Book review: “The Least of These” by Celia Dale

Here’s how Celia Dale’s 1943 novel The Least of These ends.

I’m going to tell you this because, at the moment, the odds are very much stacked against your ever having a chance to read the book.

And that’s too bad because it is a very good book, and one that is pertinent in our modern moment when innocents are being attacked by flying bombs and missiles in Gaza, Isreal, Ukraine and Russia.

Indeed, The Least of These, which follows a London family coping with the nightly bombing of their city by German aircraft in World War II, is a lost treasure of 20^th-century literature.  By all rights, it should be put back into print by one of those publishers that aim to give great books a second life, such as New York Review Books, Dalkey Archive Press and the Cleveland-based Belt Publishing.

The novel came out in Great Britain in 1943, just two years after the Blitz bombing campaign killed some 40,000 British civilians over an eight-month period and damaged or destroyed two million homes, most of them in London.

A year later, the book was published in the United States, and, as far as I can determine, it has never had a second edition, never been offered as a paperback, never resurrected from its quick status as an out-of-print book.

It’s not available for sale, as far as I can tell, anywhere on the internet.  Indeed, most of Dale’s 13 novels aren’t anywhere to be found or are only available at extremely high prices.

 

In 48 of 124,00 U.S. libraries

If you’d like — and I’d highly recommend it — you can do what I did and get the book through your local library as an interlibrary loan.

WorldCat.org, the international clearinghouse for information about libraries, indicates that, in the United States, there are 48 libraries that hold a copy — that’s 48 out of about 124,000 libraries in the nation.  There are another 11 libraries in the United Kingdom, Europe and elsewhere in the world with a copy.

By contrast, WorldCat shows that you can go to about 1,900 libraries in the U.S. and around the world and find a copy of that trashiest of all trashy novels Valley of the Dolls (1966) by Jacqueline Susann.  In other words, your odds are about 40 to 1 of finding Valley rather than The Least of These in your local library.

No one ever said literature was fair.

 

New life for Dale’s psychological thrillers

Until a month ago, I’d never heard of Celia Dale, an English author known, if at all, for her later psychological thrillers.

She was the child of actors and married a journalist and worked for a time as a secretary to the better-known and more successful, although also pretty much forgotten today, author Rumer Godden.  Dale died on the last day of 2011, just 15 days short of her 100^th birthday.

I learned of Dale from a piece in the London Review of Books looking at the republication of three of her psychological thrillers: A Spring of Love (1960), A Helping Hand (1966) and Sheep’s Clothing (1988). The London-based Daunt books has published these over the last three years at a rate of one a year, starting in January, 2022.

Meanwhile, last year, Valancourt Books, based in Richmond, Va., came out with two of Dale’s novels: A Helping Hand and A Dark Corner (1971).

Maybe Daunt or Valancourt already has a plan to bring The Least of These back into print.  But I’m not all that hopeful. There’s a good market for psychological thrillers.  Publishers, however, are leery about literary novels that never made much of a sales splash in the first place.

 

Biblical shorthand

The piece in the London Review of Books was written by  LBR staff member Ruby Hamilton, and it starts off noting that Dale, in her novels, tended to focus on characters who were physically imperfect and even ugly.

Indeed, Hamilton adds, with a snarky cleverness, that Dale displayed “a fondness for all creatures sallow and bowlegged; a menagerie of bedraggled birds, wet fish and disgusting old walruses.” And she goes on: “The title of her first book, The Least of These (1943), is a biblical shorthand for her most enduring subject: the wretched.”

Then, in a sentence, Hamilton tells what happens at the end of The Least of These.

As I said above, I’m about to do that as well, in part, because you’re not likely to read the book.

But, mainly, I’m going to tell you because, after reading Hamilton’s sentence and learning what happens, I was impelled to go and find a copy of the novel so I could read it.

 

“The neat pert figure of her girlhood”

You must understand that Dale, a first-time novelist at the age of 32, brings to life the members of the family of Mrs. Sharp, a sturdy 51-year-old widow who runs the home at 21 Prince Alfred Road in the fictional North London neighborhood of Scholars Town.

The other strong personality of the household is her daughter Queenie who, in her twenties, has a good job at a clothing factory and is the sort of young vibrant woman who, even after work, “looked as fresh and as full of sex appeal as an illustration in a woman’s magazine.”

As the novel opens, it is late August, 1940, and Queenie is in a hurry to wash and change to go out on a date, and she complains that her mother is monotonously humming an out-of-date tune.

“Well, for goodness’ sake…”

But it was impossible for ill temper to sit long on Mrs. Sharp’s face, so round and merged and good-humored was it.  In a small, rather round-shouldered body, not fat but losing the definition of its portions, could still be seen the neat pert figure of her girlhood; and in her blue eyes, snub nose and large mouth with its long upper lip was still the ghost of the good-humored larky girl who married Mr. Sharp, dead these eight years, just before the last war, in a flurry of flounces, bawdy jokes, suitable bursts of weeping, and tremendous gusto.

 

The cost

Just a week or so later, the Blitz begins, and, during the long nights filled with the sounds of bombers, bomb explosions and defense guns, Mrs. Sharp and her family are unable to sleep, psychologically worn down by fear and discomfort.

Then, Queenie notices during her daily trip on the Underground that, each night, families are going into the Tube stations and are finding it possible to get a good night’s sleep, so deep in the earth away from the bombs.  She mentions this to her mother, and, soon, the family is making that same trip every night.

But there’s a cost.

The home that had been a sacred place for the family members becomes the place they are avoiding.  Camping out among just anyone in the station becomes the norm, and the certainties of the now old way of living are no longer certain.

Queenie begins falling in love with a radical lorry driver who becomes attached to the family.  Her married sister Effie loses her home to a bomb and is now a bitter presence with the family.  Her 15-year-old sister Reenie, no longer contained by the rhythms of home life, hooks up with a bad crowd.

And — the worst measure of what is happening to the family — Mrs. Sharp shrinks as a personality, slowly crushed by the relentless oppression of the bombs and of the changes that must be endured in her life.

 

“A seething sea of stale humanity”

Throughout the story that develops, Dale often steps back to give the reader a picture of what this new life is like.  Such as one moment when Queenie looks out onto the northbound platform:

To within a foot of the platform’s edge men, women and children squatted, lay, crawled, shifted and stood.  Shabby blankets and burst suitcases mingled with bodies and limbs, newspaper and cake and bottles of tea, shoes and gasmasks, babies’ dummies, pillows, fish-and-chips. 

A seething sea of stale humanity, they stretched the whole length of the platform right to the very mouth of the tunnels, as though all those who lived in the darkness and sewers of civilization had crawled at last a little way out of their filth, a little way towards the light and air, a little way towards the safe and comfortable, quiet as yet, still crawling, still half-blind, but trailing after them as though it were a stench the threat of evil coming to be made clean.

The gloomy light illumined them between the twin blacknesses of the tunnels, and the humid wind blew fiercely through an air heavy with vinegar and cake and fusty clothes and urine.

 

“Pore silly kid”

Each day, there are new reports of deaths and destruction from the bombs.  The Sharp home is damaged when a bomb obliterates the one next door. Anyone out during the air raids — and some of the Sharp family members have to be out or choose to be out — is in danger.

The radical alteration of the lives of the family members comes to a head when Reenie is caught up in a black-market scheme of robbing cigarettes from trucks.

In a page-turning finale, a truck targeted for yet another theft turns out to be a police trap, and Reenie is running and hiding from the cops, and it is only through the help of a kind-hearted minor crook that she gets “home” to her family in the Scholars Town Underground station.

And she arrives, and everyone catches their breath, and Queenie looks at her, saying, “Pore silly kid, pore dam’ silly little kid.”

 

Up above

And the family can hear, up above, the guns suddenly blazing.

The sky, cloud-quilted, was lit by the livid flicker of shell-fire, and between the soft clouds and the brilliant stars of death a young man pressed a button within the belly of a metal bird, pressed twice and let two heavy clots of metal slide out and whine away into the darkness.  They fell within a few feet of one another, breaking a fraction more of the crust of London — one on the edge of Marks & Spencers, the other on Scholars Town Tube Station.

There were no survivors.  An emergency bus service served the district until, four months later, the line was clear again.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.18.24