The Golden Waterwheel by Leo Walmsley – #1954Club

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.

Love in the Sun by Leo Walmsley

If you look at Jane’s 2010 review of Love in the Sun (1939) by Leo Walmsley, you’ll see a comment from me saying that I’d like to read it. And, indeed, I bought a copy in 2012, still remembering Jane’s enthusiasm and how wonderful the novel sounded. Recently for my book group, I read The Village News by Tom Fort – there’s a chapter that mentions Walmsley a lot, and so 2021 finally became the year when he got his moment in the sun(!) Now read Love in the Sun, I can report that it is just as wonderful as Jane says.

I’ve done a bit of background reading online now, and haven’t quite worked out how autobiographical Love in the Sun is, nor how it relates to Walmsley’s earlier novels – but all of that can be put to one side to enjoy what this is: the story of a couple who’ve fled a financial crisis in Yorkshire, arriving in Cornwall with almost no money.

St Jude is a seaport in South Cornwall. It lies near the mouth of a small river, the Pol, whose estuary, shut in on all sides by high land, affords a safe, deep-water anchorage to ships of considerable size. The town itself, while small, straggles along a mile and a half of waterfront, its main street widening out here and there into wharves and jetties. This street continues through the old town into a residential area of hotels, boarding-houses and modern villas, becomes a parade, and ends near the sea in public pleasure gardens, with a golf course extending along the coastline.

[…]

It was the afternoon of a Christmas day that I, a Yorkshireman and a stranger, arrived on foot in St Jude, and, from one of those quays that break its straggling main street, had my first view of its harbour. That view was not specifically attractive. It did not encourage the hope that I was near the end of my peculiar quest: least of all did it suggest the beginning of a great adventure.

And perhaps it isn’t a great adventure, in the literary sense of the word. The plot of the novel is steady and simple, and all the more immersive for that. The narrator and his partner (they are not married because he still has a wife, but this is an incidental strand of the novel) fend for themselves by setting up home in a cheaply-rented old hut. Rain pours through the roof on the first night, when a storm seems almost to remove any possibility of staying. But gradually, resourcefully they make the hut into a home – they start growing vegetables, they adopt a visiting cat. In their quiet cove, they have idyllic beauty in front of them – and anxiety alongside, since they don’t know how they will survive with almost no income.

The solution is for the narrator to write a book, and it was fascinating to follow this process – aggravating at first, because he seemed so certain of its success. And, indeed, he is ultimately published – but the feelings he goes through after his first emotionless rejection are feelings that I recognise 70 years later! The development of his manuscript is perhaps the closest this novel comes to adventure. Unless you count some cat drama, which (thinking about it) gave me more tension than most tales of humans in peril.

Love in the Sun is lovely because it is authentic and beautifully realised, in all its day-by-day details. Walmsley is also wonderful at depicting this corner of Cornwall, making me ache to visit it. But the novel certainly isn’t a sweet tale of escaping somewhere beautiful. Even if it weren’t for the financial difficulties, the community are pretty lukewarm to the new residents – partly because they are new, but also because they are unmarried and eccentric. The narrator and his wife don’t seem unduly concerned about their reception, and it isn’t a dark thread of the book – rather, this is a story of solitary struggles and progress, not a saccharine story. Having said that, there is an unlikely friendship along the way, which is rather touchingly done.

The narrator, whom I think is unnamed but could be misremembering, is certainly the dominant character – but I think Walmsley’s portrayal of the partner is good too. She does have a name – Dain. Dain shares the same vision, capable work ethic and determination of the narrator, with just enough differences to make them work well together – she has a touch more romance, a little more optimism, a bit more willingness to see the best in people. If it is autobiographical, it is an affectionate portrait that still feels honest and accurate.

This novel is relatively long, but it felt even longer – in a good way. Like when I read L.P. Hartley’s brilliant novel The Boat, it’s the slow and steady pace of the novel that helps make it a beautiful reading experience. One to luxuriate in, even if it took me more than a decade to get to it after reading Jane’s review. And, you know… there are two sequels…