Frances Stebbins, Correspondent
[This is a memory from the many decades the author has been privileged to write for daily and weekly newspapers circulating in Western Virginia.]
Cleaning out recently some books I once loved but will not read again, I came upon three for reflection. When I have occasionally done a review in these columns of some favorite novels of the past, readers have responded that they too remembered.
These three, “This Above All,” “The Cruel Sea” and “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” have the common theme of endings, sad but realistic for their times. Being Lent, a time of penitence and reflection observed in some denominations, it may be appropriate to learn of these tales of a somber mood.
Their settings of World War II in England and on the high seas and in pre-Civil War Southside Virginia draw them into our own times of fears about a possible war in Europe and a reminder of a frightening event from the days when slavery was a way of life in the settled parts of the United States south of the Potomac River and east of the Mississippi.
I first read them in three eras of my own life: early teens in Orange, Virginia; early married life in Petersburg, Virginia, and late mid-life in Salem, Virginia.
Here’s a bit about the three.
In my childhood in the Piedmont, the sole means for my single mother and me to learn of world happenings was the daily newspaper. An early edition of “The Richmond Times-Dispatch” arrived in our RFD mailbox each weekday morning. It often contained a serialized popular book of the times.
There, I first read a contemporary novel, “This Above All” by a British writer, Eric Knight. Later, I bought the book with a 1941 copyright date. It was one of my first adult novels; the sex scenes were largely lost on me at the time, but later the power of the story returns even today.
It covers about four months of the spring of 1940 when London was under the blitz of Nazi Germany, and Adolph Hitler sought to break the will of the British people never conquered for more than 1,000 years. The scene is set with people living on the English Channel coast hearing the guns in France some 30-miles away.
The reader then meets a young English woman, Prudence Cathaway, who is newly enrolled as a female soldier. She’s the daughter of a famous London surgeon and accustomed to her place in the upper-middle class.
Near London she meets Clive Briggs, a deserter from the British Expeditionary Force, which has been conveyed home across the Channel after the defeat at Dunkirk. Drawn together in the dark, the inevitable takes place; Prue tells her new lover that she has a week’s leave, and they decide to take it at a Channel hotel.
During the days and nights they spend there, Clive tells Prue at length of his experiences as the British Army retreated to escape at Dunkirk. He also reveals his working-class childhood to her as they make love.
Back in London by telephone, Prue informs Clive that she’s pregnant; he tells her he’s going back to the Army. Before this can happen, Clive is seriously hurt as a bombing raid causes a wall to collapse on him. Prue’s father cannot save him.
To complete this tragedy, the author Knight was himself killed in the war.
The second book, “The Cruel Sea,” I gave to new husband Charlie when we were in our first year of marriage in a Petersburg apartment. He had served more than two years in the North Atlantic and had told me of his love of the sea even in the fearful storms that often ravaged the area near Iceland when he handled torpedoes in the U.S. Navy.
This book by British author Nicholas Monsarrat is about a group of seamen on the H.M.S. Compass Rose and their years of fighting the Atlantic and the Germans. It draws well the characters of young seamen and toughened officers and has its own love story with the focus on Lockhart; he’s gone to sea after a fading marriage. The promise of a new life with Julie Hallam is lost when at war’s end, he returns home to find that she has died.
And finally, in “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Newport News writer William Styron offers a fictionalized account of a frightening historical event that took place in 1831. An educated slave, Nat Turner, maintained that he received a message from God to lead an effort to free his people.
Turner and his band of brothers succeeded in stabbing and axing to death dozens of Southampton County white slave owners; after raping and then murdering a young white woman in a cornfield, he and other leaders were captured and hanged. Styron’s limited records reveal that Turner’s body was mutilated for souvenirs.
This horrifying tale dates from 1966. In a preface, Styron explains that he drew heavily on Nat Turner’s own account of why and how the rebellion came about. As Turner predicted, the event inspired terror of whites for Blacks.