Oh, what a lovely war
Afew years ago I had a couple of calls from producers wanting me to write screenplays set in the second world war. I mentioned this to my youngest son, the engineer. "What's with all this obsession about the war?" I asked. "Oh, that's easy," he replied. "We've reached that moment in time when memory becomes history."
It seemed a pretty sharp analysis for an engineer, so I stole it and fed it into my teaching routine. Memory becomes history, history becomes legend, and it's the job of the dramatist to articulate the mythology. There's nothing new in this. Greek drama runneth over with wars and rumours of wars, as does the Shakespeare canon, even if he is all over the place from a factual point of view.
The second world war is relatively unusual. It was, by common consent, a reasonably honourable conflict between Good and Evil, compared with the shabbier specimens of more recent times, and has inspired an infinite range of defining drama, from the sublime Dad's Army to Steve McQueen jumping over a fence on a motor-bike.
This mythology grows over the generations. One of my grandchildren did a school project on the war and became obsessed by the music of Glenn Miller and George Formby. This is another fascinating element about world wars: the music. The 1914-18 war left a formidable legacy of songs to go with the carnage; but between the years 1939-45, the composers and musicians really hit their stride. Researching my Blonde Bombshells dramas, I was overwhelmed by the volume of compilation albums broadly headed Great Music of the Second World War. Where, aside from protest songs, are the greatest hits from Korea, Vietnam or Iraq? The silence tells its own story.
Having written more extensively about the war than I ever intended, another key observation refuses to go away. Though a global conflict, for each individual it was a localised matter. My experience was largely bounded by the air-raid shelter in our neighbours' garden in Hull - statistically the most bombed city in the land. We'd gather every night with the people next door so the grown-ups could play cards while the kids lay on the top bunks, pretending to be asleep. In dreams I sometimes see the patterns of the shuttering in the concrete a foot above my head, but I don't ever remember being frightened; our parents turned it into a great adventure.
How did they do it? It's a big question with no answer - and maybe my quest for an answer is hiding behind everything. Certainly, if there was an answer, there wouldn't be a play.
When it comes to analysing this business, Kundera's great phrase - "the struggle of memory against forgetting" - is crucial. Who, for example, remembers a young man called James Isbister? He was the first civilian casualty, killed in Orkney in March 1940 when a German plane, sent to attack Scapa Flow, jettisoned its bombs. A neighbour, Willie Farquhar, was injured in the same attack, but recovered and ran open house for the servicemen stationed on the islands. His stone cottage, dubbed The Golden Slipper, prospered until Willie was taken to court in 1967 for running an illegal drinking house, at which point he was dubbed the Al Capone of Orkney by the local newspaper, which was pushing it a bit.
Willie is currently at the front of my mind as I'm writing a play about the Golden Slipper for next year's St Magnus festival - brainchild, 30 years ago, of Peter Maxwell Davies and the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, himself a regular at the Golden Slipper in its heyday. The play will be the third community piece I've written for the festival. The previous play was Barriers, about the building of the Churchill Barriers during the war. Working on the barriers were 700 Italian prisoners-of-war, including a remarkable artist called Domenico Chiocchetti, who assembled a team of craftsmen to transform a couple of Nissen huts into a chapel. After the war, an enduring friendship grew up between the people of Chiocchetti's home town of Moena and the Orcadians, with exchange visits from musicians and choirs.
It's doubtful whether Neville Chamberlain, making his speech to the nation on September 3 1939, imagined that one day, as a result, Orcadians and Italians would be sharing each other's music. He thought he was protecting Poland - not that many people remember that now, including the Poles. It would also be interesting to speculate what impact Chamberlain thought the war would have on the place of women in British society. Chances are all-women swing bands were fairly low on his agenda. To be sure, they were relatively low on mine until I wrote The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, a TV film shown on BBC in 2000 starring Judi Dench.
The film produced a huge range of reactions from people wanting to share their war stories. They were not tales of conventional heroism, but anecdotes verging at times on the absurd and the surreal. There was clearly an audience out there wanting to know more and I was commissioned to do a stage version focusing on the wartime experience. First seen at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2004, Blonde Bombshells of 1943 is now on its way from the Bolton Octagon to the Hampstead Theatre in London. It's a day-in-the-life piece about seven women and one man (who wears a frock some of the time) trying to become a band and play the popular music of the time.
The music defines the period and in Bolton inspired an extraordinary scene. While grey-haired members of the audience sang along, unbidden, to songs like Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree, youngsters gave loud whoops at the sound of swing music. Across the generations we were singing their tune.
In broad terms - and it gets pretty broad - the play is a celebratory comedy, but it honours the code as defined by the great American critic Eric Bentley. Comedy acknowledges the pain of life but in the end chooses to look the other way. Two of the women in the band have lost husbands. The bereaved have confronted pain and loss, but in the end they choose to look the other way and embrace the music.
Comedy celebrates survival and, as Chaplin observed, is tragedy seen in long shot - witness the surreal memoirs of Spike Milligan. It could be argued that the war gave Milligan his career, at the expense of his mental stability. But what emerges from conversations with people who remember the war is that they were never more alive. Ordinary people were called upon to be heroic and discovered that they could do it. The malaise of the immediate postwar years was, in my prejudiced view, largely caused by the fact that those same people were told: we don't need you to be heroic any more, would you please go back to being ordinary?
It's really very simple. What people need, in war or peace, is to live to their full potential. Or, as we say in the play, inside every woman there's a blonde bombshell screaming to get out. The same applies to men, though wearing a frock is strictly optional.
© Alan Plater
· Blonde Bombshells of 1943 opens at the Hampstead Theatre, London NW3, on July 18. Box office: 020-7722 9301