Peace, Perfect Peace – Josephine Kamm (1947)

I have come to rely on Dean Street Press Furrowed Middlebrow titles to provide quality, relaxed reading material. Peace, Perfect Peace follows some similar themes to that of Wine of Honour which I so enjoyed back in September; that of the readjustment to normal life after war has ended. This of course was a completely unique period of time, which was fairly short, but which must have affected almost everyone in some way. After six years of war, with privations and rationing still to be endured, the blackout, bombing and danger were at an end, and those serving overseas began slowly to return.

“Instinctively Frances fumbled in her handbag for a torch before she faced the lights and the certainty of the lifted black-out. For some time now she had taken streetlighting for granted, but in her present sense of withdrawal she had forgotten.”

This is an often quite poignant story of three quite different women, as they return to something like normality after the war. They will each face adjustments that aren’t always welcome, finding a new rhythm within this world of peace. As the novel opens, we meet Clare, who has recently returned to London. A novelist before the war, Clare wants to return to her writing having worked in an office which had been relocated to a Devon seaside town for the last part of the war. Clare; we learn, is thirty-five and has spent eight years as the other woman, in what immediately feels like a deeply unsatisfactory relationship with Matthew. Clare is feeling unsettled and unable to get down to her writing. She contacts her friend Joanna with whom she stayed for two years while in Devon and having wangled an invitation catches the train back there.

Joanna spent the war caring for two of her grandchildren, her husband working behind a desk in London, and one of her sons abroad and her daughter-in-law Frances in the ATS. Joanna’s grandchildren; Giles and June are very close to their grandmother, they know her better than their mother now, and she knows them well too, she is especially close to Giles, who has made a fond confidante of his grandmother. Now, Frances is out of the ATS, preparing for the return of her husband Tim, is keen to get the family back together in London. She has been preparing a flat the best she can, and now wants the children to go back with her. Joanna struggles to hide her reluctance to let the children go, though she naturally can’t and doesn’t refuse, but her relationship with the children, immediately puts Frances on the back foot. Clare is reluctant to get involved, she has a good relationship with Joanna, but she can see potential trouble ahead.

“Sitting dejectedly in front of the hissing gas fire, her feet on the fender in an effort to escape the draught which whistled under the door and through the uncovered and broken floorboards, Frances with an effort turned her mind from mental to practical problems. June, thank goodness, was no trouble at all; she thoroughly enjoyed her picnic existence and found everything new exciting, and utterly absorbing. She liked the flat, she liked her school, and she thought London – even Bayswater – much more interesting than Seaport; and, most satisfactory of all, she had turned to her mother with simple unforced affection and trust.”

Frances returns to London with June, who is excited by everything that’s new, a new place to live, a new school, new friends to make, life for Frances’s youngest child is an adventure which she accepts quite happily. Giles stays with Joanna until the end of his school term, he clearly as reluctant as Joanna to change his living arrangements. Clare begins to think that Frances’s concern that Joanna is unwittingly undermining her relationship with Giles might not be far from the truth.

Clare also returns to London, she knows she must decide what she is going to do with her personal life – she has spent too many days waiting for a man who appears in her life only sporadically, drifting off again to do as he pleases. She also has the offer of a job to think about – or is she really going to get down to writing again?

In the flat she is preparing for the return of her family; Frances is having a tough time. She feels like the place will never be clean, it appears impossible to engage any daily help, and acquiring even the most ordinary bits and pieces to make it more homely is a challenge. When Tim is demobilised, she is delighted to have him back, theirs is a good, strong loving marriage, but Frances knows she must at some time tackle him about his mother’s interference with Giles, which she is sure is preventing him wanting to come home at all. How will Tim take that? and how will twelve year old Giles settle back into his London home, when it is becoming more and more obvious, he is reluctant to leave his grandmother?

What Josephine Kamm does well in this novel is to show us how with the coming of peace not everything in the garden was immediately rosy. Everything was turned upside down again, and relationships don’t just slip easily back into place. Even the relationship between a child and his mother – when she has just been a sometime visitor for several years. Kamm writes with some pathos; Frances’s distress when she thinks Giles hates her is heart-rending. She understands perfectly how difficult normal domestic life could be how daily discomforts wear away at a house wife who wants everything perfect for her family.