Buttercups and Daisies by Compton Mackenzie

OK, that’s it. I’m going to have to start buying all the Compton Mackenzie novels I see, aren’t I? I read Buttercups and Daisies (1931) before my 25 Books challenge started, but didn’t manage to write about it – and I bought it in Hay on Wye recently. I always like to start one of the books I buy on holiday, and the intriguing opening pages of this one made it my nomination.

Here are the opening paragraphs – which, accompanied by an illustration of Mr W, were what made me both buy the book and start it immediately:

“This,” Mr. Waterall announced, on a fine Saturday morning in late September, as he gazed over the top of his paper at his wife, “this is what I have been looking for for years.”

Mrs. Waterall’s impulse was to suppose that her husband was enjoying one of those little triumphs to which he was periodically addicted. He had a habit of putting articles away in safe places, forgetting the place immediately afterwards, and accusing every member of his family, from his wife to the boy who came in to do the knives, of having interfered with his arrangements for security. Mrs. Waterall could not be blamed for assuming that. This was one of the mislaid treasures.

“For years!” Mr. Waterall portentously repeated. “Have the goodness to listen, my dear.”

Mrs. Waterall, realising that her husband wanted to read something from the Daily Telegraph, jumped to the conclusion that he had discovered another cure for baldness. She hoped it would not be as complicated a cure as the last one he had tried, when he had sat for two hours in the bathroom every Sunday morning, wearing upon his head a hemisphere of indiarubber which has kept firm by the vacuum and was connected by a long tube to an electrical apparatus emitting fizzes and blue sparks.

But what he has actually found, in fact, is a cottage in Hampshire for sale. I say cottage – it is a ‘two-roomed bungalow’, but Mr Waterall has bold ideas about what he can turn it into. He doesn’t intend to move his wife, daughter, and two sons there permanently – but he certainly intends for it to be their country house. Off he goes, to meet the man selling it. For some reason, I can never get enough of house hunting scenes in novels, particularly if they’re amusing ones, and Mackenzie’s is a corker. It becomes more and more apparent that the man selling the bungalow is a charlatan, who lies and evades questions and flatters Mr Waterall’s ego until he has agreed to take it. All he needs to do is add a few more rooms, buy some trees, and he’ll be good to go.

The novel shows how his long-suffering wife, adventurous boys, and simpering girl (simpering mostly because she knows how best to placate him for her own advantage, to the ire of her brothers) are carted out to the middle of nowhere. All does not go well. The buttercups and daisies of the title are certainly ironic. Little Phyllis falls down a well. A cow wanders in, because they don’t have a back door to the kitchen. The neighbours range from amiably mad to obstreperous.

And I loved reading all of it.

The other Mackenzie novel I’ve read, Poor Relations, was also very funny – with a put-upon protagonist whose success comes with the price of having all manner of relatives expect to live off him. In Buttercups and Daisies, we exchange an empathetic lead for one who is a well-meaning tyrant. His absolute certainty of his own rightness, and the fact that he blights lives around him without being remotely malicious, puts him in the fine tradition of characters like Mr Pooter. Mackenzie is a very amusing writer, with an excellent use of the narrative voice that undermines the character – and it’s all extremely funny.

As the novel goes on, we get more from the brothers’ perspectives, which I found a trifle less enjoyable – perhaps because it feels like we’re supposed to be on their side as they plot pranks, trespass etc., and they didn’t seem particularly likeable to me. And the tide of the novel gets taken up with whether or not the community should be called Oaktown or Oak, which does work as a conceit, but comes a bit late in the day to be the main thrust of the novel.

So, it’s not perfect – but, particularly in the first half, it’s rather wonderful. And the second half is also fab, even if I wish Mackenzie hadn’t broadened his focus so much. But one element that doesn’t falter is the ego and bravado of Mr Waterall. How I wish there were a sequel, so I could find out more about him!

There isn’t a sequel, but there are an awful lot of other Mackenzie novels out there. It seems a shame that he is basically synonymous with Whisky Galore and nothing else, when he clearly was far from a one-trick pony. Any recommendations from anyone?