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Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski is a short novel and so compelling that readers may devour it in a single day – and then turn back to the beginning to re-read and linger over every immaculate sentence.
Hilary Wainwright goes back to France after he is demobilised in 1945 to search for his small son who is lost but may still be alive. Before she was killed by the Gestapo, Hilary’s Polish wife Lisa had written to him telling him that she could endure anything if only their baby was safe and Hilary would one day come for him.
But Hilary has shut his mind to unsettling emotion; the death of his beloved Lisa has left him terrified of exposing himself to more pain. His life has lost its meaning and there is only the artificial safety offered by escaping into literature. He ‘dreaded nothing more than to be stranded without print … he had chosen the books he had brought with him on this journey principally for their length, good fat books that might annihilate many hours.’ It is only for Lisa’s sake that Hilary is searching for a five-year-old child he remembers only as a baby, and who if found will disturb the precarious boundaries he has created for himself.
Published in 1949, Little Boy Lost mirrors a Europe struggling to come to terms with the unspeakable horrors of war. Marghanita Laski paints a devastating picture of post-war occupied France – the everyday squalor and food shortages, the stench of corruption, the shifting of guilt and denial of collaboration. As one character says: ‘To me, the most horrible thing is hearing everyone excusing themselves on the ground that deceit was started against the Germans and has now become a habit…’ Her schoolmaster son replies, ‘I am not sure that we really deceive ourselves. I think we pretend this and that because we must be ashamed of so many things, even of the truth.’
‘The only good thing we can do, the only goodness we can be sure of, is our own goodness as individuals and the good that we can do individually. As groups we often do evil that good may come and very often the good does not come and all that is left is the evil we have pointlessly done.’
Pierre, working for the underground resistance, here repeats the words of his dead fiancée to Hilary, spoken the night before she was taken away to be tortured and killed. He argues that ‘this was an impractically idealistic point of view in France at this time. Nearly all the work that I personally was doing was evil by Jeanne’s definition – spying and destruction and murder – and I believed, as we all did, that it was necessary and right, not of itself, of course, but because the end was good.’ He tells Hilary how he quarrelled bitterly with Jeanne, accusing her of being a traitor to France, but that she insisted, ‘All that seems to be certain is that we should each do good where it is near to us, where we can see the end of it, and then we know that something positive has been done.’
Arriving at the dirty unnamed town clearly meant to represent all of France, Hilary determines not to become emotionally involved with the engaging child at the orphanage who might or might not be his missing son. The war left millions of displaced children all over Europe, many with no idea of who they were or where they came from. Hilary is horrified by the stark poverty of the orphanage: tubercular children are mixed with healthy ones and none have enough to eat or clothes to wear. How can he be sure that this child is his? Does he even want him to be? In his attempts to approach the whole business with a clinical detachment, Hilary is haunted by fears that he can no longer love, comforting himself with sordid sexual pleasures, but somehow without entirely losing the reader’s sympathy. He is, in effect, as lost as his son. In mounting despair we long for him to do the right thing and it looks as if he isn’t going to.
It’s seventy-five years since Marghanita Laski published Little Boy Lost, but it’s a book with a timeless quality, as deeply moving and relevant in 2024 as in 1949. On the surface it’s a simple story, simply told – the search for a missing child – but it carries with it profound questions about good and evil, and our responsibility for the moral choices we make.
When Hilary asks Pierre if he wonders, with every stranger he meets, what he did under the Occupation, Pierre answers that he is ‘tired with “collaborationist” as a term of abuse; we each did under the Germans what we were capable of doing; what that was, was settled long before they arrived.’
We might ask ourselves, what would I have done? What would I do now?
There’s a marvellously thoughtful and illuminating afterword by Anna Sebba in the Persephone Books edition of this unforgettable novel, but don’t look at this before finishing the book.
And despite the devastating tension, resist the temptation to skip ahead. You need to read every word to grasp the significance of the ending. If ever a novel had a perfect final sentence, this is it.