Chapter 6, a summary: Sebastian Barry’s ‘A Long, Long Way’

Back, then, to Dublin.

Summary— Chapter Six

Willie arrives at his father’s Dublin Castle quarters filthy after ten days in the line and the long journey back from Belgium. When he knocks on the front door his sister Maud does not recognise him. She and Annie are delighted to find her brother has returned home, but Willie insists that no-one touches him while he is lousy. The girls warm water to give Willie a bath.

Willie takes in the surroundings of his familiar home. He thinks of his father and finds himself unsettled by thoughts of the 1913 Bloody Sunday riot and his father’s role in the clashes. He ruefully reflects that, as a Dempsey builder during the lock-out, he was a scab. Once home, he feels traitorous to even think of these things.

Dolly and Willie’s father return home. Dolly embraces Willie. The two men regard each other affectionately. Willie thanks his father for writing to him; his father, calling his son a hero, says it was his honour. Willie’s clothes are bagged for cleaning and, in front of Dolly, Willie is washed clean in the tub by his father. Once dried, he puts on his father’s long johns and his old working suit. His father then hugs and holds Willie; though nineteen years old, Willie finds this comforting.

Willie’s leave passes quickly. He sees Gretta and learns her father will leave the army before being mobilised. He spends the last night of his leave with his father. He loves the older man deeply despite knowing his flaws. The two sit before the wood fire; Willie notices the marks his father made to measure his height. The two talk of his father’s impending retirement to Kiltegan after forty years in the force. His father asks about the war. Willie confirms that it is ‘rough’ in Belgium. His father confesses that he constantly thinks about and prays for his son.

Willie walks Gretta to her work as a seamstress on his last day in Dublin. He begs her to write more and she admits her failure to do so. He asks for their relationship to be formalized in an engagement but Gretta is firm. As much as she says she wants to be his wife, Gretta tells Willie they must wait to marry until after the war. Willie is not allowed near Gretta’s workplace so the pair must part. Willie glumly tells Gretta he loves her; she replies in kind and, despite himself, this cheers him up somewhat.

Later, before entering the Devoy barracks, Willie meets Gretta again. They kiss under the trees, lay down together by the canal side, and make love.

Questions

A chapter dedicated to Willie’s Dublin leave and the two most important people in Willie’s life at this point in the novel, his father and Gretta. It is revealing perhaps that the bulk of the chapter is dedicated to time that Willie spends at home, mostly with his father. It is only the end of the chapter, depicting Willie’s last day on leave, that features Gretta.

“The sentry at the castle gate gave him a right look as he walked in, like the ghost of war” (p. 70). Dublin Castle is an important location in the story, as the site of the Dunne family’s quarters, but it is also an important location in terms of Irish history and more specifically the 1916 rebellion. Learn about the history of Dublin Castle, especially in the years described in the novel. Does it alter or confirm your perception of the character of James Dunne (or indeed his family) to know its importance in the British administration of Ireland?

Dirt, infestation and cleanliness are important ideas in the opening scenes. What might these conditions represent for the different characters in the story?

“So James Patrick, a man of six foot six, stood his son William, a man of five foot six, into the steaming zinc bath, as indeed Willie’s mother had done a thousand times while Willie was a boy” (p.74). I found this a complex scene, full of pathos. Recalling the Dunne Family history, and the relationship between father and son, our sympathy is called on here at the same time as more complex and ambivalent feelings are evoked. Where in this sentence can we find the narrator provoking a sense of sympathy for the characters in the scene—and what detail do we find here that complicates this emotional response?

James Dunne is playfully referred to as “King of the Nits” (p.71) by Willie, and the narrator ironically observes later as he lathes his son’s body, “the lice must have been flying from Willie Dunne just like those poor men in Sackville Street from the batons” (p.74). The use of the metaphor here is revealing. In what ways might James Dunne be ‘King of the Nits’? Why are the drowning lice compared to assaulted workers? Don’t settle for one reading alone here. Try and tease out the ways in which these statements reveal or complicate character.

Read again the embrace between father and son described on pages 74 to 75. What exactly is so moving about this scene? In what ways do notions of masculinity and masculine reserve provide a key to understanding this scene?

‘We have to wait, Willie’ (p.77). What does this pragmatic judgement reveal about Gretta’s character, and her understanding of the situation she and Willie find themselves in? How is Gretta’s character developed here?

‘And they lay down together like ghosts, like floating souls, and she drew up her skirt in the greeny dark’ (p.78). What is being narrated in this scene? Is this the voice of the narrator alone, or does Willie’s response to Gretta indirectly intrude in this description? In what way does the description of Gretta drawing up her skirt complicate the description of “floating souls”?

Some thoughts

I must say I’m finding it an odd thing reading Barry. [Mysteriously deepens voice.] I’m not generally one for tears or getting choked up when reading books. I imagine it a bit like that old cartoon in The Beano where a load of little people live inside the skull of a bigger person, manipulating levers, shouting commands and getting into fights with each other as they control him or her (yes, I’m aware of Inside Out. I’m old, alright). So, I have this fantasy that sometimes when I’m reading, there’s this little guy wearing a ‘Critical Response’ t-shirt in my skull and he very often goes ahead and coshes the tiny chap wearing the ‘Emotional Response’ t-shirt in my head, and thus subdues him. And perhaps because of this I tend to like authors with a precision or violence about them: JG Ballard, HG Wells, Charles Dickens. Yet— and here’s the thing—when I’m watching movies, the roles tend to be reversed: Mr. Emotional Response gets to practice his choke-holds on Mr. Critical Response. So, on a Saturday morning with my five year old son, you may find me sniveling whilst watching Toy Story 3 or The Iron Giant.

Yet reading ‘A Long, Long Way’, I find myself so affected at times by events in the story I wonder whether the two hooligans in my head have forgotten that I’m reading a book. My emotional response makes me suspect myself. Is the source of the response I’m feeling actually there in the text, or is it largely within me? Am I, as a fairly repressed British man, projecting onto the text too much? Who knows.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I cried during the bathing scene, and I know there are good reasons for me doing so. I washed my own five year old son the night before reading the scene: it’s an everyday, intimate and wonderful thing for a father, to take care of his young son like this. I know that it can’t last: that my son will grow up, will take care of himself one day. So, in knowing your own hopes for your child’s future happiness and independence, there’s a pathos to this kind of physical care, because eventually it will needfully be rejected to some degree.

To bring this back to the experience of reading, I am therefore aware that I am approaching this particular text as a forty three year old father does (interestingly, Barry is himself a father who has spoken movingly about his relationship with his gay son). I am quite distant now from the experience of young love, and that may explain in part my lack of engagement in Willie’s relationship with Gretta. Which is to say that I am probably bringing my own limitations as a reader to my understanding of the text in a way that may be quite different to your understanding of the characters in the book. I’m assuming, after all, that you are probably a fairly young reader, an A-level student in all likelihood, and that this perhaps may mean that you read this novel with a mind to your experience of being parented (or not being adequately parented), or being a young lover, or whatever it is that you as a young person long for or find frustrating.

You will have your own insights and, yes, limitations too in reading novels. It’s good to be aware of these. You should engage in a little self analysis whilst doing your literary analysis. I’ve always found a piece of advice by the theorist Fredric Jameson useful when thinking about this. In his essay, ‘Beyond the Cave’ he tells us to “measure the whole extent of our boredom” when encountering texts, to judge our own alienation from different ideas, characters, narratives and cultures. Because if you have a problem with the text you’re reading, it may sometimes be a symptom rather of how you see the world. One of the joys of reading should be that it challenges you to broaden that understanding of the world around you. You know, I hated Charles Dickens when I was eighteen.

It’s dangerous to judge any novel by the simple mirror of your experience. It’s also an undoubted joy to find your experiences reflected in a book. It’s proved that way to me when reading this chapter at least.

Chapter 5, a summary: Sebastian Barry’s ‘A Long, Long Way’

I’m hoping to take a breather soon enough so that we can reflect on some aspects of the novel. Certainly I’d like to write something about Barry’s narration: its use of dialect, its lyricism, and thinking more broadly about omniscient and free indirect narration. The character of Willie, of course. Historical context, too, which still I’m somewhat shaky on, as the previous post admitted, and am currently trying to rectify by reading Diarmaid Ferriter’s fascinating history, ‘A Nation, and Not a Rabble’. All kinds of things suggest themselves. Onwards we must go, however, if we’re to get this book completed by exam-time.

Summary— Chapter Five

Willie’s battalion is on rotation from the front and, billeted in the French city of Amiens, he is finally given a few days of free time behind the lines.

Willie and Pete O’Hara decide to hit the town and are guided to a well-liked estaminet for private soldiers. They quickly get very drunk there. Willie’s head spins as he drinks away memories of Captain Pasley and Gretta.

He and O’Hara dance with two women who lead them both down into a basement. Willie, extremely drunk, finds that he is being propositioned by a prostitute. He is at first abashed by the woman’s approach: O’Hara, less naïve than his friend, quickly begins to have sex with the woman he entered with. Willie gives himself to the woman with wonder and lust, and thus loses his virginity. He falls asleep and, when he awakens with a headache, O’Hara tells him it is time to go. As they leave Willie notices a rash on the thigh of the woman O’Hara has slept with. They make their way back to their billet through the city night.

Willie, still working in the support trenches, writes a long letter to Gretta. He tells her he is now in a quiet sector of the front, though the weather is now icy. Though this is a longer letter, it has the same structure as his previous missive: Willie writes in careful detail telling of his life at the front, and ends with an outpouring of passionate declarations of love for her. He continues to have trouble ending his letters satisfactorily. As he writes, a wish to confess about his night with the prostitute weighs on him.

O’Hara, it transpires, contracts a sexually transmitted disease from his tryst with the prostitute. It seems that Willie, luckily, does not.

Willie’s company finds itself rotated back into the front line again. It remains a quiet sector. One day he is drinking tea in a corner of the trench when a soldier new to the front, a Private Byrne, carelessly lifts his head above the line of the parapet. He is shot in the eye: blood gruesomely jets from the wound. Willie wants to ignore the incident at first but then attends to the young man.

He is struck by his own uselessness in the face of this violence. The young man is tormented for hours as they wait for the medical corps to arrive. Willie responds to the incident with cold despair; he has become hardened by the war. He reflects that the youth would be better shot dead on the spot. His own anguish, however, tells of the compassion struggling to be expressed within him.

A few weeks later, rotated back behind the lines again, Christy Moran has good news for Willie. He has been given home leave for a few days. Delighted for the younger man, he pleads with Willie to stay alive until then.

Questions

A short but interesting chapter. Willie’s willie at last sees action and, unscathed, lives to see another day. Then a gruesome moment in the line conveys just how unexpected death could be in the trenches.

“But he liked the bolts to be loosened on his concerns like any other soldier” (p. 60). Research the world of the First World War estaminet. In what ways is the estaminet somewhere where soldiers could escape the war and the norms and disciplines of respectable society? In what ways does the estaminet attempt to reproduce something approximating a conventional or ‘normal’ life for the soldiers?

“Maybe there was a poison in this tepid water” (p. 61). What does this line suggest about the effect of the war upon Willie? In this chapter we find more examples of the way in which the war is beginning to take a psychological toll on Willie. From the moment when Willie’s hands begin to shake at the thought of the deaths of the men on the supply line (p.30), there are signs of Willie’s developing neurotic response to the war. Trace a timeline of these—noting where he displays significant signs of, for example, anxiety, depression, paranoia, anger and dissociation in response to events around him.

As the stupefied Willie gazes at the prostitute who offers herself to him, his response to her is revealing: “Thick, thick black hair like a smudge of night she had, and clear, clever eyes the colour of dark blue feathers in a magpie. My God, he thought, she was like a Goddess. She seemed to Willie more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen. ‘Money for fuck?’ she said.” (p.62). What does Willie’s metaphorical language about the woman before him reveal about his feelings and attitudes towards women (A-level students may find their previous study in Love Through the Ages useful here, in particular ideas informing the Courtly Love Convention)? In what ways is there a gap between Willie’s understanding of the transaction taking place in this scene and that of the young woman? Barry uses a technique known as intentional anticlimax at the end of this passage. What effect does this have on the reader?

“Why you call Willie?” said the beautiful girl, giggling” (p. 63). It’s a good question. Can you think why Sebastian Barry named his hero Willie?

There is an obvious hypocrisy in Willie and O’Hara’s actions, one that catches up with O’Hara when he catches an sexually transmitted disease and needs to see a nurse. “Oh, yeh, that’s great Willie, I’ll go and bring this to the nurses. Nice Irish girls. They’ll only be thrilled” (p.66). Similarly Willie, in writing his long letter, “every inch of it thought should he say something about the fallen girl of Amiens?” (p.65). What does this sexual encounter say about the lives of men at the front and how they relate this life to that at home? How do you judge Willie and O’Hara’s time at the estaminet?

“There needed to be a new sort of line officer like a veterinarian, he thought, because there was too much of this screaming and suffering. There was too much of it, too much of it, and it wasn’t love or anything close to it to leave a young fella screaming on the ground for three hours. It wasn’t love and it wasn’t even like being at a war and it wasn’t fucking right” (p.68). Follow the logic of Willie’s argument here. Is this a reasoned or an emotional argument? Indeed, is it an argument at all? Barry’s use of structure and language in this passage is revealing. What does it tell us about Willie’s state of mind?

I thought this an interesting chapter that developed Willie’s character. I’m warming to Willie a little, vacant though he often seems. Willie’s loss of virginity is another episode in his gradual disenchantment at the front, the loss of his innocence. The hardening of his attitude to the injured youth at the end of the chapter seemed a logical extension of this growth within him of “cold despair” (p.68). I felt the juxtaposition of the two encounters was clever by Barry—and I’m sure that the latter event, so revealing of Willie’s anguish, moved me in part because of the author’s clever use of structure.

How to arrange a bunch of flowers

Jon Stallworthy, poet and academic, who died in 2014. Read his obituary here.

 

Before we get started with reading ‘A Long, Long Way’, let me write one last post that may be useful to those who are trying to get to grips with Stallworthy’s anthology. A couple of years ago a student wrote to me, asking:

What could [you] say about the arrangement of the WW1 poems in the Oxford Book of War Poetry? I’ve read the introduction where Stallworthy said they were mainly chronological. I was wondering if you knew which were the exceptions and why? My teacher asked [me] to consider the arrangement in terms [of] the exam question, where I think I’m right in saying that one of the questions tends to ask about how a poem fits into the whole selection? Aside from being chronological are they arranged in any particular themes?

This question and the answer I gave to it has languished in a relatively unread section of the site. I think that as we shift focus for a while towards Barry’s novel it is good nonetheless to remind ourselves of Stallworthy’s impressive anthology and some ways we might approach how he organises the poems within.

As outlined by the AQA, there are 71 collected ‘poems’ in the First World War section of The Oxford Book of War Poetry, from Thomas Hardy’s ‘Men Who March Away’ (poem 99) to Ted Hughes’ ‘Six Young Men’ (poem 169). That’s a big selection of poems, covering many aspects of the experience of the First World War. We might well wonder: are they arranged in any particular themes?

The answer I have to this question is ‘I don’t know’ and, as Professor Stallworthy died in 2014, I am unlikely to directly divine the intentions of the anthologiser. But let me briefly talk you through a rudimentary plan of attack I have used in teaching how to revise the anthology over the years.

Stallworthy’s Anthology is broadly chronologically organised, but we can trace an underlying logic within this order.

The first poems are early responses to the outbreak of war- Hardy, Brooke, Asquith, Grenfell and so on. Hardy’s ‘Men Who March Away’ was published during the first week of the war- as early a response as you can get, really, from a great and elderly Victorian poet. Grenfell and Brooke’s poems are both romantic responses of young men to the war, and display attitudes to heroism and conflict that gradually become unavailable to the great war poets. McRae’s poem was written in May 1915 and so fits into the chronological pattern; but it also seems to evidence an early and relatively untroubled moral certainty about the conduct of the war.

Then we have the ‘transitional figure’ of Charles Sorely: a poet well versed in the classical poetic tradition who nonetheless seems a bridge between the naiveté of the earlier First World War poets and the later war experience, in which the deaths of millions become a reality.

There follow next two poems with very different moral and political positions regarding the British Professional soldier at the start of the First World War: the first a provocative contemporary musing by A.E. Housman, the second a relatively undistinguished but unashamedly political 1935 poem, in furious argument with the first.

A far more interesting and varied cluster of non-British poets follow, giving perspectives philosophical, aesthetic and political. Sandberg, Frost and Steven’s work evidence the objective and philosophical distance these writers have. Two striking French responses follow these, absurdist and surreal and stimulating; followed by five tumultuous poems by the great Irish poet, WB Yeats (Yeats will surely figure as a crucial poet in our upcoming reading of Barry’s ‘A Long, Long Way’).

The anthology then focuses on a cluster of collected works by the acknowledged greats of First World War poetry: Sassoon, Thomas, Gurney, Rosenberg and Owen. This is the core of the selection, works of those soldier-poets who for better or worse have defined our understanding of the conflict ever since. Rosenberg and Gurney give us poems from a war experienced by preternaturally artistically talented Privates. Owen and Sassoon’s poems reproduce with skill the peculiar experience of sensitive, intelligent, well-read, traumatised Officers. Thomas’ poems bring an elegiac and mature contemplation of the inherent experience of loss that war inevitably involves.

The two great poet-memoirists of the war follow, Graves and Blunden; it is advisable to read these sections in tandem with their great works, ‘Goodbye to All That’ and ‘Undertones of War’.

Then we have what might best be called a rag-bag of notables writing about the conflict, from Aldington to Binyon. There are straightforward but satisfying lyric poems like ‘Winter Warfare’ and ‘Battlefield’, but formal innovation too- the ever popular (with my students at least) E.E. Cummings, and the ever unpopular David Jones, whose outstanding ‘In Parenthesis’ is read in extract form (and what, after all, do students know- that’s right, I mean you, dear reader) .

After this, Ezra Pound (Ezra’s a he, by the way) and TS Eliot stand together as the great Modernist shock troops of the large ‘looking back on the war’ section. Following them are two embittered (and great) late-Victorian poet-provocateurs, Rudyard Kipling and GK Chesterton. These two writers concisely give us the most precise evisceration of the politics of a generation that is found in the anthology. Then follow two female poets, M.W. Cannan and Elizabeth Daryush, thrown in almost as an afterthought (this near complete absence of female voices about the war is the gravest weakness of Stallworthy’s anthology- I have been waiting years for a bright young feminist to get their teeth into this peculiar matter). Finally there are three poems about the first world war written late Twentieth century poets who weren’t alive at the time of the conflict. These strike me as very much photographic ruminations on the First World War, and none of the poems are anywhere near to being the poet’s best; but they each evoke a particular mood of looking backwards from what has now become a grave and forbidding distance.

These compartments are my inventions, but they’ve always worked in the teaching. I hope they will help you get a handle on the anthology. I wonder, do any students or teachers want to add their thoughts on how they approach the anthology?

(Oh, and first prize for the student who can make sense of my title for this article.)

 

And now for something completely different.

 

As my last post noted, the AQA English Literature A exam has changed. The  poems from Jon Stallworthy’s Oxford Book of War Poetry are still examined, of course, and I hope my notes for those poems will continue to be useful for you in revising for their exams. The links to wider reading that you find here will continue to be relevant to your studies. But in the new exam, these poems will be read in tandem with another text– a novel or drama. Clearly, then, for this site to remain fully relevant to the exam, we need to engage with the new element, a post-2000 novel or drama, and find the ways in which Stallworthy’s selection of poems might be found to be relevant to such a text.

Here, then, is the beginning of what I hope will be a study project that allows us to explore some of the key texts in the 2016 AQA English Literature A-level examination.

Over the next few months my students and I will be reading and writing about Sebastian Barry’s novel, ‘A Long Long Way’. This is the text we have chosen at Southfields Academy to study in combination with the Oxford Book of War Poetry.

For revision purposes I will post onto the blog at the end of every chapter a brief summary of the events that occurred in that chapter, and pose some of the questions that I feel that the chapter opens up for the reader. My students will respond, giving their own commentaries on the text, and supplying resources to the project for their peers to read and consider.

You can respond to those commentaries, answer those questions and proffer an opinion on points of interest on the Barry’s novel as we go. Join us as we read, and help us to broaden our understanding of this newly examined text.

Moreover, because ‘A Long Long Way’ is examined by comparing what we find in the novel to what we find in the poems in Stallworthy’s anthology, we will consider exactly what poems from that anthology engage with or influence the text.

As we go, I will also offer links, resources and analysis for you to explore crucial parts of the text. What kind of novel is ‘A Long Long Way’? What social or historical contexts inform the text? What have been other readers’ responses to the text? These questions and others will allow us to take a critical stance on the text, and allow us to participate in ongoing literary debates.

Do read along with us.

Voices of the First World War

A recruitment poster for the Football Battalion (Wikipedia)

 

One of the great fortunes of studying the First World War at A-level right now is the wealth of interesting resources available for you to access. It wasn’t always this way, of course; in the dark days when I first began writing this blog you could barely get an amusing gif of Fieldmarshal Haig tripping on a duckboard.

Not exactly true, but you get my gist. The centenary has been a good time for students of First World War history and literature to learn about life from 1914 to 1918.

On Monday I was lucky enough to catch an episode of Dan Snow’s ongoing Radio 4 series about the conflict, ‘Voices of The First World War’. This series is a goldmine for those of you fretting about your lack of historical knowledge about the war. In the UK you can listen online or download the series as MP3 files (outside the UK, I’m not so sure).

Each episode in the series is under fifteen minutes long, and focuses on a single aspect of the war, from First Impressions on the outbreak of the war to most recently (and fortuitously given my last post!) the emergence of new technologies like Tanks.

The episode that caught my attention was entitled ‘Sheffield and the Somme’. It is, admittedly, an upsetting program. In it, Sheffield locals give their own firsthand accounts of the effect upon the community of the massacre of the Sheffield City Battalion, or as they were then known, the ‘Sheffield Pals’.

The Pals Brigades are one of the more sobering facts of the First World War. They were a successful recruiting method whose formation had unseen and tragic consequences in battle. Men from a particular locale or men who found themselves in a particular type of employment could enlist with friends and colleagues with the prospect of staying with them for the rest of the war. In 1914-15, this break with army tradition was felt necessary to encourage mass conscription. The New Army formed- also known as Kitchener’s Army, named after the Secretary of State for War- was an army of millions, ready for active duty by the end of 1915. In fact, many of the Pals brigades first saw action in the battle of the Somme in July 1916.

The unforeseen consequence of this method of recruiting was that when a battalion faced a massacre, as the Sheffield Pals did on the first day of the Somme, the area from which the Pals brigade was taken took disproportionate and catastrophic numbers of casualties. Between July 1st and July 3rd, 1916, the Sheffield Pals- which had recruited somewhere between 900 to a thousand men in two days in August 1914- sustained 495 men dead, injured or missing. The terrible consequences of such massed death was keenly felt in the districts from which the men came. Whole cities felt the devastation of loss.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course, when we judge the formation of such brigades, and certainly they played their part in the creation of a large and well-trained conscript army. Yet  it is too little noted that foresight is a wonderful thing too; would that it had been more in evidence in British plans for the conflict. Sheffield writer John Harris notes of the Sheffield Pals, they were “Two years in the making; ten minutes in the destroying. That was our history”.

‘Sheffield and the Somme’ captures this shocking moment in British history through the dignified testimony of those who suffered. It is well worth your attention, as is the rest of the series. Should you wish to read on- particularly, perhaps, if you are reading Whelan’s ‘The Accrington Pals’- there is also an excellent website, Pals.org.uk, which details the formation of several of these brigades.

What? Privates? Where?- The Structure of a British Infantry Battalion in the First World War

I’m currently reading Frederic Manning’s ‘Her Privates We’ in an excellent edition published by Serpent’s Tail Classics. It’s a major First World War text, much regarded by great modernist writers such as Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound– and I must say that, as I read, I haven’t enjoyed any piece of writing from the period quite so much since I read ‘Goodbye To All That’, long ago. I’m sure I’ll return to it on the blog at some point in the future (together with some posts about Jules Verne’s ‘The Begum’s Fortune’ and Jessie Pope), should I have the chance.

Anyway, I found that, as I read ‘Her Privates We’, I was having trouble with something that I think you, as A-level students, will also have trouble with as you start your course. If you’re studying ‘Journey’s End’, ‘Goodbye to All That’ or any other First World War text, it helps to know the hierarchy of the British Army; to know your Private from your Captain from your Major. I found a simple explanation on the structure of an infantry battalion on the always informative website ‘The Long, Long Trail’, here. Check it out if you want to know your Batman from your Band Sergeant.

Changes to ‘Move Him Into the Sun’

Hello again!

It’s been quite a while since I last posted. Sorry about that. Teaching and having two children under the age of four have proved enjoyable if busy diversions from the world of blogging. In the meantime, it seems, the busy elves at WordPress (the company which hosts this blog) have been at work in my absence, and the links to around 28 posts have gone up in smoke.

So, here I am, back to show you how to access all the posts that have been hidden, and to introduce a new widget which it seems utterly bizarre that I haven’t installed before.

Previously, if you wanted to see all my posts, you merely looked at the sidebar under ‘Recent Posts’ and there they were. Looking there more recently however you would only have found my last 50 posts. WordPress have now placed a maximum number of posts under that category.

Well, to cut a long story short, I’ve decided to create a new archive page for all my postings. This way you can access all the study notes for poems that I’ve written, and the blog posts for wider reading too. Look to the top of the page and you’ll see a tab reading, ‘All Posts and Poems! – Archive’. Click on this and it’ll take you to a list of all my archived posts.

To make life simpler for you when searching for poems and posts I’ve also decided to install a search button. Enter a word into the box on the right-hand side and I am reliably informed that some form of electronic gnome will say ‘shazam’, throw some digital chicken bones into the air, and my best posts will appear before you.

I can’t believe I haven’t installed it before, frankly. Someone surely should apply this idea to the whole internet. They’d make pots of money! Who’s in?

How to Use This Site to Revise

“Look, I’m telling you, I started at ‘A’ and went right through to ‘Z’, and I’m stuffed if I can find it.”

January nears: and that means A-level exams. It struck me that I haven’t posted on the ways that this site might help you prepare for your exams.

One of the nice features of a blog like this is the category cloud that you’ll find in the column to the left of this posting (just scroll down). In the exam– especially those of you sitting the AQA AS exam– you will be asked questions or given texts that ask you to link that text (be it a poem, play, fiction or non-fiction) to your wider reading. So it’s always a good plan to have an idea of those poems that have common themes. The category cloud (and the Themes, Issues and Events box beneath) allows you to find poems and posts that I have linked by category.

For example: say you want to link war poems which prominently feature nature and natural imagery. Go down to the Category Cloud and you’ll find a category called ‘Pastoral/Natural Themes’. Click on this and it will bring up a number of posts and poems that feature this theme: ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, ‘War Horse-Review’, ‘On Receiving News of the War’, ‘To His Love’, ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’, ‘Rain’… and so on. You can use this list to analyse just what kind of natural imagery is found in the poems: the similarities and difference found in Thomas’ ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’, say, and Hardy’s ‘In Time of the Breaking of Nations’. The list isn’t exhaustive, of course (I’ve only got as far as Rosenberg so far) and you shouldn’t rely on my categorisation alone! But this may be useful for you to make simple mind maps about the relationships between poems.

You can also do the same when reading individual poems: zip up to the top and you’ll find the categories each poem is failed under just underneath the post title. Click on a category and it’ll bring up all the other posts linked to that theme (be careful when you choose a large category like Pastoral / Natural Themes– there may be more than one page).

If you’re feeling a little shaky about historical context, check out the category, ‘History’: it’ll bring up a number of posts, some of which may be useful to you. There are, among other subjects, posts that link to articles about about life in the infantry, zeppellins, popular culture and so on. Even if you can’t find a post about your concern, there may be links to other sites that will help you. Give it a try.

Finally, if you’re puzzling about a reading or a revision issue, you might click on ‘Ask Mr. Griffiths’ at the top of the blog. I can’t guarantee that I can help you– and I’m afraid I’ll never do your work for you– but if I can point you in the right direction, I will.

Good luck!

Starter for 12: Beginning at the Beginning.

Crowds cheer and wave outside Buckingham Palace on the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

If you’re starting at Southfields Community College as a Year 12 Student on Tuesday, congratulations: you’ve read your Starter Pack! Welcome to our AS literature course. You’ve been directed here because this is the blog that we use to help prepare you for your exam at the end of the year. We’re excited to have you on board.

Before you move on to the task set for you here, why not roam around the website. Start with our Welcome page at the bottom of the ‘Recent Posts’ column you’ll find on the right– it briefly explains the subject of the course and the purpose of this blog. Check out some of the articles on Move Him Into the Sun relating to the First World War, and note how last year’s students used them to engage in discussion (‘Poppy Wars’ gives you a flavour of the kind of interesting things we find ourselves debating). Click on words and phrases in the ‘Category Cloud’ and ‘Themes, Issues and Events’ boxes to introduce yourself to some of the recurrent themes in our study of First World War literature. If you’d like, you can even ask me a question by clicking on the ‘Ask Mr. Griffiths’ tab at the top of the blog. I can’t promise you a satisfactory answer, but I’ll do my best to help you! Take a look around– see what interests you.

We’ll be using this blog throughout the year to widen our reading and search for meaning in the poetry and prose that we read, its unifying subject: the First World War.

Now, I don’t know how much you know about the First World War. I don’t know anything about the First World War! you may be thinking. I’ve made a terrible mistake! might follow on from this. Goodbye, cruel world! would almost certainly be an excessive reaction, and if you’re thinking this, I’d call a doctor. But don’t panic. I find that most people who begin the course know little about the conflict: one year a student asked me if Henry VIII was king when the war started. She ended the year with a ‘B’ and went on to write one of the best A2 essays I’ve ever read. Ignorance is no crime: and why are you doing an A-level, if not to learn?

By the end of the year you’ll know the history of the war, through the study of the many brilliant poems, books, memoirs and plays written by those effected by it. The only crime is to be incurious– or to dismiss the subject before you start. I’m not interested in the First World War! you may object. Here I quote Yoda from Star Wars: “You will be. You will be”. Why? Because there is no aspect of your life, or that of countless millions of others, that has not been affected by this conflict. You just don’t know why yet.

Off you go. Take a look around.

Back again? Excellent.

In ‘Starter for 12’  I’m going to post some links to some websites that will help you get to grips with how the First World War started. We’ll begin at the beginning, with the origins of the First World War.

The origins of the First World War are, to someone new to the subject, very difficult to grasp. The war began almost a hundred years ago, in a world very different from our own. Nations handled their foreign policies in a way that seems, well, foreign to us. People felt patriotic in a way we find hard to understand. Many welcomed the outbreak of war: they were excited by it. These things can seem very strange at a distance. Yet, as difficult as it can be, I’d like you to try and acquaint yourself with some of the explanations for how the war began. It’s going to be tough, but… let’s try and be smarter than Baldrick!

"There must've been a moment when not being a war on went away, right, and being a war on came along."

Over at FirstWorldWar.com you’ll find a good summary of the events that led up to the outbreak of World War One. Read ‘How It Began’, ‘The Causes of World War One’, ‘Archduke Ferdinand’s Assassination’ and ‘The July Crisis’. Don’t worry if it’s all too much too take in at once; but make notes to help you understand the European Alliance system that so disastrously led to war. You’ll also find two articles on the BBC website that help explain the origins of the war: the first, by Dr Gary Sheffield, argues that war with an aggressive and autocratic Germany was inevitable: a little controversial, but well argued. The second, by Dan Cruikshank, conveys the fear of German militarism that existed in Britain before the war.

I’ll ask to see the notes you’ve made from these websites in the lesson we have on Wednesday.

If you have access to Youtube, you’ll find some interesting documentaries that can give you a broad idea of what life in Britain was like before the war. The best one for our purposes is Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain: The Road to War. Watch this to understand the social tensions in Britain from 1906 to 1914: and, if you’ve got time, you might even go on to watch its follow-up, ‘The Great War’. Again, as a matter of good practice, you should make notes to help you contextualise the poetry, books and plays that you are going to read.

I will, of course, give you further information and extracts that will help explain how ‘the War to end all Wars’ began. This ‘Starter for 12’ task, however, is a crucial opportunity for you to inform yourself on how it all began– and impress us with your enthusiasm and ability to take on this, your English Literature AS level.

We begin, as we must, with history. Yet within the week we’ll be reading together some of the marvellous poetry that the terrible and momentous First World War has given us.

Resources: Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and Vera Brittain

Three big names from First World War literature feature this week after a trawl through the infosphere, looking for First World War literary tidbits. The BBC and the Guardian come up trumps again with features on two of the poets whose work is studied on the AQA AS English literature course, while a reminiscence of lost childhood provides us with an unexpected view of the life of Vera Brittain.

Edward Thomas.

Poems by Edward Thomas and Robert Frost can be found in Jon Stallworthy’s Oxford Book of War Poetry, and you can find notes for the poems on Move Him Into the Sun. Frost was an unregarded young poet and Thomas a prolific but frustrated critic when they met in 1913, beginning a friendship that would change the lives of both men. Frost received encouragement from a sympathetic Thomas, who gave Frost’s work supportive and perceptive reviews. Thomas, on the other hand, was coaxed by Frost to convert the poetic prose of Thomas’ writings on nature into an experiment in poetry. Each was a catalyst to the achievement of the other, and a Guardian article by Matthew Hollis, ‘Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and the Road to War’, brilliantly outlines the dynamic of the relationship between the two men. Hollis writes as the author of a new book on Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France, which is this week serialised by BBC Radio 4 as their Book of the Week. You can listen to readings from the book here on iPlayer.

We can also thank the BBC for a radio documentary that allows us an insight into the life of Vera Brittain through the reminiscences of her daughter, Shirley Williams. Vera Brittain’s ‘Testament of Youth’ is, of course, one of the great memoirs of life during World War One, recounting the experiences of an intelligent young woman who suffered appalling personal loss during the conflict. Baroness Shirley Williams— perhaps better known today than her mother, and a significant political figure in late twentieth century British politics– is a likeable and sympathetic narrator of her own childhood years in ‘The House I Grew Up In’, a documentary aired on Radio 4 this week. Her mother emerges as an incredibly principled woman– a pacifist, anti-fascist and feminist– if somewhat distant from her daughter: a woman for whom life was, it seems, never easy. This is a fascinating view of Brittain from the engaging Williams. Not to be missed.

Shirley Williams with her mother, Vera Brittain.