Someone at a distance: the book that nearly broke my heart

I started reading this book on the district line in snatched moments; I took it to Rome with me and read a bit there and on the plane. I am not sure when it was that this book started to grip me. At first I was thinking – ok so this is a domestic novel; like lots of Persephones it is almost achingly well written; there is a strong sense of the 1950s; it is very English; it is very restrained.

But somehow, somewhere, it transformed into a heart breaking work of staggering understated power. I cannot believe that when it was published it did not get a single review. It really did nearly break my heart. It also took me rather by surprise.

Its focus is the marriage of Ellen and Avery, an upper middle class, middle aged couple of the Home Counties in the early 1950s. It tells you straight on the back cover, and I am not really giving anything away when I say that their comfortable life is pretty much destroyed by the arrival of Louise; a French lady’s companion. Louise is a sort of serpent character. She is a truly horrible, self serving piece of bitterness and I can’t imagine that she has many fans amongst the reading public. Through her extraordinary personality she provides a relief, against which Avery and Ellen’s marriage is destroyed and then re-made in a tiny way.

Marriage as an idea emerges from the novel in an odd way. I think that Dorothy Whipple must have rather believed in it, without romanticising it at all. In the end, the marriage is destroyed but the underlying relationship is still there, albeit damaged. Whipple manages to keep in focus the true happiness of youth and at the same time, the rubble of separation. This is never clearer than in the following description of old ladies in a rest home: “In the dining room, where the shutters were closed against the night and the lamps on the tables lit under rosy shades, the old ladies waited to be served. They had read the paper, but Ellen couldn’t have come into gentler company. There was no avid curiosity, no malicious speculation, no self congratulation that such a thing couldn’t happen to them, as there might have been amongst younger women. These women were old, time had softened them, they had learnt something from loss, helplessness, loneliness; they knew that almost anything can happen to anybody. They were kinder than when they were young”.

I wonder if women like Ellen still exist? There were moments when I thought her rather timeless, and saw shades of people I know in her incredible reserve. At other times I thought – you know Ellen, there are times for dignity and times for fighting and if you want your husband back, however awful he has been, you should run after him. That however, would not have been “Ellen” at all. She is a real period piece. She is not a doormat; she is an old fashioned wife. As the character Mrs Beard memorably says to Ellen: “We’re not the new sort of women, with University degrees in Economics, like those women who speak on the radio nowadays, girls who can do anything. We’re ordinary women, who married to young to get a training, and we’ve spent the best years of our lives keeping house for our husbands”.

Other opinions can be found at A Striped Armchair, Stuck in a book and Fig and Thistle. The pictures are the Persephone Classic edition, the Persephone endpaper and the author.

Have Book. Can Travel.

Here I am off to the wonderful ROME for a few days of bloggy holiday and some quality time with Dorothy Whipple's Someone at a Distance. What could be nicer?

Capuchin and Comyns in concert!

This post is brought to you by a very excited blogger. Excited because one of my favourite books, The Juniper Tree, by one of my favourite authors, Barbara Comyns, is being republished by one of my favourite publishers, the excellent Capuchin Classics Press. With a foreword by Margaret Drabble and a cover illustrated with an intriguing image redolent of the tale (and surely partly based on Barbara Comyns’ own image), I can hardly contain myself. Only 9 months to wait...

Treasures of the bedside Lilliput – part 1 (Nancy Mitford’s Christmas)

Regular readers may remember that although I am not a worshipper, I am definitely an admirer at the book shelf of the legendary Nancy Mitford. I think that she is funny, and it is as simple as that. So, I was thrilled to settle down with my Bedside Lilliput and discover that a short and festive tale from the comic Nancy was first behind the cover.

This short story is called Aunt Melita’s Christmas Party and it is classic Mitford – all dysfunctional families and acerbic comments. Aunt Melita likes to think of herself as the Queen Bee of her family Christmastide and although they don’t declare themselves to be willing, they all seem to comply. Even her husband, who is nobody’s idea of a natural Father Christmas. It captures beautifully how we all end up doing things at Christmas without being at all sure why.

A “lost life” available for discovery: Marjory Todd and her game of snakes and ladders

When I read Jonathan Rose’s landmark social history The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, I didn’t have either a blog or the words to say how good I thought it was. Amongst other achievements, he has trudged around otherwise unvisited accounts of working class life in the 20th century. A lady called Marjory Todd and her autobiography Snakes and Ladders are among his footnotes.

Marjory Todd was born in the 1900s. She was part of the generation for whom the First World War was a childhood memory; who grew to maturity in the late ‘20s and ‘30s and who were pretty hardened by the time the Second World War came along. She was one of five children born to a gentle former teacher and a hard drinking and maudlin cabinet maker. When their mother dies they are exposed to the caprices of their father who is as ridiculous as he is cruel. He is soon joined by a vulgar sailor’s wife whom his children label “the woman” in a domestic set up which is never quite clear to anyone.

Marjory is clever but she is poor and without her mother’s influence it rather shows. She meets snobbery at school and resentment at home and so jumps the education ship in favour of work at 14. There begins a catalogue of different jobs as lady’s maid, children’s nanny, civil servant, employment exchange operative during the 1926 General Strike, broadcaster and probation officer. Geographically, she treks up hill and down dale to earn a living and in pursuit of her dream – of going to university.

Snakes and Ladders is human and humorous and a staggering account of self reliance. Its voice is charming and self possessed. The book is also a splendid period piece. Being rather fashion conscious, I am drawn to the passages which touch on clothes. This (circa. 1925) is one of my favourites:

“I only had a jersey and a skirt; these were all my clothes. The jersey was a sort of Fair Isle I had knitted out of oddments, including, I remember, some unpicked brown woollen stockings. It was really rather gay. The skirt had been given my by a neighbour. I had no hat. I had had one; I had made it out of the raided cuffs of an old coat of my mother’s, but it had blown into the river a few weeks before. Since then, I had been going about feeling eccentric and rather brazen”.

Here is a woman of her age. A woman whose belongings can be packed into a single case; who earns her own money; and for whom “living in digs” was the final emancipation.

Her gift for giving a flavour is not the end of Todd’s historical value – for she finds herself on the spot at significant moments in history.

Firstly, this is an account of pre war labour politics, as viewed intelligently from the margins. Her account of the left wing in London in the ‘20s and ‘30s is philosophic and engaging. What is more – this is an account of the development of her ideas. Like many working class people she was educated voluntarily and in the evenings at the WEA (Workers’ Education Association) which hosted lectures and classes in chilly communal halls. She speaks for many when she writes: “we really did believe in perfectibility”. She is a thinking woman with an independent mind; idealistic but not blind to absurdities. I was particularly tickled by her brush with the Fabian Society: “The few I knew talked a lot about the working classes and seemed interested to hear that I lived in Limehouse”. She provides little further comment and I rather think she doesn’t need to.

Secondly, her life was touched by the great and the good (and the interesting). At Toynbee Hall, Todd was tutored by Cyril Joad, the intellectual and broadcaster who it seems to me, rather fancied her. He certainly provided her with mentoring and assistance in the world which few of her background could hope for. Nina Hamnett, the famously dissolute and rather interesting painter introduced Todd (whom she called “Blackie”) to C. K. Ogden, the eccentric philosopher who also became a great friend. Of all the strange and unexpected people to wander across the stage of a working class memoir; even Lady Ottoline Morrell, scary sight and patroness of all things bohemian, puts in an appearance.

What is probably most brilliant about Snakes and Ladders is that Todd deals with the business of being working class in the first half of the twentieth century. This is a voice which is not often heard and it is a voice that may sound strange to some. There is a constant need to deal with the snobberies of others; their misunderstanding of working class mores and their sense of entitlement. Todd is what my father in law would call “grafter”. She worked hard from girlhood onwards and she was given nothing. This created in her a kind of work mania and an interest in earning money which confounded her middle class friends. When she had to leave a boyfriend with whom she was in love because of work he challenged her “Why must you go? Why must you always be so working class?”

Snakes and Ladders is a kaleidoscope of the personal, the political and the historical – of those things within the mind and the most pressing needs of the body. It is not a “let it all hang out” sort of memoir. Todd hints at her personal life but she does not feel obliged to explain it. Snakes and Ladders certainly does not want for the lack of this; there is more than enough here, to be getting on with.

This is not the sort of book (more is the pity) that can be picked up in Waterstones – but I got mine inexpensively on amazon. I have included a picture of the book itself and to try to make up for the fact that I cannot find an image of Margory Todd – I have included some of the people with whom she was friends: Cyril Joad, C. K. Ogden, Nina Hamnett and Ottoline Morrell.

Further adventures in total obscurity: Surplus Women by G. C. Pain

OK so this one is a forgotten novel, even by my standards. A couple of months ago I read a reference to Surplus Women by G. C. Pain in Nick Turner’s excellent study Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon. Being a bit of a frustrated detective, I found the book cheap on amazon and clicked “buy”. What rocked up in the post a week or so later was this, rather shabby, jacketless, watermarked 1943 edition, printed by a publisher called The Woman’s Book Club (in 1943...? *radical*). And I must say, that I am glad that it did. Surplus Women is an intriguing little book.

It is the story of Kay Burns, a lower middle class young woman of the 1930s or as she puts it, one of “two million surplus women in the country that nobody wants”. Her world is that of the sparsely furnished parlour and the gas-lit suburban street. She is an orphan, brought up by her grandmother, with whom she has little in common. Her inclinations are against convention but her surroundings are stultifying normal. Rather than being embraced by family life, she is suffocated by it. The world of her community is even worse; all dismal interiors and gossip and disapproval. In revolt Kay moves away and boards in a house of unmarried ladies where she is at first liberated and then horrified by the spectre of aging a single woman. She marries in haste and repents in the time honoured way. Not really surprising when at the point of proposal, the groom comments that “I don’t say I go into raptures at the thought of holding you in my arms. I expect it will be quite nice”. Despair not however – those of you who like a bit of real love in your reading - because it does eventually come to Kay, although I cannot promise that it will not be a bitter sweet business.

This book is a well written testimony of its time. It is a swift, focussed and touching glimpse of the clash between individuality and community; between compliance and subversion; between men and women in the interwar years. Kay is an odd kind of heroine. At first, when she is young and raring to go, she is a hard and unsympathetic girl. Her rebelliousness is turned inwards and she is what my grandmother would have called a scowler. As she develops she rather grows up and love certainly changes her into a softer being – in a way which is, I suppose, rather conventional. Hers is a realistic and moving narrative of subversion. She is not a firebrand rebel but a girl of ordinary circumstances who wishes to live differently in a deeply restrictive society. Thus, she dances between the outrageous and the conventional; between what people expect and what she really wants. In the end, I rather loved her, and I recognised her too, as a woman who must, in some way have reflected many of her generation.

I have deliberately not spoilt this book, as I hope that some of you may enjoy discovering it yourselves. I wonder whether Virginia Nicholson read it when she was researching her book, Singled Out? Try as I might, I am still in the dark about G. C. Pain so if anyone knows *anything* about her, I am all ears....

Now for a bit of a dabble

"The Dabbler" is a great name and a great blog and one of its features which is close to my heart is the "1 penny book review" in which various contributors review the many obscure and half forgotten books which can be bought on Amazon for 1p or 1c.

I was most flattered to be asked for a review and did not hesitate in singing the praises of forgotten novel Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns. To read the review click here. To buy one of the 1p copies on Amazon click here.

If the promise of a penny book is not enough, I have attached a picture of Comyns to tempt you. May the rediscovery begin!

Charles Dickens, Sarah Waters, Daniel Defoe and Dan Brown combined: Forlorn Sunset by Michael Sadleir: one of the best books you have never heard of

Readers may recall that Michael Sadleir’s Forlorn Sunset was the mystery read on my recent bloggy holiday. That is to say that I dragged it from London to Beirut and from Beirut to Paris, in a suitcase that was already dangerously close to its weight limit, despite not knowing one single thing about it. As you can see from the picture, it doesn’t even have a front cover to give a hint. Inside the cover, there sits a rather suggestive ink and wash drawing by John Piper. I say “suggestive” because John Piper was an eminent artist of the mid 20th century, and so I wonder whether this book was rather better known when it was first published in 1947. It certainly can hardy be less well known that it is today. I have searched far and wide and can find only the briefest of mentions in the most obscure of sources. There isn’t even a consensus on how to spell the guy’s name: some, including the excellent art historian and biographer Frances Spalding, go in for “Sadler”, but my copy of the book definitely says “Sadleir”.

Oh well. That’s enough wallowing in obscurity. Now for why it is probably one of the best books you have never heard of. This is a novel of the Victorian underworld. It is a gallop through London, but not a London that most Londoners would recognise. This is an organised-crime riddled, iniquitous den awash with the most awful examples of lives wasted and cruelly exploited.

The story knits together the fates of a group of disparate people, high and low, rich and poor, kind and wicked, who are connected by the chance rescue of a child from a mysterious house of abuse in the 1860s. That child is Lottie Heape and it is she, as much as anyone, who forms the centre of this novel. Tangled up in her life there are Vicars and pimps, journalists and soaks, industrialists and pornographers, social reformers and campaigning ladies, brave boys and more than enough nasty pieces of work.

I feel that I should explain the title of this post. Forlorn Sunset is like Charles Dickens because it is a “cast-of-thousands” “portrait-of-a-city” sort of novel. Every character has a history, and what a history that it. I was reminded also of Sarah Waters because Sadleir looks under the carpet of his chosen society – into areas neglected by history. Daniel Defoe gets a mention because there is more than a passing resemblance between his famous lady of the night Moll Flanders (as Nicola Lacey has written “my kind of heroine”) and Lottie Heape. I have mentioned Dan Brown, not because I want to put you off, but because here we have a fast paced muddle to work out with a cliff hanger at the end of every chapter.

This is a cracking story of sin and redemption. It addresses, in a story which never drags and never feels slow, the idea of social evil and individual evil. Sadleir shows in the panorama of his story how hard it is for a person to fight against the circumstances of their birth and how when a society is rotten to the core, it can pull all sorts of unlikely people within the ambit of its rot.

If you are thinking that it sounds a bit gloomy then fear not. For in this book is a clarion call for personal bravery in the face of social convention and what can I say but “hurrah” to that.

Michael Sadleir is also the author of a book entitled Fanny by Gaslight, but don’t let that put you off.

Seriously swash buckling: A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

My father in law does not recommend books lightly or very often, so when he does, you take him a bit seriously, if you know what I mean. This was the thought with which I opened his latest recommendation, A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. This is a book which subsumes its reader. It does its work rapidly and it is as disorderly as it is delightful. It is easily one of the most remarkable books that I have read. Its power rests on the twin pillars of staggering descriptions and the slightly scary and wholly unsentimental nature of its message.

First for those descriptions. Hughes is seriously good at the pithy, skin touching, tongue tasting descriptions. The novel is set first in Jamaica and then upon the high seas of the Caribbean and is so perfect in its description of that landscape. I used to live in Trinidad and maybe I still miss the hot sweet air and the bewildering lushness; the idea that the land is so fertile that its vegetation might reclaim the space that the buildings stand on at any moment. Unlike the children in the story, I have never been in a hurricane or an earth quake, but I know the feeling of living where the elements are not meek or placid. The extent of the sense of place in A High Wind in Jamaica is astounding and it is worth reading for that reason alone.

But this book is not just one of those “you could almost feel as though you were there...” reads; it is much more memorable than that. It is the story of six children who survive a hurricane in Jamaica and who, on the journey to supposed safety in England, fall into the hands of a band of pirates. They are not the nastiest pirates you ever did see and nor are they great big teddy bears really. The truth is that they are rather down on their luck and are not too sure what to make of it when one of their exploits lands them with six infants to do what they will with.

The children themselves are the core of this novel and they are not virtuous little adults of the Victorian idyll but are savage survival machines. Far from adoring their parents they have startlingly little attachment to them and their love for one another, such as it is, seems far more based on a shared dilemma than on anything more profound. When one of them disappears to a fate unknown, but inevitably guessable, the others forget him with a ruthless and casual cruelty that chills to the bone. Under threat, they see only the make believe, they easily turn on one another and they resort to unexpected acts of violence. But before we get too shocked or too puffed up with righteous indignation, we must pause to wonder how differently adults would behave in the same circumstances: does adulthood civilise the savage in us that much?

The adventure of the children is largely seen through the eyes of one of the older girls. Emily Bas-Thornton is a canny enterprising character, but ultimately she is a child at sea. She detects a soft spot in the pirate Captain and tries to respond to it but really she is as confused as she is intuitive. Is her Captain screaming out from a lifetime of brigandary for some semblance of family life or is he a would-be child molester? Whatever the facts, Richard Hughes will not always sort them out for his reader. This is a book which is about ambiguity and the lack of understanding that exists between adults and children. I could not have been more enraptured.

There are excellent and interesting reviews of this book at Shelf Love and The Mumpsimus. I have featured a picture of my copy of the novel, on the beach and a couple of stills from the 1965 film of the novel starring, of all people, Martin Amis. I feel a book/movie night special coming on.

Meandering with Murdoch: The Book and the Brotherhood

What a lucky person I am, not only to have been given Iris Murdoch’s 23rd novel (yes, *23rd*) The Book and the Brotherhood by the lovely Bloomsbury Bell, but to have read it, mostly on a beach at Byblos in the eastern Mediterranean. Not necessarily a natural consumption spot for a book which is largely based in chilly London town houses and narrow country lanes and summer evenings in Oxford when one needs a shawl. Yes readers, this is a profoundly English book with English landscapes and peculiar mores and very English characters.

Of those characters there are certainly plenty. Murdoch is fond of large casts and this book is no exception. The “brotherhood” of friends who form the central focus of the story are a gaggle of late middle aged Oxford graduates who met at university. Their ties are not those of polite friendship but full blooded commitment, even love. The acknowledged leader of the pack is the patrician and rather controlling Gerard, whose great true love, we learn has died years earlier in a freak accident. His juniors are his dear friend Rose, the sister of his deceased love, and the measured and intelligent schoolmaster, Jenkin. Their circle also includes the drunken shadow of a man, Duncan Cambus and his wealthy, restless, aimless wife Jean. Via Gerard’s family the central group also takes in vindictive Violet, a character as pitiful as she is unpleasant, her impressionable daughter Tamar, a rather silly man called Guilliver, and, needless to say, a whole host of others.

If the book can be said to have a central character, then that character would be the man who is not a member of the “brotherhood”, but who is bound to it in ways that are strange and unbreakable and just a bit scary. David Crimond is a monomaniacal, ascetic Marxist who has an apparent death wish. I think that the idea is that he lives as purely as he thinks – and as such is cut away from normal mores when it comes to friends and lovers. He certainly causes chaos among the other protagonists. He causes them intellectual chaos by consistently extracting support from them for something – a book - which they do not agree with. He causes moral chaos by spotting the weakest of their relationships and breaking it up. He causes chaos of the most heart rending kind as the novel reaches its climax. He is able to do this not simply as a result of frightening charisma, but because he is simply far more incisive than anyone else around him.

The cast is rich and colourful, without being especially likable. Murdoch does a good job of keeping them all in good focus while life plays a pretty tragic game with them. That is the true value of this novel: it is a modern day tragedy without seeming too ostentatiously to be one. Each of the characters seems locked into a date with fate. Each of the women in particular are fated to “fall” for things, whether they be men or religion or a combination of the two. The women are so old fashioned – they seem to be crying out for domination and constantly turning down the opportunity to author their own histories. At the climax of the novel, an important character will die, but the person who actually kills them is the character who feels the least guilt. There is a strange disconnection between the characters as moral actors and what happens to them: they are somehow out of the world and there is nothing that they can do.

The truth is that behind each sorry love in this story lies a lie or a betrayal. There are emotional betrayals but there is one which is much greater. This book is about the generation of thinkers who were let down by Marxism. Those for whom communism began as a hopeful idea and ended as a demonstrable disaster to which no thinking person could subscribe. What the book deals with is the nuclear waste ground that is left behind when flimsy loves and discredited ideas have broken down. Fortunately for the would-be reader, Murdoch seems to have believed in regeneration after both.

There is an excellent review by Paul Gray online at Time. I have included a picture of the Vintage cover and the author, as well as evidence of my beach side reading....

Summer of Love: Will she? Won’t she? in Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

Who remembers the moment in Four Weddings and a Funeral when Hugh Grant rolls over in bed and asks “who is it this week?” Because as we enter this, the end of the summer, that is how we feel. In a good way, of course. I love weddings. Which is just as well, because we have been to one almost every weekend of the summer and still have one to go. We have been to Serbia (twice), Russia, the Lebanon, Hampshire, London (more than twice) and Oxford. Honourable mention must also be made of one further “not married party” which was no less a meeting of old friends and a celebration of love and commitment (you know who you are)...

And so it was as a self appointed expert, a connoisseur of nuptials, that I picked up the Persephone Classic, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is short, funny and worth-it. It is the narrative of a single day – the wedding day – of Dolly, a middle-class girl of the early 1930s. The action takes place entirely in her family home, which one presumes to be a medium sized manor house or something of that sort. The house is teeming with comic characters – the status conscious, conventionally minded mother of the bride, Mrs Thatcham, to whom appearances mean a lot; The Bridesmaids – clumsy Kitty who is beset with adolescent insecurities and elegant Evelyn who is worried about being cold in church; School boy cousins Tom and Robert, who are locked into a ceaseless argument about emerald green socks (“Go and put your head in a bag” sticks in the mind); The dour anthropologist Joseph Patten, who moons about the house having tense conversations with everyone and trying to find the bride, for what purpose, the reader must enquire on their own account.... There are numerous others; mad old aunts; domestic helps; a Canon, and they all rumble around the place in a sort of country house comedy way – with people walking out of rooms just as others walk in looking for them and so on.

At the heart of this novella there is a rich and slightly painful vein of social satire. Some characters seem to care more about what things look like than how they really are. Others respond to such hypocrisy with savagery - saying things which are designed to shock and upset. This seems to me to be not just the age old clash between the old and the young but also the clash between the conservative, the traditional and the more socially liberated approaches to life which were emerging in the 1920s and 30s. There is a thick layer of repression veiling most of the main characters and there is a lot of swigging from the bottle in dark corners as well.

Which brings me to another theme which seemed to sing out loud and clear, one to which any wedding goer is familiar: continuity. When Dolly fortifies herself with a bottle of rum and faces the music, she does what many women, possibly even her much maligned mother, have done before her. There were times when I felt that Cheerful Weather for the Wedding was like a form of social archaeology. If you remove the top soil of propriety the first layer you come to is rebellion but underneath that runs a thick course of convention and a willingness to do things the way that they have always been done.

The characters are not as whole or as touching as they could be and I did not find myself rooting for anyone but the book is thought provoking. Other opinions can be found at Stuck in a Book, Vintage Reads, Fernham, Nonsuch Book, Novel Insights, The Green Room, My Porch and the marvellously named What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate.

I have included pictures of the (predictably lovely) Persephone cover and end paper and a portrait of the author by Dora Carrington.

Here comes Holden: Further adventures in forgotten books

I hate reading books in the wrong order. I am a tidy girl who irons her bed sheets and has a neat sock drawer. I like things to be in their proper place and that includes books. Regular readers of this blog may recall my joy at discovering the work of Ursula Holden back in April when I reviewed her novel Unicorn Sisters. Well, drunk on discovery, reckless in pursuit of more, I ordered another of her little novels: Tin Toys on Amazon. It was a good read which I do not regret at all, but for anyone who may like to try it – it should be read before reading Unicorn Sisters. That’s right folks: there is, emerging from my Ursula Holden detective work, evidence of a trilogy of books, starting with Tin Toys then Unicorn Sisters and finally A Bubble Garden. So bare that in mind all ye who enter here.

Tin Toys is an odd and disquieting little book. It is the story of Ula – a little girl in the 1930s whose father has died, whose mother is woefully negligent and whose two older sisters have built a protective world for themselves, from which she is excluded. The household is riven with divisions of age and class and nationality and gender and for the most part, the segregation reinforces and breeds an atmosphere of dark loves and lonely prejudice. This is not a kind home in which to grow up and so it is no real shock that Ula herself is a peculiar child who struggles to connect with others. She is at once too cagey and also too candid.

When tragedy strikes the household Ula is packed off to Ireland and it is there that she will encounter the shock of cruelty and the web of deceptions and half truths that make up adult mores. Ula is a child and her judgement is both infant and flawed. She does not know whom to trust nor whom to love. She reaches out to several people but many of them will prove to be sorry friends. Maggie, the Irish cook/cleaner impresses Ula with her warmth and cosy tales of her homeland. Lucy, the child whom Ula meets at ballet class bewitches her with her wedgewood blue eyes and air of confidence. In Tin Toys, Ula learns the hard lesson of childhood; that adults can be as cruel and deluded and children.

It is the style and atmosphere of Tin Toys that really causes one to remember it. It is clipped and savage as a fairy tale. Things happen and they cannot be stopped or even explained. It is like all the world is locked into a fast train rattling who knows where with no hope of escape. Which brings me neatly to the front cover. The Methuen Modern Fiction paperback that I have is illustrated with Mark Gertler’s famous first world war painting Merry-Go-Round. The Merry-Go-Round is a frightening response to the mechanisation and horror of warfare in black, white and blood red. At first I thought it was an odd choice for the front cover of this book, but now I understand.

If pushed, I would have to say that Tin Toys did not quite have the emotional power of Unicorn Sisters, but it is still very good and they are so clearly from the same pen. Ula’s development is not necessarily an easy watch – but it is extremely well written and deserves not to be forgotten.

I have included a picture of the book and also (by popular acclamation!) pictures from our garden.

Little, Odd, Excellent: The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Maghanita Laski

Marghanita Laski’s strange little book The Victoria Chaise-Longue has got me thinking about eras and about links and divides between generations. Before I even started to read, I noticed that it was first published in 1953, the year that the Queen was crowned and my mother was born. How long ago that sounds. The book itself explores how social mores and the place of women had changed between the Victorian age and the modern world of the early ‘50s. I am thankful to Richard at Richard’s Books for recommending such a muse worthy novella to me.

With only 99 pages, The Victorian Chaise-Longue must surely be the tiniest Persephone there is. I think that I will take a risk and say that it is the most interesting Persephone book that I have read so far. It is a domestic novel but it is not pedestrian. Its a little bit odd, but whatever is wrong with that?

The story focuses on a few hours in the life of Melanie Langdon. Melanie is a young barrister’s wife and she is pretty, spoilt and makes a profession out of being helpless. She is the kind of girl who is always being looked after by somebody, and as the book opens she is in the care of her patrician GP, the mildly lascivious Dr. Gregory. We soon learn that Melanie is recovering from TB, an illness which almost terminated her recent pregnancy and which has kept her apart from her baby son from the moment that he was born.



All very straight forward, or so I thought. Before long, the book changes direction entirely and with the assistance of an antique chaise-longue, Melanie is transported to the Victorian age in which she has become somebody else – a Milly Baines. The reader experiences with Melanie the claustrophobia of entrapment – the prison of knowing oneself to be one person while all others believe one to be somebody else. Gradually, the sorry tale of Milly Baines begins to unravel. Melanie learns, like a detective in a story what her own character has done and how she has been punished.

I never fully understood whether we are to believe that Melanie has become a time traveller, or has been reincarnated and is recalling her previous life, but I don’t think that this matters too much. Now that I have turned the last page, I understand why Richard recommended this book, and why he mentioned it in the same breathe as The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns. Like The Vet’s Daughter, it is not a book about the paranormal, but it uses paranormal ideas to explore very real issues; morality, identity, entrapment, mystery. It borrows from the thriller genre but it s not a thriller – it is suspenseful and dark, but it is not frightening. It is a domestic novel, but it is not an aimless one. Laski uses domestic images to sign post the most powerful of human fears and links. She is not simply a chronicler of days gone by, she seems to raising objections about them too.

Melanie finds her life as Milly impossibly restrictive and frustrating. Milly has advanced TB and can barely move. She is kept in a stuffy airless room and is subject to the care of characters bound to her by duty rather than love. Melanie, whose pre illness days were filled with furniture shopping and relation visiting is horrified that she has somehow been stolen away from her own era and condemned in this way. She comes to realise, as does the reader, that the life paths of Melanie and Milly have not been so very different but that the strictures of their respective societies are. Melanie’s ordinary life events are Milly’s dreadful transgressions and the life of punishment which is so awful for Melanie to experience, is usual for Milly. Will Melanie ever escape? Well, I can’t give that one away; interested parties must read for themselves and I hope that they enjoy it as much as I did.

The illustrations are the rather beautiful Persephone edition and endpaper and the even more beautiful Marghanita Laski. Other opinions can be found at Serendipity; Booksnob; Things mean a lot; A Book a week; Novel Insights; Farm Lane Books; The Genteel Arsenal; Green Road Books; and Fleur Fisher.

Dreamer, Publisher, Novelist SPY: the strange birth of the Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns

Continuing with this week’s theme of being inspired by Simon at Stuck in a Book, I find myself with a most unusual read. Simon, Polly at Novel Insights and Claire at Paperback Reader are heading up an informal read along of The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns.

I am not reading along because I have read the book a couple of times before and know it to be a wonderful read. There are excellent reviews already at Stuck in a Book, Verity’s Virago Venture and Harriet Devine’s Blog. The novel is typical of Comyns’ unsentimental and spell-bound style and holds in focus a chilling depiction of domestic bullying and the transformative powers of the imagination. It is clear-sighted and interesting and quite unique. It is also cheap on Amazon, so if you haven’t already, maybe give it a go.....

Because it seemed silly to read along, I thought that I would read something else, which has been sitting on my shelves starring at me for some time, and which has an odd and little known connection to the Vet’s Daughter.

My Silent War is the autobiography of Kim Philby. If you don’t know the Kim Philby of history, you may know the Kim Philby of literature as he has spawned numrous literary alter egos, most notably Bill Haydon in John Le Carre’s classic novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The Kim Philby of history was a notorious double agent; a man who, at the height of the Cold War rose to the top of the British Secret Service, whilst also being a loyal agent of the Soviet state. With his fellow communists Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, he formed part of what has now become known as the Cambridge Spy Ring. My Silent War is an extraordinary book because in it Philby speaks with his own voice; showing the simmering loyalties of “Stalin’s Englishman” and the web of lies that he wove for those around him. He describes the tension between appearance and reality; between what he must have looked like to his colleagues and what he actually was, with real mastery and not a little egotism.

One such colleague, to whom Philby was, or seemed to be close was Richard Comyns Carr, the husband of the novelist Barbara Comyns. Theirs was not a polite office friendship but a close association and a constant round of dinners and drinks parties. So much so, that when Richard and Barbara married immediately after the Second World War, Philby loaned them his own holiday home for their honeymoon. It was there that Barbara Comyns had a dream that inspired the Vet’s Daughter. And so an unexpected and half-obscured path connects the lady novelist and the unrepentant spy.

But the connection does not end there. My Silent War is a book with two prefaces. The first is by Phillip Knightley, Philby’s scholarly biographer and the second is by an altogether more shadowy figure in his history – the novelist and mystery man Graham Greene. Greene’s foreword is compelling but ultimately rather fawning and not worthy of Greene’s usually critical stance. However, Phillip Knightley in his introduction tells us that Greene may have been the man whom the British authorities sent to Moscow to try to persuade Philby to return home. So Greene’s words at the opening of My Silent War stand as testimony to his regard for Philby, but possibly also, his one time “brief” to turn a double agent into a triple agent.

Graham Greene was a man with one foot in the secret service and one foot in the literary world. The foot that was in the literary world was one of Barbara Comyns’ biggest and most influential fans. He consistently championed her unusual and striking novels, including the Vet’s Daughter. Indeed, he even published her first book, Sisters by a river when nobody else would touch it.

My Silent War is an interesting read. It doesn’t shed that much light on the Vet’s Daughter, but it is an fascinating side track in the life of its author. It will be a surprise to nobody who has enjoyed the Vet’s Daughter to learn that it was inspired by a dream – it has a profoundly dreamlike quality about it and the creative and resilient power of the mind is one of its chief themes. I think that political espionage interested Barbara Comyns less than personal betrayal and as she rather dismissively commented “all of our friends turned out to be spies in those days”.

I have included pictures of Barbara Comyns (looking remarkably like Greta Garbo as Vaishnavi has commented), Kim Philby and Graham Greene (looking remarkably similar, I wonder if anyone ever saw them together….). For good measure, Kim Philby’s most famous literary double, Bill Haydon, as played by Ian Richardson also makes an appearance.

The Business School Wives Book Club: Part 5 (Russia)

G. K. Chesterton’s 1912 novella Manalive is, without question, a bit of an odd one. If you are wondering how it came to be selected for the Russian instalment of the Business School Wives Book Club, then I must say that initially, I shared your confusion. It turns out that in one of those flukes of the international book market, the quirky mysteries of English eccentric G. K. Chesterton have quite a following in Russia.

The setting for the story is however, a long way from Moscow. It is a bleak London guesthouse where a range of long term tenants are collectively miserable and directionless. A man, who is identified as one Innocent Smith appears in the garden, accompanied by a great wind. Within pages of his entry, he has induced declarations of love between other tenants, set up an autonomous High Court to deal with the business of the house and arranged to elope with the young companion of one of the house’s inmates. Happiness appears to explode over the house and the jaded and misanthropic feelings of the past are no more. Needless, to say, the story does not end there. Before long two doctors arrive with accusations against “Innocent” Smith that would make anyone raise an eye. Burglary; Desertion of Wife; Bigamy; Attempted murder: the man’s crimes appear to be legion. Is he mad or is he dangerous or is there a mysterious method in his history?

This was not the easiest of book club books to get into. It is a little heavy going due to the language and it is not always simple to work out who is speaking at any one time. It is however, quite funny and deals surprisingly and with a certain surrealistic sanity with the human need for happiness and contentment. What is even better, it can be read online here.

Although it was not a favourite read, the ruminations of one of its female characters on what makes the ideal man spawned a classic book club discussion. It seemed to us that GKC’s message was that to be happy one ought to choose a man with a hobby (however strange, and goodness me, you will find that Innocent Smith’s are strange) so that he isn’t forever hanging around the house. Encouraging.

I spot of googling has uncovered the exciting additional news that there is a film adaptation in postproduction. The latest is here. From the Business School Wives Book Club, goodbye for now.

Mirror to a million teenagers: Monica Dickens’ Mariana

Oh no! I am feeling like a book blogger who has slept through her alarm, turned her face down into the warm pillow and lazily allowed for the languishing of good books. I have many excuses, but I won’t bore you with them: I am just late in posting. As many of you know Persephone Reading Week is a lovely event co-hosted by Claire at Paperback Reader and Verity at The B Files. Despite the fact that it technically ended yesterday, this review of the Persephone Classic Mariana by Monica Dickens is my contribution.

Mariana is an enchanting read. It is a between-the-wars coming-of-age tale that has been rightly compared to I Capture the Castle by Dodi Smith. Mary Shannon is first introduced to the reader as a young married woman tucked away in a remote cottage in the Second World War. The weather outside is dreadful, the telephone lines are down and she does not know whether her husband, who is serving in the war, is alive or dead. At night, tossing and turning, and hopeless of sleep she begins to remember the events of her life from childhood through adolescence and into marriage. This act of remembrance is the subject of the book – it is a recollection story, much like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. We learn swiftly that the young woman who fears that her husband may have been lost in the second world war, lost the father whom she never really knew in the first. Her character and her life seem poised between two great tragedies but her mind is preoccupied with concerns that we all share – love; marriage; family; home.

Mary is a middle class English girl with a good eye for observation and no exceptional talents. She grows up in London with her vivacious and enterprising mother Lily and her louche and charming Uncle Geoff. Her late father’s side of the family are rather more upper class and live on the income from a chain of expensive restaurants. Their country home, the pastoral Charbury is the scene of Mary’s summers, her first brushes with romance, her early adventures and the source of her not inconsiderable sense of social superiority. The dominant love of her early years is her cousin Denys. Denys is handsome, arrogant, bullying and most undeserving of his cousin’s adoration. Like many girls of her class and period, Mary did not quite know what to do with herself in that uncomfortable interlude between school and marriage. As a result of this the reader is treated to her account of her hilariously unsuccessful spell in a drama school, followed by a year of dress making and romancing in Paris, and the events which ultimately lead to her marriage.

The first part of Mariana is far more successful than the second. Mary as a child and young teenager is a character so familiar and so real as to be almost settled on the sofa and reading the book alongside one. Every teenage girl, or woman who has been a teenage girl will recognise her unholy combination of certainty and ignorance, her desperation to be loved by some and her offhandedness with the love granted to her. The unintended humour in her story telling is a tick of growing up that all of us can recognise. Her adventures with her cousin Denys which run the gambit of worship, partnership, conspiracy and disillusion were, for me, the most successful part of the book. It is in developing Mary’s awareness of Denys, that Monica Dickens comes closest to the kind of magic that Dodi Smith achieved in I Capture the Castle. This is rather in contrast to the second half of the book, which I found rather disappointing. I felt that Mary’s later adventures did not ring true and in particular, the ending is hurried and underdeveloped. The “perfect man” when he arrives, moves so fast that one might be tempted to think that he had a train to catch. Many readers have found Mary an unsympathetic girl to share a book with. She is a little snobby, rather insensitive sometimes and displays the casual anti Semitism and class based contempt that was common in the period. However, for me, the imperfections of the girl rather added to the book. Monica Dickens is by no means uncritical of her heroine – part of the message of the book is that she is ordinary, she is of her age, she is not heroic and that is one of Mariana’s great charms.

Although burdened with a dodgy second half, I can well understand why Persephone re-printed this novel and why it has become rather a classic. The fact is that Mariana is a wonderful period piece, full of the sounds and smells and sights of an era. When the rackety Uncle Geoff takes young Mary for dinner at the Cafe Royale at some point in the early 1930s, she provides one of the best descriptions that I have read of this, the most famous of London’s “Bohemian” hang-outs. Similarly, the description of Mary’s ill-fated attendance at Denys’ Oxford College Ball, is quite lovely and reminded me of the description of Eights Week in Brideshead Revisited – it somehow manages to almost burst with unobtrusive period detail.

I am certainly not the only blogger who has enjoyed reading Mariana. I have enjoyed reading reviews by Claire at The Captive Reader, Becky Holmes at A Book A Week, Uncertain Principles at Another Cookie Crumbles, Katherine at A Girl Walks Into A Bookstore, Nicola at Vintage Reads, Carolyn at A Few Of My Favourite Books and Miranda at A Skirmish of Wit.

I have included a picture of the beautiful Persephone cover, as well as a few pictures of Monica Dickens herself.

Election – Shmelection: This is a dove-grey end-papered paradise and a politician-free zone

I am back in the UK very briefly and have found some real treats in my post-bag.

Firstly I was thrilled to receive both Iris Murdoch’s The Book and the Brotherhood from the lovely Bloomsbury Bell, and Marjorie Ann Watts’ collection of short stories Are they funny, are they dead? which was very kindly sent to me by Charles Boyle at CB Editions (see his excellent blog here). Looking forward to both of those.

Secondly, as well all know it is Persephone Reading week and so it seems especially fitting to finally get hold of my copy of The Persephone Biannually, stuffed as it is with interesting articles and vignettes. I was pleased to see so many of my favourite bloggers getting honourable mentions including The B Files, Dovegreyreader, Savidge Reads, Paperback Reader, Desperate Reader, My Porch, The Literary Stew, A Girl Walks into a Bookstore and I Prefer Reading. There were also a couple of other blogs mentioned that were new to me so I am off to investigate those now...

Sad to read that the Persephone shop in Kensington Church Street is closing.

Claire at Paperback Reader and Verity at The B Files host Persephone Reading week. I am reading Mariana by Monica Dickens. One book is a measly effort I know, but I hope to write a fairly full review of it to make up for my tardiness. I have also fished around and found a lovely picture of Monica Dickens in preparation.

So, today is shaping up to be something of a Persephone-fest – that is after I have popped out to fulfil my civic duty at the polling station – oh well, better get it over with...

War declared, innocence destroyed: Ursula Holden’s wartime story Unicorn Sisters

I am sitting in the garden, having just finished Ursula Holden’s Unicorn Sisters, and feeling slightly cast adrift. My usual way of “rediscovering” forgotten classics is to visit the Persephone Books shop, or the Capuchin Classics website, or to look at the Virago Modern Classic back catalogue. But this time, the route has been quite different. The inside page of my copy of this book has “95p” scrawled in pencil and so this must have been what I paid for it when I picked it up in a charity shop. I have certainly been hoarding it for a couple of years, unread. This book is living proof of how easily a work of excellent writing can slip out of the cannon – disappear down the side of the literature sofa. It is excellent, and yet it is barely known at all.

Unicorn Sisters is a wartime novella charting a few months in the history of Bonnie and her sisters Tor and Ula. Bonnie narrates their tale of woe and awakening in the first months of 1939 when they are abandoned by their glamorous and negliegent mother in a remote west country boarding school for girls. This school is haphazardly run by two spinster sisters of wildly divergent opinions and an elderly gardener who has found that his wartime role has been expanded to cooking and cleaning. The other children are upper middle class girls, each with a smattering of french, and mostly rather affected. Hard upon the heels of Bonnie and her sisters a batch of evacuees from London’s Clerkenwell arrive, sporting ill fitting clothes, common accents and tales of boyfriends and homely families. The isolation of the school and the seige mentality caused by the war combine and before long mutual suspicion has given way to friendship and confidence, the grammaphone has been wound up and girls dance long into the night to the tune of “Roll out the barrel”. The joy of such vistas will not last forever. Soon Bonnie and her sisters find themselves on the stage of tragedy. Worse, they are propelled into an anarchy of knowledge and experience which will horrify them.

This short novel deals with many things, but for me its main theme is displacement. All of the children are displaced by the war – they are far from home in an unknown and disintegrating place. The Boarding school girls and the Clerkenwell evacuees are also displaced by contact with oneanother. Gone are the comforts of a class identity; here are people who live differently and speak differently, and yet seem to manage; maybe there is not only one proper way to live? For Bonnie and her sisters, the displacement is still greater. They are new girls, and so they properly belong to neither group. Whatismore, they suffer from social inexperience and the dark and long shadows of their family history. Between then they have inadvertently caused the deaths of two other children before the war, and how can a child ever be free of such an awful secret?

Bonnie is a complexnarrator of an atmospheric tale and a splendid period piece. She is a bossy girl who is teetering under the heavy strain that her absent mother has placed her under - to look after her younger sisters. Their sibling love is powerful but will be tested, as Bonnie’s love for her scented mother will also be. Ursula Holden writes compellingly of the monstrous misunderstandings and miscommunications that can befall a parent and their child. The destruction of class barriers and the sudden revealation of an adult world, which is as sordid as it is liberating will provoke a crisis in Bonnie’s mind which seems as real to the reader as any declaration of war.

A novel this good deserves not to be forgotten, and the good news is that it is available from £0.01p on Amazon. Let the rediscovery begin!

Because this book is so obscure, I cannot find my usual picture of the author. To celebrate the coming of the summer therefore, I have posted some pictures of our garden, the place of my reading and ruminations.