Climbing Out of the Pit

I just finished re-reading an Ellis Peters novel, Fallen Into The Pit. The novel is set in post-World War II England and concerns three murders which take place in the normally sleepy village of Comerford. The solution to the mystery is mostly worked out by the police sergeant's son Dominic Felse, who, frankly, is unconvincingly omniscient for a 13-year-old boy. What I found more compelling than the mystery itself was the way in which Peters (actually Edith Pargeter was her real name) deals with the tough adjustment that World War II vets must have experienced coming home. A few passages to this effect:

“The war ended, and the young men came home, and tried indignantly to fit themselves into old clothes and old habits which proved, on examination, to be both a little threadbare, and on trial to be both cripplingly small for bodies and minds mysteriously grown in absence.” (p. 3)

“…some came haunted by the things their own hand had done and their own bodies endured, growths from which no manner of amputation could divide them, ghosts for which Comerford had no room. They had been where even those nearest to them could not follow, and daily they withdrew there again from the compression and safety of lathe and field and farm, until the adjustment to sanity took place painfully at last, and the compression ceased to bound them, and was felt to be wider than the mad waste in the memory.” (p. 6)

“In time of war countries fall over themselves to make commandos and guerrillas of their young men, self-reliant killers who can slit a throat and live off a hostile countryside as simply as they once caught the morning bus to their various blameless jobs. But to reconvert these formidable creations afterwards is quite another matter. Nobody ever gave much thought to that, nobody ever does until their recoil hits the very system which made and made use of them. Men who have learned to kill as a solution for otherwise insoluble problems in wartime may the more readily revert to it as a solution for other problems as desperate in other conditions. And logically … who has the least right to judge them for it? Surely the system which taught them the art and ethics of murder to save itself has no right at all. The obvious answer would be: ‘Come on in the dock with us!’”(p. 195)

The most tortured of all of Comerford's returning veterans is Chad Wedderburn, whose service with the Yugoslavian rebels is the stuff of village legend. Chad, who is Dominic's school teacher, is very much in love with Io Hart, the daughter of Comerford's widowed tavern owner; Io “could manage the whole diverse flow of customers year in and year out without disarranging a curl of her warm brown hair, and make her father, into the bargain, do whatever she wanted. When she knew what she wanted, which wasn't always.” (p. 48)

But Chad thinks himself too flawed ever to marry Io; “He had suffered, whether by his own fault or the mismanagement of others, injuries to his nature which unfitted him for loving or being loved by an innocent like Io…” (p. 277) Dominic, (too) wise beyond his years, senses Chad’s self-loathing and wonders, “Was it really possible to feel yourself maimed for life, merely because you had been pushed into killing other people in a war in order to stay alive yourself? In a war, when most people thought themselves absolved for everything? But the fellow who goes the opposite way from everyone else isn't necessarily wrong.” (p. 258)

A moment of emergency forces Chad to ask Io for her counsel, and this clears the mist between them. “She did not stop to argue, but did exactly as he asked her; she had been ready to do exactly as he asked her for quite a long time, and the real trouble had been that he had never asked her.” (p. 285) At the end of the novel, the two make a quiet trip to the registry office to become man and wife. We are left to reflect that, in spite of Chad's past and self doubts, really because of them, he was in the end most fitted for loving and being loved by an innocent like Io.

I have often been drawn to fictional characters like Chad Wedderburn, men who are admired by everybody but themselves. Other examples in this motif are the whisky priest in Power and the Glory, the savage in Brave New World, and, above all, Prince Hamlet. If Peters had been a Graham Greene or an Aldous Huxley or a Will Shakespeare, she would have given Chad Wedderburn no relief short of the grave. But instead she took compassion on Chad—and, I suppose, on her readers—and showed instead how the World War II vets actually dealt with their trauma. Having seen enough of hatred, they found wives to love; having seen enough of death, they brought children into the world.