Elizabeth Brooks’s novel The Woman in the Sable Coat is a suspenseful and evocative work of historical fiction.
All music has time-machine potential, even if it only takes you back to your last summer holiday, but the music of World War II seems especially era-defining. The Woman in the Sable Coat begins in 1934 and ends in 1947, and the Second World War looms large over the characters’ lives. If songs like We’ll Meet Again and The White Cliffs of Dover can seem rather twee to twenty-first century ears, I think that’s because they’ve been co-opted and made safe (in Britain, anyway) by the heritage industry, and become associated less with the shock and dread of war, than with Union Jack bunting, cream teas and old steam trains. It’s one thing humming along to a Vera Lynn classic eighty years on; it must have been quite another when you were stuck inside the war, unsure of how, or when, or if, it was ever going to end. Cosy nostalgia is fine, but it’s not as satisfying as real imaginative effort, and there is something spine-tingling about trying to hear those familiar old tunes in their own time and place, where they express a far greater depth, and answer to a real darkness.
I never listen to music while I’m actually writing, but I like to have it on while I’m away from my desk, mulling things over, and it was fascinating to listen to my characters’ music through their ears, as well as my own, keeping in mind all their mixed-up joys, fears and uncertainties. Having said that, several of the pieces I’ve chosen are not from the ‘30s or ‘40s. Although the story is largely set in the war, the characters do, of course, have a pre-war past and a post-war future, which are every bit as important, and it feels only right to include these perspectives in my playlist.
Anything Goes by Cole Porter (the song from the musical of the same name).
The novel begins with a flash-forward to 1946, when a woman named Nina is travelling home to England, from Canada. The circumstances of her journey are mysterious, but her mood is very dark. Nina recalls another voyage, taken six months earlier in the opposite direction, during which the passengers had “danced on deck with a live band under skies dusty with stars.” Nina’s first, happy transatlantic crossing always makes me think of Cole Porter’s titular song from his 1934 show Anything Goes, which is also set on board an ocean liner. The mood is manically carefree and resolutely unserious…and yet. Knowing what we know (i.e. that things went very wrong for the 1930s, as they appear to have done for Nina) that giddy innocence comes with a built-in unease.
I Feel Pretty by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein.
I Feel Pretty is also a song from a musical, although West Side Story was written in 1957, so none of my characters would have known it (not within the time-frame of the novel, anyway!). For me, this song perfectly evokes Nina’s character in the 1930s, as she moves from childhood to womanhood. Nina is strikingly attractive, and she grows more, rather than less, comfortable with her body, as she passes through adolescence. She knows she’s beautiful, and relishes it. As with Maria from West Side Story, the essence of young Nina is naiveté. When Maria sings, “I feel pretty and witty and bright, and I pity any girl who isn’t me tonight,” she’s brimming with youthfulness, love and joy, and it would take a mean-spirited critic to take her down on grounds of vanity.
Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony
September 1939: it’s the night before Britain declares war on Germany, and married couple, Kate and Guy Nicholson, are pondering an uncertain future. Kate dreads the thought of war; she foresees the miseries it will bring, and worries for her family and her own faltering marriage. While she potters about the house, unable to settle, her husband “is in the sitting-room, listening to a Tchaikovsky symphony on the wireless and reading the newspaper.” Guy is thrilled by the prospect of going to fight: he longs to escape his dull family life and office job, and cut a dash in an RAF uniform. In this scene, I reckon he’s only got one eye on the newspaper—if that. He is fantasising about his heroic future, egged on by the lush gorgeousness of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. This music, and the second movement in particular, is beyond Romantic: while he’s listening, Guy imagines himself as a better man, leading a better life. At the end of the concert, he comes back down to earth, and it’s not long before he’s drinking and picking a quarrel with his wife.
In the Mood by Glen Miller and his orchestra.
In the Mood has to be on the list, although I feel, guiltily, that I am resorting to cliché by including it. There are so many pieces of music that evoke this period of history, but In the Mood is The One. Is there a World War Two movie that doesn’t use it? Well, probably, but it haunts them all, with its catchy tune and jazzy, swinging rhythm. In The Mood is the music that you dance to when you don’t expect many more tomorrows, and can’t afford to stop and think about it—like Nina and Guy, in my novel, who meet and fall in love at an RAF base, at the height of the war. In their world, death is commonplace (the life-expectancy of a new recruit to a Lancaster Bomber crew was two weeks) and not much talked about. Living for the moment is the only wisdom left.
Hauntingly, Glen Miller himself was a Major in the US army air forces, and he died in a flying accident over the English Channel on 15th December, 1944.
Calling All Workers by Eric Coates
Eric Coates composed this march in 1940, and the BBC adopted it as the signature tune for their popular radio series, Music While You Work. It’s as redolent of wartime as In the Mood, but in a totally different spirit: it’s sprightly, cheering and a bit bossy. This is not Glen Miller inviting you to let your hair down, but the government telling you to roll up your sleeves and do your bit. Kate Nicholson stays at home in rural England during the war, looking after her son and envying younger, freer characters, like her husband, who have gone off to save the world. I imagine her half-listening to Calling All Workers on the BBC Home Service, while she knits for victory and worries about her evacuees.
Sinfonia Antarctica by Ralph Vaughan-Williams
After the war, Nina emigrates to Canada. A new life, with a new husband, on a picture-postcard farm in rural Manitoba: this is supposed to be Nina’s reward for years of grief and stress. As a child, she pored over her father’s atlas and dreamed of travel; as an adult, in the RAF, she indulged escapist fantasies about living in a snow-bound wilderness, with nobody but her lover for company. Now here they are—and she can’t cope.
Sinfonia Antarctica was inspired by incidental music that Vaughan-Williams had written for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic. I’ve chosen it for the Canadian section of my book because it gives such a wonderful description of the cold, frightening, beautiful vastness that confronts Nina in Manitoba. There’s a haunting solo soprano voice that weaves in and out of the orchestral sound—a melody without words—which seems to capture the inhuman beauty of the polar landscape. Just as the Antarctic defeated Captain Scott and his men, there’s a sense, in my book, that Canada might be about to defeat Nina—perhaps in a physical sense; almost certainly in a psychological one. Nina is a child of the English suburbs, and nothing has prepared her for the wild loneliness of this place.
Transcendental Etude No. 12 “Chasse-neige” by Liszt
If Sinfonia Antarctica describes the place where Nina finds herself, this piano piece depicts her state of mind. It starts with quiet, tremulous description of snowfall and builds into a panicky, blinding climax. English winters are rarely deep or deadly. Up until her emigration to Canada, Nina would have associated snow with tobogganing and skating and picture-perfect scenes on Christmas cards, rather than white-out and terror.
Dirty Old Town by Ewan MacColl, sung by The Pogues
The penultimate chapter of The Woman in the Sable Coat is something of a love letter to the English city of Liverpool: the terraced streets, the bomb-damaged churches, the grand riverside buildings, the gargantuan docks, where ships still arrive from, and depart to, ports all over the world. Dirty Old Town was actually inspired by Salford, an industrial mill town near Manchester, but the lyrics contain so many images—the old canal, the gaslight, the factory wall, the siren sounding from the docks, the smell of the “spring on the smoky wind”—that might describe any gritty, northern industrial town in the 1940s, including Liverpool. The contrast with Canada’s snowy wilderness could not be starker. I think this song captures Nina’s feelings about her return to post-war England: there’s a sort of dull disappointment mixed with an affection for home; a sense of anti-climax mingled with a sense of relief.
I’ll Be Seeing You by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal, sung by Billie Holiday
I was surprised to discover that I’ll Be Seeing You was written in 1938. I thought it must have been written during the depths of the Second World War, because it’s so imbued with heartbreak and loss—especially the way Billie Holiday sings it. Wikipedia doesn’t seem to think it’s about death, in particular, it just calls it “a popular song about missing a loved one,” but I’ve always thought of it as faintly gothic. In my version, the singer’s soldier-lover has been killed in action; he’s dead but not quite gone, and when she sees him in their old haunts (“In that small café/ the park across the way” etc) she is seeing his ghost.
The Woman in the Sable Coat ends on a hopeful note, whilst acknowledging that the missing and dead will always be with us. No matter how resolutely we turn our backs on the past and look to the future, our ghosts have a tendency to linger on—for better or worse.
Elizabeth Brooks is the author of The Orphan of Salt Winds, The Whispering House, and The House in the Orchard. She grew up in Chester, England, graduated from Cambridge University, and resides on the Isle of Man with her husband and two children.