Josephine Tey by Jennifer Morag Henderson

Author:Jennifer Morag Henderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd
Published: 2015-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The Second World War

During the Second World War, John Gielgud and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies met Gordon Daviot in Edinburgh, while they were touring their production of Macbeth, their own contribution to entertainment of civilians and troops for the war effort.1 Gielgud’s description of Gordon Daviot at this time is of a deeply depressed woman, who spoke with extreme bitterness about war and its aftermath, and who made reference to her own lost love from the First World War. Gielgud was very much struck by how Gordon appeared to him at this time, and his description of her in 1941 is one of the enduring images of the enigma ‘Josephine Tey’. He wrote about it in his introduction to her collection of posthumously published plays, and it has been quoted by almost every commentator on her life since. The Second World War is often seen as the most ‘mysterious’ part of Tey’s life; a period of silence where, commentators mistakenly write, she produced no work and where her movements were unknown. The reality, of course, is a little different, but the Second World War radically interrupted Gordon Daviot’s writing, once more forcing her to rebuild her life as it destroyed everything she had so carefully built up since her mother’s death.

As with so many of the myths around Beth’s life, the reality of what war meant to her, and the reason why so many of her friends struggled to understand this, was bound up in what it meant to be living in Inverness. As with the First World War, Inverness, as a major military hub, was affected to a very great degree, with large numbers of troops stationed and training there. Once again, Invernessians’ movements were restricted and citizens had to carry a pass – the whole of Scotland north and west of the Caledonian Canal was ‘closed’, which was a considerable inconvenience to Invernessians, since the canal cuts through part of town and people must have crossed it regularly in Beth’s time. ‘This Closing of Scotland north and west of the Caledonian Canal is a bit of a nuisance,’ said Colin with some understatement in a letter to his youngest daughter, ‘It means that no one can cross the Canal without a permit. You have to fill up reams of paper, get two photos, your registration card, how far you want to go and god knows how much more. But the powers that be seem to think it necessary so what can we do.’2 The Longman too, then an open area where Colin enjoyed walking, was closed and made into an airfield.3 Around this time, he sent postcards of Shieldaig to Moire, so it seems he did manage to travel to his birthplace during the war years, but wider travel had certainly become more difficult, affecting Beth’s journeys to London. However, Beth was actually on her way home by train to Inverness in September 1939, just after war was declared, and she did travel to London during the time of the Blitz.

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