Streatfeild

Babbacombe’s by Susan Scarlett

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Writing about my latest Furrowed Middlebrow / Dean Street Press read, I have to mention the recent, tragically early death of Rupert Heath – the brainchild behind Dean Street Press. He leaves behind him an extraordinary legacy of reprint publishing – thanks for everything, Rupert. You can read more about this at Scott’s blog.

And this blog post will be yet another tribute to what he has achieved, because Babbacombe’s (1941) by Susan Scarlett is a lovely book. It was recommended to me many years ago, but at that point it was impossible to lay hands on a copy – thank goodness it’s now available as a Furrowed Middlebrow book. And it is right bang in the middle of middlebrow – totally predictable, but all the more enjoyable for that.

If you don’t recognise the name Susan Scarlett, you may well known the writer behind the pseudonym – because this was the name under which Noel Streatfeild wrote her lighter novels. In this one, Beth has just left school and is getting her first job. She manages to secure one at Babbacombe’s – the department store where her father has worked for decades. It’s a large, tightly organised place where young employees have to quickly find their place in the whirring cogs of the machine, and Beth is keen to do her best in the frocks section. Less keen to please is Dulcie – a cousin who moves in with them. She considers herself a cut above because she is paying them board and has a small private income, and is keen to be a model in the shop – but instead finds herself as a ‘lift girl’. She is vain, impractical and selfish, and hung out to dry by the narrative in a way that did feel a bit uncomfortable to read in 2023.

Beth, on the other hand, is filled with decency and morals – but also, in order to make her lovable, a tendency to speak her mind to anybody. And that includes the curious young man she ends up stick in a lift with. (Being stuck in a lift with someone seems such a 1990s romcom trope, so it’s oddly reassuring to know that it’s been around since at least the 1940s.) She had previously caught his eye when she tripped over his brilliantly named dog, Scissors. And she tells him how much she loves Babbacombe’s and admires the owner, Mr Babbacombe, a self-made man who has worked his way from obscurity to riches – but, naturally, kept his salt-of-the-earth character. Not that she says all that; we see that for ourselves a bit later.

Little does she know – though the reader has probably suspected from the first time the man was introduced – that this is David Babbacombe, the son of the owner. He is an affluent idler, on his way up to ask his father for some more money. And, let me tell you, this way of life doesn’t strike Beth and her work ethic as being very noble:

Beth examined his lean, athletic figure in shocked surprise.

“Don’t you work at anything?”

“No. A little beachcombing now and again, and I’ve a hoard of silver cups won for this and that.”

Beth forget he was Mr. Babbacombe’s son and only felt that she liked him too much to want to despise him.

“I should have thought doing nothing but playing games was pretty dull.”

He tapped some ash clear of his coat.

“Oh, it’s all right.”

Beth hated that.

“But it isn’t. It’s miserable. You might as well be a cabbage.”

Rather chastened, David changes his mind when he gets to his father. Rather than asking for a handout, he asks for a job – and starting at the bottom.

The rest of this lovely novel is David winning Beth’s heart, and then convincing her that the class difference between them is immaterial. She takes some winning over, and in real life he would seem pretty appalling for how little agency he gives her, but Babbacombe’s is not real life and we all know the ending that we both want and are going to get. Along the way there is some fun mistaken identity business, stuff with a shoplifter, a rather tense section about an eye operation, and much more. The stakes may be high for the characters, but they are never particularly high for the reader because we know what sort of book this is.

You wouldn’t necessarily want to read a book like Babbacombe’s every day, but there is indisputably a talent in creating something this perfectly frothy and engaging. Even besides the delightful storyline, this is a wonderful novel for period detail on the inner workings of a department store – and I suspect there are many of us who can’t resist that.

When I posted a photo on Instagram, the comments were filled with other people saying how much they’d enjoyed this book. An absolute triumph and a perfect example of the sort of book it’s trying to me. Vale, Rupert, and thank you for all the lovely books like this.

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!

Tea By The Nursery Fire – Noel Streatfeild

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Picture nabbed from
Hayley’s review…

I seem to be on a little run of lovely books at the moment, although Tea by the Nursery Fire: A Children’s Nanny at the Turn of the Century (1976) by Noel Streatfeild doesn’t have quite the same feel as Patricia Brent, Spinster.  It’s not as funny – indeed, it’s not trying to be funny.  But it’s another book that is so enjoyable and cosy that you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a duvet.

Noel Streatfeild will be known to many of you as the author of Ballet Shoes and other books of that ilk.  Indeed, she is known to me as that, but I haven’t actually read any of them – the only Streatfeild I have read is the Persephone (Saplings) which I don’t remember having very strong feelings about, but finding racier than I’d expected.  Well, as you’d imagine, Tea by the Nursery Fire isn’t remotely racey. It’s the complete opposite of racey, even if there is the odd bit of illegitimacy and out-of-wedlock liaisons going on along the way.

It’s difficult to say whether Tea by the Nursery Fire is fact or fiction, and the blurb has cautiously opted for calling it a blend of the two.  Noel Streatfeild is writing about her father’s nanny, from childhood in the 1870s until her death.  Streatfeild never identifies which of the child characters is her father, so I couldn’t work out whether one of the last generation was Noel herself under a pseudonym, but I think it’s fair to assume that Noel either never met Emily Huckwell, or at least never spoke with her to any meaningful extent.  Thus every detail of this many-detailed story comes either from passed-on memories of her father, or from her own head.

Everything progresses as you might expect – we start with scenes of a poor and big family, where boys are expected to become labourers at 14, and girls head off at the same age to find a ‘position’ somewhere.  Emily is given the lowest rung at the local squire’s – basically the maid of a maid of a maid.  Only a chance comment at family prayer’s, where she offers to mend the dress of a visiting family member, gives her the opportunity to move up the ranks (and escape the watchful eye of the house’s unpleasant housekeeper).  She goes to the much smaller residence of the woman in question, and aids the friendly and wise nanny there.

And on it progresses – scenes full of nannies and their charges, maids and their duties, mistresses and their ways.  It’s a late-Victorian world which is chiefly familiar to me through the eyes of Ivy Compton-Burnett.  Of course, the tone Streatfeild takes could scarcely be more different.

I loved reading Tea by the Nursery Fire, it was heartwarming and sweet, but I think I might have really loved it if Streatfeild had taken the heartwaming down a notch.  Emily is basically perfect, and never puts a foot wrong.  She is very wise, very kind, and very forgiving.  There are a few moments of tragedy in her life, and while it is true that she deals with these calmly, rather than with the semi-histrionic heroism so beloved to 1940s cinema, she also doesn’t seem to be impeded in her path of virtuous goodness.

All of which makes her a nice, rather than lovable, character.  But it is understandable – she is the sort of paragon that you can imagine a child believing his nanny to be. Still more, the sort of person that son’s daughter would wish to believe in.

Yes, it’s lovely.  Perhaps it is only the cynic in me that would have loved it rather more if Emily had let loose with an acerbic aside now and then.

From Tiny Acorns

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I’ve been looking forward to Persephone Reading Weekend for ages, so apologies that I’m joining in quite late in the day – yesterday I was so tired that I went to bed at 8.30pm. The fact that I was still awake at 2am was not fun… nor did I read much of this book during those hours (my eyes always give up before the rest of my mind/body does) but it was a quiet day today, so read the rest of it – ‘it’ being Saplings by Noel Streatfeild. (And aren’t the endpapers beautiful?)

I bought Saplings (1947) in 2004, I think, and somehow it has languished on my shelves since then. It even came on holiday with me once, but didn’t get as far as being read – no real reason for this neglect. Perhaps because I haven’t read any of Streatfeild’s books for children? Perhaps simply because it came in over my 300pp bench-mark for ideal reads. But it finally came down from my bookcase, and I can report back.

I’ve got to confess – the first few pages didn’t win me over. It would be nice to be completely positive during an Appreciation Weekend, but I’m afraid I’m going to pick a few holes in Streatfeild’s work – although overall I was very impressed. Let’s get that out there now, so that this doesn’t feel too complainy a review. But those first few pages – we’re on a beach with the Wiltshire family. Laurel, Tony, Kim, and Tuesday (yes, Tuesday – has this ever been a name?) are messing about, playing, and doing things like this:
Kim was singing to a tune of his own, ‘The sea, the sea, the lovely sea.’ His happiness was given a sharp edge by fright. The day was going to be very scrumptious. Dad and Mum were here, and there was going to be a picnic and prawning; but first there’d be the bathe and Dad would make him swim to the raft.Oh. This felt very much like Streatfeild hadn’t taken off her children’s-writer hat, and was merely giving adult novel writing a go. My heart sank a little.

When the focus switches around to their parents Alex and Lena, however, things started to improve. Alex is a hands-on father, always conscious of what his children might be feeling, and doing his best to help them grow up properly and well-disciplined without being thwarted or unhappy. He is one of the best fathers I’ve come across in literature – rather better than E.H. Young’s William, I’d say – and still fairly convincing. His major fault, in my eyes, is sending the children to boarding school. Lena, on the other hand, is not of a maternal disposition, and misses being her husband’s sole object of affection. Through the eyes of the holiday governess Ruth, this is how Lena comes across:
On other counts Lena was not so good. She never even pretended the children came first. But did that matter? Was that not out-balanced by the perfect love always before the children’s eyes? Ruth, helping herself to peas, knew one of her more noticeably amused flicks was crossing her eyes. Was it perfect love the children saw? Certainly Lena loved Alex, but perfect love in her philosophy was an ill-balanced affair, almost all body, the merest whiff of soul.It is in her allusions to Lena’s various, ahem, appetites that Streatfeild most prominently demonstrates that this is not a children’s book. (P.134 made me gasp a little…) But alongside this we do get the bread and butter of children’s lives – the four children are well-drawn, and certainly have formed and individual characters. Kim the show-off, who craves attention but can’t control the way in which he seeks it; Laurel the dependable eldest sibling, but fraught on her own; Tuesday who wishes only to have her family around her; Tony who asks such pertinent questions, and worries too much. All painted convincingly with Streatfeild’s brush – but still it feels a little like one is reading a children’s book with longer words… There’s even a Nanny of the indomitable variety.


But things are about to change. I shan’t spoil the big event which changes the course of the novel, but suffice to say that a tragedy occurs to alter the lives of all concerned. And it’s from here that Streatfeild comes into her own – we follow the children to their various schools as they cope with this tragedy in their various ways. They come home for holidays, and we see the reunions then. In the background is always the war – rarely creeping nearer than the background, but certainly getting no further away.

Somewhere towards the last third of the novel Laurel, Tony, Kim, and Tuesday are split up for the holiday and must each spend time with a different Aunt. There were definite overtones of Richmal Crompton’s Matty and the Dearingroydes here – snapshots of various intriguing or eccentric family units. It should have been a different novel, really – they just came flitting past, and were gone before you could grasp hold of them. I’d happily read many more chapters, for instance, about the vicarage family where loving vicar’s wife Sylvia lovingly makes up holy reasons to excuse her children doing things their father might find worrying. Since Streatfeild is, like me, a vicarage child, it would be fascinating. Structure isn’t Streatfeild’s strong suit – Saplings seems to explode somewhat, proliferating with characters and going off at tangents, right until the final pages.

Structure may not be her trump card, but there is still a lot to love in the novel. Chief amongst these is the way in which she demonstrates the damage done to families and children by war. A lot of this damage would have been done by separating them from each other and their parents in their schooling, but war still has its undeniable effects. There is a rather silly Afterword from Dr. Jeremy Holmes, a Psychiatrist who reads Saplings through the lens of child psychology. In doing so, he completely ignores the fun that Streatfeild pokes at this field – it is no coincidence that the Aunt who makes generalisations about child psychology is the only one who has no children of her own. Despite this misreading, it is true that Streatfeild is insightful into the child’s mindset – although she would never, I am sure, have labelled this insight psychology.

Perhaps it is unfortunate for Saplings’ sake that I have read so many good books this year. One can’t help think how much better E.H. Young creates family dynamics; how much more insightfully Barbara Comyns gives the voice and mind of children; how much more poignant Marilynne Robinson can be. Comparisons, as Mrs. Malaprop intended to say, are odious – and on its own merits, Saplings is a fantastic read. It’s engaging, occasionally moving, and certainly enjoyable. Maybe seven years on my shelf had built up its potential too greatly for me? I shall learn not to lament the novel Saplings was not, and heartily enjoy the novel that it is.