Tessa Hadley on the canalisation of post-war Britain
In your story “Vincent’s Party,” two female students attend a party in a run-down pub near the docks in Bristol, a few years after the end of World War II. What fascinated you about this setting and time, and these two girls?
The story is, of course, a work of fiction. But as I was writing it, this world from before I was born became so vivid to me that I could actually see it, smell it, taste it, be there. Conjuring it up was an exhilarating, uncanny experience – channelling knowledge I hardly knew I had. I grew up in Bristol and even as a child, in the fifties and sixties, the bomb damage of the war was everywhere: we played in the rubble. The city’s docks, which had always been the heart of Bristol’s prosperity, were still functioning, although by this time the river was too narrow for the big boats and the focus of sea trade was shifting to Avonmouth on the Bristol Channel. But I can remember men unloading planks from the ships in the city centre and carrying them on their shoulders. (I doubted this memory – it seemed too striking to be true – but when I checked, I found that it is quite possible that I saw this in my childhood.) Children have a strong awareness of the recent past, if they are at all interested in it; the evidence of this is all around them, in the streets and schools (in the sixties we learned from textbooks written decades earlier), in the minds and concerns, conversations and material environments of their parents and grandparents. (Think of the child’s awareness of the war in France in Annie Ernaux’s The Years.)
Also, my mother was a great storyteller, and the world Moira and Evelyn live in was the world of her youth, forever present in her imagination as the height of excitement and fun. She was an art student, studying dressmaking, as was Moira, although Moira is not her. What strikes me, looking back, about my mother’s generation is the way they found everything funny. I suppose that was a reaction to the darkness (literally, during the blackouts) and gloom of their wartime childhood. And they had a wonderful sense, even in the austere fifties, of opportunities opening up in their personal lives, a freedom that was not available to their parents. This was partly due to the fundamental change in class structures that took place in post-war Britain, as the country moved from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Industrial decline had already set in, even if it was not yet obvious. This social mobility – the movement of families from the working class to the middle class with its different hopes and expectations – was the trigger for new cultural experiments.
Evelyn is at a turning point – she is no longer a schoolgirl and is beginning to grow out of the confines of her family life. She is enterprising, literary and ambitious too. She reminds me a little of Cassandra in I Capture the Castle or Sybylla in My Brilliant Career, and even a little of Jo in Little Women. Did you have these or other voices in your head when you were writing?
I like the idea that Evelyn’s vivacity, her mix of confidence and self-doubt, her bookishness, make her a sort of classic literary heroine. I suppose when an author imagines a well-read young girl dreaming of a bigger life, Cassandra and Jo and Sybylla (and Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver, Isabel Archer, Ursula Brangwen and so many others…) flicker somewhere in the background, as inspiration. What is striking about Evelyn’s ambition, however, is that it is limited to her love life! Sybylla and Jo are much better feminists. Although Evelyn considers herself smart, loves to read and is good at French, she shows no signs of planning a particular career after university. She loves the idea that talk about literature, but has no plans to write any. I don’t want to complain or sigh about that. Her attitude, if we didn’t think about it carefully, might seem almost dangerously comfortable, unencumbered by the pressures of being a young woman today. No one in their right mind would wish to put that genie back in its patriarchal bottle. But sometimes the idea of the luxury of a dreamy life of turning inward can be quite tempting. Evelyn loses herself in her reading, in her grubbiest clothes, and it doesn’t occur to her that she might monetise or professionalise her passion; she simply fires her imagination. And then – perhaps more problematically – there is the fun she has in between the grubby readings: playing up her femininity, dressing up as a role, going out to find romance and experiences. To be stared at, or at least to want to be stared at.
Evelyn is ambitious when it comes to life, I suppose. She strives for drama, adventure, to be a Successthat things are happening to her. It hasn’t occurred to her to want a job. Moira has her portfolio, and maybe something will come of it, but maybe not, or not for long. Maybe she’ll put it aside to start a household and have children, to nurture and support a man like women used to do.
At the party, Evelyn and Moira meet two men – Sinden and Paul – who obviously move in wealthier and more privileged circles than the sisters. Sinden and Paul are in the slums, so to speak, but fascinated by the bohemian environment, and they make an effort to talk to the girls. Is there more to their motivation than a fun flirtation?
A funny flirtation probably makes it sound prettier than it is. Privileged men have always had the freedom – much more novel for the girls in the story – to move between classes and to have cross-class sexual experiences that could threaten a woman’s respectability and reputation. When Sinden and Paul say they’re cavorting in the slums, there’s definitely a sexual undertone there. I don’t know how interested Paul really is. Most of the time he’s just drunk. But Sinden feels powerful, predatory, attentive: it’s telling that he’s most fascinated by Josephine, who no doubt seems to him a certain working-class archetype, more exciting – with her carefree freedom and red politics and her caustic indifference to his insults – than Moira and Evelyn, who are “nice girls” from lower middle-class backgrounds.