Beryl Pong

My first book, British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration, was published in the Spring of 2020, when the first wave of the coronavirus hit the UK and we entered our first lockdown. Needless to say, it was not the historical season I imagined it to appear. The book is concerned with what I call late modernist chronophobia—a fear of the past and the future together—and with how individuals and the British state managed temporal anxieties in the years surrounding the...

Situated off the River Calder in West Yorkshire, the Hepworth Wakefield is a bright, airy gallery with ceiling to floor windows that draw in views of the waterfront and gardens outside; these demand to be taken in alongside the artwork within.

Birds and certain varieties of birds have long been potent symbols related to war and conflict. But as airplane technologies developed in rapid tandem with the coming and arrival of the Second World War, the connection between avian and aviation reached new heights in the cultural imagination. The symbolism of doves, for instance, takes on unsettling connotations in T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (1942), where a descending dove breaks through the air with flames of incandescent terror, controversially representing the Holy Spirit in the form of a German dive-bomber. The painter Paul Nash, much of whose oeuvre relates to his fascination with flying or downed aircraft, compared different “species” of planes to birds, calling the Whitley bomber “a queer bird-like creature . . . A dove of death.” Swallows, meanwhile, feature in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), their historical flight trajectory connecting continents as well as epochs. The subsequent intrusion by modern aircraft, by “[t]welve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck,” in turn anticipates Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) (fig. 1), a film whose famous jump-cuts splice the image of a soaring falcon in medieval England with that of a Spitfire during the Second World War present. With birds like planes and planes like ducks, much cultural production surrounding the Second World War chimes the military with the ornithological. Their visual resemblance, of course, was much remarked upon beyond the realm of art, causing no shortage of anxiety even during the interwar years (fig. 2). Notorious cases in which one was confused for the other are recounted in aerial warfare “prophet” Giulio Douhet’s influential book The Command of the Air (1921), including a panicked moment at Brescia when mourners at the funeral services for victims of an earlier bombing mistook a bird for an enemy plane. Later, the first British fighter pilot casualty of the Second World War occurred when a flock of geese was misidentified by ground observers as a formation of high-altitude enemy aircraft; two squadrons of fighters were scrambled as a result and attacked each other in a case of friendly fire.