England Is My Village: and The World Owes Me A Living

England Is My Village

and The World Owes Me A Living

Other Handheld Classics

Ernest Bramah, What Might Have Been. The Story of a Social War (1907) D K Broster, From the Abyss. Weird Fiction, 1907–1940

John Buchan, The Runagates Club (1928) John Buchan, The Gap in the Curtain (1932)

Melissa Edmundson (ed.), Women’s Weird. Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940

Melissa Edmundson (ed.), Women’s Weird 2. More Strange Stories by Women, 1891–1937

Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me The Waltz (1932) Marjorie Grant, Latchkey Ladies (1921)

Inez Holden, Blitz Writing. Night Shift & It Was Different At The Time

(1941 & 1943)

Inez Holden, There’s No Story There. Wartime Writing, 1944–1945

Margaret Kennedy, Where Stands A Wingèd Sentry (1941)

Rose Macaulay, Non-Combatants and Others. Writings Against War, 1916–1945

Rose Macaulay, Personal Pleasures. Essays on Enjoying Life (1935) Rose Macaulay, Potterism. A Tragi-Farcical Tract (1920)

Rose Macaulay, What Not. A Prophetic Comedy (1918)

James Machin (ed.) British Weird. Selected Short Fiction, 1893–1937

Vonda N McIntyre, The Exile Waiting (1975)

Elinor Mordaunt, The Villa and The Vortex. Supernatural Stories, 1916–1924

John Llewelyn Rhys, The Flying Shadow (1936) Malcolm Saville, Jane’s Country Year (1946)

Helen de Guerry Simpson, The Outcast and The Rite. Stories of Landscape and Fear, 1925–1938

Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford, Business as Usual (1933)

J Slauerhoff, Adrift in the Middle Kingdom, translated by David McKay (1934)

Amara Thornton and Katy Soar (eds), Strange Relics. Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural, 1895–1954

Elizabeth von Arnim, The Caravaners (1909) Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kingdoms of Elfin (1977)

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Of Cats and Elfins. Short Tales and Fantasies

(1927–1976)

The World Owes Me A Living was first published in 1939, and England Is My Village was first published in 1941.

This edition published in 2022 by Handheld Press

72 Warminster Road, Bath BA2 6RU, United Kingdom. www.handheldpress.co.uk

Copyright of the Introduction © Kate Macdonald and Luke Seaber 2022. Copyright of the Notes © Kate Macdonald 2022.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-912766-67-3

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Note on this edition

England Is My Village

1 England Is My Village

2 The Man who was Dead

3 Too Young to Live

4 Return to Life

5 Test Flight

6 Night Exercise

7 You’ve Got to be Dumb to be Happy

The World Owes Me A Living

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

The Last Chapter

Notes on the text

Acknowledgements

David Murdoch, the nephew and literary executor of Jane Oliver, has been a generous and enthusiastic supporter of the project to republish John Llewelyn Rhys’s works, and was kind enough to supply information from his own researches into his aunt’s life, and his memories of her conversations about her husband. Rees family members James Anderson and Jill Alexander MBE were supportive of the project to bring these novels back into print.

Kate Macdonald is a literary historian and a publisher. She is the author and editor of books on John Buchan and Rose Macaulay, and wrote the Introduction to the Handheld Press edition of Business as Usual by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford, which indirectly led her to the writing of J L Rhys.

Luke Seaber is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Modern European Culture at University College London. He is the author and editor of various works on British literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including (edited with Michael McCluskey) Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain (2020).

Introduction

BY KATE MACDONALD AND LUKE SEABER

John Llewelyn Rees published two novels in his lifetime, both about the danger and poetry of flying in the 1930s. Their excellence shows that his early death was a great loss to the literature of British aviation. In obituaries and reviews his name was repeatedly linked with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the legendary French aviator and poet who was an older contemporary. Saint-Exupéry’s third novel Vol de nuit (1931) had been available in English as Night Flight since 1932 and had been filmed in 1933. Yet few people were writing in English like Saint-Exupéry, who wrote about flight as a poet. Rees was working hard to follow Saint-Exupéry’s example by lifting the literature of aviation into the realms of art.

Aviation writing in English in the 1930s could be found in newspaper columns, in Boys’ Own-style adventures by Captain W E Johns, among others, and the terse accounts of long-distance record flights and endurance records written by professional pilots who were concerned with the facts, glossing over the drama of their extraordinary bravery. Aviation in this period was still an exciting novelty, but it was a solid one, a new industry as well as a developing military vehicle, and a new mode of transport that attracted many people, if only at a distance. Flight was also desperately romantic, if a little oily, and it was a profession for which women were as well fitted as men. Flying schools were becoming as common as golf clubs, and flying circuses were not uncommon in the summer months in holiday areas, run by ex-RFC and RAF pilots and their ground engineers from the war. These were the characters and settings for Rees’s novels.

Rees was born in Abergavenny on 7 May 1911, the son of a Church of England vicar. He left Hereford Cathedral School in 1929 at the age of eighteen. From a note in an archive of family papers, we know that in the early 1930s he earned his living by writing short stories for English and American papers and magazines, and by driving his father around the parish as a chauffeur. His father tried to dissuade Rees from taking up flying and to concentrate on his writing, for which he had a clear gift, and also tried to steer him towards the ministry. But this, says the note, ‘was not according to his inclinations and [Rees] said, not his job’. Rees gained his pilot’s licence unusually quickly in July 1934 and joined the RAF as a Reservist in 1935. His first novel, The Flying Shadow, was published in 1936, under the pen-name J L Rhys; we will use this spelling of his name from here on.

In 1938 he wrote in a letter home, ‘There’s fog down to the ground today, giving pilots a welcome rest and myself a chance to write … As you see I’m still up here flying night bombers. One reason for my not writing more often is that I’m slogging away at a book. With night flying every night, time is like gold’ (Anderson 2015). His second novel, The World Owes Me A Living, about the life of pilots in a flying circus and on a record-breaking flight, was published in 1939 and did well: it was serialized in the News Chronicle, and the film rights were sold. It was reviewed in The Times as a depiction of ‘an isolated and completely unfamiliar way of life’ (J S 1939), suggesting that Rhys was clearly exploring new subjects in his fiction, bringing to life the glory and danger of flying in peacetime. But the approach of war intensified his work in the RAF and left him even less time to write.

On 5 August 1940 Rhys was killed in a flying accident, aged 29. Nothing is known about what caused the accident, but the Wellington bomber he was commanding stalled at 14.45 in the afternoon on a training flight at Harwell, north of London. As a flight lieutenant Rhys was the senior officer on board, presumably the flight instructor. He and the two pilot officers in the bomber were killed on impact (Chorley 1992, 24). He was buried by his father, the Reverend Nathaniel Rees, in his parish of Arthog, Llangelynin, in the west of Wales.

When he died John Rhys had been married for fifteenth months, to another pilot who was also an author. In the Preface to his third book, the posthumously published England Is My Village (1941) the novelist Jane Oliver describes how in autumn 1936 she had written in admiration to J L Rhys on reading The Flying Shadow, so completely had he captured her own experience of flying in his writing. They began to correspond, became friends, and on 25 March 1939 she and Rhys were married. In the Preface she writes movingly of their fifteen months of marriage in the shadow of war. After his death, it fell to her ‘to complete the arrangements for this book, to carry out exactly the wishes he had already expressed … I cannot feel despair that we had so little, but only amazement that we had so much’ (Oliver 1941, 14, 15).

Jane Oliver, the pen-name of Helen Rees, née Evans, was an experienced novelist, and seven years older than her husband. Her first novel had been published in 1932, and her first success had been in 1933 with Business as Usual, which she had written with the friend and colleague who would become her close writing partner, Ann Stafford (Anne Pedlar). When John Rhys had published his second novel, his wife had published seventeen: she and Ann Stafford would publish at least 92 novels, together and singly, by 1970. When faced with the task of assembling her husband’s last book for publication, Jane Oliver had the professional experience to know how to present his short stories to a publisher, armed with evidence of their quality from their earlier publication in magazines. It is likely that she decided on her own initiative to supplement the seven stories he had already selected with three extracts from Rhys’s two novels. Without these additions England Is My Village – the title comes from one of the stories – would have been an extremely slim volume, probably too short for publication.

It was reviewed well. On the dustjacket of the first edition the New Statesman described it as ‘Full of the fascination of the air … an exceptional book’. The Guardian said ‘his style has integrity and distinction, and in such stories as Too Young To Live he shows that he can treat successfully an emotional situation where the slightest mishandling would be disastrous’ (E A M 1941). Philip Jordan, the then features editor of the News Chronicle, who had serialized The Flying Shadow five years earlier ‘because I so admired it’, wrote to Rhys’s widow that ‘nothing is more difficult than to write about flying’ and that Rhys ‘and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry were the only two literate men who understood how to do it’ (Jordan nd). The New Yorker said Rhys’s writing was ‘sensitive, intense, and touched with a poetic mysticism that may remind you of Saint-Exupéry’ (Anon 1941).

In 1942, England Is My Village brought J L Rhys the posthumous award of the Hawthornden Prize, one of the two oldest literary prizes awarded in Britain. Previous winners of the Prize include Vita Sackville-West’s The Land, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, David Jones’ In Parenthesis and Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.

In 1942 Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford founded the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, an annual literary award in Rhys’s name, funded by Rhys’s royalties as well as Jane’s own.

‘It is not generally known that the idea of founding this Award was Anne’s and not mine,’ continued Jane, referring to […] when she and Anne had discussed how best to remember the life of Jane’s late husband. ‘I shall always be able to picture the exact spot on a Hampshire water meadow when Anne had the idea of founding this prize. I well remember how she suddenly said, Let’s have something for life, not death, something to give young writers the extra chance he didn’t get.’ (quoted in Anderson 2015)

The John Llewelyn Rhys Prize would be awarded for sixty-eight years. Winners awarded under Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford’s leadership of the panel up to 1970 included Elizabeth Jane Howard, V S Naipaul, David Storey, Nell Dunn, Margaret Drabble, and Angela Carter. It only ceased, in 2011, when its funding ended.

As a collection England Is My Village is powerful, and the stories are classically simple in construction and narration. They carry the reader back to the late 1930s and early years of the Second World War with a compelling urgency. Above all, they bring to life a culture in which the exhortation ‘Be Air-Minded!’ was repeatedly given to the British public in the interwar years. Being air-minded was in fashion, but to be air-minded was to know about the world of aviation, of flights for pleasure, for war, for business; it was to interest oneself in technology, in celebrity aviators and aviatrices. It was to fly, whether this implied learning to pilot an aeroplane with an ‘A’ (private) or ‘B’ (commercial) licence; travelling for business or pleasure for a wealthy or fortunate minority; taking ‘joyrides’ in aeroplanes as one of the attractions of a fairground or other such event for a much greater number. At the very least, it was to take flight vicariously in films, adventure stories, pulp fiction, poetry, posters and paintings, and much more besides. Rarely has a technology that by its nature is not accessible for much of the population become of such cultural importance.

Yet as far as modern awareness goes, this cultural ubiquity did not extend to English literature. English-speaking aviation did not have a narrator like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry whose personal experiences as a pilot were transmuted into novels and other works. Beryl Markham’s classic of aviation writing West With the Night (1942) was reviewed well on its first publication but sold only modestly. After the book went out of print, Markham was not rediscovered as an author until 1982. The same seems to have happened to Rhys. In 1939 the Guardian’s review of The World Owes Me A Living explicitly compared Rhys with the master: ‘as a writer about flying he is good enough to be compared with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’ (E A M 1941). Rhys’s books seemed to have had strong reviews, but his sudden and early death, and enforced wartime paper rationing, ensured that his works too went out of print very quickly. Copies of his books are now vanishingly rare.

The elusive transience of aviation is evident in the fiction of the period, but only as background. Flying creates the sky-writing in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), ‘letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters in the sky!’ (Woolf 1992, 21–2). Lord Peter Wimsey flies back from New York in 1926 in Dorothy L Sayers’s Clouds of Witness with crucial evidence to save his brother from the gallows. After Aunt Ada flies to Paris to get away from the woodshed, Flora Poste departs from Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932) in a plane piloted by her cousin Charles. Aviation also transports lovers to Paris in Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North (1933), and they wait by the ‘sexagonal seat round the little pharos of clocks’ in Croydon Airport (Bowen 2016, 133). This piece of furniture would have been vicariously familiar to thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands, across the British Empire at a time when Croydon connoted the international glamour of modernity. In Dorothy L Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise (1933), she satirizes the unlikeliness of this fashion for flight with a scheme that encouraged the public to collect cigarette coupons and claim their own airplane and a course of flying lessons, with the inevitable result that quiet suburban areas become cluttered up with private planes that no-one can fly. Freeman Wills Crofts’s The 12.30 from Croydon (1934) and Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds (1935) have Golden Age murders taking place in the air, two more detective novels in which aviation is not exceptional, but simply another mode of transport. Rose Macaulay wrote her essay ‘Flying’ in Personal Pleasures (1935) as a delicious literary squib designed to entertain, taking for granted that her readers would be intrigued to learn what it was like being up there in the clouds, but also sure that many of them would never do this, and thus could never check the veracity of her descriptions. (It’s not even certain that she ever flew herself: Macaulay was imaginatively persuasive.)

Yet, in all of these works those who participate in aviation are merely passengers. Their experience of flying is as non-experts for whom the aeroplane holds mysteries, to whom flight is a surrendering of oneself to the expert, to the pilot, to the ‘helmeted airman’ in W H Auden’s poem ‘Consider’ (1930), a figure that reaches his nightmare apotheosis as the Air Vice-Marshall in Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941). What is missing is the description of ‘the action, the clutter, the machinery, the terminology, the termini of travelling by air’, as Valentine Cunningham summarizes it, by someone in the pilot’s seat (Cunningham 1988, 167–8).

This is the importance of John Llewelyn Rhys, for he was above all a flier, a pilot. This is not to say that no other pilot in Britain in the interwar years wrote: that great mass of writing now mostly long forgotten does of course include other texts, consisting largely of factual narratives, accounts of new routes and speed records, autobiographies and memoirs. Two important examples show how exceptional Rhys is. Another writer with real expertise both theoretical and practical was C St John Sprigg (better known by the pseudonym that he adopted to write Marxist literary criticism before his death in the Spanish Civil War, Christopher Caudwell). He held a pilot’s licence, worked in aviation publishing and was author of ‘Let’s Learn to Fly!’ (1937) as well as co-author of Fly with Me: An Elementary Textbook on the Art of Piloting (1932). He also wrote detective novels, and these two parts of his life combined in Death of an Airman (1934), in which the Bishop of Cootamundra solves a murder at the flying school at which he has enrolled. This is an entertaining whodunit, and full of much valuable information on what it was like to fly and learn to fly in those years, but it is not much more than a piece of entertainment to which flying is a backdrop, however unusually expertly drawn. Contrasting with Sprigg’s expertise in flight but relative shallowness in literary terms is T H White, best known as the author of the classic fantasy novel The Sword in the Stone (1938). In 1936 he published England Have My Bones, a country diary of his experiences huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ – and flyin’. A significant part of the book is taken up with White’s reasonably successful attempt to learn to fly, and it contains some of the best literary depictions of flight from the period. But for all White’s expertise in literature, he was an amateur pilot at best.

Rhys’s combination of a deep knowledge of flying with a commitment to representing that world that he knew so well in literature makes him stand out. We can trace perhaps unexpected commonalities between his work and some of the other texts mentioned, commonalities that shed light on how different flying was in the 1930s, how much more an alien world it will be to an early twenty-first-century audience than it might at first appear. In the story that gives England Is My Village its title, Robert talks with the Squadron Leader about how he plans to spend his forthcoming leave:

The leader of the raid looked up, then kicked his heel into the turf. ‘Yes: hope this frost holds off. I hope to hunt next week.’ It was a lot too clear, Robert thought. He hoped there was more cloud over there.

‘You got some leave, sir?’

‘Yes, I’m lucky. Six days.’

‘I’ll say you’re lucky.’ Not too much cloud, he thought, covering the target and only too likely to be full of ice this time of year.

‘Have you been out with the local pack?’ the older man went on. (7)

The strong connection between flying and fox-hunting (found in England Have My Bones too) is unexpected to a modern reader, but it is a common 1930s combination. We see it elsewhere in Rhys’s work, best expressed perhaps in his first novel, The Flying Shadow (1936). Hunting is mentioned various times in that novel (as it is in England Is My Village and The World Owes Me A Living), but the key to the connection as it was consciously understood comes elsewhere in that book, when the protagonist is talking to a woman who is interested in taking flying lessons:

‘You ride?’

‘M’m.’

‘Are you good?’

‘Not bad. I drive a sports car, too, if that’s any help.’

‘It’s not, really. Driving a car hasn’t much to do with flying, in the same way that walking hasn’t much to do with swimming. I asked about the riding because half the battle in piloting is having firm, sensitive hands.’ (32)

We may