1940s

The Dogs Do Bark by Barbara Willard

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I can’t remember why I bought The Dogs Do Bark (1948), but it’s possible it was seeing a mention in passing on Scott’s Furrowed Middlebrow blog. There, he talked about it being a novel set in a seaside resort, and the title made me think it might be in a boarding house. Sorry, boarding house novel fans, it is not. But it is interesting in its own right.

There aren’t any dogs in the novel. Instead, the title comes from an idiom or poem or something. I’d never heard of it, but it is helpfully put as an epigraph to the book: ‘Hark, hark! The Dogs do bark! The Beggars are coming to Town. Some in rags, and some in tags, and some in velvet gowns.’ Eventually the meaning of all of this is explained, but I’m not sure it ever quite made sense.

The setting is St. Swithin’s-by-Sea, and Willard introduces the community very amusingly. I think her strongest, wittiest writing comes at the outset of the novel – the drama of events somewhat take over the archness with which she begins, but I loved this scene-setting:

The concert hall was full. St Swithin’s-by-Sea prided itself on an appreciation of the arts. It was a small, clean town, swept by south-west gales and great seas in winter-time, swept by trippers and red-faced holiday-makers in summer-time – a small town with a keen municipal conscience, which burgeoned in the shape of neat painted litter baskets, a picture gallery which was the bane of the ratepayers, a repertory theatre with a small subsidy, and fortnightly concerts in the autumn and spring. A visiting orchestra, under the baton of a conductor whisked rather unexpectedly into prominence by the BBC, had today brought forth a tribute in the form of pots of azaleas, which were spaced among the perennial ferns at the edge of the platform. The ladies of St. Swithin’s were very much in evidence, wearing their pearl earrings, their furs, their most responsible and intellectual bearing. The listened, flatteringly rapt, to a programme devoted without stint to the works of Grieg.

At the concert is Christine – an eager and passionate young woman, with the competing emotions of duty, romance, and honour. She is, I reiterate, young – young and naïve. Her sister Rosetta is neither of these things, married to a weak man she doesn’t much respect or like, though perhaps deep down she loves him. And all of them live with their domineering father and his mild, wise sister. Throw into the mix a devoted and slightly creepy butler, and that’s the uneasy household.

Mr Zeal – yes, Zeal is the family name – was injured in the First World War, and is a wheelchair user. He certainly doesn’t let that stand in the way of ruling his family with a rod of iron, particularly sapping the life out of his son-in-law. He is not cruel to them, but his jokes often have a sharp edge and other people’s feelings don’t factor in his decision making. Nobody seems to expect anything else.

With this set up, it’s rather a surprise that the main theme of the novel is… begging letters! It’s certainly a plot that I haven’t read anywhere else. In an era before spam emails and online fraud, the professional begging letter was the way in which the undiscerning kind could be swindled of their money. Of course, no doubt some people genuinely sent out pleas for money they needed. But, according to Zeal’s friend and local political candidate Crowther, there is an epidemic of wicked people using begging letters falsely. (Crowther’s son, by the way, is going out with Christine, and an engagement is on the cards.)

Crowther launches a campaign against such begging; Zeal thinks there is no problem with it. It all leads to the crux of the novel, where Zeal decides to trick Crowther. But there is more going on, under the surface…

I really enjoyed The Dogs Do Bark, and Willard’s writing is certainly very adept. As I hinted earlier, she does get a little melodramatic when the peaks and troths of the plot take over, and I’m not sure the stakes are quite as high as she thinks they are. While begging letters are a fascinatingly unusual topic for a novel, I think I’d have preferred them to have to bear a little less dramatic weight. A novel that just depicted life in St. Swithin’s-by-Sea, maintaining the dry style of the book’s opening, would have been a total delight. Apparently Willard was better known as a children’s historical fiction writer, and I can see that the approach she takes might well suit that genre and audience.

As it is, it was an enjoyable romp and all a bit silly – though not without poignant moments alongside. Certainly worth picking up if you come across it, if only because you’re unlikely to read anything from the 1940s quite like it.

Because of the Lockwoods by Dorothy Whipple

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I thought I’d read The Priory by Dorothy Whipple quite recently, but apparently it was more than four years ago – so I wasn’t exactly rushing onto my next Whipple when I read Because of the Lockwoods (1949). I’ve had it for goodness knows how long. Certainly I read my first Whipple back in about 2004, so I’m spacing out her novels. And I’m glad I finally picked this one up, because it’s up there among my favourites of her output.

At the heart of the novel are two families: the Lockwoods and the Hunters. They are amiable neighbours living in neighbouring grand houses in the north of England – the Lockwoods’ is a little grander than the Hunters’, but they are in the same echelon of society. It is natural that their offspring should be friends with each other. That’s Martin, Molly, and Thea for the Hunters, and Clare, Muriel, and Bee for the Lockwoods (Muriel and Bee are twins, and Whipple doesn’t care much to distinguish between them.)

Towards the beginning of the novel, all this equilibrium changes when Richard Hunter dies. It is discovered that he has not left his grieving family with much in the way of money. They must sell their house and most of their possessions; they must move to a humble street and move in less heightened circles. It’s the sort of street that would represent the height of some people’s ambitions, and indeed one character does consider it a vast achievement to be there, but it is a fall from grace.

While the Hunters’ social circle changes instantly, the Lockwoods do maintain their friendship. Though it is a friendship warped out of all recognition. They are no longer equals, and so the Lockwoods find every possible method of patronising and belittling the Hunters. Mrs Hunter is a kind, naive woman who sees only attempts at kindness. Martin is too besotted with Clare to put up much of a fight. Thea is really the heroine of the novel, and she sees the Lockwoods for what they are: unkind to the point of cruelty, thriving on their sense of superiority.

What Thea doesn’t know, but the reader learns early on, is that Mr Lockwood has defrauded the widowed Mrs Hunter out of a fairly sizeable amount of money. Not a life-changing amount, but enough that it would have helped prevent the indignities of their fall. It might have helped improve the prospects of the Hunter children, each of whom feels obliged to leave school as soon as possible, to earn money.

And they feel obliged because Mr Lockwood insists. He is not content to commit fraud – he is abrupt, rude, and callous to the Hunters at all time. He continually bemoans that he has to spend time helping the Hunters with financial advice, but he never really goes out of his way to do anything. Whipple has drawn a believably despicably tyrant – though a tyrant only to outsiders. The portrait is sophisticated enough to show that Mr Lockwood is loving to his own children.

The interweaving of the families is the main plot of Because of the Lockwoods, but I have to mention Oliver – a lower-class man that the Hunters initially avoid friendship with, but who helps them more than anybody else. Not least in accepting who they now are, and the position in society they hold.

I really loved reading Because of the Lockwoods. I know Whipple is well-loved in the blogosphere, and often singled out as a stand-out in Persephone’s catalogue – at her best, I think she is brilliant, though some of her novels are rather workmanlike in my opinion (though always enjoyable). This is definitely up there among her best. I only noted down one passage to quote, but it shows some really fine and evocative writing:

The train gathered speed. The town passed before Thea, strung out by streets and squares, embosomed in trees, pierced by spires, spanned by bridges, dominated by the cathedral towers. Then receding, the town drew together, closer, tighter, until it grew so small she could see it no longer.

If you’re a Whipple newbie, I think this would be a brilliant place to start. If you love her but haven’t got to this one yet, don’t wait.

 

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

“It is a wide and dramatic canvas that provides a stark warning to those who value status and material things over all else.” – Rachel, Book Snob

“Although primarily domestic, Dorothy Whipple explores the different sides of human nature.” – HeavenAli

“Once again, Whipple’s characters are brilliantly drawn. I loved Thea and hated the Lockwoods” – Karen’s Books and Chocolate

The Silent Traveller in Oxford by Chiang Yee – #NovNov Day 14

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In 2009, I was in the Bookbarn in Somerset and somehow got chatting to someone who worked there. It came up that I lived in Oxford, and he was determined that I should read The Silent Traveller in Oxford – published in 1944, the fifth of twelve books Yee would write as ‘The Silent Traveller’, visiting or living in different places in England and, later, Scotland, Ireland, France, Japan and America. It took me a long time to get to it, but I really enjoyed my day spent with Yee. And much of that day was also spent in Oxford, walking many of the bits that he talks about.

Yee moved to Oxford because his flat in London had been destroyed by bombing. That is one of the few acknowledgements that war gets in this book, which is otherwise almost halcyon in the way that wartime seems to have bypassed life and tradition in Oxford. Students are still studying, drinking, rowing. The streets still throng with people, and history and modernity still jostle each other amicably.

It’s hard to describe exactly what Yee’s approach to his travels is. Some of the time he is staying with acquaintances and relates their stories; some of the time he is invited into colleges and learns what sets each one apart. But much of the time he is simply walking, enjoying the small moments he stumbles across – whether human, animal, or simply landscape. I liked that he doesn’t restrict himself to one tour of the streets and pathways of Oxford, but retreads and retreads them, telling us about similar journeys but with different occurrences. He is as beguiled by a duck or autumn leaves or the colour of stone as he is by people and buildings of greater repute or consequence.

He also isn’t a tourist, as such – he lives in Oxford for two or three years, and while the book does feel like Yee is constantly an outsider keenly observing, it is drawn from a long period living here. It gives him a familiarity and fondness for it that isn’t possible for a day visitor. He does incorporate aspects of his earlier life in China – sometimes contrasting English and Chinese people, sometimes being inspired by similarities. I loved this, from one of his wooded walks:

This leisured rhythmical swaying of leaves and flowers had an intoxicating effect on me. I became drowsy, though my thoughts were clear. I thought of willows in my own country. It is impossible to travel any distance in China without seeing willows. They are as popular as chestnut trees in England, and because of their popularity they have come to play a big part in our daily life. At the Ching-ming festival when we visit our ancestors’ tombs we break off a few young willow branches to bring back home and hang on the entrance gate as a sign of spring. In far-off days when we parted from our relations or friends we waved willow branches as a symbol of the unbreakable bond between us, because the long slender branches blown by the wind seemed to cling to the departing ones and prevent their going.

I lived in Oxford for thirteen years, and still live in Oxfordshire, so I am very familiar with it – I enjoyed following his walks in my head, and thinking about how much and how little has changed in the eight decades since The Silent Traveller in Oxford was written. But I think there would be a lot to enjoy in this even if you’ve never been – and that’s because of Yee’s tone. He comes across as such a gentle, kind man. He doesn’t go for outright comedy, but there is a lightness to his touch that is joyful. And his illustrations add something rather lovely – this is the Radcliffe Camera, where I worked part-time as a library assistant for seven years.

It took me a long time to join Yee on these travels, and perhaps I wouldn’t get as much out of a book set somewhere I don’t know well, but I would still happily accompany Yee on another of his silent travels one day.

The Story of Stanley Brent by Elizabeth Berridge – #NovNov Day 10

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The Story of Stanley Brent (4) (Zephyr Books): Amazon.co.uk: Berridge, Elizabeth: 9780648690986: BooksI read a book published by Michael Walmer yesterday, albeit in a different edition – and today I read one that was published by his imprint and sent to me as a review copy last year: The Story of Stanley Brent by Elizabeth Berridge, from 1945. It is so short a novella that it is practically a long short story – coming in at only 75 pages.

In it, it tells the story of Stanley Brent from the moment he proposes to Ada all the way to his death, and a little beyond. It encapsulates the ordinary life of a fairly ordinary man in the early 20th century. He is unimaginative and conservative, struggling to make an impression at work and barely making a mark on the wider world. Even his engagement and early marriage are a little awkward and understated. This is not a great romance. And, like so many women of the era, the mechanics of marriage are an unpleasant surprise to Ada:

Ada pushed a corner of the pillow into her mouth, nearly overcome with nausea. Her mother had told her nothing of what she might expect. That her body, washed meticulously and yet ignored by her, should attain such an importance, should cause a good and decent man like Stanley to be so – so bestial and undignified, was shattering. If Stanley could not be trusted, who could? And yet her friends who were married seemed happy enough, they had children… at this a fearful doubt struck her. Suppose they, as Stanley had said, taut and angry, his patience gone, suppose they enjoyed this hateful and frightening thing?

But they do have children, and Stanley is an affectionate but oddly passive father. The household economics do not thrive, and Berridge sketches out a decline.

It is all very brief – a pencil portrait that gives the outline of a life, with occasional forays into deeper detail. In it, we get glimpses of post-natal depression, of the General Strike, of alcoholism. It flashes past.

All in all, it is a curio. Berridge writes well, and I think could easily have turned this cast and the span of the lives here into a full-length novel. The fact that it instead blurs the line between novella and short story perhaps echoes the very insignificance of Brent’s life.

The Lonely by Paul Gallico – #NovNov Day 4

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The Lonely by Gallico, Paul | eBay

I bought a book ten years ago that I thought was called Ludmilla and the Lonely – turns out it is two novellas, the second and longer of which is called The Lonely. That’s what I read today – a rather lovely little wartime story, published shortly after the war in 1947. I say lovely. It starts out not so much, but things definitely improve.

Lieutenant Jerry Wright is an American stationed in England on an airbase. He is young, quite naive, a little inclined to be carried away emotionally – but popular with the men and keen to be liked by them. Back home he has doting parents and a fiancée, Catherine, whom he has known since they were both very young children. His whole life is mapped out for him, and he has never really questioned it.

Jerry has a fortnight’s leave lined up, and a fellow airman boisterously suggests that he might take a woman away for a week of no-strings passion. In his normal life, this isn’t something he’d countenance. But a mix of being in England (!) and being at war begin to make it seem possible. And he decides to ask Patches – real name Patrice – a ‘plain girl’ in the WAAF. She isn’t one of the go-getters that others are taking away for their dirty weeks. She is quiet, sweet and – unknown to him – in love with Jerry.

Now that he was with her again he was aware that there was about her an aura of innocence that made impossible the thoughts he had had of her the night before. For if she was a little nobody, a girl he had met casually through the war, who had helped him to pass the time, yet she was also a person with dignity and some unfathomed inner life of her own, which stood as a barrier between him and the use he wished to make of her.

I didn’t love Gallico’s madonna-or-whore approach to women at the beginning of the novella, though it’s never clear how much is the foolish perspective of Jerry and how much is the author. Certainly, as the story continues, it becomes much more nuanced. Not least because some of the story is told from Patches’ point of view, albeit in the third person.

They do go away together. Gallico becomes suddenly coy about actually mentioning sex, but clearly their relationship has advanced. And, yes, the ending of this story is never in doubt. All the ingredients are there that are still the ingredients of every trashy Netflix romcom, and what fun they are to watch/read.

The exact path to get to the end isn’t entirely predictable, and possibly not entirely plausible, but it was all very entertaining. And, you know what, even quite moving. I don’t often get swayed by a love story on the page, but in not many pages, Gallico has created two characters I really grew to care about. I was cheering them on.

I Ordered A Table For Six by Noel Streatfeild

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I bought I Ordered a Table for Six (1942) by Noel Streatfeild in a lovely secondhand bookshop in Ironbridge, just a few weeks before the pandemic hit the UK. It feels like another lifetime. It’s certainly been catching my eye ever since then – because isn’t that a wonderful title?

I’ve much less well-versed in Streatfeild’s output than many of you will be, having never read Ballet Shoes or any of her other children’s books. Previously, I’d only read Saplings – the book Persephone published – and was a little lukewarm about it. For my money, I Ordered a Table for Six is rather better – and it’s available from Bello, though I was lucky enough to find this old hardback. Here’s how it starts:

“I shall,” thought Mrs Framley, “give a little party for him.”

Adela Framley had come downstairs to her office. There are few things which are pleasurable in a war, but walking to what had been the breakfast-room, and was now her office, was a daily source of happiness to Mrs Framley. Her route lay through the main passage where the unpacking was done, and through the big dining-room, which was now the work-room. As she passed, women straightened their backs or raised their eyes from needles and sewing-machines and smiled. To everybody in the building she meant a lot. She was Mrs Framley who ran ‘Comforts for the Bombed’. They might say this and that about her for her story was no secret, but during the hours while her workrooms were open she was the organiser and founder and therefore a personage. For nearly four years her sense of inferiority had been so absorbing that the fibre of her nature had shrunk. Since she had founded her comforts fund it was expanding, not to its old shape and size, but enough to give some relief to her contracted nerves.

The ‘him’ in question is Mr Penrose, the patron of this charity that has given Mrs Framley purpose. It provides necessary items to those whose homes have been destroyed by bombing, and is the sort of moment for which women like Adela Framley live. She is the sort of woman who commandeers a village jumble sale and rules it with determination (and an underlying awareness that nobody much likes her) – and ‘Comforts for the Bombed’ has given her the opportunity to do this with an unassailable moral virtue. Though there are talks of subsuming her small division into a wider, better-organised scheme. And most of the legwork is done by Letty – an assistant who is blandly loyal on the surface, and doesn’t much like Adela underneath that.

One of the wartime mysteries is the absence of Adela’s son. I can’t remember how soon in the novel that is revealed, so I shan’t say anything – but there is certainly early doubt that he is away fighting, not answering her letters. And one of the five people invited to the dinner is a friend of this son’s, who is only there in the hope that it could be financially advantageous to him. Adela’s daughter – on the cusp of adulthood – is also coming to London for it, against the advice of the relative she is staying with in the depths of the countryside. A dully suitable man has been invited in the hopes of being an eligible future husband.

The dinner doesn’t take place until towards the end of the book, but there is plenty to engage us before this. Streatfeild gives us richly detailed characters, and isn’t shy about making them unlikeable. Everybody is shades of grey – Adela’s war work being a good example of the different impulses, good and the reverse, that motivate most people. The only thing I found confusing was when we were thrust into the world of another of the dinner guests, and suddenly had whole new places and sets of characters to meet and engage with – it always felt a little severed from what had preceded, even though the different threads come together well at the climactic dinner.

It’s always interesting to read a book so centred in the Second World War that was published while the war was in full flow. I Ordered a Table for Six gives a perspective on the war that I hadn’t seen before, with perhaps the closest being the sections on war work in E.M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in Wartime. There are few characters to warm to, but it feels like a vividly real depiction of a moment in a desperately strange period of recent history – managing to merge a sort of abrasive uncertainty about the future with the ingredients of an early-20th-century domestic novel of middle-class life. I think definitely worth tracking down – just don’t read the full description on the publisher’s website, as it gives away the ending!

Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey

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Brat Farrar: Amazon.co.uk: Tey, Josephine: 9780099536840: BooksMy old housemate, and dear friend, Kirsty has three abiding passions: dogs, lexicography, and talking about how great Josephine Tey is. It was she who gave me a copy of Brat Farrar (1949) last year, as part of a lovely package to cheer during lockdown, and I suspect it was me who got my book group to read it. It definitely came up during our discussion of Daphne du Maurier’s brilliant novel The Scapegoat, because the premise is very similar. (In most years, The Scapegoat would have been among my best reads – but 2020 had some truly brilliant reads.)

Brat Farrar is the lead character of the novel – yes, it is a name, and an almost wilfully terrible one. What a bad title! I wonder why she did it? Anyway, he meets a man who tells him he is a doppelganger for a neighbour called Simon Ashby. As it happens, Simon’s twin brother went missing when he was 13, seven years earlier. A suicide note was found, but his body has never been identified – one washed up that was assumed to be him, but it was beyond recognition. So Brat is persuaded to go back and pretend to be the missing Patrick – and, as the older twin by a few minutes, inherit the family wealth. Speaking as an older twin by a few minutes… I wish.

Brat is a nice man, and isn’t particularly swayed by the idea of an inheritance – what really gets him is the idea that he’ll get to work with a whole stableful of premium horses. Brat is an orphan (his name is a corruption of St Bartholomew’s Orphanage) and has made his way in the world through being on a ranch in America. Man, he loves horses almost as much as Josephine Tey thinks the reader loves horses.

It’s an intriguing set up, if one is willing to suspend disbelief, and I always am for some sort of coincidental premise. It’s the less vital parts of the puzzle that left me slightly more incredulous – for instance, Patrick’s family don’t seem that bothered about his return from the dead. They react in the way I might if I saw someone I hadn’t expect to see for another month or two. Patrick’s aunt and guardian, Bea, is a delightful character – wise, kind, very mildly dry – and I loved her, but she is representative of the whole family in her fairly lukewarm response. I suppose one can’t spend half the book with people fainting from surprise, but still. Anyway, they’re all pleased to see him and immediately taken in – except for the twin, Simon, who is rather stand-offish and the last to be convinced that Brat is Patrick.

It’s very interesting to read about, but there isn’t much tension. It suffers from comparison with du Maurier’s The Scapegoat, which is better in many ways but particularly the feeling that everything could crumble at any point. Because we know the truth of his identity from the outset, and never seriously suspect that Brat’s cover will be blown (he has been immaculately coached by the family friend), we aren’t left very gripped. It’s entertaining to read, but bizarrely unsuspenseful for a mystery novelist.

And then, lordy me, the horses. Perhaps the most interesting character is that christened ‘Timber the murder horse’ by my book group – he has killed a man by smacking him into a tree, and his one wish in life is to do it more people. I enjoyed reading about him, and Tey really gets into the limited psyche of a horse. Where I started skimming was at a race or showjumping or something, where there are pages and pages and pages of descriptions of horses and their style and pedigree and all sorts. Just leave horses alone, guys.

Brat Farrar was left me in the strange position of really enjoying reading it, but having piles and piles of caveats. None of those are Tey’s writing style, which is excellent. It’s one of those cases where there is the kernel of a much better book at the heart of a good book. Perhaps that kernel turned into The Scapegoat?

The Stone of Chastity by Margery Sharp

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I was VERY excited when I saw that the Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press will be reprinting many Margery Sharp and Stella Gibbons titles in January. Do I have many books by both these authors still unread? Yes, of course. But it’s still great to be able to get easily available copies of books that have eluded many fans for years – most notably Rhododendron Pie by Sharp, something of a golden fleece for book bloggers.

Dean Street Press have kindly sent me that as a review book, but I have started with the other one they sent – one I’ve had my eye on for a while: The Stone of Chastity by Margery Sharp, from 1940. I had high hopes, because the next novel she wrote is probably my favourite of the seven Sharps I’ve read, Cluny Brown. And the premise is irresistible: there is a little village called Gillenham where there was reputed to be a ‘stone of chastity’ in the stream. It was a stepping stone that any ‘unchaste’ woman would stumble on – sort of like one of those medieval witch trials, though believed to have been around in the time of the current population’s grandparents.

Professor Pounce arrives in the village, with his widowed sister-in-law and his young adult nephew Nicholas, intending to investigate the legend. Oh, and there’s also the beautiful, distant Carmen, whose presence is not quite explained. It’s a delightful set up – because the Professor can’t understand why anybody would find his investigations impertinent or insulting. As his sister-in-law points out, people might be offended at his prurient questions about their grandmother’s purity – but he has only science in mind. Nicholas, meanwhile, has other things in mind – and begins to fall both for Carmen and for a Bloomsbury-type who is staying in the village and writing terrible verse-set-to-music.

Nicholas’s objections to distributing the Professor’s questionnaire are disregarded, and he sets off to an unsympathetic local community. Here’s a sample of Sharp’s delightful prose:

Wobbling down the road next morning, on a borrowed bicycle with the bundle of questionnaires stacked in its carrier, Nicholas Pounce felt himself to be, both literally and figuratively, in a very precarious position. He was practically certain that only the front brake worked, and he was extremely apprehensive as to the effect upon its recipients of his Uncle Isaac’s questionnaire. By a curious chance all the villagers he passed were able-bodied males. Some of them said “Mornin'” to him, and Nicholas said “Good morning” back. He said it ingratiatingly. In each stolid pair of eyes he detected, or thought he did, a complete lack of scientific interest and a fanatic regard for the good name of woman.

As I’ve said before, Sharp is equally good at funny and poignant – and in The Stone of Chastity, she is in full comic mode. It reminded me a lot of R.C. Sherriff’s equally delightful The Wells of St Mary’s – a local village dealing with the unexpected introduction of the miraculous, and responding with the sort of village politics that have changed little in the decades since. Factions are formed, rumours spread and, yes, the stone itself turns up.

Thanks so much, Dean Street Press and Scott from Furrowed Middlebrow, for bringing back this wonderful novel – like so many of Sharp’s books, it deserves to be a modern classic. Incidentally, it seems to have reprinted a number of times – check out the range of cover images it has received over time.

The Unnatural Behaviour of Mrs Hooker by Eileen Marsh

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I’ve always been intrigued when I saw mid-century novels by authors I’ve not heard of, and that’s particularly true since I’ve been scouting for titles for the British Library Women Writers series – and so I’ve started looking through my shelves for novels that are out of print and a little lesser known. Recently, I read The Unnatural Behaviour of Mrs Hooker by Eileen Marsh, from 1947.

Mrs Hooker lives in a small village where everybody knows each other’s business and usually makes it their business too. In the opening pages we are introduced to the community – vicar and wife, policeman, teacher, local aristocrats. The expected crowd of a village scene, though confusingly the women include Moya, May, Mary, and Maggy, which doesn’t make it particularly easy to remember which is which. Marsh has a light touch and quickly lets us know which characters will amuse and which will frustrate us. Though Mrs Hooker isn’t among this initial crowd.

She lives with her son Jim, who has just become an adult. During the war, they – like most people in the village – took in an evacuee. A young girl called Sylvia. The village – and seemingly the author – have some prejudice against London girls and their forward ways; their swaying hips and eyes that are asking for it, etc. Suffice to say, this sort of description would not be welcome in a novel now, and thank goodness.

Sylvia goes back to London for a bit, where Mrs Hooker visits, looking on her as a surrogate daughter despite the village’s distrust of her. She is rather upset by the indifference shown by Sylvia’s parents, not to mention the poverty she lives in. So when Sylvia unexpectedly returns to the village, she is welcomed by Mrs H. And she comes bearing news: she is pregnant, and Jim is the father. She is also only fifteen years old.

Jim denies that he ever slept with her, and says it must be some London dalliance. [Or – call it what it is, which the novel does not – statutory rape.] The village is divided in whom they believe of the pair. But the one person you’d expect to be on Jim’s side, and who isn’t, is Mrs Hooker herself:

“I don’t know why I should doubt the poor child’s word. I reckon she’s speakin’ the truth, poor lamb. No, it was Jim, an’ he’s got to stand the racket. I’d give my right hand for it not to be him – the disgrace of it – well, you know what folks are! But it is him, an’ she’ll make him a nice little wife an’ I’ll look after the baby for ’em an’ she can go out to work.”

This is the unnatural behaviour of the title: that she refuses to believe her son, and will not be swayed.

It’s an interesting premise for a novel, and a spin on the evacuee situation that I haven’t read before but must have been relatively common. The reason the novel didn’t quite work for me is that, after this set up, it’s incredibly repetitive. It’s less than two hundred pages long, but it keeps going in circles. Jim insists he isn’t the father. Sylvia insists he is. Various local people repeatedly refer to Jim as a ‘good, clean boy’. Mrs Hooker maintains that she is going to be a grandmother. I shan’t say what the truth is, but the reader does know it pretty early on – so we aren’t reading to find out the solution to a mystery. It all just got a bit samey – not to mention rather unpleasant to read, when people blame the fifteen-year-old Sylvia for being a hussy etc.

So, an interesting writer and a good village set up – but the theme of the novel hasn’t dated well, and the structure of the plot is severely lacking. But I’d still read something else by her, hoping for the best.

British Library Women Writers #3: Chatterton Square by E.H. Young

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For the third of the British Library Women Writers series, I thought I’d republish a post I wrote for the #1947Club back in 2016, which is when I first read Chatterton Square. It’s also the first of the British Library titles that I chose myself – and the afterword that was most interesting to me to write, as I had to do some new research into 1930s divorce law. I hope also interesting to read about! Anyway, here’s what I wrote back in 2016…

I was really pleased when I heard that Chatterton Square by E.H. Young was a 1947 novel, as I’ve had it on my shelves to read since 2007. Since 21st December 2007, to be precise, which makes it a couple of months after I read Tara’s review of it at Books and Cooks. Tara sadly left the blogosphere many years ago, but this book and she have always been associated in my mind – and it is only now, looking back at her review, that I discover that she wasn’t quite as enamoured with Chatterton Square as my memory had suggested…

This was the first E.H. Young novel I bought, but it’s now actually the fourth one that I’ve read – Miss Mole, William, and The Misses Mallett being on my have-now-read list, with William finding its way to the 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About list. How does Chatterton Square fare on my list?

It was E.H. Young’s final novel, and there is a great deal of maturity here. I would never have mistaken it for a young writer’s first effort – because the characters and their experiences are described so subtly, so gradually and with such sophistication. As usual, I am getting ahead of myself. Who are these characters?

The novel concerns two families living next to each other on Chatterton Square in Upper Radstowe – Young’s fictionalised version of Clifton in Bristol. The families are the Blacketts and the Frasers, and the time is shortly before the Second World War – though obviously the characters cannot know that it is coming. They cannot know, but some are pretty sure – and some are adamant that it will not; I think this sort of dramatic irony might be something we see a lot of in the 1947 Club.

Mr and Mrs Blackett have an unhappy marriage, but only Mrs Blackett knows it. Mr Blackett is an astonishingly real creation: a monster who is never openly cruel or even vindictive. He domineers and ruins the lives of those in his family simply by expecting his needs to be more important than theirs, and respectability to be more important than freedom. He rules with a rod of iron – but one which manifests itself in hurt disbelief if anybody should ever disobey him, and genuine wonderment that anybody could wish to. Their three daughters – Flora, Rhoda, and Mary – deal with this in different ways. Flora is a copy of her father, though has grown increasingly sick of him; Rhoda is a copy of her mother (as they begin to realise as the novel progresses), and Mary – well, she’s not really anything, and could probably have been left out altogether.

Mrs Blackett has tolerated her misery by pretending to be happy, and mocking her husband to herself. This charade is what keeps her sane, and also what brings her amusement. If there is cruelty in her methods, it is because it is a question of survival. The way Young draws this marriage is truly astonishing – in the minutely observed ways each behaves, and the vividly real dynamic that emerges. It seeps into the reader’s mind and won’t go away.

She is also unafraid to show parents who don’t idolise their children. Mr Blackett is frustrated and confused by Rhoda, but Bertha Blackett actively dislikes her daughter Flora – while still loving her. But it is touching to see Rhode and Bertha come together as Chatterton Square progresses (and it begins when Rhoda sees her mother give her father a look which contained ‘a concentration of emotions which she could not analyse and which half frightened her. There was a cold anger in it, but she thought there was a kind of pleasure in it too’.)

This family transfixed me, and is the triumph of the novel in my opinion, but we should turn our attention to the other family. Rosamund Fraser heads up the family of five children – her husband is believed by some to be dead, but actually she is separated from him. The family is happier, freer spirits, gravely looked down on by Mr Blackett – but appealing to almost all the other Blacketts (sometimes specifically – Flora fancies herself in love with one of the sons – but more as a unit to be envied.)

Living with them is Miss Spanner – a spinster and friend of Rosamund, who suffers still from the memories and affects of an unhappy childhood. She and Rosamund have a close friendship that yet retains many barriers – not least a one-way emotional dependence. Miss Spanner, in turn, starts to become friendly with Rhoda, who sneaks over illicitly to borrow books.

Young has created such a complex and believable web of relationships between these two houses, and it is an engrossing novel. There is less levity than some of her others (no character leaps off the page like the lovable Miss Mole), and it perhaps requires more commitment from a reader than some. It is not one for speed-reading – but there is an awful lot to appreciate, and slow, attentive reading is rewarded.

And as I said, the threat of war looms. Mr Blackett is sure that it won’t happen, and considers predictions of war to be irresponsible and unpatriotic; Rosamund and Miss Spanner are sure it is around the corner. Miss Spanner has this wonderful moment of musing how war could be:

War was horrible, but there were worse things. Indeed, in conditions of her own choosing, Miss Spanner would not have shrunk from it. The age for combatants, if she had the making of the conventions of war, would start at about forty-five and there would be no limit at the other end. All but the halt and the blind would be in it and she saw this army of her creation, with grey hairs and wrinkles under the helmets, floundering through the mud, swimming rivers, trying to run, gasping for breath, falling out exhausted or deciding it was time for a truce and a nice cup of tea.

In our previous chosen year, war was around the corner but could only be guessed at. Some of the books we read paid no attention to the looming at all; some of the authors probably agreed with Mr Blackett that it would never happen. What I’m intrigued to discover this time around (and this is partly why 1947 was chosen) is – will any of the books ignore the war? Could they? And how differently will they all write about?