Lamorna

LAMORNA

Lamorna is the name of Barbara Berrill´s house, but, for Stephen, "Lamorna" means a lot of different things:

• the sweetness of Barbara and Keith's mother, (and therefore, his discovery of sexual attraction), 
• the match with which he and Barbara lit their first cigarrete (a rite of passage to adulthood)
•  the terror of the Lanes (and how he overcame it)  
• the silence under the elders (=the loneliness of Uncle Peter, and his terrible reality) 

Furthermore, the name seems to represent a concrete period and place in the narrator´s life. Stephen refers to the "Lamorna Time" and to " a distant land across the sea" The time  seems to be his transition between childhood and adulthood, and the place where that happened is the Close, in the suburbs of London.

The name is also linked to the smell of the privet in the lookout:"... And, woven somehow into the sweetness of the smell(...) L...A...M...O...R...N...A" We knew the smell was important for Stephen, as it aroused a lot of different feelings and in fact  is the catalyst of the whole story. Now we learn that the perfume of the privet and the name Lamorna are closely related, and they connote the same ideas for him. 

In conclusion, Lamorna is the  mixture of sensations, experiences, feelings  and discoveries that turned Stephen into an adult. It describes the time in which, while playing a spying game, he learnt about love, relationships and growing up, and in which he gradually abandonned the innocence of childhood.

Braemar

            In Spies there is a very special place where Keith and Stephen used to play together: Braemar. It used to be Miss Durrant´s house but very little remained of it as it had been destroyed by a stray  German incendiary bomb. The kids used it as their hideout and lookout and they planned all their games and adventures there.

              To start with, this "secret" place was full of vegetation due to the thick shrubs that used to be the front hedge of Mrs Durrant´s house. However, Keith and Stephen were able to pass through it and get to the middle of the undergrowth. Besides, among the shrubs there was the privet which the narrator  remembered and was looking for in the first chapter. The smell from these bushes is important because it is the catalyst for the whole story.

               For Keith and Stephen, Braemar was a secret place where they could get away from adults´ surveillance: "There´s only one place we can talk without being observed or overheard".There, they were away from the constraints imposed on them by the adults, and they were able to act following their own rules. It was as if they entered  a completely different world:  "Once we get there we´re across the frontier into another country altogether" They had to leave behind the refinement, luxury and politeness that governed Keith´s house: "We´ve come a long journey from the chocolate spread and the silver picture frames"

           Everything was different between the bushes, where the children´s imagination flowed. On the one hand, objects acquired a new meaning and importance. A  broken piece of metal from a shot-down German plane, the remains of Miss Durrant´s life or the units of ammunition Keith had traded at school were considered precious treasure  and were kept in a locked tin box. A long carving knife found out in the rubble of the house became the famous bayonet with which Mr Hayward had killed five Germans. On the other hand, the children´s behaviour turned wilder and more aggressive there. Stephen was made to take an oath on the sharpen “bayonet” that he would never speak about their investigations or his throat would be cut. This is the first instance in the novel in which they considered hurting each other dangerously.

             In the last part of chapter 2, Keith misspelt "private" and wrote "privet" instead. In Stephen´s memory, the two concepts were linked:  "privets" and their private place. It was only in this privacy (created by the privets)  that they could start their adventure. Their findings would be related to something private as it concerned one of their families and, as Keith made Stephen promise, it should remain private. The story stems both from the smell of the “privets” that are in a private place and from the children´s nosing into private matters.

An "embarrassingly familiar breath of sweetness" (chapter 1)

The text opens with an olfactory image that brings about an involuntary memory in the narrator. The term "involuntary memory" was coined by the French writer Marcel Proust and it refers to those moments of every day life when a sensory experience triggers a recollection of past events. It is called "involuntary" because it doesn´t entail a conscious intention to remember.

In chapter one, the smell that evokes the memories is an "embarrasingly familiar breath of sweetness" that appears towards the end of June and that the narrator cannot identify clearly. Its source seems to be the first mystery to be solved in the novel.

The smell is introduced first with the pronoun "it"("(...) and there it is again"), and its  referent ("breath of sweetness") appears only some words later.  In this way, the narrator conveys the indefiniteness that clouds the smell for him. He seems to need a pause (marked by the colon) to find the right words to describe this "it" that comes every June, and that mystifies him so much.

The second paragraph stresses the same idea. The first sentence starts with a modal of deduction ("It must come from one of the gardens")  showing the narrator´s incapacity not only to name the plant that gives it off but even to determine its location. He even finds it difficult to define the perfume exactly. His assertions about it and about the effects it has on him are interrupted by questions like "And what is it?" "I feel...What?" These questions suggest once more that the nature of the smell is so elusive that he needs time to elaborate his answers. He also uses a lot of vague terms to suggest his difficulty to express what this smell is like or what it makes him feel: "It is something quite harsh and coarse" "It has a kind of sexual urgency" "I have a kind of homesickness for where I am" "I have a feeling that something, somewhere has been left unresolved." At the same time, these terms engage the reader, who shares the narrator´s need to clarify all this vagueness and indefinition.

In the hope to find somebody who can help him define the source of his unrest, the narrator  asks his daughter where the smell comes from. She explains it comes from "liguster", a very common shrub. The word doesn´t seem to conjure up any mental image in the narrator, and he even wakes up in the middle of the night obssessed by the word.( At this point, we all agreed it is a pity he couldn´t have access to Google!) But, luckily he goes down to the dictionary and he solves the first mystery by realising his daughter wasn´t speaking English when she uttered the name of the plant. The English equivalent is still not revealed to us, but at least the narrator seems relieved to have been able to find it. At the same time, he feels a bit ashamed as it seems "a ridiculously banal and inappropriate cue for such powerful feelings".

The feelings and the memories the perfume brings about are related to the narrator´s childhood. He would like to go back to the place where he grew up in the hope to find his former home. He feels tempted to book a flight to that "far-off nearby land". This last phrase is a paradox, i.e. a seeming contradiction. In class, it took us some time to work out possible interpretations of this paradox. Juan suggested it may mean that even though that land is a near place, the narrator feels it is far away because he can´t visit it as often as he would like. Franco M. said it may be far away as regards distance, but the narrator may feel its closeness because of the powerful feelings it arouses. Another possible interpretation is that it is a nearby place but it is felt as if it were far off because it is related to a distant past.

In any case, a smell which is qualified with negative words like " vulgar", "coarse", "harsh", and whose source cannot be clearly identified  has the power to unsettle the narrator completely and to send him off in a quest to understand some past secrets and mysteries.