The Triple Echo

By H.E. Bates

Published in 1970, The Triple Echo was Bates's last significant novella, but one which he described as taking twenty-five years to complete.

Set in the 1940s, the wife of a war prisoner lives in desperate loneliness and fear on an isolated farmstead. She encounters a young farmboy completely out of his element as a soldier, and the two carve out a relationship in defiance of the war around them. His decision to escape the military and to dress as his lover's sister to avoid detection eventually leads to tragedy.

In a late essay Bates discusses the long evolution of the story's plot, conceived in 1943 with two sisters and completed in 1968 with just one, in what Bates calls 'an exceptional example of stumbling and groping or, if you will, of my own prolonged stupidity.'

A film version starring Oliver Reed, Brian Deacon, and Glenda Jackson was premiered in November 1972, and issued in the United States with the title Soldiers in Skirts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Dec 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781448216635

H.E. Bates

H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse. Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside. His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed. During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym 'Flying Officer X'. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (1950). Other well-known novels include Love for Lydia (1952) and The Feast of July (1954). His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with The Darling Buds of May in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success. Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being The Purple Plain (1947) starring Gregory Peck, and The Triple Echo (1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed. H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.

Book preview

The Triple Echo

H. E. Bates

Contents

Foreword by Lesley Pearse

A Note from the Family

The Triple Echo

A Note on the Author

Foreword

I have always believed that H.E. Bates was the absolute master of short story writing. He managed to create a little world for you to enter into, and that soft focus world would stay with you long after you’d finished the story.

When I first started writing I tried my hand at short stories, assuming quite wrongly it would be easier than attempting a book. Bates was my guiding light; there appeared to be a simplicity about his work that I sought to emulate. I did get a few short stories accepted by magazines, but they could never be in his league. I certainly never created anything as lovely as ‘The Watercress Girl’. Did any writer before or since? I think I found it in a magazine and read it curled up in my aunt’s spare room one wet school holiday and then went on to rush to the library to find more of his work. Fair Stood the Wind for France was the first book I borrowed and I was totally hooked on his work, but it was always the short stories I really admired the most.

Lesley Pearse, 2015

A Note from the Family

My grandfather, although best known and loved by many readers all over the world for creating the Larkin family in his bestselling novel The Darling Buds of May, was also one of the most prolific English short story writers of the twentieth century, often compared to Chekhov. He wrote over 300 short stories and novellas in a career spanning six decades from the 1920s through to the 1970s.

My grandfather’s short fiction took many different forms, from descriptive country sketches to longer, sometimes tragic, narrative stories, and I am thrilled that Bloomsbury Reader will be reissuing all of his stories and novellas, making them available to new audiences, and giving them – especially those that have been out of print for many years or only ever published in obscure magazines, newspapers and pamphlets – a new lease of life.

There are hundreds of stories to discover and re-discover, from H. E. Bates’s most famous tales featuring Uncle Silas, or the critically acclaimed novellas such as The Mill and Dulcima, to little, unknown gems such as ‘The Waddler’, which has not been reprinted since it first appeared in the Guardian in 1926, when my grandfather was just twenty, or ‘Castle in the Air’, a wonderful, humorous story that was lost and unknown to our family until 2013.

If you would like to know more about my grandfather’s work I encourage you to visit the H.E. Bates Companion – a brilliant comprehensive online resource where detailed bibliographic information, as well as articles and reviews, on almost all of H. E. Bates’s publications, can be found. I hope you enjoy reading all these evocative and vivid short stories by H. E. Bates, one of the masters of the art.

Tim Bates, 2015

We would like to spread our passion for H. E. Bates’s short fiction and build a community of readers with whom we can share information on forthcoming publications, exclusive material such as free downloads of rare stories, and opportunities to win memorabilia and other exciting prizes – you can sign up to the H. E. Bates’s mailing list here. When you sign up you will immediately receive an exclusive short work by H. E. Bates.

The Triple Echo

‘My husband’s a prisoner with the Japs. I’ll probably never see him again. That’s all I know.’

The farm was one of those small half-lost farms that are cut off from main roads in summer by dense barriers of beech and chestnut and repeatedly in winter by mud and fog and snow. The red-brick two-storied house and its one barn had once been thatched. Now both had a roof of corrugated iron that shone harsh grey in the summer sun and lay on them in winter like a rusting, crumbling crown.

The war was already nearly three years old when Alice Charlesworth started the hard slog of running the place herself. Even before her husband was a prisoner with the Japs all she had for company was a cow, a couple of dozen hens and a terrier that hunted the rats that infested the hen-run. The blow of losing her husband to the Japs was followed by the blow of losing the terrier when it severed a leg in a gin-trap she had set for hares. She promptly shot the dog with a double-barrelled shot-gun and after that she was quite alone except for the hens, the cow and the rats that she shot too as they came out to prowl in the hour before darkness.

She looked, if anything, rather older than her twenty-seven years. She had thick cottony black hair. She always wore dull brown denim trousers and a thick dark green sweater. Her black gum-boots were always caked with mud. The oak-brown skin of her face and arms was rough. Her eyes too were brown. Normally they were keen and warm, but sometimes as she stared down the white chalk hillside at the vast expanse of valley below they also had something of the lost glassiness seen in the eyes of birds imprisoned in cases, with only dead grass and ferns for company.

Most evenings she got into the habit, like the rats, of prowling about the place. She always carried the shot-gun. The first fears of German invasion were over by that time but, she told herself, you never knew. If there were no unexpected parachutists

Reviews for The Triple Echo

[fliss88_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good writer can say so much with few words. This tiny book, only 90 pages long, packs quite a punch and the reason for the title is rather haunting when all is revealed. Fate brings two people together. Alice is a lonely woman, forced through circumstance to live and work alone on her farm, and Barton a homesick soldier. Barton is happier and less stressed spending time with Alice, helping run the farm, than struggling with the rigid relentlessness of army life. His decision to go AWOL, because of a growing affection between them has irreversible consequences. It was made into a film in 1972 staring Glenda Jackson. I haven’t seen it.

[devenish_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The scene is an isolated farm deep in the English countryside,owned by a woman who runs the place completely on her own.It is three years into the Second World War when the life of this woman is disturbed by the arrival of a young man. She starts off distrusting him,but soon falls in love. She then learns that he is an army deserter and decides to shelter and hide him from the authorities.This is a typical Bates short novel which is beautifully told and which can be read again and again with pleasure.