Proud Citadel by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

When I reviewed Dorothy Evelyn Smith’s brilliant, brilliant novel O, The Brave Music – which is being reprinted by the British Library in the autumn, hurrah! – Sarah wrote in the comments that I should try her 1947 novel Proud Citadel. I was very much looking out for my next D.E.S, so I ordered a copy – and it came with this lovely, atmospheric dustjacket.

Like O, The Brave Music, the novel starts with a young girl – but we follow her for about 25 years, rather than to the edge of adulthood. Jess has just lost her mother and is moving to a distant relative in Yorkshire.

Out of the turmoil and hardships and deep devotion of her eleven years had emerged three salient precepts: you must never lie or break a promise, you must never get into debt, and you must never love anybody too much.

Jess has been through an awful lot for her age, and takes this journey anxiously and uncertainly. At every stop, she asks the train guard if they have yet reached Sunday Halt – until he gets exasperated and three young boys start teasing her. One is clearly the ringleader whom the others follow – and Jess wonders at his unkindness but also his charm and magnetism.

She gets out at Sunday Halt and is given unclear directions through the town, out to the moor, and to the cottage where Mary is waiting for her. She is guided by that dominant, cruelly charming boy, whom she learns is Randy – to Jess, he shows kindness. And as she is crossing the moor and catches her first sight of the sea, we get one of the many wonderful passages in the novel that describe the landscape and its effect on the observer:

Jess stood and stared in silent astonishment. In all her wildest dreams of the sea that Mother had talked about she had never imagined such a fierce and turbulent loveliness as met her sight. The lines of white she had glimpsed from the train now revealed themselves as the edges of deep, curling, grey-green waves that rose in incredible majesty and stood poised for a breath-taking instant before hurling themselves with a shout on the sharp black teeth of rock that thrust out from the sandy foot of the cliffs. And then what a boiling and a surging of brownish, foam-flecked water! What a flat, shining floor of sand as the waves retreated, gathering audible breath for the next attack! What a sharp thrill of expectancy as each wave swung slowly up and up and over…

I’m not usually one for landscape descriptions in books, my eye just glides over them unintentionally – but Smith wrote so wonderfully about the moor in O, The Brave Music and writes equally wonderfully about moor AND sea in Proud Citadel. It’s always stunning while also being descriptive – nothing fanciful, but prose from someone who knows and loves the sea and the moor and is able to convey why.

When Jess arrives with Mary, she finds her first loving home. Mary is a delight – wise, kind, mildly witchy, and able to encourage good sense and adventure in Jess. As she grows older, her life becomes tangled with so many members of the community – and especially the three boys from the train and, from them, even more especially Randy.

It took me a while to finish Proud Citadel, which no doubt partly because of coronavirus anxiety. But it was also because of the one major flaw in the novel, in my eyes – there are so many characters, and we spend scenes with so many of them. You eventually realise that all of them are pretty much necessary to Jess’s central story, even though it often doesn’t seem like it at the time, but I found it hard to juggle so many households in my mind and in my sympathies. There are about five characters I’d have cut from being the major focus of scenes – they could still be there, but without interrupting Jess’s story so much.

Because Jess is a fascinating character. She is adventurous and can be as wild as the sea, but she has a deep core of morality – and, having been let down so often in her youth, cannot bear people who break a promise. The novel is in the third person, but I felt like I was let into Jess’s world entirely.

And, while I flagged at times in reading it, I still raced through the final third of the novel and felt bereft once I’d finished it. There’s nobody like Smith for making you fall in love with a community, a landscape, and feel adrift once you are no longer with them. I’m sure I’ll re-read this one, as I have already re-read O, The Brave Music, and perhaps next time it will feel like coming home to the village – and the large cast of characters will be familiar faces to whom I am returning.