1950s

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.

Pin A Rose on Me by Josephine Blumenfeld

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I was intrigued when I first read Scott’s review of Pin a Rose on Me (1958) by Josephine Blumenfeld, mostly by this line of his: “a bit like one of E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady diaries as penned by Morticia Addams, or perhaps it’s like one of Shirley Jackson’s wonderful humorous memoirs of domestic life, if Jackson had let loose all the more morbid gothic impulses of her fiction instead of keeping them fairly muted.”

Well, how could I resist?

I think it ended up being a cross between the Provincial Lady and Barbara Comyns, for me – the sardonic domestic memoir combined with a matter-of-fact observation of bizarre things. Very little is given any sense of being unusual, rather we rocket through her experiences without much pause for breath.

Mrs Appleby is the first-person narrator, who has a handful of adult children and doesn’t much care for them or their progeny. As the novel (let’s call it that, though I’m not sure it quite qualifies) opens, she is more focused on her dog Fanny and her coquettishness for dogs of the opposite sex. The line ‘Tarts don’t have Fannys’ on the first page might rather make this one impossible to reprint in England…

There isn’t a plot, really, it’s just Mrs Appleby’s life – which seems crammed with movement. At one point she rather suddenly goes off to America by sea (if I understood it properly), while elsewhere she embarks on a volunteering career in a hospital. Very little is forewarned, and the eccentricity of the structure matches the eccentricity of the character.

Essentially, it is an exercise in tone. Here are a couple of examples of it…

After dinner the others play bridge and say, ‘The rest are mine’, while I do my occupational therapy, a rather revolting piece of tapestry I am doing for my nephew and his wife who don’t want it but who daren’t say ‘no’. It has gone wrong somewhere, it rises to a tight peak in the middle and is lopsided.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” people say sadly. “But isn’t there something a wee bit wrong? Haven’t you pulled the wool too tight? You’ll have to have it stretched, won’t you?”

I shan’t have it stretched, I shall throw it into the sea the day we leave. But now while the others are writing their log books and we are drifting about between the islands, it is infinitely soothing to push coloured wools in and out of any old holes I feel inclined, and it keeps my mind off the rough seas.

And another…

Sad friend sends white hand-knitted shawl for my birthday.

“It will go well with your dark hair, my dear,” she writes. “It was originally meant for Derek’s wife, but things didn’t turn out to plan as you know, so I feel that you should have it for your birthday.” She goes on to say she has arthritis in all her fingers and is finding it more and more difficult to get through her tea cosy orders. “The doctor says I should winter abroad. What wild ideas they have.”

The shawl is beautiful, wide, long, soft and miraculously woven in the shapes of giant cobwebs and open roses. In a shop it would cost a lot. Sad friend wouldn’t get a lot from a shop, but she will get nothing from me as it is my birthday present and I can’t pay for my birthday present.”

Sometimes the tone worked really well – sometimes the deliberate inconsequential nature of Mrs Appleby’s descriptions of life were, well, too inconsequential. Overall, it is exuberant and odd, and it doesn’t quite cohere into a full novel, but perhaps Blumenfeld is trying something completely different. It certainly felt pretty dizzying to read, and there were plenty of moments that made me laugh – as well as times I had no clue what was going on or where we were. Mrs Appleby’s determined forthrightness, and total absence of anything resembling etiquette or regard for others, made her an enjoyably eccentric protagonist to spend time with. She would be a nightmare in real life, but some of the best protagonists would be.

I think I’ll re-read one day and see if I can work out what’s going on a bit better. But it’s great fun and very unusual – not quite consistent enough to warrant becoming a classic, but a tour de force that may have influences of Delafield, or even Comyns, but ends up being its own strange little thing.

Thin Ice by Compton Mackenzie – #1956Club

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Thank you for some additional 1956 Club reviews since I updated the page recently – I will make sure the list is fully updated at the end of the week. And will read all the reviews too! This week has rather got away with me, but I always manage to read them in the end – and what a variety of books people have been reading.

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else reading Thin Ice, though. It’s my third Compton Mackenzie novel, and the other two (Poor Relations and Buttercups and Daisies) both of which ended up being among the favourite books I read in those respective years. Since then, I’ve been buying a lot of his novels, and I was aware that he wrote in various different styles. The first two I read were very funny, bordering on farce. Thin Ice is… not.

It’s narrated by a man called George and is about the life of his close, long-term friend Henry Fortescue, from 1896 to 1941 – when, as we learn on the first page, Fortescue dies. They were friends as youths and continued to be as Henry became an MP, with an eye on potentially becoming prime minister. The only thing that might stand in his way is if he ‘indulges in his indulgence’ – which is being gay. This is a secret for only a few dozen pages, and even during that time it is a secret only from George – the reader has worked it out almost instantly. Henry states early on that he will never marry any woman, and that he intends to either be celibate or throw caution to the wind completely – and this is where the title of the novel comes from:

”You’re pacing this orchard with me, Geegee, trying to look sympathetic, and only occasionally peering nervously round over your shoulder to see that nobody is within earshot, but how can you be sympathetic? You can’t possibly understand my emotions. I can assure you that I shouldn’t be inflicting them on you now if I were not determined to suppress them henchforth. That’s why I’m telling you. Edward Carstairs would jeer at that. All he would ask is that I should be discreet. And that’s what I was intending to be until I realised that for me discretion was impossible. It had to be complete self-denial, or complete surrender. And walking about for ever on thin ice does not appeal to me.”

It’s certainly an interesting theme for the 1956 Club, being published more than a decade before homosexuality would become legal in the UK. Sadly, it’s not a very interesting novel in any other way.

Because it covers such a long period, and gives weight to each year, the chapters hare through a lot of time at breakneck speed. Details of the day are thrown in, often political, many of which didn’t mean much to me but do give a good sense of historical accuracy. Doubtless the 1956 reader enjoyed the references that took them back to their own younger days. But this speeding through years gives Thin Ice a feeling of being constantly in flux, and never letting us bed in to any details of the characters. The narrator is largely there to relay events, but we expect a bit more of a personality from the main character’s best friend. And Henry himself is drawn with a bit more complexity, but we don’t get enough time to dwell on any of it.

Mackenzie isn’t writing in humorous mode here, and I certainly missed that. It all felt a bit colourless and repetitive. Bland. Perhaps it wouldn’t have done if he’d picked a few years and focused more on characters and relationship between them. The scope of the novel left it without any depth.

A shame to end 1956 Club with a bit of a dud, and perhaps it wouldn’t feel quite so much a dud if I didn’t love Mackenzie’s comic fiction as much as I do.

Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson – #1956Club

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It is well documented that I want to own every single one of the Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press, and I’m doing my best to achieve that goal. I bought Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson last year, having coveted it when Scott first blogged about it. It’s a war memoir – and it’s always interesting to see the tone these have in the post-1945 club years. I get the impression that things went a bit quiet on the war memoir front immediately after the war, but 10+ years later people were ready to look back on that bizarre time.

First off, yes her name was Verily. And here’s why:

One of my father’s interests is words. He devised a system for naming his five children. Each name had to have six letters; and, because his and my mother’s names contain an R and an L, each of ours had to too – plus some peculiarity not shared by others. Merlin (n), Rhalou (h), Erroll (doubles), Verily, (v) – not so much a name as an adverb – and finally, to fall in with the system, he had to invent Lorema.

Spam Tomorrow starts off with Verily going briefly AWOL as a F.A.N.Y. (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) so that she can marry Donald, which they do hastily and illicitly – illicit because she didn’t have leave, rather than because they couldn’t be married.

She then jumps back a bit to joining the F.A.N.Y. – before which she had found a job that used her artistic talents to some extent, in that she designed the wrappers for toffees. It is an example of the slightly eccentric and bohemian spirit that is key to understanding Anderson’s character and writing – a detail that might seem too niche and absurd in a novel, but just happens to be true.

Anderson doesn’t work for the nursing yeomanry for a very long time, and is quite open about how poorly suited she was to such a regimented life. There is a very funny and odd scene early on where she is arrested and threatened with court-martialling for crashing a government vehicle into a gatepost.

A few minutes later, while I was getting ready for lunch, two F.A.N.Y.s of the quiet, useful, obedient type came into the bedroom which I shared with four others (including one whose claim to fame was that her husband had been fallen on by Queen Mary in her recent motor accident). The two F.A.N.Y.s stood in a waiting attitude, one each side of me.

“Want to borrow a comb?” I asked affably.

“You’re under arrest,” said one.

“I’m what?” I asked.

“Under arrest. We’ve had orders to close in on you and march you to the orderly room without your cap or belt.”

She never quite works out what is going on, but ultimately receives a reprieve. It’s an insight into the daftness that always comes with a militaristic attitude to life.

The bulk of Spam Tomorrow is taken up with her married life and particularly her domestic life. Some of the most dramatic pages, unsurprisingly, are when she goes into labour during an air raid. Apparently this left her quite ill for a long time, and the only cure was to have another child – which rather baffled me, but it seemed to work.

I loved everything about her looking for housing, and it was fascinating to read about the precarious nature of homes in London in a period when they could easily be bombed at any moment. And then there is the section where she starts taking house guests in a larger place in the countryside, and discovering how inept she is at it. Which gives plenty of opportunity for being scathing about some of the worst paying guests – particularly those who come from an artists’ colony and have extremely demanding tastes. It reminded me quite a lot of the latter stages in another Furrowed Middlebrow title, Ruth Adam’s wonderful A House in the Country.

Basically, the whole book was very funny and enjoyable, without ever shying away from the perils and privations of the home front. I’ve read far more home front memoirs than those of active soldiers, and I can’t imagine that trend will change, and Anderson’s is a worthy addition to the genre – because of her experiences, but mostly because of her frank, eccentric, and indomitable character.

Beyond the Gates by Dorothy Evelyn Smith – #1956club

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I’ve been buying up Dorothy Evelyn Smith’s novels, because I’m worried that when O, The Brave Music is published by the British Library later in the year, there will suddenly be none of them on the secondhand books market. Of course, Miss Plum and Miss Penny from Dean Street Press might already be having the same effect. Well, I bought Beyond the Gates earlier in the year and was delighted when I saw that it qualified for the 1956 Club.

This novel came somewhere in the middle-to-late period of Smith’s all-too-short writing career – she was 50 when her first novel was published. It concerns a 15-year-old called Lydia and the gates she is going beyond are those of Mary Clitheroe Orphanage. She has been chosen to go and be a servant for Marion Howard and her small household – though she is so diminutive that Marion initially mistakes her for someone much younger than 15. Rather a lot of emphasis is placed on how small and ugly Lydia is, though they’re not particularly significant characteristics for the rest of the novel – except for contributing to the low self-esteem she has.

Marion is unsure if Lydia will be able to manage the work on her own, but takes her back to the house and agrees to a trial. Marion is a single woman who lives with her niece Midge – various other siblings and nephews/nieces come to visit at different times, though most members of the sprawling family were killed in an accident. I drew out a family tree in the pack of my copy, and then most of them died and it became less relevant!

When she was a very old woman, whatever else Lydia might forget, she would never forget one thing – her first sight of the room which Miss Howard told her was to be her very own. 

She advanced across the threshold slowly, warily, as an animal enters strange territory, fearful of the hidden enemy, the biting trap. She stared about her furtively. Her flat, sallow face showed nothing of the leaping, incredulous pleasure that swept her in a great wave.

“Put down your box, Lydia.”

Lydia set the trunk down carefully against the wall.

This is all in 1920. The novel is in three parts, and the others are in 1930 and 1940. There is some plot along the way, not least when Lydia’s past life catches up with her in the middle section, but for the most part Beyond the Gates is about relationships. It’s about how Lydia discovers being part of a family for the first time, gradually thawing until she can believe that she is loved.

Which makes it sound extremely mawkish. And it does lean a tiny bit that way occasionally – I would have preferred Lydia and Marion to have a few more negative character traits, to offset the loyalty and kindness that they have in common. But mostly Smith is too good, too delicious a writer to be disliked. I’ve read four of her novels now (though don’t remember much about the one I read years and years ago), and what really makes her stand out is the way she brings the reader into the world of the story. I never visualise the books I read, but I feel like I’ve spent time in each of her communities. I don’t know quite how to explain that, because I haven’t imagined myself in those surroundings (my brain doesn’t work like that), but I belong to these worlds. There is something in the warmth of them, the timbre of them, the atmosphere of them, that has enveloped me and kept a bit of me behind.

It’s a rare quality, and it’s precious. O, The Brave Music remains my favourite of her books, and the one that enveloped me most completely, but I loved reading Beyond the Gates too. I’m so glad this special writer is finally being rediscovered.

Talk of the Devil by Frank Baker – #1956club

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book cover of Talk of the DevilAnother book that’s been on my shelves for at least 15 years is Talk of the Devil by Frank Baker [image on left from Fantastic Fiction]. It’s no secret that his earlier novel Miss Hargreaves is all all-time best-beloved book, but I’ve had mixed-to-negative reactions to all the other novels I’ve read by him. Will Talk of the Devil be any different?

Spoilers: not really. But let’s keep on.

The narrator, Philip, has headed to Cornwall, an area that Baker particularly loved, to visit a couple of old friends – Paul Acton and Jeremy Holden. And Baker is good on descriptions of Cornwall – here’s what he says about St Zenac, which isn’t a real place but is a wonderfully Cornish name:

‘It is a place so much on the edge of unreality, you can never decide where myth ends and history begins. Wild moorland, with massive stacks of granite clutched by lichen; streams that trickle secretly to the sea; the raven, the buzzard, the viper; and in little ravines, soft mounds of sweet turf where bladder-campion and thrift grow in rich masses. It is a country too ancient to be safe. The few farming people, in wind-swept stone cottages, are a troglodyte race, stunted in growth, with thick burry voices. Antiquarians, geologists, archaeologists, and novelists – all have written about this last edge of England, once called Bolerium. And those who have come under the spell of it invariably have to return to it; to return to the last sweeping fire of the falling sun as it sinks beyond the Atlantic, the death of day in England.’

I think Baker is at his best in Talk of the Devil when writing about Cornwall – the landscape and also the feelings it evokes. This is very near the beginning of the book, and I was filled with hope. But…

The actual plot of Talk of the Devil is rather more confusing. While Philip is visiting, he hears about the death of Gladys Acton – which many locals believe was the result of dark supernatural forces, though officially she died of natural causes.

”Because she was murdered in such a way that there could never be any evidence. Because, in fact, she was murdered by the power of malicious thought, bent upon her end. And shall I tell you why I’m so interested, Jeremy? Because people can be, and are being destroyed without any material force being employed. You don’t need guns in this game. Simply the collective power of evil. And especially for unfortunate people like Gladys Acton, who have enough integrity and determination to get in the way.”

The above is the sort of conversation a lot of people have, and Philip spends quite a lot of the novel trying to establish the nature of evil, and determine whether or not there is such a person as the devil.

Baker often looks to the metaphysical in his books. In Miss Hargreaves, a significant element of the novel explores the power of creative thought – being sufficient to make a fictional person come alive. It works there, because it is an undercurrent to a very funny and enjoyable narrative, and it is attached to a very concrete example. In Talk of the Devil, as elsewhere in his other novels, Baker gets too tangled up in philosophical and metaphysical conversations without enough surface story to make them compelling.

I found myself quite confused by Talk of the Devil. It was enjoyable enough to read, but it hovered between a rather flimsy thriller and something with more sophisticated, but more baffling, aims. Putting together a treatise on the nature of evil with a murder mystery sounds quite promising, but the tangle didn’t ever really become disentangled.

If this were the first novel I’d read by Baker, I’d probably give it a lukewarm appreciation. It’s certainly not poorly written on a prose level, even if the construction isn’t wonderful. But I start each Baker novel with the hope that, finally, I might have found a worthy successor to the wondrous Miss Hargreaves. Maybe after 15 years I have to acknowledge that lightning struck once. But more likely, I’ll keep slowly reading his books, hoping for that second miracle.

Tea at Four O’Clock by Janet McNeill – #1956Club

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One of the reasons I love these club years is that it makes me delve into the books that have sat on my shelves for donkey’s years. I bought Tea at Four O’Clock by Janet McNeill in 2005, and it has sat quietly waiting for a long time. I even read a couple of her other novels when Turnpike Press republished them (they’ve also done this one), and I enjoyed them though I wasn’t blown away by them. Not in the way that I was by Tea at Four O’Clock. It’s brilliant.

As the novel opens, Laura Percival is returning from the funeral of her sister Mildred. They have lived all their lives in a very large house (‘Marathon’) in Northern Ireland, now neither parent is alive, and for the past six years Laura has been looking after Mildred. As she walks home from the funeral, the words of the priest are going around in her head: ‘the sister who with exemplary devotion did not spare herself in the long months of nursing’. It is the only tribute she has received for these years of service. Now that Mildred has finally died, Laura has agency – and for the first time in her life.

We learn that, even before this sickness, Mildred dominated Laura’s life with a well-intentioned but draconian insistence on routine. And on respectability above all else. It’s that rigorous routine and respectability that Laura finds hard to escape in the days after Mildred’s death – she has left such an imprint on Marathon that it is unthinkable to do anything but obey her. This is what George sees when he returns – the wastrel brother who has been estranged from the family for decades. The quote below is where the novel’s title comes from. (Miss Parks is a friend of Mildred’s who came to visit and then moved in, and is clearly hoping to be asked to remain.)

“It’s a good many years,” he said, a little uncertainly, “since I heard that clock.”

Miss Parks was quick to emphasise her more intimate acquaintance with it. “Four o’clock! That’s always been a very special time with us. Mildred rested in the afternoon, you see, and Laura brought her tea-tray in at four o’clock. Mildred did like regular habits, you know. It’s a great help to an invalid, and Laura understood that so well. Do you know, Mr Percival, I’ve seen Laura waiting outside the door in the hall, with the tray in her hand, and the minute the clock had finished striking she would knock and come in. ‘Mildred,’ she would say, ‘Mildred dear, it’s four o’clock.'”

George could suddenly bear no more of it. He could see Laura standing there waiting, the tea-tray with all its appointments of lace and china and silver correctly placed for the personal satisfaction of one querulous invalid. He could imagine Laura’s hand, a small hand, never very clever at anything except the delicate brushwork of her paintings, poised ready to knock when the sound of the clock had sunk to silence. Then the hesitant rap and the opening door, and Mildred on the sofa turning her ailing body to feed on Laura’s apparent health. He felt sick and turned to the sofa to reassure himself it was indeed empty. “I’m going out into the garden,” he said, “for a smoke,” and fumbling his way through the blinds he opened the french windows and went out onto the lawn.

Hopefully that’s given a sense of how good McNeill’s prose is in this novel. She is also so good at the nuances of how Laura is reacting now – some relief, some guilt, some helplessness, some uncertainty. She doesn’t want to switch her dependency from the dead sister to the newly returned brother, but nor does she know what to do with independence. Each of the interlocking characters, dead and alive, is drawn so subtly and cleverly.

We also see the lost chances of the past – and the different paths for the future. George has affection for this sister, but also a plan to get him, his wife and child out of relative poorness (his wife is a wonderful and wise character). It’s hard not to sympathise with all of the characters. Even those whose motives are initially suspect grow more forgivable as we understand them more.

It’s a beautiful and brilliant novel, and I’m so glad I finally got it off the shelf.

Mrs Panopoulis by Jon Godden

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Earlier in the year, I read and really loved the odd, cold, psychologically fascinating novel Told in Winter by Jon Godden (sister of the more famous Rumer). So I was keen to try more of her things, and I’m a sucker for novels about older women – so Mrs Panopoulis (1959) winged its way to me. Isn’t the cover gorgeous?

(I should say, at the outset, that I read this in the peak of my eyes getting back to working, and with quite a lot of dizziness, so it wasn’t the ideal time to take it all in. But it has a big font and it’s quite a simple story, so I thought it would be a good place to try reading again. And clearly that was a few months ago, so here goes nothing with this post! For those asking so kindly, health continues to be up and down but eyes have largely been fine, praise the Lord.)

Mrs Panopoulis woke early, as the old do, but even earlier than she usually did because the ship’s engines had stopped. To her it was the stopping of an enormous heart. She lay on her back on the berth, and before she opened her eyes she moved her hand cautiously up to her breast. Her heart was beating unevenly, as it always did, but it was still beating.

Waves of light were running across the white-painted ceiling; she knew that they were reflections from the sea outside, but for a moment she could not remember where she was. The sound she heard in her sleep came again, a high, shrill mewing. “Seagulls!” she said, still half asleep, and then, “We have arrived.”

Typing that out now, I really like Godden’s writing. Maybe I wasn’t in the right state to appreciate it when I read it. Anyway, Mrs P and the people on her cruise have arrived at an island off the coast of ‘Portuguese East Africa’, whatever that is or was. Among the group are a pair of young things who have yet to acknowledge that they love each other, Martin and Flora (Mrs P’s great-niece) – Martin has travelled to meet a business partner whom he idolises. And Mrs Panopoulis has determined that she will shape their destiny.

The depiction of the island hovers on that line between interesting travel literature and not-very-sensitive cultural hierarchies. It isn’t out-and-out racist, but it also isn’t the most comfortable read. I’m felt that Godden was on safer ground when she was talking about the tourists who’d travelled there and the ex-pats who lived there. Mrs Panopoulis herself is a little sharp and rude, but driven by a thirst for adventure and an impatience with her own increasing age.

There were a lot of things to like in Mrs Panopoulis, not least the fully realised depiction of an old woman who doesn’t fall into any of the old-woman stereotypes. But, overall, I wish the novel had a bit more depth, a little more cultural sensitivity, and, without giving anything away, an entirely different ending.

So, this Godden isn’t in the same league as Told in Winter, but it might be one to revisit at some point, to see if I missed anything the first time around.

 

A House in the Country by Ruth Adam

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It’s always exciting when there’s a new set of Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press, and I always want to read all of them. I got a couple as review copies, and went straight to A House in the Country (1957), partly because I thought I’d already read it and realised I hadn’t.

I love books about houses, and particularly about rambling old mansions. This one is enormous and in a little village – and is the place that Ruth Adam, her husband, and a handful of relatives and friends decide to rent together. What they couldn’t afford on their own, they can manage as a household of eight. Incidentally, A House in the Country is marketed as a novel, but it is very heavily based on real life, including the names. So is it a memoir or a novel? Probably a fictionalised version of real life, in the mould of the Provincial Lady series. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just a delight.

Though the first page of the book warns the reader that it will be far from an unalloyed delight for the group experimenting with this venture:

This is a cautionary tale, and true.

Never fall in love with a house. The one we fell in love with wasn’t even ours. If she had been, she would have ruined us just the same. We found out some things about her afterwards, among them what she did to that poor old parson, back in the eighteen-seventies. If we had found them out earlier…? It wouldn’t have made any difference. We were in that maudlin state when reasonable argument is quite useless. Our old parents tried it. We wouldn’t listen. “If only you could see her,” we said.

She first came into our lives through the Personal Column of The Times. I have the advertisement still. Sometimes I look at it bitterly, as if it were an old dance-programme, with some scrawled initials on it which I had since learned to hate.

If that sounds like quite a bitter opening, then don’t worry. It’s better that we know all will not end well, to ameliorate the sadness when things start to go wrong – but I was still about to dive into the joyfulness of the first chapters. Quite a lot of space in the book is devoted to finding, taking, and inhabiting the house. They assign rooms, they decorate, they marvel at the extraordinary beauty of a magnolia tree on the lawn.

Moving house is one of my favourite themes in literature. Moving somewhere this magical is a dream to read about, with hope in the air offset by the gentle bite of the narrative. Because Adam writes very amusingly, somewhere between the self-deprecation of E.M. Delafield and the snark of Beverley Nichols. She sees herself and her companions and her new neighbours with clear eyes, willing to see the best in all and unable to avoid highlighting the less good. It’s a complete joy to read, and the through-line of mild cynicism prevents it from being cloying.

The only difficulty with the book being heavily based on real events is that it messes up the structure of A House in the Country a little. The second half of the book covers a great deal more time than the first, as inhabitants splinter off and are replaced – sometimes by new long-termers and sometimes by short-term rentals who might deserve more than the few, funny paragraphs they are given. But Adam has to cover a lot of similar years in a short space, and she chooses to rush through some events and characters rather than let the book become repetitive.

And the end of the book, as they have to leave the house, is as sad a description of mourning as I’ve ever read – prepared as we were from the outset. Yet, somehow, I still look back on the book as fun, light, joyous. I suppose it has a bit of every emotion felt in a love affair – albeit a love affair with a house.

 

Death in Captivity by Michael Gilbert

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I recently tweeted a photo of my British library Crime Classics collection, most of which I haven’t read, and asked the good people of Twitter which I should read next.

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As I should have perhaps anticipated, I got many, many suggestions – practically as many as there are books there. But I went away and explored a few of the options, and chose Death in Captivity (1952) by Michael Gilbert, which I think I got as a review copy. I was intrigued by it’s WW2 setting and the ‘locked room mystery’ element to it.

The novel is set in a POW camp in Italy towards the end of the war – the soldiers have heard rumours that the end of the war might be coming, but nothing concrete. But they do know that a retreating German army might have no compunction in a few last-minute killings of British soldiers in an interment camp. Now is the time to make good their escape – and they have been busy tunnelling away from the various huts they’re living in.

I’ll be honest – the characters more or less blended into factions for me, in this one. I was too caught up with the setting and the mystery (to which I’ll come in a moment) – so this review is going to be lamentably short on characters’ names and personalities. I was also feeling pretty anxious when I read it, so was speeding through for the plot. But Gilbert definitely makes us feel like we’re in the middle of this camp – with all the humour, rivalries, fear, and ambition that are the everyday norms of the extraordinary situation in which these man have found themselves.

While there are a few tunnels, most are really only decoys for the main tunnel. But one morning, the soldiers find that there is a dead body in it, under a pile of rubble. It brings about a long list of questions: murder or accident? How did he get in? Do the Italian guards know about the tunnel – and how can they begin to investigate his death without exposing their chance of escape?

Like so many detective novels, the denouement doesn’t live up to the prowess of Agatha Christie. If, like me, you started with her, every subsequent detective novelist will disappoint with their plots – I’ve yet to find any exceptions. And, no, the denouement here is not particularly satisfactory – but what was brilliant was the way in which Gilbert brought that world to life. For the vividness there, and sections of real tension, I’d very readily recommend Death in Captivity.