I’ve never made any secret of my view that my CertEd teacher training course at Bishop Otter College, Chichester (1965-8) was not fit for purpose. But it did have its moments – occasionally. One of these fell in my second year when they invited in three Sussex-based writers of children’s books in to talk to us about literature for children. The three were Rosemary Sutcliffe, Brian Wildsmith and Ian Serrallier. I was riveted. Soon after, a group of us who were musically inclined were asked to go weekly for half a term to Singleton Primary School to help teach the children a cantata written for them by Ian Serraillier who lived in the village.

A year later found me floundering in a Deptford boys secondary school (see my memoir Please Miss We’re Boys, Book Guild, 2019) which was a bit – ahem – different from rural Sussex.  But in the English Department stock cupboard I found a familiar name: Ian Serraillier. I seized upon The Silver Sword to read with my own first year (year 7) English classes. From that point on I probably read it twenty or thirty times because, a popular text, it was in other schools I taught in later too.

At Christmas just gone my niece, who teaches Year 5, told me that she was about to embark on a World War 2 project. She’d been recommended to The Silver Sword. Did I know it? It led to a bit of a brainstorming session between her and me about what else she might also use and left me yearning to reread my old favourite – which I have now done.

The new copy I bought includes an afterword from Ian Serraillier’s daughter, Jane Serraillier Grossfeld from which I learned several things I didn’t know. For example, he was a pacifist and an officially registered conscientious object during the war who did Air Raid Precautions work, lent his car to the Friends Ambulance Unit and went on teaching English. As a student he had travelled and camped along the route which features in The Silver Sword so he knew the area well.

Written in 1956, The Silver Sword is a gentle book of its time – the background issues are horrific but Serraillier focuses for the most part on kindness and decency. A family in Nazi-occupied Warsaw is split up in the middle of the war: the teacher father is sent to prison for refusing to have Hitler’s face on his classroom wall and the mother is arrested and sent to Germany as a land slave. The three children avoid being blown up in the house by escaping over the roofs. Later they team up with Jan who, by chance, has met their father. The Russian army liberates Warsaw and, after a couple of years of living in the cellar of a bombsite, they set off to Switzerland where they believe they might be reunited with their parents. Thereafter it’s a quest story with episodes en route such as meeting a friendly English Officer in Berlin and a kindly farmer named Wolff in Bavaria. The titular silver sword is a paper knife which once belonged to the children’s mother. Found by Janin the rubble,  it becomes a symbol of hope.

The tension is tautly done – at one point they have to negotiate a river with rapids in canoes and they very nearly don’t make it across Lake Constance. And of course, not everyone they meet is sympathetic. The Burgomaster, for example, is tasked with the job of rounding up Polish refugees and sending them back to Poland, regardless of their stories. And the middle child, Edek who – captured by the Nazis, spent two years in Germany slaving on the land while his sisters lived in the Warsaw cellar – has tuberculosis and is seriously ill so his condition is, in a sense, another enemy.

But the best thing is the characterisation. Jan is a ragamuffin, parentless thief who has a gift with animals. Until he gradually learns to trust and respect Ruth and begins very slowly to trust her, he is a loose cannon but oh such fun and so likeable. Ruth is fifteen when she becomes the family’s quasi mother and for a very long time shoulders the responsibility with extraordinary maturity – driven by the Christian values instilled by her parents.

Modern children might be puzzled about where everyone went to the loo in a crowded train truck on a nine day journey to Berlin – and a 21^st century novelist would probably tell them.  It’s a bit odd that the older ones can and do sometimes still carry Bronia  when she’s six years old. Nobody ever swears.  And there are other details which now seem a bit quaint but they matter very little. This is still a very heart warming tale from which today’s children will learn much about what happened in Europe during and after the war. It’s still topical too. In 2022 there are unaccompanied child refugees travelling in dangerous conditions across Europe in search of a better life. And yes I could never read the last few pages aloud in class without an audible lump in my throat. Even reading it now alone and silently I got something in my eye which is good going for a book now 66 years old – and as familiar as a favourite old coat.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

All dystopian novels are warnings. And Brave New World is the grandfather of them all. Rereading it after many years, I am astonished by the things which Aldous Huxley was pessimistic about as long ago as 1932. He was writing fourteen years after the end of the First World War and seven years before the start of the second – and in the middle of a global financial crisis.

We move six centuries into the future to discover Huxley’s world in which there is no religion except for the worship of practical, pragmatic Henry Ford – “Our Ford” – and “his Fordship”. The change of initial consonant is both witty and plausible. No one is conceived or born naturally. People are bred in bottles to be one of five castes and therefore totally fitted for the life ahead of them. The word “mother” is an unspeakable obscenity. Promiscuous sex is encouraged as part of civilised life and everyone takes a mind altering drug “soma” to maintain serenity.

That’s an extremely abbreviated and banal account of the exposition. Then, of course, the boat starts to rock. Bernard Marx, hasn’t quite been conditioned fully (an error in the doses he was given before and after “decanting” or in the many thousands of night messages fed into his infant brain) and starts to ask questions. He and a reluctant young woman named Lenina visit one of the world’s only Savage Reservations (in Mexico). There they meet John and – shock horror – his mother.

John, known back in London when they bring him, simply as The Savage has read Shakespeare – a tattered old copy which turned up in the rubbish, All such subversive books have been banned for centuries. For entertainment “civilised” people have synthesised music and “Feelies” – films which give you a physical erotic sensation as long as you hold on to the arm rests in your seat.

Of course, like all the best dystopian novels this is actually a deeply thoughtful discussion about what really matters. And although the ending is a depressingly negative one the answer is that the power of the imagination and qualities such as love and loyalty are what make us fully human. Again and again – John makes you grin by coming up with an apt Shakespeare line to refute the (literally) soulless way of life he’s encountering.

What Brave New World is saying – and it’s extraordinarily topical just now – is that we have to put up with illness, pain, loss and inconvenience. They are part of being human and the pay off for togetherness, creativity, deep shared experience (such as seeing Romeo and Juliet or King Lear) which speaks to our innermost selves and much more. If you try to eliminate all discomfort and substitute artificial “happiness” you are not human any more.

Nearly thirty years after Brave New World, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited in which he looked to see how many of his predictions had come true and found that many had.  Today it’s even truer. Overpopulation was, and is, a serious problem. The rubbish played when you’re on hold is exactly like the “music” in Brave New World. IVF technology develops every year. Cannabis will probably be decriminalised very soon. And so on and on.

There is also his last novel, Island (1962) in which he presents a Utopia – an alternative outcome to his dystopian world. I read it – but only once, I think – in my youth. I’m planning to get back to it and to explore Brave New World Revisited later this year.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier

Keen readers of this blog might remember that in September 2021 I wrote about Lady Chatterley’s Lover which I had just reread after many years away from it.  Unbeknown to me, Alison Macleod’s novel Tenderness – a magnificently ambitious response to Lawrence, his novel and its long term impact –  was published in the same month. It was well reviewed but somehow it didn’t cross my bows and I missed it.

Then came a bit of serendipity. Alison Macleod lives in Brighton where my son Felix did a job in her house last autumn. They got chatting about her work and my interest in Lawrence. Perhaps she was surprised that a jobbing plumber could discuss such things but hey – look who brought him up!  Anyway the upshot was a signed copy of this impressive book under the Christmas tree for me in Felix’s house last month. And what a welcome surprise it was.

It’s a historical novel which unfolds in three sections but she plays with chronology and the strands intercut each other. First we meet Lawrence in the 1920s (and before) when the tuberculosis which killed him in 1930 is beginning to bite as he moves, usually impoverished from place to place at the behest of friends. For one summer he and his difficult wife Frieda lived in Sussex as guests of the Mynell family. This is one of the novel’s many “Oh yes, moments” I read Alice Meynell’s poetry when I was doing my MA in 19^th century poetry and I knew of her son-in-law Perceval Lucas because he was a collector friend of Cecil Sharp and my parents were keen members of the English Folk Dance and Song Society when I was growing up – the novel is stuffed with such names and connections. Eventually when Lawrence was living in Florence his last novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published privately in 1928 – regarded as so obscene in some quarters that it was risky to send it through the post.

The second strand of the novel takes us to the USA where Macleod develops an engaging subplot having discovered that the 1960 obscenity trial was closely followed by J Edward Hoover as head of the FBI. Her fictional interpretation is that he planned to use Jacqueline Kennedy’s “unhealthy” interest in “a dirty book” as a means of scuppering her husband’s election as president that same year. Undercurrents abound as we are led to speculate on the Kennedy marriage, Hoover’s sexuality and much more. It’s fiction but the research is immaculate.

Finally comes a warm and exciting account of the London trial itself – attended, in a sense, by Lawrence’s ghost.  Like Macleod, before she began researching Tenderness, I had assumed that Penguin Books went into the trial certain that they’d win, perhaps using it as a way of finally establishing freedom of expression for future books. Not a bit of it. It was, apparently, a nail bitingly close thing with Mervyn Griffith-Jones, for the prosecution, throwing in a sodomy trump card at the eleventh hour. There was even a real fear that Sir Allen Lane, founder and owner of Penguin Books, could be deemed personally responsible and sent to prison. In the event, of course, the jury ignored the summing up and returned a not-guilty verdict thereby changing the course of publishing history.

I enjoyed every word of this 600 page brick of a book. “Tenderness” was Lawrence’s original title for Lady Chatterley’s Lover and of course there’s a great deal of exactly that in both Lawrence’s most famous book and in Macleod’s take on it. Sex between committed adults is a pure expression of feeling and why not use straightforward vocabulary to describe it? Marriage, on the other hand, is often anything but pure as Macleod  makes us see again and again whether it’s the strained relationship Lawrence has with Frieda, Connie Chatterley’s marriage to the impotent Sir Clifford or the Kennedy situation in which he is mostly out on the campaign trail and she is elsewhere, pregnant and wondering.

I also fell in love with Macleod’s version of Lawrence himself – gentle, kind and witty despite being misunderstood and ill. This is one of those rare books which made me feel sad and bereft at the end because I’d finished it and would have to move on.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.