Peace, Perfect Peace

By Josephine Kamm

Instinctively Frances fumbled in her handbag for a torch before she faced the lights and the certainty of the lifted black-out. For some time now she had taken streetlighting for granted, but in her present sense of withdrawal she had forgotten.

Set just after World War II, Peace, Perfect Peace is a poignant and humorous

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Release date: Aug 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781913054243

Josephine Kamm

Josephine Kamm was born in 1905, the daughter of Percy Hart and Hilda Marx. She was educated at Burgess Hill School in West Sussex, where she first determined to be a writer. In 1929 she married the distinguished publisher George Kamm, and in 1931 their son Anthony was born. Living in London for the rest of her life, the city formed a background to Josephine's experience, vividly depicted in many of her works, of being at the hub of crucial events and social upheavals. When war broke out in 1939 she joined the Ministry of Information as a senior officer and pamphlet writer and had her flat bombed, as well as publishing several novels for adults, of which Peace, Perfect Peace was penultimate. Josephine Kamm later became renowned as the author of a pioneering series of 'young adult' fiction in the 1960's. She died on the 31st of August, 1989.

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Introduction

It has been the fate of a number of writers, popular in the middle years of the twentieth century, to fade from public consciousness as new authors appeared, more in tune with the changed attitudes and preoccupations of recent times. Josephine Kamm (1905-1989), who lived through eight turbulent decades, and achieved what she described as ‘brief notoriety’ for the subjects she tackled in a 1960s series of novels for the group newly called ‘young adults’, is one of these. Although she wrote thirty-nine books in several genres, and still rates a mention in histories of books for the young, society has changed radically since her heyday and even her most successful novels have been long out of print.

The elder daughter of Percy Hart, a solicitor whose parents had emigrated from Bohemia to England, and Hilda née Marx, a published author of mostly light verse, Josephine was educated at Burgess Hill School in West Sussex, where the thrill of publication in the school magazine formed her ambition to be a writer. Later in life, she regretted that the school, in its early days, was not focused on academic success; denied the opportunity of a University place, she took a secretarial course and went on educating herself through reading. In 1929 she married George Kamm, an Oxford graduate destined for a distinguished career in publishing. In 1931 their only child Antony, who would inherit his father’s publishing acumen and his mother’s writing gift, was born.

Speaking of her schooldays, Josephine Kamm said that although she experienced no overt anti-semitism, she was discomfited by the awareness that as a Jewish pupil she was culturally different from her schoolmates. This doubtless contributed to her adult empathy with ‘outsiders’ and to her later writing about characters who, in an increasingly multicultural country, felt excluded from the conventional circles of British society. For although in later years she turned her attention successfully to the history of women’s education (three of her works in this genre, Indicative Past, Hope Deferred and How Different from Us were republished by Routledge between 2008 and 2012) and wrote one historical novel, Return to Freedom, about a Jewish boy living covertly in London in the 1650s, history did not provide her preferred setting for fiction. She lived in London all her days, fascinated by the interactions of city life, talking to her friends and to strangers she met at the bus stop, and relishing the sense, during the period before and after the second World War, of living at the hub of crucial events and witnessing social upheavals unimaginable in the rather staid world into which she had been born. Although the 1930s, when she did voluntary work with Jewish refugees and became aware that religious persecution was not consigned to history nor Britain immune from invasion, were an unsettling decade, it was in her nature to get on with things. When war broke out in 1939 she joined the Ministry of Information as a senior officer and pamphlet writer and had her flat bombed, as well as publishing several novels for adults, of which Peace, Perfect Peace was penultimate.

There are few people now living who can remember World War II and its aftermath, and for those of us who were children then it was unremarkable, because it was the only world we had ever known. So it is inevitable that seventy years later the ironically titled Peace, Perfect Peace, conceived as a cutting-edge take on contemporary life, will be read from the perspective of history. On one level it is a domestic tale, chronicling the loves and loves of a group of white middle-class English people, struggling to cope with the perplexities and moral choices of bourgeois society, in a country exhausted by war and unsure of the future. The plot, devoid of the overt violence and sexual tension which characterise much of our contemporary fiction, is still complex enough to hold the reader’s interest, and if the dialogue sounds somewhat mannered, it rings true to the conversation of Josephine Kamm and her circle – and is often very funny. (I can vouch for this, as I was her daughter-in-law. I am also a Scot, and, when I first met them, I found the conversation of José and her Chelsea chums both exotic and hilarious). The characters, especially the women, are fully realised in their faults as well as strengths; Peace, Perfect Peace is, in a quiet way, a feminist novel; the author was a spritely advocate of women’s rights and long-serving depute chairman of the Fawcett Library.

What sets this novel apart from many others of its time, however, is its extraordinarily acute sense of time and place, and its attention to the minutiae of life in all its bombed-out squalor, food scarcity and ‘making do’. The reader is drawn into the depressing but fascinating reality of post-war rented rooms, where ‘the bathroom [is] also the kitchen’ and a bath a weekly luxury, in a London where grime from the shattered streets seeps through ill-fitting windows and the choice in the butcher’s shop is between tripe and a thin, unappetising slice of meat pie. When the scene moves from sooty Bloomsbury to the bracing coastal resort of Seaport, elderly residents ‘never [sit] on the beach, for to reach it they would have to pass through a rusty barbed-wire entanglement’ – a relic of the inadequate defences thrown up to repel an expected German invasion.

The close examination of what mercifully was to prove a temporary world, with its clothing coupons, communal soup kitchens euphemistically rebranded as ‘British Restaurants’, trains crowded with homecoming soldiers and people tired yet optimistic of better times to come, is sometimes poignant, and often wryly comic. It is history to us, but written without the distorted nostalgia of distant memory. What we hear in Peace, Perfect Peace is the voice of a lively young woman with an observant eye, experiencing that world every day.

Eileen Kamm

CHAPTER I

She stood at the bureau absent-mindedly tracing the line of the inlay. Her eyes were half closed, her forehead furrowed and shoulders hunched. Her pose betrayed concentration and her expression showed that this concentration was distasteful or even alarming. Once or twice she moved her hands as though to open the bureau but desisted and went on with the aimless tracing. After a few minutes she turned away from the desk and took one or two hesitating steps into the middle of the room. Her face looked supremely dejected and almost ugly above a prominent chin. The corners of her long thin mouth turned sharply down. Her nose, intended by nature to be delicately retroussé, had an upward curve too sudden and pronounced to be beautiful. And yet there was something quietly attractive about her face, especially when the slanting brown eyes smiled in amusement. Only now she was not amused but scowling.

A thud on the stairs caught her ears and she turned expectantly towards the door. There was a knock and almost simultaneously the door burst open to admit a large red-faced woman in a coal-scuttle hat and a sagging tweed coat. Can I do you now, miss? asked the woman in a passable imitation of Mrs. Mopp of ITMA fame.

The relief in the girl’s face was transparent. Yes, please do. I think I’ll go out while you’re cleaning, and get some fresh air.

Might get yourself a bit of decent food while you’re about it. Starve, starve, starve, that’s what you do. Make your bacon ration last for two meals or else eat a sausage. No wonder you look like a rail! Now, take my advice and walk round to the butcher’s and get yourself a nice piece of tripe; he’s got plenty this morning. Then with that drop of milk left over from breakfast and an onion you can make yourself something really tasty and nourishing for a change. As she talked, Mrs. Mopp (whose name was Mrs. Sutcliffe) took off her coat, hat and shoes and put on an overall and a pair of carpet slippers. Then she disappeared into the inner room and came back with brooms, dusters and a pail. I shall be a full hour, Miss Ellis, so don’t you hurry back. You know my little ways. She rolled up her sleeves over fat arms and started energetically pushing the furniture about.

Clare Ellis took a coat, wound a scarf round her head and found a shopping basket. She cast a furtive glance at the bureau.

"If you think I’m going to touch that, said Mrs. Sutcliffe with good-humoured scorn, you’re much mistaken. I know my place even if others don’t. Well, good-bye, ducks, enjoy your walk and be good if you can’t be careful or some such nonsense."

Clare went down three flights of stairs to the street. On the second floor she could hear the clack of Mr. Turner’s typewriter turning out pamphlets, which no one would ever read, on how to save the world. The Simpsons’ baby wailed fretfully from the first floor and there was a strong smell of washing. There was no sound from the ground floor, where Madame Harper, pseudo-French dressmaker, stitched endlessly at too elaborate dresses.

Out in the street a fresh gust of October wind caught her, carrying a whirl of crumpled dry leaves from the plane-tree at the corner. She could see the plane-tree’s branches from her window, a pleasant enough view in the summer for they partially hid the public lavatory behind them, but in the winter by their very nakedness they seemed to accentuate the hideous red brick building in a street of Georgian houses. At its lower end the street petered out in a series of little shops. Clare passed a chemist’s shop which displayed a placard in the window saying, Sorry, no soap, a laundry with a similar placard saying, No further orders taken, and a butcher’s which said, baldly, No offal. She remembered the tripe and went a little farther to the second butcher’s shop and found the marble slab festooned with it. Nauseated, she went inside and at the end of the queue bought a slice of meat pie, determined not to confess to Mrs. Sutcliffe that she had been unable to face the nourishing tripe. At the greengrocer’s there was a notice saying: Tomatoes for registered customers only. As she always bought her vegetables there Clare assumed that she might rank as a registered customer, but the greengrocer thought otherwise and she came away with an earthy head of celery. The ironmonger’s was an oasis; no queue and stocked with rarities like salt, matches, soda and toilet rolls. Clare spent a few minutes chatting with the old man who owned it, fascinated by his habit of shooting out his false teeth and then reclaiming them with a flick of the tongue. I like to please, said Mr. Rawlins with a convulsive jerk of his mouth. And what I always say is ‘sell what you’ve got while you’ve got it.’

She would have lingered longer but another customer came in and so she drifted out into the street again and round some of the shabby, war-scarred squares of Bloomsbury which still uphold the shreds of their older dignity. But she saw nothing and scarcely knew where she walked, for her mind, riveted on the closed bureau, was filled with anxiety and a fascinated distaste. As the church clock struck twelve, she squared her shoulders and turned purposefully homewards, pushing open the front door and taking the stairs two at a time. Her room smelled of furniture polish and the violets on the mantelpiece which, half-dead, spread a far stronger scent than they had in their heyday. The round table gleamed and the upright chairs glowed with polish, but the bureau, in token of Mrs. Sutcliffe’s defiance, was lifeless and dull. Two comfortable cretonne-covered armchairs were drawn up on either side of the hearth. Mrs. Sutcliffe had lit the fire and already the flames were turning from lemon to red, and the logs were crackling and spitting. Very soon the scent of burning wood was added to the scent of furniture polish and violets, in a peaceful, lazy blending. Clare looked at the bureau and decided that she might as well have lunch. Macaroni cheese, and leave the pie for the evening when she might be too busy to cook.

The kitchen, which was also the bathroom, was dark and stuffy. The wooden board which served as a table had been known to turn turtle and cascade crockery into the bath beneath it. The clothes-line stretching from door to window was weighted with underwear, stockings, towels and tea-cloths which seemed to Clare to be imbued with an evil life of their own, for she seldom came into the kitchen without receiving a slap in the face from a tea-cloth or an enveloping embrace from a bath-towel. Now as she bent over the gas stove, which the landlord had thoughtfully placed in the darkest corner of the room, a stocking dripped playfully down the back of her neck. Frowning, she pushed it away and another promptly took its place.

Clare was by no means a bad cook, but left to herself with no one else to cook for she lived for the most part on a series of inadequate and tasteless dishes. The sauce which she made for the macaroni cheese was lumpy and the macaroni itself barely cooked, but she ate it mechanically and, not unnaturally, without appetite and then heated the remains of the breakfast coffee. As she smoked and sipped the coffee she looked at the empty armchair opposite and her mind strayed for a moment from the contents of her desk. How many times had Matthew sat there as near to the fire as he could get, and would he sit there again? Did she really want him back or would the absence of his alternating moods of demand and neglect be a relief and not a pain? She shrugged her shoulders and thought how ridiculous it was that at thirty-five she was so clever and reasonable at handling other people’s love-affairs but so childish and stupid over her own. Anyhow, if Matthew wanted to come back he would come in his own good time, and if she wanted—or felt strong enough—to turn him away she was free to do so. This sort of situation had happened before and would happen again, many times as far as she could see. It would be useless to try and force the issue and worse than useless to agonize over something which she could not control. And yet, useless though it was, she knew that sooner or later she would try and force the issue. Meanwhile, there was so much to do. Wrenching her thoughts away from the mundane strain of loving a married man, she put down her coffee-cup and opened the bureau. Inside lay sheets of paper neatly clipped or pinned together. All of them were typewritten, but while some were covered and heavily scored in places others carried only a few words. Selecting a number of sheets Clare spread them round her and started to read, an anxious expression settling on her face. As she read, anxiety turned to hopelessness. Everything was there; it must be there if only she could find it, but she had been looking now for two months and had made no headway in the search.

Thinking back over those two months and the labour they represented, she came to the hot summer’s day which in her own mind had been labelled milestone. She had spent the morning clearing up arrears in the Government department where she had worked for the past six years. The minutes she wrote and attached to files were crisp and tersely written as always, but they were a trifle tart and in places undeniably flippant. I have endeavoured, she wrote, over a period of some months to disentangle the conflicting expressions of opinion and the decisions which have apparently been taken on one (to me) perfectly simple point. I can only say now that I disagree with all of them and express the hope that my successor will succeed where I have failed. She had little hope that her successor would succeed in this particular job or in any other. He was a timid little man of about sixty who had just been axed as redundant from another section, and the word redundant had evidently eaten into his soul for he behaved as though he expected any minute to be kicked out of the door. And that’s exactly what they will do to him, thought Clare, if he doesn’t assert himself. She wished she could do more to help him before she left, and had already hinted that an attitude of general subservience would bring him to disaster in a department where toughness and an ability to scheme counted more than courtesy and efficiency. If there’s ever anything I can do to help, she had said, don’t hesitate to let me know. For a week or so there had been a little spate of notes about procedure on unimportant questions. Then the notes had ceased and she supposed that Mr. Blackman had either decided to carve out his own line of approach or else was allowing the waters of intrigue to close over his head.

Mr. Blackman had been one of the people generously thronging her mind at the time. She had only known him for a day but she knew—or thought she knew—all about his amiable but managing wife, his sons in the Army who called him affectionately old stick-in-the-mud, the suburban house into which he had sunk his savings, and the garden, his hope and pride. It was this trick of creating settings for people she hardly knew that had drawn Clare into writing a novel the year before the war had started. The result caused some reviewers to say she had exceptional promise and others that the book was facile and meant very little. The one thing common to all the reviews was an insistence that the author’s testing time lay ahead in her second or third novel. In order to prove that this was no flash in the pan Clare had immediately begun a second book, but the war had started and with it came a full-time job and Matthew. The novel was put aside and its shape had dwindled and finally been lost. But, of course, I shall write again when I can escape from here, Clare had told her office friends, and they had agreed, for they thought her clever if a little unusual.

A timely attack of measles had produced a doctor’s certificate to the effect that Miss Ellis was no longer fit to undertake a full-time job and so she applied for, and gained, her release. On her last afternoon a