Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

In the brief golden years of King Edward VII’s reign, Rosie McCosh and her three sisters are growing up in an idyllic and eccentric household in Kent, with their ‘pals’ the Pitt boys on one side of the fence and the Pendennis boys on the other. But their days of childhood innocence and adventure are destined to be followed by the apocalypse that will overwhelm their world as they come to adulthood.

For Rosie, the path ahead is full of challenges: torn between her love for two young men, her sense of duty and her will to live her life to the full, she has to navigate her way through extraordinary times. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War?

Louis de Bernières’ magnificent and moving novel follows the lives of an unforgettable cast of characters as the Edwardian age disintegrates into the Great War, and they strike out to seek what happiness can be salvaged from the ruins of the old world.

Louis de Bernièresis the best-selling author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin , which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best Book in 1995. His most recent books are Birds Without Wings and A Partisan’s Daughter , a collection of stories Notwithstanding and a collection of poetry, Imagining Alexandria .

THIS WAS THE day that Daniel vaulted the wall.

Not many weeks previously the tiny Queen had begun to lose her appetite. In Marseilles, President Kruger of South Africa, fleeing into exile laden with wealth stolen from his own people, raised the rabble to new frenzies of anti-Britishness, and hotels where British travellers were thought to be staying were besieged.

The Queen grew drowsy. She had never before shown any lapse of energy or attention, but now she nodded off even at crucial moments. She received a letter from a boy bugler in the Devons, telling her how he had been the one to sound the charge at Waggon Hill, and she managed to reply to it.

The Queen travelled from London to Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. She loved it there, and had long considered it to be her real family home. She had her own little beach with a bathing hut, and there was a miniature house where her children, now scattered across Europe, used to play when Albert was still alive. Across the Solent she could visit the vast military hospital that she had set up at Netley, bringing the scarves that she liked to knit for the wounded soldiers.

The Queen found that she could not speak when the Brazilian ambassador came to present his credentials. She was forgetting how to talk. She failed to recognise Lord Roberts when he returned in triumph from South Africa in order to become the new Commander-in-Chief. He was bewildered and grief-stricken.

The Queen performed her last great imperial act, and proclaimed the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia. Her visit to the Riviera was cancelled, and the Keeper of the Privy Purse was obliged to pay out £800 in compensation to the Hotel Cimiez.

It had been so long since the death of a sovereign that no one knew what to say, or how to behave. Lord Salisbury refused to talk about the accession ceremonies because it was too upsetting. The well-to-do cancelled their dinner parties and balls, and the frivolous optimism that had accompanied the arrival of a new century evaporated. It was January, and the dark clouds that wept rain onto the land complemented the mood of the people beneath them.

The Queen’s relatives and descendants converged on Osborne from all over Europe. In South Africa the war that was supposed to have been won already was carried on by Botha, Smuts and de Wet. Money and young men continued to be expended. The British troops were killed mainly by enteric fever.

The tiny Queen died. The Lord Mayor of London was informed, and then the rest of the world. Whilst the nation lay stunned, the Great argued about what should be done next. Lord Acton announced that King Edward VII could not call himself Edward VII because he was not descended from previous Edwards. Did the Lord Mayor of London count as an ex-officio member of the Privy Council? He decided that he did, and gatecrashed it. Who was in charge of the funeral? Was it the Lord Chamberlain or the Duke of Norfolk, even though he was a Catholic? The Duke insisted on his historic right, and the King conceded. Lady Cadogan received an invitation to the interment that was intended for her husband, in which she was requested to come wearing trousers.

The Queen’s coffin was so minute that it might have been that of a child. King Edward and the Kaiser walked behind it as it was drawn through Cowes. It came across the Solent in a battleship, flanked by the greatest fleet in the world. In London the route from Victoria Station to Buckingham Palace then Paddington Station was blocked solid with mourners hoping to see the great procession of the gun carriage. Behind it rode King Edward, flanked by the Duke of Connaught and Kaiser Wilhelm, followed by the handsome and slim Crown Prince of Germany, the embodiment of hope for his nation, the guarantor of its great future as a beacon of civilisation.

The Queen’s body was laid to rest at Windsor. The grandmother of Europe had gone, and everyone knew as if by instinct that a momentous era had suddenly ended. She left behind railways that ran at sixty miles an hour, with carriages that nowadays had roofs on them. Vast liners crossed the Atlantic in two weeks. Bull-baiting had gone, and there was a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals and another for the prevention of cruelty to children. Swearing had become taboo in polite society, and aristocratic men no longer got so drunk at dinner parties that ladies had to make their escape through the windows. There were now aerated bread shops, and Lyons Corner Houses where one was served by ‘Nippies’ in white frilly aprons. Anybody these days could buy coffee. The River Fleet was no longer an open sewer. Many had electric light, and there was clean water laid on in the working-class districts for half an hour every day, except for Sundays, causing an awful elbowing on Saturdays. Motor cars no longer caught fire when you started them up. They had, however, spoiled the evening drive in hansoms through Hyde Park. The cult of respectability had introduced a blessed order into people’s lives, and at the same time opened the door for marvellous hypocrisy.