My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young – review
Louisa Young is a prolific and varied writer. As Zizou Corder, she and her daughter Isabel have won acclaim for their young adult Lionboy series; she has published three previous adult novels and a biography of her grandmother, Kathleen Scott, widow of Antarctic hero Captain RF Scott. And now My Dear I Wanted To Tell You, her fourth novel for adults, is set amid the desperation of the first world war.
In Kensington Gardens, 11-year-olds Nadine and Riley meet: she the privileged daughter of a conductor living in Georgian splendour on the north of the park; he the child of a fireman, raised in a nearby working- man's cottage with few opportunities and an outdoor privy. Riley is welcomed into the lives of Nadine's upper-class bohemian family and begins to better himself, sitting for paintings and developing an accent that shames and frightens his clear-eyed, pragmatic mother. So far, so Atonement. But at 18, just as the couple acknowledge their feelings have grown beyond friendship, the combined forces of the war and Nadine's mother conspire to separate them. Riley is sent to Flanders, under the leadership of a vulnerable and increasingly traumatised captain, Peter Locke.
The first half of the story moves between the men in the trenches and the women who wait for them – Nadine, now a VAD nurse in London, Julia Locke, Peter's listless and beautiful wife bored at home in Sidcup, and Rose, Peter's saintly and unmarried sister. But there is a sense that all this is an overture and it is in the second half that the novel really takes flight.
To circumvent the censors and avoid delay, wounded soldiers could tell loved ones about injuries on a standard-issue postcard that left room only for their names and to categorise wounds as "slight" or "serious". The first line of this postcard forms the title of the book; the choice between these two categories underpins the plot and is Riley's first lie to Nadine. He has risen fast through the ranks to become a captain himself, a position almost elevated enough to make him worthy of his beloved, when he is wounded and sent home: "Half of my face is missing. You said so yourself. Missing in action . . . still in the filthy mud of Passchendaele . . . Half of my face is dead, doctor, lost without a grave. Known only to God. A jawbone of the Great War." Officer or not, a working-class boy with only half a face will not please Nadine's mother.
To recover he is sent to the Queen's Hospital in Sidcup where Rose Locke is his nurse, under the pioneering (and non-fictional) plastic surgeon, Major Harold Gillies. Treated by Gillies, hundreds of soldiers were given hope; faces disfigured in combat were rebuilt over many months to resemble those of men again.
The surgery is fascinating. Young's descriptions are clear and technical, and the atmosphere of the hospital is palpable, frightening, inspiring and painful. Nearby, Julia Locke does her bit for the war effort by instructing the gardener to plant a few vegetables, drifting through her days with aimless self-absorption, worrying incessantly that her own lovely face will age during Peter's long months away. Her battle with the enemy lines on her forehead distracts her almost entirely from her husband's slow breakdown. There are echoes here of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier, although Julia is, if possible, even more enraging than West's Kitty. But this is predominantly Nadine and Riley's tale. The core of the book is a love story built on rich, strange details of the first world war.