Summary:
The Great War cost Robert his left leg and his first love.
A shattering breakup leaves Robert convinced that he is a destructive force in romantic relationships. When he finds himself falling in love with David, an old friend from boarding school, he's sure that he shouldn’t confess his feelings. But as their meandering conversations drift from books and poetry to more intimate topics, Robert’s love deepens - and so do his fears of hurting David.
Since he was wounded, David has been batted from hospital to hospital like a shuttlecock, leaving him adrift and anxious. His renewed friendship with Robert gives him a much-needed sense of peace and stability. Slowly, David opens up to Robert about the nervous fears that plague him, and when Robert responds with sympathy and support, David finds himself feeling much more than friendship. But he’s afraid that he’s already a burden on Robert, and that asking for more will only strain their developing bond.
Can these two wounded soldiers heal each other?
Content warning: period-typical homophobia and ableism (probably less than is strictly period typical, but this is a romance novel, not a historical essay), implied/referenced suicide.
Original Review November 2023:
For me there isn't enough WW1/post-war stories in the LGBTQ genre so when I find one, I immediately 1-click it and read it, well circumstances got in the way so even though I purchased The Larks Still Bravely Singing in November 2022 I didn't get a chance to read until now as I was preparing for my Veteran's Day blog post.
I was not disappointed. Aster Glenn Gray is a new author to me which for some can be scary but for me I find it a bit exhilarating, that unknown gets the blood pumping. I was well rewarded and the author is definitely going on my authors-to-watch-for list.
Many of the WW1-era stories in LGBTQ that I have read often have an element of shell shock or what we know today as PTSD, lets face it you can't have a true-to-the era story and not have veterans dealing with the aftereffects of what they faced. Some stories may focus on it deeper, there are a variety of ways shell shock effected the returning men but very few actually have MCs as amputees(at least of the ones I've read), some but not many. So to have both MCs as amputees I found the author handled it wonderfully, from David's refusal to wear a prosthetic to Robert's tiring on long distance walks. I can see where some readers might see David's lack of thinking of Robert's mobility issues as selfish but I don't see it that way. Perhaps it's my love of the era, both in fiction and fact, it can be hard to see past one's own limitations and that doesn't make them selfish, it makes them human. As a caregiver, people have to come to acceptance of themselves and others in their own time. Which is exactly what David and Robert do and that is what makes them tick.
I want to wrap them both up in Mama Bear Hugs and tell them everything is going to be all right but as I said above, we have to accept and find our place in the world on our time. David and Robert deal with these issues in a believable and entertaining way. The author says at the end of the blurb, "period-typical homophobia and ableism (probably less than is strictly period typical, but this is a romance novel, not a historical essay)" and I would say it's a pretty accurate description. There is enough truth to know the author didn't just try and write history by today's standards(which I truly hate) but gave enough fictional leeway to not be bogged down as a school lesson(which I also hate). The Larks Still Bravely Singing is a near perfect blend of fact and fiction to create a very entertaining and heartwarming tale of friendship, romance, and living again.
For me when reading fiction many beliefs can be suspended, its fiction afterall, but there are some elements that need to be addressed at least semi-accurately if not completely spot on, that can't be left at the sidelines. In Larks I was able to tick so many of these boxes:
WW1 ✅
Historical ✅
Post-war ✅
Caregiving ✅
Friendship ✅
Disability ✅
Romance ✅
Larks may not make my annual re-read list but it is definitely not a one and done read either.
Chapter 1
Robert Montagu had not been in bed with pneumonia for so very long. He had fallen ill in February, and it was only April when his sister Enid wheeled him onto the terrace of Montagu House. But the contrast between the raw winter weather when he took ill and the fresh bright sunshine of this gentle spring day made it seem like an eon.
“I feel like one of those chaps climbing out of Plato’s cave,” Robert commented to Enid. “Blinking at the bright light of reality after looking at shadows my whole life. I don’t seem to recognize any of these fellows.”
Secretly he thanked God for it. Perhaps all the chaps he’d slept with had moved along while he was ill.
“We got in a whole new crop of convalescents,” said Enid. For the duration of the war, Montagu House had become a convalescent home, specializing in amputees. After all, they had already installed a lift for Robert in 1915, after he lost his left leg above the knee at the Battle of Loos. It had been a difficult wound, and although Dr. Hartshorn remained optimistic that more surgeries would put it right, so far the stump was no good for a prosthetic.
“Don’t suppose you’d tell me who’s who?” Robert asked. Enid would know all the men’s names. Both Robert and Enid helped out in the wards, but Enid in particular was tireless, uncomplaining, at least on her own behalf; prepared to complain to the death if it might benefit one of the men. Once she and Dr. Hartshorn, the lead physician, had shouted at each other so loudly that it had been audible at a dinner party.
“That fellow walking around the fountain,” she said, with a tip of her head, “that’s Arthur Paige. He’s just got his artificial leg and he’s breaking it in, that’s why he’s walking like that, poor duck. And you see the two men playing catch?”
“They’ve got two arms between them?”
“Otis Sackville and Anthony Tarkington. They’ve both got their right arms, which would be lucky, only Tarkington was left-handed before, unfortunately.” Tarkington was rather good-looking, but in the tall weedy way that had never particularly appealed to Robert, so soon his gaze drifted on.
It caught on the oak tree halfway across the lawn—or rather, on the chap who was walking along one of the oak tree’s low-hanging limbs, arms outstretched as if he were balancing atop a fence, so that Robert could see that he had no left hand. Robert could not see his face, yet he felt a shock of recognition as he looked at the sunlight picking out glints of gold in his light brown hair.
“Are you cold, dear?” Enid asked.
Robert realized he had shivered. “No; no,” he said, but accepted the blanket that she draped around his shoulders anyway. He lifted his chin to gesture at the oak. “Who is that fellow?”
“That’s David Callahan,” Enid said, and Robert felt another chill. “Do you know him?” Enid asked.
“We went to school together.”
“Do you want me to call him over?”
“No,” said Robert, a little more forcefully than he intended. “Not just yet.”
***
David Callahan had not really cared about cricket.
That was, perhaps, an odd reason for Robert to take an interest in him, because Robert had been so mad about cricket that he cried (in absolute secrecy, of course) when he wasn’t made the captain of the eleven. And certainly David wasn’t the only boy who didn’t care about cricket, but most of the others were awful at it, and Robert had always taken their disdain as sour grapes.
David Callahan, on the other hand, showed the makings of a fine cricketer almost as soon as he’d learned the rules. But he never much seemed to care, either about cricket or about the social jockeying that was so much a part of a boy’s life at a boarding school like the Abbey. It had annoyed the other boys, who called it cheek and unforgivable side, although they soon took care not to say as much in front of David, because he had a right hook like a boxer’s.
Not that he cared about that, either. He fought willingly enough when someone else pushed him to it, but he never picked a fight himself.
Robert was in his final year at the Abbey and beginning to get bored of the school himself, and it seemed to him that David was bored of it too, because unlike the rest of them (still mired in kiddish games) he had faced real danger in his life, and true tragedy. He had grown up in South Dakota, land of blizzards, coyotes, tornados; and he had been orphaned when both his parents died in a train derailment.
And of course David was so good-looking, at least in Robert’s opinion. When David arrived, the prairie sun had tanned his face and bleached his hair, so that it gleamed like wheat. During the short days of the English winter his tan faded and his hair darkened to the color of toffee, but his dark wide set eyes retained their bright distant look, as if he were gazing at some far-off horizon that only he could see.
David was sixteen when he arrived at the Abbey, but a childhood diet of American eggs and bacon made him a head taller than the other boys his age, who had been raised on scant boarding school porridge. Sometimes he was clumsy, as if he were not yet accustomed to his size; and some of the boys took this to mean he was slow as a scholar, too, and certainly he didn’t have much background in Greek. “No call for it in the colonies?” asked Babcock, who died in the war three years later, so it wouldn’t do to call him a bully.
“No. We had better things to do,” said David, so indifferently that it took a few moments for Babcock to realize it was an insult. Then he pounced, and that was how the boys found out about David’s right hook.
In the common room, David never flinched and never backed down. But one day not long before the Christmas hols, Robert came upon him curled up in the back corner of the library in the little-used natural history section.
Robert had not expected to find anyone there. In fact, he had come to that corner of the stacks looking for a hiding place to cry over a letter Cyril Sibley had sent from Oxford. Cyril had always been liable to fits of piety, and now—he phrased this very delicately; nothing that could get either of them in trouble—he had decided that their love affair was wicked, and must be broken definitively off.
But David already occupied that corner, sitting with his legs drawn up to his chest, not crying, but flushed and pink about the eyes as if he had been earlier. He lifted a defiant face to Robert, daring him to make something of it.
They sized each other up. “I’m looking for a book about butterflies,” Robert said finally.
David regarded him. He had a sullen, aggressive look, and Robert wondered with wary excitement whether David might hit him. That would distract Robert from Cyril anyway.
But then David’s face relaxed. “You’re interested in natural history?”
Robert nodded. And then: “Are you interested in that sort of thing? Malmsey’s got a natural history club. We trot around the countryside looking for wildflowers and rock formations and so on, and then stop to eat lunch in a pub.”
Lunch in a pub was, secretly, Robert’s favorite part of these expeditions. He had only joined because Cyril was so barmy for natural history. But now he was glad he’d spent all those muddy half-holidays clumping around in the fields, because David’s face split in a big American grin. He lifted the book he was reading, so Robert could see the title: Fossils in Cornwall and Devon. “I’ll be spending Christmas with my aunts,” he said. “They’ve got a cottage in Hawley on the coast of Cornwall.”
“You’ve got aunts?” The rumor in the school was that David was an orphan with no relations but an uncle, who had dumped him here and forgotten him. Certainly no one sent him parcels, a grim fate in a school that expected its students to depend on packages from home to supplement the meager rations.
“Great-aunts. Spinster sisters.”
“Rough luck.”
“No,” said David, a note of surprise in his voice, and Robert realized (and felt a fool for not realizing before; but he had been thinking of his own crabby spinster great-aunt, who sometimes whacked Robert’s shins with her cane) that of course to David any relation who took an interest in him was good luck. “They want me to come. They sent a ticket for the train and everything. I haven’t met them before, but it has to be better than my uncle’s house. He’s still mad at my mother for marrying an Irishman.”
Robert restrained himself, with great difficulty, from asking how that had come to pass. Later perhaps, when they knew each other better. “There are supposed to be wonderful fossils down in Cornwall.”
“Oh yes,” David agreed. “That’s where they found so many of the earliest dinosaur fossils… well, not exactly where I’ll be, but the same general area.” He looked up at Robert, a bright appealing look that made Robert’s breath catch in his throat. “Do you think he’d let me join the expeditions? Malmsey?”
“I can’t see why not.”
“He knows loads about natural history,” David mused. Malmsey taught Latin, for which he did not noticeably care, and the boys often distracted him into talking about mollusks or birds’ eggs. “Why do you call him Malmsey?”
“Well, his surname is Clarence… like the Duke of Clarence, you know, who was drowned in a butt of malmsey… it’s affectionate,” said Robert, because it occurred to him that the murder connection might make it sound rather hostile to an outsider.
Then David laughed. Robert had never heard him laugh before, and the sound appealed to him even more than David’s bright upraised eyes. “What is it with English schoolboys and ridiculous nicknames? Are you afraid someone will hex you if they say your real name?” But David was grinning as he said it, and so Robert was not offended; felt, indeed, that he had made a friend.
The set up of the school did not usually encourage much mingling between boys in different forms, but Malmsey’s natural history excursions threw David and Robert together. They walked as a pair, David clambering up trees and sloshing down into streams and marshlands as Robert trailed after, watching David’s thighs as he slung a leg over a difficult branch, and the way his abdominal muscles flexed when he pulled himself up.
That was pleasurable enough in its way. But Robert liked even better when they stopped for tea at a pub or a farmhouse. At school David was generally reserved; the boys had to badger him to hear anything about his old life. (Robert thought this was a clever piece of work on David’s part: the boys wouldn’t have rated his stories of snakes and tornados half so highly if David told them willingly.) But after a long day tramping the countryside, mud-spattered and red nosed with cold, as they sat drinking tea from tin cups in a farmyard David would talk.
“We used to have a brown Jersey just like that,” he might reminisce, nodding to the cow chewing its cud placidly in the field, and then he would be off. “The homestead never paid, though. Dad had to get a job at Mr. Mahoney’s dairy, maintaining the machinery.” He said this quite as naturally as if it were a normal thing to have one’s father go to work in a dairy. One of the farm dogs came over to sniff at their feet. It pressed its nose into David’s cupped hand, licking for crumbs, and David fondled its ears. “After my parents died, Mr. Mahoney offered me a job. I could have worked my way through high school, but then Uncle Bernard,” (he pronounced it that American way: Bernard, the accent on the second syllable) “sent a telegraph, and everyone was so impressed by the idea of an English boarding school…”
David’s hand had stilled on the dog’s ears, and the dog gazed mournfully up at him. Robert swung his foot sideways to kick David’s. “Well,” Robert said. “I’m glad you’re here.” David smiled over at him, a quick smile that went to Robert’s heart, and Robert added, “My grandfather—my mother’s father, I mean—started out as a farmer in Pennsylvania. My mother always says they were poor as church mice till Grandpa found mineral deposits on the land and started a paint factory.”
“Why did she ever come to England?”
It was a cheeky question, especially spoken in that tone. But David rarely seemed to realize he was being cheeky (off school grounds he even called Robert by his Christian name, although at least he had the sense not to try that in the Abbey), and, off school grounds, Robert often let him get away with it. “I suppose she had some idea of marrying into the English aristocracy,” Robert said, “although she didn’t quite make it.”
In summer term Robert offered to help David with his Greek. (He had some idea of reading the Phaedrus with him, but David’s Greek proved so abysmal as to make this impossible.) All the seniors got their own studies at the Abbey, tiny rooms that had one been monk’s cells, and so David began to come often to Robert’s study.
Robert could not say exactly when David had begun to return his interest. Certainly he’d seemed frightfully pi at first, worse than pi in fact, absolutely oblivious to everything of that sort.
But he was not oblivious any longer by summer term. Robert remembered a particular day, a warm golden day in June, David sitting on the hassock at Robert’s feet. Late afternoon, motes of dust floating in the sunlight that poured through the windows. Halcyon days.
David had lifted his face toward Robert, and Robert knew in that moment that he could take David’s face in both hands and kiss him and David would let him, would love it, would be his.
And he had not because—well, it seemed unfair, in a way. There was an expected order of things, quite different from the sermons in church but even more ironclad in its own way. The new boys were supposed to hero-worship the seniors in their nearly grown-up majesty. Then, as they grew into seniors themselves, their affections were meant to turn back toward the new boys, as the closest thing available to girls; and once they’d left school, after Oxford or Cambridge or Sandhurst, they were supposed to fall in love with women.
Robert had succeeded splendidly in the first phase of this plan, and then never got past it; when he should have been charmed by the girlish beauty of the new boys, he kept falling in love with his fellow seniors. Of course, David was younger than Robert, but he was almost as tall, and although Robert loved the way he looked, he was not the kind of good-looking that could be described as pretty.
Robert did not quite know, then; he was still young enough to push inconvenient knowledge away from him. But he already suspected that he did not have it in him to fall in love with a girl.
David, though. He told stories about his American high school, about the classes with boys and girls sitting side by side, dances in the gymnasium… “Did you dance with a girl, Yankee?” Thatcher had cried, his face avid; and although most of the boys would have scorned to be so obvious, affected in fact a haughty dislike of girls, they crowded round to hear as David said yes, he had, lots of girls, and it was splendid, his face growing ever so slightly pink with the memory.
David had not deigned to share her name with the crowd, but on one of their tramps through the countryside, he had mentioned to Robert the girl he had liked best, Caro. The corners of his eyes crinkled as he reminisced, “We used to tease her because she curled her hair.”
“She sounds vain,” Robert pronounced, goaded by a stab of jealousy that he did not recognize as such until long after. David had frowned and told him nothing else—in fact, stopped talking to him entirely for the next hour. Robert had told himself he was glad, and didn’t care, and really had been sorry.
David liked girls. It would just complicate things for him if Robert corrupted him. And so Robert, aglow with the flame of conscious chivalry, had risen from his chair to lean out the window, and point into the empty sky, and say, “I say, old chap, is that a curlew?”
It seemed an awful lot of rot now, looking back. They should have seized the day. But who knew then that time was so short? It was June of 1914. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not yet been assassinated, and they had no reason to believe that the high Edwardian summer would not continue forever.
Aster Glenn Gray writes fantasies with a romantic twist, or romances with a fantastic twist. (And maybe other things too. She is still a work in progress.) When she is not writing, she spends much of her time haunting libraries, taking long walks, and doing battle with the weeds that seek to topple her tomato plants.
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