1919


Way, way back in March I started talking in this parish about journeying through the 20th century via the short story. One story for each decade. Over the next couple of months I kept looking for the perfect place to start and I had it in my head I’d do the journey chronologically and continuously. I kept thinking that and before I knew it nearly three months had gone by and I’d still not started.

So I’ve changed tack. And I’ve started with one story, from 1919 I believe. And I’ll dip in and out of the journey as and when I choose.

To the second decade then. DH Lawrence is so out of fashion today that I almost hesitate to say anything in his favour. But Tickets, Please is such a haunting, disturbing story it deserves attention. The first time I read it I wasn’t aware it was written so close to the end of the First World War. The wartime setting is obvious, of course. The fact that the tram line at the centre of the story, winding its way through "stark, grimy, cold little market-places, tilting away in a rush past cinemas and shops" is almost entirely manned by women - "fearless young hussies" Lawrence calls them- says as much. But I wonder now how much the violence at the heart of the story was some echo of the much, much greater violence of the previous four years?

The story reads more like a Dionysian rite than anything. There’s a tram inspector called John Thomas, a man with an eye for all the ladies that work on the route. He dates and then discards one of those fearless young hussies, Annie. She doesn’t take it lightly, gathers half a dozen of his old flames and then arranges to meet John Thomas at the depot where the other women are already waiting for him. They ask him to choose one of them to walk home with. He refuses. It goes badly for him. "He turned his head away. And suddenly with a movement like a swift cat, Annie went forward and fetched him a box on the side of the head that sent his cap flying and himself staggering."

That is just the start of their assault on the inspector. "He was their sport now. They were going to have their own back, out of him. Strange, wild creatures, they hung on him and rushed at him to bear him down. His tunic was torn right up the back, Nora had hold at the back of his collar, and was actually strangling him. Luckily the button burst. He struggled in a wild frenzy of fury and terror, almost mad terror. His tunic was simply torn off his back, his shirt-sleeves were torn away, his arms were naked. The girls rushed at him, clenched their hands on him and pulled at him: or they rushed at him and pushed him, butted him with all their might: or they struck him wild blows. He ducked and cringed and struck sideways. They became more intense."

The women then get him onto the floor and despite his struggles he can’t break free. "You ought to be killed," Annie tells him, slapping his face and telling him to choose. He does. He chooses Annie. And there the story more or less ends, with a strange eerie sense of non-resolution. I come away humming with the wildness of it.