The Colours of the Night (as Catherine Ross)

[from endpapers] THE COLOURS OF THE NIGHT

Against the background of a heavy bomber aerodrome, and intertwined with the lives of three other girls, this novel tells the love story of an airwoman and an officer -- Virginia Bennett and Colin Craig.

After many war novels from a man's point of view, here is a well-observed and psychologically penetrating portrait of women in the Services. The four girls live jampacked with many others in Hut Five, to the accompaniment of bomber operations and the petty frustrations of Service life.

This is a novel of contrasts: easy freedom for the aircrew and severity for the girls; the coloured lamps over a dance floor and the white light of bomb bursts; the indulgent attitude of their male commanders beside the harshness of their own sex. The enemy not the Germans but the female authority over them. While over all, like a patient axe in the sky, Messerschmitt reconnaissance aircraft watch and wait and report back...

The dj flap of The Colours of the Night is a selection of excerpts from what seem to be really glowing reviews of the book. All of them echo the first, by H.E. Bates: "Easily the best picture of WAAF life on a bomber station that I've ever come across. Absolutely authentic."

A spate of this kind of book began to appear in the 1960s -- fictionalized reflections from women now in their 40s and 50s on their WWII service experiences. I just love them. The product of twenty years' growth, distance, and processing, there's an undercurrent of deep sadness in all of them, but they also radiate a time-won wisdom and empathy. Look back at us, they seem to say to their sister vets -- it was so hard and we were so young. When Betty Beatty has Virginia talk about the lessons of her "short but concentrated life" (61), you can tell this is a woman reflecting, with compassion, on who she was, on the strange historical circumstances of her generation's youth and how it shaped them in ways they didn't realize when they were deep in the living of it.

They also, as Bates' endorsement indicates, convey an authenticity that historical fiction, however well-written, just cannot match. Virginia is an MT (motor transport) driver on an RAF base -- "WAAFs provided 50% of the drivers for the RAF" -- and Beatty vividly describes what doing that work, in that environment, felt like. The feel of the gauntlets, the sapphire flare of the perimeter lights, the luminous blossoming in the sky of the recognition charges from the Verey pistols -- "the colours of the night" -- and she returns over and over to the thing that, more than any other, can't be experienced through visual and audio records of the time: a vanished scentscape. About the Nissen hut she shares with several other WAAFs, she writes "The air was thick with the smell of coke fumes, face powder, floor polish and Brasso" (6). She talks about the "particular smell" of an RAF Sergeant's Mess party:

What it's compounded of, I couldn't list properly. To begin with, it's hot and beery. It smell of linoleum. And polish. And leather boots. Hot pastry and hot punch. There's the smell of the flowers they've bought from Mess funds, and the painted twigs that they eke them out with. Around it all is the acid scent of the Lincoln tarts they've also bought and the bonhomie of the boys themselves. So it's a powerful mixture -- harsh and raucous, sad and sweet. (53)

And, on her drives, "that smell I shall always associate with bomber airfields -- the half-sad, half-sweet scent of decaying leaves mixed with a sharp tang of frost." (37) It's unfamiliar to the modern reader and yet so evocative, you can feel what it must have meant to her fellow vets read the words and be suddenly immersed in memory.

There's a romance at the heart of Colours but what it's really about is bigger and darker. This is true of the love story itself, overshadowed always by the war's 44.4% Bomber Command crew death rate (the ending is definitely a HFN). But even more, it scintillates with frustration and rage at the way young women in the service were treated. The appalling sexual harrassment and assaults, the humiliating monthly medical checks for pregnancy and VD, the double standards by which young men and women were treated -- if caught fraternizing, a friend warns the narrator "well, you'll get the chop. It'll be you that gets the dirty end of the stick. Not him" -- and the way the female chain of command is complicitous in this double standard by actively (even with relish) enforcing it.

And, yet, through all this darkness, injustice, and death, what really shines is the courage and the humor and the friendship of these young women -- " a mixed and salty bunch" -- who lived and worked and mourned with each other, faced danger and death together, and stood ever ready to lend the comfort of a drop of perfume and a swipe of lipstick -- "a bright clear red that looks heavenly with uniform." (52)

Bonus: incredible 40s slang -- "all sorts of gen -- some pukka, some duff" (41), janker-wallahs (98), Brylcreem boys, and the dark etymology of "blockbusters".

Altogether, a great, thought-provoking read. Recommend.