Wars, Words and Deeds by Stella Tillyard / Features / Untitled Books

Tillyard, Stella c. Sussie Ahlburg USE 2011.JPG

“My father’s suicide was devastating not just emotionally, but philosophically. It changed the way I thought about humanity and undermined the Enlightenment beliefs I had grown up with.”

Photograph: ©Sussie Ahlburg

Wars, Words and Deeds by Stella Tillyard

Historian Stella Tillyard, whose previous books include Aristocrats on the lives of the Lennox sisters and A Royal Affair about George III and his siblings, has been described by Simon Schama as "dazzling... a phenomenally gifted writer". Her first novel, Tides of War, has just been published.

How busy the unconscious is, and how predictable in its diligent snuffling about in the hidden, the forbidden and the taboo. Or perhaps its just my unconscious, the bit of it I know, that, like a heat-seeking missile, homes in on what is out of sight or over the horizon, as if it knows the coordinates. There you are: a heat-seeking missile. Just the simile for a writer who grew up in a pacifist household.

It wasn't so much that peace reigned over my childhood universe, as that war was absent. My father was a life-long pacifist, and his beliefs extended to the way we lived at home. No hands or voices were raised, no swords, helmets, fighter planes or guns allowed. My brother was forbidden the usual arsenal of male childhoods, having to make do instead with a brightly painted pop-gun, with a cork on a string that had to be fitted into the wooden nozzle and then expelled with a faint whoosh of manually compressed air: all no more exciting than a bicycle pump. Of course we made swords with sticks and string, but in my imagination their use had more to do with chivalrous duelling than inflicting pain. We also made an Airfix model of the Victory, but that was more about the romance of sail than the Battle of Trafalgar.

It helped, perhaps, that I grew up in the 1960s, when the memory of World War Two was overlaid with Harold Wilson's white heat of the technological revolution, mini-skirts and The Beatles. I can just remember the day when my father came home with a copy of "She Loves You" - I was maybe five years old - but I probably did not know who Vera Lynn was until I was in my twenties. All this did not mean that the war and its legacy were never discussed, but most of the stories were told by my mother, about being a child in the war, the exigencies of rationing and the excitement of the return of sugar or nylons. Perhaps having three girls and only then a boy meant that there was little social pressure in the household to consume or re-enact the war. Certainly, I cannot remember reading any World War Two stories. War was confined to fiction and history: accounts of Agincourt or Naseby in I Was There; 'Jackdaw' packs which reproduced original documents in tasteful coloured folders; Drake and the Armada in People in History. My version of derring-do was to idolize global explorers. The first stories I wrote were fictionalized accounts of Columbus, Vespucci, Magellan.

Looking back it seems that where many British children had war games, the Battle of Britain with its romance of Spitfires and the few, a legacy of imperialism that was then still sprinkled with an allowable stardust and made heroes of Stanley or Livingston, and the German enemy, I had a hole. War just wasn't there. Besides, my great aunt was German and my uncle Indian. Numerous relatives came from other countries. Patriotism was a vulgarity, only once, I think, indulged, when we were allowed to collect Union Jack stickers and badges during the I'm Backing Britain campaign.

When war did creep into my childhood, it was as something reprehensible and terrifying. I remember my father, who seldom spoke of his wartime experiences in New York and London or his years with Friends Relief in France from 1944 to 1946, pouring scorn on an account of the stoicism and heroism of people in the East End. He was there in 1944, he said, a firewatcher on the roof of the London Hospital, from which vantage point he watched people looting their neighbours' houses.

Writing about eighteenth-century women's lives meant that, for the early part of my writing career, war was only ever going to be peripheral. Besides, the women I wrote about were steeped in Voltairian disdain for the business of war. In 1993, however, I decided to write a book, provisionally titled Soldiers, about the sons of Sarah Lennox, the Napiers. Three of the Napiers were soldiers who served with Wellington in the Peninsular War, and one a sea captain. Charles Napier, the oldest of them, was the conqueror of the Sindh, who sent home the famous telegram after his final victory which read, "peccavi" "I have sinned". It wasn't war that then interested me in the Napiers stories, but the change in one generation of family history from the values of the Enlightenment to an engagement, however reluctant, with the imperatives of imperialism.

War was creeping closer, but I moved to Italy that year and never wrote the book. Before I gave it up, however, I had read several memoirs of the Peninsular War, as well as the magnificent History of the War in the Peninsula by William Napier, written in the 1820s in defence of his beloved general, Sir John Moore. Napier was the first real war writer, and took his cue from the many personal accounts of the war in the Peninsula that appeared at the time he wrote. He was meticulous in his research and even-handed (indeed inclined) towards Napoleon. The language he used to describe fighting, borrowed from chivalric romance and Sir Walter Scott, his magnificent rhetoric and his impassioned championing of the common soldier set the tone in England for war writing, in novels as well as non-fiction, right up until World War One, and for much longer in children's literature.

At the same time as thinking about the Napiers I began to read and learn about the experience of women in wartime, especially during the Second World War, in a way that made me come to understand that, terrible though it may have been, for some women war was an opportunity, and even the best thing that ever happened to them. My mother-in-law, an attractive woman from a humble background, trained as a nurse and went out to Cairo in the war. She subsequently married the surgeon she worked under. Once home she sloughed off her own family, never seeing any of them again as far as I know. No longer a publican's daughter, she was now a surgeon's wife. She was driven in a Bentley, educated her five children in private schools and became a magistrate. There are many similar stories. War subverted the natural order and allowed women to enjoy and reinvent themselves. Olivia Manning's war sagas, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy are packed with similar characters. The rackety and fluid nature of wartime London society, its spivs and fly-by-night nightclubs, its defiant concerts in the park and surprisingly well-stocked restaurants: the whole fun of it is beautifully conjured up by Elizabeth Bowen in The Death of the Heart. Recently Sarah Waters explored this theme in The Night Watch, in which women are not only doing men's jobs in wartime London, but also freed to have the kinds of love affairs that would not have happened in peace.

I still might never have written about war had my father not killed himself in 2003. His suicide was devastating not just emotionally, but philosophically. It changed the way I thought about humanity and undermined the Enlightenment beliefs I had grown up with. If a man who was a life-long pacifist could commit such violence against himself, then all of us have a capacity for violence, an urge to death. My thoughts about war now began to gather into a snowball that is still rolling today. Instead of seeing war in political terms I now framed it as a psychological event, even the "natural" state of things. Peace and quietude are the aberrations, not war. Fascism and prejudice threaten us continually because their seeds are within us all. We can never be complacent. Ten years before this I read David Grossman's brilliant See Under: Love. What Grossman articulates in that novel is what I too believe, that there is the potential for what we lazily call evil in all of us, and the potential too for its negation.

My ideas about war are evolving still. I recently read Simon Baron-Cohen's Zero Degrees of Empathy, which argues that what we call evil should better be termed a lack of empathy. Though some of us may be born with an inability to empathize, most of us learn, or fail to learn, empathy in early childhood, and if that's the case, we can learn and unlearn evil. This idea has radical implications for politics, education, justice and religion. Using observation and neuroscience, Baron-Cohen is putting within a framework of experiment and proof ideas that artists have already explored. War, in this formulation, is not a permanent state; it is what human beings do to one another when they have lost the capacity for empathy. It is this thesis that was put forward in Michael Haneke's 2009 film, The White Ribbon, and it is one that now interests me greatly.

........................................................................................................................................................... Tides of War by Stella Tillyard is published by Chatto & Windus

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Tuesday, 24 May, 2011