Every day in every way it’s getting a little bit better

“Every day in every way it’s getting a little bit better” is a line Jimmy Bigelow sings among former prisoners reunited after the war at the Hope and Anchor. In a gathering shaped by remembrance, loss, and the effort to feel intact, the upbeat refrain offers a small shared affirmation without suggesting that their lives have simply improved.

The refrain at the reunion

The line appears during a night when the men drink together and laugh about what has happened to them. For a while, their laughter makes the dead feel present among them; the gathering names Lizard Brancussi, Wat Cooney, Yabby Burrows, Jack Rainbow, Tiny Middleton, and Darky Gardiner, among others. Jimmy begins singing, and the refrain gives the company a simple phrase to hold onto amid its stories of the absent and the surviving.

The reunion takes place at the Hope and Anchor, where the former prisoners stand around a pub fire. The year is uncertain even within the account: it may be 1947 or 1948. The men have not all been together since demobilisation. Jimmy, who says little, sings a line whose steady optimism contrasts with the uncertainty and changed circumstances evident around him.

Hope and the limits of cheerfulness

The men’s laughter and drinking help them feel, for that night, as they had before the war. The refrain belongs to this temporary recovery of fellowship: its promise sounds less like a measured report of progress than a communal effort to keep going. The company’s warmth depends on remembering the dead as part of the living group, even as its members use laughter to make the past bearable.

That effort is not presented as a cure. Jimmy says he is doing the best he can, and the account observes that the marriage he returned to was not the marriage he had left—or that he had returned a different man. He eventually has four children and is called a family man, though the narration distinguishes that label from the experience of being a man who has four children. Against those unsettled facts, the refrain’s optimism remains provisional, rooted in the shared moment rather than a promise that everything has been repaired.

Memory after the war

Much later, Jimmy’s daughter Jodie dies of leukaemia at nineteen, and Jimmy survives her by twenty-eight years. He takes little seriously and comes to see the world as essentially comic; meanwhile, a growing public interest in memory surrounds him as his own recollections become less complete. He retains jokes and stories, the taste of a duck egg given to him by Darky Gardiner, and the hope and goodness he associates with the men.

Jimmy’s memories preserve acts of care as well as fellowship. He remembers Wat Cooney waiting at the cookhouse until the last man arrived, saving food and making sure everyone received something. He does not remember Wat’s death during the march to Three Pagoda Pass or the cruelties associated with that journey; his sons and other observers point out errors and contradictions in his accounts. The novel places the reunion refrain within this larger tension: hope and laughter can sustain a shared life, while memory remains partial and does not make suffering disappear.

Narrative significance

The line condenses the reunion’s double movement. The former prisoners try to feel whole together, and singing gives their hope a form that can be shared; at the same time, the dead named around the refrain and Jimmy’s changed postwar life prevent its optimism from becoming uncomplicated. Its significance lies in that balance: a small expression of persistence among comrades, not a declaration that the past has been overcome.