Cactus by Ethel Mannin

After reading Rolling in the Dew, I was keen to read more of Ethel Mannin’s fiction  – particularly something in a non-satirical mode. I wondered if something she wrote could be suitable for the British Library Women Writers series, so hunted down one that was clearly about a woman’s life: Cactus (1935). Sadly my Penguin copy more or less fell apart as I read it, so I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to re-read it, but it was certainly an interesting experience.

Elspeth is the heroine of Cactus. The novel opens when she is a young girl, with family in the north of England and in Scotland – she doesn’t really fit in with her family and their expectations of her, and she doesn’t have friends her own age. They don’t understand her and she doesn’t understand them. Her greatest friend is her Uncle Andrew – an eccentric man who chooses to live alone rather than with the rest of the family. They tolerate him with bemused affection.

In these early sections of Cactus, he teaches Elspeth to be an independent thinker. He quietly reveals the dangers of group-think, whether that be jingoistic nationalism or the meek place of a woman in Edwardian middle-class life. They are lessons that she takes very much to heart. And, on a more tangible level, he introduces her to the beauty of cacti. Others wonder why she is train to something spikey and plain, but…

When a cactus came into flower, said Uncle Andy, it was the most wonderful flower you ever saw, and it lived on long after other flowers, which bloomed more readily, had died and been forgotten. It was worth waiting for, said Uncle Andy.

And if you’re thinking ‘hmm, I wonder if this will be a metaphor for Elspeth herself’ then, yes indeed, you are right. Throughout the novel, Mannin returns to this metaphor – it becomes a little unsubtle at times, and perhaps didn’t need to be quite so foregrounded, but it’s an interesting enough idea.

Elspeth grows older and moves to Germany in the late 1930s. She falls in love with a slightly tempestuous young man called Karl, defying convention on the one hand while remaining quite bound by it on the other. For instance, she is shocked when he wants to have sex before marriage – shocked a little, in fact, that this friendship has developed into love almost unawares. Mannin isn’t condemning her for this element of conventionality. Elspeth is no more an obedient disciple to modern, bohemian thinking than she is to old-fashioned morality. She forges her own path, with her own decisions and standards.

But even the most independent thinker cannot avoid being affected by war. As it becomes clear that Germany will soon be at war – and possible (though still, to the characters, unlikely) that Britain will also enter the war – Elspeth decides to leave Germany and return to her family home. It is, she hopes, a temporary absence. But she has also been chilled by the bellicosity she had never anticipated in Karl. It is equalled by the ‘Hun-hate’ (a common word in the novel) that she finds back home. In vain does she try to explain that she may disagree with Germany’s authorities while still liking, even loving, individual Germans. I was so impressed that Mannin would write about this in the mid-1930s, when anti-German rhetoric was clearly on the rise again in Britain. Her nuance in resisting mindless nationalism and hatred of other countries is done perfectly.

These tensions become more palpable when two German prisoners of war are left at Elspeth’s family’s farm. One is a bit of a brute, but Elspeth instantly feels a connection with the other – Kurt. The similarity of his name to Karl’s is not a coincidence. While the two men are quite different, Elspeth explains that Kurt reminds her a lot of her lost love – a man she has to accept may well be dead now, given his keenness to fight. Her family won’t let the men in the house, and initially only give them food fit for the pigs – but Elspeth wears them down a little, and forges a connection with Kurt that is central to the second half of Cactus.

Mannin really doesn’t hold back in her visceral writing about war. Elspeth’s brother is working in an army hospital, but Kurt says he cannot really understand what front-line war is like. (Skip this quote if you are sensitive to graphic descriptions.)

“He doesn’t know what war is. No man who hasn’t been in the trenches does.”

“He sees every day what war does to men.”

“It’s not the same as having it happen to yourself. you can know all about building a trench parapet of human bodies and walking on human faces, and such things, but it doesn’t do anything to you unless you’ve experienced it for yourself. It’s not a case of being physically shocked compared with being intellectually shocked, it’s a case of knowing something in your bowels. In English you talk about having guts. Mind is an abstraction, but guts are damnably real. They get twisted round your bayonet. Round your pick when you’re digging. That’s the kind of knowing, when your own guts writhe with it.”

It’s hard to believe something like this is in a 1930s novel by a woman better known, I believe, for light-hearted comedies and romances. While Cactus never takes us to the front-line, the brutality of war seeps through its pages. She doesn’t address the impending war, which was becoming inevitable in many people’s eyes by the time Cactus was published, but it is a silent subtext to the reading experience.

Cactus isn’t a perfect novel. There are times when it loses a little of its subtlety and gets too close to melodrama. It is very earnest, and I would have appreciated more of the wit that played through its first chapter or two. But, for the most part, I found it an involving, passionate cry against unthinking conflict and herd mentality. I’m certainly keen to keep exploring Mannin’s fiction.