Woman of Glenshiels - Lennox Kerr, 1935

This novel is about the tribulations and aspirations of a working class woman, Mary Bassett, within a system that constantly denies aspiration. The story follows her from adolescence to maturity, ending with the depression years of 1933-4, contemporary with the writing of the novel. The Scots town is no doubt similar to the Paisley were the writer was brought up and lived at the time of writing. It is not a 'socialist' book, but a story of working class struggle that includes scenes which comment on socialism. The heroine, Mary is not  ideological but pragmatic. She has her own views, which she will argue dogmatically: these are not given as the author's views, and although we readers may understand how she has reached them, we also may not agree with them. They show rather a working class woman trying to work things out. Although this struggle is general, the background is Scottish in two main ways, the place of religion in the social fabric, and the use of the Glasgow dialect throughout the dialogue. The readerly ear tunes into this, and it is not a drawback.
Young Mary walks out with Donald, a socialist whose dreams is to line up the bosses and shoot them. His mother was a socialist, his father a pacifist. He believed that the 1914-18 war was no concern of the working man. He didn't believe that private property was morally owned. Mary constantly nibbled away at his socialism and he constantly compromised, without changing deep down. He refused to sign up as soldier and was given a white feather. The story shows the pressure that Mary came under through her peer group, "the Table" [i.e. the women working at the same table].and hence the pressure she brought to bear on Donald. Such women's groups are called "the real parliament" where decisions are made whilst men focus on football, drink and work. Donald signed up and was killed within five days of arriving at the front. Ironically, as he became one of the boys, Mary didn't like what he had become. We see her  gradually justifying her opinions to herself, and telling herself that their relationship would not have worked. The issue did not fully resolve itself to the end of the book.
Mary worked in a cooked meat factory making veal, much as the author had done in his youth. She had a work ethic and a respect for her employer, whom she saw as a fellow worker (his lack of employer's drive led to bankruptcy, as Donald said it would). She was no shirker. Gradually she built up for herself a well-furnished sitting room in her father's house out of her earnings, ensuring its tidiness with dragon-like control even of her father. When she married Dan, this furniture was taken lock stock and barrel to her own house. She remembered times her parents had no furniture, having to tiptoe so neighbours did not realise they had no carpets, and was determined to ensure she could keep up appearances.
By the time she married Dan she was emotionally hard and brittle. They had a girl and a boy. Dan was Labour, not, he said, a communist. She was impressed by his emphasis on the need for collective bargaining and declared a support for Labour politics. However, she believed that the unemployed were at fault for not seeking work, much because Dan had a relatively safe and protected job. However, when his shipyard closed down and he could not find a replacement job, she attempted a doorstep sales business. When he couldn't sell her stock, she took to the road herself and realised both the impossibility of her self-help plan, and that closures were not the worker's fault. She returned to her meat factory, which was already failing as the veal remained unsold. She noticed that processes were inefficient and forced the younger workers to work more efficiently, which resulted in finishing early rather than as before spreading the same work over the day. The factory folded. The owner was too soft hearted and should have raised efficiency and cut staff.
The book reaches a crisis when her daughter failed to thrive and the doctor blamed under-nutrition because she was feeding her inappropriate foods. In this extract, the young doctor had given a passionate speech about social inequity and malnutrition:

Her cold determination shocked the man from his passion. He watched her curiously and saw the firm mouth, the burning eyes and that wide impressive forehead. From her he felt force and strength like an armour, a weapon thrusting. 'You've taught me a lesson, Doctor,' she said vibrantly. 'I was content to be like the others. I took what I got and made the best of it. I forgot for a while....But you've woke me up again. I drapped the fight but I can start again. Ther's money tae be had and I'll get it....If I have to work my flesh away....My bairns'll get what they need.'  He was slightly shocked. He wished he had not let himself go. In this woman was a quality that made him apprehensive. She would stop at nothing, he thought; she is fierce as an animal. God help those who stand in her way. [p.261]

 To provide the children with a more varied diet, Mary took a domestic job whilst Dan was 'on the Parish': this led to a court-case for fraud as this income was not declared. An official had spoken to the small son at the door and been told that his mother was at work. The court-case underlined how the system made it impossible to people to help themselves, and how current policies were leading to major child malnutrition in working class families. If you can't look after your family, Dan was told, they will be taken into care. They were fined £10; to pay Mary had to sell her furniture: she knew she was being swindled, but had no choice. Full circle. There the book ends.

Glenshiels - James Lennox Kerr 1932

I surveyed the various works of JLK some years ago (here at http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/248) and am returning to his adult fiction in the 1930-40 period. He is noted as a Scottish socialist writer, which is vague enough to be not untrue.

Glenshiels (John Lane The Bodley Head, 1932) is an early work and rooted in his memories of childhood in Paisley near Glasgow. It is heralded as an outstanding Scottish novel by such as J B Priestley and Compton Mackenzie. It went into a second impression in 1932. It is now totally forgotten, such is the fickleness of public taste.

It is a story of a working class family in a small Scottish town, alert always to what other people might say about them, and keen to put on a prosperous face. The author ran away to sea just from such a place in 1916. The plot has a circularity, as we shall see, as class attitudes are reproduced across generations.

The dramatis personae are: Hector Mackinley (his first name never again mentioned) who lived with his wife and family in a three roomed tenement. Daughter Winnie was 16, son Sam aged 8. Mackinley was a bombastic bully, without a pleasant thing to say to or about his wife, and threatening to thrash his children, even spanking his daughter's naked bottom in the street. We never learn Mrs Mackinley's first name. The family relationship was based on fear. Mackinley also bullied other men, being particularly hard on 'Socialists' who in his view supported scroungers. His 'besting' of a Socialist supporter in the early pages returns throughout the book as a sort of chorus. 

The opening scene is of the Town going to church, in their best clothes and putting on their best airs and graces. This Sunday is described in ritual terms, the procession to church, the stilted conversations, the behaviour in the service, the thanking of the minister, and the procession home. This was something that is 'done' without any involvement of niceness or ethics. Bullying the socialist is part of the Mackinley Sunday ritual, as Socialists are clearly ungodly.

The after church walk also reveal attitudes and prejudices. One side of the road was considered posher than the other - you could expect very little from the folks 'over there'. Although Mrs M expressed concern about the poor bairns in the streets, Mr M had a very clear view: 

"Mackinley, to whom such poverty only made more conscious of his own worthiness, grunted impatiently, "It's their own fault ...they had as much chance as others. If they spent less in the public houses..."

The story follows Sam into adolescence, meeting Agnes and becoming a street lad. Then part 3 follows Winnie, as a shop assistant (a job she enjoys) walking out with friends and becoming the target for a grotesque lad John, a butcher's apprentice (as JLK had been once). We are not told, but get the impression, that he raped her and she fell pregnant. Although he was not pleasant even when courting, John considered himself trapped (the pregnancy was clearly Winnie's fault, done deliberately to catch him) and most surly. The wedding had to be rushed, the pregnancy never admitted but understood by everyone. Mackinley funded a lavish wedding, not out of affection but for public show. Sam got drunk and spoilt all that - we never hear the consequnces. Winnie had to give up work on marriage. Her husband John was the same bully her father was, and the same stultifying bore, to be scivied for, pampered, but never loved in return.

The story ends with a hard edge, Winnie realising that the housewife's life was very boring, and her mother visiting. Mrs M asked her outright when the baby was due. After she left, Winnie broke down, sobbing:

"The auld bitch!" she cried, despairingly. "The auld bitch... she knew all the time".

Curtain, the book ends with that expression of family tenderness. Nevertheless, Mrs M is presented as the person to be most pitied, with the realisation that her pointless life would be reproduced by her daughter Winnie.

Underground Europe Calling

A book of this title was written by Oscar Paul (pseudonum for Oscar Pollak, born 1893), former editor of the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung (workers newspaper), a socialist paper, published early in 1942 by Victor Gollancz. Clearly he was an editor in exile. This is an optimistic book, certain that the rule of fascism would be ended by a workers revolution. In a sense, the task of defeating Nazism was a massive one, given the Nazi machinery that had been established. The story emerges of how the little people, the working and middle classes, would pull together to put right the ravages of war after the war was over. The author was deliberately vague about whether capitalism would be overturned - that would be the decision of the revolution itself.

It is a tragedy that ordinary decent people in Germany and Austria did not rise up in protest about what they clearly knew - as some did in Poland, Denmark and Norway. To rise up was to commit suicide and endanger one's family. Acts of resistance had to be small and unnoticeable, or at least untraceable. Unfortunately one had to be brave even to consider it, and the result was no opposition to a murderous ruling class. Paul ended his vision by looking after the war to how ordinary people would come together in international rebuilding. The former enemy would be clothed, housed and fed as fellow workers worthy of solidarity. We think of German and Japanese reconstruction, of the Berlin air lift. The sense of healing and reconsiliation during the early decades after the war was remarkable. The grossly guilty, Mengele, Eichmann, Goering and the others, were pursued but many others were re-educated and returned to a productive life. This book suggests that a new labour movement will emerge after the war, that there is no return to the status quo before Fascism. This movement should grow beyond national borders so it will operate in a pan-European and global theatre.

In the post-war period, in Britain, austerity still continued, food and manufactured goods were in short supply, and land-girls were still needed up to 1951. People may have wanted to forget the war as quickly as possible, but the effects of war affected everyone's lives. David Kynaston's A World to Build: Austerity Britain 1945-48 is a good next place to go.