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– GRUMBLING AT LARGE – in Swan Arcade, wool purveyors, where ‘I was allowed to be a little eccentric’, his personality being ‘a peculiar mixture of the insufferable and the enchanting’. He believed the years 1911–1914 were his most formative and rewarding period. Bright Day, for many devotees the favourite Priestley novel, and the most auto­biographical, reflects those years, telling of a young man’s enlightenment in the carefree years before the Great War, via a cultured and musical family with several lively daughters. In an early essay, Jack had ­written wistfully about a Yorkshire family, the Thorlaws, at whose hospitable house folks gathered. There Jack sang comic songs ‘by the hour, without shame’. The people who thronged to the Thorlaws’ were ‘nothing like the beautiful, the clever, the distinguished persons whose acquaintance I can boast today’ (he was writing this in 1927), ‘but dimly consecrated in my memory by a happiness that something seems to have withered away, shining there in a queer kind of Golden Age, strangely compounded of provincial nobodies and cheap port and chaff and comic songs.’ But overshadowing Bright Day was foreboding as well as nostalgia. That Golden Age was summarily disrupted by the outbreak of World War I. In 1914, Jack volunteered with the 10th Duke of Wellington’s West Riding battalion, of the 23rd division. He celebrated his twenty-first birthday on the front line, ‘among shells and bloodstained barbed wire’. His experiences in the trenches ‘when the guns began to roar and the xii
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– Introduction – corpses piled up’ remained ‘an open wound that never healed’. The Great War afflicted him deeply. He was luckier than the doughty lads who joined the Bradford ‘Pals’ battalion, ‘the most eager, promising and finest members of my generation’ who were butchered on the Somme on 1 July 1916. So he was deprived of most childhood friends (‘The men that were boys when I was a boy are dead’), and he very nearly died himself. He never wrote of his experiences, but he read voraciously and observed human behaviour. ‘Reunion Battalion Dinner’ tells of his reunion in Bradford with survivors of his platoon, seventeen years on, in which he expresses his outrage that some old comrades were absent because they could not afford to pay for, or to dress for, such a reunion dinner. Home from the trenches, Lieutenant John Priestley, aged twenty-four, took advantage of the ex-officer’s grant to go to Cambridge, to read English literature at Trinity Hall, switching to history and political science. Cambridge did not dazzle him; he had ‘left too many illusions flattened in the Flanders mud’. He could hardly enjoy undergraduate life on a grant that scarcely kept him alive. ‘I had never felt really happy there, never even felt cosily at home.’ The literary critic known as Q, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, tried to persuade him to stay on and teach, but he was ‘too bloody-minded a fellow to fall in with academic life, or to take a teaching job’. Besides, he had already published his first book, Brief Diversions, ‘a little book of undergraduate odds xiii

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– GRUMBLING AT LARGE –

in Swan Arcade, wool purveyors, where ‘I was allowed to be a little eccentric’, his personality being ‘a peculiar mixture of the insufferable and the enchanting’.

He believed the years 1911–1914 were his most formative and rewarding period. Bright Day, for many devotees the favourite Priestley novel, and the most auto­biographical, reflects those years, telling of a young man’s enlightenment in the carefree years before the Great War, via a cultured and musical family with several lively daughters. In an early essay, Jack had ­written wistfully about a Yorkshire family, the Thorlaws, at whose hospitable house folks gathered. There Jack sang comic songs ‘by the hour, without shame’. The people who thronged to the Thorlaws’ were ‘nothing like the beautiful, the clever, the distinguished persons whose acquaintance I can boast today’ (he was writing this in 1927), ‘but dimly consecrated in my memory by a happiness that something seems to have withered away, shining there in a queer kind of Golden Age, strangely compounded of provincial nobodies and cheap port and chaff and comic songs.’

But overshadowing Bright Day was foreboding as well as nostalgia. That Golden Age was summarily disrupted by the outbreak of World War I. In 1914, Jack volunteered with the 10th Duke of Wellington’s West Riding battalion, of the 23rd division. He celebrated his twenty-first birthday on the front line, ‘among shells and bloodstained barbed wire’. His experiences in the trenches ‘when the guns began to roar and the xii

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