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Island Thinking
Suffolk Stories of
Landscape, Militarisation
and Identity
Sophia Davis
 Island Thinking

“In this thoughtful and illuminating book, Sophia Davis asks us to consider
the imaginative appeal of what it means to be an island. Taking in the view
from the shores of the Suffolk coast, Island Thinking looks at how ideas of
nationhood, identity, defence and nature become bound together in place.
This book uncovers the stories of how this small, seemingly isolated part of
England became significant to emerging national narratives about Englishness,
its rural inheritance and its future military technological prowess.”
—Rachel Woodward, Professor of Human Geography, School of Geography,
Politics & Sociology, Newcastle University, UK, and author of Military
Geographies

“Sophia Davis’s Island Thinking offers a fascinating and compelling account of

mid-twentieth-century Englishness, as seen through a rich archipelagic history
of one of England’s most peculiar and most iconic counties, Suffolk. Davis
leads the reader through the intensely local impacts and affects of profound
historical and global change, and reads the landscape wisely and well for what
it can tell us about the dramatic transformations of English culture through
and after the Second World War.”
—Professor John Brannigan, University College Dublin, and author of
Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles,
1890–1970

“Through close scrutiny of Suffolk stories, Sophia Davis offers a compelling

narrative of islandness in England from the mid-twentieth century. These
accounts of landscape and militarisation, migration and the natural world,
show how island thinking invokes both refuge and anxiety, security and fear. In
looking back, Island Thinking captures ongoing English preoccupations.”
—David Matless, Professor of Cultural Geography, University
of Nottingham, and author of In the Nature of Landscape

“Island Thinking expertly takes the reader into the secrets of the Suffolk coun-
tryside in a way that no other study has. Adeptly guiding the reader through
the historical layers of its twentieth century landscape, Davis exposes the
deeper roots of how the nation relates to itself, using Suffolk to trace the
broader themes of isolation, defense, heritage, and nostalgia. Anyone with a
fascination with the countryside will enjoy the way that the county’s traditions
of silence and secrecy were punctuated by pioneering conservationists, return-
ing avocets, ex-servicemen, and the rewilding of abandoned ruins. Beautifully
researched and written, the reader can discover in Island Thinking a parable for
our times as we seek an understanding of how this landscape has done so much
to create a sense of “Englishness”. This superb scholarly researched study marks
an invaluable new contribution to British landscape history.”
—Michael Bravo, Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute,
University of Cambridge
 Sophia Davis

Island Thinking
Suffolk Stories of Landscape,
Militarisation and Identity
Sophia Davis
Berlin, Germany

ISBN 978-981-13-9675-5 ISBN 978-981-13-9676-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9676-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore
Pte Ltd. 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by
similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
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authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
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 Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making. It is largely based on a
Ph.D. that I completed back in 2010, and it finally reaching the world
owes a lot to Professor Nick Jardine, one of my mentors at Cambridge,
who periodically and encouragingly nudged me in this direction. Nick
was a wonderful support during writing the thesis, and an inspiring
role model in the department, with his enduring capacity to find things
fascinating and his devotion to teaching. I am also hugely indebted
to Helen Macdonald for sparking my interest in the history of nature
conservation and natural history and their weird entwining with mil-
itary themes. Working with Helen during my M.Phil. both propelled
my analytical and writing abilities and emboldened me to do the Ph.D.,
and it was a joy to have her energy, encouragement and guidance
throughout the process of creating that thesis. Although I was based
in history and philosophy of science, my work encroached increasingly
on the territory of cultural geography, and I benefited greatly from
discussions with Michael Bravo over in the geography department at
Cambridge. Another cultural geographer to whom I am deeply thank-
ful is Professor Hayden Lorimer, who examined the thesis and gave me
a lot of time and support in developing postdoc ideas. Back on home

v
vi      Acknowledgements

turf, I am very grateful to Professor Simon Schaffer for a particularly

helpful chat near the end of the thesis writing process. Simon was
another very inspiring presence for me in the history and philosophy of
science department through his generosity and openness to discussing
with students.
That particular chat took place at the Eagle pub, at the end of our
department’s street, and where many a lively and thought-provoking
discussion took place after our weekly departmental seminar. Both the
Eagle and the tearoom up on the top floor of the department were key
sites for my own intellectual development, and I am very thankful for
having experienced such a warm, open academic atmosphere. My thanks
go to Tamara Hug and all the staff at the department for their work in
shaping it to be like that, and I greatly appreciated wide-ranging con-
versations there with my colleagues, particularly Leon Rocha, Rebecca
Wexler, Nicky Reeves, Saffron Clackson, Ruth Horry, Josh Nall, Boris
Jardine, Nick Tosh and Christina MacLeish. Some of them joined me for
various trips to the Suffolk coast, including a field trip to Orford Ness
with the department’s Cabinet of Natural History, and Boris kindly sup-
plied me with some photos from one of those trips. This book is also the
product of explorations in second-hand bookshops, as well as wandering
around Suffolk by car and foot.
At Cambridge, I received helpful comments on papers presented
to various seminar groups within my department and in Darwin
College, and I also benefited from the feedback on papers I delivered
at conferences, especially the Militarised Landscapes conference in
Bristol in 2008 and the Science in Society conference in Washington,
DC, in 2011. My Ph.D. was funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council (AHRC) in the UK, and I am hugely thankful for
receiving that scholarship. During my subsequent scholarship at the
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, I greatly
enjoyed conversations with Jenny Bangham, Professor Felicity Callard
and Etienne Benson. The feedback from three reviewers via Palgrave
Macmillan was helpful for writing this book from the original Ph.D.
thesis over the past year, and I am thankful to Joshua Pitt and Sophie
Li at Palgrave Macmillan for their help during the publication process.
Obtaining the permissions for the images led to some delightfully warm
 Acknowledgements      vii

communication with various people, which I appreciated very much.

I would like to thank the RSPB, both for the use of their images and
for some enjoyable stays at their archive in Sandy. The Orford Museum
also allowed me to use some images from their collections, and I had
the honour of joining some members back in 2008 as they prepared
for an exhibition on the village’s wartime history. David Hosking and
Tristan Allsop both very kindly allowed me to use images from their
fathers, the late Eric Hosking and the late Kenneth Allsop. The family
of the late Gordon Kinsey also gave me permission to use one of his
images, and Allan Powell from the Martlesham Heath Aviation Society
was very cooperative in supplying the image itself. At the Suffolk record
office in Ipswich, the archivists were very helpful, and I’d like to thank
Wayne Cocroft from English Heritage and Grant Lohoar and Angus
Wainwright from the National Trust for taking time to talk with me
about Orford Ness.
Over the past year of writing this book, I greatly appreciated the sup-
port of my friends, with a special mention to Maggie for kicking me
into action again with sending out the book proposal and listening to
extended monologues on its contents, as well as Joey, Florencia, Nick,
Andy and Leon for being great friends throughout. I have met many
courageous and powerful people through my work in somatic therapy
over the last seven years, and I am deeply grateful for the experience of
being able to accompany them in their transformative journeys, which
has taught me a lot. I will be forever thankful to Susanna, Peter and
Liz, Lisa and Rich, James and Jenny, and Charlie and Hannah for being
there for me for all this time. Finally, a massive thank you goes to my
wife, Steph, for backing me in pursuing my goals and cheering me on at
every stage along the way.
 Contents

1 Island Stories 1

2 Secluded Suffolk: Countryside Writing, c.1930–1960 31

3 Invaded Island: Wartime Enclosures and Post-war

Memories 73

4 Looking to the Skies: Post-war Radar Stories 115

5 Birds and Belonging: The Return of the Avocet,

1947–1969 161

6 Nature Set in Reserve: 1950s–1960s Nature Conservation 199

7 Rewilding and War Monuments: Orford Ness,

c.1995 to the Present 237

8 Conclusions 277

Index 295
ix
 List of Figures

Chapter 1
Fig. 1 Map of coastal Suffolk 17

Chapter 2
Fig. 1 Shingle Street (Photograph by the author, May 2008) 35
Fig. 2 River Alde at the Snape Maltings at dawn (Photograph
by the author, May 2008) 45
Fig. 3 Anti-erosion measures near Shingle Street (Photograph
by the author, May 2008) 51
Fig. 4 Martello tower with pillbox near Shingle Street (Photograph
by the author, May 2008) 64
Fig. 5 Martello towers from Shingle Street towards Bawdsey
(Photograph by the author, May 2008) 65

Chapter 3
Fig. 1 Anti-invasion structures known as “devil’s teeth”
on Minsmere beach, 1949 (Photograph courtesy of the Eric
Hosking Trust, www.erichoskingtrust.com) 79

xi
xii       List of Figures

Fig. 2 Anti-tank cubes near Bawdsey (Photographs by the author,

May 2008) 83
Fig. 3 Pillbox near Orford (Photographs by the author, May 2008) 84
Fig. 4 Orford Battle Area map (Courtesy of Orford Museum) 87
Fig. 5 Orford castle in the “Invasion Village” series, 1940
(Courtesy of Orford Museum) 91
Fig. 6 Orford square in the “Invasion Village” series, 1940
(Courtesy of Orford Museum) 92
Fig. 7 A few hundred metres south of Shingle Street (Photograph
by the author, May 2008) 106

Chapter 4
Fig. 1 Bawdsey’s transmitter masts in the 1940s (Photograph
courtesy of the late Gordon Kinsey’s family, originally
appearing in his Bawdsey: Birth of the Beam [1983]) 130
Fig. 2 Observation tower and pillbox at Bawdsey (Photograph
by the author, May 2008) 131

Chapter 5
Fig. 1 RSPB logo from 1970 162
Fig. 2 Photograph of avocets by Eric Hosking, appearing
in The Times, 1950 (Courtesy of the Eric Hosking Trust,
www.erichoskingtrust.com) 163
Fig. 3 Nesting avocets as pictured in Brown’s Avocets in England
(1950) (Courtesy of the RSPB) 170
Fig. 4 Illustrations from Allsop’s Adventure Lit Their Star,
by Anthony Smith (Courtesy of Tristan Allsop) 180
Fig. 5 Illustrations from Adventure Lit Their Star, by Anthony
Smith (Courtesy of Tristan Allsop) 181

Chapter 6
Fig. 1 Bulldozer transporting soil at Minsmere in October 1969
(RSPB 1976) (Courtesy of the RSPB) 210
 List of Figures      xiii

Fig. 2 Visitors outside the island mere hide at Minsmere

with Bert Axell top left, from Minsmere: Portrait of a Bird
Reserve (1977) (Courtesy of the Eric Hosking Trust,
www.erichoskingtrust.com) 221
Fig. 3 Tree hide at Minsmere, from the RSPB’s Minsmere
guidebook (1952b) (Courtesy of the RSPB) 226
Fig. 4 Temporary hide at Minsmere (RSPB 1976) (Courtesy
of the RSPB) 227

Chapter 7
Fig. 1 Pagoda laboratories from Orford harbour (Photograph
by the author, October 2008) 243
Fig. 2 Building entrails seen from the path (Photograph courtesy
of Boris Jardine) 244
Fig. 3 Concrete circle and shingle ridges (Photograph courtesy
of Boris Jardine) 246
Fig. 4 AWRE laboratories in the shingle, and a sign warning
of unexploded ordnance (Photograph by the author,
May 2006) 246
Fig. 5 Laboratory 1 (Photograph by the author, May 2006) 248
Fig. 6 Laboratory 1 (Photograph courtesy of Boris Jardine) 249
Fig. 7 WE177 (Photograph by the author, May 2006) 249
 1
Island Stories

In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, a new urgency has come to asking
questions about developments in British identity. This book explores
the imaginative appeal of the island, which has always resonated
strongly in Britain, dealing with developments in local and national
­identity broadly concerning the period 1930–1969, with a final c­ hapter
on 1995 to the present. Whilst considering the national and global
scales is always relevant, the book focuses on a very local scale, using
a regional study to unravel the motif of the island, and showing how
deeply embedded this island thinking has been both on micro-scales
and at the level of the nation. My focus is on coastal Suffolk in the
east of England, a mostly flat land leading to heaths, marshes, rivers
and the North Sea. This little patch of the country is closed in on the
south by the River Orwell, on the west by the road from Ipswich, on
the north by the River Blyth and the village of Southwold, and on the
east by the sea. Referred to as an “island within an island”, this corner of
England provides fascinating stories of a nation looking both o­ utwards
and inwards, trying to understand itself. As the countryside was given
greater importance in mapping out Englishness during the ­twentieth
century, this area was characterised as giving a glimpse into a more

© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. Davis, Island Thinking,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9676-2_1
2    
S. Davis

authentic, older version of England. It was also home to the early devel-
opments in radar, the project to “make Britain an island again” after
the early twentieth-century advances in aerial warfare had raised fears
of Britain’s vulnerability to aerial attack. Post-war narratives of radar’s
development there extended the motif of the “island nation” and the
myth of the “hero’s war”.
Following the Second World War, the tendency to look to the skies
for invaders carried on in another guise, as a craze in amateur studies
of bird migration saw the nation’s coast become dotted with bird obser-
vatories in a chain reminiscent of the wartime chain of radar stations.
Described as “the heritage we are fighting for” during the war, birds
and their watchers provide interesting insights into contemporary cul-
tural imagination and identity. In another intermingling of war and
birds, wartime flooding prompted the return of the avocet to this area
of the country, the protection of which sparked a key episode in the
history of British nature conservation. The avocet’s protection in the late
1940s was full of ex-servicemen and behaviour that seemed to reenact
wartime watching and guarding and the recovery from violent wartime
experience through reorientation to local nature. The project of creating
British nature reserves took off in earnest in the post-war years, raising
questions about exactly which “nature” was seen as in need of setting
aside as islands of conservation. The reserves created for the avocets on
the Suffolk coast, Minsmere and Havergate Island, provide a window
into the changing attitudes to nature in the 1950s and 1960s. Finally,
ideas of conservation and heritage took another form much later in
this same area, when a former military-scientific research site became
a National Trust nature reserve in 1995. Referred to by locals as “the
Island”, Orford Ness and the experiences there allow us to trace con-
temporary formulations of wildness, war and nation.
In John Gillis’ book, Islands of the Mind (2004), he explores how
islands have occupied a central place in the collective imagination and
history of the Western world. As he claims, “western culture not only
thinks about islands, but thinks with them” (Gillis 2004, 1). Focusing
specifically on the island-as-nation metaphor, Fiona Polack writes
that “an island’s boundaries provide the sort of fixed limits that make
it a perfect microcosm of … national concerns” that are “less easily
 1 Island Stories    
3

containable or comprehensible in other locations” (Polack 1998, 217).

This book explores narratives of isolation and enclosure in the run-up to
and aftermath of the Second World War, with a final chapter on memo-
rialisation of twentieth-century warfare. It uses a variety of n ­ arratives
about the region of coastal Suffolk to unpick layers connecting to ideas
of England, its national past, its nature, its relationship with militari-
sation, and our place in it. In a world in which English nationalism
has been on the rise for some time, some have argued that the Brexit
vote should primarily be understood as a response to England’s loss of
faith in the once-glorious British project, or what political commentator
Anthony Barnett (2017) refers to as “the lure of greatness”. This book
explores developments in how the nation related to itself during the
mid-twentieth-century fall of the empire, using a highly local focus to
trace broader themes of isolation, defence, heritage and nostalgia.

1 Island Nation
In 1940, Graham Clark wrote that “We are so accustomed to think of
ourselves as islanders that we sometimes tend to forget that Britain is
part of the European continent from which she has at certain intervals
in her history become temporarily detached” (Clark 1940, 1). This was
not part of a political text, but the beginning of a book on Prehistoric
England, one of the new “British Heritage Series” that the publisher
Batsford had begun the year before. Literature about the countryside
had grown in popularity in the 1930s in what geographer Catherine
Leyshon (see Brace 2003) has called the popular discovery of the coun-
tryside. During the Second World War, the countryside focus grew to
encompass the nation’s heritage and its nature, and the English country-
side was presented as what the “people’s war” fought to protect. The spe-
cial importance of the countryside during the Second World War can be
seen in J. B. Priestley’s popular “Postscript” broadcasts, many of which
referred to the countryside. In a particular broadcast in June 1940, he
spoke of a “powerful and rewarding sense of community” experienced
in the countryside, when he spent a night with the local village guard
­helping keep “watch and ward over the sleeping English hills and fields
4    
S. Davis

and homesteads” (Priestley 1940, 12). Continuing his study of the

deep heritage of the island nation, Graham Clark wrote that “From the
moment that geographical continuity with the continent was broken
our insularity became a factor of immense significance”, since Britain
existed “within a barrier behind which we could develop our own dis-
tinctive civilisation”. The separation also came with the threat of these
barriers being penetrated, however, as Britain became the “natural vic-
tim of those who coveted her natural wealth”, and Clark describes the
“waves of invaders” over the few thousand years of Britain’s history
(Clarke 1940, 5, 8).
There is a slippage from England to Britain between Priestley’s and
Clark’s 1940s narratives, and this shifting scale of reference will recur
throughout this book. For many of those who we will encounter, the
frame of reference is England and Englishness. Indeed, the identifica-
tion of England with the island, although false, has been “an unwaver-
ing one among English writers and other English people” (Beer 1990,
269). This quote is from literary scholar Gillian Beer, who argues that
“The island has seemed the perfect form in the English cultural imag-
ining … Defensive, secure, compacted, even paradisal” (Beer 1990,
269). That appeal can be seen in another of Batsford’s series, the Face of
Britain, which included John Ingham’s book on The Islands of England.
Many of Ingham’s claims about “island fever” seem to operate on a
double level, referring to the national “island” at the same time as the
smaller islands within the archipelago. As Ingham put it, “the lure of
islands never fades; it is as old as it is irresistible; and who among us,
at one time or another, has not dreamt of possessing a small, self-suffi-
cient kingdom of his own? Perhaps we English, with our insatiable curi-
osity about the sea, and reared on a tradition of Robinson Crusoe and
Swiss Family Robinson, are particularly prone to this emotion” (Ingham
1952, 14). Ingham attributes his interest in islands to Ronald Lockley,
a naturalist who pioneered the establishment of bird observatories on
the islands around Britain, beginning on his island of Skokholm in the
mid-1930s, and expanding around the nation’s shores in the late 1940s
and 1950s. Like Ingham, Lockley’s Islands Round Britain describes how
“There is something about a small island that satisfies the heart of man”,
 1 Island Stories    
5

going on to discuss the feelings of ownership and control over the place:
“a kingdom of our own set in the silver sea” (Lockley 1945, 8).
Sea is as important as land for the island concept, as Beer observes—
land surrounded by sea, offering a vast extension of the island, and
allowing the psychic size of the body politic to expand, bumping into
others’ territory. From the early twentieth century and through the
period considered by this book, the “island” of Britain was seen anew in
two important aspects. With the rise of the aeroplane, it was seen from
above, challenging the notion of the sea’s extension. As H. G. Wells
commented in 1927, you cannot fly to dominions around the empire
without “infringing foreign territory”, whereas it had been possible in
the steam-ship era to sail from England around the empire through
international waters, which are requisitioned as part of the island (Wells
1928, 131). Seen from the perspective of the aeroplane, the island
seemed suddenly much more fragile. As Wells’ quote reminds us, along
with the sea, the empire was the second great extension of the island
nation, and the second to be lost in the twentieth century. Vulnerable,
and reduced in size, what would happen to the island nation’s view of
itself, an England that was suddenly centre without periphery?
Islands have long captured the Western imagination, and have for a
long time been a space for exploration, self-inquiry and satire of writers’
own cultures. The variations in figurations of the island form, whilst rel-
evant to considering the nation’s view of itself, also necessarily interact
with Britain’s imperial history. Discussing the anxiety bound up with
Britain’s smallness in contrast to its vast empire, historian Linda Colley
(2003) observes that up to the early nineteenth century, there were per-
vasive fears that Britain was too small to accomplish great things, and
despair that its small population was draining to the colonies and to its
woefully small army and navy. Arguing that Britishness was “forged”
between 1707 and 1837 in conflict with an external “other”, Colley
(2005) observes that even when they were winning, there was often a
fear that the British imperium was inherently unnatural. This changed
during the nineteenth century, partly due to the late eighteenth-century
emergence of new racial, scientific, political and religious attitudes (Said
1994). In addition to the subsequent notions of European or British
6    
S. Davis

superiority, another factor was the shift at home in both real popula-
tion levels and how the population was perceived following the work
of Thomas Malthus and the first census in 1801. The fearfully small
British population suddenly appeared staggeringly large, and in need of
spilling over into the colonies. Britain’s sense of smallness at this time
was also soothed by its accession of a very large, cheap and seemingly
tractable Indian army. Britain’s empire, it should not be forgotten,
always rested in fact on the backs, bayonets and taxes of those living
outside the “island” of Great Britain.
Another crucial factor in Britain’s changing image of itself was the
Industrial Revolution, fuelled by the nation’s easy access to coal, iron
and water power, making Britain’s global power seem more practicable,
even inevitable. Early modern industries were all, to quote Robinson
Crusoe, “island industries”, the British Industrial Revolution being
enmeshed with revolutionary developments in seaborne trade, naval
power, and their sciences and technologies. Advances in transport and
communications addressed some of the challenges of a small set of
islands attempting to handle a global empire, with trains, ships and tel-
egraphs moving people, ideas, goods, information and profits at unprec-
edented rates. Industrialisation thus seemed to quell concerns about
Britain’s inadequate base, through increasing productivity and allowing
its population to boom. Nineteenth-century Britain seemed less a frag-
ile dot on the map than a spider at the centre of a global web, an octo-
pus with tentacles in every part of the globe.
Returning to the notion of islands bringing with it the dual ele-
ments of land and water, one surrounded by the other, literary scholar
Samuel Baker (2010) argues in his Written on the Water that Britain’s
insular situation shaped not only British culture, but also the very con-
cept of “culture” that the British Romantics developed, framing their
picture of human life as a whole within the horizon of a common
experience of the sea. Thus Wordsworth and others who pioneered
culture talk referred to islands, shores, oceans and systems of aquatic
circulation when doing so, and the British Romantics developed a new
architectonic for modern poetic practice by embarking on an intense
involvement with the sea. Shifting from the water back to the land,
geographer Robert Peckham (2003) argues that during the nineteenth
 1 Island Stories    
7

century, national cultures were increasingly construed as autonomous,

self-contained island-like spaces set apart from other communities
beyond. In Britain, the authentic islands within the island state received
particular interest in the late nineteenth century, as a relationship was
forged between these two levels of island. Biogeographical and evolu-
tionary writing represented the island as a site for observing preserved
life forms and diversification, and through this interest, islands emerged
as ambivalent, problematic places, at once prison and refuge, places
of innocent childhood adventure and beastly aggression (Peckham
2003). Gillian Beer (1989) also observes that within the strong island
discourse emerging in the mid-nineteenth-century natural sciences,
islands were painted as full of resourcefulness, diversity, productivity
and strangeness, exemplified by Darwin’s Galapagos Islands finches and
Wallace’s Aru Islands birds of paradise. Contemporaneous to Darwin
and Wallace’s studies, the literary island of the time stood for loneliness,
tedium and lost community.
By the late nineteenth century, Britain seemed to have effectively can-
celled out its own islandness through empire, and the influential late
nineteenth-century historian, J. R. Seeley, framed empire as nation in
line with a great deal of other contemporary works scheming to create
greater imperial unity. Despite these attempts to exorcise the spectre
of smallness, anxieties about Britain’s limited dimensions was never far
beneath the surface. Other states seemed to loom large as Germany and
Italy unified, the Russian empire expanded, and the United States sur-
vived its civil war. Although British imperialism was near its territorial
peak by the turn of the century, it had already started to lose momen-
tum, to fissure internally, and to meet serious resistance from national-
ist movements in the colonies (Porter 2004). Literary high modernism
explored this sense of vulnerability, combined with the view afforded
by inherited centrality (Said 1994), or what Raymond Williams (1989)
described as “metropolitan perception”.
In the modernism of the early twentieth century, such as the writing
of E. M. Forster, a defining tension exists between a nostalgic yearn-
ing for a lost insular and pastoral state, and the privileges of living at
the centre of an expansive industrial and imperial power. As shown in
Frederic Jameson’s (1990) account of “meaning loss” in modernism,
8    
S. Davis

those at the centre could no longer grasp what Gertrude Stein referred
to in the 1930s as “the daily island life”. Politically, such an elegiac
tenderness towards a vanishing cultural integrity at the core of a mul-
tinational British Empire was expressed as Little Englandism, exem-
plified by the writing of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. Jed
Esty describes England’s lost insular wholeness in the course of British
expansion as a hallowing and hollowing of Englishness; empire hal-
lowed Englishness by virtue of its projection onto (and invention for)
the colonies, and simultaneously hollowed Englishness by splitting its
being into core and periphery (Esty 2004, 26).

2 Shrinking Islands
If the notion of English islandness has been at once alluring and prob-
lematic, as this sketch suggests, then the period from around 1930
brought a new intensity to the motif of the island. It was becom-
ing clear by the late 1930s that England’s global domain would not
grow any further, and if anything, it would shrink (Darwin 1991).
The converging crises of economic disaster, imperial overextension
and totalitarian threat pointed to the inevitability of British contrac-
tion. Anticolonial nationalisms were building strength on the imperial
periphery, particularly in Egypt and India, and the dominions (Canada,
South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) began seeking and gain-
ing autonomy from British authority in the 1920s and 1930s. As the
challenges in 1930s Europe started diverting resources away from the
empire, colonial unrest became more important and alarming (Barnett
1986). Jed Esty’s brilliant A Shrinking Island describes the intellectual
and artistic projects of the 1930s as not so much pro- or anti-empire,
but rather post-empire, littered with signs of British imperial contrac-
tion as both an anticipated crisis and a burgeoning historical reality. By
the time the European war became imminent, England (with Scotland
and Wales in tow) was already on its way to an insular status it had not
experienced in hundreds of years (Esty 2004, 38).
Already earlier in the century, the island had seemed to come under
question through the impact of air power, with the phrase “Britain is
 1 Island Stories    
9

no longer an island” becoming well known after newspaper headlines

used it to report Frenchman Louis Bleriot’s first crossing of the English
Channel in 1909 (Clark 1999, 42). Invasion anxieties began occupy-
ing the national psyche, fuelled by thrillers like Erskine Childers’ The
Riddle of the Sands (1903) and John Buchan’s spy novel, The Thirty-
Nine Steps (1915). Although the latter features Richard Hannay being
pursued by an aeroplane, the plots usually centred on attack from the
sea. After the Zeppelin attacks of the First World War, however, inva-
sion fears shot skywards, and by the 1930s Britain was increasingly
gripped by fears of vulnerability to aerial attack, the prevailing mood
being fear that the next war would bring sudden annihilation from the
air (Deer 2009, 167). As Air-Commodore Charlton put it in The Air
Defence of Britain, the nation’s geography had spared Britain the unend-
ing conflicts of the continent, but with the coming of the air age, “At
one fell swoop the barriers are lowered, the walls are breached, the riv-
ers crossed and the mountains overtopped” (Charlton 1938, 13). This
sense of threat took form in Baldwin’s doom-laden 1932 prediction that
the “bomber will always get through”, something of a mantra in the
1930s, and by the end of the decade, fear of invasion by parachutists
had become acute (Patterson 2007, 76). Populist next-war fiction from
the time often focused on air power (Searle 2009), and clearly, the idea
of the physically bounded island nation had gained a new level of atten-
tion, and seemed newly vulnerable.
In parallel with these shifts, late modernist writing translated the end
of empire into a resurgent concept of national culture, a rediscovery of
the insular whole without its periphery. Unlike earlier nostalgic writing,
this was a redemptive act, reclaiming territorial and cultural integrity
for English culture and thus in a sense disavowing the history of British
expansionism. As England shrank back to its original island centre, it
could be reimagined outside of the stream of worldwide modernisa-
tion and “progress”. Jed Esty (2004) describes an “anthropological turn”
within writers who transitioned from high to late modernism, bringing
an anthropological notion of Englishness back to the core. For centu-
ries, definitions of the English homeland had been situated in the dual-
isms of home/abroad, modern/primitive and metropolis/periphery, and
now such representations would have to be reworked to make sense of
10    
S. Davis

England on its own terms. Exemplifying this trend, T. S. Eliot shifted

from the multicultural world of The Waste Land to the sacred national
sites in “Little Gidding”, and E. M. Forster moved from Italian and
Indian culture to his midcentury pageants and country rambles.
Instead of romantically projecting the irrational and the primi-
tive onto the colonial periphery, English intellectuals had to redis-
cover magic and mystery in the centre (Mellor 1987). In addition to
this reenchanting of England, the 1930s saw a blossoming of doc-
umentary realist novels, in which the nation’s daily life and society
were taken as something unknown but discoverable. A good example
is George Orwell’s exploration of what he considers the unknown ter-
ritories of English life in The Road to Wigan Pier (1934). This anthro-
pological, documentary tendency is also demonstrated by the Mass
Observation project, in which observers throughout the nation recorded
people’s day-to-day interactions. Created by a poet, a filmmaker and
a sociologist, and influenced by surrealism, Mass Observation began
by treating each individual as a microcosm of society, styling itself as
a “science of ourselves”, and aiming to bring the scientific citizen into
being through its observers (Jardine 2016). The 1930s also witnessed
the (re)discovery of the English countryside, with a boom in domes-
tic tourism fuelled by books like H. V. Morton’s In Search of England
(1927), and a wave of amateur-naturalist books revealing the nationally
sacred landscapes. Batsford published over 50 titles on the countryside
between 1934 and 1940, with much of the countryside writing focused
on locating England’s national past in the countryside (Brace 1999).
This was also the period in which the preservationist movement gained
momentum, in what Raphael Samuel described as the “historicist turn
in national life” (Samuel 1998, 139).
A striking literary example of the “anthropological turn” is Virginia
Woolf ’s Between the Acts, in which Mrs. Swithin talks of England’s pre-
history, before it was an island, when “Once there was no sea … No sea
at all between us and the continent” (Woolf 1941, 23). The main focus
of the book is a village pageant-play that tells England’s “island history”
through fragmentary snapshots separated by gramophone music. As the
audience attempts to synthesise the meaning from the fragments, the
Clergyman saying “Surely, we unite?”, an aeroplane formation overhead
 1 Island Stories    
11

disrupts their efforts, acting as the final burst of music and ensuring
that only fragments remain. Gillian Beer describes Woolf as particularly
acute in her understanding of the aeroplane in relation to the cultural
form of the island (Beer 1990, 267). As the audience discuss the play
and the Clergyman, Mr. Streatfield’s words—“And if one spirit animates
the whole, what about the aeroplanes?” (Woolf 1941, 230)—Woolf
deepens her use of the island to explore the difficult relationship of air
power to the island nation. Woolf ’s use of the island form also recalls
John Brannigan’s (2014) argument that “archipelagic modernism”
turned to the “peripheral” spaces of islands, coasts and the sea to rein-
vent the Irish and British archipelago as a plural and connective space.
From the midst of the looming imperial contraction and grow-
ing sense of vulnerability, during the Second World War the British
propaganda machine battled to keep alive the island form. Churchill’s
speeches were full of references to the besieged “island fortress” and
our “island nation”. As part of the official “war culture” in Britain,
such rhetoric held a great deal of power. In his excellent Culture in
Camouflage, Patrick Deer discusses how the Ministry of Information
worked through various channels to create a vision of “a fully mobi-
lised island fortress, loyal empire, and modernised war machine ready to
wage a futuristic war of space and movement” (Deer 2009, 3). Within
this imagery existed a tension between the “island fortress”—England
standing alone—and the expansive empire standing there too, much of
which was being recruited in the war effort. Wartime media representa-
tions attempted to resolve this tension through inclusive imagery of a
“people’s war” at home and a “people’s empire”, as Wendy Webster
(2005) explores in Englishness and Empire. Attempting to address
diverse audiences across empire and metropolis, as well as to quell a
strong feeling of anti-imperialism in America, “people’s empire” imagery
portrayed a temperate empire through themes of welfare and partner-
ship, showing the common people of Britain and the “British world”
united across vast distances in a common cause. Togetherness was a
recurrent theme in empire imagery, and although there was a clear pref-
erence for the racial community of white Britons—the “sons of empire”
from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa—, the war
12    
S. Davis

marked a twentieth-century high point in racially inclusive imagery of

Britishness (Webster 2005).
As war receded and the empire shrank, different views took hold.
The home front imagery during wartime had emphasised the “lit-
tle England” of the common people, united across genders and class,
and characterised by humour and quiet courage, modest domestic
pleasures, homely comforts and kindliness. This was the image of the
quiet, pipe-smoking J. B. Priestley, whose wartime radio broadcasts had
reached 40% of the adult population in 1941 (Nicholas 1996, 244).
Films on the home front, such as Millions Like Us (1943), The Gentle
Sex (1943) and A Canterbury Tale (1944) had shown women abandon-
ing domesticity to serve in aircraft factories, the services and the land
army. But this “people’s war” imagery was eclipsed in the 1950s by a
new narrative of a “hero’s war”. The inclusive wartime imagery faded
from view in 1950s depictions of the war, as women, home front
civilians, Indians and Africans were largely expelled from wartime
narratives. Churchill became a cult figure, and his many-volume auto-
biography appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s, which Deer argues
“audaciously abolished the distinction between history and memoir”,
giving a decades-long “popular and enduring afterlife” to official war
culture and the “island fortress” discourse (Deer 2009, 236). In contrast
to Priestley’s “little England”, Churchill represented a “greater Britain”
signified by martial masculinity and imperial identity on the front line.
Adding to this shift, as the empire was dismantled and relabelled as
the Commonwealth, the imagery formerly associated with empire was
replaced with narratives emphasising order and domesticity (Webster
2005). The imagery associated with empire in wartime—of martial
masculinity and fighting away from home—became associated with
the Second World War in war narratives of the 1950s. Webster argues
that whilst the Second World War was reworked from the “people’s war”
into a “hero’s war” in the 1950s, the exclusive story of national great-
ness took over the territory vacated by empire imagery. Second World
War films were the most popular genre after comedy in the 1950s, with
top box-office earners like The Dam Busters (1955) and Reach for the Sky
(1956). Such films showed exciting adventure, and celebrated the vir-
tues of the old imperial hero—active, resourceful, manly, courageous,
 1 Island Stories    
13

high-minded and self-sacrificing. The idea of a heroic white British mas-

culinity was thus transposed from an imperial to a Second World War
setting, offering an enlarged and dignified idea of Britishness, a narra-
tive of national destiny, and a new energising myth of the nation. This
notion of England beginning to function as a symbolic replacement for
its colonies is closely bound with Esty’s “anthropological turn”.
Along with these narratives, an important new strand in post-war
British politics and self-image was the so-called “special relationship”
with the United States. This phrase, voiced by Winston Churchill
in 1946 as a special relationship with both America and the British
Commonwealth and empire, provided Britain with a heroic narrative
of national destiny based on the idea of English-speaking peoples. As
the realities of power emerged, however, wartime anxieties that Britain
was being invaded and occupied by American troops—and that Britain
was dependent on America for victory—were succeeded by anxieties
that Britain was financially dependent on America for survival (Webster
2005, 82). There were concerns about the Americanisation of British
culture, and the Suez crisis of 1956 highlighted tension within Anglo-
American relations, showing American dominance. From within these
changing times, it is helpful to follow Linda Colley in acknowledging
the extent to which Britain’s one-time empire was characterised at its
core by insecurities and persistent constraints, and that “one relic of
empire has sometimes been a markedly schizoid sense of national self
and size, a perception that whilst Britain is naturally small, it is also
simultaneously and deservedly large” (Colley 2003, 189). To this end,
she quotes Winston Churchill, who once remarked that: “We on this
small island have to make a supreme effort to keep our place and status,
the place and status to which our undying genius entitles us” (quoted in
Barnett 2001, 81).

3 An Island Within the Island

In the period of Esty’s anthropological turn and Samuel’s histori-
cist turn, Island Thinking investigates a series of stories within a small
geographical area that witnessed the 1930s development of radar, the
14    
S. Davis

wartime creation of many enclosed military spaces, the post-war recol-

onisation by the avocet, and the subsequent establishment of enclosed
nature reserves. Common to these episodes was a presence of island-like
places, the rhetoric concerning which brought them into conversation
with the island nation as it underwent its inward turn. The language of
place in these stories also resonated at a regional level as the county of
Suffolk was written as an island of the past. I investigate a series of sto-
ries or moments within this region, most of which take place within the
period 1930–1969, with the final chapter jumping to the early twen-
ty-first century. These stories are treated as a collection rather than a
comprehensive overview or chronicle of change, each offering an insight
into what John Taylor has called “the English obsession with landscape”
(Taylor 1994, 6).
Through this series of moments within a small corner of the archipe-
lagic nation, the local themes speak to a sense of broader identities or
associations. The stories are taken to be instances of what Homi
Bhabha described as the transitional social reality of nations. Bhabha
uses encounters with the nation as it is written to explore the tempo-
rality of culture and social consciousness: the nation-space in the pro-
cess of articulating its elements, where history is in the process of being
made, and the image of cultural authority may be ambivalent because
it is “caught, uncertainly, in the act of ‘composing’ its powerful image”
(Bhabha 1990, 3). The performativity of language in narratives of the
nation is a crucial concept on which the present book relies. In Raphael
Samuel’s classic book, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (1998), he
tours a variety of accounts of the national past as viewed from differ-
ent perspectives and points in time, including their “foundation myths”.
Historian Paul Ward (2004) approaches Britishness as having been
constantly shifting since the 1870s, looking at topics like class, gender,
region and ethnicity. In Tom Nairn’s 1977 study of British decline, he
observes a particularly conservative nationalism throughout imperial
times, “a sense of underlying insular identity and common fate” (2003,
32), which recognises class divisions but places more importance on
maintaining stability. Nairn refers to the mobilisation of this nation-
alism for external warfare up until the fall of the empire as strength-
ening its inward conservatism and its conviction of an internal unity.
 1 Island Stories    
15

For Nairn, an advocate of the break-up of Britain, this nationalism

has been useless outside of imperial conditions, since it inhibits radi-
cal change or reform. Island Thinking is concerned with this insular
unity during the empire’s decline, approached not through politics, but
through the countryside and the mythical histories located there.
In Chapter 2, I embark on a journey around eastern Suffolk: an
“island within an island” as it was described in 1950 (Pennington 1950,
167). This chapter draws on countryside writing, a genre that flourished
in interwar Britain as its many regions were described in guidebooks,
historical studies and other non-fictional writing. Touring 1940s–1950s
writing, I show how the Suffolk of post-war imperial contraction was
imagined as isolated and secluded, and as preserving a more authentic
version of England. In particular, the sea, the sky and old Martello tow-
ers were written as essential elements to understanding Suffolk, and I
explore how they crystallised nostalgic views of the region, written alter-
nately as sinister or as untouched by war and modern technology.
The nation’s edge is also the focus of Chapter 3, where I consider the
theme of wartime intruders and contested understandings of the region.
During the Second World War, Suffolk became home to countless air-
fields and their staff, a ten-mile strip of coast was evacuated and covered
in anti-invasion structures, and villages were evacuated for various mil-
itary purposes. I follow one such village, Iken, through its wartime use
as a battle training area, and its subsequent release in 1947. Drawing on
press articles and oral histories, I show how the landscape took on the
character of no-man’s-land or even the front line. Jostling with this view,
post-war countryside writing persistently wrote over the local traces of
militarism, looking instead to the past, as if an older version of England
was preserved there. Invasion never seems far from the imagination on
these shores, however, and in the 1990s another evacuated village was
propelled to national fame through rumours of a failed 1940 invasion
attempt, just south of Iken at Shingle Street.
In Chapter 4, the themes of militarisation and invasion multiply as
Orford Ness and Bawdsey—a few miles from Iken and Shingle Street—
were used for the military-scientific research that developed radar in
the late 1930s, framed as the project to “make Britain an island again”.
A string of watching stations was constructed along the coast, later
16    
S. Davis

credited as crucial to winning the Battle of Britain. Narratives of that

story are laced with imagery of those places being islands themselves,
and the researchers calling themselves “the islanders”, and radar was also
depicted in ways that seemed to restore a commanding sense of vision
to a nation in blackout. The “island fortress” discourse circulated in offi-
cial stories of radar after the war, salvaging the sanctity of the nation
during a transition into a time when national isolation had become
increasingly problematic.
Chapter 5 weaves a different intruder into the region’s story, in the
form of a bird. In 1947, the avocet began breeding in two areas flooded
for war-related reasons, Havergate Island and Minsmere, after a hun-
dred-year absence from Britain. Guarded and kept secret by former
servicemen, the birds then came under the protection of the Royal
Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), who took the birds’ success
as a symbol of success for British nature conservation, and later made
the bird their logo. In a nation increasingly full of birdwatchers, this
story captured the public imagination. Exploring the theme of milita-
rised nature, I show how the story was framed in terms of secrecy and
privacy, and related to the public as a continuation of wartime watch-
ing and guarding. Protecting birds (including avocets) also appeared
in post-war fiction as a way for returning servicemen to recover, where
nature appeared both as intrinsically militarised and simultaneously as a
refuge from war: the Britain they had been fighting for.
Developing the avocet’s story, Chapter 6 focuses on the development
of nature reserves. The RSPB’s management at Havergate and Minsmere
nature reserves was both pioneering and crucial in the development of
British nature conservation practices, making them excellent places to
investigate which nature was seen in need of conserving in post-war
Britain. Minsmere was key to a new phase in British nature conserva-
tion in the late 1950s, in which the survival of wild places was seen to
need much more active interference, and during the 1960s, bulldozers
created new feeding areas, and screened walkways and observation hides
orchestrated and hid visitors’ movement. The avocets were also impor-
tant to the development of the RSPB’s film unit in the mid-1950s, with
the birds thus becoming visible not only to the reserve’s visitors but also
to people attending public lectures and watching televisions.
 1 Island Stories    
17

Fig. 1 Map of coastal Suffolk

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 She rose at last. It was time that she should be going. She
stretched out the tired arms upon which she had been lying, looked
at the patient hands which had long lost the beauty her face still
kept, and lifted her eyes to the solemn sky.
“I shall die some day,” she said, passionately. “No one can take
that away from me. Thank Heaven, it is not one of the privileges a
woman forfeits by marrying out of her station.”
Forbes stayed three days longer; restless, wretched days
whenever he thought of himself and his position; sunlit and serene
whenever his facile temperament permitted him to forget them. He
felt that he should be moving on, yet, having stopped, was at a loss
how to proceed. Staying or going seemed equally difficult and
dangerous. He had no precedents to guide his action. Nothing in his
previous life and training had ever fitted him to be a fugitive. He was,
as he often reminded himself, not a fugitive from justice, but from
injustice; which is quite another matter, but after all hardly more
comfortable. He began to suspect that he might have been a fool to
come away, but was too dazed to decide intelligently whether he
should go forward or back. He was still in this undecided frame of
mind on the morning of the third day.
Wilson and his wife performed by turns the duties of telegraph
operator, with the difference that whereas she received by sound, he
took the messages on paper. On the evening of the second day of
Forbes’s stay, Wilson, sitting alone in the office, received a message
from Pueblo that startled him.
“Great Scott!” he said, and looked around to see if his wife was in
sight. She was not, and on reflection he felt thankful. It would be
better not to have her know. There were some things women, even
plucky ones, made a fuss about. They were not fond of seeing
criminals taken, for instance. So he answered the message, and
having made the requisite copy locked that in the office safe. The
long strip of paper, with its lines of dots and dashes, he crumpled
carelessly and dropped into the waste-basket.
The next afternoon Mrs. Wilson, in the process of sweeping out
the room, upset the waste-basket, and the crumpled piece of paper
fell out and rolled appealingly to her feet. There were a dozen
messages on the strip, but the last one riveted her eyes. She read it,
then read it again; returned it to the waste-basket and sat down to
think with folded hands in lap, her white face as inscrutable as the
Sphinx. What should she do? Should she do anything?
The man might be a criminal or he might not. The fact that he was
followed by detectives with papers for his arrest, who might be
expected to arrive on the afternoon train, proved nothing to her mind.
At the same time, criminal or none, if she interfered it might prove a
dangerous experiment for her, and was sure to be a troublesome
one. Why, then, should she interfere?
There was only one reason, but it was a reason rooted in the
dumb depths of her being—the depths that this man’s bearing had
so disturbed. He was of her people; on her side—though it was the
side that had cast her off. The faint, sweet memories of her earliest
years pleaded for him; the enduring bitterness of that later life which
she had lived sometimes forgetfully, sometimes—but this was rare—
prayerfully, sometimes with long-drawn sighs, seldom with tears,
always in silence, fought for him; the inextinguishable class-spirit
fought for him—and fought successfully.
She looked at the clock. It lacked an hour of train-time. What she
did must be done quickly.
She went out to her husband, loafing on the platform.
“I’ve got to go to Connor’s, Jim. There’s no butter and no eggs.”
Wilson looked up carelessly. “All right,” he said.
She went into the back room which served as kitchen and store-
room and provided herself with a basket, into which she put meat
and bread. As she left the station, Wilson came around to the side
and called to her:
“You’ll be back by supper-time, Ellen?”
The woman nodded, not looking back, and plunged on up the
rocky spur.
 When she found him, an hour later, Forbes was lying on a sunny
slope indulging in the luxury of a day-dream. He was stretched out at
full length, his arms under his head, the sketch-book that he had not
used lying by his side unopened. For the life of him he could not feel
that his position was serious, and the mountain-air and the sunshine
intoxicated him.
“Once I get clear of this thing,” he was saying to himself, “I’ll come
back here and buy me a ranch. Why should anybody who can live
here want to live anywhere else?”
To him in this pastoral mood appeared the woman. There was that
in her face which made him spring to his feet in vague alarm before
she opened her lips.
“They’re after you,” she said. “You must be moving. Do you know
what you want to do? What was your idea in stopping here? Have
you any plans?”
He shook his head helplessly. “I thought perhaps—Mexico?”
“Mexico! But what you want just now is a place to hide in till they
have given you up and gone along. After that you can think about
Mexico. Come! I’ve heard the whistle. The train is in. You’re all right if
they don’t start to look for you before supper-time, and I hardly think
they will, for they’ll expect you to come in. But if anybody should
stroll out to look over the country, this place is in sight from the knoll
beside the station. Come!”
Stumbling, he ran along beside her.
“I swear to you,” he said between his labored breaths, “I did not do
it. I am not unworthy of your help. But the evidence was damning
and my friends told me to clear out. I may have been a fool to come
—but it is done.”
Her calm face did not change.
“You must not waste your breath,” she warned. “We have two
miles to go, and then I must walk to Connor’s and get back by six
o’clock, or there’ll be trouble.”
 They were working their way back toward the station, but going
farther to the east. She explained briefly that their objective point
was the nearest canyon. She knew a place there where any one
would be invisible both from above and below. It was fairly
accessible—“if you are sure-footed,” she warned. Here he might hide
himself in safety for a day or two. She had brought him food. It would
not be comfortable, but it was hardly a question of his comfort.
“You are very good,” said Forbes, simply. “I don’t want to give
myself up now. You are very good,” he repeated, wondering a little
why she should take the pains.
She made no answer, only hastened on.
To Forbes the way seemed long. His feet grew heavy and his head
bewildered. Was this really he, this man who was in flight from
justice and dependent on the chance kindness of a stranger for
shelter from the clutches of the law?
They reached the canyon and began to make their way slowly
down and along its side. The woman led fearlessly over the twistings
of a trail imperceptible to him. He followed dizzily. Suddenly she
turned.
“It is just around this rock that juts out in front. Is your head
steady? It falls off sheer below and the path is narrow.”
“Go on,” he said, and set his teeth.
The path was steep as well as narrow, and the descent below was
sheer and far. Mid-way around the rocks a mist came over his eyes.
He put up his hand, stumbled, fell forward and out, was dimly aware
that he had fallen against his guide.
A crash and cry awoke the echoes of the canyon. Then silence
settled over it again—dead silence—and the night came down.
Their bodies were not found until three days later. When the
Eastern detectives had identified their man they proposed his burial,
but Wilson turned from the place with the muscles of his throat
working with impotent emotion, and a grim look about his mouth that
lifted his lips like those of a snarling beast.
 “Carrion! Let it lie,” he said, with so dark a face that the men
followed him silently, saying nothing more, and the two were left lying
upon the ground which had drunk with impartial thirst the current that
oozed from their jagged wounds.
The suspicions of primitive men are of a primitive nature. Those
three days in which nothing had been seen or heard of his wife or
Forbes had been a long agony to Wilson. And now that the end had
come it seemed to him that his basest suspicions were confirmed. To
his restricted apprehension there was but one passion in the world
that could have sent his wife to this stranger’s side, to guard and
save him at her cost. So thinking, it seemed to him that swift justice
had been done.
And that he might not forget, nor let his fierce thoughts of her grow
more tender, the next day when the train had gone eastward and he
was left alone to his desolation he took his brush and laboriously
wrote across the end of the high platform, in great letters for all men
to see and wonder at, the phrase he thought her fitting epitaph:
THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.
And there it still stands, remaining in its stupid, brutal accusation
the sole monument on earth of a woman’s ended life.
 HARDESTY’S COWARDICE
I
Straight on before them stretched the street, a wide and
unobstructed way at first, but narrowing a little farther on, where
there were, besides, buildings going up, and great piles of lumber
standing far out in the road, and heaps of sand, and mortar-beds.
Could he possibly get the horses under control before they reached
those cruel lumber piles, where to be thrown meant death or worse?
They were running wildly, and it was down hill all the way. She did
not believe that human strength could do it, not even Neil’s, and he
was as strong as he was tender. She looked down at his hands and
noticed how white the knuckles were, and how the veins stood out,
and then she bent her head that she might not see those fatal
obstructions in their way, and clasped her hands as tightly as her
lips. She found herself senselessly repeating, over and over, as if it
were a charm, “Broad is the way ... that leadeth to destruction.”
It was a June morning, cool and sweet. If ever, life is dear in June.
Her eyes fell on the great bunch of white roses in her lap. He had put
them in her hands just as they were starting, and then had bent
suddenly and left a quick kiss on the hands. It was only the other day
he had told her that he had never, from the very first hour they met,
seen her hands without longing to fill them with flowers. Would she
be pleased to take notice, now that he possessed the right, he meant
to exercise it?
Poor roses! Must they be crushed and mangled, too? She did not
like the thought of scarlet stains upon their whiteness, and with some
wild thought of saving them—for were they not his roses?—she flung
them with a sudden gesture into the street.
“Oh, Christ!” she cried, voicelessly, “spare both of us—or neither!”
 It was just then that the horses swerved and reared, the carriage
struck something in the road and tilted sharply to the right. She
clutched the side involuntarily and kept her seat. When, a second
later, the carriage had righted itself, and the horses, more terrified
still and now wholly uncontrolled, were dashing forward again, the
place beside her was vacant, and the reins were dragging on the
ground.
She shut her eyes and waited. It was not long to wait. There came
a crash, a whirl, and then unconsciousness.
The evening papers contained an account of the fortunate escape
from serious disaster of Mr. Neil Hardesty and Miss Mildred Fabian,
who were on their way to a field meeting of the Hambeth Historical
Society when the young blooded horses Mr. Hardesty was driving
took fright at a bonfire at the corner of State and Market Streets, and
started to run. Owing to the sharp down-grade at this point, their
driver was unable to control them. After keeping their course in a
mad gallop down State Street for a quarter of a mile, the carriage
struck an obstruction, tipped, and Mr. Hardesty was thrown out,
being severely bruised, but sustaining no serious injuries. The
horses continued running wildly for two blocks more, when one of
them ran against a lamp-post and was knocked down, upsetting the
carriage and throwing Miss Fabian out. She was picked up
unconscious, but beyond a cut on the head was also fortunately
uninjured. Mr. Hardesty and Miss Fabian were to be congratulated
upon the results of the runaway, as such an accident could hardly
occur once in a hundred times without more serious, and probably
fatal, consequences.
It was some two weeks later that the family physician, consulting
with Mrs. Fabian in the hall, shook his head and said he did not
understand it; there was no apparent reason why Miss Mildred
should not have rallied immediately from the accident. The shock to
her nervous system had doubtless been greater than he had at first
supposed. Still, she had been in sound health, and there seemed no
sufficient cause for her marked weakness and depression. He would
prepare a tonic and send it up.
 Meeting Neil Hardesty, himself an unfledged medical student,
entering the house, the doctor stopped to observe:
“You must try to rouse your fiancée a little. Can’t you cheer her up,
Hardesty? She seems very much depressed nervously. Perhaps it is
only natural after such a close shave as you had. I did not care to
look death in the face at that age. It sometimes startles young people
and happy ones.”
Neil shook his head with an anxious look.
“It is not that,” he said, “for she is half an angel already. But I will
do my best,” and he passed on through the broad, airy, darkened
hall to the high veranda at the back of the house, where he knew he
should find her at that hour.
The veranda overlooked the garden, blazing just then with the
flowers of early July. She was lying languidly in her sea-chair; there
were books around her, but she had not been reading; and work, but
she had not been sewing. One hand was lifted shading her face. The
lines around her mouth were fixed as if she were in pain.
He came forward quickly and knelt beside the chair. He was
carrying some brilliant clusters of scarlet lilies, and he caught the
small and rather chilly hand, and held it over them as if to warm it in
their splendid flame.
“Do you know that you look cold?” he demanded. “I want you to
look at these and hold them till you are warmed through and through.
What an absurd child it is to look so chilly in July!”
She raised her eyes and let them rest on him with a sudden
radiant expression of satisfaction.
“It is because you are so unkind as to go away—occasionally,” she
remarked. “Do I ever look cold or unhappy or dissatisfied while you
are here?”
“Once or twice in the last two weeks you have been all of that.
Sweetheart, I must know what it means. Don’t you see you must tell
me? How can one do anything for you when one doesn’t know what
is the matter? And I am under orders to see that you get well
forthwith. The doctor has given you up—to me!”
He was startled when, instead of the laughing answer for which he
looked, she caught her breath with half a sob.
“Must I tell you?” she said. “Neil, I do not dare! When you are here
I know it is not so. It is only when you are away from me that the
hideous thought comes. And I fight it so! It is only because I am tired
with fighting it that I do not get strong.”
“Dear, what can you mean?”
She shook her head.
“It is too horrible, and you would never forgive me, though I know it
cannot be true. Oh, Neil, Neil, Neil!”
“Mildred, this is folly. I insist that you tell me at once.” His tone had
lost its tender playfulness and was peremptory now. “Don’t you see
that you are torturing me?” he said.
She looked at him helplessly.
“That day,” she said, reluctantly, “when the carriage tipped and you
went out, I thought—I thought you jumped. Neil, don’t look so; I knew
you could not have done it, and yet I can’t get rid of the thought, and
it tortures me that I can think it—of you. Oh, I have hurt you!”
He was no longer kneeling beside her, but had risen and was
leaning against one of the pillars of the veranda, looking down at her
with an expression she had never dreamed of seeing in his eyes
when they rested on her face. He was white to the lips.
“You thought that? You have thought it these two weeks?”
“I tell you it is torture. Neil, say you did not, and let me be at rest.”
“And you ask me to deny it? You?” His voice was very bitter. “I
wonder if you know what you are saying?”
“Neil, Neil, say you did not!”
He set his teeth.
 “Never!”
He broke the silence which followed by asking, wearily, at last:
“What was your idea in telling me this, Mildred? Of course you
knew it was the sort of thing that is irrevocable.”
“I knew nothing except that I must get rid of the thought.”
“Can’t you imagine what it is to a man to be charged with
cowardice?”
“I charge nothing. But if you would only deny it!”
“Oh, this is hopeless!” he said, with an impatient groan. “It is
irremediable. If I denied it, you would still doubt; but even if you did
not, I could never forget that you had once thought me a coward.
There are some things one may not forgive.”
Silence again.
“And my—my wife must never have doubted me.”
She raised her eyes at last.
“If you are going, pray go at once,” she said. “I am too weak for
this.”
She said it, but she did not mean it. After all, it was the one
impossible thing on earth that anything should come between them.
Surely she could not alter the course of two lives by five minutes of
unguarded hysterical speech or a week or two of unfounded fretting.
But he took up his hat, and turned it in his hands.
“As you wish,” he said, coldly, and then “Good-morning,” and was
gone.

II
“I think that is all,” said the hurried, jaded doctor to the Northern
nurse. “The child is convalescent—you understand about the
nourishment?—and you know what to do for Mrs. Leroy? I shall bring
some one who will stay with her husband within the hour.”
 Outside was the glare of sun upon white sand—a pitiless sun,
whose rising and setting seemed the only things done in due order in
all the hushed and fever-smitten city. Within was a shaded green
gloom and the anguished moaning of a sick woman.
Mildred Fabian, alone with her patients and the one servant who
had not deserted the house, faced her work and felt her heart rise
with exultation—a singular, sustaining joy that never yet had failed
her in the hour of need. The certainty of hard work, the
consciousness of danger, the proximity of death—these acted
always upon her like some subtle stimulant. If she had tried to
explain this, which she did not, she would perhaps have said that at
no other time did she have such an overwhelming conviction of the
soul’s supremacy as in the hours of human extremity. And this
conviction, strongest in the teeth of all that would seem most
vehemently to deny it, was to her nothing less than intoxicating.
She was not one of the women to whom there still seems much
left in life when love is gone. To be sure, she had the consolations of
religion and a certain sweet reasonableness of temperament which
prompted her to pick up the pieces after a crash, and make the most
of what might be left. But she was obliged to do this in her own way.
She was sorry, but she could not do it in her mother’s way.
When she told her family that her engagement was at an end, that
she did not care to explain how the break came, and that if they
meant to be kind they would please not bother her about it, she knew
that her mother would have been pleased to have her take up her
old life with a little more apparent enthusiasm for it than she had ever
shown before. To be a little gayer, a little more occupied, a little
prettier if possible, and certainly a little more fascinating—that was
her mother’s idea of saving the pieces. But Mildred’s way was
different, and after dutifully endeavoring to carry out her mother’s
conception of the conduct proper to the circumstances with a dismal
lack of success, she took her own path, which led her through a
training school for nurses first, and so, ultimately, to Jacksonville.
The long day wore slowly into night. The doctor had returned very
shortly with a man, whether physician or nurse she did not know,
whom he left with Mr. Leroy. The little maid, who had been dozing in
the upper hall, received some orders concerning the preparation of
food which she proceeded to execute. The convalescent child rested
well. The sick woman passed from the first to the second stage of
the disease and was more quiet. The doctor came again after
nightfall. He looked at her charges wearily, and told Mildred that the
master of the house would not rally.
“He is my friend, and I can do no more for him,” he said, almost
with apathy.
The night passed as even nights in sick-rooms will, and at last it
began to grow toward day. The nurse became suddenly conscious of
deadly weariness and need of rest. She called the servant and left
her in charge, with a few directions and the injunction to call her at
need, and then stole down the stairs to snatch, before she rested,
the breath of morning air she craved.
As she stood at the veranda’s edge in the twilight coolness and
twilight hush watching the whitening sky, there came steps behind
her, and turning, she came face to face with Neil Hardesty. She
stared at him with unbelieving eyes.
“Yes, it is I,” he said.
“You were with Mr. Leroy?” she asked. “Are you going?”
“My work is over here,” he answered, quietly. “I am going to send
—some one else.”
She bent her head a second’s space with the swift passing
courtesy paid death by those to whom it has become a more familiar
friend than life itself, then lifted it, and for a minute they surveyed
each other gravely.
“This is like meeting you on the other side of the grave,” she said.
“How came you here? I thought you were in California.”
“I thought you were in Europe.”
“I was for awhile, but there was nothing there I wanted. Then I
came back and entered the training school. After this is over I have
arranged to join the sisterhood of St. Margaret. I think I can do better
work so.”
“Let me advise you not to mistake your destiny. You were surely
meant for the life of home and society, and can do a thousand-fold
more good that way.”
“You do not know,” she answered, simply. “I am very happy in my
life. It suits me utterly. I have never been so perfectly at peace.”
“But it will wear you out,” he murmured.
She looked at him out of her great eyes, surprisedly. It was a look
he knew of old.
“Why, I expect it to,” she answered.
There was a little silence before she went on, apparently without
effort:
“I am glad to come across you again, for there is one thing I have
wanted to say to you almost ever since we parted, and it has grieved
me to think I might never be able to say it. It is this. While I do not
regret anything else, and while I am sure now that it was best for
both of us—or else it would not have happened—I have always been
sorry that the break between us came in the way it did. I regret that.
It hurts me still when I remember of what I accused you. I am sure I
was unjust. No wonder you were bitter against me. I have often
prayed that that bitterness might pass out of your soul, and that I
might know it. So—I ask your forgiveness for my suspicion. It will
make me happier to know you have quite forgiven me.”
He did not answer. She waited patiently.
“Surely”—she spoke with pained surprise—“surely you can forgive
me now?”
“Oh, God!”
She looked at his set face uncomprehending. Why should it be
with such a mighty effort that he unclosed his lips at last? His voice
came forced and hard.
 “I—I did it, Mildred. I was the coward that you thought me. I don’t
know what insensate fear came over me and took possession of me
utterly, but it was nothing to the fear I felt afterwards—for those two
weeks—that you might suspect me of it. And when I knew you did I
was mad with grief and anger at myself, and yet—it seems to me
below contempt—I tried to save my miserable pride. But I have
always meant that you should know at last.”
She looked at him with blank uncomprehension.
“I did it,” he repeated, doggedly, and waited for the change he
thought to see upon her face. It came, but with a difference.
“You—you did it?” for the idea made its way but slowly to her mind.
“Then”—with a rush of feeling that she hardly understood, and an
impetuous, tender gesture—“then let me comfort you.”
It was the voice of the woman who had loved him, and not of any
Sister of Charity, however gracious, that he heard again, but he
turned sharply away.
“God forbid,” he said, and she shrank from the misery in his voice;
“God forbid that even you should take away my punishment. Don’t
you see? It is all the comfort I dare have, to go where there is danger
and to face death when I can, till the day comes when I am not
afraid, for I am a coward yet.”
She stretched her hands out toward him blindly. I am afraid that
she forgot just then all the boasted sweetness of her present life, her
years of training, and her coming postulancy at St. Margaret’s, as
well as the heinousness of his offence. She forgot everything, save
that this was Neil, and that he suffered.
But all that she, being a woman and merciful, forgot, he, being a
man and something more than just, remembered.
“Good-by, and God be with you,” he said.
“Neil!” she cried. “Neil!”
But his face was set steadfastly toward the heart of the stricken
city, and he neither answered nor looked back.
 The future sister of St. Margaret’s watched him with a heart that
ached as she had thought it could never ache again. All the hard-
won peace of her patient years, which she thought so secure a
possession, had gone at once and was as though it had not been;
for he, with all his weaknesses upon him, was still the man she
loved.
“Lord, give him back to me!” she cried, yet felt the cry was futile.
Slowly she climbed the stairs again, wondering where was the
courage and quiet confidence that had sustained her so short a time
ago.
Was it true, then, that heaven was only excellent when earth could
not be had? She was the coward now. In her mind there were but
two thoughts—the desire to see him again, and a new, appalling fear
of death.
She re-entered the sick-room where the girl was watching her
patients with awed eyes.
“You need not stay here,” she said, softly. “I cannot sleep now. I
will call you when I can.”
 “THE HONOR OF A GENTLEMAN”
I
Because there was so little else left him to be proud of, he clung
the more tenaciously to his pride in his gentle blood and the spotless
fame of his forefathers. There was no longer wealth nor state nor
position to give splendor to the name, but this was the less sad in
that he himself was the sole survivor of that distinguished line. He
was glad that he had no sisters—a girl should not be brought up in
sordid, ignoble surroundings, such as he had sometimes had to
know; as for brothers, if there had been two of them to make the fight
against the world shoulder to shoulder, life might have seemed a
cheerier thing; but thus far he had gotten on alone. And the world
was not such an unkindly place, after all. Though he was a thousand
miles away from the old home, in this busy Northwestern city where
he and his were unknown, he was not without friends; he knew a few
nice people. He had money enough to finish his legal studies; if there
had not been enough, he supposed he could have earned it
somehow; he was young and brave enough to believe that he could
do anything his self-respect demanded of him. If it sometimes asked
what might seem to a practical world fantastic sacrifices at his
hands, was he not ready to give them? At least, had he not always
been ready before he met Virginia Fenley?
She reminded him of his mother, did Virginia, though no two
women in the world were ever fundamentally more different.
Nevertheless, there was a likeness between the little pearl-set
miniature which he cherished, showing Honora Le Garde in the
prime of her beauty, and this girl who looked up at him with eyes of
the self-same brown. Surely, Virginia should not be held responsible
for the fact that a slender, graceful creature with yellow hair and
dark-lashed hazel eyes, with faint pink flushes coming and going in
her cheeks, and the air of looking out at the world with indifference
from a safe and sheltered distance, was Roderick Le Garde’s ideal
of womanhood, and that he regarded her, the representative of the
type, as the embodiment of everything sweetest and highest in
human nature. Virginia’s physique, like Roderick’s preconceptions of
life and love and honor, was an inheritance, but a less significant
one; it required an effort to live up to it, and Virginia was not fond of
effort.
His feeling for her was worship. Virginia had not been looking on
at the pageant (Roderick would have called it a pageant) of society
very long, but she was a beautiful girl and a rich one; therefore she
had seen what called itself love before.
As an example of what a suitor’s attitude should be, she preferred
Roderick’s expression of devotion to that of any man she knew. He
made her few compliments, and those in set and guarded phrase;
except on abstract topics, his speech with her was restrained to the
point of chilliness; even the admiration of his eyes was controlled as
they met hers. But on rare occasions the veil dropped from them,
and then—Virginia did not know what there was about these
occasions that she should find them so fascinating; that she should
watch for them and wait for them, and even try to provoke them, as
she did.
Worship is not exactly the form of sentiment of which
hopelessness can be predicated, but Roderick was human enough
to wish that the niche in which his angel was enshrined might be in
his own home. He let her see this one day in the simplicity of his
devotion.
“Not that I ask for anything, you understand,” he added, hastily. “I
could not do that. It is only that I would give you the knowledge that I
love you, as—as I might give you a rose to wear. It honors the flower,
you see,” he said, rather wistfully.
She lifted her eyes to his, and he wondered why there should flash
across his mind a recollection of the flowers she had worn yesterday,
a cluster of Maréchal Niels that she had raised to her lips once or
twice, kissing the golden petals. She made absolutely no answer to
his speech, unless the faintest, most evanescent of all her faint
smiles could be called an answer. But she was not angry, and she
gave him her hand at parting.
In spite of her silence she thought of his words. The little that she
had to say upon the subject she said to her father as they were
sitting before the library fire that evening.
John Fenley was a prosperous lumberman, possessed of an
affluent good nature which accorded well with his other surroundings
in life. Virginia was his only child, and motherless. She could not
remember that her father ever refused her anything in his life; and
certainly he had never done so while smoking his after-dinner cigar.
“Papa,” she began, in her pretty, deliberate way—“papa, Roderick
Le Garde is in love with me.”
Her father looked up at her keenly. She was not blushing, and she
was not confused. He watched a smoke-ring dissolve, then
answered, comfortably,
“Well, there is nothing remarkable about that.”
“That is true,” assented Virginia. “The remarkable thing is that I like
him—a little.” Her eyes were fixed upon the fire. There was a pause
before she went on. “I have never liked any of them at all before, as
you know very well. I never expect to—very much. Papa, you afford
me everything I want; can you afford me Roderick Le Garde?”
“Do you know what you are asking, Virginia, or why?” he said,
gravely.
“I have thought it over, of course. Couldn’t you put him in charge at
one of the mills or somewhere on a comfortable number of
thousands a year? Of course I can’t starve, you know, and frocks
cost something.”
“My daughter is not likely to want for frocks,” said John Fenley,
frowning involuntarily. “You did not take my meaning. I wish your
mother were here, child.”
“I am sufficiently interested, if that is what you mean,” said Virginia,
still tranquilly. “He is different, papa; and I am tired of the jeunesse
dorée. Perhaps it is because I am so much dorée myself that they
bore me. Roderick has enthusiasms and ideals; I am one of them; I
like it. You, papa, love me for what I am. It is much more exciting to
be loved for what one is not.”
Her father knit his brows and smoked in silence for a few minutes.
Virginia played with the ribbons of her pug.
“Marylander, isn’t he?”
“Something of the sort; I forget just what.”
“H’m!”
“Le Garde isn’t a business man,” John Fenley said, at length.
“Isn’t he?” asked Virginia, politely smothering a yawn.
“Is he? You know enough about it to know how important it is that
any man who is to work into my affairs, and ultimately to take my
place, should know business and mean business, Virgie. It is a long
way from poverty to wealth, but a short one from wealth to poverty.”
“Yes,” said Virginia, “I know; but I also know enough about it to be
sure that I could manage the business if it became necessary. You
and I are both business men, dear. Let us import a new element into
the family.”
Fenley laughed proudly. “By Jove! I believe you could do it!” A little
further silence; then, “So your heart is set on this, daughter?”
“Have I a heart?” asked Virginia, sedately, rising and leaning an
elbow on the mantel as she held up one small, daintily slippered foot
to the blaze.

II
Long afterward he used to wonder how it had ever come to pass—
that first false step of his, the surrender of his profession, and so of
his liberty. Before middle life a man sometimes forgets the imperious
secret of the springs that moved his youthful actions. In reality, the
mechanism of his decision was very simple.
“How can I give up my profession?” he asked Virginia.
 She smiled up into his eyes, her own expressing a divine
confidence. “But how can you give up me?”
Though his doubts were not thereby laid to rest, the matter was
practically settled, and it was understood between them that he was
to accept her father’s unnecessarily liberal offer, and take his place
in John Fenley’s business as his own son might have done. This
may have been unwise, but it was not unnatural, and if there was
any unwisdom in the proceeding, it was apparent to no eyes but
Roderick’s own. Other people said what other people always say
under such circumstances—that young Le Garde was in luck; that he
would have a “soft snap” of it as John Fenley’s son-in-law; that he
had shown more sagacity in feathering his own nest than could have
been expected of such an impractical young fellow. They did not
understand his chill reserve when congratulated on this brilliant bit of
success in life. If they had spoken of his good fortune in being loved
by Virginia, that was something a man could understand. The gods
might envy Virginia’s lover, but that he, Roderick Le Garde, should
be congratulated on becoming John Fenley’s son-in-law was
intolerable.
He by no means pretended to scorn money, however, and he felt
as strongly as did Fenley that Virginia must have it. Luxury was her
natural atmosphere—any woman’s perhaps, but surely hers. Other
men sacrificed other things for the women that they loved. He gave
up his proud independence and his proper work, and was sublimely
sure that Virginia understood what the sacrifice cost him.
But it was true that he was not a business man by nature, and his
first few years in John Fenley’s service were not the exacting drill
which would have given him what he lacked. Although he
conscientiously endeavored to carry his share of the burden and do
well what fell to him to do, the fact was that John Fenley was a great
deal too energetic and too fond of managing his own affairs to give
up any duties to another which he could possibly perform for himself.
Thus Roderick’s various positions were always more or less of
sinecures as far as responsibility was concerned, and he had a large
margin of leisure as well as a sufficient amount of money to devote