Book review: Weights and Measures by Jane Fraser

Niall Griffiths

In the handwritten introductory note in my review copy of this novel, the author declares that it is her ‘love letter to a time, place and community that is no more’. The time is 1939/1940, the place is a working class suburb of Swansea, and the community centres around the Froom family, whose business is butchery. And the expressed ‘love’ is deep and respectful and aching and thankfully free from any saccharine nostalgia; we are frequently reminded that this was a moment in history when humanity seemed to hate itself. It is struggle and support, it is horror and hope. It is a picture of lives continuing to seek sustenance and amelioration whilst being gulped in vast moments, seismic historical shifts, colossal geo-political processes. In the middle of a global conflagration, money must be made, tiled floors must be cleaned, puberty must be endured. Gas masks must be worn. ‘The awful pity of it all’ is the refrain.

Jim, the master butcher and patriarch, is a veteran of the first war, a carrier of learned ritual and duty that, to a 21st century sensibility, smacks of PTSD/OCD: ‘If he didn’t [polish the family’s shoes for the week ahead] then the world might fall apart or slide into some moral quagmire’. There is a stolid wife, Mary, and three children, the eldest of whom, William, is in the RAF (and yes, as it must, The Telegram eventually arrives). Meat, dead flesh, is everywhere; it is an element in which these people live; sausages, black pudding, dripping, accoutrements of diurnality such as cleaning cloths made from the skin and bone of once-living things. It’s neatly done, the conflation of butchery and war, explicitly so when a black market pig is smuggled in a hearse and when the youngest son, Teddy, regards the meathooks from which slabs of flesh hang and also his brother’s equipment: his ‘sausage kit bag stuffed with Christmas presents when he’d come home on leave;. . . his cocked air-force man’s hat; his empty great coat; sides of beef, carcasses of lambs, pigs hanging snout down – all merging into one another’. Death is essential to the human story and phenomenon, the author suggests; the continuation of some life is contingent on the premature and enforced cessation of others. In some instances, that involves sustenance and nutrition, and in others it involves the temporary satiation of the insane yearnings of a psychopath imbued with gargantuan and grotesque power. And conflict itself need not be expressed with fire and steel; when Granny Wiedenbach’s house is daubed with ‘NAZI WHORE LOOK OUT’, Mary, attempting to scrub the words away, reflects that the war ‘had come to Cwmbwrla: not with bombs, or gas, or burnt or bloodied bodies, but with a paint brush’. This episode is revisited later in the novel when Teddy observes the vandalism of the Italian-owned cafe: ‘bloody fascists. . . Fuck off back to where you came from. As far back as Teddy could remember, the Italian men had always been from around here; this was where they’d made their homes, where they belonged, [but] there was venom in the crowd’s high-pitched voices, and evil in the way they were pointing their fingers as though jabbing their very eyes’. Could be a description of many scenes on news broadcasts of recent years, and indeed contemporary relevance and concatenation appears to, in part, task the author’s intention: the aftermath of a bombing could be a scene from Gaza, Lebanon, New York on 9/11: ‘the three of them were covered with white dust: in their hair, over their faces, in their eyebrows, coating their dressing gowns and slippers. Their terrified eyes stared out from the ghostliness’.

The ‘awful pity of it all’ indeed, but consider the title: ‘Weights and Measures’ refers to a government agency whose job it was to discover any transgression of the rules of rationing; a fleeting moment in the narrative itself (although it is something of a cataclysm in Jim’s self-awareness), but it suggests counterbalance, calibration, equilibrium, or at least the possibility of such, and it is in the mutual love, empathy and reciprocal support between the characters that such a possibility is manifest. Jim, alone, lighting a fire, sees ‘everything ablaze again, heard that huge roar, smelled the stench of fumes and smoke and death. . . raging, engulfing Cwmbwrla, Swansea, Europe, the world, consuming everything and everyone in its advance, as it had done the first time around’. Yet we’ve seen this man befriending a robin; we’ve seen him, touchingly, worrying about his eternal soul whilst law-breaking in an effort to feed his family; and following this episode we will see him making love with Mary, ‘as if they were trying to recreate the beginning of everything when all of it was ending. . . and when it was over [he] pulled her nightdress back down and said Sorry, Mary, and she said It’s alright Jim. It’s alright’.

And so this book is, fundamentally, a paean of praise to human innocence and purity (quite apart from the notions of ‘racial purity’ that were fuelling the global abattoir of the times) and that part of the soul that will, in spite of all efforts to pollute it, remain unsullied. Refer back to that ‘love’ mentioned in the opening sentence of this review; it is a form of profound respect and reverence for human resilience and it glows on every page of this book. Mary ‘couldn’t explain the feeling’ we are told, when she’s in bed with her husband post-coital as the world outside the window burns: ‘Necessary, was the word that would come closest to it’. That’s an apt phrase for this accomplished novel, too.

Weights and Measures from Watermark Press is available to purchase now.