Until recently, most fictional treatments of the Anglo-Norman period have portrayed it as a time of high-powered masculinity dominated by the military values of a brutal garrison aristocracy where female characters are generally absent or fulfil a minor love interest. In the past, most novels of the period were written by men who excel at the mud and macho prose of fighting and mayhem. So it came as some surprise to discover a lyrical, quite beautiful, 1954 novel set in this period and written by a woman: The Fourteenth of October by Bryher.
Bryher is the name adopted by Winifred Ellerman, the poet and novelist friend of the more famous H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, a founding figure of Imagism, friend of Ezra Pound and a splendid poet in her own right.)
Under their adopted names, HD and Bryher spent the years of the Second World War living together in Kensington, bombs raining down, busy at their typewriters during what they called ‘the days of Mars.’ Perhaps it was the fear, early on in the war, of invasion, of a powerful force across the channel coming to ravage and conquer, which turned Bryher’s thoughts to an earlier and successful cross-channel invasion ending in the Battle of Hastings on 14th October 1066.
In this novel the battle happens just out of view as the people in the story, peasant militia from Cornwall, fail to arrive on time, missing the main action. Yet they hear it – just as the guns could be heard firing across the channel and bombs could be heard falling in London as they wrote. Confusion, lack of news, not knowing what’s going on, recriminations about appeasement, evasion, refusal to arm or not being properly prepared – these are themes through which Bryher evokes both 1066 and 1940. “The English had been unwilling to defend a way of life,” she writes resonantly. Although published nearly ten years after the end of the war, it reverberates with echoes of those years before opening up to the harmonies of lyrical lamentation for the loss and destruction caused by war in whatever age. Catching that same connection, Edith Sitwell, who wrote the Preface, hails it as a ‘beautiful book…it is full of word magic, of the magic of a dream (but a dream that has been experienced, not only imagined). We live through the dread, the doom…’
Failing to arrive at the battle may be another kind of disaster in the long run. A many-layered story of loss and fragility, the novel touches on the fleetingness of time in lovely poetic images: ‘The five years, from landing to leaving, were as a single July rose…’ and encapsulates worlds of meaning in sentences squeezed to essences: ‘Everything seemed static except pain.”
The Fourteenth of October is a haunting and evocative way of telling the Hastings story.