To Bed With Grand Music

To Bed with Grand Music, first published in 1946, is about sex in wartime. On the first page (a scene as compelling in its way as the five conception scenes at the beginning of the novel Manja, also published by Persephone) Deborah and her husband are saying goodbye to each other before he is posted overseas. They swear undying loyalty, well, undying emotional loyalty because the husband does not deny that he might not be able to be faithful all the time he is away. But once he is gone, Deborah is soon bored by life in a village with her small son and decides to get a job in London. Here she acquires a lover, and another, and another. As Juliet Gardiner, the historian, says in her Preface, this is a near harlot's tale. But she admires the book very much because it shows such a different side of the war from that shown in, for example, Jocelyn Playfair's A House in the Country, which is full of people mostly behaving honourably. The title of To Bed with Grand Music comes from an essay by Sir Thomas Browne called 'On Dreams' where he writes, 'Happy are they that go to bed with grand music, like Pythagoras, or have ways to compose the fantastical spirit, whose unruly wanderings take off inward sleepe.' And indeed Deborah is both happy at going to bed with grand music, and unruly. Although this is, in some ways, a rather shocking book, it is also very funny. There is a scene when she is making a gesture about resisting her first lover and he says that if his wife was in the same position as Deborah, i.e. with her husband away possibly for a long time, he would want her to have a lover so that she would not be bad-tempered. This is rather typical of the ironic, sardonic, yet possibly realistic tone of the book, which certainly throws light on the wartime years in a quite…