"Shelter from the Storm", Ellie Dean

[igenlode]

I scampered incredibly quickly through a heartwarming piece of Second World War genre-fic as toilet reading -- not an entirely fair way of judging literature, but it seemed good enough of its kind. Just for once it would be interesting to see a plot where the unmarried mother didn't experience a sudden rush of overwhelming love on the arrival of her infant and decide to abandon all her plans for having it adopted (oops, could that have been a spoiler?)

People didn't talk about 'African-Americans' with reference to black GIs, though (they were officially Negroes and certainly not 'African' in anyone's eyes) -- and my hackles were really raised by the author's dismissive attitude to railway signalling as the territory of puffed-up men strutting self-importantly around with flags. While I'm sure a heavily-pregnant girl could have managed to take over the relatively light duties of a country stationmaster if necessary (though I find it hard to imagine any railway company agreeing to allow it!), the author doesn't come off well in showing her laughing up her sleeve at the silly elderly male instructor who thinks all this stuff about sending tings down the line to a waiting train is important. (Never mind about the engine that is described as whistling 'up its funnel' :-p)
Apparently it hasn't occurred to the writer that railway signalling is as complicated as it is as a result of a series of hideous accidents, and that even on a small branch line the consequences of getting it wrong are potentially appalling. It's just some esoteric male ritual to her :-(

Comments

[watervole]

Ouch! I can think of at least one major railway crash that was caused by a signalling fault.

And even on small country lines, if you get the signals wrong, you could have the points set the wrong way and get a derailment.

And many country lines were single track, which meant you had to have only one train on the track at once. Often, they had batons that were handed over at fixed points, and you could only go onto the track if you were holding the one and only baton.

I HATE writers who get their facts wrong.

[igenlode]

I'm pretty sure the writer's knowledge didn't extend to single-line token operation!

Apart from anything else it felt anachronistic to me because my instinct was that people at that era had a lot more respect for the business of railways and the people operating them... but that may just be the sort of fiction that I've read. ("The Railway Children" comes to mind as at least one example written by a female author, although of course that's a generation or more earlier.)
Signal-boxes were places full of mystique, and you didn't ever distract the signalman. The stationmaster might be a pompous figure of fun, as might the local mayor, but like the mayor he was an important authority figure. And the train was the one link with the wider world outside: it brought in the newspapers, it took out the milk-churns, you set your watch by its passing ("railway time"!), and all those who set off to greater things elsewhere would start off by buying a ticket.

So if you didn't really understand how it worked, I'd expect an attitude of mystified respect (as for the inward functioning of a jet-liner) rather than a casual dismissal of 'boys' toys'...

As a writer, the problem is always that you don't know what you don't know (and that, however esoteric, your readership may contain someone who does!) I've no idea how accurate the section at the start of the book on Wrens overhauling boats' engines was -- it sounded credible enough to me, going solely by my memories of Nevil Shute's haunting "Requiem for a Wren" -- but my suspicion is that the author had researched that, because she knew it was outside her experience, but assumed she didn't have to worry about the trains...