Caught outside at the start of a raid in the Belfast Blitz as the incendiary bombs rain down, Audrey looks up at the sky, transfixed by its eerie beauty. She watches ‘the first magnesium flares falling, bursting into incandescent light, hanging there over the city like chandeliers’. It is the sort of thing you never forget, she thinks, ‘not in a lifetime’.
This scene in These Days, by the Northern Irish writer Lucy Caldwell, brilliantly captures familiar territory for anyone who has read about the Blitz. The awe at the peculiar beauty, the feeling that this is unforgettable and will change people forever, the desire to domesticate these undomesticated happenings (the chandeliers): all this comes up often in fiction and memoir from the period. Caldwell’s originality is to push moment-by-moment reflections into consuming thematic concerns. What is a lifetime? her novel asks, movingly and compellingly. Do we have an individual responsibility to shape our lives, and does that mean somehow being true to the kinds of intense feelings that an extreme experience such as the Blitz brings out in us?
Caldwell’s cast is an upper-middle-class family in central Belfast. The father, Philip, is a doctor, used to putting on a brave face and therefore unprepared for being overwhelmed by the traumatic sights he witnesses. The mother, Florence, is still half-consumed by the loss of a secret youthful lover. Their two daughters, Audrey and Emma, are just embarking on adulthood when war breaks out. Emma signs up as a first-aider and falls seriously in love with a female colleague whose death is overwhelming both for Emma and the reader when it happens daringly early in the narrative. Audrey has just started a career that she will soon give up when she marries the respectable fiancé she is dimly aware she does not love.
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