THE SKYLARKS' WAR by Hilary McKay....a review by Adèle Geras and interview with the author.

When the proof of The Skylarks' War arrived in my house, I did what I always do with books: opened it at the first page and began to read. I was so overwhelmed that I photographed the page, put it up on Twitter and declared it to be an example of the perfect opening of a novel.  I'm still of that opinion, so I'm reproducing it here.

I hope very much that you can read it because it sets the tone for the rest of the book. To my mind, this is elegant and  succinct and also, most importantly, an invitation to turn the page.

Too often, a beautiful writing style can hide a dearth of plot, or a paucity of interesting and well-developed characters. Not so here. The Clarry whom we meet as she's being born on the first page carries the story through twenty years and more and so does her brother, Peter. We follow their lives, but just saying that is not enough. We see, through the prism of their stories, a whole social landscape which is changing almost before our eyes. Education is important in this book and its effect on both Clarry and Peter, in different ways, absolutely crucial.

We have small town suburban life complete with delicious domestic detail of the kind that I love finding in a book. We have school, both boarding and grammar. And we have a kind of paradise in Cornwall, where Clarry and Peter's grandparents live. It's here they meet the third main character in the book: the charismatic, gorgeous and delightful Rupert, who is, to anyone familiar with the literature of the Great War, the very embodiment of the young men, the flower of Europe, mown down in those years. He's the sort of person everyone falls in love with. This includes the reader, and also a fascinating and loveable  character called Simon, whose devotion to Rupert will be seen for the homosexual longing it is, at a time when being gay was punishable by imprisonment and a social disgrace. 

The War, when it comes, is treated in a slightly different way from what I've seen other writers do. Through Clarry, the Home Front is most important. Letters are important. What's happening in France and Belgium is only shown briefly, but Mckay has one chapter (Chapter 27) which tells us  about the War in three and a half pages...again, a model of economy and elegance. Anyone teaching this period would do well to read this chapter and use it with their classes. 

The other thing I love about this book is this: it's a family book, like  those of Noel Streatfeild or R F Delderfield. It's a book that you can all read: you, your mother, your children, your granny, your uncle, your brother...you can give to to a whole family for Christmas. Buy multiple copies and just distribute them. I find it hard to imagine anyone not enjoying it. You will smile, and you will cry. You will rejoice and mourn with Clarry. You will recognise yourself and your friends. I hope you don't recognise your own father because Clarry and Peter's surviving parent is a monster of a very particular kind. 

I'm going to finish with a passage which can stand, I think, for the whole book. 

"Simon thought that if the only way of being in contact with someone was by words written on paper, then those words must be both worth reading and true."

The words in The Skylarks' War are exactly that. 

Below, I've asked Hilary Mckay a few questions and I'm grateful to her for answering. The photos used in this piece are all from her and I thank her for letting me use them.

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1) You've written many books and different kinds of books too. This is a new departure it seems to me. Can you tell us a bit of how the idea first came to you.

The idea has been with me for a long time, five years at least, when I began to write a book called Binny in Secret (later reissued as Binny Keeps a Secret.) It was a story with a present-day plot - the Binny story - and a subplot which eventually enlightened the present-day plot...(gosh this is complicated. It was a much too complicated book) set one hundred years before. The characters in the sub-plot were the three main characters in The Skylarks' War. As soon as I began writing about Clarry, Peter and Rupert (after Rupert Brooke, who captured my fourteen-year-old heart by way of a book of poems from my mother and never quite let go of it, whatever I learned about him after that.) I knew that there was much more to them than the few thousand words I gave them. They were so alive to me. I wrote another book or two after Binny in Secret, but always the Skylarks were there, and gradually on my desk I acquired a 1911 sovereign, a book about stars and constellations, and an old Victorian key. (the photos, shown together below are Hilary's own.)


2) Did you have a certain kind of reader in mind when you began? Were you aiming it at children? It seems to me to be the epitome of a Family Book: one that all generations can read together

I wrote it for myself. Sometimes writers are advised to write for themselves, but as a children's writer, this is rarely completely possible. This was one for me, though, entirely, and for the generation who were lost and hurt a hundred years ago. The only thing childish about it is the length. Of course an intelligent child could read it but so I hope could an intelligent adult. [A bit of Hilary's text here is complimentary to me, but I'm afraid I'm including it. Adèle] You know what I mean, because your own young adult novels are just the same. I read Troy and Happy Ever After at the same time as my fourteen-year- old daughter and we both loved them equally.

3) Many books about the Great War deal either with actual fighting or the home front. You do both. Was there any editorial pressure on you to beef up the fighting in any way? If there was, how did you resist it.
There was no editorial pressure on me at all, not for any part of the book. The editing was so light. It was mostly to do with chronology actually, because it covered such a long time span. I had a huge spread sheet with everyone's ages, historical events, etc running through the twenty odd years that the story covers.

4) The emotional battlefields are as devastating in their way as the real ones. In particular the father of the Penrose family is....I have no words for him....and I'm struck by how little he is condemned in the novel either by his children or by you? Do you have a particular reason to let him off the hook a bit?

Did I let him off the hook? I didn't mean to. He was an awful man. My characters knew that and so did I. I found him frightening: the thought of Clarry living with him, his utter coldness. They diminished him in the end with pity and laughter, but he was never redeemed. He remained what he was from the start. Devoid of love. Not off the hook at all!

5) 1918 was a moment when women were more and more coming to the fore in education and suffrage and so forth. Your novel seems to be a clarion call ( Clarry-on!) for education, kindness and understanding. Would you be upset or pleased if your readers took it as an 'issue' novel?

I would be delighted if readers took it as a Clarion Call...I like Clarry-on call! I am all for the girls. I found such a brilliant second-hand book when I was researching the novel, called "Somerville for Women." When I looked inside, I found it had been signed by a group of Somerville friends. One of them, Jill Brook (Lewis) says: "It can't be 40 years!" There are eight or nine signatures. So moving. We had a similar 'Eight' at St Andrew's and now at our own nearly forty years later, we say to each other: "Are you coming? I've got five of the eight...." etc.

6) Is there going to be a sequel? I feel there could be a few...a series!

I don't know. I wish I did. Maybe I could follow one of the next generation into WW2.

A brief autobiography:


I grew up in Boston, Lincolnshire, the eldest of four sisters in a very small house. My entire family read books like starving wolves eat their dinners, reading was my first great escape. The second was St Andrew's University. After a variety of jobs I settled down in Derbyshire to write books, which has just about kept the show on the bumpy road these last twenty five years or so.

Sapper Smith's Gallipoli diary, by Clare Mulley

Last weekend marked 100 years since the start of the First World War’s tragic Gallipoli land offensive, aimed at securing the strategic peninsula in the Dardanelles - the vital sea route to what was then the Russian Empire. It was the first combined naval-army operation in history, but both offensives were effectively repelled by Turkish forces. After eight gruelling months, Allied forces had to be withdrawn to Egypt. This was a serious defeat with significant political and military repercussions, and an estimated over 60,000 men from Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand killed and possibly 87,000 from Turkey, as well as huge numbers dying from disease.

My grandfather, Alfred Smith, a naturally quiet and peaceful young man, was among those who served at Gallipoli. Having worked in the local post office in Malton, Yorkshire, before the war, Alf had chosen to enlist with the Signals Division of the Royal Engineers, serving his country by laying the insulated telephone cables that would enable rapid military communications, and as a signaller himself.

My grandfather, Alfred Smith's 1915 war diary

Alf's war-time diaries start on 14 April 1915 when he left Biggleswade to join the ship that would transport him across the Bay of Biscay; ‘sick’ he scribbled in pencil. He then continued to the African coast, ‘Boxing contest aboard ship’; and past Malta to Alexandria in Egypt. From there he was sent to Imbros, now Gökçeada, the largest Turkish island in the Aegean, just across from Gallipoli, where he watched the ‘checking of Dardenelles by warships’. His diaries are never effusive, at most four short lines a day, with more space given to notes on signal flags and so on, but they provide a fascinating glimpse into his months at Gallipoli.

Because of its strategic location, Imbros had been retained by the Ottoman Empire in 1913 when the other Aegean islands were ceded to Greece. However the island remained under Greek administration. The first Allied attack on the Dardanelles had been launched in February 1915, followed by more sustained action a month later. During the battle, according to an account by the Ottoman General Staff, ‘all telephone wires were cut, all communications with the forts were interrupted’, but the enemy forces rallied and the British fleet was forced back, giving a huge morale boost to the Ottomans. Over the following month Allied ground forces assembled in Greece and Egypt, tasked with eliminating the Ottoman artillery so that Allied minesweepers could clear the way for the larger vessels to return. The Royal Engineers were also sent in to lay communication lines. However, a month’s delay allowed the enemy to prepare effective defences. The land campaign was launched in late April, with appallingly heavy casualties on both sides from the start.

Alfred's diary, April-May 1915

It was now that Alf’s ship arrived in the area. Although his was not an active combat role, he would soon find himself serving under fire. In early May, still onboard ship, he noted the ‘heavy bombardments’, and reported watching ‘severe fighting all morning’ on shore. Nevertheless, whenever there was a lull in the fighting and he was not sending cables, Alf managed to swim from the ship or listen to piano on deck. They docked on 19 May, and for the first few weeks Alf’s diary is filled with the heavy work of laying cables, as well as cleaning rifles, blue skies, desert winds, and ‘rumours of pay’.

The battles continued through the spring, and by mid-June Alf was noting ‘heavy bombardments’ again, and on 1 July, ‘shells falling all day… near our dug out. One, just behind, killed two men and eight horses’. Later that week he witnessed a troopship torpedoed and sunk in five minutes, and after that there is little let up in the bombing. ‘Turks using incendiary shells’ he wrote on 22 July, ‘which fired gorse on left flank’. Alf chose not to dwell on the horrors he must have witnessed, although he recorded when one friend was killed while bathing, and others were killed or wounded during the shelling of the signals camp. A few lines later he noted that ‘fresh fruit is obtainable’. Small pleasures had become remarkable.

In August Alf was sent to Suvla Bay on the mainland peninsular, five miles north of the Anzac sector, as part of the final British attempt to break the deadlock of the Battle of Gallipoli. Fortunately, he was in the second landing. Had he been in the first, his chances of survival would have been slim as wave after wave of men were shot down as they disembarked. The land there even today is full of bones and spent bullets among the broken seashells. With no picture of the wider battle strategy, Alf's diary comments only on the action nearby, the courage of the Australians, casualties among his signals staff colleagues as they worked to repair and extend communications, and the consolation provided by their meagre pay, mostly spent on cigarettes.

Alf's Royal Engineers cigarette case

The failure of the August Offensive finally showed the Allied leadership that the Gallipoli campaign could not be saved, but the knowledge was slow to effect change on the ground. Alf was still there when autumn brought relief from the heat, but gales presented new problems. He was now tormented by ‘dust and wind’ and often ‘terribly cold’ at night, even after second blankets had been issued. The dugouts flooded when the rains arrived, and a friend died from hyperthermia during one freezing period.

From late September through to December Alf was busy filling in old dugouts and digging in new foundations, helping to mend roads, make mortar and lay bricks as they shifted camp, as well as spending long days laying new cables. He must have been extremely fit. Perhaps it was a relief to work hard physically, although he was saddened to have to destroy ‘an old Turkish house, rather fine old place which has had very fine gardens’. His humanity shows in such details. He used his rare days off to inspect a downed aeroplane, explore the local town, help some fishermen to haul in their nets, and bring back sour oranges picked from roadside trees. 

,

Alfred Smith, front right, and friends from
the Royal Engineers Signal Corps,
Imbros, November 1915.

A black and white photo shows Alf and five sun-tanned pals in front of their heavy canvas tents back on Imbros in late November, all in shirt-sleeves and army trousers, one wearing a Fez, and each with a pipe or cigarette clamped into their mouths. The British Cabinet confirmed the military decision to evacuate in early December. Alf was finally shipped out to Egypt, heading for the ‘Cleopatra Camp’, two days after Christmas. ‘Not a bad ship,’ he wrote, if ‘somewhat crowded’. He would spend the rest of the war laying cables and sending signals from Egypt and Palestine.

Alf had a hard war, losing many friends and, while in Egypt, contracting the malaria that would plague him for the rest of his life. However he was fortunate to have been accepted into the Royal Engineers and, unlike so many, to survive both the Gallipoli campaign and the rest of the conflict. His greatest achievement, he said, was to have done his duty without having had to kill anyone. In 1919 he returned to work for the Post Office, moved to London, married his sweetheart, and in 1930 became father to my mother. Like many, he rarely spoke about his experiences or elaborated on his diaries – but he did not destroy them either.

Alfred Smith's war medals: The 1915-18 Star,
The British War Medal 1914-1918, and the Victory Medal.

Along with a few possessions, photos and some letters, I have Alf’s service medals. Still kept in the small cardboard box in which they were posted to him are his British War Medal 1914-1918, and his 1914-15 Star, stamped on the reverse to ‘Spr; A, Smith.’ – a more modest name you could hardly imagine. He also received the beautiful golden Victory Medal with a great winged angel on the front, and on the reverse the inscription ‘The Great War for Civilisation 1914-1919’. This was never threaded onto its fine rainbow-striped ribbon, and it is clear that Alf did not choose to wear it. Indeed I wonder how much any of his medals saw the light of day; my mother says she never saw them during his lifetime. Perhaps as these were fairly standard medals he did not seem himself as a hero, or perhaps he could not share his nation's official sanction of the conflict, having witnessed slaughter on such a scale to so little end at Gallipoli.

Back of Alf's Imbros, 1915 framed photograph

Alf's 1915 photograph, however, of himself and his mates from the Royal Engineers, who all courageously served during the Gallipoli campaign, was carefully dated, annotated with their names and home towns on the back, and framed with a hook to be hung on a wall. The photo is yellowed from exposure to the light, and was clearly highly prized. Alf died when I was a child and I never spoke to him about his war-time experiences, however I think this says much about how my gentle, very decent grandfather chose to remember his war. 

I would be very interested to know if any readers have inherited similar papers, photographs or possessions?

c. Clare Mulley

www.claremulley.com