A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  “That is Augustus,” Miss Slee said.

  “I have never seen that boy in my life before,” Mr. Swift said resolutely.

  “Neither have I,” Mrs. Swift said.

  In retrospect, Mr. Swift said gloomily, you could see that it was bound to end in disaster.

  “And it all started so well,” Mrs. Swift said.

  “It always does,” Mr. Swift said.

  The whole village had been in a state of great excitement. It had been discovered by Mr. Robinson, who ran the local history society, that the village was much older than anyone had thought, the proof coming from the remains of a Roman villa that had been unearthed in a field on the outskirts of the village. “Evidence of early occupation by our Roman conquerors,” Mr. Robinson said.

  “A viller,” Augustus reported back to his little gang of pals. His cohorts—Norman, George and Roderick—had recently decided to give themselves a name. They had considered and rejected the Pirates, the Outlaws and the Robbers, and after much discussion (endless, some might have said) and one or two mild scuffles, they had finally settled on the Apaches as a name that conveyed their bold fearlessness. (Or bloodthirsty murderousness, Mr. Swift said.)

  “Roman conkers,” Augustus explained further. There was a murmur of interest from the Apaches. Every autumn the playing fields of their school became the battleground for the annual Conker Wars, a particularly savage form of warfare that inevitably ended with several of the injured in Matron’s office.

  Mr. Robinson had been invited to dinner by Mr. and Mrs. Swift, along with the vicar, who was the genial, slightly confused sort of vicar that was very common in the area, and Miss Slee, a forthright, rather mannish spinster whose weekend hobby was “rambling.” (“Ramblin’?” Augustus said scornfully to his parents. “How is that a hobby? You’re always sayin’ to me, ‘Stop ramblin’ on, Augustus,’ and then,” he tugged on the imaginary lapels of an imaginary barrister’s gown, “and then you say, ‘Why don’t you get a sensible hobby, Augustus?’ ”)

  Also sipping the Swifts’ sherry were Mr. and Mrs. Brewster, who were new to the village, and Colonel Stewart, who was generally disagreeable to all and sundry and had a particular dislike of small boys. “A soirée,” Mrs. Brewster exclaimed, when invited. “How charming.” Mrs. Brewster cut a rather striking figure. She was tall, with a head of impressive red curls and a rather theatrical manner. She was very keen on amateur dramatics, apparently.

  “Not just the Romans,” Mr. Brewster said, eyeing the near-empty sherry decanter anxiously. “Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, it’s been one invading horde after another.” The Brewsters were “new money” according to Miss Carlton, a shrew-faced elderly spinster who eyed Mr. Brewster eyeing the decanter. She was a “teetotaller,” which seemed to make her rather irritable. She had induced Augustus and the rest of his little tribe to sign a pledge that they would never partake of alcohol in exchange for a halfpenny-worth of lemon sherbets. “Fair trade,” the Apaches were agreed. “Bringing up the rear” at the soirée was the Swifts’ next-door neighbour, Mrs. Garrett.

  “Previously,” Mr. Robinson said, holding forth again, “we had only been able to date ourselves back to Domesday.”

  “Doom’s Day,” Augustus murmured to himself appreciatively. “Day of Doom.” He was much taken by words that seemed to hold within them the promise of almost infinite mayhem. His eavesdropping was rudely interrupted by Cook knocking him on the head with a soup spoon—her preferred weapon—and shooing him away. “That boy lurks,” he had heard her complaining to their housemaid, Mavis. “He’s a regular little spy.” Augustus felt rather gratified by this compliment. Naturally, he was going to be a spy when he grew up. As well as a pilot, a train driver, an explorer and “a collector of things.”

  “What kind of things?” Mrs. Swift had asked at the breakfast table that morning, and immediately regretted the question as Augustus launched into an enthusiastic list that included mouse skeletons, gold farthings, molluscs, twine, diamonds and glass eyeballs.

  “I’ve never heard of gold farthings,” Mr. Swift said.

  “That’s why I’ll collect ’em. They’ll be worth a king’s ransom.”

  “What if they don’t exist?” Mr. Swift said.

  “Then they’ll be worth even more.”

  “Did you drop him on his head when he was a baby?” Mr. Swift asked Augustus’s mother. Mrs. Swift muttered something that sounded like “I wish I had,” and added, much louder, “Do stop fiddling with the marmalade pot, Augustus.”

  Go away,” Cook said to him. She was still in high dudgeon over the Charlotte Russe she had planned for “dessert,” which was what they ate when they had guests. When they didn’t have guests it was simply “pudding.” Augustus said it wasn’t his fault that he had eaten all the sponge finger biscuits. He had been going to take just one and then somehow when he looked again they had all gone! How did that happen? (How did it happen so often?) To Cook’s chagrin, the Charlotte Russe had been demoted into a more banal mousse. “What will they think?” she grumbled.

  “They’ll think they’re jolly lucky,” Augustus said, under the understandable misapprehension that “mousse” was “moose,” which sounded like a more exciting item of food than the usual fare served up at the Swifts’ dining table. Indeed, “moose” was the kind of prey that the Apaches might hunt with their bows and arrows before spit-roasting it over a camp-fire. (Augustus’s own bow and arrow were currently confiscated due to an unfortunate incident.)

  “There are no moose in this country,” Mr. Swift pointed out.

  “How do you know,” Augustus said, “if you’ve never seen one?”

  “You have the makings of a fine empiricist,” his father had told him, after a particularly challenging discussion about cricket balls and greenhouse glass. (“But if you didn’t see who threw the ball then how could you know it was me?” “Because it’s always you,” Mr. Swift said wearily.)

  Mrs. Garrett clapped her hands suddenly and said, “A pageant!” (Augustus had returned to loitering, a soup spoon was no deterrent to an Apache.) “We should have a pageant to celebrate the village’s history.”

  The assembled company were in voluble agreement. “It will depict the whole history of Britain as experienced from the point of view of a typically English village,” Mrs. Garrett enthused.

  “I myself,” Mrs. Brewster said, “have played several queens in theatrical productions.”

  Mrs. Swift murmured something inaudible.

  “But none of those awful boys must be in it,” Colonel Stewart said.

  “Oh, goodness no, I quite agree,” Miss Carlton said. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said hastily to Mr. Swift, “one of them is yours, isn’t he?”

  “Well…” Mr. Swift demurred, “we found him on the front doorstep actually.” Augustus frowned at this paternal betrayal. There were sympathetic murmurs all round and Mrs. Swift said agreeably, “Of course we didn’t. It was the back doorstep.” There was much laughter at this remark. Augustus’s frown deepened. Had he been found on a doorstep? Front or back seemed irrelevant. He was an abandoned orphan. He was rather pleased with that idea. Perhaps his real parents were incredibly rich and had been hunting for him ever since accidentally leaving him on Mr. and Mrs. Swift’s doorstep.

  “Oh, I’m sure we can find something for all the children to do,” Mrs. Garrett said. Mrs. Garrett was a somewhat troubling figure in Augustus’s world. Until recently she had been merely the rather stout and friendly widow who lived next door. She was fond of children (an unusual trait in a grown-up) and had a very good greenhouse full of peaches and grapes that the Apaches were always attempting to raid, to the fury of her gardener. She was also generous with sweets and cakes, again an unusual habit in a grown-up. But, unfortunately, she was also the leader of the local “chapter” of Afor Arod. The words were Saxon, according to Mrs. Garrett, for “fierce” and “bold,” which none of the members were. If you could imagine a Scout pack consisting of only the outcasts and
rejects of boyhood society then that would be Afor Arod: the goody-goodies, the fat, the toadies, the swots—and girls.

  They were a peace-loving alternative to the “rather militaristic” Scouts, according to Mrs. Garrett, who was a stalwart of the Peace Pledge Union. “Cooperation and harmony,” she said. Augustus’s mother thought this would be “good” for Augustus as these were traits that he was “singularly lacking.” Not true! he protested. “Look at the Apaches.”

  “Quite,” Mrs. Swift said and dragged him along to a meeting.

  This was so unfair, he thought bitterly as he watched a group of children dancing in a circle. Dancing! No one had mentioned dancing.

  “Oh, a new friend for us!” Mrs. Garrett declared as if she had never seen him before when in fact she encountered Augustus on an almost daily basis.

  And then Augustus met his nemesis. He spied a little girl in the corner of the room, a little girl with the curliest curls and the sweetest dimples. “Madge—hello.” She was doing some kind of sewing. “Cross-stitch—a badge, would you like me to make you one, Augustus?” Augustus nodded dumbly, looking even more idiotic than usual.

  And now he lived in horror that the rest of the Apaches would catch him in the midst of any of the Afor Arod’s ghastly pastimes—the aforesaid dancing and sewing, the chanting and poetry writing. Nature walks—which, it turned out, did not mean the raiding of birds’ nests or the indiscriminate shooting at things with catapults, no mayhem, in fact.

  The whole thing was odious, but he was helplessly in thrall to Madge. (“Oh, thank you for helping me wind my wool, Augustus.”)

  A pageant,” he reported back to the Apaches. “Invading hordes,” he added. He moved a pear drop from one cheek to the other, a movement that generally signalled deep thought. “Got an idea,” he said casually. “If we—”

  “Oh, do stop,” Teddy said to Ursula.

  “He’s nothing like you, you know,” his sister said, laughing.

  “I know that,” Teddy said. “But please stop reading now.”

  Author’s Note

  When I first decided that I wanted to write a novel set during the Second World War I rather grandiosely believed that I could somehow cover the whole conflict in less than half the length of War and Peace. When I realized this was too daunting a challenge—for both reader and writer—I chose the two aspects of the war that interested me most and which I thought provided the richest material—the London Blitz and the strategic bombing campaign against Germany. Life After Life is about Ursula Todd and what she goes through during the Blitz, while A God in Ruins (I like to think of it as a “companion” piece rather than a sequel) is about Ursula’s brother Teddy and his life as a Halifax pilot in Bomber Command. Neither novel is exclusively about the war, indeed in both novels we spend a long time either arriving at the outbreak of hostilities or dealing with the aftermath. Nonetheless it is Ursula’s and Teddy’s individual and shared experiences of the war that permeate their lives.

  Ursula lived many versions of her life in the previous novel, which gave me a certain freedom when it came to Teddy’s own life, many of the details of which are different in this book. I like to think of A God in Ruins as one of Ursula’s lives, an unwritten one. This sounds like novelist trickery, as indeed it perhaps is, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of trickery.

  Teddy captains a Halifax and so it goes almost without saying that he is stationed in Yorkshire where most of the Halifax airfields were situated. (The Lancaster gets all the glamour and glory. I would refer you to Teddy’s grumbles on this subject rather than mine.) Teddy’s Halifax is part of Bomber Command No. 4 Group, one of two groups based in Yorkshire (the other was No. 6 Group—the RCAF). I am never specific about this, nor have I tied Teddy down to a named airfield or squadron, in order to allow myself a little authorial latitude. I imagined him, however, as part of 76 Squadron and I used the squadron’s operational records (in the National Archives) when it was based either at Linton-on-Ouse or at Holme-on-Spalding Moor as a guide for his war.

  For the reader’s interest, I have appended a short bibliography of some of the sources that I used for this novel. I read many vivid first-hand accounts of individual aircrew’s experience to which I am indebted; histories and accounts that draw on personal experiences, as well as the more official histories. The stories of the men who served in Bomber Command are all extraordinary, documenting as they do not only the prized virtue of stoicism but a heroism and determination (and modesty) that seem almost alien to us nowadays, although of course we have not been tested the way they were. The average age of these men (boys, really), all volunteers, was twenty-two. They experienced some of the worst combat conditions imaginable and fewer than half of them survived. (Of aircrew flying at the beginning of the war, only 10 percent would see the end of it.) One cannot fail to be moved by the sacrifice of their lives and I suppose that was what first impelled me to write this novel.

  There is nothing that happens during the chapters set during the war in A God in Ruins that isn’t in some way based on a real-life incident that I came across in the course of my research (even the most horrific, even the most outlandish), although nearly always modified in some way. It is sometimes difficult to remember that you are writing fiction, not history, as it is only too easy to get caught up in the finer (and not so finer) technicalities, but the needs of the novel should always trump one’s own peculiar obsessions. The Bristol Hercules engine became mine but that, too, I handed on to Teddy.

  I readily admit to borrowing from everyone, but particularly from a harrowing account of ditching in Geoffrey Jones’s Raider when, in January 1944, the (unnamed) crew of Halifax II JD165 (S-Sugar) from 102 (Ceylon) Squadron based at Pocklington spent three days adrift in the North Sea on their return from a raid on Berlin. I also learned a lot about what it was like to be caught in a thunderstorm from Keith Lowe’s Inferno. I fudged a few things, the date of the introduction of those darned Bristol engines for a start, and for the most part ignored the continual developments in technical and navigational aids so that the reader wasn’t continually tripping over heavy-handed references to, for example, HS2, Fishpond or Monica, all the time. Some things I haven’t explained—for the same reason, but also because I haven’t necessarily understood them myself (best to be honest here, I think).

  The bottom line is that it’s fiction. Personally I think that all novels are not only fiction but they are about fiction too. (Not, I don’t think, as post-modernly self-referential as it sounds.) I get tired of hearing that a new novel is “experimental” or it “reinvents the form,” as if Laurence Sterne or Gertrude Stein or indeed James Joyce never wrote a word. Every time a writer throws themselves at the first line of a novel they are embarking on an experiment. An adventure. I believe in the rich textural (and textual) interplay of plot, character, narrative, theme and image and all the other ingredients that get thrown in the pot, but I don’t believe that necessarily makes me a traditionalist (as if we’re not all in a tradition, the tradition of novel writing).

  Everyone always asks you what a novel is “about.” In the “Author’s Note” that accompanied Life After Life I griped that it’s about itself and I didn’t spend two years writing it in order to précis it in a couple of sentences. But, of course, it is about something. If you asked me that question about A God in Ruins I would say that it’s about fiction (and how we must imagine what we cannot know) and the Fall (of Man. From grace). There are, you will probably notice, a lot of references in the book to Utopia, to Eden, to an Arcadian past, to Paradise Lost and Pilgrim’s Progress. Even the book that Teddy’s daughter, Viola, throws at his head at one point is Enid Blyton’s The Land of Far-Beyond, which is itself based on Pilgrim’s Progress. So much of this is only semi-deliberate, as if there is a part of the writing brain that knows what it’s doing and another part that is woefully ignorant. I see only now how much rising and falling there is in the text. Everyone and everything ascending in flight or falling to earth. (And t
he birds! Flock upon flock!)

  Imagery is for me of paramount importance in a text, not complex imagery that jumps up and down and demands to have its hand shaken but a more subtle web that weaves its way throughout, often enigmatically, and knits everything together. The “red thread” of blood that binds the Todds echoes the red ribbon of the long leg to Nuremberg that echoes the thin red cords of Teddy’s sheltered housing—a pattern that I hadn’t even noticed until the final read-through of the novel and yet makes perfect sense to me now. (Just don’t ask me why there are so many geese. I have absolutely no idea.)

  And, of course, there is a great conceit hidden at the heart of the book to do with fiction and the imagination, which is revealed only at the end but which is in a way the whole raison d’être of the novel. I think that you can only be so mulishly fictive if you genuinely care about what you are writing, otherwise you are occupying a two-dimensional space where the text ceases to be an interface between the self and the wider world. If this is a refutation of modernism or post-modernism or whatever has superseded post-modernism, then so be it. Any category designed to constrain should be thrown out. (“Constraint” and “restraint” are words that appear continually throughout this novel—and their opposite, “freedom”—something else I only realized when I had finished. I thought about taking them out and decided against it. They’re there for a reason.)

  War is Man’s greatest fall from grace, of course, especially perhaps when we feel a moral imperative to fight it and find ourselves twisted into ethical knots. We can never doubt (ever) the courage of those men in the Halifaxes and Stirlings and Lancasters but the bombing war was undoubtedly a brutish affair, a crude method employing a blunt weapon, continually hampered by the weather and lack of technology (despite massive advances that war always precipitates). The large gap between what was claimed for the results of the bombing campaign and what was actually achieved was never fully understood at the time, and certainly not, I suspect, by those men flying the bombers.