Review: Vivien Horler
Our Noble Selves, by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday/Penguin)
In 1947, shortly after six years of devastating war, the idea was mooted to hold a “festival of Britain” scheduled for 1951, partly to celebrate the century since Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition, and partly to cheer everyone up.
The main exhibition centre was to be on the south bank of the Thames, more or less across from the Houses of Parliament, which previously had been an area of warehouses and housing. Other exhibitions and festivities were to be held around the country, including in Edinburgh and Northern Ireland. Pleasure gardens – featuring a fun fair – were set up in Battersea Park, a few kilometres upriver.
The apparently shambolic organisation of this festival is at the heart of Kate Atkinson’s delightful Our Noble Selves, which features a cast of extraordinary characters including a 13-year-old girl called Veronica who has a strong sense of justice and a habit of getting her own way.
Harry Flynn had a tough war. A journalist, he was sent to Singapore as a war correspondent just before the fall of the territory to the Japanese and, instead of being interned, was mistaken for a serving military officer and sent to work on the killer Burma Railway as a prisoner of war.
He comes home, damaged in body and soul, and finds an undemanding job in a printing works. He also finds himself married to war widow who comes complete with a house, a daughter – Veronica – a dog and a lawn. He thinks this will be healing, but it is not, and soon afterwards he moves to a small flat in Soho.
One day in 1949, while eating a lunch sandwich in St James Park while watching some moorhens, he is accosted by his old boss, the editor of the News Chronicle, who had assumed he was dead. Today Gerald Barry is director of the planned Festival of Britain, and he offers Flynn a job – compiling a festival anthology of poetry written by a motley bunch of aspiring British poets.
To his own surprise, Flynn accepts, and two years later is ensconced in Savoy Court, next to the Savoy Hotel, home of the Festival Office and just a short walk across the river, via a war-era Bailey Bridge, to the festival site.
Flynn shares an office with two others, all damaged to some extent by the war. Their job is “relief” – doing all the bits and pieces of festival business no one else wants to.
There is Badger, posh, who did something secret and when asked about his war experiences cites the Official Secrets Act and routinely replies: “I couldn’t possibly say.” His job is to help assess the wild and wonderful items the British public send in to be housed in the Eccentrics’ Corner; submissions include a collapsible rubber bus (to fit under bridges) and a festival emblem composed of 604 gallstones, all from one patient. (Neither is accepted.)
Then there is gloomy Evans, a former lay preacher who spent a week in a lifeboat after his merchant ship was torpedoed in the Arctic, watching his fellow survivors die. And there is the Boy, a 14-year-old Cockney messenger-cum-facilitator who knows all there is to know about what is going on in Savoy Court. Evans is trying to take the Boy in hand.
Someone sends in a model of the South Bank site made entirely of soft toilet rolls (as opposed to those awful shiny rolls older Brits and visitors to Brtain might remember). It too is rejected – and the Boy disposes of the soft rolls to a variety of grateful recipients.
There are hilarious moments. At one point their boss, Denholm, remembers the tedium of middle class Sunday afternoons in the front parlour: “The Boy yelped with laughter. Apparently this is a euphemism used by his sisters for an unmentionable part of their anatomy. Evans slapped him on the back of his head.”
During the same conversation, Denholm asks Evans to be in charge of all the pageants to be held across England, um, Britain, as part of the festival. “ ‘I thought you would be the perfect person to pilot the provinces through the process of pageant production.’ With an effort, Denholm pulled himself out of the mire of alliteration…”
Apart from being in charge of the anthology, Flynn is also the liaison man for the Rooms, an exhibition of typical British household rooms, such as “bed-sitting room for two school-age boys”.
And the final member of the office is the impressive Miss Ogilvie, small, sharp, elderly, and assigned to help the office meet their deadlines. When Evans notes that Miss Ogilvie seems, like the Boy, to know a lot about what is going on, she says severely: “I pay attention, Mr Evans.”
When Miss Ogilvie is out of the office during her lunch hour, Badger observes: “Starchy sort, isn’t she?”
More or less superimposed on all of this is a bit of a weird number, the disappearance of a French festival staffer called Delphine with whom Flynn had a drink, saw her into a taxi, and then remembers nothing until the next morning when he wakes up, in his flat, covered in blood and with two black eyes.
And I’ve barely mentioned step-daughter Veronica who is abruptly deposited on Flynn’s doorstep by his estranged wife for a couple of weeks while she goes off to Europe with Flynn’s successor. Veronica’s dogmatism and determination to clear his name manages to crack Flynn’s withered heart wide open.
In her author’s note Atkinson says she always feels awkward about making up stuff in historical fiction. “In the case of the Festival of Britain, however, I came across so much material that was strange and quirky (often by design, on the part of the Festival) that sometimes the things I was making up seemed qite dull in comparison… In fact, really, the only thing I made up was the plot to fit round all this.”
I thoroughly enjoyed Our Noble Selves – it is charming and quirky and wry. I could have lost the murder plot – the tale of the incoherence and bumbling and ultimate success of the festival could have carried the book on its own. Remember 2012, the British TV series about the London Olympics starring Hugh Bonneville of Downton Abbey fame? This book is a bit like that – a delight.
- Our Noble Selves was one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for October.