REVIEW: The Skylarks' War

[feather_ghyll]

The Skylarks’ War: Hilary McKay. Macmillan Children‘s Books, 2018

I’ll start this review by discussing preconceptions, or, less pretentiously, admit that for some reason I thought this book was set during the second world war. I didn’t really look at it when I snapped it up in a charity shop (way back when) as it had been so widely lauded. It was only upon opening it up to read it that I realised my mistake. And, of course, it was suitably published a century after the end of the first world war.

It wasn’t very long before I realised that motherless Clarry Penrose and her story had a hold on my heart. Although her brother Peter is an important character, and we later follow a wider circle from their cousin Rupert to Peter’s school friend Simon to his sister Vanessa, it’s the baby who grew up believing that her birth killed her mother, taking her away from her father and brother, who is really the heroine. The more awful her failboat of a father is, while she continues to love unstintingly, even as she grows up and sees his fallibility, the more you care.

Apart from being a historical story, allowing it to be more honest about the experience than contemporary books, particularly for a young audience, could or would be, it’s powered by feminist rage, questioning the pre-war sexist attitude that says girls can’t (swim, do certain jobs, go to university,) countering it by asking ‘Why not?’ It shows the opportunities the great war offered girls and women, such as the jobs that they stepped in to fill. But even before that, there is the striking character of Mrs Morgan, who ‘does’ for the Penroses. She’s not very good at it, but we and Clarry gradually learn the unexpected job she longed to do, and she is one of the influences that help Clarry grow and ask ‘Why not?’ too.

The characters are all wonderfully drawn, with Peter’s autocratic tendencies always set in the context of an unloving father. And when he does something rather desperate to get out of something he badly doesn’t want to do, the book shows how he has to live with consequences for the rest of his life that he couldn’t have foreseen. Clarry has a gift for seeing the best of everyone in all walks of life, which mostly is vindicated.

The writing is simply gorgeous, there’s wonderfully apt sentence after wonderfully apt sentence. Its image of the Western Front as a smile will stay with me. It also only gradually introduces the skylarks of the title, first talking about how they continue to sing, even in war-ravaged France and Belgium, and how they seemed to be singing in their own mother tongue to all the soldiers. For Rupert, the birds are associated with Cornwall, where he was brought up – we meet golden Rupert in summer 1912, for it is customary for Clarry and Peter to leave their cold Plymouth home to spend the summer there with their granparents and Rupert, and the reader can guess from his age and the date that he will end up in the trenches. Even his name suggests it. And then finally, as I’d suspected before reading the book, the Penroses’ grandparents explicitly refer to their grandchildren as skylarks

My only issue with the writing was the strong tendency for words to be repeated three times. I like threes as much as any Celt, but nobody uses three words for emphasis that often, and it would have been a far more effective technique had it been used less. The chapters get shorter and shorter as Clarry grows up, which is somewhat understandable as more and more of the child characters become adults and the war takes its toll. Clarry, for instance, starts off in a state of ignorance about what military action really is, with her father not letting any newspapers into the house and her school practising a ‘don’t fuss’ stoicism, but she soon loses that, even if she doesn’t quite have the actual experience of nursing and soldiering that other characters do. Yet there were details that I felt were unnecessarily glossed over – did Clarry really stick to her decision to become a vegetarian? What was Odessyus’s real name? I wasn’t entirely swept along by the final romance (partly because of their being cousins and it seemed to be mainly yearning from her, for Rupert pretty much bolted away from ‘darling Clarry’ when she was on the cusp of womanhood, and okay, he had a lot of damage to work through, but it’s only in a children’s book that you can get away with such a void where relationship building ought to be and its contrasted by the other relationship we see developing.)

Another aspect that McKay might have written more about was school life. Peter and Simon (it was only after ending the book that I consciously made the Simon Peter connection) don’t seem to have a lot of touchstones to refer to about their time. Simon was utterly wretched there, and Peter only really enjoyed the school work. It’s a scathing take on boarding schools. But when Rupert is haunted by the memories of his time there with his friend and fellow soldier Michael, Peter’s memories seem to have to do a lot of work in comparison. But then again, the importance of items like the sovereign, the dictionary and the beret in Clarry’s narrow, restricted life – her father being grudging with everything, from affection to a few material goods – is perhaps the point.

With the lens of the current pandemic, I noticed that there’s no direct mention the influenza epidemic at all, but there are cases of colds and pneumonia and the homemade treatments scrambled to battle them.