the casual response of those around him (they're aware, and they keep an eye on him, but no action is ever undertaken to make him desist) cannot be anything other than breathtaking. Especially as one of the victims says it is "not awful... just boring". It does make you shudder somewhat.

Wesley is not condoning or validating, of course. She's just reporting. That's how it was. To write otherwise would be anachronistic. But you wonder whether anyone could write about this subject in quite such neutral, matter-of-fact terms now, 40 years later.



***

I started off loving The Camomile Lawn. The opening scenes were such a great evocation of those heady days just before World War II. The lawn was such a great symbol of all that was, and will never be again. The dialogue was so snappy and readable.

As the narrative wore on, though, I started to tire of the characters. Everyone hopping into bed with everyone else. No-one really going anywhere. So many couplings, some of which strained credulity. The Richard-Helena-Max-Monika swap-around is believable -- I've known it to happen... But the Polly-David-Paul triangle...? And Max so absolutely, inescapably, irredeemably everywhere?

It is said that Helena and Calypso were Wesley's fictional alter egos. Which is interesting because both are thoroughly unlikeable... Calypso is cold and disengaged -- until this epiphany about loving her fist-wielding husband. Ultimately, I found her unbelievable. And Helena is frankly loathsome. Sophy is a bit of a cipher, a closed, secretive little figure, who had to bear way more than a child should, and has therefore developed rather oddly. She is at least interesting. But, apart from Helena, Calypso, and perhaps Sophy, the characters are somewhat under-developed.

And the framing narrative seemed a tad creaky to me, with the oldies suddenly spilling their hearts in their various vehicles as they converge on the funeral and the old house of memories. Pauli seems a bit of a caricature, and the Sophy-Oliver experiment a bit contrivied -- even it's not a pat happy ending, and you don't hold out a huge amount of hope for them.

I couldn't help comparing The Camomile Lawn a little unfavorably to Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014) and the Cazalet Chronicles: The Light Years, published in 1990; and the remaining four volumes, published in 1991, 1993, 1995, and -- the latecomer -- 2013.

But Wesley's book is undeniably engrossing. Why so? This reviewer suggests: "The answer is, I think, the sheer energy and vitality of the storytelling, the bracing lack of sentimentality in the characters, and Wesley’s warts-and-all portrayal of them. Stories involving Brits living through wartime so often tend to emphasise the characters’ bravery and heroism. Wesley’s characters are refreshing partly because their heroism exists alongside their less exalted virtues: their selfishness, their jealousies, their wilful blindness to uncomfortable facts and their Olympian abilities to lie to each other and harbour dirty little secrets... There’s also something refreshing about the freedom Wesley allows her female characters, imbuing them with a bold amorality that’s normally reserved for men."



***

There were a couple of historical details that I found interesting. When war broke out, the Erstweilers were initially interned on the Isle of Man...

And with reference to the black-out regulations, we have this: "Calypso felt her way down the area steps. 'We are far more likely to break our necks doing this than get bombed.'" I remember my dad telling me how he was coming home from the dance hall in the dead of night on his motorbike, and ran into an invisible tripwire that was supposed to obstruct invaders... Catapulted over the handlebars, hurt, and understandably displeased, he met the stone-wall response: "Defence of the realm, yessir, defence of the realm."

I wouldn't say dad exactly "enjoyed" the war. And he never spilled any personal beans. But he spoke warmly of his time in the army. The camaraderie, the informal education it afforded, the opportunity to see the world (not that he ever wanted to leave the country after that, because he'd "seen enough of abroad during the war"). Good and bad, it all provided him with a fund of stories that he'd dip into for the rest of his life.

But then he had the rest of his life to live. Unlike millions of others.