Chapter 14, Just Like The Ones We Used To Know, Christmas Day

[rthstewart]

Finally, I get Chapter 14 up, after a detour to something hinted at in Under Cover.

There actually isn't that much research that I haven't already discussed before.

The King's Speech took some research to find and while it's quite the info dump, I just didn't feel right editing it.  The part in the House of Russell was in my previous Christmas story but edited slightly to fit better within TSG. 

I did have fun with Susan's fashions and spent a lot of time here looking at the pictures of French fashion from the 1930s.  I imagine Susan wearing something like this:



Source:  HPrints  Also at this stte, you can see pictures of the sort of lovely things that First Officer Pole has in  her attic. 

Oh, I dropped the hint that Michael Pole is with the RAF Photo Reconnaissance Unit flying out of RAF Benson in Oxfordshire.

Edmund's musing on the Leipzig War Crimes tribunals come from various sources and while generally reviled as a failure were also precedent-setting.  My particular spin on it comes from Telford Taylor's The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials.  You can read the basics in the wiki entry.

  This page has good information about the context of Foreign Secretary Eden's statement to the House of Commons on December 17, 1942 regarding what would eventually be called the Holocaust.

Thanks to adaese, Doctor Dolly, anastigmatfic, h_dash_h and felipemarcusthomas who have been invaluable as I juggled with the different interactions. 

That's all.  Thanks so much for reading.  I'm now at the point where I can really turn to the NBB.  First check in is in a week and I've not started, so here's hoping I can pull it off.  And that's all for now.  I do hope I hear from folks.  I was two days late posting this.  I promised Christmas Day, but I felt I disappointed by using the King's Christmas Message and the repeat of the Russell House part, so I wrote the Under Cover tie in.  Writing that segment took a little time. 

Comments

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

I rewrote the scene with Susan and Helen several times. In one version, Susan understands what is going on between Beatrice and her mother. In the one that ended up in the story, she does not. Further, Susan, in some versions, was very manipulative. I really wanted Susan to hear that her mother was proud of her. Where I came down is that it's a lot easier for parents to understand what their children have been up to, than it is for children to understand what their parents are doing. It's very hard for children to see parents as people. That viewpoint in the end very much colored the scene. So, what Susan thinks of the reports of her father? I wonder if Susan is since the trip naturally aligning herself more with her father, more likely to dismiss her mother as silly, dumb, interfering, or not very sophisticated. She's not actively thinking that, but she's acting it out.

Long answer for I'm not sure how she feels about her father. I think she's probably a few years away from accepting him as a jerk. He's unfaithful and that's bad, but maybe Susan reasons that's just what powerful men do. Or maybe she draws a line with her mother.

As for Jill's father, I was thinking he would be a convenient person to kill.

[cofax7]

Hmm, but would Susan see her father as powerful? I mean, they are a middle-class family (albeit with some education), and while Wassname Pevensie's expertise may be valuable to the war effort, I don't get the sense anywhere of him being a man of authority except in a very limited way.

And Susan, after fifteen years as a reigning monarch, is even less likely to see her father as a powerful figure.

This is a tricky situation to navigate--that children don't see their parents as fully human is clear, but then again these children aren't, really.

... I do hope you won't kill Jill's father, if only because you already killed off a sympathetic African-American character.

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

Those are excellent observations about Susan's reaction to her father. I have some things very clearly set out regarding Mrs. P, Edmund, and Peter, but less with Lucy and Susan. I'd actually assumed that in comparison to the other children, he's extremely proud and supportive of Susan doing the proper, good, loyal British conservative thing of being a Cold War Warrior. She's not a disappointment to him as the others are.

And yes, you are quite right. I did not want to kill Michael Pole for several reasons and the fact that Guy Hill is dead was one of them.

Thanks again, so much!

[cofax7]

I'd actually assumed that in comparison to the other children, he's extremely proud and supportive of Susan doing the proper, good, loyal British conservative thing of being a Cold War Warrior. She's not a disappointment to him as the others are.

Really? Because even my father would be appalled at the thought of me being an actual spy and going into danger and all that unladylike rot, and he's nearly a full generation younger than Mr. Pevensie. I think John Pevensie would be not only appalled but enraged that Helen knew about it and indeed encouraged it. What's good for grown women is not appropriate for his darling daughter. I see massive, massive battles on this issue. And in some way I could see Peter siding with his father, not because of the danger, but because of the ethical murkiness that he so dislikes.

John Pevensie (it is John, right?) would know, because of his intelligence work, the risks that any women in the SOE run, and if Susan had to play a part in the war effort, he would want her safely tucked away at Betchley, punching cards. Women on the front lines? That's for the Soviets, not for England.

... or that's my take on the issue, anyway. If you can bring him around to it, I'll be interested in how you make it work.

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm interested to see how it will work too! My thinking had definitely been more in the direction of post-War when he thinks Susan has some nice government type job, doing the good work, fighting the fight, supporting the anti-Communist cause. Whether she actually does (or is a spy, or whatever) is another matter but I had seen them as being very aligned with the conservatives and England as Empire and being virulently anti-communist, as opposed to Lucy and Peter who are moving very far left.

[h-dash-h.livejournal.com]

Which is interesting, because in Narnia the (nominally) domestic territory they had the most trouble with, the Lone Islands, was populated by hyper-capitalists. I suppose one could fit Narnia into a conservative viewpoint on libertarian grounds, but it seems to lean more towards low-maintenance liberalism, to me. I mean, the response to the problem of Jezebel the Beaver was to give her a government job ;-)