the war

The war is the novel's originating wound, the historical catastrophe that reaches across decades to shape Harold Fry's character, his family's collapse, and the pilgrimage that structures the entire narrative. Though the war itself is never directly narrated, it operates as the first cause of nearly everything that follows: it broke Harold's father, drove away his mother, and instilled in Harold the habits of invisibility and self-repression that defined his sixty-five years before he ever put on his yachting shoes and walked out of Kingsbridge. The novel repeatedly returns to the war not as a remembered battlefield but as a force that deformed a generation's domestic life, leaving children like Harold to grow up in the wreckage of men who had seemed good ideas before the war and bad ones after it.

The War's Rupture of Harold's Family

Harold's father returned from the war an alcoholic, prone to depression, a man whose hands trembled when he reached for his glass and who could not bear to hear his own son chew. The boy learned early that the best way to get along in life was to keep a low profile, to appear absent even when present, because his father sometimes said nothing and only held his ears and closed his eyes, as if the boy were a pain inside his head; other times he called Harold a dirty beggar. A neighbour explained it as nerves, saying the war had made people funny, but that explanation did nothing to soften the daily reality of a child who wanted to stand close beside his father and know the feeling of an adult arm around his shoulder, who wanted to ask what happened before he was born. Harold's mother, young with a peony-bud mouth, had found her husband a good idea before the war and a bad one after it, and she made no secret that a child was the last thing she wanted or needed. The marriage fractured along the fault line the war had opened, and the boy was left to navigate between a father who flinched from him and a mother who swiped his knuckles as if brushing off a fly and told him to go and play outside.

The war's damage culminated in the two abandonments that defined Harold's childhood. His mother packed her suitcase and arranged a long silk scarf round her neck that hung down her back like hair, and she never returned. His father then took up with a succession of women until, on Harold's sixteenth birthday, he showed the boy the door. The two men remained estranged for many years, until a woman rang Harold out of the blue and said she was his stepmother, and that he had better fetch his father because the old man was mad as a hatter. Harold found him a nursing home, but his father was dead before he was sixty, having spent his final years shouting and throwing things, with no idea who Harold was. The war had not merely wounded Harold's father; it had hollowed out the family itself, leaving Harold to carry into adulthood the conviction that the safest way through life was to be unnoticed.

The Postwar Child's Habits of Self-Effacement

Harold's entire working life bore the imprint of the war's aftermath. He worked as a sales rep for the brewery for forty-five years, keeping himself apart, working modestly and efficiently, without seeking either promotion or attention. Other chaps travelled and accepted jobs in senior management, but Harold had not wanted either; he made neither friends nor enemies, and at his request there was no farewell party for his retirement. When one of the girls in admin organized a quick whip-round, few of the sales team knew much about him, though someone said they had heard once that Harold had a story, but did not know what it was. He finished work on a Friday and returned home with no more to show for his lifetime's employment than a fully illustrated Motorist's Guide to Great Britain and a voucher for Threshers, the book placed in the best room along with all the other things no one looked at, the voucher remaining in its envelope. He was teetotal, a fact that carries its own quiet irony given the alcoholism that destroyed his father and that Harold himself would later fall into after his son's death.

The war's legacy expressed itself in Harold's smallest gestures and deepest instincts. When the pilgrims around him expected him to drink the fruit drinks that sponsors pressed on him for photographs, Harold confessed to Kate that he could not hold the bottle and remove the lid and then not drink it. He explained, with a sad smile, that he was a postwar child, that people of his generation did not talk up their achievements and did not throw things away; it was how they were brought up. This single admission gathers the whole of the war's moral inheritance: a generation taught to endure, to waste nothing, to keep its head down and its mouth shut. Even his physical bearing spoke of it, for Harold was a tall man who moved through life with a stoop, as if expecting a low beam, or a screwed-up paper missile, to appear out of nowhere. The war had taught him to expect assault from the ordinary world, and he had spent a lifetime bracing for it.

The War's Return in Memory and Marriage

As Harold walked, the war's long shadow re-emerged not as history but as the texture of his remembered life. He recalled how, as a boy, he had tried to chew without noise because his father did not like to hear him masticate, and how his mother would answer his father's accusations with the retort that it takes one to know one, screwing out a cigarette. The walking unleashed the past he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid, and it chattered and played through his head with a wild energy that was its own. He no longer saw distance in terms of miles; he measured it with his remembering. The war had set in motion the very conditions of his marriage, for when he left home at sixteen and set out on his own, it was the brewery that brought the newly wed couple to Kingsbridge, and it was Maureen who had caught his eye across a dance hall and made him fall wildly in love. Maureen herself understood the war's role in Harold's life, explaining to Rex that Harold had had a difficult childhood, that he had loved his mother very much, and that his father must have had some sort of breakdown after the war. She had wanted to be everything he had never had, to give him a home and a family, and in the early years they had been very happy, with Harold digging vegetable plots and Maureen growing potatoes, beans, and carrots.

Yet the war's damage proved stronger than Maureen's devotion. When their son David hanged himself in the garden shed, the old patterns reasserted themselves with terrible force. Harold's response to the coroner's report was to start drinking, just one to keep him steady, then bottles kept in paper bags under his desk, and he drove home at night not knowing how. When he was really out of it one night, he dismantled the garden shed, and then he broke into the brewery and did something terrible, an act for which Queenie took the blame and was fired on the spot. The war had made Harold's father an alcoholic; grief made Harold one too, and the cycle of damage repeated itself across the generations. Maureen, for her part, retreated into the house, put up net curtains so the neighbours could not pry, and began talking to David as if he were still with her, keeping his room exactly as it was the day he died. The war had taught Harold to repress, and repression became the family's shared language, until Harold and Maureen stopped talking altogether and she moved out of their bedroom.

The War as the Burden the Walk Must Carry

Harold's pilgrimage was, in the deepest sense, an attempt to walk out from under the war's long shadow. The decision to walk came to him in a phone box at the other end of England from Queenie, with no deliberation and no reasoning, the decision arriving in the same moment as the idea, and he was laughing at the simplicity of it. But the walk itself became a reckoning with everything the war had set in motion. He understood moments from his life as if they had only just occurred, sometimes believing he had become more memory than present, replaying scenes from his life like a spectator trapped on the outside, seeing the mistakes, the inconsistencies, the choices that should not be made, and yet unable to do anything about them. He learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too; that the world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other, and that a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had done so for a long time. He could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique, and that this was the dilemma of being human.

The war's deepest legacy, however, was the one Harold could not walk away from: the memory of the afternoon twenty years ago when it had all come to an end, the memory he was normally so good at repressing. He lived again the afternoon he had driven Maureen to the funeral director's to see David one last time in the coffin, with Maureen having packed a red rose, a teddy bear, and a pillow to go beneath his head. In the car she had asked Harold what he was going to give, knowing he had nothing. He sat outside with his head in his hands, waiting his turn, until a passer-by stopped to offer a cigarette and Harold took it, although he had not smoked since the days on the buses, his fingers shaking so hard the passer-by used three matches to light it. The war had made Harold's father a man who could not bear his own son; the war's aftermath had made Harold a father who buried his own son and could not speak of it for twenty years. His confession letter to the garage girl, in which he finally told the full story of David's suicide and his own drinking and the destruction of the garden shed, was the act of a postwar child finally breaking the silence the war had taught him to keep. The war had made him a man who kept a low profile, who appeared absent even when present, who made neither friends nor enemies; the walk made him a man who could tell a stranger the truth of his life, one foot in front of the other, and in doing so begin to let the war's long damage finally end.