Black Bethlehem

This tripartite novel, published in 1947, is set in London, where the author lived, during the Second World War. The narrative opens and concludes with a blitz scene in February 1944 in which John Everyman, an air-raid warden, is injured:
“He was crossing the road when the ground heaved under him. The last thing he saw was the red light in the northern sky. Then all light and sound ran together and vanished, and he fell down, down into darkness.” He and other characters in the novel express a sympathy not only for those being bombed in London but also those being bombed in Berlin: “The whole thing: this war — the bombing here — the awful bombing of Berlin — the lives wasted — the goodness wasted.”

The author, Lettice Cooper (born 3 September 1897), was born near Manchester and grew up in Leeds. She began writing fiction aged 7. Her brother, Leonard, was invalided out of the army and also took to writing fiction. Her first novel, The Lighted Room, was published in 1925. She went on to write as many as 20 novels. During the Second World War, she met Eileen Blair, wife of George Orwell. She and Orwell feature in Black Bethlehem as Ann and Christopher Drake.

In Part I of the novel, set in April 1945, the main character is Lieutenant Alan Marriot, recently invalided after a battle siege in the Dutch countryside. In a visit to his Aunt Hilda they discuss the war and she recalls the First World War:
“ ‘My friends have mostly been killed.’...
‘Some of them I know, and I'm very sorry. But not all. You mustn't exaggerate. Thank heaven the casualties in France haven't been nearly as bad as we all expected.’
‘Those are just numbers!’
She blinked at what must seem to her nonsense.
‘If you remember, as I do, the terrible slaughter in the last war.’
He said wildly, ‘It's a pity everybody didn't remember it.’ ”
He tells her about his friend Justin, who had recently been killed in action, and she reveals that her fiancé had been killed in the First World War:
“I don't know whether anyone has ever told you, I was engaged to be married just at the beginning of the last war. His name was David, David Nicholls. He was at school with your father. He was killed at Paschendale. After that I felt I must do everything I could to see that he hadn't died in vain, that it wasn't all wasted.”

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.”

Strange Fruit

This novel, published in 1944, is set in a small town in Georgia in the 1920s and portrays the interaction between the two communities, black and white. The central character, Tracy Deen, has been leading a wayward life, including a relationship with a young black woman called Nonnie Anderson. Towards the end of the novel, he seeks to become a reformed character by attending church, getting engaged to respectable Dorothy and distancing himself from Nonnie. His decisive actions, however, have violent consequences.

The author, Lillian Smith (born 12 December 1897), grew up in northern Florida. After her studies, she spent several years teaching in eastern China before returning home in 1925. In 1936 she launched a quarterly literary magazine that encouraged liberal expression by authors from both communities of the South. She closed the magazine in 1945 to concentrate on her own writing. This was the first of several novels. She was renowned as one of the first prominent Southern white authors to write about and speak out openly against racism and segregation. She was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2000.

In the early chapters of this novel, we learn about the army service of the central character, Tracy Deen, and what the soldiers thought about when far from home:
“Months in the Ruhr Valley left you time to think. Cut off from everything that makes it hard to think at home, it was easier... Most of the men didn't talk much about ideas. It was women... When they talked about women Tracy would find something else to do. There was no woman he wanted to talk about or think about.”
When he is sent with his unit to Marseille, however, the change of atmosphere starts him thinking:
“He liked the place and used to walk for hours at night on the streets, feeling something about it...
One night — it's hard to know how a thing gets in your mind — he began to remember Nonnie. He was walking along a street whose name he never knew. There was music somewhere and voices somewhere, and in the shadows a girl softly accosted him. He did not answer her but a tone in her voice sounded in his mind after he passed her. There was a feeling in his mind too that he had been here before... the music, the easy soft laughter... He thought: I'd like to dance with Nonnie... She had never been something to think about until then... Now she was here.”
Such was the power of nostalgia in the soldier serving overseas.

The Last of Summer

This evocative novel, published in 1943, is set in West Clare during the last few days of countdown to the outbreak of the Second World War. The central character, Angèle, the French daughter of a Clare man, decides to visit his family home for the first time. There she meets for the first time her Uncle Ned’s widow, Hannah, and children, Tom, Martin and Josephine. Though they are first cousins, she and Tom quickly fall in love and become engaged before the outbreak of war in her native country intervenes.

The author, Kate O'Brien (born 3 December 1897), grew up in Limerick, spending much of her childhood in boarding school after the death of her mother. She studied English and French at University College Dublin and began work as a teacher. While working as a governess in the Basque city of Bilbao from 1922 to1923, she began to write fiction. Her novel, Mary Lavelle, published in 1936, was largely based on her own experiences there. Her debut novel, Without My Cloak, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1931. She spent most of her life in England away from the conservative strictures of de Valera’s Ireland.

Tom Kernahan, father of the central character, had left home in 1909 and never returned. When his brother, Cornelius, is asked about the First World War, he recalls his own limited experience and what he knew of Tom’s involvement:
“Were you in that other war, Corney?"
"No. I volunteered for the South Irish Horse, but they rejected me. Said I was C3, if you'll believe me! And Ned didn't go either — he had a wife and two children already, and the whole of this place depending on him. He made a good deal of money out of it, I can't deny. But Hannah was anti-British even then, and wouldn't have let him join up, if he'd wanted...
Tom was in it though... I remember Ned hearing some way that he was attached to a French regiment, and doing liaison work with the British. I remember we were delighted it was for the French he was fighting. And then in 1917 Ned had a postcard from him to say he was invalided out. That was the last news I ever had of him until nine years later, when Ned told me he was dead.”

Towards the end of the novel, Martin resolves to follow in his uncle’s footsteps, intending to join the French army. His sister has immediate plans to go to Brussels to become a nun. We are left to wonder what would have happened to Angèle and her cousins, Irish and French, during the war that had just been declared.