There are few people as qualified to participate in the ‘Changing Age’ programme as Joan Bakewell, who has enjoyed a prolific and successful career in print and broadcast journalism since the 1960s and published her first novel, All the Nice Girls, at the age of seventy-four. The majority of the novel is set in 1942, in the fictional Northern town of Staveley, and draws upon Bakewell’s own experiences in wartime Merseyside. The staff and pupils of Ashworth Grammar School for Girls sign up to ‘adopt’ a ship in the Merchant Navy, and the scheme proves to be a catalyst for social intrigue, political debate and (of course) romance. Meanwhile, a second narrative thread switches the action to 2003, where grandmother Millie uncovers a family secret, and her daughter Kate joins the protests against the imminent invasion of Iraq.
Bakewell’s narrative is informative rather than intuitive: it is not uncommon for it to be spelt out that ‘Polly felt rebuked. Robert was piqued’. However, this clipped style lends itself perfectly to the sharpness of her social commentary, as when she explains the position of the unmarried headmistress, Cynthia Maitland: ‘In later decades she might be described as having a career, but no one spoke like that in 1942. It was enough to have a life’. It is a simple, but devastatingly effective evaluation. Cynthia is, in fact, the novel’s stand-out character, and Bakewell crafts a convincing portrait of a principled woman who finds herself overtaken by unexpected emotions. Having lost her fiancée in World War One, Cynthia has almost accepted her spinster status, but is derailed by her feelings for the ship’s captain, the unhappily married Josh. The decision to act upon their mutual attraction is a calculated risk, and Bakewell narrates their affair with a balance of pragmatism and romance. Cynthia’s sexual awakening is touchingly described, and the progress of the relationship makes for compulsive reading right up until the inevitably unhappy denouement.
The success of the 2003 sections is somewhat compromised by the need to conceal the outcome of the wartime plot until the end of the novel, but they nevertheless provide a thought-provoking comparison of British society ‘then’ and ‘now’. The differing reactions to conflict are highlighted, as the obedient patriotism of World War II is contrasted with the very public protests against the invasion of Iraq. Kate of the 2003 narrative is a single mother with a supportive family, able to pursue her career and begin a new relationship. It is a lifestyle option unimaginable in the 1940s, when illegitimacy still carried a painful stigma, and sex outside of marriage (however prevalent) was still viewed as immoral. The contrast is pointed, and makes for a refreshing absence of narrative nostalgia for the ‘good old days’.
Despite the subject matter, All the Nice Girls is not without humour. Bakewell takes a satirical sideswipe at the classic wartime romance of Brief Encounter when Cynthia finds a ‘speck of coal dust lodged in her eye’ at Liverpool Lime Street station: in the absence of handsome, medically qualified strangers, Cynthia simply reaches for her own handkerchief and gets on with her day. And later in the novel, the obnoxious Brenda Alsop’s career path into journalism prompted much enjoyable speculation on my part as to which of Bakewell’s Fleet Street colleagues could have provided the initial inspiration for this ‘high priestess of reactionary polemics’. Nevertheless, this is an essentially serious novel. The role played by the Merchant Navy in bringing vital supplies to Britain has frequently been overlooked by writers, in favour of more ‘glamorous’ branches of the armed forces. Bakewell redresses the balance, describing both the comradeship and the claustrophobia of life at sea, and convincingly portraying the relationships between the men on board. The subject is meticulously researched, with a bibliography of reference books helpfully provided for those inspired to further reading. All the Nice Girls is then ultimately more educational than escapist – and proves to be all the more engrossing as a result.