After the Party/Cressida Connolly

I can probably as I am one say this without being ravaged in social media but After the Party is very much a woman’s novel. It features at its heart the relationship between 3 sisters and covers subjects such as food, rearing children and middle class county socialising, all more likely to engage the female reader.

However the backcloth, Oswald Mosley’s movement in the thirties, is of interest to both sexes. In brief, Phyllis the youngest of three sisters, Patricia and Nina is a passive character who takes the line of least resistance becomes increasingly involved in the “Movement” of Oswald Mosley known as the British Union.

Her sister Nina and her husband Eric organise summer camps in the West Sussex area. These are for young children to educate them in the movement. Phyllis has returned from South America where her husband Hugh worked for a rubber company.

They set up home in Bosham and to find recreation for her three children she sends them to the camp. Her husband, many years older than her, is a secretive character who goes up to London to meet with important figures in the Movement. There is much excitement when the Leader Sir Oswald Mosley speaks at the camp and attends a local dinner party.

We learn almost immediately  that Phyllis is imprisoned. 800 British citizens were interred without trial and legal representation, some for the whole duration of the Second World War under the Defence Regulation Act (1940).

This was manifestly unfair and unjust but it’s hard to feel that much sympathy for Phyllis as she shows no remorse, continues to admire Mosley to the point of veneration after the War and socialise with other members of his movement. It is true that the selection for interment was random. Mosley’s secretary and mother were not interred, nor were in the novel Eric and Nina who were far more active in the movement.

That we won the War, and fought the longest one of the Allies, that Churchill foresaw the threat of Nazism earlier and more perceptively than anyone and that he mobilised the nation’s spirit has rather blurred the rise of British fascism in the thirties. Many followers of it were afraid of war inflicting the number of casualties of the Great War, felt Bolshevism was the real threat and not so latent anti-semitism; all this inspired the Movement.

Was it right to intern 800? There was a risk of fifth columnists as happened in Norway so my feeling is a reluctant yes. However one of the oddities was that Jewish refugees were sent to the Isle of Man alongside Nazis.

Cressida Connolly, daughter of Cyril, reveals all this but strangely does not refer to the disgraceful post war reconstituting of the British Union as the British Union of Servicemen. The renewed movement did not last long, not least as Jewish ex-servicemen like Gerald Fleissberg, a paratrooper and veteran of Arnhem, and Morry Beckman were prepared to fight – sometimes dirty – to disrupt the fascist meetings and prevent control of the streets.

The structure is dual narration. In italics and from a distance in time, Phyllis speaks to the reader though it seeems she is informing the writer on her research . This works well as Phylilis’ tale is an indicator of events to come .  I enjoyed the read weighted as it was towards women.