WW2 Women Fliers in Fiction

Women Flyers at War: W.E. Johns and Dorothy Carter, Worralls and Marise.

by Stephen Bigger, Conference Paper, Bristol 2018

Thank you for the opportunity of writing this paper and my apologies that I cannot be with you in person because of my responsibilities as lone carer. I have had a research interest over the past three decades in stories written for children between 1939 and 1945, a time when no one knew how the war was going to turn out. Evacuation was occasionally mentioned as a topic, but apart from Kitty Barne’s Visitors from London using her WVS evacuation experiences, the evacuation stories we know best were written later. Barne’s other war stories We'll Meet in England (1942, refugees), Three and a Pigeon (1944, black market), and In the Same Boat (1945, sinking ships) have been neglected as their war context has retreated.
I focus this paper on female fliers in fiction in this period. The 1930s had charismatic examples of female pilots such as Amy Johnson which gripped the popular imagination. Mary Cadogan wrote Women with Wings: Female Flyers in Fact and Fiction (1992), linking history with fictional stories. I am going to deal with two examples she mentions there, the Worralls books by W E Johns, which I shall cover in broad outline only since Mary gave a reasonable summary, and I offer a fuller discussion of the war stories of ‘Dorothy Carter’ (pseudonym of Mrs Dorothy Eileen Heming nee Marsh).

Worrals

W.E Johns had his own experience of flying in wartime in the Royal Flying Corps and those primitive aircraft are never far from his Biggles stories. He kept up to date through his Popular Flying and Flying magazines, and he supported Churchill in the call for rebuilding the RAF in the 1930s. He received a favourable supply of paper during war years and was asked to encourage girls into flying careers. With women being recruited into the forces, the government were keen to motivate girls and women to join up. The Worrals books were a consequence of this. Flight Officer Joan Worralson (Worrals) of the WAAF had a friend Betty "Frecks" Lovell. He was not securely briefed. WAAFs did not fly (though Worrals and Frecks did) but did admin tasks. Women in the ATA transported planes from factory to airfields. Worrals did an SOE operation without her author having any clue of SOE training and operations. Johns knew Amy Johnson (married name Mollison which the name Worralson mimics) and former stunt pilot Pauline Gower, who established the women’s branch of ATA (Air Transport Auxiliary).

The wartime Worrals books took her to France, Mesopotamia and Australia. The factual basis was loose. WAAFs did not fly planes but Worrals flew a ’Reliant’ (clearly based on a Boulton & Paul Defiant). Frecks uses the gun turret in anger, another forbidden action for a WAAF. Two SOE style missions to France are a stretch of the imagination too close to the truth for comfort (SOE was a secret organisation). Maybe that is why he was encouraged to send Worrals and Frecks further afield, to the Middle East and Australasia. Johns was not paid well for his books so he wrote a lot. A chapter before breakfast, he claimed, a new book in three weeks. Worrals was rather like Biggles with a bra, with similar daring do, but going weak at the knees when with her beau. His representation of women would not have impressed Pauline Gower.

Dorothy Eileen Marsh/Dorothy Carter (Mrs Heming), 1901 - 1948. 

My first introduction to Mrs Heming’s books was through a recommendation to read Dorothy Carter’s Wren Helen (1943), named after Eileen’s daughter and grandmother or greatgrandmother of living family members. I was fortunate to correspond with members of her family and with their help listed and purchased her books. The 1930s depression was hard on the Heming family, with four young children to feed and clothe. Eileen had a typewriter and could type well. Writing books was a possible way out. School stories were popular, boys playing cricket, girls hockey. Jack Heming heard in the mid 1930s that stories of flying would sell, so the couple went up to London to talk to W E Johns, then a publisher. They came back enthused and began to plan books on flying, but without particular expertise in aeroplanes. Not all were happy politically. In Blue Wings, Jack places his heroes on the side of the Nationalists (Fascists) against the Republicans (democrats) who are stereotyped as vicious Soviets. It is a lively story, but doesn’t read well today. Mrs Heming opted to use different pen-names for different audiences (and publishers). Her family helped me unravel them, as they also helped Eric Bates to produce a privately printed (now unavailable) biography/bibliography Among Her Own People: Lives and Literature of Eileen Marsh, Jack Heming and Bracebridge Heming in 2005. Until my 2009 blog entry (in 1930-1960.blogspot.co.uk), booksellers were unaware that her pen-names were linked.

In Wings in Revolt (1939) she as Dorothy Carter includes a Captain Bigglesworthy, a humorous allusion that seems not to have annoyed her mentor. Mary Cadogan had an advantage on me in being able to use the British Library, whilst I had to seek out and buy the very scarce books. This paper focuses on Eileen’s war stories involving women fliers. Mary Cadogan, Women With Wings, ch. 7, pp.130-5 wrote:
“Efforts to find out more about Dorothy Carter, as a pilot and a writer, have proved abortive – but she was certainly one of the first authors to create really convincing flying stories for girls” (p.131).
By 2010 both judgements were incorrect and Mary and I met several times to discuss issues dealt with in this paper. Mrs Heming had no substantial flying experience, and was vague on details. The books also puzzled Owen Dudley Edwards in his study of second world war youth literature. I met and corresponded with Owen around 2010 and I introduced him to Bates’ book and the contents of this paper.

Eileen Marsh contributed to the Girls Own Paper (GOP) encouraging upper-middle class girls to learn to fly. From 1935 she wrote 102 books until her early death in 1948 (average 10 a year, one every five weeks) under many names. 25 were about female fliers. She often combining her real names Dorothy Eileen Heming (nee Marsh) or using other family names. She published 7 titles in 1936, 4 as Eileen Marsh, and one each of Dorothy Carter, Martin Kent and D.E. Marsh. Of the twelve titles in 1937, 5 were by Eileen Marsh, 2 by D.E. Marsh, and one each by James Cahill, Guy Dempster, Martin Kent, Elizabeth Rogers and E M Shard. And so one, year by year.

Altogether by 1948 there were 26 books by Eileen Marsh, 14 by Dorothy Carter, 9 by Elizabeth Rogers, 8 by Guy Dempster , 6 by Martin Kent, 6 by D.E. Marsh, and smaller numbers for the rest. After the war, when paper was more plentiful, she also wrote Sunday School prizes for Lutterworth, (a lucrative market) using the names Eileen Heming, Dorothy Marsh, James Cahill, Rupert Jardine, Jane Rogers and Mary St. Helier. Male or neutral pen-names were used for boy readers, and different publishers monopolised particular names, such as Collins with Marise titles, and Lutterworth with Eileen Heming titles. Guy Dempster books were blood-curdling Fleet Air Arm stories for boys, following troops in the armed service, maybe in collaboration with Jack who was away in the war. As Elizabeth Rogers, The Girls of Fort Tregantle (1946) was a romantic romp on an ATS training exercise, with the preoccupied girls giving too much away to a pair of German-Irish spies. The hot hormones wouldn’t pass any feminist test today. Her 15 adult novels, most as Eileen Marsh, offered a social commentary on the 1940s. These books are war related and of good quality. We Lived in London (1942) was a hard-hitting account of life in the blitz. The Walled Garden (1943) began a family saga. Eight Over Essen (1944) followed the lives of eight members of a bomber crew who failed to return from an Essen raid. I Had a Son, Barbed Wire and The Memorial showed social tensions.

Both Mary Cadogan and Owen Dudley Edwards praise the stories as giving an authentic picture of flying and presume Eileen was a flier. She was not. Her first two flying books, written in 1935, were Two Girls on the Air Trail and Peggy Parachutist in which details of how to fly were imaginative, such as managing to throw a small packet from the plane into an open window. Radio tuning is usually described as ‘twiddling the knobs’. When books began to sell and she had some spare cash, she took a few short lessons to get a sense of what dials and knobs did. She read first-hand accounts of flying and probably talked to pilots. The series we are mainly dealing with during the war are of Marise for Collins writing as Dorothy Carter. There were post-war flying stories focusing on a new heroine Jan.

The first three Marise books are implausible accounts of winning the Kings Cup Air Race, being in the movies and being taken for a goddess in the snowy Arctic. The three next titles concern us here:

Sword of the Air (1941)

Comrades of the Air (1942)

Marise Flies South (1944)

Marise has a plane in Croydon Airport and as Sword of the Air opens, the second world war will be announced next day, her father being in the secret service getting people out of Poland. Marise meets up with her father in between trips. Marise applies to join the WAAF (or WAFF, p.20) but is rejected but later invited to join the ATA as a ferry pilot, taking new planes from the factory to airfields. She is interviewed by a tall lady resembling Pauline Gower who developed the female section of ATA. Gower’s autobiography Women with Wings inspired Mary Cadogan’s title. Amy Johnson was one of her early recruits and died on an ATA mission. The casualty rate was one in ten, but these were the glamour girls. Marise’s first posting was to a Hawker ‘shadow factory’, presumably that built on Parlaunt Farm, at Langley near Slough developed in the late 1930s. She overcomes chauvinist banter with aplomb. Her first delivery was of a Hurricane to a camouflaged airfield (invisible from above). There was indeed a camouflage unit to deceive hostile aircrew, but such work was uncommon in 1940 when the story was set. Delivery of a four-engined seaplane to the east coast for Coastal Command gives the opportunity to describe convoy operations operating with radio silence. She begins to meet her male chums from previous adventures ‘doing their bit’. She delivers a Spitfire to pre-Dunkirk France (therefore before late May 1940) where she met two more male chums. The airfield was probably Calais Marck. The Spitfires delivered here were reconnaissance, and the story confirms that this is what her chums were doing. On the next trip her plane was lost in fog and strayed over German territory, brought down by flak, which following orders she set on fire. She hatches a mad plan to steal a Messerschmitt 109 but was apprehended. On hearing the news chum Jim went into action. Marise felt that ordinary German soldiers were kept in the dark by propaganda, whereas the SS were ‘scum of the earth’ and ‘scum rises to the top’. Her guide on the journey to Berlin tried to discover if she was a spy. She was kidnapped, and counter kidnapped by the resistance so meeting her father again. With no easy way home, Marise became ‘Magda’ cousin of an SS man working secretly with the Resistance, and sent to work in an aircraft factory. When compromised (with prime information) she and her father were spirited away home by the three chums in a night landing of a Wellington bomber.

The following year came Comrades of the Air, in which Marise discovers that her three male chums were going to Russia (shortly after Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of Russia has begun). She persuades her ATA boss (Pauline Gower in real life) to let her deliver a plane to Russia. Details of the improbable journey over German occupied territory are vague. She meets up with Russian female pilots and in particular Katya Petroff. The Soviet pilots shoot down several Nazi planes before having to close down their base in the face of enemy advances. Marise flies a ‘sweet to fly’ Russian bomber (Mary Cadogan surmises a Tupoler SB-2, actually a Tupolov ). More likely it was a Petlyakov Pe-2. Eileen was a keen reader of aircraft magazines and rejoiced in new developments. Tupolovs comprised 95% of the Russian Air Force, but it was not remotely sweet to fly, quite the opposite. By 1940 it was largely obsolete though a few late marks minimised some problems. It was nicknamed Pterodactyl because its high wings were ungainly. Petlyakov was Tupolov’s deputy and set to work to design a new type which entered service around 1940. The Petlyakov Pe-2 was a high-altitude twin engine bomber what came into service in 1941 and were largely flown by women pilots. It was heavy on take-off, often a two-woman job, but after that it was sweet enough to fly. It was well-defended, more so over time and from the beginning was a match for Bf109s (although gunner casualties were high).

There are various escapades, the plane losing navigation devices and ending up at the arctic coast, Marise using her Canadian arctic skills to repair the engine, witnessed a naval war-crime, and eventually returning to habitation to find Nazi forces committing atrocities which we now know was not propaganda. Her three male chums turn up with her father, and they all overcome all odds. The story of the Soviet women pilots has been honoured in several books, listed below. Wherever Eileen took her information from, she told this story with deep respect.

The final Marise wartime story, Marise Flies South (1944) sees her ferrying a plane to Darwin, Australia and New Guinea. The Australian formula was similarly used after the war for Jan (Janice) and Wren Helen. Marise takes a B24 Liberator bomber to Darwin single-handed and is invited by two other female ferry pilots to take Typhoon aircraft to New Guinea. The story was undoubtedly suggested by the exploits of the B24 ‘Shady Lady’, from the 380th Bombardment Group, “The Flying Circus”. Darwin was bombed more severely than Pearl Harbour in 1942. Eleven Liberators attacked a Japanese fuel refinery on Borneo. Shady Lady was caught in tropical storms, flew for 16 hours 35 minutes before fuel ran out. The crew managed to patch it up enough to limp home and it became a national monument. The four-engined Liberator had a crew of ten and a range of 16 hour flying. The story assumes that Marise flew this heavy plane single-handed across the world without a co-pilot and navigator. Since the territory between India and Australia was occupied by the Japanese, refuelling half-way would be impossible. Jan Flies Down Under written four years later details the journey with several refuelling stops, including on Java, then no longer occupied by the Japanese. This story shows this to be a gruelling and dangerous journey even with a co-pilot and cooperative airfields.

These stories for girls foregrounded emotions and innocent romance. Marise gets two new male chums, Pete and Babe who are shot down by the Japanese, so the girls go in to rescue them. The girls are also shot down, and finding Pete and Babe, they all have a hard time before rescue. Marise’s father, posing as a German liaising with the Japanese, appears in the story from time to time. In all these stories the level of plausibility is low, and the detail about flying rudimentary. We don’t get to hear what the dials and gauges are for, or the rudder or joystick, or navigation techniques.

After the war Eileen wrote One Woman’s Life which was a fictionalised autobiography. In this the author received a fee (£50 per book) rather than a royalty contract. This was not unusual in the 1930s so even W E Johns had to renegotiate book deals in the 1950s and lack of royalties gave her no incentive to press for additional printings. Ten books a year would have grossed her £500 before tax, not insignificant but not a fortune. She described her writing day as starting when the children went off to school and domestic tasks completed, then on the typewriter for four hours before getting tea ready. She died of a brain haemorrhage on 5 Aug 1948 and is buried in Aldington churchyard near Romney Marsh. Aldington appears in many of her books about flying, as a kind of personal signature.

These books are can-do books for girls. No aspiration is too high, no skill cannot be mastered. Technology is not the preserve of men. The female ferry pilots astounded airfields by having flown so many types, including enormous 4 engines planes like Lancasters. We honour the real women who did these jobs.



Books for further reading

Pauline Gower Women with Wings (1938).

Mary Cadogan Women with Wings: Female Flyers in Fact and Fiction (1992).

Bruce Myles and Fergus Mason Night Witches (1981).

Lyuba gradova Defending the Motherland: The Soviet Women Who Fought Hitler's Aces (2015). 

Giles Whittell, Spitfire Women of World War II (2007).

Eric Bates, Among Her Own People: Lives and Literature of Eileen Marsh, Jack Heming and Bracebridge Heming ( 2005).

Worrals war stories (Johns):

Worrals of the W.A.A.F. (1941)
Worrals Carries On (1942)
Worrals Flies Again (1942)
Worrals on the Warpath (1943)
Worrals Goes East (1944)
Worrals of the Islands (1945)

Worrals post-war stories.

Worrals in the Wilds (1947)
Worrals Down Under (1948)
Worrals in the Wastelands (1949)
Worrals Goes Afoot (1949)
Worrals Investigates (1950)

Wren Helen books (Dorothy Carter).

Wren Helen (1943)
Wren Helen Goes South (1944)
Wren Helen Goes North (1946)

Marise books (Dorothy Carter).

Mistress of the Air (1939)
Star of the Air (1940)
Snow Queen of the Air (1941)
Sword of the Air (1941)
Comrades of the Air (1942)
Marise Flies South (1944)

Guy Dempster books,

The Phantom Wing (1937)
Secret of the Desert (1939)
Fleet Wings (1941)
Winged Venturers (1942)
Commandos Raid at Dawn (1943)
East With the Admiral (1945)
Southward Bound (1947)
The Stolen Cruiser (1948).

Eileen Marsh adult books referred to:

We Lived in London (1942),
The Walled Garden (1943),
Eight Over Essen (1944),
I Had a Son (1944),
Barbed Wire (1945,
The Memorial (1947),
One Woman’s Life (1949).

Malcolm Saville (1901-82), new editions

There is a flourishing Malcolm Saville Society for whom I have written critical accounts of Malcolm Saville's stories for children and young people for twenty years now, some of which you can find online (e.g. https://eprints.worc.ac.uk/800 and 1499). This is a little strange since I never read these books as a child. I also wrote his entry for Dictionary of National Biography. Girls Gone By publishers republished his 20 Lone Pine stories, and are currectly republishing the Marston Baines stories for which I am providing introductions. These stories of good and evil are children's versions of James Bond, with young university students playing active roles. I present here part of my introduction to the third story, Dark Danger (1965). His attitudes are typical of older middle class men in the 1960s, pro-establishment, anti-socialist and anti-feminist. His stories are not normally read by children today, and this edition is based on the original edition and not edited to be more child-friendly.

Introduction.

Epigraph: Good and evil both travel like ripples from a stone tossed into a still pool (p.73)

This, the third Marston Baines story, is set first in Venice and later in Rome. Its Heinemann dust jacket illustrated by Michael Whittlesea spreads over front and back showing Francesca (a young woman from Venice) running in distress down the Spanish Steps in Rome. The Children’s Book Club jacket shows a black and white Venice silhouette. There are no internal maps or drawings. The detail of tourist spots suggests that research was carried out during Italian holidays although the main action takes place in fictional houses and alleys, as the Foreword emphasises. Mark O’Hanlon indicates (Beyond the Lone Pine: A Biography of Malcolm Saville, 2001) that the Venice holiday was in 1960 and Rome in 1962.

The story’s main theme is Black Magic/ Satanism, which has inspired an evil plot for world dominance. Saville’s Foreword stresses: “Satanism actually exists. It is practised secretly in many European countries including Britain, and each year many churches are desecrated. Satanism is hateful and evil ̶ the reverse image of religion and of Christianity in particular”. Saville took inspiration from contemporary James Bond books and films, and some plot details in this book draw on the newly released On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.  Saville the Anglican Christian would have been aware of press coverage of witchcraft and black magic in the 1960s and he considered it sacrilegious and threatening. His version of Satanism involved the black mass, the opposite to Christian Eucharist. His belief in the potency of the Eucharist seems to balance with the negative potency of the black mass. Satanism exists with evil motivations and consequences. This story warns young readers to steer well clear of it.

We have to look elsewhere for the main source of Saville’s depiction of Satanism, which we find in Dennis Wheatley’s The Satanist (1960). Wheatley’s Gregory Sallust second world war thrillers prompted Fleming to write the James Bond books. The Wheatley family, father and children, were active in MI5 (military intelligence) in wartime. Wheatley showed an early interest in the occult which featured in several stories - The Devil Rides Out and To the Devil a Daughter. He said in his ‛authobiography’ (The Time Has Come: The Memoirs of Dennis Wheatley (Vol 3) 1919-1977 p. 131) “The fact that I had read extensively about ancient religions gave me some useful background, but I required up-to-date information about occult circles in this country. My friend, Tom Driberg, who then lived in a mews flat just behind us in Queen’s Gate, proved most helpful. He introduced me to Aleister Crowley, the Reverend Montague Summers and Rollo Ahmed”. These were a weird bunch. Driberg was aristocratic with communist sympathies: those of my generation knew him better as William Hickey the Daily Express gossip monger. Ahmed lost his teeth in a Satanic ritual that backfired, Summers (never ordained) was a paedophile who liked devout Catholic boys. Crowley was the brain behind modern Satanism seeing himself as a prophet of the new religion Thelema which ushered in the Æon of Horus declaring that its followers should adhere to the hedonistic self-centred code of “Do what thou wilt”, a phrase which appears often in The Satanist.

Wheatley was ideologically conservative, sitting in his smoking jacket in his London Club. His main characters supported the monarchy, empire and social class distinctions. Many of his villains are villainous simply because they attack the establishment. His preface illustrates this: he says: “should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject and thus come into contact with a man or woman of Power, I feel it is only right to urge them, most strongly, to refrain from being drawn into any practice of the Secret Art in any way. My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would bring them into dangers of very real and concrete nature.” This is hugely ambiguous ̶ in the story, satanic powers are real, can change the weather, can seal doorways to keep people prisoner, and can ward off bullets. His story assumes telepathy and occult powers are real. A crucifix is a potent charm against dark arts that might find a place in Hogwarts. The preface suggests that Wheatley believed all this. Saville prefers rather to blame trickery, drugs and hypnosis.

The Satanist (1960) was Saville’s likely source. This is the story of a woman whose husband, an MI5 agent, was killed as a human sacrifice when unmasked by a Satanic temple in London: she secretly infiltrated the temple to extract revenge. Her Irish colleague, Barney Sullivan, had two tasks, one to be a communist/anarchist agent provocateur in labour relations, and secondly to infiltrate the Satanist Temple to find communist links. Barney’s relationship with Mary is in many ways parallel to Patrick’s with Francesca, and both end with romance. Patrick (also Irish) rescues Francesca from Satanists much as Barney rescues Mary. Barney’s undercover anarchy work is reflected in Three Towers in Tuscany, the first Marston Baines story. A Black Mass is described in chapter 5, and another takes place at the end of the story. Saville paints a picture of Christian parody, with an upside-down cross, black candles, the Mass recited backwards by an unfrocked priest. These also feature in Wheatley. Hypnosis and drugs were used in both stories. Both refer to Satan as ‛the Master’, Wheatley’s dressed as a ram, Saville’s a goat. In both, becoming a neophyte requires undertaking some service to Satan (i.e. supporting the evil plans of the leadership). Both stories use blackmail through photographs. A human sacrifice occurs in Wheatley and is planned in Dark Danger to persuade the victims. In both, the crucifix was used as a weapon.

The story of Dark Danger has three locations, in Venice, England and Rome. In Venice Simon Baines’ university friend, Patrick Cartwright, age 20 takes a job tutoring Count Brindisi’s son, Piedro who had missed time in school after hospitalization. Piedro had a beautiful 18 year old sister, Francesca. Patrick and his pupil take the waterbus or vaporetto on the Grand Canal to Rialto Bridge, the cheapest and most crowded form of transport. They walked through the side alleys to find the down-at-heel palazzo (“Not much of a palace now...Rather a sad place really”, p.2) which will be home for a while. Piedro mused pragmatically that “There are plenty of poor people in Venice” which is “a ghastly place in the winter”. He added that many incomes relied on tourists, so winter was a very slack time. They moved down side alleys, over bridges with gondolas going underneath, one propelled by “a tough-looking villain”. Coming to a small square called a campo, originally meaning ‛field’ Piedro explains, Patrick intervenes in a fight in which one man was trying to knife another. Piedro refuses to translate the resulting conversation and after this, the tensions of the story unfold.

Brindisi Palace, fictional but typical, was five storeys high, a balcony, a state room, and had painted mooring posts onto the Grand Canal, a boathouse, and a small courtyard garden. From the balcony, the “great waterway ̶ curved like a bow, or perhaps like a loop in a necklace set with jewels ̶ lay below him. The lights from the houses were reflected in the dark, sparking water which was busy with traffic”. With such vivid descriptions, the first few pages of chapter one paints an atmospheric landscape.

Venice has a long history over which buildings, including churches, were built on foundations of wooden piles sunk into the clay. 117 islands were built on. The river formed the Grande Canal with over a hundred side canals and many alleys called calli ̶ three thousand, says Piedro ̶ to accommodate buildings. From time to time you come to small squares called campo. There are six sectors, San Marco, Castello, Cannaregio (all to the NE), and San Polo, San Croce and Dorsoduro (all to the SW). Arriving at San Marco (St. Marks Basilica) on the broad San Marco canal, Patrick would have needed to take a boat up the Grand Canal past San Polo (St Pauls) to the Rialto Bridge. On San Marco Piazza, Saville says in the Foreword, Caffe Florians is a real famous eating house, actually advertising its origins from 1720; and the Quadri on Saint Mark Square is an acclaimed Michelin Guide restaurant . Francesca hints that they are expensive (p.23). St Mark’s Cathedral has its roots in the time when the bones of St Mark the Evangelist (that is, the Gospel writer) were stolen from Alexandria. St Marks Basilica was therefore a pilgrimage centre. The four bronze ‛Roman’ horses are mentioned: looted from Constantinople in 1204AD, they were looted again by Napoleon, and returned in 1815. The horses on the facade are now replicas, the originals are inside under cover. They also took the lift up the campanile (bell tower) to see the view as a watery patchwork, naming the various features and islands (p.28) for the readers’ benefit.

The historic buildings have today been refurbished for the wealthy. Unfortunately, the weight of buildings (often 4-6 storeys high) causes a little sinkage and rising sea levels can mean flooding. In 1966, the year after Dark Danger was written, flooding caused such major damage that flood prevention schemes were brought forward and eventually a flood barrage built. One topographical puzzle comes when Patrick looked out of his window down the canal “across the rooftops to the dome of the famous church of St. Giorgio Maggiore on its island between the city and the Lido” (p.17). The Lido was the outlying reef offering some protection from the sea. There are two puzzles. A view of San Giorgio is dominated by the bell-tower, or campanile, which is not mentioned. The dome is small in comparison. Also, from where Patrick was supposed to be looking, San Giorgio would not visible but masked by San Marco’s domes with its own campanile. Saville conflated different views from memory. The youngsters swam and sunbathed on ‘The Lido’: this original Lido protecting the Lagoon had been developed into a glamorous island resort with 12 km of beach and many hotels, made famous through Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice.

Switching the scene to England, a refugee is picked up by the British Secret Service and is sent to stay with the vicar at Barfield in the Cotswolds, who was a renowned expert on black magic. Marston Baines visits and learns that this refugee had been mixed up with black magic in Italy, but escaped with information vital to the secret services. Marston lunched en route “beyond Oxford”, certainly The Evenlode, Eynsham (built 1935) on the A40 to Burford. “Barfield”, we are told, had a church with a tower, a lych-gate and a cricket ground, down a little lane to the north of the A40. The pub is named The Three Horseshoes. The best fit is Swinbrook, population 140, on the outskirts of Burford, with the church of St Mary (with a tower) and a substantial cricket pitch and club. Its pub is The Swan. The Three Horseshoes is a not uncommon pub name, one being close to Saville’s homes in Sussex. Barfield is an adaptation of  Burford closeby. Swinbrook church is a gem, with monuments, misericords and the graves of four Mitford siblings. There is no lych-gate here or locally so this is an embellishment. The fictional refugee is found dead on the church altar as a Satanic sacrifice, a fate he was terrified of. Marston nevertheless found out that a Venetian scientist is being pressured to reveal a secret, and that the Black Magic syndicate has a female leader. The Satanic executioners are a couple, man and woman, on a motor cycle, and Marston is mugged on the way home (having forgotten his SOE commando training again), his red Mini Cooper (see book 2 in the series) being terminally damaged and sadly dumped in a quarry.

The action moves to Rome where Count Brindisi received a phone call to visit his former assistant. The instructions were: go to number 7, Via Del Umberto near the top of the Spanish Steps and close by the church of Trinita dei Monti. The Catholic church with this name, pictured on the Heinemann dust jacket, is located at the top of the Steps . He would stay in a small hotel he often used, Hotel Popolo. His route to the Spanish steps is described as Imperial Forum, the white Victor Emmanuel monument, the Corso and the Via Condotti. Other places featured are the Trevi Fountain, amid street cafes; the La Barcaccia fountain; the house where Keats died, and the Coliseum, with emphasis on the memorial to Christian martyrs. What happened to the Count is substance of this story. It involved a Black Mass in catacombs accessible from a lonely villa south of Rome. A criminal committee of twelve plus the female leader mimicked Jesus and the twelve disciples. The Count countered the bullying through audible prayers and psalms. His forced journey to the Black Mass is saturated by images of Christian martyrdom.

Like in the first two stories, there is a balance between action and innocent romance since Saville wanted his stories to appeal to both young men and women. The three young men were present without the girls from the earlier stories. Patrick and Francesca were romantically connected, though the others were flirtatious. Francesca was a victim throughout, a double-negative plot-scape, victim and girl-interest combined. She has little autonomy but is acted on throughout, beautiful but passive. Francesca was however a strong swimmer, mirroring Petronella/Peter before her in the Lone Pine stories.

My epigraph above shows the potential consequences of good and evil. Both are real in a black and white world. Christ and Satan, Christianity and Satanism both have power and are at war. This power in Saville is not paranormal as in Wheatley, but the consequences of deliberate choices, which can be changed and provide redemption. Although prayers and crucifixes are weaponised as talismans, this is in a psychological not paranormal way. The good life, the Christian life, Saville is saying, should be a battle against evil using everything available and not thinking about the dangers and personal cost. I agree in general and disagree in detail. As a High Church of England Tory, his concept of good was tied into conservatism, the monarchy and the status quo. His concept of evil was black and white, extreme, a deliberate challenge to Christian values. However we live in a world of grey ethics, where it is hard to tell who is good and who is evil, where opinion is polarised, playing out on social media and polarised media. But nil desperandum if effort is made, through education and literature, we can develop critical skills in the young. Reviews were mixed, the Church Times liking it, and Books and Bookmen finding it unsubtle. Today in 2018, Saville’s themes of racism, spies, terrorism, drugs and murder are all in evidence and increasing. Unfortunately, reality has now become more extreme than fiction.

Philip Davies, Old Testament Specialist. RIP

Philip Davies (1945-2018)
Philip wrote a chapter on Jerusalem in the book I organised and edited, Creating the Old Testament. It is clear from the obituary below that this owed much to his time working  in Jerusalem. The chapter drew on the biblical stories of the foundation of Jerusalem, through as you can see below his academic experiences in Jerusalem. Philip was like me a minimalist, showing how little of historical accuracy can be drawn out of Old Testament/Biblical texts. That the existence of Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets and exilic theology cannot be assumes to depict history. The texts come from a socio-political-theological whirlpool in which writers and 'schools' defended their empires and ideas. Nothing in the Bible tells us how to live our lives, any more than Homer's Odysseus does. The university academic is duty bound to critique, to ask difficult questions, to resist simplistic answers. Creating the Old Testament similarly made no simplistic assumptions of historicity. Historicity is tied up in the fact that someone, somewhere wrote the stuff, for reasons only he (probably) knew and we can in part deduce. Old Testament scholarship has to deconstruct the intellectual ideas of its past. I said that nothing we assume about ancient Israel is essentially trustworthy. Stories had an agenda which is still being worked through politically today. A number of us knocked these ideas around in the last quarter of the 20th century, seeking to undermine entrenched opinion. It was a kind of intellectual siblinghood we all valued.

I honour a courageous life well spent.


OBITUARY

By Thomas L. Thompson

Professor Emeritus

University of Copenhagen

June 2018

The death of my most dear friend Philip Davies on Friday, May 31, by cancer is a great loss to our entire field. He was not only a scholar of great talent and integrity, who interested himself in all that touched biblical studies. He was also ever a scholar of astonishing originality and discipline, whose impact on the field was immeasurable, not least because of the clarity of his arguments and his ability to focus on the rhetorical center of an issue. Who would have dreamt that such a simple distinction as that between the “biblical Israel”, the “ancient Israel” constructed by historians and the “Israel of the past”, which no longer exists, could have provoked a decade-long debate among biblical scholars, archaeologists, historians and theologians as Philip did in his 1992 essay, In Search of Ancient Israel?

Philip was a scholar, whose long active involvement in the roles of teacher, adviser, editor and publisher created in a career of some fifty years an understanding of the production of knowledge in modern research and scholarship, which was without parallel. The title of his Festschrift captioned Philip as “Far from Minimal’ (Burns and Rogerson 2012). When one tries to describe Philip’s contributions to biblical scholarship as associated with but a singular direction in scholarship, one should consider that this volume, honoring Philip, appeared as the 484th volume of the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, a series for which Philip had been one of the founding members! Philip had also been one of the founders of the journal itself, as long ago as 1976, before minimalism had found a voice of its own. Philip also had more than forty years of involvement with the program of Biblical Studies in Sheffield, which engaged him in the training of a great number of graduate students. Philip was a scholar who dealt with problems and the critical voice he brought to any given issue defined his method. I think Ingrid Hjelm’s reminder:
“One should and does think of Philip Davies as a minimalist, but he has supported so many maximalists as well”! The breadth of Philip’s scholarship was his greatest gift and it forms the greatest challenge for any who wish to address his critique seriously.

I first met my friend in England in 1975. It was shortly after I had received my PhD from Temple University and I was giving a brief lecture tour, which James Barr had arranged for me to discuss my dissertation. Philip, I remember, had returned to England to take up his new teaching position at Sheffield. I will never forget the physical landscape of our meeting, although I continue to avoid any significance it might have had for me. We stood facing each other in the sun. He stood on the shiny black-asphalt paved street near the corner of a curved sidewalk and we talked—for some two hours—about all that was going on in the field: about Gottwald and Weippert, archaeology in Europe and the ever-plaguing problem of the Americans’ biblical historicizing. I cannot recall any of the details of our conversation, except that it continued and we did not move from the street corner or out of the sun. Perhaps we were afraid that if we went to a pub for a beer or stopped the conversation in any other way, it might never be taken up again.

I first had direct experience of Philip’s teaching capacities in 1986, when Philip had a research leave and was teaching a course at the École Biblique and I was also working at the École on the Toponomie Palestinienne project together with Francolino Goncalvez. I was also preparing a literary reading of the origin stories of the Pentateuch, which the Sheffield Academic Press had agreed to publish. As I was living in the Old City, we decided to meet every Thursday—with as many of his students who wished to come—at my apartment for a lunch of falafel sandwiches and beer. Some 6-8 students usually came. After lunch, we discussed things biblical as long as we and the beer lasted; that is, until about 6:30 PM. Conversations always brought forward two interrelated themes, which Philip and I enthusiastically were involved in: history and archaeology on the one hand and the literary implications of texts and narrative on the other. The first circled around the question of developing historical interpretation of Palestinian archaeology, which avoided efforts aimed at historicizing biblical narratives. My Toponomie project occupied much of my workdays at the time and engaged me in tracing and identifying the considerable oss of the cultural heritage, which had been embedded in Arab names of villages, wadis, springs, wells, hills and valleys, etc. Both this and the potential of developing post-processual interpretations of archaeological remains engaged Philip’s experience with the Palestine Exploration Fund, brought our conversations to a clearer awareness of the role played by politics in our work. Nevertheless, the students’ interest in biblical studies repeatedly brought our conversations back to the problems related to a Zionist interpretation of a “history of
Israel”—rather than Palestine—in terms of a biblical-archaeological construction of history, ever in deep conflict with a literary and folkloric analysis of biblical origin stories. This second theme awoke in Philip sharp, incisive critique, laced with an irony, which repeatedly exposed the deep sense of his humor and joy in his work.

I was not unaware of how generous Philip was in such discourse, both to me and his students. He had an impressive ability to become quickly engaged in whatever was most central and relevant to his students and colleagues. Their interests quickly became his own. Rather than turning a conversation to his own interests, his interest became that of his interlocutor! What he brought to the conversation was simplicity and clarity and an immense understanding of sound critical methods, expressing his immense reading and experience. What was most
interesting about discussions with Philip was that he was rarely interested in finding agreement. He rather seemed to be always taken up with clarifying what was ambiguous or confused. In these early discussions, Philip and I rarely agreed on very specific issues, but I always came away from such a conversation understanding better what I had meant! Philip Davies, as a teacher, was, perhaps, the most well-read biblical scholar of his generation. He was engaged in the whole field and sought ever to see it as interrelated and coherent. He was that rare scholar who was engaged in the whole of biblical studies.

A few years after our meetings in Jerusalem, I had the great good fortune of teaching with him for a semester in the theology department at Marquette University in, I believe this was in the Autumn of 1990. Philip came to us on a teacher’s exchange program and took up the teaching obligations of my colleague John Schmidt, who spent the semester in Sheffield. Without the least hesitation, Philip and I sought to find again the common ground we had shared in Jerusalem and began to meet at his apartment each week. The context, however, was quite different this time. Not least because I was quite well-prepared for these conversations, engaged as I was in finishing the final draft of a history of European and American scholarship, regarding writing the “history of Israel” from Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to Ahlström’s History of Palestine. Two years earlier, I had spent eight weeks in the library of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute and shared many lunches with Gösta as he set out on the demanding final draft of his History.

When I met with Philip while he was at Marquette, so many changes had occurred in the field of biblical studies that I felt that the greatest need I had was to find a clear and simple narrative to guide me through the restructuring debates of the 1970s and 1980s, which I felt had changed biblical studies so radically. I could bring the many conflicting arguments and perspectives onto the table for discussion, but I lacked both clarity and simplicity, for me unfathomable virtues, which Philip possessed in abundance. Looking back on these difficult, at times heated, but always new and fresh discussions that Philip offered with such generosity, I see in retrospect of his death our loss of an immeasurable gift of clarity. Honored be his memory!

At the dentist

A visit to the dental hygienist today led to an interesting conversation. We will call her Kay and her assistant Jenny. Their children are in nursery and infant schools locally. Kay has known me for years and was asking about my research and I mentioned that Living Contradiction was published last September. That led to a conversation about infant schools when I said that my ambition is for schools to be happy places for children.

Jenny’s daughter was in Reception but receiving an extraordinary amount of homework “because the curriculum was too big to fit into school hours” (quoting the class teacher). Jenny’s concern was that this was upsetting her quality time with her child. She would normally read to her and with her, play imaginatively, chat about the day and so on. But homework was a formal list declared completed in a homework book. The child is 4 years old. What madness is requiring schools to do this? Seeking to fill every minute up to a 7pm bedtime? The mother’s instincts that relationship, enjoyment, and well-being should take precedence are absolutely correct. Homework at this age is inappropriate, the school’s neurotic response to government and inspectors misguidance. I advised ignoring homework and being creative with filling in the homework book. Jenny said she already was, but felt vindicated by our conversation.

Kay’s eldest was 7-8 and entering the world or digraphs and trigraphs (incidentally disempowering parents). This is classic step by step SSP (Miskin phonix) assuming that the children had not puzzled over tough, rough, bough, cough, dough, through and though long ago. I could read before school and can barely remember the process. Then, recognition, sounding out and reading as a habit all mingled. By 1982 I wrote a dissertation on reading readiness in which the current wisdom was this multi-approach was advocated. Of course phonics were not ignored, but English has more exceptions than rules, such as I before E.

I explained that my philosophy was that school should be an enjoyable place where children were happy and motivated, and that this was against government ideas of top-down authority and punishment. We will talk again. I have looked out a spare copy of Living Contraction for them.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead: Weighing the Heart

A few friends are teaching ancient Egypt in primary school so here are a few pertinent points.

We are used to the pyramids and valley of the kings so are aware that death was high on anyone's agenda. The pharaoh's spent much of their wealth on their tomb, even a minor pharaoh like Tutankhamen. Grandiose ambitions for the afterlife were shared by common people also. The Egyptians were world powers (in their own terms from the 3rd to 1st millennium BCE. Some pharaohs were prolific builders, like Ramses II ("the Great", around 1200BCE) whose statues are everywhere in Egypt. The Pyramids were a millennium earlier.

Customs about the afterlife were part of funerals. In royal tombs, the steps to the afterlife were painted on the walls with scenes painted on the walls at great expense. More common funerals would use papyrus scrolls, sometimes specially produced, sometimes off the shelf. Funerals were generally optimistic, as I guess they are today. We assume that whatever happens in the afterlife, it will be good rather than bad. A funeral represents a passing from one state to another. It is a time to remember good acts. So it was in Egypt. The funeral programme walked the dead through the transition, informing them of what to do and what to say. It was not really a ritual and there are variations.

The first stage was in the Hall of Justice (Maat, pictured as a goddess). Justice is represented as a feather (Ostrich, it is often said). The feather is a stylus, a pen, with which laws were made. The feather was weighed against the dead person's heart to determine whether he (or she) had been a good person. A monster, the Devourer of Death, stood by but never seems to get any action.

Here we see the jackel-headed god Anubis bringing the dead in dressed in white. Why white may be too difficult to know at this distance - a neophyte changing statuses maybe? or maybe it is just artistic (see also below). The colours came from chemical deposits, crushed down and stabilized in gum, so the remain bright today. In the second scene, Reds are iron oxides, blues are copper oxides, green from malachite (copper), yellow from ochre and later arsenic trisulphide, white was chalk mixed with gypsum. Colours were naturalistic, based on observation. White dress was common then as best clothes. Anubis checks the scales, with the heart on one side and the feather of justice on the other. . Then the verdict is written down and the dead taken through to Osiris seated on a throne. His green face represents his role in fertility and rebirth; deities usually were given gold skin. There is a lotus at his feet representing beauty coming out of mud and filth. Across the top are seven pairs of divine figures, representing completion or wholeness. Three stands for plurality, five (less common) represents divine activity, and seven, perfection and completeness. Animals can have symbolic associations, maybe as predators (hawks, crocodiles, cats, dogs, jackels) or beauty (ibis). The most significant bird of all the mythical Bennu bird, is both, part crane and part hawk.

The pictures here come from this book, alas out of print but there are other books available, such as a Penguin, which give an account and translation of the Egyptian funeral documents. I have focused on weighing the heart, but the long papyrus scrolls present pictorial every stage of the journey of the dead. A soul has to go through many mansions and has to know their names, and the names of the custodians and gatekeepers. The scroll gives them the information which they have to memorise. The journey ends at the boat of Ra sailing over the sky from dawn to dusk.

This next picture shows the familiar heart-weighing with Anubis checking the scales and the recorder behind alongside the Devourer. The third version below has a female subject.

Here the dead woman is led by Horus and the Devourer is under the scales taking a particular interest. There is an interesting mix of blue colours, light and dark, in this illumination. A decorative monkey sits on top of the scales

If teaching Ancient Egypt in KS2, weighing the heart/soul in a balance of justice is a useful way into moral and citizenship education. Next, the soul of the dead hovers as a bird over the corpse.

The soul has to journey through many mansions, each with doorkeepers and passwords which are contained in this ceremonial programme.

The dead and his wife sitting, with their souls as birds in front

One lion represents yesterday, the other tomorrow

The dead's senses are opened for future life eternal and future food and luxuries are piled in front

The eyes of the soul are opened for future life

The soul worships Ra on his solar boat, the solar disc appearing above the hawk's head.

Finally, a page of hieroglyphs. Original pictures, for example of water, have come to symbolise a sound so there are hundreds of hieroglyphs to represent consonent-vowel combinations. A simpler alphabet was to come later. The glyphs in this passage below are simplified so often look nothing like the pictures they used to be. Hieroglyphs were the work of specialist priests, far too complicated for common people.