Blitz Writing: Night Shift & It Was Different At The Time

Introduction

by Kristin Bluemel

Inez Holden was a London novelist and short story writer, at least as famous during her life for her flamboyant lifestyle, fantastic conversation, and celebrated friends — including HG Wells, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Arthur Koestler, Stevie Smith, Mulk Raj Anand, and William Empson — as she was for her literary accomplishments. Working and writing without the supports of education, family, or wealth, Holden published seven novels, two story collections, and one wartime diary during some of the most tumultuous decades of the twentieth-century. Throughout this period she also maintained an extraordinary private diary, the surviving volumes of which begin in the midst of the London Blitz and continue well after the end of the war until August 1960. Here she records in astute and often humorous detail her encounters with prominent London personalities, including her brief affair with Orwell, as well as her impressions of hundreds of anonymous, memorable, ordinary Londoners.¹ With the publication of Inez Holden’s Blitz Writing: Night Shift and It Was Different At The Time, contemporary readers are invited to read Holden on her own terms, as a writer worth knowing because of her unique voice and perspective on Second World War London. Holden’s Blitz writings teach us about compassion amid crisis, of community amid difference, of the power of the written word to inspire hope amid violence and despair.

Night Shift is a novel about working-class characters conscripted into a London factory called Braille’s that produces camera parts for reconnaissance planes. It Was Different At The Time is a wartime diary covering the years 1938–1941 with entries that Holden collated from her private diaries of that period. The entries record Holden’s work in hospitals, in a government training centre, as a fire watcher, as an occasional broadcaster for the BBC, and as a guest at ‘Hogsnorton’, a farcical name for the BBC Centre in Worcestershire. Both novel and published diary also record in spare, clear prose the sensations, destruction, and human costs of the London bombings, of Londoners’ resistance to the assault on their city, of the ‘incendiaries, dive-bombers, and guns’ that contributed to ‘a hideous melodrama let loose over London’ (154). This style — restrained, realistic, accessible — tempts us to believe in the possibility of apprehending in Holden’s work an unmediated wartime reality, a pure translation of Home Front experience as told by a keen, distanced observer. Night Shift and It Was Different At The Time may strike readers as two chapters from the same book, two moments in the same moving picture of life during the Blitz. Yet novel and published diary have distinct narrators and purposes and each short book offers up a unique interpretation of Blitz experience and survival. Blitz Writing brings these two interpretations into conversation with each other, urging readers to move from a recognition of Holden’s cinematic realism and documentation of London living to understanding Holden as an artist.

During her lifetime, Holden achieved publication but not fame, her novels and short stories and journalistic work failing to attain the popularity or influence achieved by many of her writer friends. This edition of Night Shift and It Was Different At The Time asserts that Holden is due for discovery and recovery, that her work will find new readers who will appreciate her writing for its own sake. These readers will see in the seemingly transparent style of her writing the glass of her art, appreciating her vibrant personality — her wit, intelligence, and humour — and the ways her social positioning as a woman and a worker enriches our historical imagination of life during the Blitz. Many readers will be drawn to Blitz Writing out of an interest in Britain’s wartime past, but this is not the only or best reason to pick up this book. Holden’s individual, enduring voice is the greatest attraction in Blitz Writing and her representation of the extraordinary people who so bravely, so humanly navigate wartime’s material and social hazards is its greatest contribution to the literature of the Second World War.

Life into Art

Holden’s father was Wilfred Millington Holden of Wellesbourne, Warwickshire, whose family is listed in Burke’s Landed Gentry (1952) as the Holdens of Bromson; her mother was Beatrice Mary Byng Paget, born to the Pagets of Darley House, Derbyshire. There are virtually no archival sources confirming details of Holden’s childhood and youth. Instead, we have the vivid memories of friends and relatives which, though subject to the vagaries of all such personal accounts, lie at the heart of any biography. Holden’s cousin, friend and original literary executrix, the writer Celia Goodman, recorded in a 1994 memoir in the London Magazine that Holden’s mother was an Edwardian beauty who had owned fifteen hunters and was known as the second-best horsewoman in Britain (Goodman 1994, 29).² In her twenties Holden herself was considered to be a bohemian society beauty, and the three novels she wrote during those years, Sweet Charlatan (1929), Born Old, Died Young (1932) and Friend of the Family (1933) record the frivolous, absurd lives of privileged characters who could have stepped out of the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Yet Holden’s life was marked by transformations of consciousness and circumstance, and neither her bohemian life in the 1930s nor her gentry origins could define or predict her political, social, or literary alliances. In the 1920s Holden was a party girl who consorted with and was sketched by Augustus John. By 1941 she was an experienced author, earning for Night Shift jacket quotations from HG Wells and JB Priestley, the latter describing the novel ‘as the most truthful and most exciting account of war-time industrial Britain’.

Holden’s full name was Beatrice Inez Lisette Holden, and this unusually large number of names suggests parental attention. However, Goodman tells us that Holden’s parents did not bother to register their daughter’s birth and Holden told her friends that she was unsure if she had been born in 1903 or 1904. She described her parents as not merely ill-suited but as united in mutual antagonism. One of her foundational memories was her father firing a gun at her mother and missing.

When she was fifteen, she went to Paris and then London, living on her wits and her exceptional good looks (Goodman 1994, 29–30). Goodman’s daughter Ariane Bankes finds in Holden’s childhood trauma the sources of her adult eccentricity: ‘Inez was utterly original, utterly sui generis […] She simply did not subscribe to the conventions of society, and her crossing of boundaries is entirely explicable in terms of her early rejection by her family and her subsequent rejection of all that her family stood for — class values and all’.³

Holden’s first novels were published when she was in her twenties. Her second novel, Born Old, Died Young (1932), features an adventuress heroine named Virginia Jenkinson who ignores the practical matters of her own wellbeing, suggesting something of the attitude Holden herself might have had at the time. The author Anthony Powell, who saw Holden frequently in London during the war years, certainly believed that Virginia Jenkinson was Holden’s fictionalised self-portrait, claiming in his autobiography Messengers of the Day that Holden in her twenties lived ‘fairly dangerously in a rich world of a distinctly older generation’ (Powell 1978, 24). Holden would have resisted terms like party girl, adventuress, society beauty, bohemian, Bright Young Person, that others have used to describe her social position in the 1920s and 1930s. Although she wrote about debutantes, film stars, chorus girls, bohemians, and millionaires, her journalism of the 1930 makes it clear that she considered herself an outsider rather than a member of London’s high life. In 1932 an editor at the Evening News introduced Holden to readers in an article ‘Farewell to the Bright Young People’, as a writer who ‘knows London’s fashionable Bohemia well’, but Holden herself ends the piece with the sentence, ‘Personally I don’t mind who gets labelled a Bright Young Person so long as it isn’t me!’ (Holden, 30 August 1932). Holden’s article ‘The Adventuress Of To-Day’ paints a sympathetic portrait of the modern adventuress who resembles in some ways other portraits of Holden: ‘The modern adventuress […] cannot work or scheme or even save money. She is the sort of person who simply can’t do anything about anything. To some people she seems appealingly helpless, and to others, just appallingly hopeless; finally, they are either moved, or irritated, into helping her. And that is how she lives’ (Holden, 20 July 1932).

Holden’s first novel, Sweet Charlatan (1929), was also her first to feature Bright Young Things, and is frivolous enough to feature a witch character named Rose Leaf, whose roles as hostess and murderess seem to demonically attract the young hero, Cedric Dorn. The only sympathetic character in the book’s cast of absurdities is Cedric’s young wife, the bohemian waif, Autumn. Autumn leaves Cedric to Rose Leaf, but we are able to imagine some positive fate for her given the following revelation:

Once she [Autumn] had been enslaved by the frail affectations of Cedric, the belated Beardsley gesture, the sweet superficiality […] all this silly brilliance had ceased to hypnotise, and Autumn herself had returned to almost schoolgirlish simplicity of speech and thought and was even now considering the importance of doing what one liked. (Holden 1929, 181–82)

Here is Holden at her satiric socialite best. Yet the subdued earnestness of Autumn’s escape from superficiality and the affirmation of her desires suggests that Holden might have maintained a latent sympathy for her that arose from her own changing goals and identity. Autumn’s repudiation of the ‘epigrammatic outlook’ of a Beardsley or Cedric in favour of simplicity of speech points towards Holden’s movement in this same direction. The best examples of Holden’s affirmation of simplicity of speech, suitable for the dark, pared-down years of the Depression, are the stories that she published in a collection titled Death in High Society (1934), some of which were later reprinted in her 1945 collection To The Boating. Holden had translated these stories, which had previously appeared in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, Nash’s and The Evening Standard, into Basic English, an experimental language of 850 words developed by CK Ogden. Ogden believed that anyone with a phonograph, anywhere in the world, could learn Basic on his or her own in thirty hours. Basic English came to be associated with Orwell’s totalitarian Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it was inspired by egalitarian impulses and pacifist ideals. As Ogden explains in the foreword to Death in High Society, Basic English ‘is an all-round language for everyday use, which may be turned into a language for the expert by the addition of short special lists’. He introduces Holden as his expert on the short story, assuring readers that Holden’s stories ‘are representative of an important part of the reading material on which the value of Basic for general purposes has to be tested’ (Ogden 1934, 8–9).

Holden’s stories in Basic provide other hints about her path from a writer of socialite farces to working-class documentary fictions. While rich and foolish characters still dominate her Basic stories, working-class characters begin to earn our interest. For example, the title story, ‘Death in High Society’, begins with the departure of two nameless cleaning women from the London home of Esmée Earnshaw, who watches them secretly and vindictively from the comfort of her long, grey limousine. We witness Esmée leave her car and sneak into her own house in order to check up on the thoroughness of her cleaners before she gets trapped mid-floor in the lift that she had installed in order to ‘get more work done in less time’ (Holden 1945, 118). The story ends three weeks later with a satisfying, macabre retribution that gives the cleaning ladies the last word. ‘Well,’ says the first, ‘here we are again dear. Where is she now, eh?’ The second replies, ‘Keep your nose out of other cats’ milk’ while she makes her way with ‘slow, stiff feet […] in the direction of the lift’ (Holden 1945, 119).

Sharing Esmée’s class status, Holden’s chronic state of being in debt or without any cash taught her to identify with poor working people and to give generously to others whenever she could. For example, when the Orwells were bombed out of their home on 28 June 1944, Holden gave them the use of her flat near Portman Square. In or out of luck and cash, her friends affirm that she maintained a sense of style and drama uniquely her own. Goodman writes that Holden ‘simply found life endlessly amusing and interesting and was able to make it seem equally so to others. She was a keen and fascinated observer of human nature at all levels, but she was never malicious and she had a depth of compassion that prevented her from judging harshly any but the most odious characteristics’ (Goodman 1994, 34). Others were not always so generous to Holden. It was one of the small tragedies of her life that HG Wells, whom she admired personally more than perhaps any other writer, ejected her from his mews flat in 1941, blaming her for a disastrous dinner party with Orwell where the two men argued about Orwell’s recently published criticism of Wells in a Horizon article (Bowker 2003, 288).

We can imagine some of the forms Holden’s generosity would take if we turn to the work of her friend of the 1930s and 1940s, the poet and novelist Stevie Smith. Smith used Inez Holden as the basis for her fictional character Lopez, who emerges in the first pages of Smith’s 1949 novel The Holiday. Lopez is the hostess of a wonderfully successful party that nurtures a ‘quick love-feeling’ among its guests amid a feast of rationed ‘spam, ham, tongue, liver-sausage, salad-cream, cherries, strawberries (out of tins), whiskey and beer’ (Smith 1980, 13). Smith develops her Lopez character in later pages of The Holiday, tempting us to imagine her friendship with Holden in the same terms that Smith’s heroine, Celia, uses to describe her relationship with Lopez. Celia tells us that she

keeps close to [Lopez] for company. Here is this admirable girl, I think, who has this admirable courage and this admirable high heart, for she is not a sad girl, she is not walking round in fury and despair. She writes and entertains the Government and the Section people, and the editors, and all the time it is nothing but a wonderful adventure for her to have, it is in the spirit of the Scarlet Pimpernel, or Sideways Through Patagonia, it is like that. (Smith 1980, 55–56)

Before publishing The Holiday, Smith used Holden as a model for another Lopez character in her short story, ‘The Story of a Story’ (1946). In this story, Lopez is described as ‘a very clever quick girl, she had a brilliant quick eye for people, conversations, and situations’ (Smith 1981, 52). Lopez is an incorrigible gossip and this quality too seems to have been Holden’s. Powell used her as the model for his flamboyant character Roberta Payne in What’s Become of Waring (Taylor 2003, 284). Decades later Powell described her as ‘a torrential talker, an accomplished mimic, her gossip of a high fantastical category; excellent company when not obsessed by some ‘story’ being run by the papers, of which she was a compulsive reader’ (Powell 1978, 24). Bankes confirms Powell’s impressions of Holden’s character. While she concedes that ‘It is of course very difficult to convey the personality of someone as unique as Inez,’ she fondly remembers that ‘her maverick qualities were what set her apart, and made her the remarkable figure that she was’.⁴

In ‘The Story of a Story’, Smith conveys some of what might have been Holden’s remarkable character. Smith’s protagonist, a writer named Helen, has drafted a short story based on the personal troubles of friends named Bella and Roland. Lopez rang up ‘all the friends, and the friends of the friends, the people who knew Lopez and who knew Helen, and who knew Bella and Roland’ to tell them about the story, turning social exploitation into social exposure (Smith 1981, 16). Lopez’s collusion with Helen’s desire to make life serve the interests of art reminds us how difficult it can be to keep novelists as friends. Smith and Holden were both ambitious and accomplished writers, both mimics, both gossips, but their Blitz alliance did not survive the 1950s. Smith’s biographer Frances Spalding attributes this falling out to Holden’s jealousy over Smith’s greater literary success (Spalding 1988, 151).We can imagine from ‘The Story of a Story’ that Holden would have her own story, the other side of ‘The Story of a Story’, to tell about Lopez and Helen. It is amusing to guess at correspondences of personality between Holden and the fictional characters reportedly based on her, but art is not life. We are left with shadows of Holden in the writings of others, while her substance remains in her own words, the novels, stories, and diary entries that she left us about the interwar and war years.

The Poor People’s War

Skilled at the satiric portrayal of wealthy, upper-class families like her own, Holden herself was never assured of income and can accurately be described as working poor. Bankes explains that despite Holden’s lack of formal education, ‘she was intelligent and witty enough to be an intellectual, and to move in intellectual-bohemian circles. As it also happens, she sympathised more with the working class than any other class — but she didn’t belong to any class, by choice. She was an outsider’.⁵ Spalding notes in her biography of Smith that Holden had grown increasingly bitter about gross social inequalities resulting from differences of wealth (104). In reaction to these feelings, the leftward drift of literary culture, and perhaps, her increasing intimacy with George Orwell, Holden developed a political consciousness and by the mid- to late-thirties identified herself as an anti-Communist socialist. While it is hard to know what turns anyone into a writer, let alone what turns any writer into a socialist writer, in Holden’s case we have not only the evidence of her published work, but also the unpublished evidence of her diary.

Holden’s diary suggests that the Blitz itself was a source of her increasing commitment to socialism as a vehicle for improving the lives of plain and poor people. Angus Calder, in his landmark social history of the Second World War, The People’s War, theorises that Britain came closer to social revolution during this war than at any time since the seventeenth century’s Civil Wars. Aiming to recreate the feel of everyday life for ordinary people within the contexts of grand battles and personages, Calder borrows the words of writers to turn art back into an account of wartime life, citing Richard Hillary, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, J B Priestley, Vera Brittain, John Strachey, Barbara Nixon, John Lehmann, and Inez Holden (Calder 1969, 200). He also includes the astonishing statistics of loss that put London in ‘a grim litany of names – Guernica, Dresden, Hiroshima, Hanoi – which have become symbols, obscuring rather than representing the facts of life and death’ (261).

Among those statistics, it’s worth repeating the most essential: that ‘Blitz’ is the shortened version of ‘Blitzkrieg’, German for ‘lightning war’; that the Blitz was the German bombing campaign against British cities undertaken in preparation for a planned German invasion; that the Blitz is generally assumed to have begun on 7 September 1940 and to have ended on 11 May 1941; and most chilling of all, that 15,775 Londoners died in the Blitz and 1,400,000 became homeless (Bell 2009, 158). Calder tells us that on the first day of the Blitz, German bombs

poured chiefly on Stepney, with its inimitable mixture of races […] on the tailors of Whitechapel; the factories, warehouses and gasworks of Poplar; the woodworking firms of Shoreditch; the docks of West Ham and Bermondsey. They poured on the sweated clothes trade, on the casual labour of the docks, on petty businesses Jewish and Gentile. (Calder 1969, 189)

As this brief excerpt from Calder’s history suggests, workplaces and poor people bore the brunt of the Blitz. It is this working poor people’s war to which Holden belongs.

Between September and mid-November 1940, ‘an average of 160 bombers dropped an average of 200 tons of high explosives and 182 canisters of incendiaries nightly’ on London (194). Yet amid all the destruction, workers reported for their shifts and managers to their desks. In factories such as the one Holden represents in Night Shift, there was little absenteeism due to raids. Calder notes that while ‘the central London population had dropped by a quarter by