BLITZ
WRITING : NIGHT SHIFT & IT WAS DIFFERENT AT THE TIME
By Inez Holden
Handheld Press. 194 pages. £12.99. ISBN 078-1-912766-06-2
Reviewed by Jim Burns
What did I know about Inez Holden before receiving this welcome
re-issue of two of her short novels from the 1940s? Only a little, I
have to admit. I had read an amusing story, “Uncle Drunkle”, in an
old copy of Writing Today,
edited by Denys Val Baker and Peter Ratazzi in 1943. And there was
another, “The Flat Above Me”, in
Penguin New Writing 9
(1941), edited by John Lehman. These were publications I’d picked up
in second-hand bookshops as I hunted for grubby copies of magazines
from the 1940s.
Andrew Sinclair mentioned Holden a couple of times in
War Like A Wasp; The Lost
Decade of the Forties (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1989) but didn’t
include any of her work in
The War Decade: An Anthology of the 1940s (Hamish Hamilton,
London, 1989). Holden’s “According to the Directive” was selected
for Wave Me Goodbye: Stories
of the Second World War, edited by Anne Boston (Virago, London,
1988). I picked up bits of information from the notes on
contributors in these publication, but it was Celia Goodman’s “Inez
Holden: A Memoir” in London
Magazine (December/January, 1993/94), edited by Alan Ross, that
helped me to get a better grip on her personality and writing
career.
Holden was born in 1903 or 1904 (her parents didn’t bother to
register her birth) into a financially comfortable but somewhat
eccentric household. Her mother was a noted “Edwardian beauty who
had owned fifteen hunters and was known as the second best
horsewoman in
There was more to her than the frippery of the bright young things
of the time. She had a talent for writing, and in the late-1920s and
early-1930s she published three novels which recorded “the
frivolous, absurd lives of the privileged characters who could have
stepped out of the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s
Vile Bodies”.
It’s difficult to determine exactly when and how Holden became more
socially and politically conscious, both in her life and writing.
Like other writers, she probably reacted to the tensions of the
1930s as the Depression brought poverty to millions of people and
fascism began its inexorable rise in
When the war started in 1939 Holden, like many other people, either
volunteered for, or was conscripted into, the work force required to
replace the men from factories and other locations who were being
called-up for the armed forces. She did some basic training as a Red
Cross nurse and worked as an auxiliary in hospitals and first-aid
posts during the blitz, and later spent time in an engineering works
as a machinist producing parts for aircraft. Her experiences
provided the basic material for
Night Shift and
It Was Different at the Time.
It Was Different at the Time
was written in the form of a diary, though not with a strict series
of daily entries. It moves through a period from April, 1938 to
August, 1941, focusing on certain months in each year, and building
up the approach to war, its start, and the onset of bombing raids on
She has a friend, Victor, who has just returned from
When war was declared, Holden took on work as a Red Cross Nurse, and
her experiences began to widen. The descriptions of the hospital
wards are brisk and to the point, and her quickly-established
portraits of staff and patients soon create a wide picture that the
reader can clearly see. People have personalities and are not just a
faceless mass. Much of the work that Holden did was routine and
designed to support the qualified nurses, but she seems to have been
present during at least one operation. Taking down details from a
patient she finds that he has no next-of-kin, no friends, but she is
impressed by his “apparent happiness. He was uninhibited, without
fear, smiling and strong”.
Later, working at a first-aid post, she watches the “demolition men,
rescue parties, and stretcher bearers” being called out night after
night. Like the firemen, they work while the bombs are still falling
and the fires raging, and don’t always return. Harry, a popular
officer – “Always there when anything’s on…..Right on the spot at
the start and, and the last to leave at the finish”, in the words of
a member of his team – goes out one night and is killed.
Night Shift
picks up Holden’s story after she left working as a Red Cross nurse,
and obtained employment as a machinist in a factory. It covers a
working week, Monday through to Saturday, with the actual work being
repetitious and seemingly needing only basic instruction before the
operative is left to get on with the job. The employees were mostly
women, though the foremen and supervisors were all men. Pay and
conditions were not good, and the long hours (up to
There is a woman called Feather among the workers and she is clearly
very much like Holden in being better-educated, if not in a formal
way, and wider-travelled than her colleagues. She probably
represented Holden, though the anonymous narrator talks about her as
just being one among many. But, as in
It Was Different at the Time,
the workers aren’t a nameless mass. Many of them are named and
given certain distinctions of character that enable the reader to
see them as individuals. They talk about their husbands and
boyfriends, many of who are already in the armed forces, and about
what they do when they’re not at work.
The hazards of factory work, especially at night, while the Blitz is
at its height are outlined. Everyone is conscious of the fact that a
bomb may hit the factory at any time. When one does while the
Saturday night shift is working, the narrator is lucky in that she
had been transferred to a Sunday night shift, and so is not killed
or injured. Her situation brings out how much it was a matter of
chance who lived or died. Another woman is doubly lucky. She missed
the Saturday night shift because her house was damaged by a bomb
blast and she survived but couldn’t get to work. Death is all
around, and people just get on with what they have to do.
In many ways, Holden’s writing is much more convincing than later
fictional recreations of the Blitz. Written while the events she
describes were taking place, it still has a fresh feeling that gives
it an immediacy. She keeps her prose simple and describes what she
has seen without fuss:
“I went up to the top of one of the empty houses and looked out over
It often strikes me that wartime circumstances led many writers to a
direct and straightforward way of writing. There wasn’t a mood or an
inclination to experiment, in either prose or poetry. Communication
was the key factor when writing a story or a poem, and the aim was
to reach as wide an audience as possible. No-one, writers and
readers, wanted to waste time. Short stories, short novels, short
poems predominated. Little magazines with compendiums of stories and
other material that might be read in the barrack-room, the factory
canteen, or while waiting to be called out to a fire, were popular
and sold in numbers that would astound editors of literary
publication today.
What happened to Inez Holden after 1945? Despite being widely
published in a variety of magazines, and with seven novels (two
published in the early-1950s) and two short-story collections to her
credit, plus writing film-scripts for J. Arthur Rank, she was never
a best-selling author. Kristin Bluemel sums up her situation in
these words: “During her lifetime, Holden achieved publication but
not fame, her novels and short stories and journalistic work failing
to attain the popularity or influence achieved by many of her writer
friends”. She doesn’t appear to have ever earned a lot of money from
her writing, and presumably may have had an income from her family
background. According to her cousin, Celia Goodman, Holden wrote
only short stories, many of them published in
Punch, after her last
novel appeared in 1956. She died in 1976.
I think it’s worth quoting Kristin Bluemel again when she sums up
what Holden achieved with the two works I’ve reviewed; “Despite a
career that produced no best-sellers and earned no literary awards,
she composed a life out of the colourful scraps of material that
others left behind and wove from them stories of the everyday art of
survival in a city that was falling down and in a country defying
destruction”
A couple of final notes that may be of interest. A character called
Felicity crops up in It Was
Different at the Time, and was based on her friend, Stevie
Smith. In return, Smith based someone called Lopez in her novel,
The Holiday, and her
short story, “The Story of a Story”, on Holden. And, though it
wasn’t quite like Marcel Proust’s experience, memories of my
childhood during the war came flooding back when I read Inez
Holden’s reference to a meal of corned beef and fried potatoes in
Night Shift. I thought it
was a great treat at the time.
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