We Think the World of You

This tragicomic novel, published in 1960, is largely concerned with Evie, a German Shepherd dog, whose master, Johnny, has been sent to prison for theft. It deals with both the incarceration of Johnny and the captivity of his dog at his parents’ London home. This is reflective of the author’s experience as a prisoner of war in Switzerland during the First World War.

The author, Joe Ackerley (born 4 November 1896), received a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the 8th Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment. He went to France in June 1915. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916) he was wounded both by a gunshot to the arm and by shrapnel to one side of his body. He was rescued from a shell-hole having been lying there injured for six hours. He was invalided home but soon recovered and returned to duty on the Western Front. In May 1917 he was wounded in the leg while leading an attack near Arras and was captured by German forces. He spent the remainder of the conflict as a prisoner of war, being moved from camp to camp before ending up as an internee in a resort hotel in Switzerland. During his detention he began to write the play Prisoners of War.

Ackerley was open about his homosexuality for much of his life and this novel explores the homosexual central character Frank’s love for both Johnny and Evie. The frustration that Frank experiences in his love for both Johnny and Evie is representative of the author’s own difficulty in forming loving relationships (the author had been tormented by unrequited love when a prisoner of war). Frank frequently feels estranged from Johnny and from his wife and his parents. Johnny’s father is a villian of the piece and is the one character connected by the narrative to the war in which the author fought:
“Generally a silent, ruminative sort of man, he was liable, if addressed, to respond, and would launch, in his slow, monotonous, complacent way, into reminiscenes, usually concerned with the First World War, which seemed to have neither direction, end, nor point, excepting always to exhibit himself, in a climax one had learnt to foresee... as having come off best.”

Frank thinks of Evie in affectionate terms that are normally reserved for lovers:
“She stood before me now in the failing light of this early March evening, gazing at me intently. How pretty she was! How elegantly tailored her neat sable-gray, two-piece costume! Her sharp watchful face was framed in a delicate Elizabethan ruff, which frilled out from the lobes of her ears and covered all her throat and breast with a snowy shirt-front. She stood like a statue — no, she was too lightly poised for that; more like a dancer...”
Whereas Frank succeeds in rescuing Evie from confinement in the scullery at Johnny’s parents’ home, he ends up taking full responsibility for Evie’s care and through it is both restricted and lonely:
“Advancing age has only intensified her jealousy. I have lost all my old friends, they fear her and look at me with pity or contempt. We live entirely alone. Unless with her I can never go away.”