The aftermath of war was murder for some

Matthew Lewin talks to crime writer Elizabeth Wilson about her new novel set in a world of rationing and austere attitudes toward sex

The Twilight Hour by Elizabeth Wilson
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ELIZABETH Wilson has found a fascinating setting for her latest crime novel – the famously icy winter of 1947 when England was in the grip not only of unprecedented snow and ice but also of unrelenting post-war shortages of everything from food and petrol to clothing and furniture.
This is a world of rationing and coupons, where girls had names like Dinah and Gwendolyn, boys were called Colin and Hugh and Titus, people called each other ‘silly clots’ and women exclaimed ‘You beast!’ when their men folk let them down badly.
But perhaps more important (for the purposes of the novel), it was a world trying to clamp down on the relatively permissive sexual attitudes of the war years, and people who had the misfortune to be homosexual in the 1940s had a grim time of it indeed.
And if there is a particularly convincing ring to the setting, the milieu and the attitudes – not to mention the clothing – of the characters, it is because the author had already carried out a huge amount of research on the period for previous (non-fiction) books putting fashion and clothing into a historical, sociological context.
And that all happened “by accident”. Ms Wilson initially read English at Oxford, and then trained as a social worker because she was interested in mental health. She didn’t much like that, so she “wangled” her way into academia by teaching social work, and then she wangled her way around the departments of what was then the University of North London until she found herself teaching cultural studies.
Then one day she wrote an article for the Guardian about feminism and fashion, and that led to her book Adorned in Dreams in the 1980s, and suddenly she was one of the pioneers of the sociological study of fashion and dress. Nowadays she is a Visiting Professor at the London College of Fashion.
“It’s not true that feminists weren’t interested in fashion,” she says at her home in Camden Square. “All those women, and all the leftist men too, cared a lot about how they looked really, and there were ‘uniforms’ that people adhered to.
“Nobody said anything about it, but there were certainly ways you could and couldn’t dress.”
She is now the author of several works of non-fiction as well as two previous crime novels (which, she says, were “not very good”).
Why had she moved from non-fiction to writing crime novels?
“Well, for example, I have been trying to write a book about atheism, about not being religious in this extremely religious atmosphere in the world today, but I found that there is just too much that one cannot say nowadays. I began to find it more and more difficult to write about the things that I wanted to write about, and I decided that if you write fiction, you can actually say much more.
“In addition to that, I had always vaguely thought that I would like to write novels, and I have always been very keen on crime fiction.
In her latest book she has found a way of using her cultural history research in a different way: “With a novel you can make interesting times more interesting to a wider group of people.”
The heroine of the novel is Dinah who was, in a way, rescued from the clutches of her very traditional and conservative parents by the war – and then, when the war ended, she was rescued from having to go back home by marrying Alan, a budding film scriptwriter.
With Alan, she moves in an exciting world of film-makers, idealists, directors and a film star called Gwendolyn.
But her idyllic life gets a sudden and bitter dose of reality when, while doing a favour for a friend, she discovers the murdered body of a rather dissolute and alcoholic surrealist painter.
She makes the terrible mistake of failing to report her discovery (in order to protect her friend), and the result is that poor gay Colin, a member of the Communist Party, is arrested and charged with the murder.
Dinah, knowing that Colin cannot be guilty because Titus was already dead when Colin went to the house, can only retrieve the situation by herself finding the real murderer. It is a difficult and exciting process that gives us a glimpse of the things that made people desperate in those times.
Central to the intriguing plot was the vicious disapproval of homosexuals during the period, and the terrible shame of women having a baby out of wedlock.
“It all got much worse after the war. In the 1930s, although most people would almost not have heard about homosexuality, there was at the same time a culture that recognised it in a way, particularly in terms of theatrical culture,” Ms Wilson explains.
“During the war, people were pushed together in same-sex situations. But after the war there were all these moral panics about trying to clamp down on sex generally.
There had been too many unmarried mothers and illegitimate babies and divorces, and there was a feeling that they had to put a lid on all this, and especially on gay men. It got very tortured and depressing.
“And as for having an illegitimate child, that was a terrible thing. I remember that even in the 1960s, my first placement when training to be a social worker, was at what was called a ‘moral welfare home’ for unmarried mothers in Cambridge.
“It was quite awful. We would be sitting having coffee, and these poor hugely pregnant girls would be mopping the floors all around us. Work was seen as a kind of penance. And then, the minute the baby was born, they would be hugely pressured to have it adopted.
“I remember one girl from the Fens whose boyfriend used to come and visit her. They clearly had a real relationship, but I remember the matron looking out of the window at the couple and saying: “Look, they don’t feel it. She has no idea of the sin of it.
“Those attitudes were very prevalent in the 1940s and they went on right into the 1960s”.