This is by Marghanita Laski (1915-88), and it was published in 1949. My copy was sourced at Douglas Library, and I read it purely on the strength of Simon Haisell's recommendation (because I've not found a bad one yet).

The story concerns an English writer/poet called Hilary Wainwright, and we open in 1943, with WWII still raging. Hilary's Polish wife, Lisa, stayed on in Paris (where they had been living) when Hilary went off to join the war effort in 1940. "We all thought the British would be fighting in France," he explains. And initially, they were. But suddenly the Germans are poised to break through: "The way through to the British Army in the north was closed. The only practical escape was by the south-west. Hilary decided to make a dash for Paris first. He arrived there a day before the Germans, the day after his son was born." He needs to leave sharpish, or risk becoming a POW. But Lisa is still too weak to be moved. And, in any case, they think the separation will be short. Wrong... The Germans soon occupy large swathes of France.

Lisa's undercover wartime work involved spiriting British POWs to safety, and she perished at the hands of the Gestapo in 1942. Hilary is already aware of that. But now, Pierre Verdier, a friend of Lisa's, turns up in England to tell him that John, the couple's little boy, has gone missing. Knowing that her cover had been blown, Lisa entrusted John to the care of Jeanne, Pierre's fiancee. Jeanne, who ran an underground newspaper, has also died. But before she was caught, she took little John to the local priest -- or, at least, that's what they think happened... There are other possibilities. She may have taken him somewhere different. Or -- worse -- he may be among those who have been brutally killed, or among those adopted by German families.

Pierre volunteers to try to track the boy down: "If anyone can find your son for you, I can."

In the last letter that Hilary ever received from Lisa, she exhorts him to fetch John, "and make him your son". So Pierre's news and his offer are a kind of unblocking of the dam: "It was only then that Hilary fully realised that his son was lost. Since Lisa’s death he had ceaselessly dreamed that he would one day find happiness with a child who was not yet an imagined person but only a surviving symbol of his and Lisa’s love. But there had seemed no need to open his heart to this token child, safe in France and unattainable; his deep unassuageable anguish could all be for Lisa. But now this Frenchman came to tell Hilary that not only Lisa but his child, a real child, had been lost, that the pity and agony must be indefinitely extended, the happiness and comfort indefinitely postponed. With horror his discovered in himself only a deep wish to be spared this new phase of pain, discovered that he was saying to himself, If the boy's lost, then let that be an end to it. He could not endure to imagine the possible agonies of the lost child."



That's the first part, called The Loss, and I've quoted it quite extensively because these are the elements that the rest of the story builds on. Part Two is called The Search. The war is over now; Hilary is at liberty to go to France; and Pierre has found a boy he thinks is John. The would-be father, however, is still a very reluctant seeker, still terribly afraid of being hurt again.

There's no hard evidence, but it seems the child was indeed passed to the priest, whose practice it was to secretly hand such children on to Mme Quilleboeuf, an impoverished laundress, where they were briefly housed until someone called to collect them. Unfortunately, the priest suddenly dies, leaving her with a child, and no-one to pass him on to. After a couple of months, she desperately needs a solution, and takes him to the orphanage in the town where she was born.

This is all just surmise, Hilary says. Pierre responds: "Believe me, Hilary, if this child is not yours, you will never find your child." He keeps quiet about a couple of other candidates he investigated -- one mentally disabled, the other already happily housed.


This drawing, by "Vicky", was commissioned for the original publication of the novel in 1949

Part Three is called The Ordeal. Leaving Pierre behind, Hilary goes off to the orphanage that Mme Quilleboeuf mentioned. He meets the Mother Superior, and he's about to meet the boy, now called Jean. He has prepared himself for seeing someone who is his son:

"And then he looked at the child.
"And told himself with a kind of horror, 'How could I ever have imagined that this child was mine!'"

Laski is very good at knocking the potentially sentimental edge off this story. It could have been cloying. But her brutal honesty about Hilary's angular personality prevents that.

It seems Hilary has subconsciously been expecting a child who looks a bit more like himself at that age. What he's not expecting is a badly dressed, clearly deprived, "foreign" child. The boy is clever, says the cultivated M. Mercatel, who teaches at the orphanage. That helps. "From a cultured and intellectual background," he continues.

Hilary takes the child on a couple of modest outings, and warms to him. But nothing really clicks.

The Mother Superior would clearly like him to adopt Jean, whether he's his son or not... She identifies a cold emptiness about Hilary ("you seem to me lost and in need of comfort"), and she thinks the responsibility of a child might help.

But we've already heard about the shell that Hilary has constructed around himself. It has not dissolved: "I couldn't endure being hurt again; I'd sooner feel nothing. I don't like children as such; they bore me. I used to think that a child of my own would make me happy, but I know that isn't true any more... I just want to be left alone so that I can't be hurt again."

Part of Laski's brilliance is that she makes Hilary a pretty unsympathetic character. I'm not referring to the not liking children thing; that's fairly understandable. But he gets our backs up with his total lack of empathy; his tendency to see things in terms of black and white; his readiness to judge; and his snobbery (intellectual and urban). We wonder how good a father he's going to make, actually, if he ever does find his boy...


Paris, 2024

Anyway, the days allotted to his visit are running out, and the Mother Superior is gently urging him. After all, she says, there's nothing for the boy here... Hilary feels pressured: "So that's that...; everything cut and dried, everything decided and bang goes my life."

And then he meets Nelly. She's manipulative and fairly horrible, but he's attracted to her. (There is a "Joyce" in the background somewhere, whom Hilary has vaguely mentioned marrying, but there's no indication that he ever talked to her about the possibility of recovering his son...) Anyway, Hilary decides he wants something that's purely physical and non-binding. It's a slightly odd plot point, as snobby Hilary basically despises the woman.

Shortly afterwards, two things happen. The first is that Nelly pressures him to come with her to Paris (to which he agrees, knowing that this would effectively spell the end of his attempts with Jean); the other is that he takes her to the fair, and wins a pink velvet dog that's exactly like Binkie, the plush toy he and Lisa used to have in their flat in Paris.

He writes his goodbye letter to the Mother Superior; and he packs up the dog and sends it as a present to Jean. He leaves the hotel, heading off to meet Nelly, and thinking, "It's all over and I'm free again." When his conscience reproaches him, he counters: "I'm through with ordeals... I haven't enough courage. I must escape." There's no proof about Jean, after all. "I didn't come here to adopt a child but to find my own. I didn't find him and so I may go freely to my pleasure, freely to my invulnerability and to my memories."

Not for him this business of giving, letting go, dissolving into tenderness... But then he remembers that moment of tenderness with Nelly -- even with Nelly... Wonders who else he has an "obligation of tenderness" to. Still can't see that this feeling encompasses the child, though. Wouldn't taking a child who might not actually be his be a betrayal of Lisa? But where is Lisa? He can't "feel" her any more. She has gone. And then, "with absolute certainty", he realizes he CAN give love, and he CAN accept this child as his son.



The fourth section, very brief, is called The Judgement. Hilary returns to the orphanage. Jean has already received the pink plush dog. And Hilary arrives just in time to hear him shout triumphantly: "It's Binkie. It's Binkie come back!"

So, yes, the Nelly twist felt slightly artificial, given Hilary's fastidiousness, and therefore stretched credulity a little, but otherwise this was a beautifully set up story, which made for a very gripping read. It's a satisfying ending, but not a sentimental one. We're glad these two have found each other, but we have lots of question marks over the way their relationship is going to develop...

***

Another of the book's strengths is its depiction of post-war France. Hilary notes, on his return, that this is "not France as he remembered it". There are ruins everywhere, and every commodity is in brutally short supply -- unless, that is, you're willing to pay over the odds for everything, because there's a thriving black market, and no shortage of people willing to exploit others to the best of their ability.

"Don't you wonder," Hilary asks Pierre, "with every stranger you meet, what he did under the Occupation?" Pierre replies pragmatically: "We each did under the Germans what we were capable of doing; what that was, was settled long before they arrived."

The orphanage is terrible. It's not that the nuns are unkind, but there is hardly anything to give the children. They're all likely to come out with tuberculosis or rickets, and the best a handful can hope for is to learn a trade. Those incapable of following that path are almost certain to be exploited as cheap agricultural labour. And it's all so much worse, the Mother Superior says, in Germany, Austria, and Poland...

Anna Sebbe's Afterword quotes historian Mark Mazower on the astonishing numbers of children left without homes and families across Europe after WWII. The UN was caring for 50,000 unaccompanied children in Germany alone, "many of whom had forgotten who they were or where they came from". The story of John/Jean is one which would have played out many times over across the continent.

And, of course, it's reminiscent of one of the threads of Ali Smith's Summer, when Daniel's sister, working for the Resistance, places her child in safety when she thinks things are going to get hairy. We know, but Daniel never knows, that two of the characters we've been following are that sister's descendants.


Normandy, 1990

Little Boy Lost also encourages us to see "victory" through the eyes of the war-weary French. On the way to Paris, Hilary is warming to the familiarity of the scenes he passes, but then: "Yes, it was familiar again -- until the bus creaked past the bombed factory, the makeshift bridge, the shattered rusting locomotives, and the English in the bus shamefacedly whispered to each other, 'Do you think WE did that?' and then wondered if there could still be friendship between the destroyer and the destroyed."

We recently watched Oliver Parker's The Great Escaper, in which Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson give magnificent performances as an elderly couple in a care home during the time of the D-Day 70th anniversary commemorations. It's based on a true story (though no doubt with some elaboration). Bernie Jordan can't get a place on an organized trip to the jamboree in Normandy, and so he "escapes", catches a ferry to France, and wings it, with the help of a few friends he makes along the way.

The great thing about the film (apart from its sympathetically realistic portrayal of aging) is that it doesn't play up all the ra-ra that accompanied the anniversary. Instead, it focuses on the things that don't generally get the headlines: The grieving Germans; the survivor's guilt that many (including Bernie) carry throughout their lives; and the way war scars everyone involved.

In an article written at the time of the 2024 celebrations, Jessica Phelan reminds us that the D-Day invasion was "both a triumph and a tragedy". Some quotes:

"The people of Normandy had already been living with German soldiers for around four years by then. That had involved considerable sacrifices, and they intensified as Nazi commanders began to suspect an invasion was coming... In the months preceding D-Day, British and American planes bombed the rail network in northern France. In the hours before and after the landings, they targeted Normandy’s main roads. The routes passed through cities, towns, villages. But Allied commanders decided to sacrifice them -- in fact, to pulverise them. Their ruins would serve as roadblocks... Some 15 towns were pummelled by Allied bombs on 6 June and the days that followed, including ones with no military targets to speak of. By 7 June, 3,000 people were dead – as many as on the beaches the day before. The raids continued on and off into September, killing an estimated 20,000 civilians in all."

One survivor explains: "Caen was bombed, for example -- why? For nothing. There were hardly any Germans there. All these towns were massacred."

I remember Saint-Lo as the first place we used to call in at, once we were off the ferry to Caen. It was a good place to stock up with French goodies, have a coffee, admire the window displays, and sniff the French air. I'd forgotten that more than 90 per cent of it was destroyed in the bombing.


Normandy. Two children watch an American Jeep making its way through the ruined centre of Saint-Lo in August 1944

People fled the bombing campaigns. Chaotically. Traumatically. Their experiences were indelible.

It would take a couple of decades to rebuild Normandy, and many more for people to really talk about their experiences. Early D-Day commemorations -- taking place in the Cold War, with a new enemy to focus on -- were all about "the heroism of these warriors who saved Europe from the Nazis". No-one was that interested in remembering that this liberation came with huge civilian losses.

It wasn't until 1994 that a real drive began to tell a more complete story.

Which shows how very prescient Laski was...