Book Review : Growing Up Quite English in the Second World War

Love Is a Durable Fire by Brian Burland (Norton: $16.95)

Admire the impossible arrogance of novelists. Admire the way they set about creating their fictional worlds and then just step inside them--secure, fixated , in the knowledge or delusion that their readers will follow along behind.

Brian Burland makes no concessions to his reader at all. A careful reading of the publisher’s cover letter is necessary just to get a handle on the fictional setup: This is Burland’s eighth novel, “the third (in sequence, actually the second) in a memorable trilogy of novels about young James Berkeley and the Berkeley family of Bermuda and England.” The first was printed in 1969, the second in 1970, but the “given” here is that the reader should be able to follow right along--to remember, after years, all about this family. Indeed, a family tree is included, with characters like “Cross-Channel Charlie” and an infant who “dies at 18 months, old enough to say Papa,” but these characters never even appear in the narrative.

We are asked, instead, to follow the fortunes of James Berkeley, almost 13, as this story begins in 1942. James has been sent by his parents, who remain safe from the war in Bermuda, over to England to go to public school, because his mother opines she’d rather have a dead properly reared boy than an improperly reared live one. James is one of five children, and his two older brothers are already in Britain. Teddy--a gross, disgusting animal of a sibling--is in naval training, and Christopher, the eldest, is an RAF hero, except that, for all his heroism, he’s operating dangerously close to the edge.

James himself has been so severely traumatized by his dreadful sea passage (half the ships in his convoy were sunk) that he continuously bursts into tears and is tormented nightly by hideous nightmares. Thus begins a seemingly unending series of prep-and-public-school agonies loosely connecting with Christopher’s dreadful torments in the air. These two boys--just seven years apart--have been cast out of Paradise, the white-washed, fresh and clean island of their birth, back to gray, gritty, ungrateful England.

The larger pattern we are expected to notice is that the England these colonials are in service to is crumbling both from without and within. The Berkeley clan has a branch in Canada and, of course, Bermuda, but they come originally from a British aristocratic family. James and Christopher both see, separately, that all their great-uncle’s wealth is built on ill-gotten gain, and that perhaps, just perhaps, these wars might not be occurring if the class system and all the injustices of Empire were not so blatantly enforced.

The two sensitive brothers are suffering, each in his own institutionalized hell. Except that James eventually learns to love his aunts and the Hall.

And Christopher may hate flying and killing in the war, but after he’s been shot down in France and meets the lovely young Piquette (just 17, working for the Maquis), he begins having war adventures in the soppy tradition of Hemingway’s Robert Jordan in that sleeping bag with “Rabbit,” or Alan Ladd and Geraldine Fitzgerald in “O.S.S.”

So, on the one hand, James disapproves of England and the “system,” but when the army takes over the Hall to quarter Allied soldiers, he goes into a rage when they remove his family’s crest. And Christopher suffers terribly, but we’re given to understand that once he’s behind the lines he lives intensely and well. And the Germans aren’t really to blame for all the killing. And the military isn’t. And the public school system isn’t. . . . And around page 500 you begin to wonder resentfully what in the heck is going on in this book!

The author solves it all by pointing out that James’ mother has done her best to ruin his life, Christopher’s life and her husband’s life, and if it weren’t for Charity Lilyana Croydon Halcyon Berkeley none of these characters would be in the fix they’re in. But since we see Charity directly in only one scene, it’s hard to take the author’s word that all human misfortune was invented by a crazy lady in the late ‘30s living in Bermuda.

No, just read this for historical detail, and . . . admire the arrogance of novelists.