A God in Ruins

Seven-year-old Sunny spends most nights crying into his pillow. He is at Jordan Manor, staying with Dominic and Dominic’s mother, Mrs. Villiers, whom Sunny refers to as Grandmama. Dominic is on heavy prescription drugs and can barely respond to Sunny when he asks him questions. Sunny often overhears Grandmamma talking to her husband, Colonel Villiers. She is worried that Dominic will not be able to “inherit” in “his condition” (259). Because Sunny is the last male Villiers, he is “their last hope” (259). Grandmamma refuses to use Sunny’s real name and insists on calling him Philip. 

Once a week, Sunny speaks with Teddy on the phone as Grandmamma hovers nearby, monitoring what he says. His time with them began when Viola “had abandoned them” to “stand up for her beliefs” (263), as she put it. Teddy had encouraged Sunny to visit his other grandparents for the summer and get to know them. The Villierses arrive and pick him up. Teddy is nervous when he sees how coldly Antonia—Mrs. Villiers—treats the children, and he sees that Dominic is obviously under the influence of LSD. Sunny is immediately miserable when he arrives. Grandmamma berates him for his manners, and no one is kind to him. He rarely has enough to eat and sleeps in a cold nursery. The Villierses decide to send him to a local prep school. Each day, a servant named Thomas will drive him back and forth. 

Before he begins day school, Dominic suggests that they have an adventure. They walk for hours after Dominic takes several small pink pills. After arriving at a forest, Dominic begins muttering to himself and then stares at mushrooms, claiming to be unraveling their mysteries. Sunny is hungry and eats some bitter berries off of a bush. They finally exit the other side of the forest and onto a railway. Dominic sits on the ground between the rails and smokes. Sunny falls asleep. Dominic wakes him when a train is approaching. Sunny manages to jump off of the rails in time, but Dominic doesn’t move, too excited as he watches the train bearing down on him. 

Sunny’s visits to the Villierses were only supposed to last for a few weeks. When Teddy realizes that Viola might have planned to leave him there indefinitely, he appeals to the family courts to take custody of Sunny. Teddy takes Bertie and drives to Jordan Manor one afternoon. Teddy is stunned by the dilapidated grounds and knows that sending Sunny there was a mistake. He believes “they are going to rescue Sunny” (282). Grandmamma had forced Sunny to start school immediately after Dominic’s death and did not tell Teddy about the accident for three weeks. Later, Teddy reads an article in the newspaper with the headline “HERO DAD dies saving son” (286). The train conductor claims that he saw Dominic trying to pull Sunny off of the tracks, sacrificing his own life to save Sunny. The article claims that Sunny had behavioral issues and was “fascinated by trains” (286). 

At school, the headmaster and other boys are cruel to Sunny, who begins wetting his bed every morning and night. Grandmamma hires a tutor named Mr. Treadwell for Sunny after the boy falls behind in school. During one lesson, Sunny realizes that he has to use the bathroom. Mr. Treadwell refuses to let him leave until he finishes a sum on his homework. Sunny runs down the hall anyway and runs into Grandmamma, who refuses to let him pass without saying excuse me. Desperate, he squats and defecates on the floor, as he has seen the dogs do. She calls him “[t]he most disgusting boy who ever lived” (288). Thomas hits him, and he is sent to his room. Bertie and Teddy arrive the next day and leave with Sunny. 

Teddy is walking with a dog named Lucky, listening to bombers overhead. Two days earlier, Nancy had come to visit him during his leave and had been surprised to see that he had acquired a dog during the war. Lucky had somehow stowed away on a plane that Teddy’s crew had been on. They had shared their oxygen with the dog until they landed, and then Teddy had adopted him. 

Teddy and Nancy had left London and stayed in a hotel on the coast. The next morning, Nancy tells him that they must get married after the war, and Teddy proposes, even though he doesn’t have a ring for her. They walk on the beach, and Teddy tells her that a week earlier, a new plane had arrived on the base, and when it landed he saw that Nancy’s sister Gertie was flying it. She had been working as a plane transporter and was treated well by the men. Nancy and Teddy get a photograph taken on the pier, and Teddy carries it in his battledress pocket from then on, next to the silver hare. Nancy is only able to stay for the one night, and they say goodbye. 

After his first tour was finished, Teddy had a chance to become an officer but volunteered to continue flying. He felt that it was what he did best and a more effective way for him to use his talents in the fight than teaching: 

Flying on bombing raids had become him. Who he was. The only place he cared about was the inside of a Halifax. He had believed once that he would be formed by the architecture of war, but now, he realized, he had been erased by it (305). 

When Teddy joined a new bomber crew, the men were all unfamiliar to him except for Keith, a man who was in his previous unit. Keith had also come to London for leave, and Teddy takes him and Lucky to stay with Sylvie at Fox Corner two days after Nancy departs. 

Teddy has a weeklong affair with a wealthy, beautiful woman named Julia, who works in a garage driving Army trucks in London. They stay at one of her family’s unused homes, which is full of expensive art, including a genuine Rembrandt painting. He remembers Keith saying once that it would be nice to fall in love, and he tries to convince himself that he is falling in love with Julia. However, later he sees that he can appreciate the week for what it was: “unfettered, lusty sex” (313), and he is grateful for the memories when he returned to the more “common-or-garden type” (313). Shortly after, Julia is killed by a bomb at an Army ordnance base, along with 17 others. 

At Fox Corner, Sylvie holds a large lunch party for Keith and Teddy, inviting various eminent people from the communities. When asked for thrilling stories about combat, Teddy cannot think of anything to say. He goes outside to get some air and thinks about a recent bombing mission over Hamburg. The squadron had dropped “2,300 tons of bombs and over 350,000 incendiaries in an hour. A world record” (317). Teddy had found the fires and explosions in the dark hypnotic and beautiful. He thinks about Hugh and grieves again at the loss of his father. 

Teddy spends the last night of his leave with Ursula. She takes him to a concert of Beethoven’s music. While waiting for the symphony to begin, they discuss the destruction of Hamburg. Ursula wants to know if Teddy is conflicted about dropping bombs that will kill innocent people as well as the enemy. Teddy responds that Germany’s housing and industry must be destroyed, and that he is doing his duty. They both grow uncomfortable and are relieved when the music begins. The music affects Teddy emotionally, and he wonders if he might start levitating. 

Years later, Teddy learns that the planes on the Hamburg operation were sent specifically to target residential areas, which he had not known on the night of the operation. He remembers that he had been able to smell the scent of burning flesh rising from the city as thousands of people below burned in agony, and “[h]e knew then in his secret heart that one day a reckoning would come due” (326). 

Weeks after the concert, Teddy’s plane is shot down just before it lands. Keith is hit by machine gun fire and is killed, but the rest of them survive the crash. That night, Teddy went back to his room, held Lucky, and cried.