But Dy is bored by Roe’s tales, is uncomprehending, and is made uncomfortable by his broken emotion. When his eyes fill with tears, she draws back, and becomes more conventionally “brisk.” “Darling, you mustn’t let it get you down,” she says, when he tells her about Shiner’s death, as if he were talking about having lost his wallet. He angrily accuses her of interpreting everything much too “prosaically,” a charge she fails, or refuses, to understand. If the traditional gender roles have been confused here, so too have the social idiolects: Dy, in her limited way, sounds conventionally upper class, while Roe, in expansion, has taken on some of the tortured loquacity, now in a tragic rather than comic key, of the late Mr. Pye.

And this is where Caught ends: two characters in 1940, standing in the English countryside, both caught—caught in their different genders and experiences; and caught in their separate languages, each language differently inadequate to the massive task of witness that still lies ahead. What is growing up between them, still in its early life, like lilac on a bomb site, is a third language, the novel’s, or perhaps we should say the author’s—a heightened, parenthetical, intermittent, garish poetry, full of flaming reflections.

—JAMES WOOD

CAUGHT

This book is about the Auxiliary Fire Service which saved London in her night blitzes, and bears no relation, or resemblance, to the National Fire Service, which took over when raids on London had ended.

The characters, while founded on the reality of that time, are not drawn from life. They are all imaginary men and women. In this book only 1940 in London is real. It is the effect of that time that I have written into the fiction of Caught.

—H. G.

WHEN WAR broke out in September we were told to expect air raids. Christopher, who was five, had been visiting his grandparents in the country. His father and mother decided that he must stay down there with his aunt, and not come back to London until the war was over. His mother, Dy, went away to join him.

The father, Richard Roe, had joined the Fire Service as an Auxiliary. He was allowed one day’s leave in three. That is, throughout forty-eight hours he stood by in case there should be a fire, and then had twenty-four in which he could do as he pleased. There were no week-ends off. Public holidays were not recognised. The trains at once became so slow that there was no way he could get down to see Christopher in a day.

Christopher was like any other child of his age, not very interested or interesting, strident with health. He enjoyed teasing and was careful no one should know what he felt.