Crooked Cross, Sally Carson’s ‘electrifying masterpiece’ from 1934, to be republished
Sally Carson was not an oracle or a prophet, just a young woman from Dorset, born in 1901. Yet she foresaw a dark and violent future foranniversary of the end of the second world war. Controversial in its day, her novel had to walk a careful path to avoid the accusation that it was alarmist about the Fuhrer’s aims. A stage adaptation of her story was even censored, shorn of all its “Heil Hitlers”.
It is the story of a German family, struggling in an uncertain economy, but looking forward to the marriage of their daughter, Alexa, to a young doctor – that is, until his Jewish background jeopardises their engagement.of July 1934, where Gerald Gould judged it “a very good novel” that avoids any “propagandist tendency” by letting “the story stand on its merits”. Reading the manuscript last year, the contemporary author Rachel Joyce described it as an “electrifying masterpiece”.
The novel opens on Christmas Eve in 1932 and charts the growing disaffection of a group of German youth who feel lost and ignored, and so turn towards a new authoritarian leader. On the back of its critical success, the book was quickly turned into a stage play and’ theatre critic as the “tragedy of a Bavarian girl’s love for a Jewish doctor in the early days of the Nazi revolution” that captivated “without indulging in propaganda and without bias”.
The stage script of the book earned the attention of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which had to approve public plays until 1968. It called for every “Heil Hitler” to be cut from the script. Even in this censored form, the play went on to draw protest from rightwing factions in Britain, who viewed it as anti-German propaganda and argued it was too negative about the Nazi government.
Sylvia “Sally” Carson was the youngest of three sisters brought up by a widowed mother in Dorset. As a young woman she taught dance, while also working as a publisher’s reader and spending her holidays in Bavaria with friends. She started writing the novel there, completing it in England and then penning two sequels,. She married the Bradford publisher Eric Humphries and had three children in three years – a twin son and daughter, and then another daughter.
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