Gerald Bullett

Biography

Gerald Bullett was born December 30th, 1893 at 107 Brockley Rise, Forest Hill, London, and was the third of three sons. His father, Robert Bullett, was a schoolmaster and later a coal agent. His mother, Ellen née Pegg was a farmer’s daughter from Ullesthorpe, Leicestershire. Gerald was educated in a small private day school in Muswell Hill in north London. There were a few events in Bullett’s early life that helped shape him into the man and author he became. Beginning at age ten, Bullett’s mother died, after which he became a bank clerk at age sixteen, and had written his first novel when he was 18 (although it was never published and was destroyed). Soon after, his second book was published during he service with the Royal Flying Corps in France. After returning from World War I, Gerald Bullett married the love of his life, Edith Marion (Rosalind) Barker, née Gould (1887-1982) on December 5th 1921. According to Felicity Ehrlich, both Gerald and his wife preferred the country life, so they “lived frugally in a succession of rented houses in the home counties, finally settling in an Elizabethan farmhouse at East harting in Sussex.” They only had one daughter. The economic and social climate that Bullett experienced during his lifetime was up and down because of both world wars.

Bullett was a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals. He also became an “assiduous short-story writer and poet, small-time publisher, and editor and author of some forty published books” (Ehrlich). Bullett was the first author to broadcast his own story and frequently performed his own work for the radio. He also served on the committee of the book society and was employed by the BBC overseas service as a talks producer from 1940-1943 during World War II. Many of the political issues that influenced Bullett also stemmed from both of world wars. Some of Gerald Bullett’s writing contemporaries and influences were Alfred Knopf, Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, and E.M.W. Tillyard, who once helped to rebuild Bullett’s confidence in writing when he received some harsh criticism for The Snare of the Fowler (1936) for trying to imitate and make his own Oedipus narrative. Ultimately, Bullet wrote mostly fiction because it was “pervaded by a feeling for his maternal midland roots and memories of his Edwardian childhood in Muswell Hill among the ‘middle middle-class,’” and had a regular annual appearance of his novels that was “interrupted only by the Second World War” (Ehrlich). Thanks to the Oxford dictionary of National Biography, this information about Gerald Bullett and his life opens the doors and helps us to better understand “The Mole.” This short story, written in 1923, just a few years after the war, is fiction, however, the beginning scene of the story involving the burning bodies and the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Gubbins are based on experiences that Butler had while serving in the war.