The Tin Nose Shop – Don J Snyder
I don’t like being told what to read. Now that I am old I want to make my own choices and even friends suggesting books that they wish to lend me has a certain responsibility attached. To be polite I really ought to read the kind offering! Anyway, sometimes of course I am seriously pleased that I accepted and read the proffered story and this is a case in point.
Here we are in the ghastly years of the First World War with young men rushing to join up, experience the ‘glory of war’ and of course be home by Christmas. As the brutal, agonising reality of trench warfare is gradually exposed, men returning home; injured, broken and traumatised, are left with a very personal battle: rehabilitation into civilian life. As a result of the bombs and explosives used, there were very many cases of extreme facial disfigurement. This is now well over a century ago and there was a limit as to what surgeons were able to do. Many men felt unable to be seen in public or, distressingly, to allow their families to see what had happened to them.
In a London hospital and one in Paris, artists and sculptors were brought in to make masks to cover severe facial damage. They were given a photo of the patient pre-war and using strips of plaster, thin sheets of copper and very specialised paints they created a picture of the face. Sometimes hair was added to give a moustache, eyebrows and sideburns. The mask could be attached using the arms of spectacles or if the patient had no ears, then fastenings to go round the head. Some wondered if the government was as keen to shield the public from the horrors of the trenches as much as giving a little dignity back to those crushed and damaged young men. Maybe that is a rather cynical.
‘The Tin Nose Shop’ (that is what these hospital departments became called) begins with two close friends, Ned and Sam, going off to war, the former enthusiastically, the latter markedly less so. They have for years been part of a friendship triangle with Katie, who Ned marries and has a child with just before leaving for the front. (I was reminded by this love triangle of Mary Wesley’s ‘A Camomile Lawn’ where she has characters in a similar position, just one war later.) ‘Promise me you’ll bring my husband back,’ Katie says to Sam, and of course he says ‘yes.’ A promise he is unable to keep. These are the years when perceived cowardice was punished by the firing squad and it seems this might be Sam’s fate. However, the situation is not quite as the reader is led to believe and it is only gradually that we are told the true series of events.
As a talented artist who had been at art school before the war, Sam is recruited for work making masks. He has his own demons to quell and is sometimes almost as disturbed as the poor soldiers who are sent to him. He has not made contact with Katie to tell her anything of what had happened in France, he cannot share his mental torment with those who are prepared to listen and he has lost any sense of self worth. But, he is still under the auspices of army command, so he continues to use his artistic skills and make masks.
This is both an historically interesting story and a very affecting one. The characters are well drawn and the blissful ignorance of those in England about the reality of war taking place in France and Belgium, comes across powerfully. I don’t know the number of men shot for cowardice when actually they were suffering from shock and trauma but it was egregious, even if one needs to add that contextual phrase about it ‘being of its time.’
The author comments that whilst doing research for this story he found that some people injured in the Omagh IRA bombing in Ireland in 1998 chose to wear masks rather than undergo a lengthy tranche of plastic surgery.
This is an excellent novel. I’m glad my friend offered it to me.