The Lost Generation? The plight of a veteran boy soldier in the 1920s
- aksmith304
- Aug 7, 2023
- 2 min read
I'm fascinated by the way that the First World War was understood in the 1920s by the people who had lived through it. The way we think about the First World War, even a century later, has been shaped by the literary war boom of the late 1920s. The publication of books such as Goodbye to All That (1929) by Robert Graves and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), crystallised the ways in which the war would be remembered: men, trenches, rats, poppies, disillusionment. One book that is never included in this list, however, is Josephine Tey’s first novel Kif.
Kif was also published in 1929 under the pseudonym, Gordon Daviot. Shortly afterwards, Tey created her detective, Alan Grant, and embarked on the career as a crime writer for which she is best remembered. The novel tells the story of the eponymous Kif (pronounced Keef), a fifteen-year-old farm boy who enlists in the army soon after the outbreak of war, despite his age. His primary desire is to escape from the boredom of his ordinary life – something that drives him throughout the novel. The reader sympathises with this from the outset; after all, we are all bored sometimes. Despite his youth, Kif, never seems young, and his time in the army during the war is the best of his life.
It is here that the novel appears to contradict the culture of disillusionment created by war boom literature. Instead of being noticeably traumatised by his war experience, Kif thrives on the variety and excitement. It offers the real escape that he seeks. There is no notion of the boredom of trench life here, just comradeship, thrills and a bit of romance. But the novel is hard-hitting, nonetheless. Kif is barely twenty when he is demobbed and returns to a society that wants only to forget the war. He struggles to survive and falls in with the wrong crowd, but the sharpness of Tey’s writing ensures that we continue to be on his side.
Kif is disillusioned with the post-war world. When things go wrong, Tey shows us an alternative way that the war has shaped the boy. It impacts on his lack of success in peacetime by making violence an acceptable and innate part of his identity, one which shadows him whatever he tries to do. Kif is part of what Gertrude Stein called ‘the Lost Generation’, although as a working-class English boy, he is not what she had in mind. A war-driven, lingering culture of violence in the 1920s, particularly in communities hit by social hardship, is evocatively explored here, offering a different view of the legacy of the war in the years that followed the Armistice. Kif never feels like a victim, but he is a victim of circumstance nonetheless.
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