Television Drama and the People's War: David Hare's Licking Hitler, Ian McEwan's The Imitation Game, and Trevor Griffiths's Country

Television Drama and the People's War: David Hare's Licking Hitler, Ian McEwan's The Imitation Game, and Trevor Griffiths's Country RICHARD JOHNSTONE It is now fifteen years since Angus Calder first published his influential history, The People's War: Britain 1939-45. In his preface, Calder summed up succinctly and unequivocally what he saw as the significance of his researches; The war was fought with the willing brains and hearts of the most vigorous elements in the community, the educated, the skilled, the bold, the active, the young, who worked more and more consciously towards a transformed post·war world. Thanks to their energy. the forces of wealth, bureaucracy and privilege survived with little inconvenience, recovered from their shock, and began to proceed with their old business of manoeuvre, concession, and studied betrayal. I It is a view which remained for a number of years in an odd state of suspended . animation, as though for many readers the lingering euphoria of the sixties had made the second half of Calder's equation seem rather an overstatment, unduly pessimistic. But as the sixties themselves began, with hindsight, to take on those very qualities "ofmanoeuvre, concession, and studied betrayal" ofwhich Calder speaks, so his view of the Second World War achieved a wider currency, not least through its influence on some ofthe best of recent television drama. In David Hare's Licking Hitler (first broadcast by the B.B.C. in 1978), Ian McEwan's The Imitation Game (i980), and Trevor Griffiths's COUlllry (1981), we have attempts by three writers, themselves children of the forties, to deal with what, largely as the result of Calder's work, they have come to see as the true historical significance of the War - an historical significance that lies beneath the familiar iconography of Spitfires and buzz-bombs, of fishing boats off the coast of Dunkirk, of sleeping figures on the platforms of the underground. It was as a direct result of reading Calder's book in 1978 that Ian McEwan "resolved to write something one day about the war."2 For David Hare, RICHARD JOHNSTONE "reading Angus Calder's The People's War changed all my thinking as a writer; an account of the Second World War through the eyes of ordinary people, it attempts a complete alternative history to the phoney and corrupting history I was taught at school.,,3 What caughtthese writers' imaginations, and seemed to strike them as true, was the paradox that Calder deliberately emphasizes in everything he has to say about the War: that a national experience which seemed, despite the suffering, to offer new beginnings, new roles, which seemed to point the way to an exciting and fulfilling future, was in fact a dead end. Far from ushering in the millennium, the War actually consolidated everything that had gone before. The rhetoric of common cause had merely obscured the ways in which the old injustices and inequalities were being preserved. In the final speech of Licking Hitler, the War is summed up as the source 'of all subsequent evil, of what is described as the "lying, the daily inveterate lying, the ... deep corrosive national habit of lying" (p. 54). While neither Calder, nor any author of these plays on which his influence is so marked, goes so far as to suggest that the War was invented to divert the people's attention, the common thread is there. The war against Germany was a side-show, effectively a means of duping people into believing that the age of true community had arrived. At the end of Trevor Griffiths's Country, set in the period immediately after the German surrender, the patrician Philip Carlion offers to make peace with his rebellious sister Virginia. "Not," says Virginia, "while there's a war on.,,4The war to which Virginia refers, the war between the governors and the governed, is seen in all three plays as the crucial battle, the lines of which were blurred by the more urgent need to fight Hitler. As Hare and McEwan and Griffiths see it, the determination ofone class ofpeople to exclude the others from their domain ofprivilege never wavered; it was simply that...