It is well documented that I want to own every single one of the Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press, and I’m doing my best to achieve that goal. I bought Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson last year, having coveted it when Scott first blogged about it. It’s a war memoir – and it’s always interesting to see the tone these have in the post-1945 club years. I get the impression that things went a bit quiet on the war memoir front immediately after the war, but 10+ years later people were ready to look back on that bizarre time.
First off, yes her name was Verily. And here’s why:
One of my father’s interests is words. He devised a system for naming his five children. Each name had to have six letters; and, because his and my mother’s names contain an R and an L, each of ours had to too – plus some peculiarity not shared by others. Merlin (n), Rhalou (h), Erroll (doubles), Verily, (v) – not so much a name as an adverb – and finally, to fall in with the system, he had to invent Lorema.
Spam Tomorrow starts off with Verily going briefly AWOL as a F.A.N.Y. (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) so that she can marry Donald, which they do hastily and illicitly – illicit because she didn’t have leave, rather than because they couldn’t be married.
She then jumps back a bit to joining the F.A.N.Y. – before which she had found a job that used her artistic talents to some extent, in that she designed the wrappers for toffees. It is an example of the slightly eccentric and bohemian spirit that is key to understanding Anderson’s character and writing – a detail that might seem too niche and absurd in a novel, but just happens to be true.
Anderson doesn’t work for the nursing yeomanry for a very long time, and is quite open about how poorly suited she was to such a regimented life. There is a very funny and odd scene early on where she is arrested and threatened with court-martialling for crashing a government vehicle into a gatepost.
A few minutes later, while I was getting ready for lunch, two F.A.N.Y.s of the quiet, useful, obedient type came into the bedroom which I shared with four others (including one whose claim to fame was that her husband had been fallen on by Queen Mary in her recent motor accident). The two F.A.N.Y.s stood in a waiting attitude, one each side of me.
“Want to borrow a comb?” I asked affably.
“You’re under arrest,” said one.
“I’m what?” I asked.
“Under arrest. We’ve had orders to close in on you and march you to the orderly room without your cap or belt.”
She never quite works out what is going on, but ultimately receives a reprieve. It’s an insight into the daftness that always comes with a militaristic attitude to life.
The bulk of Spam Tomorrow is taken up with her married life and particularly her domestic life. Some of the most dramatic pages, unsurprisingly, are when she goes into labour during an air raid. Apparently this left her quite ill for a long time, and the only cure was to have another child – which rather baffled me, but it seemed to work.
I loved everything about her looking for housing, and it was fascinating to read about the precarious nature of homes in London in a period when they could easily be bombed at any moment. And then there is the section where she starts taking house guests in a larger place in the countryside, and discovering how inept she is at it. Which gives plenty of opportunity for being scathing about some of the worst paying guests – particularly those who come from an artists’ colony and have extremely demanding tastes. It reminded me quite a lot of the latter stages in another Furrowed Middlebrow title, Ruth Adam’s wonderful A House in the Country.
Basically, the whole book was very funny and enjoyable, without ever shying away from the perils and privations of the home front. I’ve read far more home front memoirs than those of active soldiers, and I can’t imagine that trend will change, and Anderson’s is a worthy addition to the genre – because of her experiences, but mostly because of her frank, eccentric, and indomitable character.