Unconditional Surrender

by Emyr Humphreys

Trollope's The Warden is recast for the twilight of WWII, as experienced in a small Welsh town by its uneasy rector, Edwin Pritchard, and its most notable German refugee, Cecilia, the former Countess von Leiten. During the months between Germany's surrender and the atomic bombing of Japan, Pritchard gets caught up in controversy because he supports Cecilia's continued settlement at the Residential Home for Decayed Gentlewomen instead of her repatriation to Germany. In this suspicious atmosphere, as people begin to blink away their wartime certainties, Pritchard and Cecilia must also separately contend with Colonel Bacon, a gregarious blustering Home Guard Tory, Klaus Rist, an insinuating young POW, and Arthur Llwelyn, the local Welsh nationalist candidate?all of whom are queuing up for slices of the postwar pie. The personal becomes political as Pritchard casts his lot (and petrol ration) with Llwelyn's campaign, while his daughter, Meg, becomes fascinated with Rist and his normally steadfast wife, Olwen, grows too friendly with Colonel Bacon. Humphreys's old-fashioned novel lacks a certain Victorian richness, but, narrated in Pritchard's and Cecilia's anxious streams of consciousness, it arrays a wide enough social cast to capture the crowded uncertainty of a historical cusp.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

180 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1996

About the author

Emyr Humphreys was a leading Welsh novelist, poet and author, writing in both English and Welsh. His career spanned from the 1940s until his retirement in 2009.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

“These were still terrible times. The urge to destroy was still abroad like a pestilence...”

It is 1945, the end of the war in Europe, and not everyone welcomes the inevitable changes that result. The Countess Cecilia von Leiden, self-exiled in Wales and wishing to stay, faces an uncertain future as sympathies evaporate in the Home for Decayed Gentlewomen and unwanted repatriation beckons.

“The only vital force in these corridors is the unrelenting hostility of a monstrous regiment of old women...They are armed to their false teeth with venom. “We’ve won the war. Nothing to stop you going home now, Countess. Won’t that be nice?””

The Reverend Edwin Pritchard, an Anglican rector lost among chapel-goers, suffers a crisis of faith. Confronted with photographs from the concentration camps he sees no God, only the image of the devil.

“What good are our prayers? Nothing more than systematic sighs and groans. I shall never see those stacked corpses arise to be clothed in white raiment. Babylon the great is fallen, fallen, and become the habitation of devils. These were the events of the end of a war and a climax of destruction and life crawls on. Not for these. Not for any of these.”

He also has the Countess to deal with, and his wildly optimistic daughter, and the young piano-playing German prisoner-of-war, and the spivvy Colonel taking tea with his wife, and the abominable Sir George Ellis Owen lecturing him on his support for Plaid...and yet poor, decent, ineffectual Edwin would far rather be researching his parish history, or even labouring peaceably on his brother’s farm.

Tetchy, complaining, scheming but impotent, yet oddly sympathetic , the two of them - Countess and Rector - narrate this short novel turn by turn, bringing to life the impact of change on a small Welsh community. A time and a community that Emyr Humphreys knew at first hand and captured with economy and wit.