Tag: Mollie Panter-Downes

‘As the Fruitful Vine’ by Mollie Panter-Downes

Mollie Panter-Downes was a reporter and correspondent for The New Yorker throughout the Second World War, and published 21 stories in the magazine during the war, alongside a fortnightly ‘Letter from London’ and 18 long articles about life in England during the war. All in all she wrote 852 articles for The New Yorker, mostly from a secluded writing hut in the gardens of her country home where she lived with her husband and children.

‘As the Fruitful Vine’ tells the story of Lucy Grant, who discovers she is pregnant soon after marrying her husband and seeing him leave for the Far East with the Royal Navy. Her family fuss around her and encourage her to move away from London to live with relations in the country, as the great fear of a German invasion grows and grows. As in all the stories the point is that lives are continuing to be lived, even while the sounds of bombs from the other side of the Channel grow louder and louder.

But Lucy is less concerned about this than about her competitive older sister Valerie, though she comes to realise that Valerie has wanted to fall pregnant for years but has been unable to. This is the most important achievement in Lucy’s life, this ability to do something her sister cannot. Panter-Downes paints ordinary lives such as these continuing, with all their petty grievances and empty victories, even while the backdrop grows steadily more grim. It’s worth reading the whole volume as an alternative history of WWII, told through lace-curtained windows and enduring, ordinary lives.

First published in The New Yorker, 31 August 1940. Collected in Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, Persephone Books, 1999

‘It’s the Reaction’ by Mollie-Panter Downes

Back in the days of WW2, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote stories featuring ordinary British people – mostly women – trying to cope with the day-to-day realities of life on the Home Front. Panter-Downes’ style – understated, perceptive and minutely observed – makes for a subtly powerful effect. She is particularly adept at capturing the range of emotions experienced by her characters, from loneliness and longing to fear and self-pity. In this, my favourite of her stories, a lonely young woman is buoyed by the camaraderie of war when she finally gets to know her neighbours as they shelter together during the Blitz. However, once the sequence of air raids is over, life in Miss Birch’s apartment block reverts to normal – and when she tries to rekindle her new friendships, Miss Birch soon discovers the fickle nature of relationships, even in times of hardship and war.

First published in The New Yorker, 1943, available to subscribers here. Collected in Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, Persephone 1999