From
Elizabeth Crawford's informative introduction to Wine of Honour:
Barbara Proctor Beauchamp (1909-1974) was born in Surrey, the
eldest child of a stockbroker, and brought up and educated in France and
Switzerland, where her parents had a chalet at Château d’Oex. Her younger
brother and sister, twins, died young; Alice aged 21 in 1934 and Philip killed
in Singapore in 1942.
Among
other things, the family chateau in Switzerland explains the use of that
country as a setting in at least two of Beauchamp's novels, Without Comment (1939) and Ride the Wind (1947). Reviews of
Beauchamp's books are difficult to come by—she is one of those authors who seem
to have been largely ignored by critics—but she apparently had something of a
fan in well-known critic (and novelist) Frank Swinnerton, whose review of the
former novel in the Observer notes,
along with some nice praise, that it has autobiographical elements:
Now, the truest-seeming book I have read this week is
"Without Comment," which not literally but in its type suggests first
hand experience … Miss Beauchamp tells in "Without Comment" the brief
tale of an English family, resident in Switzerland, which is broken by the
divorce of the parents; and she concerns herself chiefly with the doings of two
young girls, one of whom married for love and escape, while the other, through
whose eyes most of the events are seen, allows herself to be seduced in the
modern manner by a handsome flirt and has to wait long for any kind of liberty.
The book is full of crisp observation and outspoken natural talk; its
impressions of the Swiss scene and the Belgian resort in which the children
visit their divorced father are excellent; and while the more poignant
inventions lack force the squabbles, the lighter adventures, and the relations
of the sisters are all excellent. I do not remember better sketches of
neglected, sophisticated girlhood.
If
it's true that the novel was autobiographical, there might be some additional
clues there about Beauchamp's family situation (would that the novel were
available anywhere).
The Daily Sketch felt, by the way,
that Without Comment was
"brilliantly told". Sadly, I've not come across any contemporary
reviews of Wine of Honour at all,
though a subsequent novel, Virtue in the
Sun (1949), was praised by John Betjeman as a "first-class
novel", while Howard Spring (if I'm correctly making out the words of a
badly scanned blurb) said it was "one of the finest presentations of a
boy's mind in such stressful circumstances that I have come on for a long time."
As
you will all know by now from my previous raving about it, Wine of Honour is, among other things, a brilliant documentation of
women, many of whom have been in the services, adjusting to the first few
months of postwar life. Sadly, Beauchamp doesn't seem to have written about the
war itself in her fiction, so it was intriguing to get just one little snapshot
of Beauchamp in wartime from a short blurb in the Montana Standard in 1940 (presumably it was syndicated to other
newspapers as well):
In protest at the "fantastic position" of women
auxiliary firemen in London, two women novelists, Miss Barbara Beauchamp [sic],
have resigned from the force, their chief complaint being that they volunteered
as drivers, but were asked to scrub floors.
The
other woman novelist may well have been Norah C. James, but thanks to a
careless typist or typesetter we may never know for sure. Based on the information from the author bio above, from the dustjacket of The Girl in the Fog, she must have gone more or less directly into the ATS after resigning from the fire service.
Returning to
Elizabeth Crawford's introduction, we do get a glimpse of Beauchamp's postwar
life:
While writing Wine of
Honour Barbara Beauchamp was living not in a bucolic English village but at
9 Cumberland Gardens, Islington, a quiet enclave close to King’s Cross, in the
house she shared with her partner, Norah James, to whom the novel is dedicated.
Norah was also a novelist, notorious as the author of Sleeveless Errand which, when published in 1929, had been censored
on the grounds of obscenity. In this post-Second World War period Norah’s
publisher was MacDonald & Co, suggesting it was not a coincidence that the
same firm published Wine of Honour.
The two women wrote at least one short play together, broadcast on the BBC Home
Service in 1947, and one book, Greenfingers and the Gourmet, which
combined instructions for growing a wide range of vegetables with a 'number of
specially good recipes in which these vegetables played an important part'.
They had been partners since at least 1939 when Norah dedicated her
autobiography, I Lived in a Democracy,
to Barbara, but by the early 1960s appear to have separated and for the remainder
of her life Barbara shared a home with Dr Millicent Dewar, a renowned
psychoanalyst. Barbara continued her journalism career after the war, for a
time reviewing novels for provincial newspapers and herself publishing three
further novels, the last in 1958.
I got three of the etitless for my birthday: Spam Today, Somewhere in England, and Nothing to Report. Can hardly wait to jump right on in!
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