Afterthoughts
Story-writing
One day I may sit down in advance and plan a story in great detail from beginning to end. I thought I'd done that with this one. But, somewhere in Mornington the tale turned left instead of right and instead of a pregnant Sunny arriving destitute in Oxford and being taken on as a worker in one of Cholmondley and Joyce's factories... Well, now you know what really happened.
Peter and Viola
"I cannot say whether we shall ever see Peter or Jane again, nor is it at all likely that we shall learn how their lives will turn out - for good or ill, happy or sad, together or apart - but I trust that they, following their hearts and listening carefully to their daemons, will follow the path that seems right to them."
Phooey! I simply had to bring Peter's story to a conclusion. I gave him a difficult life and it seems desperately unfair for it to have gone that way, especially after he set out with so much promise. To have died at the age of only forty-two after almost twenty years of pain and drug addiction doesn't sound like a fortunate or a fulfilled life, does it? I can only hope his achievements and experiences made up for it to some extent. I also hope that Arthur clarified what Will Parry's father once said about life after death in the world of HDM. I'm sure he never meant to imply that your unique personality would dissolve away after death, like sugar in tea.
Goodbye, Peter. I'm going to miss you. Oh, and by the way - despite any apparent similarities and insofar as any writer can honestly claim to be distinct from his creations Peter isn't me. Or, to put it another way, if I had to choose someone to represent me it wouldn't be him, but another character altogether...
Songs
Every chapter (except for Hampstead Heath) was headed by a quotation from a popular song, but I didn't tell you their titles or where they came from. Here's the complete list:
Home: You Are My Sunshine (Most recently heard on the
soundtrack of the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(2000))
The Chthonic Railway: When Sunny Gets Blue (I was
thinking of the version by Nat King Cole)
Highdean: Love
Letters Straight From The Heart (As sung by Elvis Presley)
The
Streets Of London: Moon River (From the film Breakfast
At Tiffany's (1961))
Mornington: A Transport Of Delight
(From the revue At The Drop Of A Hat)
Kensington Gardens:
Alfie (From the 1966 film of the same title. Accept no
substitute!)
The Day Room: Dance, Little Lady (From the
revue This Year Of Grace)
Chelsea Barracks: Jolly
Good Luck To The Girl Who Loves A Soldier (This Great War
recruiting song features in the Arcus Theatre Company presentation of
Our Grandmother's War. Book us! We're very reasonable!)
The
Chain: When Sunny Gets Blue again
Pompey: Sea Fever
(Originally a poem, but it was later set to music by John
Ireland)
The Convoy: The Green Fields Of France (Although
this protest song is ostensibly about the Great War of 1914-1918, it
dates from 1976)
The Comrades Three: Early One Morning
(Everyone must have sung this folk song at school at some time or
another)
The Crossroads: Crossroads (In the performance
by The Cream. Eric Clapton's finest hour!)
On The Marie-Louise:
I'm Only Sleeping (From Revolver)
In The Sight
Of God: Smoke On The Water (Every guitarist know this
classic Deep Purple riff)
The Alethiometer: I'm Gonna Sit
Right Down And Write Myself A Letter
On The Road: On the
Road Again (The Canned Heat version from 1968)
The Copse:
Going Underground (A great anti-war single from The Jam)
The
Dome: Kites (By Simon Dupree and the Big Sound)
The
Attic: Days of Pearly Spencer (A huge hit in 1967 for David
McWilliams)
The Citadel: All Along The Watchtower (From
another fine 1968 LP, John Wesley Harding)
The Brothers:
The Two Magicians (Collected by Francis J. Child and listed
as Child Ballad no. 44)
The Voice Of God: Within You, Without
You (From Sergeant Pepper)
The Word Of God: We
Gotta Get Out Of This Place (a 60s hit for The Animals)
The
Clockmaker's Girl: The End (From Abbey Road)
Sunny
If you found Sunny's negative qualities of vanity, rudeness, selfishness and snobbery off-putting and dislikeable at the beginning of the story I hope they were eventually outweighed by her virtues of courage, kindness, courtesy and understanding at its end. They were always there inside her but it took the events of the Holy War to bring them out. Had she not been driven to run away from school and join the Ambulance Brigade I think she might have turned into a Marisa Coulter or a Lizzie Boreal; beautiful and intelligent but also cruel, manipulative and self-serving.
Will I write any more about her? I don't know. I've given up on making predictions or promises about what I will or won't do as they always turn out to be wrong.
Thanks
Thank you as ever for reading this far. A special thank you also goes to my reviewers - especially Danny Barefoot - and to the Sraffie community at the Republic of Heaven for their support and their continuous flow of interesting and stimulating ideas.
Sunny's war has little in common with the Great War of 1914-1918, but my description of her experiences was informed by FW's researches into the life of women combatants and non-combatants during that conflict. If it were not for her I should have known even less than I do about World War 1 and women's roles in it and so my last and most significant thanks go to FW who, all unknowing, was the greatest help of all.
Ceres, November 2005
There's more...
This is not the end of Sunny's story! She also appears in The Interview, On The Ramparts and the forthcoming Night Of A Thousand Stars which can be found right here on