There's No Story There

There's No Story There is about the lives of conscripted workers at Statevale, an enormous rural munitions factory somewhere in England during the Second World War.

The workers are making shells and bombs, and no chances can be taken with so much high explosive around. Trolleys are pushed slowly, workers wear rubber-soled soft shoes, and put protective cream on their faces. Any kind of metal, moving fast, can cause a spark, and that would be fatal. All cigarettes and matches are handed in before the workers can enter the danger zone, and they wear asbestos suits.

'Inez Holden is a great lost voice from the literature of the Second World War. These pieces of fictionalised reportage place her on the same shelf of Forties-era writing as Julian Maclaren-Ross and Henry Green.' - D J Taylor, author of The Prose Factory, and Lost Girls. Love, War and Literature, 1939-1951.

'There's No Story There is a nuanced, understated and incisive portrait of wartime industry. It's a classic of observational writing and a vital debunking of "people's war" mythology.' - Gill Plain, Professor of English Literature, University of St Andrews

“'Inez Holden is a great lost voice from the literature of the Second World War. These pieces of fictionalised reportage place her on the same shelf of Forties-era writing as Julian Maclaren-Ross and Henry Green.' -- D J Taylor, author of The Prose Factory, and Lost Girls. Love, War and Literature, 1939-1951.'There's No Story There is a nuanced, understated and incisive portrait of wartime industry. It's a classic of observational writing and a vital debunking of "people's war" mythology.' -- Gill Plain, Professor of English Literature, University of St Andrews”

‘This is a journal of the tense months between Dunkirk and the start of the Blitz – months when a German invasion of Britain seemed both imminent and inevitable. It’s written with a steady intensity; raw worry pokes through the elegant prose, and though there are many vivid details, and moments of wit and levity, this is also an extraordinary meditation of what it means to be free in a world of encroaching tyranny.’ — Lissa Evans

Inez Holden (1903-1974) was a British journalist, novelist, BBC script-writer and cultural critic. As well as being one of the Bright Young Things of the 1930s, she was later associated with George Orwell (briefly his lover, also a writing partner), novelist Anthony Powell, H G Wells (she rented his spare apartment in London during the Second World War, and introduced him to Orwell, unsuccessfully), and was one of the very few women to be published in Cyril Connolly's haute highbrow magazine Horizon. Her WW2 writing was focused on the experiences of the working classes and the voiceless. She published ten books, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, between 1929 and 1956. She did not marry or have children.

There's No Story There is about the lives of conscripted workers at Statevale, an enormous rural munitions factory somewhere in England during the Second World War. The workers are making shells and bombs, and no chances can be taken with so much high explosive around. Trolleys are pushed slowly, workers wear rubber-soled soft shoes, and put protective cream on their faces. Any kind of metal, moving fast, can cause a spark, and that would be fatal. All cigarettes and matches are handed in before the workers can enter the danger zone, and they wear asbestos suits. 'Inez Holden is a great lost voice from the literature of the Second World War. These pieces of fictionalised reportage place her on the same shelf of Forties-era writing as Julian Maclaren-Ross and Henry Green.' -- D J Taylor, author of The Prose Factory, and Lost Girls. Love, War and Literature, 1939-1951 . 'There's No Story There is a nuanced, understated and incisive portrait of wartime industry. It's a classic of observational writing and a vital debunking of "people's war" mythology.' -- Gill Plain, Professor of English Literature, University of St Andrews

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