Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

This novel, published in 1947, is set in Australia in the 24th century. The central character, Knarf, has written a historical novel about Harry Munster, a veteran of the First World War, and is discussing it with a colleague. His novel, Little World Left Behind, begins in 1924 and brings Munster’s story through unemployment during the years of the Depression and then on to the Second World War. Although Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was published in 1947, it was written in 1941 and 1942 and it, therefore, describes the latter years of the Second World War predictively rather than historically (though, of course, Knarf himself is describing it historically).

The authors, Marjorie Barnard (born 16 August 1897) and Flora Eldershaw (born 16 March 1897), collaborated under the amalgam nom-de-plume, M. Barnard Eldershaw. They met as students at the University of Sydney. One of Eldershaw’s brothers, John St Elmo Eldershaw, served as a gunner on the Western Front and died soon after the war. Their first collaborative novel, A House is Built, was published in 1929. During the 1930s they hosted an influential literary salon in their flat in suburban Sydney. Their collaboration became more difficult and less productive after Eldershaw moved to Canberra in 1941. This was to be their last collaborative novel. It was severely censored and only published in its completed, uncensored form for the first time in 1983.

Harry Munster had served with the Australian forces during the First World War. At an early stage of Knarf’s novel, Munster considers his family’s struggle to sustain themselves and remembers his experience as a soldier:
“His mind strayed back to the war. The times his belly had been sticking to his backbone, times when he'd been perishing and the food had come up stone cold, or there hadn't been any, because Fritz had got the ration party. Times when to lie down and sleep in the mud, even to the thunder of a barrage, would have been the sweetest thing in the world, times when he would have welcomed death itself for the sleep there was in it. He'd sworn then if he ever came back he'd not be ungrateful again for food and sleep, quiet, and a body free from lice.”

When he is caught up in the turmoil of the blitz in Sydney during the Second World War, his traumatised mind returns him to a battle scene at Gallipoli in 1915 and another scene from the Western Front in 1916:
“Another crash came and the blast threw him down, spreadeagled on the road. It was a minute before he stirred, got to his knees and then to his feet. His chin was wet with blood but he felt nothing — only the sky was red with whirling black stars and the ground rose steeply under his feet. He was running up the slope at Gaba Tepe, carrying his equipment, his lungs bursting, the surf of the Turkish fire just ahead of him; he was caught by their own barrage in the crumbling French village out of Bouchevenes, stumbling blind and suffocated towards a shelter that had gone.”