1950s

Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson #1954Club

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When I was in Toronto in 2017, I was keen to buy books that wouldn’t be so easily available back home – and it made sense to pick up Canadian authors, where possible. It was also during another Project 24, so I couldn’t go wild with the number of books I bought – I restricted myself largely to Stephen Leacock, Margaret Laurence, and Ethel Wilson.

The only Ethel Wilson I’d read was Hetty Dorval, in the Persephone edition, and I remember liking it but none of the details. Now I’ve read this beautiful edition of the unprepossessingly-titled Swamp Angel, and I can see why she is so beloved by many Canadians.

We open in Vancouver. Maggie Vardoe is living with her second husband, having been widowed in her first marriage. And, on page one, we get this sentence:

Mrs Vardoe had become attached to, even absorbed into the sight from the front-room window of inlet and forest and mountains. She had come to love it, to dislike it, to hate it, and at seven-fifteen this evening she proposed to leave and not to return. Everything was, she thought, in order.

As well as a vital plot point, it’s a great indication of Wilson’s writing in this novel. She blends the beautiful with the plain. Throughout the book, we are always aware of the surroundings – views and environments and nature are as crucial as anything happening in the foreground. But Wilson is not sentimental about the natural world; she is in awe of it, and she values the vantages people have of it.

Maggie leaves the house, having cooked enough meat for her husband to eat cold for a few days. We don’t learn a lot about Mr Vardoe, except that he is irascible, unkind, demanding and unsatisfactory. It’s no mystery why Maggie wants to leave. What is less clear is where she might go, and why.

Swamp Angel follows Maggie as she becomes independent. At various places in those forests and mountains she could see from her window, Maggie learns how to live in a way that gives her autonomy, and respects the people and places around her. She is pretty good at it from the outset, so this isn’t a case of seeing a suburban housewife gradually learn to adapt to a new way of life. It is as though this way of life has always been waiting for her, and she only has to dive into it.

Maggie isn’t alone in this experience, nor is it idyllic. A large part of the novel sees her working at some remote cabins, and the difficulties this causes with the married couple who own it. She also invites a young Chinese boy to work with her, based on a brief meeting. There is little maternal in the relationship she has with him, or his brother. What I found interesting about Wilson’s writing is how often it resists comfortable emotional conclusions. People remain self-contained, or have outbursts that they regret. There is a beauty in the restraint that the characters are permitted.

In between the character interactions, Wilson allows herself leisurely envelopments in the natural world that are the novel’s most beautiful moments. I particularly loved this description of the northern lights, and how Maggie is swept into it:

One night she saw, north of the lake, a pale glow invade the sky. Maggie got up and pulled a blanket round her. The pale glow was greenish, no, a hot colour rose up and quickly took possession. The colour changed. The vast sky moved as with banners. The sky was an intimation of something still vaster, and spiritual. For two hours Maggie watched enraptured the great folding, playing, flapping of these draperies of light in heaven, transient, unrepeated, sliding up and down the sky. After declaiming lavishly, the great Northern Lights faded with indifference as one who is bored and – deploring display – says I may come back but only if I choose; I do as I wish; I am powerful; I am gone but I am here. The orthodox stars, which had been washed away, returned palely. Night was resumed, and Maggie slept.

I’ve missed quite substantial parts of Swamp Angel that take place back in Vancouver, with Maggie’s friends and husband, and haven’t even mentioned that the Swamp Angel is in fact a gun. But hopefully I’ve said enough to tempt you to the quiet tumult of this novel.

The Golden Waterwheel by Leo Walmsley – #1954Club

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One of the books I loved last year was Leo Walmsley’s Love in the Sun, a very autobiographical novel about living and loving in poverty beside the sea in Cornwall. You can read my earlier review, and it will leave you unsurprised that I was keen to read more from Walmsley. And so I was really pleased to see that the first sequel, The Golden Waterwheel, was published in 1954 – quite a long time after 1939’s Love in the Sun, but picking up where it finished.

The narrator (basically Walmsley himself) and his wife Dain have made the difficult decision to leave Cornwall behind and go back up north, to Yorkshire, where they had come from. They want to set up a home with plenty of land, still near the sea, and raise their young family. Having coped with very little in Cornwall, they know they are capable of making do – but the narrator also has a new source of income, in the form of his successful writing. In Love in the Sun, his first book was accepted – in The Golden Waterwheel, he is writing what would become Love in the Sun. It’s all very meta.

The slow, steady pace and the guileless tone of the first book are replicated here. Each step is given equal weight, and we see the couple find various sites they’d like to live in, before finally getting a plot further from the sea than they’d wished but with views and plenty of potential. And they set about creating their dream home – within the remit of modest, achievable dreams. I always love reading about house-hunting, house-building or anything to do with devising a home, and so I loved all of this. Again, it is a gradual development, told in a straightforward way. Walmsley doesn’t mine it for humour, and there is nothing either self-deprecating or self-aggrandising. Anything that is amusing comes from incident, not from the framing of it.

And it is beautiful. Walmsley is a deep appreciator of the natural world, and he conveys it without metaphor or ornament. He sees that it is beautiful, and he describes it as it is. Here is a walk on the nearby moor:

It was lovely. The real heather was a long way from being in full bloom. Enough of it was out to give a blush of tender purple to the dark green and browns of the moor. The sea wind had packed the sky with cloud, too even in its structure, too pale and too low to portend rain, and although there would be no visible sunset, the light was strong and the lower air so clear that every detail of the moorland landscape for miles around was optically sharp. The lone pines, the odd groups of sheep, a shepherd’s hut, the low hills each surmounted by one or several of the conical mounds that marked the burial place of an ancient Briton. The salty wind was cool but invigorating, and the sun-dried springy turf extended a warmth. There was a steady droning of bees and you could almost taste honey in the smell of the heather blooms they were plundering.

I loved this book as much as its predecessor, and I’m looking forward to The Happy Ending, the final in the trilogy. It is set on the cusp on the Second World War, so is not really representative of 1954 life – but does hark back to a halcyon time. The waterwheel of the title is never built; it is a dream that doesn’t quite come true, and perhaps that is why it remains golden. But, even without out, there is something golden about the whole period.

Ludmilla by Paul Gallico – #NovNov Day 18

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Earlier in the month I read The Lonely by Paul Gallico, and today I read the other half of the book I have it in – Ludmilla, originally published in 1955. It was printed as a separate book initially, but it is only about 50 pages – including drawings by Reisie Lonette.

For those who’ve read Gallico’s Small Miracle, it is quite similar. Set in Liechtenstein, it’s about a festival where cows are paraded with ribbons etc, and the cow at the front is the most celebrated one of the year. The Weakling cow covets the prized position, though barely produces any milk and is lean and unimpressive. But a prayer to St Ludmilla might just sort things out…

You who believe that animals are dumb and incapable of reason or emotions similar to those experience by humans will of course continue to do so. I ask you only to think of the yearning and heartache that is the lot of the poor and not-so-favoured woman, as she stares through the glass of the shop window at a gay Easter hat, a particularly fetching frock, the sheerest of stockings, or a pair of shoes with little bows that seem to dance all by themselves; lovable articles, desirable articles, magic articles out of her reach since she can neither buy them, nor earn them as a gift, yet things that she knows would transform her in a moment from someone drab and unnoticed, into a sparkling queen, a ravishing beauty that would draw all eyes to her. Or, if not all eyes, then at least a few, and if not a few, then just one pair of eyes, and in the end, the only pair that mattered. Are you a book editor? Find your job on Jooble.

Ludmilla is very slight, but has its charm. The cow is rather a lovely character. It is a curious choice to pair it with The Lonely, because they have nothing in common (except for Gallico’s not-entirely-enlightened perspective on the role and motivations of women). Gallico can be fey or dark or both, and this one couldn’t be feyer if it tried. Fun, if minor.

Murder Included by Joanna Cannan – #NovNov Day 5

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A murder mystery is a fun choice for my novella-a-day challenge, because I always wants to finish a murder mystery in one day – and it’s only the length that stops me. Quite spontaneously, I took Murder Included by Joanna Cannan off the shelf this morning. It was published in 1950, though seemed to me to be set a decade or two earlier. Confusingly, it has also been published as A Taste of Murder and Poisonous Relations, which could be handy information if you want to track it down – and I recommend you do, because I thought it was really excellent.

Perhaps the title has been changed because it isn’t instantly obvious what it means, at least to more modern eyes. It refers to the idea of ‘breakfast included’ or ‘baths included’ – whatever features and facilities might be mentioned by somebody advertising rooms. Because the setting is Aston Park, a palatial ancestral home that has recently opened up to ‘paying guests’. I.e. it’s a hotel retaining a veneer of titled pride.

Sir Charles d’Estray lives there with his new wife Barbara, known as Bunny, a fairly highbrow novelist. They haven’t been married long, but it’s long enough for Bunny to realise that an overhaul is needed to avoid bankruptcy – so she spearheads the paying guests venture. Both halves of the marriage have at least one child – Sir Charles has three, all horsey and disdainful, while Bunny’s daughter Lisa is the main reason she has agreed to a marriage that never particularly appealed. She wants stability. They have lived in France for a long time, poor and with an unsalubrious crowd, and seeing Lisa expertly resurrect a drunken man at the age of twelve has convinced Bunny to take her to English respectability.

All has been going well, with various fairly long-term paying guests – some relations of the d’Estrays and others strangers – when one of them is found dead. Elizabeth – one of the relatives; a cousin – has been poisoned.

A death in a crowded country pile is hardly a novelty for the murder mystery, but there were various things that made Murder Included stand out for me. One is the cleverness of the solution, which naturally I won’t spoil – but it does include a neat trick that I don’t remember seeing used anywhere else. But the main reason I loved this book is Cannan’s writing. Here’s the police detective, Price, arriving at the scene:

He had kept silence as a loutish local constable drove him through the October dusk over hills to wrought-iron gates, yew hedges, and Elizabethan gables. A doddering parasite of a butler had shown him into this large, over-crowded, shabby, so-called study, where Colonel Blimp, after nearly wringing his hand off, had turned ‘Susie – little woman’ out of a chair and expected him to sit down in it. Now, fussing about with cut-glass decanter and silver cigarette box, he was doing his best to turn an important conference into a cosy chat.

(Susie, for the avoidance of doubt, is a dog – and Colonel Blimp is a reference to the archetype, not a character in Murder Included.) Price has been sent in from Scotland Yard because the local police are too biased in favour of the respected family and the house’s servants, many of whom are related to police officers. And Price doesn’t have any time for this sort of set up. He has his prejudices about rural people, titled people, and more or less anybody who isn’t a left-wing urbanite like himself.

Cannan can be very funny, and she spears characters so mercilessly well. That means she can make us really like the people we’re meant to like, such as Bunny and Lisa. But others are definitely victims of her pen. I’m not sure if we are meant to actively dislike Price, and she apparently did use him for other murder mysteries, but he definitely isn’t the sympathetic detective hero that many novelists would use. Here he is questioning teenage Lisa…

‘I’m sure you’re a very clever little girl. I’m sure if anyone – even a grown-up person – annoyed you, you’d get the better of them.’

Lisa looked puzzled. ‘I’m not in the least clever. I’ve never got the better of anyone. Actually if someone annoys me I answer back, but I generally get the worst of it.’

‘And then do you brood over it and think out your revenge?’

‘Good gracious no! I’m not a character out of Wuthering Heights,’ said Lisa, laughing merrily.

Elizabeth isn’t the last person to die in the story – it would hardly be a classic murder mystery if she were. And perhaps the book is published a little late to truly be of peak Golden Age, though it’s up there with the best examples I’ve read in terms of economy, style, and plot.

In fact, I would give it that great accolade, which is all too rare of detective fiction: I’d have loved it just as much if there hadn’t been a murder at all.

British Library Women Writers #9: Mamma by Diana Tutton

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Two new British Library Women Writers titles are out YESTERDAY in the UK – Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs and The Love Child by Edith Olivier, which are both up there among my favourites in the series so far. I was going to do one of my posts about them, but realised that I’d never actually done BLWW number 9, Mamma (1956) by Diana Tutton. (You can see my posts on all the series at the blww tag.)

I first read Mamma in the Bodleian, after loving the extraordinary Guard Your Daughters but not being able to track down her other books. Older copies of Mamma do turn up now and then, but obviously this new edition is available to everyone easily!

When I read Mamma, I was a bit taken aback at first. Guard Your Daughters had been an instant favourite – almost from the first page. It was lively and funny and chaotic. Mamma is a much quieter book – it’s about Joanna, whose daughter Libby moves in with her to save money. She brings along her new husband Stephen, whom Joanna doesn’t know. He is much older than Libby – indeed, he is only a few years younger than Joanna. And gradually Steven and Joanna develop feelings for one another…

It sounds very sensational, whenever you try to describe it, but it really isn’t. It is such a gentle, thoughtful, and unsensational book – just looking at what might happen in this situation, between three decent people who don’t want to hurt each other.

When it came to writing my afterword, I ended up writing about sex – I always seem to veer into this for the series, and I’m worried that people will be alarmed. But the levels of discretion writers did or didn’t have about sex does seem to shift so much in the period – in fact, there’s a novel I’m hoping we’ll do next year that is very interesting on the topic, writing much less discreetly than you’d imagine for the era…

In Mamma, it’s all tied up with psychology and changing norms – particularly around celibacy before marriage.

“I don’t see,” said Elizabeth, smiling, “how anyone at all young can live without sex and not get warped.”

Steven’s feelings changed abruptly. Of all the tactless remarks! But Joanna answered peacefully: “Quite a lot do.”

“Well, they all get a bit peculiar.”

“I don’t think that’s altogether true.”

“Janet says it comes out in all sorts of funny little ways.”

“Well, good Lord, we’ve all heard that one,” said Steven impatiently. “But it’s by no means universal.”

“Even if it’s not visible,” calmly continued Elizabeth, “it’s still there. In fact if you can’t see if it’s probably worse.”

“Darling,” said Joanna, looking, as Steven gratefully noticed, not hurt, but amused, “we’ve all heard that, too.”

“Often,” added Steven.

“Oh, all right!” said Elizabeth, not at all offended. “But all the same, Janet says – ”

“A course in so-called psychology,” said Steven nastily, “doesn’t guarantee a profound knowledge of human nature.”

I’ve been interested to see some people preferring this novel to Guard Your Daughters – I still think that’s Tutton’s masterpiece, and one of my all-time favourite novels, but Mamma is such a different type of novel that they don’t really compare. Now we just need to decide if there is an appetite for her third and final novel, about brother/sister incest…

Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer by Molly Clavering

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Sometimes it does feel like the corner of the book internet I occupy is really just Scott’s kingdom, and we live in it. Scott being Furrowed Middlebrow, of course, both blog and the series of reprints from Dean Street Press. One of the things I really like about his series is that, most of the time, they don’t just bring out one or two books by an author – they drop a whole load at once. The most recent author to get a job-lot of reprints is Scottish mid-century writer Molly Clavering – and I started with Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer from 1953. She wrote a bunch of novels in ’20s and ’30s, and this was the first of seven novels after a break of fourteen years.

It was generally considered that Mrs Lorimer, that quiet woman, was not at all a sentimental person. Therefore when Nan Gibson, her valued and trusty and frequently tiresome cook-housekeeper, announced one morning as she twitched back the bedroom curtains, ”I hear Harperslea’s been sold,” the pang which her mistress felt must have been simply because another suitable house – a house she would have liked for herself, had been bought by someone else.

There are shades of Netherfield being let at last at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice – but Mrs Lorimer is not looking for an eligible young man. She is looking for enough space to host all her adult children and their spouses and offspring. There are quite a few of them, so I shan’t go into all the details – one of the most prominent is the son-in-law obsessed with his car, and his wife (Mrs Lorimer’s daughter) who feels neglected in comparison. She decides to make her own entertainment, which she does by finding the daughter of the house at Harperslea – a Nesta Rowena Smellie. There is a lot of discussion about the name ‘Miss Smellie’, and it is a name of course, but it did all feel like an unnecessary tangent. They re-Christen her Rona, which has become rather less acceptable as a nickname in the past eighteen months…

The bulk of the tension and romance of the novel comes from the various young married couples – and it doesn’t take a genius to work out what might happen between the sole unmarried child, Guy, and this Rona girl. There are some obstacles connected with her nouveau riche family and his inability to stick to any career, but the writing is on the wall from the first moment they are mentioned.

Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer is, indeed, quite packed with incident – a great deal of which crops up and is resolved throughout the novel, rather than tidying everything away at the end. But the beating heart of the novel is Mrs Lorimer herself, and what makes the book more than the sum of its parts. She is patient and consistently underestimated by those around her – who see her as a mother and not as someone with passionate feelings and thoughts herself. Her life is broadly happy and she is not demanding of others, but I enjoyed how Clavering showed the layered life behind the dependable matriarch.

Clavering doesn’t demand much of her reader, and this is definitely a cosy read where the stakes never feel quite as high to the reader as they do to the characters – but it’s cleverer than it might seem at first, and I’m glad to have found another fab new-to-me author from Furrowed Middlebrow.

April Lady by Georgette Heyer

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Complete & Unabridged (April Lady): Amazon.co.uk: Heyer, Georgette, Matheson, Eve: 9780745166322: BooksWhenever Karen and I run a ‘club’ year, somebody reads a Georgette Heyer novel. I don’t know how many she wrote, but my guess would be thousands. And every time I say ‘How on earth have I not yet read anything by Heyer?’

I think it’s partly because of the historical fiction angle, and partly because the name ‘Georgette’ is so odd. It’s certainly not for lack of trust in the legions of people who love her. And, you know what, all those people were right. I still haven’t actually read a physical Heyer novel, but I spent the Bank Holiday weekend stuck on the motorway, listening to an audiobook of April Lady read by Eve Matheson.

April Lady was published in 1957, which places it somewhere in the second half of Heyer’s writing career – it’s one of her Regency novels, and I finished it without having any idea what the title refers to. The main characters are Nell Cardross and her husband, the Earl of Cardross, or Giles. She is young and beautiful, from a relatively unwealthy family, and I do stress the word ‘relatively’. Cardross, on the other hand, has money all over the place – but wants to make sure his wife isn’t too profligate with spending, and doesn’t hide bills from him. This is the gist of the opening scene and, indeed, the entire plot.

There is a curious sort of ‘Gift of the Magi’ theme to the central couple: neither knows how much the other loves them. Giles thinks Nell married him for his money; Nell thinks Giles married her for her looks, and for convenience. Nell’s mother – described as having ‘more hair than wit’ – has told Nell to stay undemonstrative, so as not to annoy her husband, and not to question any extra-marital dalliances he might have.

For her part, Nell discovers an unpaid dressmakers bill for £300. She doesn’t think she can take it to her husband – because she fears his anger, but mostly because she fears it will confirm his belief that she is mercenary.

And so much of April Lady is Nell’s attempts to get her hands on the money without Giles knowing – and without taking the advice of her exuberant, funny, and mildly immoral brother Dysart. (His suggestions include selling her marital jewellery and making fakes, ordering more dresses to keep the dressmaker busy, and even dabbling as a highwayman.)

As I listened, I expected this to be the opening scene to a much more complex plot – but this is what sustains the whole novel. There is a parallel plot with Cardross’s sister Letty. who reminded me a lot of Lydia Bennet with her impetuousness and high drama – she is yearning to marry Mr Allendale before he heads to Brazil, but needs her brother’s permission. These two plots cleverly overlap, but Heyer is brilliant at sustaining this central motivation throughout April Lady, without flagging.

My favourite thing about the novel is how delightful all the characters are. Nell is perhaps a little too straitlaced to be truly entertaining, but I adored her wastrel brother, her impulsive sister-in-law, and her witty, calm husband. He might be the villain of the piece in another writer’s hands, but he reminded me of a kinder Mr Bennet – teasing people, especially his sister, while implacable in his own choices.

And, gosh, this novel is funny. I laughed a lot in the car – my favourite bit being a friend of Letty’s who has rehearsed various dramatic speeches about never giving away Letty’s secret plan, only nobody else seems to give her cues or react as she would like.

Ultimately, of course, all ends well and everything is explained – but not before some misunderstandings and complications come along. I genuinely cared about the happiness of these characters, though never felt a moment’s anxiety that the happy ending might not come.

I’ve used two Austen comparisons already, and I think any comparisons that have been made between Heyer and Austen are justified – at least to an extent. Heyer’s plot is not as keenly plotted as Austen’s, nor her characters in April Lady quite as immortal, but it was a truly wonderful read that exceeded my fairly high expectations. My first Heyer, but definitely not my last.

One Woman’s Year by Stella Martin Currey

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There were several independent publishers I knew I wanted to read for #ReadIndies month, and of course Persephone was among them. But which one? Well, I was most excited about One Woman’s Year by Stella Martin Currey, published in 1953 but often seeming like it was a couple of decades earlier.

One Woman’s Year is a delightful journey through the year – an anthology of anecdotes, household hints, recipes, and so on. The story/anecdote bit is the longest and perhaps most delightful of each section – just tales from family life, about enjoying village life, the countryside, and everyday activities. From a very privileged position, of course, though they are not stories of expensive outings and excess. They are the sort of stories that would be brought out at family events – from a disastrous renovation project to a French exchange student. All are told with an enjoyably British sense of deprecating humour. I was often reminded of E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady, which is about the best thing to be reminded of.

Then each month has a cheerful look at the favourite chore of each month, and a wry look at the least favourite. Often this is more of a story than a genuine application, particularly all these decades later, but the recipes that follow could still be followed today, for the most part. Yes, there is an unsettling predilection for curry powder, particularly for someone who spent time in India with her military husband, but I might well be giving the strawberry shortcake a go at some point.

Each month ends with a short anthology of literary passages from novels and poems. These are usually the sorts of things that leave me cold, as I like to read with proper context, but Currey’s choices are brilliantly and thoughtfully done. For instance, she brings together a section from Cold Comfort Farm with an anonymous chronicler of an early nineteenth-century village and a poem about laburnums. Each month’s anthology works beautifully together. All the more impressive because this was, of course, long before the internet – these are quotations that Currey has drawn together from a lifetime of reading.

One of my favourite things about this book is that it’s fully illustrated with woodcuts by Malcolm Ford. No publisher has a deeper appreciation for woodcuts than Persephone Books, and these are second to the ones in The Runaway among my favourites they’ve done, either in their books or in the magazine.

Initially I intended to read one section each month, and make it last a year – well, I couldn’t stop once I’d started. Thank goodness Persephone resurrected such a lovely and comforting read.

For All We Know by G.B. Stern

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What a curious novel, which has left rather an impression on me, even though I find it a little complex to untangle. I bought For All We Know [1955] in 2011, based on having enjoyed her books on Jane Austen that she co-wrote with Sheila Kaye-Smith. She’s also one of those names you see a lot if you’re interested in women writers in the early/mid twentieth century – and years ago I did read her novel Ten Days of Christmas. But somehow it still felt like I was a Stern fiction newbie. Do Christmas novels feel substantially different? Like you haven’t really heard a singer if you’ve only listened to their Christmas album?

Anyway, I decided to see what was going on with For All We Know – the sort of title that isn’t really giving anything away. What I think of as an Alan Ayckbourn-esque title – trips off the tongue and doesn’t really mean anything.

I was daunted by a family tree in the opening pages. For me, a family tree in a book is a tacit way of admitting that they haven’t done a good job delineating characters. But onwards – the first section, of five, is a family group discussing Gillian’s recent biography of the whole dynasty. She has been working on it for years, and it has been a total critical and commercial flop. Gillian is a biographer of some note, and the family is well known in theatrical circles, so why has it not been a success? Well, because Gillian has ignored the noted Bettina, and devoted significant sections to Bettina’s son Rendal, who is of no public note.

This family gathering and sotto voce discussions over, we jump back a few decades – to an infant Gillian, encountering Bettina’s side of the family for the first time. Bettina is Gillian’s grandfather’s sister’s daughter, whatever that translates into in terms of cousins and removes. That side of the family has a whole range of siblings and cousins and whatnot, and you quickly work out why the family tree is needed. All you need to know is that Gillian’s grandfather is the head of the side of the family that isn’t famous, and Bettina’s mother is the head of the side that is.

It was Timothy, her cousin, who had casually referred to Gillian’s grandfather and her Uncle Conrad as the ‘failure branch’ of the family tree. Dear, dear Timothy! Happily able to say even worse than that, not to tease nor to be cruel but because he could not for the life of him see why she need mind, as it was true. Timothy had a thick blank spot, and though only twelve years old when he came forth with this chubby definition of Gillian’s immediate family as compared with his own, indisputably the ‘celebrity branch’, he would be just as capable of saying it to-day when he was sixteen, because the thick blank spot had not grown more delicately assailable and nor had he; just one of those get-away-with-murder-boys, every year handsomer, and brilliant at everything he undertook.

Gillian is a few years younger, and in awe of this daunting family – though also enamoured by them, and desperate for them to show her attention and affection. The strength of For All We Know is the Stern’s understanding of the power of embarrassing or upsetting moments. She is so good at children and the way they feel so strongly in the moment. There are a couple of incidents where young Gillian feels she is being laughed at by the family – and, even more powerfully, one moment of triumph that is later forgotten by the people she thought she’d impressed. In a biography, these moments wouldn’t even warrant a footnote – but in Gillian’s young mind, they are seismic. She decides that she will one day write the biography of the family, and begins to fill notebooks with observations and eavesdroppings.

The novel has a further three parts, jumping forward in time, seeing how Gillian’s life becomes more embroiled with the family. Timothy fulfils his early promise and becomes a big-name actor in Hollywood; Rendal has fulfilled the prediction that he will have a much less illustrious career. Gillian has grown in confidence, though still clearly in awe of what Bettina thinks, and capable of strong emotional reactions.

One of the interesting things about For All We Know is that, jumping in stages through this family’s history, Stern doesn’t land in the most significant places. We hear about marriages that have happened between sections, and of moments of success and fame. The chapters of narrative seem almost random, in terms of a timeline, but perhaps they are the places of biggest emotional impact – not the places that Gillian’s biography would highlight. Stern is more interested in the ways that relationships within the family change. And particularly between Gillian and Bettina. There is no big surprise twist or gotcha moment – I did wonder if Bettina would turn out to be Gillian’s mother or something, but there’s nothing like that. But there are times when their relationship shifts dramatically – largely because what they want and expect from it is so different.

Getting to the end of For All We Know, I was left with a really strong impression of the emotional weight of the narrative – and, yes, slightly disconcerted by the curious structure and the events that aren’t covered. I can see why Stern chose to pick the moments she did – and yet I feel a bit like Gillian in the early chapters. That I’ve been watching a family from the outside, not quite privy to their most significant memories. I like a novel to leave me thinking, and I’m not quite sure yet whether I’ll remember this novel as a brilliant success or as something a little off-kilter. Or perhaps both?

British Library Women Writers #6: Tea is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex

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When I was first asked to suggest titles for the British Library Women Writers series, one of the first titles that came to my mind was Tea is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex. Some authors are loved because they are great prose stylists. Others because they have something profound to say about contemporary society. And then there are people like Mary Essex who just know how to write a rattlingly enjoyable story. I say Mary Essex – her real name was Ursula Bloom, and Mary Essex was one of a handful of pseudonyms she used for her hundreds of books. Truly, an extraordinarily prolific woman.

I’ve read a few of the books she wrote as Mary Essex, and this was the first – back in 2003, I think. I bought it because of that wonderfully beguiling title, which I’m hopeful will also attract book shoppers when bookshops are open again.

The novel is about David and Germayne, who decide to open a tea garden in a village just after World War 2. David has some experience in teashops – albeit the business side rather than any hands-on experience – and Germayne is willing to come along, though obviously a little less enthusiastic. They met when she was married to someone else, and Essex is very witty about their coming together – how Germayne wanted somebody spontaneous and more exciting than her first husband. It’s that spontaneity that leads to this ill-fated plan.

The village are not very pleased to have these outsiders coming in, and they have to try and placate various other people – from the doyenne of the village to the pub owners who claim the tea garden is stealing their business. Many things in village life have not changed since 1950, when this book was published, and I certainly recognise a lot of the sparring. Things only get more animated when Mimi is hired as a cook. She is a refugee from Vienna, and not above using her feminine wiles to get attention. As the narrator drily notes, her English gets more broken the more she wishes to charm her interlocutor.

Essex handles the whole thing wonderfully – it’s just a joyful romp, with quite an unexpected ending that I shan’t spoil here. It was quite difficult to find any contemporary issue to write about in the afterword, so I chose to write a bit about rationing. But this isn’t in any way an ‘issue novel’ – rather, it is a dollop of fun in a year that needs all the fun it can get.