The Scarlett Woman, Part 4: NOEL STREATFEILD (as SUSAN SCARLETT), Under the Rainbow (1942) & Peter and Paul (1940)

Saltings was enchanting. If it had not been so ungetatable it would have been crammed with tourists all the summer through. A Norman church, grey and weathered, sat in a churchyard so green by comparison with the surrounding yellow-grey of the downs that, from the crest of the hills, it looked like an emerald. … To those who saw Saltings first on a hot day in summer—when heat shimmered in the hollows—that churchyard, and those sheep, and the surrounding cottages with their flaming gardens, stood for ever as a picture of peaceful England.

Well, the world is still awful, and so my escapist reading continues. Thank heavens I rediscovered these delightful books just as the world fell into an even darker crevasse than usual. And these two Susan Scarletts make a nice pairing, both featuring vicars, though in the first the vicar is the lead and in the second he's relegated to a cameo.

In Under the Rainbow, Martin Richards, a dedicated, idealistic vicar, has found himself too physically weak for life in an impoverished London neighborhood, so (poor guy) he has been moved to the most idyllic village imaginable, with a lovely home watched over by an impossibly perfect housekeeper, 60-year-old Bertha, who has raised 10 children and wants nothing more than to work her fingers to the bone for the vicar.

Naturally, something must create complications, and here it's the sudden (remarkably unmourned) death of Martin's sister and her husband in a car crash, leaving Martin to take in their children, Polly and Andrew. Martin clearly needs someone to care for the children, and he finds our heroine, Judy (Streatfeild recycling names again, this time from Murder While You Work), who is absolutely (almost tiresomely) saintly, but who has come through her share of difficulty and is determined to make a new start, so perhaps we can forgive her.

Around the same time, Martin is saddled with his ghastly Aunt Connie, who is not only conservative and jealous and petty ("she believed, sub-consciously, that a child who is at that moment contented with something must be a child who is doing the wrong thing, and must, therefore, be promptly set to do something else"), but also nearing a form of hateful lunacy, particularly in regard to poor Judy. And if that weren't enough, Lady Blacke, the widowed squire (squiress?), who fancies herself a kindly benefactor to all (as long as she doesn't have to inconvenience herself by giving anything but money) has determined that Martin should be her next husband, so she loathes Judy as well and sets about investigating her troubled past in order to rid herself of this meddlesome saint. Some additional spice is added by the local schoolmaster, who promptly falls for Judy, and his 17-year-old sister, who alarmingly sets her sights on Martin as well (I think he really must be the Anglican version of Andrew Scott from Fleabag).

It's all quite amusing, though reflecting on this book now, it seems perhaps even sillier and less plausible that many of the other Susan Scarletts. But I can honestly say that I cared not one whit when I was reading it, and because I do love an idyllic village setting, it made almost as addictive reading as, well, all the other Scarletts I've said were addictive reading.

Under the Rainbow was published in 1942, but there's nary a mention of the war, though that quote at the beginning of this post might have been meant to pack a little extra punch of meaning with its image of "peaceful England".

Next up is Peter and Paul from 1940, also containing no glimmer of war (though there is some rather catty behavior):

It is not fun being the plain one of the family. But being the plain one of twins is a wretched position. That’s why parables about grains of mustard seed, which grew up and startled everybody by their magnificence, did Pauline good.

Petronella and Pauline Lane are 17-year-old twins, but obviously not identical ones, as "Peter" is apparently the most ravishingly beautiful young woman ever to have lived (judging from the reactions of other characters throughout), while "Paul", though appealing, is the kind of girl who gets lost in the shuffle, attention-wise. (Honestly, lucky Paul, but of course she doesn't see it that way.) Paul is also the smarter, more sensitive one, while Peter, though basically kind, is utterly self-absorbed and obsessed with Hollywood and its glamorous stars.

Their father, Mark, is the local vicar, a bit stern and traditional in his views of women ("so much of a saint that if he wasn’t a great dear he’d be a prig"), but loving and kind as well, and fortunately malleable in their mother Catherine's hands, so that she is able to arrange, against his instincts and with the help of the amusing local aristocracy in the form of Lady Bliss, for Peter and Paul to go to London to work at the dress shop run by David, the son of Lady Bliss. This so that the pair can meet eligible men, which they clearly can't in Saltings—surely even a vicar "must see as he ground his way round his parish in their deplorable old Morris, that there was not a marriageable man within miles."

David's fortune-hunting manageress Moira Renton (who also skims some of the shop's profits for herself) is anything but pleased by the arrival of the twins, though Peter, naturally seeing as how irresistible she is, becomes the muse for David's designs and slips out of Moira's control. As a friend of Moira's puts it:

“I don’t know what Moira’s game is,” she said to the table generally, “but I suspect heaven watches over anything quite as lovely and quite as stupid as that. Special guardianship, you know, like they say drunkards get.”

Paul is less lucky though. Moira lands her with the exhausting job of messenger, in an attempt to wear her out and drive her away, but Paul unexpectedly loves the job and befriends everyone on the staff. Paul also feels an immediate affinity for David, but though he is initially charmed when he meets her on her own, he is of course swept utterly off his feet by his first glimpse of Helen of Tr—er, I mean Peter. But does that way happiness lie for him? And indeed, will anyone at all find happiness if Moira has anything to do with it?

Peter and Paul is the shortest of the Susan Scarlett novels, and one of the first to be written, since though it only appeared in book form in 1940, it was apparently serialized in 1939, the same year in which Clothes-Pegs and Sally-Ann appeared. One wonders if Streatfeild was working within the confines of a word limit, as the ending, though satisfying enough, is a bit more abrupt than one would expect. But it's as light and frivolous and charming as all the other Scarletts, a worthy companion to Clothes-Pegs in its dress-shop setting, but here we get to see the shop from a different perspective, and get some entertaining glimpses of London nightlife of the time as well.

Unlike Lady Blacke in Under the Rainbow (who in any case has only married into the upper crust), Lady Bliss is the kind of aristocrat Streatfeild loved best. Her chatter while recommending a place for the girls to stay in London is a particular delight:

“And I’ve just been telling your mother I know of a perfectly charming place where you can stay, except at the week-ends, of course, when you’ll come home. I’m sure your dear father wouldn’t dream of allowing you to be away on Sundays, and quite right too. Why, I had a niece who was away every Sunday and that was why, I am sure, things turned out as they did. Sundays can be so dull, especially in the winter, and you must do something. Anyway, it was a very nice baby and they’re married now.”

I'm starting to run low on Susan Scarletts now, but I still have at least a couple left to enjoy. We all need some escape these days, and Streatfeild was a master at providing it (even if she was inexplicably reluctant in later years to admit she'd written these delightful bits of fluff).