The novel opens on the day WWII ends. With the ending of war, class barriers go up again in the village, and all hell breaks loose when upper middle class Margaret wants to marry working class Roy. This deceptively light novel gets to the heart of class distinctions, and prejudice, in all its nuances, as perhaps no other novel has. [Feb 2005] ( )

The Village, first published in 1952, begins on the very day the war ended. Two women, who have been firm friends during the war, go as usual to the Red Cross Post. Here they spend the night as they always had done, chatting over a cup of tea. As dawn breaks they lock the door 'but still they lingered, unwilling finally to end this night and the years behind it. '"There's a lot of us will miss it," Edith said. "We've all of us felt at times, you know, how nice it was, like you and me being able to be together and friendly, just as if we were the same sort, if you know what I mean." "I'll miss it a lot too," Wendy said. There was no point in her saying that it could go on now, the friendliness and the companionship and the simple human liking of one woman for another. Both knew that this breaking down of social barriers was just one of the things you got out of the war, but it couldn't go on.'

The main theme of The Village is that Wendy's attempt to cling on to her old way of life was already under pressure by 1939 and had become even more out-of-date by 1945. It is Edith who is the New Britain, with her prosperous son and her commonsense and indeed kindness. Wendy, with her snobbery and her refusal to change and her uncompromising attitude to her daugher, is the Old. When Labour swept to a landslide victory in 1945 'Attlee's government promised a fairer future for all and no going back to the inequalities of the pre-war world,' writes Juliet Gardiner in her Afterword to this Persephone edition of The Village.

When Wendy goes back up the road to Wood View on Priory Hill 'where the gentry lived' and Edith goes downhill on the other side, 'down Station Road among the working classes', they both assume that the values and habits of pre-war Britain will continue. But Britain has already changed a great deal, a change symbolised by Edith's son Roy, a printer with excellent prospects, falling in love with the penniless Margaret, Wendy's daughter. 'The story of the romance between the two of them forms the central narrative of the novel,' Juliet Gardiner continues, 'and the attitude of the other villagers when the news gets out illuminates their understanding - or rejection - of the village's elaborately calibrated social stratification. This is a finely-observed novel about the losses and gains of the Second World War, how hopeless and how isolating it would be to hold onto the past, how illusory was the notion that the war had broken down class barriers, or had managed to save "deep England" from the future and how peace, too, would produce its own list of casualties.

It is also about the futility of 'keeping up appearances', the boredom of middle-class women with nothing to do, even the realisation that cooking and housework had to be streamlined if theose women were to take their place in society. But above all The Village is an extremely enjoyable and well-written novel evoking an entire community (there is a long cast of characters at the beginning) and a whole way of life, and has one of the most ancient plots in the world - a young couple who fall in love but are forbidden to marry.

Marghanita Laski's The Village was first published in 1952, and has recently been reissued by Persephone Books, but I picked up an old book club edition from the early 1950s at the Staffs Bookshop in Lichfield, Staffordshire. I didn't know what to expect, and I was very pleasantly surprised. The novel opens at the end of World War II. Peace has just been declared, and the people of Priory Dean are celebrating—all except Mrs. Trevor and Mrs. Wilson, who, as they have done for the past six years, take up their posts at the Red Cross and spend the evening chatting over cups of tea. Mrs. Trevor is a member of the village gentry, with an old house on Priory Hill. Before the war, working-class Mrs. Wilson from down on Station Road was Mrs. Trevor's "char," but the war has brought them together. Now the war is over, and the village faces new challenges as it struggles to piece together its crumbling class structure. It's difficult, especially now that the gentry are struggling to make ends meet and the sons of the working class—the Poor People—are bringing home fifteen quid a week. Soon Churchill and the Conservatives are out and Labour is in—bringing to power working class men like Aneurin Bevan, architect of the National Health Service and far-left bogeyman to the Tories. But the cracks in the old class system really begin to show when Miss Margaret Trevor and Roy Wilson fall in love. It's a wonderful story—beautifully written, bitter and hilarious, full of tenderness and anger—about the end, for better or worse, of a traditional way of life. Sarah Crompton wrote in the Daily Telegraph: "If anyone asked me to describe life in post-war Britain, I would suggest they read The Village, a story of lovers divided by class that tells you more about the subtle gradations of life in the Home Counties and the cataclysmic changes wrought by war and a Labour government than any number of plays by J.B. Priestley or more famous tomes by Greene and Waugh." ( )

A fascinating look at the English class system in the years after the war. ( )