Rolling in the Dew by Ethel Mannin (Novella a Day in May #30)

If you read about middlebrow women writers of the interwar years, you’ll doubtless have come across Ethel Mannin’s name. I don’t know if she had one book that was particularly well-known, but she was astonishingly prolific, as you can see on her Wikipedia page. I have three of her books but hadn’t read any, until Rolling in The Dew – one of three books she published in 1940.

The title comes from a George Orwell quote – Google tells me it’s in Coming Up For Air, but Mannin’s dedication gives the game away: ‘To George Orwell, who so abominates ‘the bearded, fruit-juice drinking sandal-wearers’ of the ‘roll-in-the-dew-before-breakfast’ school.’

Though published after war had started, it is set in the summer of 1939. Our hero, Pierre Mirelli, is a Frenchman living in England who stumbles across a colony living in the middle of nowhere.

“My name is Dewberry,” the big man informed him, “Rudolf Dewberry. You’re French, aren’t you? I thought do. We’ve no French here. Some Austrian and Czech refugees. And we did have some Basque children for a time. But no French.” He seemed sad about it.

Mirelli did not know what to say to this, his country not yet having produced refugees, so he merely smiled with an air of apology.

Dewberry continued heavily, “The world is in a sad mess, my young friend. The nations of Europe are as the Gadarene swine. Here in this community we have created an ideal world in miniature. But a practical ideal. Here we live in the spirit of Kropotkin’s mutual aid, each co-operating in the common good, yet each respecting the sanctity of the individual.”

One thing leads to another, and Mirelli finds that he has agreed to join the community at a conference in Geneva, where they will be addressed by Dr Krang, a pupil of Freud’s. Mirelli mostly wants to go because it means his passage will be paid to Europe, where he will be able to visit his fiancée Marthe. He has been asked to deliver a lecture, seemingly just on the strength of representing a nationality that haven’t yet got covered. Dubious, amused, nervous – he goes.

The community is not in-line with the life Mirelli would wish to lead. He discovers that they all follow the brilliantly-named Haybox-Schnitzel diet: vegetarian, non-alcoholic, and largely consisting of what looks like sawdust to Mirelli. There’s one character who lives off bran and fruit, and is hoping to wean herself off the fruit. (As a vegetarian who doesn’t drink, I could live with this diet – but the foodstuffs that are mentioned are still very unappetising.)

Of course, it is all very old hat to tease health groups and hippies and people who advocate getting back to nature, swimming in cold water before breakfast, doing yoga etc etc. In 1940, I imagine it was a little newer (if not entirely new). But it is not mean-spirited humour, and Mannin interestingly links it to all manner of contemporary sociopolitical conversations – from religious faith to Freudianism to capitalism to fascism. While her tongue is always in her cheek, she does take the delightfully over-the-top premise and sustains it into something very interesting. And it helps that Mirelli is such an endearing, sympathetic character in the midst of this maelstrom.

Mannin’s writing is a joy, too. She has some wonderfully dry lines, which reminded me of E.M. Delafield. Like when she introduces Mrs Dewberry, ‘for she was that, however much her Rudolf might seek to lessen the bourgeois shamefulness of it by referring to her as his female companion’. I suspect Rolling in the Dew is something of an outlier in her work, inasmuch as she doesn’t appear to have usually been a satirist, but it has encouraged me that her enjoyable writing style will be transferred to more ‘ordinary’ topics. I have Proud Heaven and Cactus waiting for me, so watch this space.