In your story “Vincent’s Party,” two sisters, university students, go to a party at a seedy pub near the docks in Bristol, a few years after the end of the Second World War. What drew you to that setting and time period, and to these two girls?
The story is an invention, of course, a fiction. But, as I wrote it, that world from before I was born came alive for me as vividly as if I could actually see it and smell it and taste it, as if I were present in it. Conjuring it was a heady experience, uncanny—I channelled knowledge I hardly knew I had. I grew up in Bristol, and even when I was a child, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the bomb damage from the war was all around: we played on the bomb sites. The city docks, which had always been at the heart of Bristol’s prosperity, were still functioning, though the river was too narrow by that time for the big boats, and the focus of maritime commerce was moving out to Avonmouth, on the Bristol Channel. But I can remember men unloading planks from the ships in the center of the city, carrying them on their shoulders. (I doubted this memory—it seemed too striking to be true—but I found when I checked that it’s perfectly possible that I saw this in my childhood.) Children have a strong awareness of the recent past, if they’re at all interested; the evidence is all around them, in the streets and in the schools (in the sixties we learned from textbooks that were written decades earlier), in the mind-set and preoccupations, the conversations and material surroundings of their parents and grandparents. (Think of the child’s awareness of the war in France in Annie Ernaux’s “The Years.”)
Also, my mother was a great storyteller, and the world that Moira and Evelyn live in was the world of her youth, which loomed hugely in her imagination forever afterward, as a high point of excitement and fun. She was an art student, and studied dressmaking, just like Moira, although Moira isn’t her. One of the things that strikes me in retrospect about my mother’s generation is the way they thought everything was funny. It was a reaction to the darkness (quite literally, during the blackouts) and sombreness of their wartime childhoods, I suppose. And they had a wonderful sense, even in the austere nineteen-fifties, of the opening up of possibilities in their personal lives, of a freedom that had been unavailable to their parents. This was partly due to the sea change in class structures that happened in postwar Britain, as the country was shifting from a manufacturing economy to a white-collar service one. Industrial decline had already set in, though it wasn’t obvious yet. That social mobility—families moving out of the working classes and into the bourgeois middle class, with its different aspirations and expectations—fuelled a new cultural experimentation.
Evelyn is at a turning point—no longer a schoolgirl, starting to outgrow the narrowness of her family life. She’s enterprising and literary and also ambitious. She reminds me a bit of Cassandra, in “I Capture the Castle,” or Sybylla, in “My Brilliant Career,” even a little of Jo, in “Little Women.” Were any of those voices, or others, echoing in your mind as you were writing?
I love the idea that Evelyn’s sparkiness, her mixture of confidence and self-doubt, her bookishness, make her something like those classic literary heroines. I suppose whenever a writer imagines a bookish young girl, dreaming of a bigger life, then Cassandra and Jo and Sybylla (and Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver, Isabel Archer, Ursula Brangwen, and so many others . . .) will flicker somewhere in the background, as inspiration. What’s noticeable, though, about Evelyn’s ambition is that it’s confined to her romantic life! Sybylla and Jo are much better feminists. Although Evelyn thinks she’s clever, and loves reading and being good at French, she gives no sign of planning for any particular career after university. She loves the idea of talking about literature, but has no plans for writing any. I don’t mean to deplore this or sigh over it. Her attitude could almost, if we didn’t carefully think it through, feel dangerously pleasurable, unburdened by the pressures that are put on a young woman today. No one in their right mind, I suppose, would wish that genie back into its patriarchal bottle. But sometimes the idea of the luxuriousness of a dreaming life, turning inward, can feel pretty enticing. Evelyn gets lost in her reading, in her scruffiest clothes, and it doesn’t occur to her that she might monetize or professionalize her passion; it just feeds her imagination. And then—perhaps this is even more problematic—there’s the fun she has in between the scruffy reading times: performing her femininity, dressing up in character, going out to find romance and experience. Being gazed at, or at least wanting to be gazed at.
Evelyn is ambitious for living, I suppose. What she aspires to is drama, adventures, being a succès fou, having things happen to her. It hasn’t occurred to her to want a job. Moira has her portfolio, and perhaps something will come of that, or perhaps it won’t, or not for long. Perhaps she will set it aside to make a home and have children, to promote and support a man, as women used to do.
At the party, Evelyn and Moira meet two men—Sinden and Paul—who clearly move in wealthier and more privileged circles than the sisters do. Sinden and Paul are, so to speak, slumming, but intrigued by the bohemian environment, and they make an effort to follow up with the girls. Is there more to their motivation than a fun flirtation?
A fun flirtation probably makes it sound prettier than it is. Privileged men have always had the freedom—much more novel to the girls in the story—to move between classes, and have the kinds of sexual experiences across class boundaries which might jeopardize a woman’s respectability, her reputation. When Sinden and Paul say they’re slumming it, there’s definitely a sexual undertone. I don’t know how interested Paul is, really. Mostly, he’s just drunk. But Sinden feels powerful, predatory, observant: it’s telling that he’s most fascinated by Josephine, who no doubt appears to him as a certain working-class archetype, more exciting—with her careless freedom and Red politics and her caustic indifference to his insults—than Moira and Evelyn, who are “nice girls” from a petit-bourgeois background.