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.

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.