The Darkest Hours is a novel of conflicts and contrasts set against the backdrop of WWII.
In the context of the day, 1939-1940, through choice or circumstances, none of the main characters can lay claim to an unblemished personal history. The handy excuse, “There’s a war on,” is used to justify behaviour that, in normal times, would otherwise raise eyebrows and provoke a comment about the questionable actions and character of those concerned. Over the course of the novel, the flawed ethics of the characters reveal themselves.
The aristocratic and enormously wealthy Lyndhurst family hide their grubby family secret beneath a veneer of respectability, a secret that would have them ostracised by their peers, and Lord Lyndhurst tossed from Churchill’s wartime cabinet and stripped of his peerage. Lady Lyndhurst is not above using that secret as leverage.
The four adult Lyndhurst offspring are not shy about granting their hormones full rein, at least in private, any more than their parents. Gilbert, the oldest, pays for his women. Brilliant, beautiful Mary, a Cambridge University don, crossed the threshold with her naval officer boyfriend before the story begins. Victoria, bright, beautiful and curious, still relatively unsullied yet eager to explore her options, offers herself to Miles Shepton, her younger brother, Simon’s, old school friend and now Hurricane fighter pilot. Dashing, handsome Miles will happily oblige anyone in a skirt regardless of age or social position and jumps at the opportunity to relieve Victoria of her burden of chastity. And Simon, in bomb disposal, now that the war has reached England’s shores, encounters Claire, whose mother, Odette Bromley, is Lord Lyndhurst’s mistress.
Tristan, Lord Northbrooke, once owned a spacious townhome in London’s Regent’s Park, a wealthy neighbourhood of Georgian homes. After his father’s death, and Northbrooke’s loss of his job as an art appraiser for an auction house, he turned the house into a gambling den and high-class brothel. Lyndhurst is a client. When Northbrooke’s debts exceed his ability to repay and faced with the prospect of bankruptcy, Lyndhurst offers to buy the house for the amount of the indebtedness plus one guinea. Northbrooke has little option but to accept. A week later, he takes a room in a rundown row house in the slums of the east end of London, and a job as a clerk in an insurance brokerage. Tristan’s landlady, Dulcie Smith, is a prostitute who works from home, and her identical twin, worldly-wise, ten-year-old daughters, Dot and Madge, are fully aware of what goes on when their mum is “on the job.”
Having determined that one night under Dulcie’s roof is one too many, Tristan pays for the balance of the week’s rent in advance and then offers to help Dot and Madge with their homework, further trapping him to an indefinite stay. On his salary of £6 a week, the rent is all he can afford, and besides, he grows fond of the twins. He sees potential in them and wants to steer them away from following their mother’s profession.
Along with his enormous wealth, Lyndhurst acquired a position of power and influence as the Minister of Munitions in Churchill’s government and the trust of Churchill himself. He is also a man of great political ambition. His taste in women ranges from Odette, his mistress of ten years, to his real preference, girls on the cusp of puberty, and is willing to pay handsomely to hasten their paths to adulthood.
The Darkest Hours takes the reader from the wretched poverty of the slums to the airfields and skies of the south of England and northern France, from the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to mansions in Hampshire and London.
On the first night of the Blitz in September 1940, as the story nears its conclusion, the net tightens, characters draw closer to the centre of the web of deadly deceit, and traps are sprung.
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