Sydney M. Williams
burrowingintobooks.blogspot.com
Burrowing into Books
“After the Party” by Cressida Connolly
July 16, 2019
“England feels so reassuring and safe to me.
I couldn’t stand the thought of another war.”
Phyllis
Forrester on her return to England after years abroad
After
the Party, Cressida Connolly
Penguin
Random House, UK, 2018
The story Ms. Connolly tells is one of how easy it is to be subsumed by
innocuous-seeming decisions that have long term negative consequences. From the
perspective of several decades, we know the evil done by Sir Oswald Mosely and
his British Union of Fascists (BUF) – that he (and his followers) wittingly, or
unwittingly, supported the monstrous programs of Adolph Hitler. But this story
is best understood if the reader is able to divorce him or herself from the
knowledge we have today and to place ones’ self into that time, twenty years
after the Great War in which 700,000 British soldiers lost their lives. Ms.
Connolly writes about mothers of children who attend the BUF camp
run by Nina and Eric, sister and brother-in-law to the heroine Phyllis
Forrester: “Their conviction
and commitment to the cause of peace was very real. Many women would already
have lost brothers, uncles, fathers – even, among the older generation,
sweethearts – to the dreadful toll of the 1914-18 War. Another such conflict
simply could not be countenanced.”
Ms. Connolly begins her novel with a rubric, a line from Iris Murdoch’s
A Word Child about how a wrong turn taken and persisted in – a single
mistake – can wreck the rest of one’s life. This story, which bounces back and
forth between 1938 and 1979, opens in 1979, with Phyllis reflecting on why her
life turned out so miserably. She recalls her release from prison in the fall
of 1943. She had been imprisoned in late spring 1940, along with her husband
Hugh, for being a member of Mosely’s BUF Party. In March of 1940, two months
before she was taken to Holloway Prison, Phyllis thinks: her justification and
her naiveté are exposed,
“…people outside the Party were apt to mistake the Peace Campaign for a lack
of patriotism, little understanding that those within it felt a passionate
loyalty to very notion of Great Britain.”
In 1938, Phyllis and her much-older husband, a former Commander in the
British Navy during World War II and now retired from the rubber business,
return to England after many years abroad. They go to Sussex in England’s
southeast where Phyllis’ two married sisters, Patricia and Nina live. Nina and
her husband manage a BUF camp about which Nina is discrete, describing it as
educational, promoting peace and a place where the children will have fun and
meet others. “Phyllis found it electrifying to be among such a number of
fellow souls, all united in in their passion for the cause. It was a wonderful
feeling to belong. When Sir Oswald took to the stage to address them, she
joined others in giving him a standing ovation.” Most of these women were
not political, nor were they aware of the evil Fascism and Nazism represented.
It was the memory of the last war that was fresh in their minds and that
dictated their actions.
By spring 1940, the war had been underway for eight months, in what was
called the “Phoney War” – so-called because all was quiet along the western
front. Nevertheless, English lives had been lost in naval encounters. Mrs.
Manville, who takes care of the mother of Phyllis and her sisters (their father
recently died), suffered the loss of her sister’s nephew when HMS Courageous
was torpedoed off Ireland in September 1939. She knows Mosely for what he is
and calls out Phyllis and her sister Nina for “your salutes and uniforms and
speechifying…,” but Phyllis is not traitorous, though one could not say the
same about others in the organization, including her sister Nina and
brother-in-law Eric. She is, however, naïve. She tells Mrs. Manville: “If
our Peace Campaign had been put into operation, this calamity might have
been averted.” Mrs. Manville’s
response: “That’s balderdash!”
Phyllis and her husband are imprisoned. Through Ms. Connolly’s telling,
we learn how families turn on one another. We read of a single incident in
December 1938 that happened to Phyllis, for which she was not to blame, but that
will nag her for the rest of her life, as she believes it led to her best
friend’s death. We learn of the emotional strings of women like Phyllis on
which Mosely played so adeptly. We come to better understand why so many wanted
to believe that a second war could and should be averted; thus, were willing to
follow Mosely down his path toward sedition. On a lighter note, this being a
book by a British author writing of events eighty years ago, we meet new words,
at least new to me, like “trug,” “jibbed,” secateurs” and “fug.” We learn about
Holloway Prison and the Isle of Man and of the fact that those imprisoned were
without recourse to habeas corpus or even to lawyers. Phyllis and her husband
are separated and there are rumors of executions. “Phyllis didn’t really
believe that her husband had been executed; yet if she could be taken from her
home, locked up without trial, without committing any crime, without
explanation, perhaps anything was possible after all.” She questions
British justice.
Life rarely turns out as expected when we are young and dream of the
future. Luck plays a role, but actions we take, decisions we make, the people
with whom we associate have long term consequences, thus a word of caution
permeates the story. When well-researched, historical fiction has advantages,
which straight history does not. It allows the reader to get inside the minds
of people portrayed. The title is a “double entendre,” in that it could refer
to Mosely’s BUF Party, or it could refer to the party in December 1938 that
held such consequences for Phyllis. What makes this story so compelling,
though, is it could happen to anyone. The reader who sanctimoniously concludes
that it was either Phyllis’ stupidity or deliberate complicity that caused this
tragedy misreads the author’s interpretation of how decisions are made, without
benefit of hindsight. Retrospectively,
we are all wise. Prospectively, few of us are.
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