Way of Life

BILL THATCHER was a New Englander. He spent his summers in the Berkshires, in a square, ancient, white house. In the winter his family lived in an apartment facing the green little park of Boston’s Louisburg Square. He went to Dartmouth, played the piano, wanted to make a career of music. But the early 1940’s found him in a small English village called Little Minchen; and instead of the ghosts of English yeomen appropriate to the thatched roofs and ancient verdure. Little Minchen was full of very contemporary American paratroopers. And it was because Bill Thatcher was an American paratrooper that British Major Wainwright asked him home. Major Wainwright had chucked London at the end of the previous war. He had dug in at Little Minchen, married his girl, and together they had raised vegetables, flowers, and an intelligent and lovely daughter named Minchen after the place in which they had created their own particular peace. Major Wainwright hated war. But the early 1940’s found Minchen a Land Girl who spent her free hours playing the piano for the American trops, and the Major and his wife doing their bit and taking the invasion of their private serenity with generosity and fortitude.

It was inevitable that Bill and Minchen should fall in love. They were both young, aware, sensitive. They had grown up with an ocean between them, yet they matched. One background was the equivalent of another, and the future was theirs to make, but first to believe in, to have faith in against all the odds and insecurities of a warring world. Way of Life is the story of this faith. Mr. Gibbs has written a tribute to the soundness of this newest war generation, less bitter and at the same time more knowing than their fathers’.

As counterpoint to a simple love story, there are italicized passages preceding the chapters, odd flashes and snapshots of the more sordid corners of the recent conflict, of any conflict. Mr. Gibbs’s hatred of war, his admiration and hope for the young, and his belief in life itself make his novel more than the pleasant reading of its surface — it is all on the side of the aflgels.

DOROTHY HILLYER.