These Days by Lucy Caldwell: vivid story of Belfast Blitz

These Days

Author: Lucy Caldwell

ISBN-13: 978-0571371303

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Guideline Price: £12.99

Lucy Caldwell’s new novel is set during the Belfast Blitz: four German airstrikes in April and May 1941. The first, known as the Dockside Raid, saw strategic targets hit with few casualties. “Cognisant of how much worse it could have been, people are calling it, dismissively, or sometimes proudly, our wee raid”, writes Caldwell. It was shortly followed, however, by the Easter Raid, which led to 900 deaths – the greatest loss of life in a single night outside of London.

A Belfast native now based in London, when Caldwell sits down to write, “all else falls away”, she has said. “It’s Belfast I’m writing from.” Her 2007 debut novel, Where They Were Missed, was set during the Troubles. It was followed by the 2011 Dylan Thomas Prize-winning The Meeting Point, a story of Irish missionaries in Bahrain, and All the Beggars Riding (2013), about a girl in London who discovers that her father had another family in Belfast. Caldwell’s most recent publications have been short story collections, Multitudes (2016) and Intimacies (2021), which includes the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award winning All the People Were Mean and Bad.

These Days is Caldwell’s fourth novel and her first foray into historical fiction. The book is divided into three parts, named for the raids. It relays the wartime events primarily through the lives of the Bell family. Philip, a doctor, and his wife Florence have three children: Audrey (21) works in the tax office, Emma (18) is a volunteer first aider, and their brother Paul is a young teen who dreams of enlisting. Their lives intersect with six-year-old Maisie,  who gets separated from her mother at a bomb shelter during the Easter raid.

The Bell women, from whose perspectives the story unfolds, struggle with internal desires at odds with their public personae. Audrey is recently engaged to Richard, also a doctor, but is unsure if she’s made the right choice. When she tries to picture married life with Richard, “the edges somehow slip away”. Emma, meanwhile, is discovering her sexuality through a clandestine affair with Sylvia, an older volunteer. A devoted wife by all appearances, Florence harbours fantasies of a young love lost in the Battle of the Somme.

The word “blitz” comes from the German blitzkrieg (lightning war). Caldwell has clearly done her research: she told The Irish Times she had interviewed people who lived through the events, and the details are vivid: the terror at the sound of sirens, planes and bombs; the shock of returning home to find only a hole in the ground; the desperate search for missing loved ones in makeshift morgues.

She also conveys the attempts to go about the business of living in the shadow of death and destruction. We see Florence optimising rations, Audrey planning her wedding, Maisie inconsolable after new shoes are confiscated by the customs on a train back from Dublin, and later packed up with a Belfast bap and her doll Polly as part of the exodus of evacuees.

The novel’s title comes from Selva Oscura, a poem by the Belfast-born poet Louis MacNeice, who pops up regularly in Caldwell’s work. “A life can be haunted by what it never was/ If that were merely glimpsed…These days, though lost, will be all your days.” One of the characters faces tragedy and is haunted by what had been glimpsed, and Betty, an employee of the Bells, suffers devastating losses when her house is razed by a raid. (Half of the houses in Belfast were hit during the blitz and 100,000 people left homeless, with working-class neighbourhoods bearing the brunt of the casualties.)

Although the period details are accurate, historical fiction is at its most powerful when the reader experiences history by embodying the characters. As Caldwell wrote in All the Beggars Riding, “that’s what fiction does, or tries to do. It takes a detail…and burnishes it until it is somehow more and better than itself, and in the light of it you can start to understand: just maybe, perhaps, what it’s like to be someone else”.

While both her short and long fiction contain compelling characters, unfortunately the ones in These Days never quite come off the page. Caldwell’s short stories so brilliantly capture the sinkholes underlying the surface of the quotidian; split-second twists of fate that could destroy a life. Yet somehow here, when the stakes are actually life or death, the intensity of the internal drama falls away. Regardless of historical accuracy, the vernacular rings quaint: “Hell’s bells, Paul!” Audrey explodes. “Would you ever stop fissling and footering and jumping around!”

It is to the author’s credit that she has successfully brought to life the city at a critical historical moment, amid surprisingly sparse literature about the Belfast Blitz. I just couldn’t help wishing that the people were as fully rendered as the scorched urban landscape surrounding them.