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.
This sounds such a lovely read. I like the idea of the humour arising out of the situation rather than a knowing narrator. I don’t mind an arch narrator but it’s nice to have a break too!
How wonderful that a book you really wanted to read should be from 1954! And it sounds just lovely!
Hello. The Golden Waterwheel is one of my favourite Walmsley books. You can see a few seconds of Leo and his family in 1938 taken on cine film – this is from the very period in the book. Here’s the link (it’s the fourth one down): http://www.walmsleysoc.org/screen.html
Oh, these sound marvellous, thank you for sharing such an unusual one!
I loved this, and want to read the book. I can get it on kindle here for about 4 dollars. I just began a book called The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, and on the first page he mentions Three Fevers by Walmsley. Of course, I spent some time reading about him, and his books, and the society. And then I thought, I’ll bet Simon has written something about Walmsley, and sure enough. I look forward to this book and Love in the Sun. I will be getting it on the kindle, too. Thank you for writing about it, and for just being you with your interest in and knowledge of the old books!