The female protagonist of Moral Fibre is Georgina Reddings. Unlike the hero, Kit, she was shy about communicating with me directly. I knew her first and foremost through Kit's eyes and only gradually pieced together more about her. Slowly, step-by-step, she emerged out of the shadows as her natural modesty and reticence melted and she took shape as a full-blown character in her own right.
Excerpt 1:
By the time Kit turned to hand Georgina a small box, her stomach was tied in knots. Fiona had been right! Her invitation had misled him. Yet, surely, he wouldn’t give her a ring in front of her parents? Would he?
He seemed to read her thoughts and reassured her, “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Georgina. Just something I thought you’d like.” The words were casual, but his smile was a little twisted and his eyes were sad. Her obvious apprehension at his gift had already sent the necessary message.
Still terrified of what might be inside, Georgina undid the ribbon and opened the box. Inside she found a pair of thumbnail-sized ebony earrings. They were delicately carved elephants with tiny ivory tusks. How ambiguous, she thought. Not a ring or a pin, the acceptance of which signalled a girl’s commitment to a young man, but hardly consumables either. They were something she was expected to wear and remember him by. Was there anything wrong with that? She couldn’t make up her mind. Conscious of her parents’ as well as Kit’s gazes, she removed one from the box to look more closely. “They’re sweet! So delicate!” she exclaimed. Did her voice sound as forced and silly to the others as it did to her?
“You wrote in one of your letters that you hoped I hadn’t shot any elephants on my safari because you thought they were wonderful animals.”
“That’s true!” She agreed more naturally. “I’ve always loved the elephants at the zoo because they look so intelligent.” As she spoke, she held an earring up to her earlobe so her parents could see. They both made appreciative noises, but she could sense that they were watching her and Kit like hawks. They clearly liked Kit, but she suspected they shared her reservations about her giving her heart again too soon.
“They really are lovely,” Georgina insisted, putting the earring back in the box. “Thank you so very much.”
“Speaking of safaris and Africa, I was wondering if you had any photos of your family that you could show us?” her father said, smoothly ending the awkward scene.
“Oh, yes,” Her mother joined in, an enthusiastic accomplice. “I would so love to see pictures of your home in Africa. I must admit, I can’t imagine it at all.”Georgina was the daughter of a rural vicar in West Yorkshire. She enjoyed a carefree and comfortable childhood, attending a girls boarding school run by the Church of England. The Victorian vicarage with its large barn made it easy for her to indulge her passion for horses, riding and hunting, and she was a bit "horse crazy" as a young teenager, but the war soon sobered her. In 1942 she started studies at the Lincoln Diocesan Teachers Training College, with the goal of becoming a secondary school teacher. At at dance at the Lincoln Assembly Rooms, she met and instantly fell in love with the shy, serious and gentle Don Selkirk, a Lancaster skipper from a nearby RAF station.
Scion of a wealthy, Scottish gentry family, Don bedazzled Georgina, without even trying. They became engaged within four months of meeting, to the delight of both sets of parents. Don's parents found Georgina sweet and innocent, modest and malleable. Her parents saw in Don the perfect gentleman with a law degree and good prospects after the war. Meanwhile, he was protective and considerate in every way. He cocooned Georgina in a sense of safety. He encouraged her to continue her studies, yet indulged her hopes, visions and plans for a future together. He assured her he had always been lucky and that nothing would happen to him.
And
then he was dead. A 20 mm cannon of a German night fighter having hit
his heart and killed him instantly. Georgina's entire world fell apart.
She hadn't just lost the only man she'd ever loved, she'd lost her
dreams and hopes for the future as well. All at the age of 19.
Georgina's grief was as great as her heart and her capacity for love. It shocked the under-cooled society around her, which expected a "stiff upper lip," "restraint," "self-control." After all, Don was only one of 55,000 airmen who were to die, and civilians were being killed every day too. There was no room in wartime Britain for too much grief. Instead, the emphasis was on all those established British virtues that had won an Empire and seemed more vital than ever in this, their "finest hour." Her friends and colleagues at the college were alienated. Her parents feared for he sanity. Her doctor thought she needed psychiatric treatment.
The only one in the whole world with whom Georgina could share her grief without reproach or inhibition was with Don's best best, his flight engineer Kit Moran. But Moran was in trouble. He had refused to fly after Don's death. He was posted off his squadron and sent to a RAF diagnosis center. His future was under a cloud, and he told Georgina that he believed it would have been better for everyone if he had died in Don's place.
Georgina denied it, and with that recognition that Kit too was a valuable life that might also have been lost, she started groping and stumbling along a path out of her underworld of grief. She clung to Kit as a lifeline connecting her both to Don through his memories and to life. Although Kit was soon sent for flight training in South Africa, they corresponded. Georgina wrote two to three times each week, pouring out her feelings and by writing down her thoughts as she came to terms with her loss bit by bit.
Then, in August 1942, Kit returned to the UK to start operational training. Since his family was in Nigeria, naturally Georgina invited him to spend his disembarkation leave at her home with her parents. And there they met again. Suddenly, their relationship wasn't all about Don and the past. Kit was in love with her. But Georgina was terrified of committing her heart again when Kit was facing a tour of operations in a war that was as intense as ever.
Excerpt 2:
Long after Philippa had fallen into an exhausted sleep, Georgina lay awake in bed gripped by growing panic. Suddenly, chillingly, it was so all so clear: she was in danger of making the same mistake. She had been keeping Kit at arm’s length to protect herself from pain. She’d told herself she didn’t love him because she didn’t love him the same way she’d loved Don.
With razor-sharp clarity she saw that didn’t matter. She didn’t love her mother the way she loved her father, or her father the way she loved her brother, or love any of them the way she’d loved Don, but that hardly meant she didn’t love them. Each love was as unique as the object of love. She would never love anyone exactly as she’d loved Don, but to deny her love for Kit was absurd. She did love him, intently and powerfully — and he had a right to know.
“Oh, God,” she prayed. “Don’t take him away from me before I have a chance to tell him I love him!” She knew all too well that training accidents could be fatal. Why, just last week Philippa had told her — without betraying any details, of course — that several training aircraft had been lost on a single night due to an abrupt change in the weather. For all she knew Kit was among them, already dead. Oh, God, please not that!
The panic was increasing not easing. Georgina almost got out of bed to write a letter to Kit immediately but turning on a light would disturb Philippa. Besides, a letter would take days to reach him, days in which he might die. She couldn’t risk it. She must ring him first thing in the morning. But she didn’t have a telephone number. No matter, Philippa would be able to find it and pass it on to her — assuming Philippa was fit to work tomorrow. Georgina looked over at her snoring roommate and pleaded mentally: Please go on duty tomorrow! Please!
MORAL FIBRE IS THE WINNER OF THE HEMINGWAY AWARD FOR 20TH CENTURY WARTIME FICTION
IT WAS ALSO A FINALIST FOR THE BOOK EXCELLENCE AWARD 2023
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