Swift Herons – 16 May 2025

‘What’s the theme this week?’
Books were piling up on the desk. Twelve Post-War Tales, The Deserters, Allies At War, Shrapnel Boys…
‘War,’ I said cheerily.
Except perhaps it wasn’t. Isn’t.

I picked up Graham Swift’s Twelve Post-War Tales and turned again to the opening story in which a British serviceman applies to a German government department to find out what happened to his relatives during the second world war. The British soldier’s family were German-Jewish. The German official whom he meets had been a soldier and a prisoner of war. Both men’s parents were killed by ‘the other side,’ though they mean different things by that.

The British man has not applied through the proper channels – the wrong form sent to the wrong department to ask about the wrongs he can all too well imagine. What conversation could the men have had were it not for this discussion of administrative policy and record keeping? What conversation are they in fact having beneath the offer of a chair, an ashtray?

Does this opening signal all that is to come? In subtlety, yes. In setting and tone, not even close.

The story ‘Beauty’ begins with a man answering the telephone. His son-in-law informs him that he has become a grandfather. He is in his dressing-gown. He takes the expected call downstairs in order to savour the moment, a minute during which the news is his before he wakes his wife and it becomes theirs.

Perhaps the theme, if one can call it that, is children. Does that mean this is about the future? Is that the opposite of a war story? Perhaps it is about being called up – and agreeing to the call up – for someone else. For all the future someones. But we’ll get to that. Perhaps.

Swift’s stories face the Cuban missile crisis, the Troubles, the 11 September attacks. Every story is post-war, post-wars: impossible not to be, given human history.

Every story can narrow distance in space or time, even set it close to nought. Memory transports characters and readers in the length of an en dash – at her father’s funeral, a woman sits beside her mother and squeezes her hand; her mother does not return the squeeze but the woman feels her father reaching for her hand on a day decades before.  

In The Deserters by Mathias Enard, an academic recalls the conference organised to celebrate her father, Paul Heudeber, a famous mathematician, less-famous poet, Buchenwald survivor and communist, and due to take place on 11 September 2001. A starving, filthy soldier is on the run, from which war and exactly where is unclear. Seen by a woman, herself a deserter of sorts, he first goes to shoot her, then to imprison her then to help her.

Enard alternates between the two stories, leaving you to be their meeting place, pulling together Heudeber’s past, his daughter’s present and the soldier’s future.

Allies At War by Tim Bouverie explores the politics of the alliance between Britain, the US and the Soviet Union during the second world war, examining the relationships between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin as well as between ministers, ambassadors and civil servants.

It is fascinating to see how this alliance is maintained in spite of their despising so much about each other, not to mention the spying, the duplicity and the lack of heating at Chequers which meant Roosevelt would only hang out in the airing cupboard.

But while the diplomats obfuscate and Churchill gets in and out of baths (between naps) and Stalin gets everyone drunk at a banquet in St Catherine the Great’s bedroom, life continues. Life in Spite of Everything by Victoria Donovan reveals the day-to-day stories of those living in the east of Ukraine, under conflict since 2014. What began years ago as a research project into similarities and connections between Wales and Ukraine has inevitably changed considerably. Donovan reports on life now as well as what has led here, centring the voices of the residents without portraying them as victims.

Two children’s books similarly bring out the reality – including the silliness and creativity – of everyday life even as bombs begin to fall. Shrapnel Boys by Jenny Pearson and Under a Fire-Red Sky by Geraldine McCaughrean are both about children living in London in the early years of the second world war. In the former, Ronnie and his brother begin to collect shrapnel from the street each morning. In the latter, four children due to be evacuated jump off the train as it leaves the station. While both lead to great adventures, I was struck by the power of the writers to show how quickly the characters change and how their childhoods are affected even on the less eventful days.

Perhaps the theme is Life Expectancy Begins to Fall. The theme is this poetry collection which draws together the questions left behind by Swift’s epiphanies about humanity, by Enard’s apocalyptic landscapes, by Bouverie’s dreadful allegiances and Donovan’s constant crisis. If you don’t believe me, come and see Tom Sastry read from the collection tomorrow, Saturday 17, at 5pm. Tom will make you laugh, then despair. I’ll offer you a drink for the moments in between.  

In one of Swift’s stories, ‘Blushes’, a doctor diagnoses a boy with scarlet fever. ‘You’ll live,’ he says casually. Had the boy questioned whether he would? Should he do so now? I made a note in my phone: ‘You’ll live.’ Whatever intelligence lives inside decided it knew better and changed the note: ‘you’ll love.’ How sentimental. I hope I don’t end up claiming that’s the theme.

May your weekend be Swiftian,* if not swift,
Lizzie

*For the avoidance of doubt, I am thinking of Graham but I suppose that you can think of Jonathan, if you wish. Or Taylor, even.