There’s No Story There – Inez Holden (1944)

There’s No Story There by Inez Holden reissued by Handheld Press tells the little told stories of men and women workers during World War Two. Like the novella and nonfiction writing published in Night Shift and It Was Different at the Time the two texts in the book Blitz Writing– which I read a couple of years ago – Holden really put her journalistic skills to good use in the depiction of working lives. There is a wonderful sense of all of life being here – brought together from all walks of life.

“The morning shift was going through the first inspection. The men filed through on the left, the women on the right. They walked in single file. People from the Potteries; volunteers of the first war year; new conscripts, old and young; housewives from the villages; women from the towns; from Scotland and Ireland; men just discharged from the Army and invalids of long-time unemployment; ex-miners, greengrocers, builders, bakers, men from the south, from the north, middle-aged men wounded in the last war, young men soon to be called up and old casual labourers. The sons of preachers; the daughters of dockers; the children of crofters.”

This novel is about the lives of conscripted workers at Stalevale, an enormous rural munitions factory, somewhere in the English countryside. Stalevale is quite vast – almost a mini town – rows of large sheds, each with its own specific purpose, neatly laid pathways between. Here the conscripted men and women, many of them from the Potteries and the North, make the shells and bombs for use in the war. It’s perilous work, and no one takes any chances with the handling of such high explosives.

There is no plot as such, this is a novel about a way of life at an extraordinary period in our history. A time in which people had to set aside their normal lives, living away from their homes and families. Here thousands of workers come together their lives immediately altered by the rules, the shift patterns, and the communal living. There is a sense of people being outside of their normal sphere – all while belonging to a large community all working together. It must have been quite an intimidating experience to arrive for the first time – not knowing exactly what lay ahead.

“The train journey – perhaps the first – the crowded station, the factory town and the great grey hostel buildings, the work itself, carried out in silent isolated groups, never more than twenty workers in one semi-underground shed, never less than two hundred in the canteen at break-time, sometimes six hundred in the hostel at meal-times, and always seven thousand going out or coming in on shift. The journey herd, the hostel herd, the workshop herd – where even the movements of the work were disciplined down to a slow rhythm – all added to the fear and sense of isolation from the home herd.”

Stalevale is a place of strict order – necessarily so – long hours and shift work, living with former strangers in a hostel when not working. Although very much a novel – There’s No Story There is written in a documentary style – Holden’s intention clearly to bring the people of this place to life – a realistic portrayal of a munitions factory and its workers. The workers dress in special asbestos suits, covering their faces with layers of cream and powder to protect them from the dangerous substances they are working with. Inspections cause tension, as the inspector chooses to stop as if by random one person in every two hundred to check their identities.

Naturally there are various characters who we get to know throughout the course of the novel. With a practised ear Holden recreates their conversations, showing the private everyday worries and preoccupations of these ordinary men and women who were doing some quite extraordinary work. It is quite shocking when a dreadful accident does occur, how almost routinely it is treated – it’s a common enough event for everyone to know exactly what to do, and be anxious to nip any gossip in the bud.

The perspective moves continually from one worker to the next. We meet Julian, the life of the factory viewed through his eyes, as he silently goes about his day, narrating his experiences internally – his mutism caused by what today we would recognise as PTSD. Gluckstein is tormented meanwhile by his memories of the anti-Semitism he experienced in London. Young Linnet has not been married all that long, she is excited that her husband will be arriving on forty-eight hours leave – when she will move temporarily into the married quarters with him. She takes the opportunity to pick some wildflowers growing nearby to brighten up their room. Geoffrey Doran the Time and Motion man writes obsessively in his notebook – he is an astute observer of all that happens – he eavesdrops on the chatter around him, becoming something of a figure of fun, as he begins to start his own private mass observation record. One woman is discovered inventing stories about her ‘friend’ – there’s some amusing embarrassment over the identity of a special visitor to the factory – points of interest in an otherwise tedious, grinding routine.

There’s No Story There is an extraordinary portrayal of people rarely found in fiction – it is surely a must for anyone interested in this period of history and in the life of ordinary workers in particular.

After the novel this volume contains three wartime short stories – which I don’t have time or space to write about here – but are well worth reading too. It’s always nice to get a bit more in a book I feel.

I would be fascinated to read more by Inez Holden, but currently the rest of her novels remain out of print.