MISS CARTER'S WAR
Sheila Hancock
Bloomsbury, $36.99
If ever there was a poster girl for reinventing oneself, it would have to be Sheila Hancock. Best known for her lengthy and successful career on the stage and on screen, Hancock has recently become a popular and well-respected writer. After her husband, the actor John Thaw, died in 2002, Hancock wrote the best-selling memoirs The Two of Us and Only Me.
In Miss Carter's War, Hancock has turned her hand to fiction. The novel begins in 1948 with Marguerite Carter graduating from Cambridge University. As one of the first women to receive a degree there Marguerite is a pioneer; she is also an idealist. She has no interest in applying for the plum jobs becoming available for members of her sex, or even entering politics. She is going to change the world by working as a school teacher.
Marguerite's story spans half a century and Hancock puts the spotlight on important events in England during this time. We frock up to watch the Coronation on a rented television set, don a duffle coat to march against the bomb, and observe Margaret Thatcher's rise and fall. This is ambitious – perhaps too ambitious: there are sections of the narrative where her characters are mere shadows silhouetted in front of a newsreel screen. Hancock also makes the mistake many rookie writers of historical fiction fall prey to in casting famous people from the past in walk-on roles.
Nevertheless, Hancock cannot be faulted for the sensual way that she brings the past to life. Marguerite takes pleasure – after years of wartime rationing and shortages – in the lavish cut and fabrics of the New Look, and we can almost feel the lush swish of a full skirt. But Hancock's creation of her main character is the real triumph.
Miss Carter's memories of her service with the French Resistance are always with her, a neat way of demonstrating the baggage that she and everyone else carried in the post-war world. She is a fighter all her life, but, as well as imbuing Marguerite with her own indomitable spirit, Hancock has been canny enough to ensure that she also has her full quota of human frailties. When Marguerite learns that the male colleague she fancies is gay, this causes a temporary rift in their relationship. Not very right-on of her, but a typical response for someone of that era and, in its piqued wrong-headedness, arguably rather endearing.
