BEST BOOKS ON... COURAGE
THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. A FEW years ago, I had to take my mother to A&E. She was in her late 80s, with a hole in her leg that was bleeding heavily. We had to wait for hours, but she sat there uncomplainingly until it was her turn.
Meanwhile, all around us, people half her age with a splinter or its equivalent were wailing away, denouncing the system and shouting at staff. It made me realise the war generation are different from us. They are made of other stuff.
It’s hardly surprising, given what they grew up with. Courage was not just required on the battlefield, but in everyday life.
Their Finest Hour And A Half, by Lisse Evans, is a great World War II novel, because it’s about civilians.
Set in a film unit that’s churning out heart-warming propaganda movies for the war effort, it has charm, romance, comedy, a cheering story of female empowerment (it’s just been made into the film Their Finest with Bill Nighy and Gemma Arterton). And yet it never lets up on the details of the privations of wartime and the daily trauma that came with the Blitz.
Of course, the heroes that lived through, or died in, that war were born from the heroes of the one that went before.
The trenches in France were a pretty stringent test of human courage, as Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong reminds us. It’s harrowing to read the scenes of horror in the Somme and Ypres, and yet there is the main protagonist, Stephen Wraysford, so determined to fight that he refuses all leave.
We don’t have to wait for a war to have our courage tested. The life of Skeeter, in The Help by Kathryn Stockett, is as cushy as they come.
A rich, white girl in Sixties Mississippi, she’s used to being waited on by the family’s black maids. But when her eyes are opened to what life is like for ‘the help’, she risks a lot to change her little corner of the world.
Sometimes courage is needed even in peacetime and privilege. We must try to rise to those occasions when they come.