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Deborah Moggach
1916, pretty young Eithne Clay runs a shabby genteel South London boarding house while her gentle, dreamy husband is off at the War. Her 14 year old son Ralph dotes on his mother, but has adolescent thoughts he d rather hide from her. Winnie, the young maid, is a homely, goodhearted country girl, rejected by Archie, the cheeky butcher s boy before he too is called up. When the dreaded telegram arrives at the house… things turn from difficult to desperate for the two young women. The lodgers are a curious but necessary burden the Spooner family, with shell-shocked husband, sad wife and tiny,…
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topAbout the Book
1916, pretty young Eithne Clay runs a shabby genteel South London boarding house while her gentle, dreamy husband is off at the War. Her 14 year old son Ralph dotes on his mother, but has adolescent thoughts he d rather hide from her. Winnie, the young maid, is a homely, goodhearted country girl, rejected by Archie, the cheeky butcher s boy before he too is called up. When the dreaded telegram arrives at the house… things turn from difficult to desperate for the two young women. The lodgers are a curious but necessary burden the Spooner family, with shell-shocked husband, sad wife and tiny, knowing daughter; Boyce Argyle, man about town and hero to young Ralph but recently missing; and blind Alwyne Flyte, communist and cynic, victim of a gas attack in the trenches. And then along comes the butcher, Neville Turk, big handsome ladies man, irresistible for his meat, money and brutish confidence, who throws flighty Eithne into a turmoil, but has sinister plans of his own. Winnie and the blind lodger , meanwhile, conduct a strange, erotic liaison based on the fact that he can t see her And young Ralph, ignored by his mother in favour of the butcher, looks on – feeling the undercurrents of desire, seeing more than he should (of sex, of the nightime dealings of Mr Turk, and what Flyte and Winnie get up to). All the strands come together in a shocking denouement, which turns a coward into a hero, and young Ralph into a man. They are all in the dark, with their dreams, secrets and fantasies. Electric light, new to their world, may be a boon but it reveals both grime and secrets. News of the war is never far away and casts a long shadow. Life is tough on the home front and they re all making do and working the system in different ways, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic and very human.
topDeborah Moggach interview/review
As I write this, the First World War is slipping out of memory and into history. Only five British servicemen are still with us – all aged over 106 – and soon these last witnesses will be gone. All that remains will be silence, and books, and our imaginations.
No other war has affected us so profoundly. It changed history, of course, and set in train the often catastrophic events of the twentieth century. But it’s the senseless slaughter of a generation of young men that haunts us. My grandmother, for instance, lost her only brother and eleven cousins. I often wonder what they would have done with their lives; how their grandchildren would be middle-aged by now; how the world would be a different place with those people in it.
In fact it’s my grandmother’s own story that inspired this novel. Her much-loved young husband Tommy was also killed in action in 1918, leaving her alone with a small son. She re-married a man her little boy hated, with disastrous results (her son, my half-uncle, ended up committing suicide). Nearly a century later and the effects are still being felt in my family – just one small example, amongst many, of the war’s fall-out. That sniper’s bullet changed everything.
I didn’t want to write about snipers, however. I wanted to write about the effect of the war on ordinary lives. This seems to be the missing piece of the jigsaw – we’re deluged with books about the trenches but we know little of what happened on the home front, where women struggled to survive without men, when they had to take over men’s work, when food was short, times were hard but also extraordinarily liberating. Rules were broken, the old world disintegrated and it would never be put back together again. The London of blackouts and bombing raids was a sexually-charged city where, as my butcher says, “women would drop their knickers for a pound of mince”. The dank, dark, gas-lit streets of Southwark, where my novel is set, seethed with secrets and deception. War creates victims but also profiteers, and my story concerns a young widow, who runs a shabby lodging-house, and a racketeering butcher who woos her with meat. Her son’s hatred of this interloper leads to a chain of events with a dramatic and tragic climax.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- ‘Like the recent novels by Ian McEwan and Sarah Waters, In the Dark successfully modernises the past.’ (Sophie Harrison, Sunday Times ) Do you agree with this critic’s assertion that Moggach ‘modernises the past’? Is this the goal of a successful historical novel? Do you think present-day authors treat the First World War differently to contemporary writers?
- In her author interview Deborah Moggach writes about how her own family was affected by the First World War and the fact that that time is about to slip out of living memory. What do you know about your own family’s experiences in that time and how did that inform your reading of In the Dark ?
- ‘Deborah Moggach’s affection for her complex, damaged characters shines through the dark’ ( The Gloss ) Which of the characters in In the Dark most captured your sympathy and why? Did you find any of the characters unsympathetic or do you think Moggach manages to evoke affection towards all her characters?
- What do you think Mr Turk’s profession adds to the story? Is it important that he is a butcher? What effect do you think Deborah Moggach is trying to create?
- After Alwyne Flyte’s revelation, Ralph describes him as a ‘thoroughgoing coward… as bad as Mr Turk. Worse, in fact,’ Do you agree or do you feel his actions can be justified? Does his sacrifice at the end of the story change this?
- The coming of electricity, telephone and the motor car are important pivotal moments in the story. What do you think Moggach is trying to say about progress and its effects?
- Emily Bild is a real person (see acknowledgements) whose place in the story was bought in a charity auction. Would you like to see your name in print like this? What kind of character would you hope to be?
Other Books by Deborah Moggach
Driving In The Dark
Desmond never did have much luck with women – except in getting them through…
Final Demand
Natalie is a girl who should be going somewhere. Beautiful, bright and amb…
Hot Water Man
Fresh from London, Christine and Donald Manley have come to the alien swelter…
Porky
At school they called her Porky on account of the pigs her family kept outside…
Seesaw
Take an ordinary, well-off family like the Prices. Watch what happens when one…
The Ex-Wives
Actor Russell Buffery’s voice is his most reliable organ where women are co…
These Foolish Things
When Ravi Kapoor, an over-worked London doctor, is driven beyond endurance by…
Tulip Fever
Amsterdam in the 1630s: blessed by not only commerical Wealth, but also the …
You Must Be Sisters
In respectable middle-class Harrow, three sisters are growing up and going …
Suggested Further Reading
- Atonement ~ Ian McEwan
- Birdsong ~ Sebastian Faulks
- The Night Watch ~ Sarah Waters
Additional Online Resources
The author biography and interview are both taken from Deborah Moggach’s website
Interview with Deborah Moggach in The Times (about love)
Interview with Deborah Moggach from The Guardian
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