"You're taking a job?" exclaimed Mrs. Wilmot to her daughter,
Diana Pemberton. "Oh dear, what has happened to make you decide to do such
a thing?"
We
can be pretty certain from this opening that Diana's efforts to claim a career
for herself, now that her children are all at school, aren't going to go
swimmingly. It's not terribly hard to predict just how things will go wrong
either (indeed, her mother among others fairly accurately predict the way it
will go). But though there's nothing very revolutionary or surprising about Against the Stream, it's an entertaining
window on a time from which there aren't a lot of portrayals of career women.
Diana's
discussion with her mother follows familiar lines, but occasionally sheds some
interesting light on postwar domestic life:
"Family life isn't so uncomplex and one-sided now: girls
are given the same education as boys, women don't wait on men, they compete
with them for jobs. And there's another thing, Mother. For various reasons,
home-making has lost a lot of interest for many of us. We live in small houses
with small gardens because we can't afford anything bigger, and if we could, we
couldn't get the staff. As for the traditional interests of the housewife—preserving—where's
the sugar? The linen-cupboard? We can only afford enough to fill a shelf
instead of a cupboard. What's our larder? A row of tins. We can't entertain
often, it's too expensive; our houses are too small to have visitors for more
than a couple of nights, and anyway, what can we give them to eat? Running a
home as one's sole interest can be very dull, Mother. One is reduced to the
bare bones of home-making—housework, washing, ironing, shopping and cooking
monotonous meals with indifferent materials."
Fortunately
for Diana, however, a dream job exactly fitting her qualifications and
interests more or less falls into her lap. (Some people have all the luck—why
hasn't a lucrative job requiring extensive knowledge of British women writers
just happened to fall into my lap,
dammit?)
Diana
and her husband Rupert live in the fictional village of Hirst, outside of
Canterbury, a place known primarily for its nearby Roman fort. During the war,
a bombing raid brings to light further evidence of the town's history:
For, during the Baedeker raid upon Canterbury, a stray bomb
fell upon a furniture depository in Hirst. It was an odd scene next day: the
stuffing out of mattresses hung like macabre blossoms in back-garden
fruit-trees, the air was white with down out of burst pillows; a bicycle hung
by its handlebars from the sign of The Bull and Butcher; brass-ware from Benares
littered the entrance to the County Library, and iron bedsteads, twisted into
unlikely shapes by fire, reminded one of the obscurer modern sculptures.
The bomb was, of course, unfortunate for the people who had
stored their beds, their bicycles, their Benares brass-ware and so on in the
wrecked depository, but had dramatic and exciting results, for it revealed what
no one had known before—that there had been a Roman town as well as a Roman
fort.
As
a result, a wealthy resident has financed the creation of a new museum, and
guess who (after 14 years of housewifery and with apparently no other work
experience at all) is made the first curator? No, it's not terribly plausible
(though in all fairness the position is poorly paid and so perhaps only
feasible for a woman with other means of support), but it ensures that the
reader, at least a reader interested in historical knowledge, will become
invested enough in Diana's work, which we get intriguing glimpses of, to then
share her frustration at the thought of losing this stimulation.
In
some ways, in fact, Meyrick's strategy here is kind of brilliant. Every
time the reader becomes excited about her professional successes (she has great
ideas for the museum, she makes an important discovery at a construction site,
she gains an admirer in a world-renowned scholar in her field), the reader gets
pulled up—like Diana herself—by another domestic conflict or misunderstanding. Thus,
the reader's experience echoes Diana's, which means that we pull for her and
want her to find a way to keep the job. Of course, the risk is that visiting
the heroine's frustrations on readers can compromise their pleasure in reading,
but by and large I think Meyrick gets away with it.
The novel doesn't have any solutions to these
problems, not surprisingly, and although it has a happy ending of sorts, it's
an inevitable compromise (and perhaps no more realistic than her getting this
plum job in the first place). But it makes for an interesting read, and Diana's
mother in particular is a high point. Much is made of Mrs Wilmot's telephone
manner. First, we learn that Diana's father used to have the eccentricity of
shouting deafeningly into the phone, unable to believe that his voice needn't
be modulated according to the distance he wanted it to cover. But her mother's
phone manner is even more striking:
At last she heard someone, and her mother's voice said very crossly:
"Yes?"
Mrs. Wilmot had not a good telephone manner: she had been
brought up to write well-worded letters at a writing-desk, not to use the
telephone. She had never grown used to it, and her discomfort expressed itself
in a furious manner of speaking, quite out of keeping with her character. Diana
was used to this furious voice, and was not in the least quelled by it as
others were apt to be. Indeed, one timid lady had been so upset by the
accusing, abrupt "Yes?" that she had replaced the receiver without
ever daring to give her name.
"Mother, something's happened, and I want you to help me."
"Whatever is it?" demanded Mrs. Wilmot, sounding
extremely angry, but actually longing to be able to help her family.
And sometimes reading this sort of book can put other
books from the time into perspective. Diana is required to go to a conference
in York and spend the night, and her reaction seems extreme to modern readers
used to occasional travel:
It was so unusual for Diana to be going away without either Rupert
or the children, that although it was only a matter of one night she found
herself becoming quite dramatic about her departure. She hugged the little boys
when she said good-bye to them; she walked to the bus-stop with Marian and
kissed her lovingly good-bye in full view of several schoolgirls in the bus,
much to arian's discomfiture; she said
to Rupert, "You will meet my
train tomorrow night, won't you?" as though she was arriving at London
Airport after a dash of thousands of miles across five continents. By the time
Joyce arrived she was quite strung up, and felt like tearfully imploring her
not to desert the children, on the emotional level of Mrs. Micawber's declaration
of her own fidelity to Mr. Micawber—which would have surprised Joyce very much.
For me, this scene evoked the Provincial Lady's
fretting over her departures for London and, later, America, which I always
thought were merely meant as exaggerated and self-deprecatingly humorous. But
as PL was making such departures two decades before Diana's, and furthermore
was leaving her husband and family for literary pursuits, it becomes a bit
easier to see how conflicted she likely would have been.
Going into reading this novel, the sum total of my
knowledge of Gwenllian Meyrick was:
1) Born 5 Sept 1908 in Norwich, married Orrell
Hamilton Strafford 1934, died Gloucestershire 21 Feb 1997, full name Gwenllian
Clara Richmond Meyrick/Strafford.
2) Listed as a teacher on a 1930 passenger list.
3) Author of six novels 1950-1961. The fourth, The Disastrous Visit (1956), was
described by a bookseller as "Novel set among an ordinary family in London
in the 1950's." I also found a blurb about the last, Shed No Tear (1961): "Catherine, a twenty-year-old art
student, married Hugo Thornton knowing that he had been attached to the elegant
Mrs. Olivia Seymour, but after a while Hugo begins to tire of family life."
4) Some of the dustjackets of her books are adorable,
and her name is distinctly melodious (though I learned from a web search that
if her first name is pronounced in traditional Welsh fashion, there is no
earthly way I can make the required "ll" sound).
So, there wasn't a lot here to really justify my
flagging her to track down her books, but for whatever reason (honestly, it was
probably the dustjackets) I've intended to do so for ages. Will I be tracking
down more of her novels? I think I might actually. I can't help but wonder if
her other novels are as "issue" oriented as this one. If they are,
they could be similarly interesting time capsules, and if they're not, it would
be interesting to see how entertaining she can make a more conventional plot.
Firstly, I do hope you and yours are safe from the terrible disaster ongoing over there in California!
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness this looks to be just my sort of writing! On my list for Christmas reading! I often feel guilty for wanting a book just for its dust jacket or illustrations so its nice to hear I'n not the only one. I wonder why Ms Meyrick was given such a traditional Welsh name. And don't feel bad about the pronounciation of "ll". I think you need to have been borm in Wales of Welsh stock to get your tongue in the right shape!
We had a week or so of terrible air quality in SF from the wildfire smoke, but that was the worst of it here, and thankfully the rain finally came last week. Thanks so much for your concern, Ann!
DeleteAs it happens, I've already read a bit more Meyrick and am enjoying her work very much, so in this case judging her books by their covers has paid off!
I have bought more than one book because of the cover art. An interesting blog about an interesting author, and this is a lovely bit of cover art.
ReplyDeleteJerri
Thanks, Jerri. I'll definitely be writing more about Meyrick before too long, and will have more cover art to share as well!
Delete