The World I Knew

Margaret Sewell (1927) by John Moody
On the 10-year anniversary of her husband's death
(from Liss Llewelyn website)

The Great War ended on November 11, 1918, but its effects were felt for years to come. Louis Golding, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia who had settled in Manchester, was rejected from British army service for medical reasons: poor vision, inflamed tonsils, and diseased lungs.* Wanting to contribute in some way, Golding volunteered as a hospital orderly and canteen worker, serving in England, Salonika, and France.*  His first book of poetry, Sorrow of War, was published in 1919 and draws upon his experiences in tending the wounded.

Broken Bodies

Not for the broken bodies,
   When the War is over and done,
For the miserable eyes that never
   Again shall see the sun;
Not for the broken bodies
   Crawling over the land,
The patchwork limbs, the shoddies,
Not for the broken bodies
   Dear Lord, we crave Your hand.

Not for the broken bodies,
   We pray Your dearest aid,
When the ghost of War for ever
   Is levelled at last and laid;
Not for the broken bodies
   That wrought their sorrowful parts
Our chiefest need of God is,
Not for the broken bodies,
   Dear Lord—the broken hearts!

            —Louis Golding

Though Golding’s poem “Broken Bodies” bears witness to his medical work during the war, it also likely draws upon a more personal tragedy: Golding’s younger brother, Jack, a soldier with the 1/7th Manchester Regiment, was killed in one of the last German offensives of the war on April 5, 1918.  

In 1940, Golding published his memoir, The World I Knew. In it, he describes the sadness and unease that characterized life after the Armistice:

Louis Golding, 1917

The war came to an end.  I returned to Oxford, in the autumn of 1919.  It was not, as I had sometimes hoped it might be, a gay season.  There was something a little husky, a little wild in the voices of the autumnal city, as if they told of Death departing from his covenant, of his coming not when the fruit had been gathered, but when the sap rose through the trees.  That year, when the flush of red washed flame-like over the creepers, there were many to whom the colour spoke too vividly of the flush of red that had washed over the green fields of France that did not always remain green.**

Golding also became increasingly concerned with anti-Semitism following the war, and in 1932, Hogarth Press published his short work A Letter to Adolf Hitler. Golding had spent time in Europe in the interwar years, and he describes a visit to Berlin in 1931, where he witnessed

Jack Golding

the despair… and the boredom and the sullen fury, the mood over which Hitler sprawled, like a fungus.  In Berlin… one walked on the quaking floor of a crater.  The Berlin crust might be gilded. The nostrils might be full of the odours of baked meats and rich beers.  But now and again the stink of sulphur thrust up from the crevices.  You heard the thump of lava under your feet.***

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* Louis Golding, The World I Knew, Hutchinson & Co., 1940, p. 27.

** Golding, The World I Knew, p. 35.

*** Golding, The World I Knew, p. 216.