A Child in the Theatre by Rachel Ferguson – #NovNov Day 1

It’s time for Novellas in November – run by Cathy and Rebecca – and I have rather unwisely decided to try and read one every day in November. It seemed like a great idea a while ago. I’ve done my 25 Books in 25 Days a couple of times, and it’s not many more – so here’s hoping it’ll be a fun time.

There are a couple of caveats – I’m going to chat and do a book a day, not necessarily a novella, so expect some non-fiction and perhaps some short story collections, and other rule-breaking things. The other caveat is that my eyes/head haven’t fully recovered from the mystery illness I had last year – usually all is fine now, but sometimes I get periods when I’m dizzy or have sore eyes, and neither make reading very easy. If that happens, I might have to quietly give up or postpone the project.

ANYWAY that’s a lot of intro when really I should be writing a quick review of A Child in the Theatre by Rachel Ferguson. It was published in 1933 and I bought it in 2009. It has been one of those books I’m really keen to read, and kept wanting to save it for a special occasion – eventually, after more than a decade, I decided I should stop waiting and just read it. Coming in at 191 pages, it fits my loose definition of a novella that it should be under 200pp.

The title is a bit misleading – it is all very connected with the theatre, but the child of the title is arguably not the main character, and nor is she a child for very long. She is Amy Bowker, later known as Amy Ida, who had her big break after being spotted as an angelic infant – swept onto the stage, quickly falling into a world that her working-class, naive, mildly neglectful parents don’t truly understand. Her carefully learned morals no longer make sense in this new environment. Everything becomes about her ascendancy through the stage – an ascendancy that is very up and down, teetering in the right direction. Ferguson depicts it with dry humour and clear-eyed reality. ‘Reality’ isn’t a word one would usually associate with Ferguson. A Child in the Theatre is certainly more grounded than her more famous novels. While Ferguson will never write about the grimness of the gutter – she satirises that sort of outlook in a play in A Child in the Theatre, called ‘High Tea’ – she has also peopled this book with characters who don’t wander into fantastical realms, in the way her characters often would.

I said that Amy isn’t really the central character of the novel – that title must belong to Vivian Garson, later Vyvyan Garson. She is introduced as Amy’s schoolteacher – one with very unconventional views, particularly for the first decade of the 20th century…

And then it began: the rumour, staff-circulated with shocked, apologetic titter, that Miss Garson had explained, upon inquiry, what a mistress was to the elder girls. Yes. Nell Gwyn… or Mrs Fitzherbert.

Miss Langham took the splendid line that the rumour was incredible – and invited Miss Garson alone to tea to cheer herself.

‘Miss Langham! They’ve a right to know. I mean, they’ll be wives and probably mothers themselves one day, and what is the real difference between being a wife or mistress, when you get down to brass tacks?’

Miss Langham closed her eyes. She was never herself among brass tacks.

Vivian Garson is eventually fired after being seen having a port with someone in the theatre, where she has been to support Amy’s first professional role. She can’t find another teaching job – but she has become almost obsessed with the prodigious Amy, and decides to get a role herself in the theatre. While she doesn’t end up going where Amy is, as she intends, she does become swept up in the theatrical world. As Vyvyan, a more glamorous name, she becomes part of the chorus. And then becomes a bigger and bigger name.

Vyvyan and Amy have interlocked lives, but Ferguson cleverly keeps them apart in the book. Their careers overtake and imitate each other. It’s not a case of one having success and the other languishing – at times, one is feted and the other struggles. Then it will reverse. Vyvyan never stops thinking about Amy, seeing a deep bond between them; Amy, on the other hand, seems wilfully ignorant of her erstwhile teacher and well-wisher.

Ferguson’s novels are often delightfully unhinged. A Child in the Theatre is something different. It has a recognisable Ferguson style, but is much more about the intensity of a relationship between two women, even if they seldom meet or correspond. There are so many places where the story could have played out differently, but Ferguson never gives into the predictable. She hardly ever even states the unbreakable tie that shadows both of the women. She plays out their two careers, and the bond is invisibly in the background.

Ferguson obviously has a great time writing about the theatre, and presumably draws on her own experience as a stage actress in the years before the First World War. I found it very illuminating and convincing, and there are other fascinating period moments – such as brief sections on suffragette. And it is, of course, often very funny. I did enjoy this paragraph, which feels like it came from life:

Miss Anderson came of a local family whose trade beginnings success was swamping, and whose care for the deletion of the Howdlie accent was a religion. The Andersons did not say ‘By gum,’ but by-gummery was in their blood and outlook, and to Vyvyan her struggles to imitate a lady imitating an actress imitating a mill-hand were a feast for eye and ear.

Overall, I can see why this hasn’t had the wide audience of Ferguson’s tour de force novels. It is a quieter, subtler, more sedate book in some ways. It is, of course, also quite short. But I think it is no less an achievement than many of her delightfully histrionic books. A Child in the Theatre is Ferguson in a different mode, and one I think is certainly worth seeking out.