Random Summer Reading: Little Boy lost

With time to spare the other day in Yorkshire, I dropped into my favourite independent bookshop, the one on the Grove in Ilkley. I came out with the last book I had expected to find or buy: Little Boy Lost, by Marghanita Laski, published in 1949, the year I was born, and now republished by Persephone books. I vaguely thought I’d read it before: I certainly remember it as one of the few modern novels my father ever owned.  I suspect he may have bought the book because he admired Marghanita Laski; he used to enjoy watching her and Jacob Bronowski on The Brains Trust every Sunday at teatime.

Having now read it, I’m sure this was for the first time. I do remember, though, having been puzzled by the name of the central character, Hilary (the English father searching for his lost child in postwar France) so I must have at least looked at it. Hilary I knew only as a surname – Sir Edmund Hilary my earliest hero – or as a girl’s name. The idea that a man could be called Hilary perhaps put me off.  The story itself, as I now know, is by turns moving and disturbing; it is beautifully told by an author who never wastes words and has so skilfully constructed the narrative that the resolution is only reached in the last paragraph of the final page.

It isn’t, however, just the search for the little boy lost that makes this book compelling. Much of the tension in the story derives from Laski’s evocation of small-town France, post Vichy, post war, where the aftermath of four years of conflicted loyalties – of collaboration and accommodation, of resistance and betrayal, clouds every conversation. Even the Mother Superior of the Orphanage which may or may not be housing Hilary’s son has to confess to the moral compromises she felt forced, during the Occupation and especially after the Liberation in 1944, to make.

For Hilary, compromise is ethically unthinkable; yet he too must wrestle with the dilemma presented by the little boy for whom he begins to feel an attachment, although nothing so far has persuaded him that he is the child of his wife, Lisa. He and she had separated the day after their son was born, just before the fall of Paris, he returning to England, she staying in France to join the Resistance, only to be captured and executed. The Mother Superior tries to persuade Hilary to take on responsibility for this waif, but Hilary cannot convince himself that this would be fair to Lisa (since their actual child would then for ever remain unfound) or to himself.

The later chapters, when he decides to sever ties with the child and plans to return to England, make disquieting reading, his self-justifications and attempts at putting the past behind him being set against the background of a frustrated visit to a local fairground. Self-justification turns to self-contempt, however, when he realises that a woman he has agreed to meet at the fair has spent the years of the Occupation enjoying the company of German soldiers stationed in the town. Ironically, though, it is a lucky win at one of the fairground stalls that same evening which leads to the final and wholly unexpected resolution of the novel – as I’ve said, on the very last page.

Little Boy Lost, a book I don’t suppose I had thought of for nearly sixty years and which I bought on impulse, is one I shall now never forget. It has also prompted me to plan on rereading a book I last read some twenty years ago, Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness, published within a year of Marghanita Laski’s novel. This, too, is a novel set in the aftermath of the war; it is also a story of the consequences of accommodation, collaboration and resistance, focusing especially on the guerilla activities of the Maquis. The central sections of the novel are set in London where two childhood friends, who met originally in France, are reunited and find new life, new friends and new dangers in the bombed-out churches, offices and houses of the City of London.

I first read The World My Wilderness not for its topographical or postwar setting but for a different kind of new life: Macaulay’s representation of the architectural wreckage of London being repossessed by the wildflowers that transform the rubble of war into a strangely beautiful brave new world. I included the book in a reading list I produced for a weekend course on ‘Ruins in Literature’ I taught about twenty years ago at Madingley Hall, the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, where I used to work. I’m eager to re-read and compare it with Marghanita Laski’s novel.

But as it happens, I cannot yet re-read Rose Macaulay’s novel; it’s sitting on my shelves at home while I am in the USA for the next month. What I have read, however, is the historian Julian Jackson’s latest work: France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain (2023).

I am in awe of this book, the title of which perfectly explains its thesis. Not just focusing on, but wonderfully reconstructing, the trial of Pétain in the stifling and claustrophobic Palais de Justice next to Sainte Chapelle in Paris, Jackson demonstrates how the trial exposed a post-Liberation France bitterly divided against itself. Because Pétain had been technically head of state - though even that was a point at issue – France  itself was indeed in the dock, and Jackson shows that the whole trial was an indictment not just of one man but of the way a country that had a strong, almost mystical, sense of its grandeur, had failed to defend itself and its citizens or to support its allies.  I would not have bought France on Trial if I had not just read Little Boy Lost, but to have read two such books in succession has made my summer.

Adrian Barlow