Frames, Frontiers and Fantasies: ‘Nasty Ladies Within’ — Marion Milner and Stevie Smith

Abstract

Seventeen-months-old Christine, whose poignant ‘mums’ open Stokes’ 1947 Inside Out is in fact a child named Carol (temporarily separated from her mother in war-time) whose suffering is described in Anna Freud’s and Dorothy Burlingham’s Young Children In War-Time.³ Stokes was not alone in thinking that the themes of human nature could be found in the war nurseries. But where he finds a disquieting eloquence in Christine’s/Carol’s monotonous monologue, others were more nervous about the apparent frailty of the frontier between inside and outside: inside the head, outside in the world, inside the nursery, outside in the war. In War in the Nursery, Denise Riley quotes a leader (entitled ‘War in the Nursery’) for the British Medical Journal in 1944. The editorial notes, with due foreboding, that ‘in the years from two to five the battle between love and primitive impulse is at its height … Winnicott, Buhler, Isaacs, Bowlby and others all note the turbulent characteristics of the age … Destructive impulses let loose in the war may serve to fan the flame of aggression natural to the nursery age’.⁴

In the nursery, that is where to find the themes of human nature: the rest is ‘working-out’, though it be also the real music. But if we want the heart of the matter we must go back to the themes, however bare, to the matchless mental suffering, for instance, of seventeen-months-old Christine, who said: ‘Mum, mum, mum, mum, mum …’ continually in a deep voice for at least three days.

Adrian Stokes¹

There is no existence of a private peace: you fight for your country or, refusing to fight, you yet fight, and directly for the enemy. That is perhaps the ultimate most horrible demand of war; the State must have your conscience.

Stevie Smith²