Tranquillity

by Winifred Peck

"What is the use of a lot old has-beens?" asks a hospital nurse at the outset of the story, and the story itself provides the answer. One of the minor yet cruel problems of this was was the lot of the aged and infirm. This story tells how an incongruous company of such forlorn people lived in the refuge of an admirable Nursing Home run by the three delightful sisters, the Misses Brown, in a far suburb of London. There were other cases admitted, of a younger and very different type, so that the contrasts in age and circumstances were striking. Very different too were the types of nurses who waited upon them, and their reactions to the whims and complaints of their old patients and the outrageous behaviour of one and very beautiful maternity case. The story covers only some hours of one day, when omens of evil seem to hang over the Home called "Tranquillity", and a night of tragedy. But the story shows that there may be some consolation for the old and helpless, and still some work to be done by them.

188 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Lady Winifred Peck (née Knox), born 1882, was a member of a remarkable family. Her father was Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, the fourth Bishop of Manchester, and her siblings were E. V. Knox, editor of Punch magazine, Ronald Knox, theologian and writer, Dilly Knox, cryptographer, Wilfred Lawrence Knox, clergyman, and Ethel Knox. Peck’s niece was the Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Fitzgerald who wrote a biography of her father, E. V. Knox, and her uncles, entitled The Knox Brothers.

She read Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Her first book was a biography of Louis IX in 1909.

In 1911 she married James Peck, a British civil servant, who was awarded a knighthood in 1938. They had three children.

In 1919 she began her novel-writing career which saw twenty-five books over a period of forty years, including House-Bound (1942) which was reprinted in 2007 by Persephone Books. She also wrote two books about her own childhood, A Little Learning (1952) and Home for the Holidays (1955).

Reviews

[Felicity · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've been seduced by Peck's gentle humour and sympathy in her other novels you may be surprised by the disturbing ending of this one. This novel is set in a retirement home during the Blitz. I read this before current events in Ukraine rendered it horribly topical.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an unexpectedly moving and unsentimental book written during WWII, dealing with the "home front" question. "Tranquillity" is a nursing home run by the 3 sisters Brown, all capable nurses themselves. They have chosen to accomodate the old and infirm people whose way of life has disappeared during the war. An old colonel whose devoted manservant has been called up for military duty. A delightful widown, crippled by arthritis, who lost all 5 of her children, some to war violence and some in a suspicious accident. A burned-out nurse. A lifelong suffragette, still stubbornly working herself to death for one cause or another. All these people struggle with a sense of uselessness, or having been passed by, of being useless survivors. The only two young people in the nursing home are a soldier who was wounded at Dunkirk and a beautiful young woman about to have her first baby. While the older people are scandalized by the expectant mother's noisy visitors, her vitality gives them a sense of renewed youth and stamina.

In the space of less than 24 hours, various small events happen. The least sympathetic of the nurses receives a warning from a fortune teller and leaves without notice. The visiting doctor tries to see more of Nurse Agnes and less of Nurse Paula. The woman who lost 5 children learns to forgive. And a baby is born. Then the night comes, and with it come the bombs....

This is in many ways a sad book - it's full of old, sick people who wonder why they are still alive. But in the end, there is a new life, and new hope. So this is about everyday heroism, about the daily lives of people whose only role in the war effort is to survive and to remember England as it once was.