Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (44 page)

What is the significance of Jeremy’s colour blindness, which is especially interesting given his artist mother’s passion for colour?

I needed Jeremy to have a relatively minor physical disability that would prevent him from joining up as a soldier. I also liked the idea of colour blindness because it worked so well with the idea of telling a story that occurs primarily at night.

Why does Maeve, who has also known loss, seem better able to deal with it than Harriet?

Harriet’s early life was not a particularly happy one. She was not blessed with loving parents or a happy childhood. She suffers from the fear, and the reality, of being abandoned. Her marriage was the one bright thing, and when it was taken away from her she was, understandably, devastated.

Maeve’s loss of her son came later in life. Even though the loss was devastating, she wasn’t shaped by it the way Harriet had been permanently altered by the death of her husband when she was still a young woman. What happens to people matters, but perhaps when things happen matters just as much.

What prompted you to explore the lives of two women who spent most of their lives alone, something that can’t have been easy in that period?

My grandparents’ generation went through two world wars. A man could conceivably be called to fight in both wars. My grandfather fought in the first war and was killed fighting in the second war. For women, the experience was equally devastating. A woman could lose her husband in the first war, her sons in the second. I wanted to show how women’s lives were shaped by these losses, and how many women spent a large portion of their lives alone because of this. My grandmother was one of these women, and I lived with her for a time in my early twenties when I was struggling to become a writer, so I remember very clearly how closed she was as a person because of the untimely death of her husband.

Young Jeremy is a ghostly echo of Harriet’s deceased husband Owen, who was killed in the first battle of Ypres. What was his influence on her?

Harriet had shut down in the years following her husband’s death, and meeting Jeremy, and imagining him as Owen, enabled her to open up to life again. I think Jeremy didn’t resolve the past for Harriet so much as he allowed a future for her.

What part do you believe art, such as visual art for Maeve or writing for Harriet, plays in healing?

Art is about creation, so it’s the opposite of the destruction that was delivered upon Coventry, and in this way it is able to help offset the damage (both physically and psychically) caused by the bombing. It doesn’t repair the damage, for either Maeve or Harriet, but by making art they are able to place something in the way of that damage.

In your life, have you known any sort of connection among people in a crisis similar to that experienced by Harriet and Maeve?

The closest event that I can think of was the ice storm of 1998 in eastern Ontario and western Quebec. In our house we were without power for ten days, and once the novelty of using the camping equipment indoors had worn off, it became very stressful. There was the worry of pipes bursting, and of ice forming on the inside walls of the house. For the people who had fled their houses there was a concern about looting. But for all the insecurity of that time, I also remember how people came together as a community and how much people helped one another out.

What role do your personal memories play in your writing in general?

Like all writers, I use the material of my own life in my work. Not directly, in that I don’t tell the story of my life, but indirectly, in that I write about emotions that I am familiar with, situations about which I have some understanding. When I write, I like to learn something new, immerse myself in an unfamiliar world, so I am less interested in writing directly from my life experience. But if the story I am telling is to have any credibility, I have to have some emotional understanding of what I am writing about. This is the balance that always needs to be struck when I am working on a book.

by Helen Humphreys

When I was exploring the idea for
Coventry
one of the things I was thinking about was the relationship between destruction and cre ation. When something has been destroyed, what moves in to take its place? Is art a response to obliteration? As the city of Coven try fell during the night of November 14, 1940, did memories and stories rise to fill the spaces the buildings had left?

Originally the novel had more of this idea in its pages. The characters reflected on what was happening around them, had associative memories, recalled various anecdotes regarding the city’s history. It made sense to me that loss would be balanced with memory and story, and I wanted this balance to be everywhere in the novel. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to accomplish this because the very premise of my novel was also its limitation. The book was set during a night of bombing. The noise from the bombing made conversation difficult, if not impossible at times. So, my idea of having the characters relate to one another with personal stories and historical anecdotes wasn’t going to fly. Thus the novel was shaped by its own restrictions. Instead of having Harriet Marsh remember her husband, I had to move her physically to an earlier time and have those memories play out as lived experience. I had to restrict conversation between my characters to times when they were sheltering inside a building and the outside noise was subdued.

A novel is a world, and in writing a novel, an author is creating a particular world. It seems that no matter what story I am telling, the possibilities of a definitive world are equally balanced by the limitations. But it is in this struggle between what is possible and what is impossible that the imagination is charged and the story earns its shape. Just as all failure is its own kind of success, all the restrictions of an imagined world ultimately reveal themselves as freedoms.

The 1919 section of the novel—when Harriet goes to Ypres to discover what happened to her husband, Owen—became, for me, one of the strongest parts of the book. It set in motion aspects of Harriet that would show themselves more profoundly in the main action of the novel. It served to provide a guided tour of the aftermath of war, and to foreshadow the ruin of Coventry. None of this would have been shown or described—I would not have written this section at all—if my original idea for the novel had panned out.

In writing
Coventry
I used many books and accounts that detailed the events o November 14, 1940, but the following were particularly useful:

The Story of the Destruction of Coventry Cathedral
, by Provost R.T. Howard

Moonlight Sonata: The Coventry Blitz, 14/15 November 1940
, compiled and edited by Tim Lewis

The Coventry We Have Lost
(volumes I and II), by Albert Smith and David Fry

Coventry at War
and
Memories of Coventry
(pictorial records), by Alton Douglas in conjunction with the
Coventry Evening Telegraph

Air Raid: The Bombing of Coventry, 1940
, by Norman Longmate

The guidebook Harriet references in the 1919 section of this novel is the illustrated Michelin guide from that same year, titled
Ypres and the Battles of Ypres
. The letter from Owen Marsh is an actual letter from my grandfather, Dudley d’Herbez Humphreys, who fought in the trenches at Ypres in 1914. References to
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours
, by Abraham Gottlob Werner, correspond to the 1821 edition published by Patrick Syme.

www.cwn.org.uk/heritage/blitz/

Read more about the bombing in this article, “The Coventry Blitz,” on the site of CWN—News and Information for Coventry & Warwickshire.

www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_fi.php?lang=en& ModuleId=10005137&MediaId=171
Visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum online to see historic film footage of the bombing of Coventry.

www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwtwo/ women_at_war_01.shtml
The fascinating article “Women Under Fire in World War Two” on this BBC site examines women’s work during wartime.

www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/
Explore this BBC archive of personal memories, “WWII People’s War,” comprising 47,000 stories and 15,000 images.

www.hhumphreys.com
Drop by Helen Humphreys’ site for more about the author, her work, and upcoming events.

“This elegant novel illuminates the impact of war on ordinary people…Helen Humphreys reminds us how love is found and lost, lives forever changed, and unexpected friendships are born.
Coventry
is both an elegy and a celebration.”

—Ann Hood, author of
The Knitting Circle

“With stark, precise poetry, Humphreys builds a palpable, almost unbearable sense of inevitability and loss that echoes both John Hersey’s
Hiroshima
and Ian McEwan’s
On Chesil Beach
.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“War’s radical cognitive dissonance comes to vivid life.”

—
The New York Times

“Humphreys deploys her immense craft with spellbinding results…Nobody conveys longing like Humphreys.”

—
NOW Magazine

“Humphreys evokes the wartime atmosphere of fear and dislocation with great poignancy.”

—
Quill & Quire

“Meticulously researched and vividly imagined, this is a historical novel that…powerfully resonates through the years to our present moment. As such it’s a gift to us all.”

—Peter Ho Davies, author of
The Welsh Girl

“[A] small jewel of a book…Humphreys utilizes her superb poet’s eye to turn all the twisted metal, broken buildings and wrecked lives…into literary art.”

—
Ottawa Citizen

“An affecting novel about the city’s—and Harriet’s—romance and tragedy.”

—
ELLE

“So vivid, you can almost taste the acrid smoke and feel the panic…With a poet’s sensitivity, Humphreys captures the blind, lethal insanity of war.”

—
The Seattle Times

LEAVING EARTH

AFTERIMAGE

THE LOST GARDEN

WILD DOGS

THE FROZEN THAMES

Coventry

Copyright © 2008 by Helen Humphreys. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40012-1

A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd in a hardcover edition: 2008 This Harper Perennial trade paperback edition: 2009

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

The lines from Philip Larkin are from the poem “High Windows” and are used with permission from Faber and Faber Ltd./The Estate of Philip Larkin.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Humphreys, Helen, 1961–
Coventry : a novel / Helen Humphreys.

“A Phyllis Bruce Book”.
EPub Edition © MAY 2006 ISBN: 9781443400121

I. Title.

PS8565.U558C68 2009

C813’.54

C2008-908023-8

RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Text design by Sharon Kish

A Novel