We Have Been Warned

In this novel, published in 1935, the author imagines a violent right-wing counter-revolution in England in opposition to the perceived threat of a Soviet-leaning Labour movement. In the foreword, she explains that “the final chapters of the book were written before the events of summer 1933 in Germany and before the counter-revolutions of 1934 in Austria and Spain”. The central characters are a married couple, Dione and Tom Galton. He lectures in Oxford and campaigns as a parliamentary candidate in the industrial north. She is from the Scottish highlands and has political sympathies somewhat further left than her husband's kind of socialism. Their socialist views harden following a visit to the Soviet Union.

The author, Naomi Mitchison (born 1 November 1897), was born in Edinburgh and grew up in an academic family, receiving her education in Oxford. On leaving school, she began to study for a science degree but abandoned the course on the outbreak of the First World War to train as a nurse. She served in a Voluntary Aid Detachment at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. She married in 1916; her husband, Richard Mitchison, was on leave from service on the Western Front. He was a friend of her brother, John Haldane, who fought with the Black Watch regiment in France and Mesopotamia. Her literary career began in 1923 and lasted some 75 years; of her 90 books, she is perhaps most highly regarded for her historical fiction.

Whereas the novel deals with the general political situation that arose in the aftermath of the First World War, it also documents the impact that the war had on the lives of individual characters. Dione Galton’s sister, Phoebe,  is married to Robin, a man with a war injury: “his leg had been bothering him again, there was probably still a tiny piece of shell in it, evading the X-rays — just enough to set up a kind of mild general poisoning from time to time.” Robin’s brother had been killed at the Somme in 1916. Donald, a friend of Dione from her childhood home in Scotland, is a Communist activist and obtains from a former serviceman “a souvenir of the Great War... an old Mills bomb, Mark 5, still undetonated”. This he uses to assassinate a political opponent, leading to his enforced exile in Ukraine. Her husband, Tom, is asked by a student about his service in the war:
“ ‘But you remember the European War?’
‘Quite definitely. Especially in wet weather.’
‘Why?’
‘My wound begins to play tricks then....’
‘But I didn't know you'd been wounded! It must have been a marvellous time.’
‘Marvellous? Haven't you read any war books?’
‘Oh yes. I adore them. You know that superb scene in All Quiet on the Western Front, the men sitting on boxes in the mud and...’
‘...Well, never mind, if the National Government goes on as it's doing at present there'll probably be another war in your time.’ ”