The Privet Hedge by J.E. Buckrose

A few weeks ago, I decided to do a mystery book haul – picking four books I knew absolutely nothing about, from mid-century female authors I’d never heard of, to see if I could find some hidden gems. It’s all part of scoping out for future British Library Women Writers titles – hard work, but someone has to do it(!!) If I were canny, I’d find a way to write these off in my taxes, but I don’t understand at all what that means. It is embarrassing how financially illiterate I am.

ANYWAY. Of the four, I decided to start with The Privet Hedge by J.E Buckrose, from 1922, depending whom you ask. The reason I chose this one to start with is because it opens with a description of a house, and books-about-houses are among my favourite things. Here’s the first paragraph:

At the far end of Thorhaven towards the north was a little square house surrounded by a privet hedge. It had a green door under a sort of wooden canopy with two flat windows on either side, and seemed to stand there defying the rows and rows of terraces, avenues and meanish semi-detached villas which were creeping up to it. Behind lay the flat fields under a wide sky just as they had lain for centuries, with the gulls screaming across them inland from the mud cliffs, and so the cottage formed a sort of outpost, facing along the hordes of jerry-built houses which threatened to sweep on and surround it.

In this house live Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford, as the narrative tends to refer to them. They are sisters, past middle age, who have always lived with each other except for the brief two years while Mrs Bradford was married. Quickly widowed, she returned to their life together – and, though a gentler soul than her sister in many ways, also always makes clear her sense of superiority from having once been married. She gives the impression of having lived an awful lot of life in those couple of years, and it is a superiority that Miss Ethel recognises and accepts.

Those ‘jerry-built houses’ of the opening paragraph are causing a change. A distant relative of theirs owns the land separating their little house from the encroaching housing estates – and he has just sold it for development. Swathes of housing estates on greenbelt land in villages feels like a very contemporary concern, but it was clearly equally pressing in the 1920s. The sisters, particularly Miss Ethel, are horrified that new houses might crowd in the other side of their privacy-ensuring privet hedge – blocking out the view and destroying their tranquillity.

If that weren’t all, their maid has also just left to get married. Luckily her younger relative Caroline has been put up for the role. She is a teenager, recently out of school, and has been ‘promised’ to Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford ever since their maid announced she was leaving. But Caroline has a last-minute change of heart. Like many young women of her generation and class, domestic service no longer looked so promising. “I’d starve before I’d ask permission to go to the pillar-box, and spend my nights in that old kitchen by myself,” she says. Instead, she can earn money by manning the box on the promenade – for Thorhaven is a seaside town.

In the end she compromises by working there and helping out the sisters, though not as a live-in maid. It’s a really interesting look at the new job prospects of the 1920s for a certain type of young woman – and I particularly enjoyed all the details of life by the coast, and the society that lives there together out of season (and moves out of their house during season, to get some tourist income). Caroline’s main story is something of a love triangle, though, between the reliable but dull Wilf – and a man who is engaged to another woman. I tend not to find romance storylines very interesting in books, and this one did lean a bit into love-at-first-sight territory. It isn’t badly handled, but for me it was the least interesting element of an otherwise very interesting novel.

What helps The Privet Hedge rise above other novels of its type is Buckroses’s writing. The initial scene-setting paragraphs are rather lovely, showing a good eye for detail that brings the town and its inhabitants alive. Here is a dance scene, for instance:

Still the evening came with no sign of rain; the band stationed at the edge of the green played cheerful dances with a will, and it was no fault of theirs that the music sounded so lost and futile amid the roaring of the sea – rather as if a penny whistle were to be played in a cathedral while the organ was bombing out solemn music among the springing arches. Perhaps the visitors and the Thorhaven people felt something of this themselves, for they put no real zest into their attempts at carnival, but they danced rather grimly in the cold wind, with little tussocks in the grass catching their toes and the fairy lamps which edged the lawn blowing out one after the other.

Overall, I really liked The Privet Hedge. If it had predominantly been about Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford, I would have wholeheartedly loved it – but as the novel progresses, their story becomes less prominent than Caroline’s. I suppose that was the market for this sort of book at the time – and it’s certainly enjoyable. But the older couple of sisters, anxiously watching modernity come literally and figuratively closer to their door, is what really sold this novel to me – and they are its greatest success.