Home front
The burial of the Unknown Soldier links three women in this moving novel, writes Michele Magwood
AS events commemorating the centenary of World War 1 reach their apogee this month, this quiet, poignant novel lays bare the sorrow behind the familiar photographs of trenches and Tommies. In telling the tales of three ordinary women affected by the war, Anna Hope punctures the numbness around the historical facts, the loss and horror of such magnitude that a hundred years on still beggars belief.
Speaking from her home town of Manchester, Hope (pictured below) explains the genesis of the novel. “I had been reading a lot of social history and I was fascinated by the period of 1918-1920 because so much changed for women.”
Women were granted the vote in 1918, but during the war they had entered the workplace to take over the jobs vacated by conscripts. “When the war finished, men came home to a profoundly different place. There was mass unemployment and homelessness and women were pushed back home after a taste of independence. It was a time of social unrest.”
Most of the returnees were maimed. “Hundreds of thousands of them were injured,” she says, “and the nature of their injuries was often dehumanising and emasculating.” It’s no wonder, she points out, that the younger generation started playing with gender, the women cropping their hair and flattening their breasts. “The flappers weren’t glamorous, they were desperate and sad.”
Hope cleverly strings her story on a dramatic event — the interment of the Unknown Soldier. “The government decided not to bring bodies home, so they were buried where they fell.” Families and loved ones couldn’t visit the sites. There were tours offered, she writes, but, at a cost of six pounds, it was unaffordable to most. And so, after the end of the war, it was decided that a single anonymous soldier would be used to memorialise countless others.
It was an opportunity for a vital collective mourning. Four bodies were taken from each of the main arenas on the Western front. One — a “bundle of scraps, really” — was randomly selected to be interred at Westminster Abbey.
The book opens with a description of military personnel recovering an unidentified body in France, and throughout the story Hope segues between London and the body’s procession over five days to its final resting place.
In London we follow the stories of three disparate women. There’s the older, working-class Ada, whose son vanished with no explanation from the army. Hettie sits in a cage in the Hammer- smith Palais dance hall, dreaming of better times and waiting to be sprung for sixpence a dance with sad ex-soldiers, the limbless, the scarred, the halt and the lame.
And then there is the brittle Evelyn, who lost her officer boyfriend and is giving two fingers to her aristocratic family by working in an office making payouts to wounded veterans.
Each is there to watch when the Unknown Soldier makes his final journey down Pall Mall, his casket now topped with a battered helmet. More than a gulpingly moving story about loss, Wake is an exploration of endurance and equanimity and how a world began to reinvent itself.