Elderly Freda is in a care home in Hackney, remembering her wartime evacuation to the Lincolnshire Wash, where at 12 years old she was sent on a train away from all she knew in east London. Hubbard’s description of this phase in Freda’s life – the bleak landscape, the cold house, the minimum rations, the abuse, Freda getting her first period, alone and with no one to ask – is affecting and memorable, as is the cruelty of most of the people Freda meets during this time.
For survivors, memories of the wartime years have become “a patchwork of events etched across our hearts”, thinks Freda. But the attempts of care home staff to interest her in a BBC programme commemorating the 75th anniversary of Dunkirk are met with listlessness. “Soon it will pass from living memory and be no more relevant than the Battle of Waterloo,” Freda muses in her diary.
Other sections set during the war introduce us to Philip Rhayader, a 22-year-old conscientious objector who has left Oxford with his vocation to join the church in tatters, following a nervous breakdown and the discovery of strong feelings for a male friend. He has escaped to Lincolnshire and a job of sorts in a lighthouse near where Freda is staying. Sue Hubbard, also a poet and art critic, tells us in an introduction that the bare bones of her story and the names of her protagonists come from Paul Gallico’s 1940 novella for children, The Snow Goose, so we are primed for the moment when an injured goose will bring these two unlikely characters together.
Freda and Philip’s characters and background are described and set up with care, but it is not until the middle pages that we get to the moment where they meet and the actual story begins. “Can I help look after the goose?” she asks him, and I found myself expecting many more scenes between them doing just that while their friendship deepened. In fact, we rarely see them together again.
“I realise I’ve said very little about you in this journal,” writes Freda, 75 years later. And that’s a pity. The relationship between Philip and Freda feels slight and underdeveloped, given its significance for both their later lives. We understand that they have a shared yearning for connection and meaning, but not quite how their friendship becomes life-changing for both of them.
What is beautifully developed, however, is the question of how we might live without religion or war-mongering. Philip “knew he had an innate sense of the holy but that it had nothing to do with theology or creeds, that it was to be found, if anywhere, in the first primroses or the flight of the whooper swans etched against the pale morning sky”.
This sense of the holy in ordinary things is the heart of the novel – “the clouds overhead, the feel of the cane chair supporting our backs or the morning sun flooding through the bedroom window, or that moment when we climb out of bed to turn on the tap and make a cup of tea”. When Philip wrestles with his beliefs as a conscientious objector, Hubbard doesn’t provide easy answers for him. “What was all this for? Was there really something out there, rather than nothing?”
Flatlands has an elegiac, gentle quality, evoking the Wash as “a place between somewhere and nowhere, one of the last wildernesses in England”. The Fens provides an evocative landscape, lonely and bleak. The power and energy of the novel comes in the last third, when Philip decides that he can’t remain on the outside of life for ever. “All we could do was paint, write, garden, love. Participate,” he says. In fact he does more, acting with bravery and heroism – just as his namesake does in The Snow Goose – in a novel of tender quiet voices, and grace.
• Flatlands by Sue Hubbard is published by Pushkin (16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
