the 1940s

The 1940s in Ian McEwan's Atonement is the decade that shatters the fragile hopes of the novel's central couple and forces its protagonist into a lifelong reckoning with her crime. It is the historical period in which Robbie Turner, having served three and a half years in prison for a rape he did not commit, is released into the British Army and sent to France, only to be caught in the disastrous retreat to Dunkirk. It is also the period in which Briony Tallis, having abandoned her place at Cambridge, trains as a nurse in London and confronts the human cost of war and of her own false testimony. The decade ends not with a reunion but with the author's confession, in 1999, that she invented a happy ending for her lovers, who in reality died in 1940.

War and the Destruction of the Lovers' Future

The 1940s begins for Robbie Turner with his release from prison and his hurried reunion with Cecilia Tallis at a Joe Lyons teahouse in the Strand in 1939. They have not seen each other for three and a half years. Their kiss at a bus stop is the only physical intimacy they manage before he reports for duty. A cottage in Wiltshire, borrowed through a Girton friend, is planned but never occupied. War is declared three weeks before his training ends; all leave is canceled. When leave is finally granted, Cecilia is in Liverpool for a trauma nursing course. Robbie follows her north but misses his connection at Birmingham New Street and, fearing the consequences of reporting late, turns back. By the time she returns, he is disembarking at Cherbourg. The winter of 1939–40 is spent in boredom and daylong marches in northern France, with little heavy weaponry and no contact with enemy fire. The lovers sustain themselves through letters, but the war has already stolen their one chance to be together.

The Retreat to Dunkirk and the Trauma of the Road

In May 1940, the British army is ordered to fall back on Dunkirk. Robbie, now a private soldier, is separated from his unit during a Stuka attack and loses his rifle. He walks cross-country with two corporals, Mace and Nettle, who follow him because he has a map and speaks French. The journey is a catalogue of horrors: a child's leg wedged in a plane tree, a mother and her son vaporized by a bomb, a field of slaughtered cavalry horses, a mountain of burning uniforms. Robbie is wounded in his side by shrapnel and develops a fever. He hallucinates, walking "across the land until he came to the sea" in a rhythmic trance. He is haunted by the memory of a French boy asleep in a bombed cottage, and by the thought that he might never see Cecilia again. The road to the coast is lined with abandoned equipment, dead soldiers, and refugees. At the Bergues-Furnes canal, he and the corporals cross the bridge by feigning injury to avoid being pulled for perimeter defense. They reach Bray Dunes, where the beach is crowded with thousands of waiting men and no boats in sight. They spend the night in a cellar, and Robbie, delirious, shouts "no" in his sleep, waking the others. Nettle tells him the navy has returned and they will march to the beach at seven. Robbie falls asleep thinking of Cecilia's words: "I'll wait for you. Come back."

Briony Tallis's Nursing and the Confrontation with Suffering

Briony Tallis, having refused her place at Girton College, begins nurse's training at St. Thomas's Hospital in 1940. She is stripped of her identity, designated "N. Tallis" on her badge, and subjected to the harsh discipline of Sister Marjorie Drummond. Her days are filled with bedpans, floor-polishing, and the cult of hygiene. In late May, the wards empty and the hospital prepares for the casualties of Dunkirk. On the first day of the evacuation, Briony helps carry stretchers, removes dressings, and extracts shrapnel from a wounded airman. She sits with a dying French soldier, Luc Cornet, who mistakes her for a girl he knew in Millau and asks her to marry him. She holds his hand as he dies. The experience transforms her: she learns that "a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended." She also receives a rejection letter from Cyril Connolly at Horizon, who praises her novella Two Figures by a Fountain but tells her it lacks "the backbone of a story." The letter forces her to recognize that the evasions of her fiction mirror the evasions of her life.

The Wedding and the Unfinished Confession

In June 1940, Briony learns from her father that Paul Marshall and Lola Quincey are to be married. She walks across London to the church on Clapham Common, intending to interrupt the ceremony and confess the truth. But she remains silent, watching the couple exchange vows. She then walks to Balham to find Cecilia, who is living in a rented room at 43 Dudley Villas. Robbie is there, having survived Dunkirk. The confrontation is brutal: Robbie tells Briony he is torn between breaking her neck and throwing her down the stairs. Cecilia forces him to calm down, and they give Briony instructions: she must make a sworn statement retracting her evidence, write a detailed letter to Robbie, and go to Surrey to tell her parents the truth. Briony also reveals that the real attacker was Paul Marshall. The meeting ends with Briony walking away, feeling "homesickness" for her sister and Robbie together. She never sees them again. In the novel's 1999 coda, Briony, now a celebrated novelist and suffering from vascular dementia, confesses that she invented a happy ending for Robbie and Cecilia. In reality, Robbie died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, and Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. The 1940s, for them, was a decade of separation, suffering, and death, not of reunion and love.