Sneak preview, FM32: VERILY ANDERSON, Spam Tomorrow (1956)

From novelist, children's author, and journalist Rachel Anderson's introduction to her mother's memoir:

In 1954, in an emotionally charged farewell editorial for The Townsend, she wrote, ‘The war took so much from us that we grew to accept deprivations almost without feeling. We lost friends, we lost our homes, we lost whole ways of life..… (yet) we learned that, even in the parting of death, something of the spirit is left behind on earth, something that we had perhaps not known to exist in the living person, something that had lain dormant as the hidden seeds of the willow-herb in the sooty City of London.’

A bit later, Rachel poignantly but inspiringly describes Verily's reaction to her loss of eyesight, which is just the positive, make-the-best-of-things sort of attitude one would expect having read her memoirs:

As Verily’s eye-sight began to fade, her piano was moved next to her bedroom to be more easily reached and she took to dictating her work, leaving her family to correct it. On being registered blind, she insisted, with typical positivity, how delighted she was that at last she qualified to be trained for a guide-dog. She then dictated an article for The Author (Society of Authors journal) discussing how Milton might have adapted to having a canine carer.

When I posted about Spam Tomorrow earlier this year, I also got a lovely comment from another of Verily's daughters, author Janie Hampton (one of the women behind the wonderful History Girls blog). I hope she won't mind if I share it again here so that more readers can enjoy it:

I'm one of Verily Anderson's 4 daughters, I wasn't born until her 3rd book 'Our Square'. We all enjoyed seeing this, and the good news is that Spam Tomorrow is being republished by Dean Street Press on 5 August 2019. Verily was very proud that the Imperial War Museum held a copy of Spam Tomorrow, where it's been used by many WWII researchers. 'Mummy Vincent' was Nicholas's mother Noel, one of Verily's best & oldest friends, a lovely calm woman. Kate was indeed Joyce Grenfell, in 'Scrambled Eggs for Christmas'. None of us were her actual god-children, but she was like a fairy godmother to us, passing on her stage clothes for us to cut up, and secretly buying us a car, house etc. Twenty years after her death, I edited her letters, and wrote her biography for John Murray publisher. I think 'Beware of Children' was called ' No Kidding' in USA - after the film made by the Carry On... film people.

From Verily's Guardian obituary in 2010 (see here):

[H]er breakthrough as a writer came in 1956, at the age of 41, when she published Spam Tomorrow, a deft and frequently uproarious account of her wartime experiences on the home front. Critics hailed it as a new kind of memoir, one of the first to explore the lives of women in wartime.

Before the success of Spam Tomorrow, she led a life that was colourful but frequently impecunious. Born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, the fourth of five children of the Rev Rosslyn Bruce and his wife Rachel (nee Gurney), Verily was always certain that she wanted to be a writer. As children, she and her brothers edited and wrote a nursery magazine which they called the News of the World. Verily's haphazard schooling ranged from a few years at Edgbaston high school for girls to being taught at home by her mother, to a brief and unsuccessful stint at the Royal College of Music in London. She said she worked at "100 different jobs" (including writing advertising copy, illustrating sweet papers and working as a chauffeur) before the outbreak of the second world war, when she enlisted with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, on the grounds that if there were going to be a war, it would be "less frightening to be in the middle of things".

And finally, at another point in her introduction, Rachel drops in this little tidbit:

From the age of nine, she kept a daily diary, of which there remain 142 volumes, all marked “Strictly Private”. These were never intended for public reading, let alone publication.

Oh dear.  What one wouldn't give to get hold of one or two of those volumes!

Spam Tomorrow is available in both e-book and paperback formats from Dean Street Press, released August 5, 2019.

Bombs and giggles: VERILY ANDERSON, Spam Tomorrow (1956)

I don't about you, dear readers, but I don't do as much re-reading of old favorites as I would like. I'm always meaning to, but then I come across new books and get sidetracked by the proverbial bright shiny object instead. But I feel particularly bad about those books that I read before I started blogging, which have remained "the standard" for me but which I've never written about. Those are the books that tend to gaze accusingly at me from my bookcase.

It was therefore very much high time for me to re-read this one, one of the first WWII "home front" memoirs I ever read. It remains, along with Frances Faviell's A Chelsea Concerto, an absolute favorite. I've written about several of Verily Anderson's lovely, poignant, hilarious memoirs before (see here), but I haven't circled back around to this one. Until now!

Things start off here with Anderson's classic, wry humor:

"Long-distance call for Bruce," a F.A.N.Y. sergeant, soured by the years of peace between the wars, looked into the common-room and addressed me in the third person.

…

I zipped up my khaki skirt, loosened after lunch, and ran to the telephone. It might be Donald. It was.

"What size do you take in wedding rings?" his voice asked from London.

"I don't know, darling. Why? Are we going to be married?"

"That's what I should like. Can you get leave?"

"Of course, darling." I would have married Donald any time he asked me since I first met him a few years before.

"What about tomorrow?"

"All right, darling. Of course."

After that memorable (if somewhat anticlimactic, from a marriage proposal perspective) opening, Anderson flashes back to a breezy summary of her childhood and youth, including her troublesome schooldays (later unforgettably described at full length in the wonderful Daughters of Divinity) and a disturbing but entertaining near miss with a possible white slaver.

But then it's on with the main course of the book—the experiences of Verity, Donald, their friends and relatives, and their own growing family during the war years—all told with Verity's delightful zest for life and poignant stoicism in the face of hardship. From her initial appreciation of the aesthetics of barrage balloons ("If this is the war," I said, "it's much prettier than I'd expected"), to enduring a rather daft F.A.N.Y. court-martial for having crashed a makeshift ambulance into a fence post, to a bout with German measles in a hospital reminiscent of a medieval torture chamber, Verily's war gets off to a bumpy start.

Verily (I somehow feel that I'm on a first-name basis with her) is just the sort of author that you feel you’d love to sit down to tea with (though mind you, the three-ring circus of a home she describes wouldn't make it the most restful of teas). She's also the kind of author who, between provoking giggles, reveals an underlying strength and a determination to find the lighter side of even the darkest moments. One could do worse than remember her perspectives in one's own stressful moments. I love her reasoning about staying in the F.A.N.Y.s:

Walking home to the rectory, I tried to analyse my reasons for wanting to go back. My heart had never been in the F.A.N.Y.s until Dunkirk. The community life did not suit me. Discipline did not appeal. I was not a good F.A.N.Y., either technically or socially. Could it be patriotism? Knowing myself, I felt there must be some more selfish motive behind it. Then I remembered telling Lucy I should feel safer right in the war.

That was it. Anything might happen now, not only to my brothers and friends in the navy, the army, the air force, but to my parents, to Rhalou with her little family, and to Lorema still at school. In the F.A.N.Y.s I should be safe from the impact. Somebody else does your thinking for you in the army, and even your feeling. And if I were killed, well, in the F.A.N.Y.s life was that much less interesting to want to cling on to.

But only a few pages after that poignant moment, here she is opportunely and hilariously giving the newly-trained neighborhood first-aid post a chance to do their thing:

During an early daylight raid I became one of the first casualties to be treated by the first-aid post set up in the garage under Berkeley Square. I was making shepherd's pie in our small kitchen, carefully following the recipe book because I had never learnt to cook before I was married. A bomb dropped some way off. The vibration caused a heavy saucepan to bounce off a high shelf; it hit and broke a beer bottle on a lower shelf, which then fell on my head. It was the silliest accident, because anyone In their senses would have looked down and not up while that sort of thing was going on. I went on with my shepherd's pie till I realised that the excess of uncooked gravy was dropping from my head.

…

When I asked the local chemist for lint and disinfectant, he felt it was only fair to allow the first-aid post to claim me. He personally led me down their ramp; and immediately a label with my name and address and religion on it was tied round my arm in case I died during treatment. The V.A.D.s were as pleased to see the blood running down my face as we, in the F.A.N.Y.s, were when a new old crock fell into our hands. Half a dozen V.A.D.s made a rush at me and treated my small abrasion as though my whole head had been blown off. They treated me for shock with sugared tea, specially brewed, and they would have gladly carried me away on a stretcher had I allowed it.

Then there's the night Donald, who works for the government, doesn't arrive home and Verily convinces herself he's with some floozy, only to have to cool her jets the next morning when she learns that he'd been summoned to an unplanned meeting with Churchill…

Not my copy, but I found these photos online of a
copy of the book annotated for Verily's godson. Not at
all certain what Verily means by saying this copy "was
a splendid silver beer mug on a timber stand"???

This annotation says: "These dots replace a censored
paragraph about life at the Vincent's [??] during an
air raid in which Mummy Vincent ignored bombs, blast
and the full treatment to finish washing up."

In Anderson's later memoirs, we come to know her children very well as they grow up (including Rachel, who is a well-known novelist and children's author in her own right). In Spam Tomorrow, we get to be in at the births of Rachel and her older sister Miriam. No doubt childbirth always feels harrowing to those involved, though not many first-time mothers have to experience labor pains and a bombing raid at the same time (while being observed by a group of medical students, no less):

Whenever, from time to time, I could get my breath I gasped out some fatuous crack, feeling it behoved me, as the central figure, to entertain the company a little.

…

As the pace grew fiercer, outside interference was added to the drama by the crash of gunfire and drone of aircraft overhead.

"Ours" said one student with confidence, and was immediately contradicted by a bomb dropping a few fields away. By now I had ceased to care, and would have welcomed a whole bread-basket of bombs on the top of us.

Spam Tomorrow progresses through the war years and right up to V-E Day (descriptions of which are always among my favorite parts of war memoirs and novels), so that first-born Marian is old enough to have become a connoisseur of bombs:

When a bomb whistled down, Marian threw herself giggling on to Donald's bed, saying, "One two three and a—" "Bang!" she shouted with delight as the bomb exploded.

"More bangs?" she asked hopefully.

"Oh, the woos," she said regretfully of the all-clear, knowing it meant that she must return to bed.

If you haven't met the delightful Verily yet, you really owe it to yourself to make her acquaintance. Spam Tomorrow is followed by five more memoirs: Our Square (1957), about the family's harried life in London after the war, Beware of Children (1958), about their time running a holiday vacation camp for children, Daughters of Divinity (1960), about Verily's school days, The Flo Affair (1963), about Verily's adventures with the children following Donald's unexpected death, and Scrambled Egg for Christmas (1970), which takes up the family's story a few years later, when Verily is back in London trying to make ends meet. Some are easier to find than others, but all are well worth reading. It all started with Spam though!

Lingering traces (and a big thank you)

First and foremost (I think I started my last post with those very words, so my creativity is at a low ebb, but the words are fitting nevertheless), I have to say that I was so grateful for all the many comments on my last post about the shift in focus I have in mind for this blog. I think I partly expected many people to react with, more or less, a "Well, that's that then. I can remove that blog from my list of online reading material," and I was very very very pleased that so many people chimed in with their encouragement and support. It really meant a lot to me and gave me a big boost in enthusiasm for the blog—and probably in all-around ego as well, but you'll have to ask Andy about that...

I also have to thank several of you who are bloggers yourselves for the invaluable advice about cutting down spam comments by adding a word verification requirement. I should have recalled that this was an option, or should have looked into my options more thoroughly and reminded myself of it, but perhaps I can say, as my excuse, that I was so swamped by spam comments that I didn't have the time to do my homework. At any rate, I turned on word verification two or three days ago and am delighted to report that a) several of you have successfully left comments since then, so it must not be too cumbersome to navigate, and b) that I have received not one spam comment since. Which has given me a whole new lease on blogging life, so thank you, thank you, thank you!

Now, I have already started to experiment a bit with ways of briefly reporting on interesting and relevant books I've read and any particularly profound (um, sure) thoughts I've had about them (concisely!!!), but this was a particularly crazy week at work, so a planned first attempt at such a post has been waylaid for a few days.

(Note to self: Instead of taking time off during the holidays next year, be kind to yourself and take the utterly mad first week of January instead, the week when everyone suddenly awakens from an eggnog- and Christmas cooking-enhanced stupor and realizes they've done no work since Thanksgiving, then panics and tries to catch up while manically attempting to keep irrationally glorious New Year resolutions that are, let's face it, doomed to fail in another week or two. Ugh.)

But over the past couple of weeks, I have been delving a little into books on my TBR shelves that I've been meaning to get to for ages (more on the actual reading soon), and I've come across a couple of interesting tidbits buried within the pages. I admit I first thought of a post about items found in my books a long time ago (and there's nothing whatsoever original about such an idea, of course, as numerous other people have done the same), but it somehow felt too forced at the time and I scrapped it. But having come across three rather evocative items in a short span of time, I figured I might as well share them.

Now I don't know if other people feel that some irrevocable meaning attaches to found items from the books in which they're found, or if such a daft notion would never occur to anyone but me. But I do.

So, for example, a bit of extra poetic meaning attaches to the fact that a ticket to a St. Martin-in-the-Fields concert, dating from 1994, wound up in my copy of E. H. Young's Miss Mole, acquired nearly 20 years later at a Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Big Book Sale.

I could almost imagine that a latter-day Miss Mole attended this concert and left her ticket behind. And of course the ticket made me yearn for London even more than I ordinarily am on any given day of the week.

And it's certainly not inappropriate that tucked inside my long-unread Virago edition of Dorothy Strachey's Olivia was a ticket (sadly undated) for the P&O European Ferries. Someone was taking this very short novel, about a British girl at a French boarding school, along with them on their journey from Portsmouth to Le Havre.

Nowadays, it looks like a similar ferry (P&O seems to no longer exist and the only ferries on this route are operated by Brittany Ferries) takes a little under four hours, so if the former owner of the novel was a fast reader, I hope he/she had other reading material as well or was planning for a little sightseeing or a nap along the way as well.

In view of the fact that the location in which a book is found adds meaning to the book for me, it is with regret that I admit that I can't recall for sure from which book the Du Maurier cigarette ad (or possibly an insert in the cigarette package itself?) came, but it's clearly rather old.

When was the last time the American or British government would have allowed an assurance, in a cigarette ad, that a particular brand of smokes "guards physical fitness"? Why, who knew? Smoking these cigarettes is practically good for you!

I'm including this item here with the other two because I recently came across it again, having obviously removed it from a book a while back in order to keep it from falling out and getting lost while I was reading the book. I put it in a safe place, but then forgot it there, and the rest is history. And I read so many old books that I have no clue now in which one it might have been nestled. 

But now that it has been found, I had to locate an appropriate new home for it. This is surely a problem few people would consider seriously, but I rather did. Finally, looking at my bookcase, and at the older books I have, I decided that, for me, Rosamond Lehmann somehow seems like a likely smoker, or at least an author who would have had a lot of smokers around her. So the cigarette ad's new home is my nice early copy of her novel, The Ballad and the Source.

And that’s enough of that for now. If I went through all the books on my shelves, I would find dozens more such things, so perhaps I'll do a bit more digging someday. Meanwhile, I'll get back to thinking about a workable "book report" post. Hopefully coming soon...

Sneak peak: covers and intro writers for new Furrowed Middlebrow titles

It's that time again, when I get to share some more of what we've been working on with the new Furrowed Middlebrow titles coming soon from Dean Street Press. Now I get to show you the new covers and tell you some exciting news about the writers who will do introductions for each of the titles.

Although all of the books we publish are obviously favorites of mine, this batch feels particularly personal, since I've been fascinated with "blitz lit" and the home front for many years—since well before I started this blog. To be able to release nine of my favorites from this field all at once is a really special experience.

Now, a small prologue. You who are regular readers of this blog know that I don't read a lot of contemporary fiction. But occasionally a modern novel just aligns with my obsessions so perfectly that I can't resist. This certainly happened a few years ago when Connie Willis released her breathtaking two-part novel Blackout and All Clear, about Oxford historians using time travel to research the realities of wartime life in Britain. It's riveting and touching and suspenseful, and it's also by far the most perfect evocation of the period I've ever read that wasn't written by someone with personal experience of it all. I'm in awe of the research Willis put into this mammoth but completely addictive project (I would have loved for the whole story to be 3,000 pages instead of a mere 1,000!). And for anyone who has doubts about the time travel bit, I can say that I almost never read sci-fi of any kind, but this is so well-done and realistic that you quite forget any implausibilities. If you're fascinated by life during wartime, you owe it to yourself to read them. (Two of Willis's earlier novels, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book, also feature some of the same historians researching other historical moments, and both of those are brilliant as well.)

So, why this digression to gush about a contemporary author? Well, because, beyond all of my wildest dreams, Connie Willis has actually written the introduction for BARBARA NOBLE's marvelous Blitz novel The House Opposite! I've been a geeked out little fan boy about this for quite two months now, so it's a great relief to finally make the revelation. And suffice it to say that her enthusiasm for the novel matches mine, which only adds to the thrill. I'm clearly beside myself…

But of course, I love all of our intro writers, and all the intros I've read so far are excellent. For that matter, how exciting is it to have art historian / museum director / scholar / diarist Sir Roy Strong providing an introduction to our reprints of CAROLA OMAN's Nothing to Report and Somewhere in England? Apart from all his other brilliance, Sir Roy has considerable personal knowledge of Oman since he was married to her niece, designer Julia Trevelyan Oman.

In the course of obtaining the rights for Oman's novels, we also made contact with her grand-niece, who sent me some wonderful recollections of her aunt and several photos, which I'll be sharing with you in an upcoming post.

We also have introductions written by close family members for two more of our titles, and I love the bit of personal insight they offer into the authors themselves. Rachel Anderson, who has written a lovely introduction to her mother VERILY ANDERSON's wartime memoir Spam Tomorrow, is herself a prolific and acclaimed author of children's fiction as well as several novels for adults. Rachel doesn't put in an appearance in Spam Tomorrow until about halfway through the book, and then her birth is a more peaceful one than her older sister Marian's, whose birth in the midst of German bombing is one of the books most unforgettable scenes. But she is prominent in her mother's later memoirs, and it's priceless to have her introducing the book.

Close personal knowledge also informs Eileen Kamm's wonderful introduction to her mother-in-law JOSEPHINE KAMM's postwar novel Peace, Perfect Peace. Now, if the name Eileen Kamm doesn't ring any bells, it's likely that her maiden name, which she has used for dozens of acclaimed children's titles, will be familiar to a lot of you. She is better known to readers as Eileen Dunlop, and I'm thinking I shall have to expand my horizons and do some reading from a generation or so after my usual period, as her books look rather irresistible!

Journalist, memoirist, and novelist Charlotte Moore is already no stranger to readers of the Furrowed Middlebrow edition of E. Nesbit's The Lark, for which she provided a brilliant introduction. So I'm very excited to have her introducing ROMILLY CAVAN's marvelous Beneath the Visiting Moon this time around. I haven't seen her intro yet myself, and I can hardly wait...

And last but most definitely not least, I always adore the introductions that scholar and researcher Elizabeth Crawford writes for us. In her previous work for us, she has unearthed the most amazing details and tidbits about Rachel Ferguson, Winifred Peck, Elizabeth Fair, and Elizabeth Eliot, and this time around she's doing triple duty, writing intros for BARBARA BEAUCHAMP's Wine of Honour, SUSAN ALICE KERBY's Miss Carter and the Ifrit, and one of this batch's most anticipated titles, MARJORIE WILENSKI's Table Two. Probably needless to say that I haven't read any of these yet either, as Elizabeth has her work cut out for her, but I'm so thankful that she was up for the challenge and I have no doubt the results will be riveting.

Finally, after giving you all of this wonderful news and teasing you with the lovely covers (if I do say so myself), I have just the tiniest bit of bad news. We knew we were taking on a big job tackling nine titles by eight different authors all at once—eight different sets of rights situations to sort out, eight different intros, etc. But we still just slightly underestimated the amount of work involved (and when I say "we", I should really be acknowledging that it's Rupert at Dean Street Press who's been bearing the brunt of it all!). As a result, these new titles, which I had originally announced for early July, have now been reset for an early August release—just in time for lazy summer holidays! Queue mournful violin music. I'm so sorry for the delay, but hopefully the anticipation will make these books taste all the sweeter. 

Now, I hope you're as pleased with these covers as I am. I'd like to note that the covers for Spam Tomorrow and Peace, Perfect Peace incorporate the artwork from the original dustjackets, which turned out quite nicely I think. The others are an array of mostly wartime artists—it's amazing how poignant yet beautiful bomb damage can be when painted by a brilliant artist, and the "business as usual" image for Miss Carter, which I had never seen until I stumbled across it searching for appropriate cover art, is one of my favorite "stiff upper lip" images. Eric Ravilious, whose ravishing paintings we've used for several previous books, seemed a perfect choice for the two cheerful Oman titles, and if the eerily beautiful Milena Pavlović-Barili work used for Visiting Moon is a bit more surreal than our norm, it's also somehow perfectly fitting for this tale of a young woman celebrating her 18th birthday with World War II looming in the background (and it even includes the visiting moon).

Dustjacket porn: Familiar faces

Back in April (see here) I told you a bit about my Fairy Godmother and the lovely things she had sent me after my updated Hopeless Wish List post (now already hopelessly out of date). In that post, I shared some of the luscious dustjackets she had scanned for me of some of Mabel Esther Allan's rarest titles, and I have more of those to share soon. But she also sent me a slew of other dustjackets from her phenomenal collection. In this post, I'm sharing jackets for some of the books I've already written about here in the past, but for which I had either no cover images or only very poor images from the internet.

First, off, at the top of this post, a book I loved so much I made it part of the first batch of Furrowed Middlebrow titles published by Dean Street Press. I first reviewed Frances Faviell's brilliant, gut-wrenching WWII memoir, A Chelsea Concerto, back in 2013, and at that time I had never even glimpsed the cover art. F.G.'s copy, and the wonderful photo of Faviell herself, is ravishing indeed.

Next up, another favorite from an author we'll be publishing this year. We're reprinting Verily Anderson's Spam Tomorrow in our batch of WWII titles this summer, but Daughters of Divinity is just as wonderful and I'm happy to finally see the lovely original dustjacket (complete with a quote from no lesser figure than Elizabeth Bowen praising Spam). I reviewed Daughters of Divinity here.

I wrote about Elizabeth Coxhead's A Play Toward in 2015 (here). I found a halfway decent cover image from the internet for that post, but nothing near as nice as F.G.'s full scan. I was lukewarm on the book then, but I have recently read a bit more Coxhead with better success, which I'll be posting about soon, so a revisit to this one might be in order.

A Play Toward is on my Grownup School Story List, and so is Elizabeth Lake's The First Rebellion, a favorite I also reviewed in 2015 (see here). I had a very shoddy cover image indeed at that time, so F.G.'s scan is an enormous improvement!

It's impressive that F.G. managed to find a copy of Fay Inchfawn's Salute to the Village (reviewed in 2013 here) with any dustjacket at all, and it was delightful to see how the book originally looked.

I had a decent front cover of Geraldine Symons' The Suckling when I reviewed it late last year (here), but it could hardly compare to the gorgeous full jacket image provided by F.G.

I've written about Ruth Adam several times, but her dustjackets are a challenge to come by. I wrote about Fetch Her Away in 2016 (see here), and the novel reflects Adam's passionate concern with social issues.

Just about my favorite of Ruth Adam's books, though, is A House in the Country, which I reviewed here, yet I had never seen this lovely dustjacket for it. The book is charming and humorous, as you might guess from this cover, but you might not guess from the illustration that Adam's social concerns are also present here, cleverly interwoven with her amusing plot.

Back to my Grownup School Story List, I reviewed Margaret Hassett's Educating Elizabeth in 2015 (here), but had also never glimpsed its cover. F.G.'s copy is a bit the worse for wear, but it's a pleasure to get to see it at all.

And finally, one last cover from an author we're publishing this summer. I never got round to reviewing Come, Draw This Curtain, though I did read it a year or two ago. We're publishing Kamm's earlier Peace, Perfect Peace (reviewed here), and you might just see more of those enthusiastic blurbs about it on the back of this cover. I also recently reviewed Kamm's Nettles to My Head (see here).

And that's all for now, but have no fear: This is only the tip of the iceberg of the wonderful dustjackets F.G. has provided. Next up are lovely jackets for some of the children's fiction I've reviewed here. And as I mentioned, there are more Mabel Esther Allan covers and many more from other authors coming soon. Thanks again to the very generous F.G.!

VERILY ANDERSON, Our Square (1957)

This makes the last of Verily Anderson's six humorous memoirs that I've read, though it was the second to be written. I've written about three of the others, but unfortunately I read Spam Tomorrow (1956) and Beware of Children (1958), the two books that sandwich Our Square chronologically, before I was blogging, so will have to use that as an excuse for re-reading someday soon. The three that I have written about are Daughters of Divinity (1960), The Flo Affair (1963), and Scrambled Egg for Christmas (1970). Of the six, Spam Tomorrow, which describes Verily's World War II experiences, and Daughters of Divinity, which describes her adventures at boarding school, are my favorites, but all six make for delightful reading, and Our Square proved no exception.

This volume traces Verily and her family's life in London in the years after the war, when the family's budget shortfalls and the city's housing shortage resulted in their house becoming a sort of cheerful three-ring circus:

Neighbours could let themselves in to help themselves to the right-sized pudding basins and friends and relations in London for the day, could use our house to wash and brush up without our even being at home. If at times it was rather like living on the pavement of Kensington High Street, so little privacy did it allow us, it gave our house that pleasant lived-in atmosphere some houses strive for centuries to achieve. Most of our country friends and relations only came to London once a year, but there seemed to be three hundred and sixty-five of them, for hardly a day passed without a country visitor.

Among other things, Verily must face the challenges of finding an appropriate school for her children (a memorable search, with careful investigation of a nearby school whose students seem unusually happy and well-behaved leading her felicitously to the local State school), finding—and affording—domestic help ("Nanny came. From the start she made it fairly obvious that it would take her years to reform our children. In fact, Marian would be almost grown-up before we could expect to notice a change."), dealing with Donald's sudden period of unemployment, and encountering a slightly eerie doppelganger family just across the street.

And of course, it wouldn't be a Verily Anderson book if illness didn't come into play. They do seem to have been a bacterial and viral hub! In this installment, the family weathers mumps, quickly followed by influenza, treated by a rather half-hearted woman doctor:

I sent for the doctor. He had 'flu. His partner came. She could just as easily have been a bishop's wife interested in art, or a hockey mistress interested in food. Her physical development was so great in all directions that she was unable to ascend the stairs without knocking at least one picture off the wall, which she then picked up and admired for its depth of colour. She was intense; she was verbose; she was apparently quite uninterested in being a doctor.

And those illnesses are punctuated with Verily's diagnosis with a gynaecological issue that may be limiting her ability to contribute further to the chaos of their home, and which may require surgery to correct:

A gynaecologist who had cured me after a year's tiresome illness following Marian's birth told me yes, there was something definitely  wrong. The details he gave me of my present complaint were sufficiently alarming to make me have to hang on to the back of the heavily carved chair to prevent myself from falling over. By the time he had finished, in his quiet polished unemotional tone, I had decided that the best thing for the children, as well as Donald, was for him to marry again as soon as possible after my untimely decease. I even put up one or two candidates in my mind's eye.

Of all the authors I think would have made lovely neighbors, Verily Anderson might be near the top of the list. She approaches even crises with her wry sense of humor and a "more the merrier" kind of zest. Of course, I might specify that she should live just a few houses down from my own, in my ideal literary neighborhood, as the noise might be a bit much to have next door…

I always look forward to the appearances of Verily's mother, and I wasn't disappointed here. One gets a clear sense of her energy and (almost too) lightning-fast mental processes from Verily's description of her arrival on a visit:

"I hope you make them put their beds up themselves," my mother said. "You must eat them today. They were shot on Saturday. They were both on leave together." Which meant that my mother's mind, hopping with the ease of a tit on a twig, had jumped from visiting relations to a brace of dead pigeons, which I now noticed she had laid across the arm of a chair. It was not they who were on leave, but their slaughterers, my two brothers in the Navy. "I wish I could get some nice long ones," she went on. "The last ones were so short they hardly lasted any time." She was off my brothers now and on to wicks from Barkers. I could tell that by the way she started looking for her bag and gloves.

My only regret now is that having read all of these lovely memoirs I have no more to look forward to. I don't know of any other memoirist who can quite match Verily Anderson, and I rather wish she had written 20 more. I have to take this opportunity, also, to share again the wonderfully informative obituary of Verily (see here) which Grace, a commenter on this blog, shared the last time I wrote about her. It gives such a vivid sense of how much fun it would have been to sit down to tea with such a witty, compassionate woman, who had seen hard times and weathered them with her humor and cheerfulness intact. (In fact, I rarely refer to authors by their first names, but it seems to come unthinkingly in the case of Verily.)

And while re-reading that obituary, I noticed something I must have read before but hadn't properly registered. Verily's third memoir, Beware of Children, about the Andersons' time running a holiday home for children, was filmed as No Kidding in 1960 (though apparently released in the U.S. with its original title?). As literary kismet would have it, it featured Geraldine McEwan in Verily's role and Joan Hickson as the cook who liked her drink rather too much. Both actresses, of course, are best known now for playing Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in two different television adaptations of the novels. To stretch the connections a bit further, a supporting role in the film is played by Irene Handl, who later wrote two novels that are just out of my date range.

VERILY ANDERSON, Daughters of Divinity (1960)

I've been a fan of Verily Anderson's humorous and sometimes poignant memoirs ever since coming across a mention (I think it was in Philip Ziegler's wonderful London at War) of her first, Spam Tomorrow (1956), which covers her sometimes scary but more often hilarious experiences in wartime, including meeting her husband Donald. I've gradually been piecing together a collection of the other five, and just managed to add two of the rarest volumes to my collection—Our Square (1957), which chronicles Verily's family life in London after the war, with her increasing brood of offspring, and Daughters of Divinity (1960), which irresistibly traces her time at boarding school (and deserves to be a highlight of my Grownup School Story List). (The three other volumes, for those unfamiliar with them, are Beware of Children (1958), about Verily and Donald's experiences setting up a holiday camp for children, The Flo Affair (1963), which I discussed a bit here, and Scrambled Egg for Christmas (1970), which I discussed here.

Although I know it won't be long before I dip into Our Square, I couldn't resist starting with Daughters of Divinity, which I've been curious about for years. And it actually lived up to my expectations—it's now fighting it out with Spam Tomorrow as my absolute favorite of Anderson's books.

As the book opens, Verily's older sister Rhalou is already off at Normanhurst, a high class boarding-school whose eccentric headmistress is a cousin of Verily's mother. Verily herself is still at home, but spends most of her time pretending to be at St. Judith's, a rigorous boarding-school of her own imagining. The vividness of her fantasies is a bit restricted, however, by the lack of any other girls except her younger sister Lorema, who is beginning to grow a bit restive and to yearn for other sorts of games:

Besides being the gym mistress at St Judith's, I was also, at times, the head girl, and to appease Lorema for being the other three hundred and fifty-nine girls, she had lately been appointed all the other prefects. But I foresaw other concessions might have to be made if the school were to continue to run on its normally smooth lines.

But in the opening scene, a visit from eccentric Cousin Daisy and her husband Cousin Cecil (whose inappropriate use of "bloody" and "bastard" are tracked enthusiastically by the Normanhurst girls) results in plans for Verily to join Rhalou at Normanhurst. (One imagines that Lorema must have viewed Verily's departure with mixed feelings—sadness at missing her sister, but surely also some relief at no longer having to constitute the entire student body of St. Judith's!)

Of course, Verily has difficulties in adjusting to school life (what would be the fun of her tale otherwise?). One of the most hilarious passages of the book comes as Verily is familiarizing herself with the school's voluminous rules—specifically the instructions concerning fire safety:

The first was entitled "In Case of Fire" and was phrased in such an alarming manner that my anger soon turned to terror. At the first sound from a double electric fire-bell (sited on each landing) we were to leap out of bed and dip our bath-towels in our water-jugs and place them over our mouths. (N.B. More deaths had been caused in fires by asphyxiation from smoke than from actual burns.) Wearing dressing-gowns and slippers and carrying our eiderdowns (N.B. More deaths had been caused in fires from pneumonia than from burns and asphyxiation together), we were to form a chain and move in a speedy but orderly manner to the nearest staircase (provided the nearest staircase was not in flames). But the rules gave the impression that we should be most unlikely to find a staircase anywhere that was not in flames. In fact they implied that there was little hope of our survival anyway whatever we did. Obeying the rules would merely help to prolong what would anyhow be a slow and agonizing death.

Verily's bad marks begin to mount immediately, and she never really fits in with the enthusiastically horsey crowd of popular girls ("Just think what it would be like not to hunt! Life honestly wouldn't be worth living.") She is forever getting into trouble and being punished, which at first terrifies her until she discovers she doesn't really mind the occasional public humiliation very much and begins to take it for granted. Eventually, however, for the good of her house (echoes of hundreds of school stories there!), she decides, at the suggestion of one of the horsey girls, that perhaps her trivial bad behavior is all because she doesn't have the outlet for her frustrations and repressions that most of the girls possess in the dangers and excitements of the hunt. Whereupon she challenges herself to do the most outrageous things possible so that she will no longer be tempted (or have time, from the look of it!) to commit trivial misdemeanours. The scene in which she finds herself crawling terrified across the school's glass dome is in itself worth the price of admission—it's also an echo of a whole slew of school stories, though I would be surprised if any of those have the same outcome…

The other passage that particularly made me giggle takes place when Verily, ill with the flu, is placed into a bath chair to be taken to the sanitorium (inexplicably, at this school, a half mile away from the school proper). The mule pulling the bath chair clearly knows the way, but it's Verity's fate to create chaos out of order:

The basic rule with bath chair steering, I remembered, was that to go right, one pulled the rod over to the left. For the moment both mule and I only wanted to go straight on, but when we came to a fork in the drive where we had to turn left uphill towards the stables, I gave the mule a helping hand by pulling the rod over to the right.

For some extraordinary reason the rod on this bath chair was not the same as on my grandmother's. On this one, if one pulled to the right, then right the bath chair went. Moreover any auxiliary steering seemed to have a strangely stimulating effect on the mule, which broke into a sudden run, something between a trot and a canter, leaving the surprised garden boy behind.

Imposing as the springs were, they had obviously not been designed to cope with the rough grass and branches over which we now galloped and I was tossed about the seat as though in a ship in rough seas.

When I was flung helplessly into a corner of the bath chair, I guessed that we had reached a bank where the ground sloped steeply away to the right. I clung tightly on to the handle, fearing that if I let go the bath chair would surely turn over. The mule romped on till I knew, from our shuddering halt, we could only have entered a derelict game larder at the bottom of the hill, removing part of its roof as we did so. I was able to slide back into the middle of the seat.

This was a really delightful, rollicking good time throughout, and should be of particular interest to all fans of school stories and anyone who enjoys tales of childhood misfits who make good. I have a feeling Verily Anderson belongs on my list of authors I wish I could have tea with—though I might find it difficult to swallow cucumber sandwiches in between my guffaws at her self-deprecating hilarity.

By the way, in addition to her six memoirs and a series of Brownies stories, Anderson published three children's books centered around the York family—Vanload to Venice (1961), Nine Times Never (1962), and The Yorks in London (1964). These seem to be even more challenging to track down than her memoirs, but if they contain even a fraction of the humor and high spirits of the memoirs, I am definitely intrigued by them. Have any of you ever caught sight of any of these rare creatures?