"Girls' stuff" (yeah, right): GWENDOLINE COURTNEY, JANE SHAW, SUSAN WYCHWOOD

Apart from my recent post showing some of the Mabel Esther Allan dustjackets kindly shared with me by F.G., I haven't posted a lot about "girls'" fiction lately. It's funny how my reading of certain types of books ebbs and flows a bit during the course of the year. I've sometimes wondered if it's related to weather or hours of daylight or something strange like that, but it probably just my weirdly varying moods.

For whatever reason, over the past month or so I've spent some wonderful weekends and/or happy bedtime reading delving into some particularly good titles originally marketed for teenage girls. Maybe my moon's in Aquarius or some such thing…

All dustjacket images courtesy of F.G. (of course!)

The first title to talk about is one more title that can now be crossed off of my recent Hopeless Wish List, thanks to Constance of the wonderful Staircase Wit blog. After I noted on my list that a copy of GWENDOLINE COURTNEY's A Coronet for Cathie (1950)—even the Girls Gone By reprint from a few years back—would cost a bit more than the average flat in London, Constance jumped in and saved the day, and it wasn't long before my eagerness overcame all the other titles on my TBR list and I dived in. (I should also note that Constance reviewed the book herself soon after, and her review here likely sums things up better than I could ever do).

For those unfamiliar with the story (i.e. if you don't have an original copy treasured from your childhood, and missed the Girls Gone By reprint, and don't want to sell your cozy Bloomsbury flat to buy a copy now), it's the charming if implausible story of sickly 15-year-old Catherine Sidney, an orphan raised with limited means by a loving aunt, who discovers that, following a striking series of tragedies in a hitherto unknown branch of her family tree, she is now the unfathomably wealthy Duchess of Montfort. We should all have such problems. 

Cathie ventures to Devon with her Aunt Bet, where she briefly meets the dying elderly Duke, as well as her gruff but kindly new guardian, Colonel Rushton, and the colonel's three lively and likeable children. (One might expect that some of these other members of the family might be a bit saddened by the truly alarming body count among the Duke's heirs of late, but little mention is made of all the corpses beyond their beneficial impact on Cathie's social status.)

A bit of sarcasm aside, though, and with all its implausibilities, Coronet is a lovely fun tale. It started out just a bit bumpy for me as it is for all intents and purposes a Ruritanian tale despite being set in England, and Ruritania has never been my favorite country to visit. Then, too, as Constance also points out in her review, Cathie's completely ludicrous fragility for much of the story (being carried up and down stairs by her own personal footman—I mean, I wouldn't mind having a footman, but if I get to the point of making him carry me around I hope someone stages an intervention) makes her not a terribly dynamic heroine. Plus, she at times is so idealized, so much adored by all who meet her, that a couple of times I found myself perversely wanting to press her nose into her crumpets just a bit.

Later in the story, however, when Cathie is no longer decrepit and is able to head off to day school with her considerably more dynamic cousins—and even take up horseback riding!—things do liven up, and the whole premise of her as a kind, unselfish, down-to-earth squire for her vast estate begins to pay off. (Though, as much as I comprehend that any large landowner with lots of tenants has some real social responsibilities to shoulder, the way Cathie's estate is described feels a bit too feudal for the 1950s!)

None of those details matter much in the end, however, as realism is hardly the point of the story. A Coronet for Cathie is not my absolute favorite of Courtney's work—Sally’s Family will always retain that title, I think, and Girls of Friar’s Rise and Stepmother are also faves, all with their more domestic concerns. But Coronet is still great fun, with memorable characters and a nice message about "people who are worth knowing" and those who aren't. Thank you again to Constance for making it possible for me to read it. I highly recommend it—particularly if you were thinking of selling that flat anyway…

From there, I confess I was instantly and irrevocably seduced by the cover art of JANE SHAW's Anything Can Happen (1964), which happily came into my collection courtesy of the wonderful F.G. I was just at the point where one look at the girls with adorable Sixties hair browsing the bookstalls by the Seine with Notre Dame in all its unsinged glory behind them was all it took. I immediately started reading, and it proved to be every bit as charming and compulsively readable as it looked.

I read a couple of Jane Shaw books years ago and enjoyed them but never became obsessed. Well, I'm afraid obsession is in the cards now, so it's just as well that Girls Gone By announced, while I was reading this book, that they're beginning to reprint several of Shaw's books.

The premise is a classic wish fulfillment fantasy—Alison and her cousin Elizabeth (nicknamed Dizzy due to her reputation for nonlinear thinking, not to mention seeing criminal activity everywhere she looks) are sent to visit their Aunt Sophie in Paris. Poor things. And Aunt Sophie, a crime writer who tends to get obsessed with her work, is not exactly a strict or attentive guardian, so they practically have the run of the city. They quickly make friends with handsome young Pierre, his brother Alain, and their two adventurous little sisters Régine and Danielle.

Everywhere they turn in Paris, they find mysterious happenings, which Alison sometimes puts down to Dizzy's flair for intrigue but which finally become all too real. They encounter suspicious behavior in a jewellery shop, get followed by "the Man in the Grey Suit," and come to believe that Alison's mother's old governess Madame Bertholet, whom they solemnly promised to visit, is the victim of some diabolical intrigue at the hands of her housekeeper. In the course of their adventures, they find plenty of time to visit Montmartre, stop in to Deux Magots, climb the Eiffel Tower, and stroll through the Louvre.

It's all silly and implausible, but I found it absolutely addictive and delightful. I didn't want it to end. As I was reading, I recalled that Sue Sims and Hilary Clare, in their Encyclopaedia of Girls' School Stories, suggested that Shaw could most closely be compared with P. G. Wodehouse, and although that sounds like an odd link, the kinship is clearly on display in Anything Could Happen, which sparkles with wit and charm throughout. I'm assuming there are other Shaw fans among readers of this blog?

And finally, just two weekends ago, I was needing something light and cheerful to blot out the general sluggishness resulting from antibiotics for a sinus infection (yuck), and picked up SUSAN WYCHWOOD's French Leave (1936). I've had this school story for ages, since I bought it based on Sims and Clare's description of it, and it's turned out to be one of the most enjoyable, down-to-earth school stories I've read.

It centers around Avalon Grey, who is sent to boarding school in France because her widowed father, a retired general, can't bear her resemblance to her dead mother and to her older brother, who ran away from home years before when he was just about Avalon's age. For the most part, the plot is realistic, with lots of humorous but entirely plausible scenes between girls and mistresses, including mild culture clashes between French and English ways of doing things (Avalon is the only "Eengleesh mees" at the school, though a new English mistress does arrive partway through the school year). The French provincial town where the school is located is pleasantly described, and contains excitement only in the form of a local regiment of Spahi soldiers (recruits from Algeria serving their required time in the French army—no postcolonial concerns here!). The staff and fellow boarders are mostly kind and eager to please their English classmate, though there is a requisite troublemaker, Denise, who resents the attention Avalon receives and seeks to bring her down a notch or two.

There are a few gentle adventures of the traditional school story sort, but even there the book manages to stay fairly plausible—there's no climbing out the chimney of a burning room or singlehandedly taking down a ring of spies in Wychwood's tale. Instead, there's a very modest buried treasure left over from World War I (with some interesting discussion of the impacts of war), the discovery and rescue of an injured Spahi colonel in a forest, a near-miss with a wild boar during a walk through the forest, and a Spahi lieutenant who takes a mysterious interest in Avalon. Somehow, it's all very sweet-natured but without being cloying or sentimental, spirited and entertaining without being frenetic, and manages to give one a feel for the rhythms of day-to-day school life. Sims and Clare noted that "[t]he details ring completely true, and one cannot doubt that the author is drawing on her own experiences or those of someone close to her."

Sadly, the identity of Wychwood herself remains shrouded in mystery. Even the brilliant John Herrington was unable to trace her. Sadder still, this was apparently the only book she published. I for one would have loved it if she'd written 20 or 30 more.

To give you a taste, since this book is also a bit of a challenge to track down at reasonable prices, some of my favorite passages in the book relate to the determined belief in the minds of the French that England is perpetually shrouded in fog. Early in the book Avalon discusses it with her classmates:

"Is it true," asked Louise, "that in England there is always a fog, especially in London?"

"Oh, no," laughed Avalon, "we have them sometimes, of course, in the winter, and now and then there are some very dense ones in London, but not always!"

"One hears it said," muttered Denise darkly.

"Yes," said Avalon, "I have heard it said too, but no one in her senses could believe any country to be permanently wrapped in fog."

"Is your King married yet?" asked Jeanne hastily, to change the subject.

"I saw him once in Paris. He is handsome, your King," said Marie-Therese.

"Yes, isn't he splendid?" glowed Avalon. "I've seen him once, in London."

"Which she couldn't have done in a fog," put in Antoinette soberly.

And that passage links up nicely, later in the book, with a scene in which Avalon and the new English mistress toy with the assumptions of a Frenchwoman on the train to Paris:

"You have fogs in England?" she added hopefully.

"Occasionally," agreed Miss Field. "I remember one five years ago—or was it six? Do you know, Avalon? Or perhaps you would have been too small at the time to appreciate it."

"But I have seen a fog," claimed Avalon.

"Indeed?" said Miss Field, turning to her with well-acted eagerness. "When? Where? You have never mentioned it to me before."

"It was about a year ago," said Avalon. "It was quite thick—one could only just see the top of the church steeple at the end of the street. What a pity you missed it!"

I recommend French Leave for fans of more realistic school stories, and I anticipate a very pleasant reread somewhere down the road.

Playing catch-up (as opposed to ketchup) part 1 (GWENDOLINE COURTNEY, MAUDE S. FORSEY, MABEL ESTHER ALLAN)

I do have some catching up to do on recent reading to mention, and I'm starting off with an unusually cranky post about three children's books I've read in the past few weeks. Oddly, two of them—the ones I'm cranky about—were by authors I have otherwise loved and enjoyed quite a lot, while the third, which I'll place in the middle of my discussion to alleviate the snarkiness, and which proved to be an absolute delight, is by an author I'd never read before (and who, indeed, wrote very little else).

First, GWENDOLINE COURTNEY, author of one of my absolute favorite "children's" books (scare quotes because although it's certainly suitable for children, there's really very little reason adults can't enjoy it just as much), the wonderful postwar Sally's Family (1946), as well as other terrifically enjoyable books like Stepmother (1948, aka Elizabeth of the Garret Theatre, aka Those Verney Girls), Long Barrow (1950, aka The Farm on the Downs), and The Girls of Friar's Rise (1952). I've written about her a couple of times before here.

Now, At School with the Stanhopes (1951) falls right in the middle of those favorites, time-wise, so perhaps I was just generally in a bad mood as I was reading it. It certainly seems to have all the elements of a fun, frivolous, girl-ish read—16-year-old Rosalind is pulled from her classy boarding school and stuck living with her older brother Richard, a stodgy but brilliant historian, and his teenage "factotum" and general housekeeper, Henry (an odd domestic arrangement all around). Richard and Henry are both distinctly anti-girl (no, not in that way—though frankly it might have been more fun if that were the case), and Rosalind is a waifish, insecure girl prone to navel-gazing and moping around such that I would have been even more opposed than Richard and Henry to the thought of her living with me. Ahem.

Fortunately, there's the charming Stanhopes to save the novel from tedium, even if they were unable to save it completely in my eyes. Kate Stanhope is a young mistress from Rosalind's old school, who inherits a property nearby and decides to bring her numerous younger sisters and start a school for them. So it's sort of a school story, though certainly not in any traditional sense, as most events still take place outside of school hours. Rosalind is naturally invited to be a student, and the madcap younger Stanhopes make it their mission to wear down the defenses of Richard and Henry. And to be fair most of their escapades are entertaining enough—Courtney is always on firmest ground when she's writing about feisty families.

Overall, though, it seemed to me that Courtney was struggling to keep the story going, and the plot of Rosalind's meek, cardboard drama queen personality and Richard's obsessive stodginess had already dragged out too long at the end of 50 pages, let alone 200. It was compromised too by Courtney's determination to have it both ways—presenting them both as kind-hearted, smart, and loving, and yet remarkably stunted emotionally when it came to working through conflicts and misunderstandings that should have been resolved in a matter of days. I rather wanted to knock their heads together on more than one occasion.

I also have to say, although I hardly expect girls' stories from the 1950s to be pillars of feminism, one really sees quite clearly here Courtney's rather traditional views of women and their roles. Which is fine, it's just a bit too explicit here for my enjoyment. All of the characters seem to view it as a tremendous victory when Richard deigns to allow Rosalind to begin cooking and cleaning and acting as hostess when he has a guest. Kate Stanhope, head of the school, notes that Rosalind is 16 years old and it is therefore high time that she get used to serving as hostess. Ah, yes, Rosalind clearly has a bright future as some man's doormat ahead of her! Of course, it's all tied up with the ridiculous relationship between brother and sister, and so there is some plot-specific justification for seeing things in this way (by asking her to host a luncheon party, Richard is acknowledging Rosalind's existence and capabilities), but it definitely grated on my nerves.

Sadly, I don't think this particular title from Courtney will ever require a re-reading.

On the other hand, MAUDE S. FORSEY's Mollie Hazeldene's Schooldays (1924), also a rather nontraditional school story in its way, I embraced wholeheartedly.

It's a very quiet, sweet little story, refreshingly free of near-drownings, avalanches, bear attacks, sniper fire, or any of the other melodrama that school stories sometimes resort to (okay, maybe the last two are exaggerations—or are they?). Schooldays focuses on ordinary, mundane school life, beginning with the charming, gently troublemaking Mollie's first arrival at school and continuing until her schooldays are complete. Some of the big dramas include Mollie and chums learning to ride a bicycle, planning an entertainment for girls from another school, and producing a school magazine—generally quite plausible and unsensational, though with an occasional schoolgirl silliness that made me giggle more than once. Two of my particular favorites to share—first, the girls mockingly bringing the slightly dim Leah Sheepwash to her senses over her collection of fraudulent and far-fetched supposed historical items, by sharing with her a few relics of their own:

"You wouldn't sell me that quill, I suppose?" she hazarded doubtfully, looking at the treasure with longing eyes.

"Sell the Langton heritage?" exclaimed Alice dramatically. "No—not for Venice!" Wrapping the feather in pink tissue paper, she replaced it in her box, and held up the next—a dried piece of orange peel. "Now, Leah, you've no doubt heard of the downfall of Napoleon?"

"Oh yes, of course," agreed Leah.

"Well, this is what he fell on."

"I didn't think it meant an actual downfall," put in Leah doubtfully.

"This was the cause of his second downfall, and was picked up on the island of St. Helena, and handed to a sailor ancestor of mine, a certain Jack Langton, by the great Bonaparte…"

Purely silly, but I dare you not to grin a little at Leah's gullibility. I also loved, later on, Mollie's defense of her controversial ending to the potboiler the girls have been writing in installments for the school magazine, alternating chapters between them:

"What made you so cruel as to send the dear young man with the copper-coloured hair to prison, Mollie Hazeldene, and to marry the heroine to a perfect stranger?" demanded Jessie.

"Considering he had shot two villains in Chapters VI. and VII., and made off with a bag of gold in Chapter VIII., I thought it was about time,'' I announced. "Any stranger was better than that hero. Besides, only a stranger would ever marry the heroine. No one who knew her would take her on."

Not exactly riotous humor, admittedly, but so genuine and energetic I couldn't resist it. Unlike many of the school stories I've read, this one will certainly make for an occasional cheerful, comforting re-read.

Of course, if you prefer your schoolgirls defeating smugglers, crawling out of the chimney of a burning room, or sliding down a glacial crevasse to their almost-certain doom, Mollie Hazeldene's Schooldays isn't the place to look. But for a really gentle, charming look at more or less realistic school life in the early years of the 20th century, you could hardly do better.

Oddly, after publishing Schooldays in 1924, Forsey doesn't seem to have published again until one more school story, Norah O'Flanigan, Prefect, in 1937. An earlier book, Jack and Me, appears to be for younger children (though a contemporary review praises it for some of the same strengths I mention above, so it might be worth checking out, given a chance), and several other titles listed in the British Library, mostly in the years 1937 and 1938, appear to be the short plays for children which Sims and Clare mention. From what researcher John Herrington was able to discover, it appears that Forsey had been a schoolteacher for some time before her marriage in 1925 (the year after Schooldays appeared, so perhaps we have a reason for the long delay of her next book after all?). She would have been 40 years of age when she married (born August 30, 1885), and she lived on until 1971. If only she had found time for more writing!

From that high point, it's back to another low point. If At School with the Stanhopes was the least of my Gwendoline Courtney reading, then A Summer at Sea (1965) is surely the dregs of the MABEL ESTHER ALLAN reading I've done.

As many of you already know, I am ordinarily an enthusiastic fan of Allan's work, especially those novels focused on teenage girls just on the verge of adulthood, which I think she does especially well. I've previously written about her several times—you can click here if you want a trip down memory lane—but this one just didn't quite work for me.

The heroine of A Summer at Sea, 18-year-old Gillian, is sent for a summer on a sort of low-budget small cruise ship, to help out her aunt who runs the ship's shop. In part this is to help her recover from a heartbreak at the hands of an older man, Robin, who has strung her along and then dumped her for someone else. The ship travels to destinations such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Bergen, and an unplanned stop on the Scottish isle of Barra. As one would expect, Allan's travel descriptions are a high point—she clearly loved travel herself and here as elsewhere that enthusiasm comes across.

Sadly, however, Gillian, although her emotional state is understandable to an extent, is not a terribly enjoyable character with whom to be sightseeing—whining and moaning and fretting her way along in an apparent determination to wallow in self-pity to the fullest extent possible. Where many of Allan's heroines have a sort of self-possession and quiet dignity that shines through even their natural insecurity at facing the world, Gillian seems peculiarly wet blanket-ish. (Perhaps she and Courtney's Rosalind might profitably have spent some time together, and I would be all in favor of such a therapeutic friendship—as long as I don't have to read about it.) Her anxiety and fear about opening herself to a new romance, too, is comprehensible, but not particularly effective as a plot device. The book is a pleasant enough read, but not a memorable one, and for rereading purposes I'll happily stick with the greater subtlety and polish that The Vine-Clad Hill/Swiss Holiday or Catrin in Wales have to offer.

Bookseller label from my copy of A Summer at Sea

Yikes. As you know, I rarely talk a lot about books I don't like here, as I enjoy focusing on the positive. I also don't like to bash books that others may actually enjoy quite a lot, and so I do wonder what other Courtney and Allan fans think of the books I mention here. But I also have to admit that I have another of these cranky posts gurgling along in my psyche at the moment, that will probably be following soon as part of my attempt to catch up on my recent reading. After that, I promise I'll be back to raving about how wonderful the books I've read have been and dammit, why aren't any of them in print!

Book report: What I read on holiday

Okay, I’m sure you’ve all heard just about enough our recent trip, but as part of my segueing back into talking about books and reading I figured I might as well report on what I was reading during all that time. Particularly since I obviously didn’t make a lot of notes of my thoughts, so if I don’t talk about them all now, they’ll be lost to this blog forever.

I took only a handful of physical books with me (though of course with my Kindle I had about 50 more, so I was sure to be covered). I had picked up my first Miss Read Thrush Green book, Battles in Thrush Green (1975), at the book sale just a couple of weeks before our trip, and I finished reading it right before we left. Having got a taste for the charming characters, I had checked the actual shop at our public library and found four more books in the series, so I carried Return to Thrush Green (1978) with me on the trip, and finished reading that one just a few days in. I know some of you are also Miss Read fans, but I wonder if you have a clear preference between the Fairacre series and the Thrush Green series. Having read only one of the former and now two of the latter, I have to say I have a preference for the latter—I think because it’s told in the third person and therefore shifts perspective between all the characters, while the Fairacre book I read was in the first person and limited to the schoolteacher’s perspective. But perhaps that’s not the case with all the other Fairacre books? At any rate, I very much enjoyed both of the Thrush Green books, but now I have a quandary—should I venture back to the beginning of the series now, or continue reading forward to the end and then go back to the beginning. Oh the quandaries that face obsessive readers!

I had also come across three Amanda Cross mysteries at the book sale, and finished reading The Players Come Again (1990) before we left. That was an odd entry in a mystery series, since the mystery was really a purely literary one. It was rather more a straightforward academic novel, a less complex version of A. S. Byatt’s Possession, than what would ordinarily be called a mystery, but it was quite enjoyable for all that. So I took the other two Cross mysteries with me, and was reading The James Joyce Murder (1967) during our stay in Rye—perhaps that explains why the ghosts didn’t bother us, it’s not exactly a suitably moody book for such a setting. I enjoyed that one very much, but when I proceeded to A Trap for Fools (1989), I got bogged down, and I have to admit I still haven’t finished it. Perhaps that’s as much because other books started to find their way into my bag by that point in our trip as it is because the book was less enticing—it is interesting in its meditations on academia and female friendships, but it does seem to drag a bit as a mystery (though here at least there is a proper murder).

This is all a sort of preface for the best book I read on vacation. In addition to passing along some of her “extra” books to me, Gil had the brainstorm of letting me read a Josephine Bell mystery she had just picked up as a gift for someone else, then I could return it to her by mail before leaving England. I happily accepted, especially since the mystery in question was Death at Half-Term (1939, later reprinted as Curtain Call for a Corpse), one of the Bell books set in a school.

This mystery centers around Dr. David Wintringham, who has been known on previous occasions to aid Inspector Mitchell of Scotland Yard in solving perplexing cases. David and his wife Jill happen to be at the school for a half-term performance (Jill’s sister Judith is married to the headmaster). A touring theatre company is putting on a production of Twelfth Night when the leading man gets himself clobbered over the head. There are skirmishes between the actors, a mysterious tension between a temporary master at the school and the leading lady (who is gleefully melodramatic in mourning the husband she never loved), a group of boys who take it upon themselves to find the murder weapon (and do), and a simmering romance between a master and the assistant matron. All of which makes for rollicking fun along the way.

I'm certainly going to be on the lookout for more Josephine Bell. Allowing for the possibility that not all of her books may be as much fun as Death at Half-Term, I’m willing to bet that many of them are. Happily, it appears that many (but not all) of her books have now been reprinted by Bello Books, but I wonder why she hasn't yet received the attention she deserves. At any rate, thanks to Gil for giving me the chance to read this one!

From there, amazingly enough, I proceeded to another American mystery (hey, I was on vacation!)—Helen McCloy’s superbly eerie Through a Glass, Darkly (1949), which also, as it happens, has a school connection, though very few of the scenes actually take place at school. It’s an intriguing tale, part mystery, part thriller, about seemingly supernatural events. It begins with a young art teacher in a girl's school being dismissed without explanation because she seems to have inspired unspecified gossip or anxieties among the girls and staff. To say much more would spoil the elegant unfolding of the eerie plot, during which one's assumptions and sympathies are likely to shift several times, but the book is of particular interest because there is, on the one hand, a perfectly logical explanation of the odd and tragic events, and, on the other hand, just the slightest possibility left open that the events really might have been supernatural after all. If you’re a sensitive reader, don’t read this one right before bedtime! Some readers might feel that all the theorizing about the supernatural, including historical examples of similar situations, slow the pace too much, but I enjoyed it anyway, and the situation of vulnerable women at a slightly ominous girls' school might remind some readers of the similarly eerie and similarly compelling Ethel Lina White novel The Third Eye, reprinted a few months ago by Greyladies.

While I’m talking about mysteries, Mavis Doriel Hay’s Death on the Cherwell (1935) helped me get through the long, dreary flight home. (And I am reminding myself, as I did so many times on our trip, that it is, according to Google, properly pronounced CHAR-well, as if one were ordering a steak well-done, not CHURR-well. I have quite a list of such pronunciation lessons now!) It’s the second of Hay’s three mysteries, following Murder Underground (1934) and preceding The Santa Klaus Murder (1936), all three reprinted in the British Library mystery series. As a mystery, Death on the Cherwell seemed like no great shakes to me, though as usual I made no effort to follow all the ins and outs of who was where at what time doing what for how long. But as a novel about young women at Oxford, it’s quite charming and fun in a perky, flapperish sort of way. It’s a good book to curl up with when you don’t have energy for anything challenging and just want the pages to turn themselves—for example, on a transatlantic flight. I was also interested to discover from the introduction to the book that Hay was, as a novelist, yet another of many, many casualties of World War II. First the stresses and constraints of the approaching war must have prevented her from writing, and then the death of her husband, an RAF pilot, must have thoroughly derailed her from writing such cheerful, energetic fiction. She did later publish books about arts and crafts, but never seems to have returned to writing fiction. The war had many casualties off the battlefield as well…

Also somewhat in the mystery/thriller category is Joy Packer’s The Man in the Mews (1964), which I read halfheartedly on the trip and only finished after we’d returned home. I picked up the book because I thought she might belong on my Overwhelming List, only to discover that she was from South Africa. It’s part romance, part thriller, and part psychological drama—the Google Books summary reads, “Widow who visits London after a long absence when her daughter becomes engaged is recognized by a collector of newspaper crime stories as the ex-wife of a murderer.” 

It’s by no means a great book, but I did find it modestly interesting in some ways. There's the title character, an admirer of murderers, who is somewhat intriguing in his very modern-seeming desire for a dark notoriety. And there's the middle-aged Mrs Olivier, hiding her dark secret and trying to protect her daughter from it, who has returned to London for the first time in decades. Sadly, there are also some rather excruciatingly melodramatic romantic scenes and confrontation scenes, and a belief in the determinism of genetics that seems strange to modern readers. A forgettable novel, for sure, but one with a bit more kick than I expected.

I mentioned in my last post that amazing Oxfam shop in York, and Doris Pocock’s The Treasure of the Trevellyans (1938) was one of my acquisitions there. The cover was so charming, I couldn’t resist reading it right away. It’s a pleasant family adventure tale, about an impoverished artist who inherits a run-down house and land in Cornwall from an eccentric uncle, and takes his family there for a long holiday. The trouble is, the house is so run-down that it amounts more to camping out than living in a house. For the Trevellyans themselves, this is of little concern, as they are a perky, adventurous clan and take it all in stride. But when their posh cousin decides she wants some adventure of her own and stows away with them, she finds it harder to adapt to the rough conditions. Then the uncovering of a reference to a family treasure hidden somewhere on the property leads to an exciting and sometimes harrowing search. (Note to self: When asked to search for treasure by being lowered into a well in a bucket, decline the opportunity.)

Pocock has some obvious weaknesses as a storyteller—a bit too formulaic, her prose a bit awkward and repetitive at times, a tendency to be overly obvious with her sentimental conclusions (of course, everyone learns valuable lessons in the end)—but the formula she uses is a pleasant and entertaining one, and the setting is enticing. It’s nowhere near as strong, for example, as Gwendoline Courtney's family tales, but certainly worth the four pounds I paid for it (especially with its lovely dustjacket).

I love the book, but I still think the girl in
yellow looks a bit like a Stepford wife. Perhaps
that explains their love for housekeeping?

And speaking of Gwendoline Courtney, I’m going to interject one more pre-holiday read here, because otherwise I know I’ll never get round to mentioning it. When I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by life just before our trip, I picked up one of several Courtney novels sitting on my TBR shelves, The Girls of Friar’s Rise (1952), which proved to be just the medicine I needed. All the more surprising because it is, apart from being a lovely family story, basically a tale of how delightful housework is—a theme I shouldn’t, by rights, enjoy at all. But reading about housekeeping is certainly better than undertaking it, and so this book, about a troupe of domestically accomplished girls, inadvertently left to manage on their own when their parents rush off to Canada and the adult supervision they’d arranged falls through, turns out to be quite delightful. 

The girls befriend a new neighbor who has taken up residence in a ramshackle old house nearby in hopes that country life will help him recover from a serious illness. Such a scenario, in the hands of a modern thriller author, would no doubt lead to the girls being tortured or made into slave labor or the subjects of science experiments, but in Courtney’s more idyllic world, the man watches over the girls while they glory in making the ramshackle house into a home and help to heal him with their affection and ample produce from their garden.

It’s really a lovely book. Not quite, for me, to the standard of Courtney’s earlier book, Sally’s Family, which deals just a bit more realistically with the realities of postwar life, but it’s nevertheless wonderful, feel-good fun. It was reprinted by Girls Gone By a few years ago, but is out-of-print again now. Hopefully they’ll get around to a reprint one of these days.

And that’s that. I actually managed to do a fair bit of reading, if you consider how much ground we were covering every day on the trip! The mark of a true addict…

GWENDOLINE COURTNEY, Sally’s Family (1946)

“Six of them!” Mrs. Rees exclaimed, staring aghast at her master, who, his damaged leg propped up on a stool, was lying back in his chair, looking up at his housekeeper—and quondam nurse—with apprehensive amusement.

“Yes, six of them.  And five of them under eighteen.”

Mrs. Rees sank down on a chair, as if unable to stand up to the shock of finding that Charles Selwood, having reached the age of thirty-six and still a confirmed bachelor, was now to stand in loco parentis to six—no, five children!

So begins Sally’s Family, and it’s a promising beginning for my first experience of a Girls Gone By reprint—the tale of 24-year-old Sally who, in the days immediately after the end of World War II, comes out of the A.T.S. and must try to make a home for her five orphaned brothers and sisters.

This is made more challenging by the fact that the children have been split up in different households for most of the war.  Their father has been killed in Burma, after having saved Charles’ life.  Sally joined the A.T.S. right after the beginning of the war.  Initially, the other children had been left with an elderly aunt, but when the Blitz began the school-age children had been evacuated with their separate schools.  The aunt took Robin and Jane to the countryside but died soon after, leaving Robin with a clergyman and his wife, while Jane went to live with an Oxford don and his wife.

The novel’s introduction by Jilly Day makes clear that this type of reunion was not particularly unusual, though I can't recall coming across it in any other novels of the time, and it’s a wonderfully intriguing premise for a family story.  Charles—who has resolved to help the family and make sure they’re okay, but nevertheless make them stand on their own feet—finds himself drawn to the whole family (and one member in particular).  He rents them a filthy, run-down house that has been commandeered by a Civil Defense Unit for the duration of the war, and Sally must dive in to make it livable.  Fortunately, she has some help from the redoubtable Mrs. Rees, from whom Sally begins to catch the joy of housekeeping, which here sounds a bit like a contagious disease—perhaps contracted from Kay Smallshaw in Persephone’s How to Run Your Home Without Help, published around the same time:

She was already filling a kettle that had been left standing in the hearth, and found that she was actually catching a little of Mrs. Rees’s enthusiasm as that admirable woman proceeded to disinter various cleaning materials from the basket that had held the overalls.  Even to make this room clean would be an achievement one could feel proud of.

The arrival of each of the children to the family’s ramshackle new home is entertaining, but none so much so as the final arrival—of the youngest daughter, Jane, who had always (before the war) been known as Pookum:

She opened the door wider, and a small, demure figure clad in quaker-like grey walked composedly in.  A long dark plait hung over each shoulder, and solemn blue eyes surveyed her elder brothers and sisters without the slightest trace of shyness.  While they all stared in dead silence the blue eyes singled out Sally, and Jane advanced towards her, a small hang—for she was very small for her ten years—held out with all the aplomb of a woman of forty.

“How are you, Sally?  I remember you per-fectly despite the fact that I was so young when our family was un-a-void-ably split up,” she said staidly, articulating each syllable with care.

It’s hard not to love Jane/Pookum, as she approaches life in such a calm, practical, prematurely intellectual way, and she was the high point of the novel for me.  (But perhaps that’s because I rather identify with her?)  And, although the entire novel is light and cheerful and entertaining, Jane is really the only proper, giggle-out-loud comic relief.  Her background does, however, provide some challenges—not least to her poor teacher at the local school:

“She’ll be all right once lessons start,” Miss Leigh said quietly as the girls parted from her at the door.  “If she’s never been to school before she’s bound to be a little nervous at first.  But she’ll soon settle down,” and she returned to her scholars, blissfully unconscious of just how soon Pookum, who was not customarily given to fits of panic, would recover and settle down.

When Jane gets home, she tells the girls of her critiques of the “babyish” stories Miss Leigh tells in history class, stories that “have been en-tire-ly dis-cred-it-ed and dis-proved by his-tor-ians.”  She even, as Miss Leigh tells them later, “started quoting Latin on one occasion.”  But fortunately Miss Leigh—like just about everyone else in the novel—is unflummoxable and immediately recognizes Jane’s intelligence and potential.

Obviously, we are not in the realm of hard-hitting, gritty, postwar realism here.  There is perhaps more than a little propaganda here about the joys of housework (not unlike the Smallshaw book), and each family member’s sterling character and enthusiasm for hard work might occasionally stretch the limits of credulity.  Some of the family’s lucky breaks are as convenient as those in E. Nesbit’s The Lark—finding furniture in the attic when they finally get around to taking down the lingering blackout there, receiving cases of handy materials salvaged from their bombed-out former home in London, Charles’ frequent gifts of chickens, eggs, and cream.

Cover of 1962 Collins reprint

On the other hand, this is not just an idealized “cozy” (though it is certainly cozy enough for any rainy day), and the difficulties Sally and her siblings face do contain some insight into the realities and hardships of postwar England.  Even better, the family dynamics and the children’s unique personalities from growing up in such different environments are believable and completely entertaining.  Perhaps they even contain a sort of underlying message about how this microcosm of Britain as a whole would have to work together and sacrifice in order to survive postwar austerity?

Oddly, Sally’s Family kept reminding me of a very, very different novel, but one which also manages to turn relatively uneventful day-to-day life into something that’s hard to put down.  RC Sherriff’s The Fortnight in September, about a middle-class family’s perfectly ordinary vacation to the seaside, is one of my favorite Persephones, and as in that novel, Courtney here manages to create a compelling story from the most mundane details of domestic life.  Kitty has been billeted with the well-to-do Mrs. Howard, who has spoiled her and given her a taste for the good life, and she must be brought around to the joys of housekeeping and family life.  The siblings play trivia games to help Jane and Robin with their schoolwork.  Guy and Lucy start cramming to try to win scholarships.  Sally badly injures her foot and brings Tom, a young doctor home on leave from the military, into the novel’s cast.  Not exactly the events from which page-turners are usually made. 

And yet, somehow, I found I could barely put it down.  For those of you interested in fiction about wartime and postwar England, and fiction about domestic life, this one should prove irresistible.  And now, of course, I’m itching to read more of Courtney’s work.  Fortunately, Girls Gone By have reprinted several of her other titles as well—and hopefully will continue to do so, since the ones they haven’t gotten to yet are often shockingly pricy.

Also, as an aside, I was interested to learn from the book’s introduction that Courtney was the only civilian to have worked on Operation Overlord, the code name for the D-Day invasion of Normandy.  And, more sadly, she is one of a fair number of the women on my Overwhelming List to have been injured in a bomb blast during the war: Courtney's hearing was damaged, and her resulting extreme sensitivity to noise affected her for the rest of her life.

Oh, and by the way, the original cover, which GGB uses for their edition (the back is shown below), is quite irresistible as well.  Sadly, however, Courtney herself seems to have been camera-shy, as I could locate no photo of her.