“I’m sorry. There is no excuse for what I did. It’s too easy to say that we came back as beasts. We were beasts to begin with and then the war brought it out.” [loc. 3724]
Set in 1923, in a world still shadowed by the aftermath of the First World War. Lucy, fourteen, befriends Winifred, John and Edith when her grandfather arranges for her to go on Sunday-evening excursions to meet the Funny Men. These are four war veterans, each horribly disfigured, nicknamed after the characters in The Wizard of Oz: the Tin Woodman, the Lion, the Scarecrow and Toto (the latter in a wheelchair, his legs amputated). It's not initially clear that this is anything more than just, as the facilitator Coach says, giving these men the company of innocent children who 'are able to judge the quality of the man as opposed to what condition his hide is in'.
But all too soon it does become clear that the children are not just there for innocent companionship. They are there for what Winifred (known as Fred) calls 'Mench', short for 'Unmentionables': they are there because their guardians have prostituted them.
Fred says it can't be rape because they're getting paid. Lucy, the protagonist, is more worried about occasionally not hating it. She becomes quite fond of the Funny Men, especially the Tin Man. And when everything changes -- when Lucy and Fred find themselves drawn into the decadent, cocaine-fuelled, jazz-soundtracked social whirl at Goodwood House -- Lucy and the Tin Man manage, in a way, to save each other.
This is a deeply unsettling book, all the more so because it's often poetic and philosophical. In parallel with Lucy's story, there is the parable of Arthur Elms, who on the battlefield developed the ability to snap his fingers and produce flames. Arthur is not a likeable fellow -- he is referred to at one point as a 'discount Aleister Crowley' -- but it's interesting to see someone who has gained, rather than lost, from the war. The 'funny men' tell their war stories in the third person, an account of what happened to some other chap long ago: Arthur never tells his story at all.
The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times offers a sobering depiction of England after the First World War (and the Spanish flu, which Lucy's grandfather blames as much as the war for his failing business). Economic decline, grieving widows, physical and mental trauma, and a lot of soldiers dropped back into normal life as though none of the horror had ever happened. There are some annoying anachronisms, some painful scenes and some beautiful ones, and moments of true courage and love: but it was hard for me to forget that the story was built on a foundation of child prostitution.
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