There was a time when I did not like short stories at all. I found them limiting experiences in which the characters and the themes are never properly developed and all of the substantial parts of a good read are notable by their absence. I very much took the view that reading a short story was a bit like eating custard without crumble. So it is with some surprise and a little embarrassment that I admit that I have now changed my mind. When mastered, the short story form can be as compelling and touching as a novel, and nobody does it better than Mollie Panter-Downes.“Good Evening Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes” is a collection of short stories originally published in the New Yorker during the second world war. They are now drawn together in the form of a Persephone Classic. The stories were written and published during the war and their focus is the home front. The constant motif is the middle class British lady - knitting socks for heroes, sitting by the wireless and sharing her home with strangers. The character’s concerns centre on the themes of survival and adaptation. For some of them survival simply means staying alive. For others it is the desperate urge to make a relationship, a family, a home live through the war. Together with the dream of survival comes the constant anxiety that accompanies each page: will my world still exist when the war is over? Will I still have a place at the table? Adaptation to the demands of war comes easier to some than to others. Panter-Downes captures marvellously a nation in the act of trying to adapt – it is only natural that some should succeed where others do not. Although these are heavy themes, she writes lightly and with knowing humour.
The stories to which my mind constantly returns are “Cut Down the Trees” from 1943 and “The Waste of it All” from 1944. In “Cut Down the Trees” Mrs Walsingham, an elderly society lady and her trusty maid Dossie struggle through the war in the company of 40 Canadian soldiers who have been billeted in the old lady’s grand home. While Mrs Walsingham is an adapter, the conservative Dossie is dismayed and not a little heart broken by the disintegration of her upstairs downstairs world. When Mrs Walsingham decides to eat in the kitchen instead of the dining room Dossie’s thoughts were that:
“It was all part and parcel of the unwarranted bad joke, the conspiracy against Dossie’s way of life, which they called a war and which had taken first the menservants and then the girls one by one, which had stopped the central heating, made a jungle of the borders and a pasture of the lawns, marooned the two old women in a gradually decaying house with forty Canadians, and made Mrs. Walsingham stop dressing for dinner”.
The seismic social shifts caused by the war are also explored in “The Waste of it All” where a lonely middle class government worker whose husband is away fighting takes in an unmarried mother and her adorable child. As in “Cut Down the Trees” the path of social change is seen through the lens
of personal loss and frustration. Frances, the lady of the house is tormented with worry for her absent husband and their marriage. Her affection for the husbandless Margaret and her beautiful baby Raymond quickly turns to resentment and confusion. Frances begins to feel displaced in her own home and she cannot understand how a girl could reject social norms – could taunt the respectable hand that feeds her. The truth is that the social changes which were taking place would never be reversed. Panter-Downes captures a world that has been lost.The stories of Mollie Panter-Downes illustrate that everybody has to go on living even when there is a war on. They are vignettes of a society busying itself and trying not to think the worst. They acknowledge that most people managed remarkably well as much as they illustrate how nobody can keep up an act all of the time. Their form does not limit the stories – in fact their shortness lends to their power. With these tales the reader hears a resounding clatter of teacups on saucers, the click click of knitting needles and the slow and monotonous moan of the air raid siren. There is, in short, a wonderful sense of time and place. The “short story” part means that there is a sense of society as well. Thank you Persephone for another classic.
