A 1950s career woman: GWENLLIAN MEYRICK, Against the Stream (1953)

"You're taking a job?" exclaimed Mrs. Wilmot to her daughter, Diana Pemberton. "Oh dear, what has happened to make you decide to do such a thing?"

We can be pretty certain from this opening that Diana's efforts to claim a career for herself, now that her children are all at school, aren't going to go swimmingly. It's not terribly hard to predict just how things will go wrong either (indeed, her mother among others fairly accurately predict the way it will go). But though there's nothing very revolutionary or surprising about Against the Stream, it's an entertaining window on a time from which there aren't a lot of portrayals of career women.

Diana's discussion with her mother follows familiar lines, but occasionally sheds some interesting light on postwar domestic life:

"Family life isn't so uncomplex and one-sided now: girls are given the same education as boys, women don't wait on men, they compete with them for jobs. And there's another thing, Mother. For various reasons, home-making has lost a lot of interest for many of us. We live in small houses with small gardens because we can't afford anything bigger, and if we could, we couldn't get the staff. As for the traditional interests of the housewife—preserving—where's the sugar? The linen-cupboard? We can only afford enough to fill a shelf instead of a cupboard. What's our larder? A row of tins. We can't entertain often, it's too expensive; our houses are too small to have visitors for more than a couple of nights, and anyway, what can we give them to eat? Running a home as one's sole interest can be very dull, Mother. One is reduced to the bare bones of home-making—housework, washing, ironing, shopping and cooking monotonous meals with indifferent materials."

Fortunately for Diana, however, a dream job exactly fitting her qualifications and interests more or less falls into her lap. (Some people have all the luck—why hasn't a lucrative job requiring extensive knowledge of British women writers just happened to fall into my lap, dammit?)

Diana and her husband Rupert live in the fictional village of Hirst, outside of Canterbury, a place known primarily for its nearby Roman fort. During the war, a bombing raid brings to light further evidence of the town's history:

For, during the Baedeker raid upon Canterbury, a stray bomb fell upon a furniture depository in Hirst. It was an odd scene next day: the stuffing out of mattresses hung like macabre blossoms in back-garden fruit-trees, the air was white with down out of burst pillows; a bicycle hung by its handlebars from the sign of The Bull and Butcher; brass-ware from Benares littered the entrance to the County Library, and iron bedsteads, twisted into unlikely shapes by fire, reminded one of the obscurer modern sculptures.

The bomb was, of course, unfortunate for the people who had stored their beds, their bicycles, their Benares brass-ware and so on in the wrecked depository, but had dramatic and exciting results, for it revealed what no one had known before—that there had been a Roman town as well as a Roman fort.

As a result, a wealthy resident has financed the creation of a new museum, and guess who (after 14 years of housewifery and with apparently no other work experience at all) is made the first curator? No, it's not terribly plausible (though in all fairness the position is poorly paid and so perhaps only feasible for a woman with other means of support), but it ensures that the reader, at least a reader interested in historical knowledge, will become invested enough in Diana's work, which we get intriguing glimpses of, to then share her frustration at the thought of losing this stimulation.

In some ways, in fact, Meyrick's strategy here is kind of brilliant. Every time the reader becomes excited about her professional successes (she has great ideas for the museum, she makes an important discovery at a construction site, she gains an admirer in a world-renowned scholar in her field), the reader gets pulled up—like Diana herself—by another domestic conflict or misunderstanding. Thus, the reader's experience echoes Diana's, which means that we pull for her and want her to find a way to keep the job. Of course, the risk is that visiting the heroine's frustrations on readers can compromise their pleasure in reading, but by and large I think Meyrick gets away with it.

The novel doesn't have any solutions to these problems, not surprisingly, and although it has a happy ending of sorts, it's an inevitable compromise (and perhaps no more realistic than her getting this plum job in the first place). But it makes for an interesting read, and Diana's mother in particular is a high point. Much is made of Mrs Wilmot's telephone manner. First, we learn that Diana's father used to have the eccentricity of shouting deafeningly into the phone, unable to believe that his voice needn't be modulated according to the distance he wanted it to cover. But her mother's phone manner is even more striking:

At last she heard someone, and her mother's voice said very crossly:

"Yes?"

Mrs. Wilmot had not a good telephone manner: she had been brought up to write well-worded letters at a writing-desk, not to use the telephone. She had never grown used to it, and her discomfort expressed itself in a furious manner of speaking, quite out of keeping with her character. Diana was used to this furious voice, and was not in the least quelled by it as others were apt to be. Indeed, one timid lady had been so upset by the accusing, abrupt "Yes?" that she had replaced the receiver without ever daring to give her name.

"Mother, something's happened, and I want you to help me."

"Whatever is it?" demanded Mrs. Wilmot, sounding extremely angry, but actually longing to be able to help her family.

And sometimes reading this sort of book can put other books from the time into perspective. Diana is required to go to a conference in York and spend the night, and her reaction seems extreme to modern readers used to occasional travel:

It was so unusual for Diana to be going away without either Rupert or the children, that although it was only a matter of one night she found herself becoming quite dramatic about her departure. She hugged the little boys when she said good-bye to them; she walked to the bus-stop with Marian and kissed her lovingly good-bye in full view of several schoolgirls in the bus, much to  arian's discomfiture; she said to Rupert, "You will meet my train tomorrow night, won't you?" as though she was arriving at London Airport after a dash of thousands of miles across five continents. By the time Joyce arrived she was quite strung up, and felt like tearfully imploring her not to desert the children, on the emotional level of Mrs. Micawber's declaration of her own fidelity to Mr. Micawber—which would have surprised Joyce very much.

For me, this scene evoked the Provincial Lady's fretting over her departures for London and, later, America, which I always thought were merely meant as exaggerated and self-deprecatingly humorous. But as PL was making such departures two decades before Diana's, and furthermore was leaving her husband and family for literary pursuits, it becomes a bit easier to see how conflicted she likely would have been.

Going into reading this novel, the sum total of my knowledge of Gwenllian Meyrick was:

1) Born 5 Sept 1908 in Norwich, married Orrell Hamilton Strafford 1934, died Gloucestershire 21 Feb 1997, full name Gwenllian Clara Richmond Meyrick/Strafford.

2) Listed as a teacher on a 1930 passenger list.

3) Author of six novels 1950-1961. The fourth, The Disastrous Visit (1956), was described by a bookseller as "Novel set among an ordinary family in London in the 1950's." I also found a blurb about the last, Shed No Tear (1961): "Catherine, a twenty-year-old art student, married Hugo Thornton knowing that he had been attached to the elegant Mrs. Olivia Seymour, but after a while Hugo begins to tire of family life."

4) Some of the dustjackets of her books are adorable, and her name is distinctly melodious (though I learned from a web search that if her first name is pronounced in traditional Welsh fashion, there is no earthly way I can make the required "ll" sound).

So, there wasn't a lot here to really justify my flagging her to track down her books, but for whatever reason (honestly, it was probably the dustjackets) I've intended to do so for ages. Will I be tracking down more of her novels? I think I might actually. I can't help but wonder if her other novels are as "issue" oriented as this one. If they are, they could be similarly interesting time capsules, and if they're not, it would be interesting to see how entertaining she can make a more conventional plot.

Stay tuned!

RUTH ADAM, Fetch Her Away (1954)

Some of you may be familiar with Ruth Adam from her second novel, I'm Not Complaining (1938), which was an early Virago reprint, or from her wonderful historical look at the changing roles of women in A Woman's Place 1910-1975 (1975), available from Persephone. Or you might already have read about two of her more obscure works—the wartime mystery Murder in the Home Guard (1942) and the charming late novel A House in the Country (1957)—on this blog (see here). I find her a consistently interesting author, largely because her work is always informed by a vibrant awareness of social issues, but also because of her attention to detail and to the humorous absurdities of her characters' situations. She doesn't shy away from reality or provide easy answers to her characters' problems, but she also doesn't hesitate to find the humor in them.

As with most of my authors, little enough information about Adam's lesser-known fiction is available (and online searches are plagued with irrelevant results because of the ordinariness of her name—Ruth Adams and Ruth Adamses abound in staggering numbers). But I've always been struck by ODNB's passing reference to two of her other late novels and their inspiration:

In 1955 Ruth Adam, with her friend the London county councillor Peggy Jay, co-founded the Fisher Group, a think-tank on social policy and the family which gave evidence to government committees of inquiry and contributed to such legislative reforms as the 1963 and 1969 Children and Young Persons Acts and the Local Authority Social Service Act of 1970. Arising out of this concern Ruth Adam wrote her disturbing novels Fetch Her Away (1954) and Look Who's Talking (1960) about girls in care, which are rare in their sympathetic depiction of women social workers.

I was a wee bit ambivalent about these novels, which sounded rather like those old TV movies-of-the-week that tackled pressing issues of the day (usually in completely reductive terms). But I knew I could rely on Adam not to be overly reductive, at least, and probably to make even an issue close to her heart interesting and entertaining. Fetch Her Away is hardly a novel I would recommend to everyone, but if you have an interest in the hardships of neglected children and the workers who attempt—hope against hope—to help them, then it's quite an interesting portrayal.

Just FYI, some unavoidable spoilers here, though I doubt if they would come as a great surprise to anyone who reads the first 20 pages of the novel.

The story centers around Suzanne, a young girl whose mother is dead and whose rather superficial stepmother, as the novel begins, is leaving her abusive husband and moving on to what she imagines will be greener pastures, and around Jackie Duffie, a child welfare worker who tries first to reunite the family with assistance, then to find a suitable foster home for Suzanne, and finally, as the years pass, to find a home for a pregnant Suzanne and a man she barely knows.

It's a bleak story, but a realistic one, which effectively delineates all the forces that keep the cycle of neglect and despair churning. And sadly, it doesn't seem as though this cycle has changed very drastically in the intervening 60 years since the novel was written, though drugs and violence have undoubtedly increased and further complicated matters. However, although one is likely to feel a bit sad and thoughtful upon finishing Fetch Her Away, there are some excellent examples of Adam's charm and humor scattered here and there throughout, particularly in relation to the workers and others trying to help Suzanne.

Here, for example, are Jackie's musings on the perils of temporarily removing children from troubled homes:

It was risky to offer to take a child "for a time," because it always turned out to be a remarkably long time. The working-classes had just discovered a fact which had been known to the aristocracy for hundreds of years, and to the middle-classes for a century or so-that family life is a lot less trouble if you arrange to have your children brought up by paid officials at a comfortable distance away from home. They looked upon the Children's Department as a free boarding-school. Once you housed an unwanted child, the parents were liable to settle down happily without it until it reached years of discretion.

And here we see how her work deprives her even of the most popular method of fighting insomnia:

Jackie turned the pillow over a hundred times, in the hope of discovering a comfortable side to it. She watched the car-lights loom up and recede across her window, listened to the chanting of late revellers and  counted the chimes of the clock. She even descended to counting sheep jumping through a gap, until she found she was separating them into possible boarding-out and definitely institutional sheep. Still she was obstinately wakeful.

And finally, the passage that most made me laugh, from late in the novel, here's Jackie seeking help from a powerful and immensely practical community organizer:

"I know," said Jackie. "But if no one can do anything, I have an awful feeling that Robert and Suzanne are doomed to go on repeating the pattern—deserting as they were deserted, betraying as they were betrayed. It's exactly like one of those old families which have a curse on them that goes on in each generation and no one can ever get away from."

Mrs. Hardy looked doubtful. So far as she had ever thought about family curses, she had supposed that they could be cleared up by re-housing the family in uncursed premises and perhaps turning the old place into a youth hostel or even a Child Guidance Clinic. But she got Jackie's point.

Fetch Her Away is not, then, a novel that most of you will want to rush out and read for yourselves, but it's certainly an interesting one in relation to Adam's other work. She was clearly an author who was passionate about improving the problems she saw around her, and applied her efforts to entertaining fiction that she must have hoped would help readers understand them better.

I'm hoping to also track down Adam's So Sweet a Changeling, apparently also published in 1954, which one reviewer described as an "[a]musingly told story of the unauthorised adoption of an illegitimate baby." And there's one of her novels, 1947's Set to Partners, that seems to be completely inaccessible, which you know only makes me more intrigued—I don't even have a clue about its subject matter. (I've been lucky in finding a couple of her rare early works, though I've been grossly remiss about writing about them here—mea culpa and hopefully I can rectify that at some point.)

Have any of you read any of Adam's other works?

Hopeless No More Part 3: MARJORIE WILENSKI, Table Two (1942)

Way back in January of 2015, I began a post called "Hopeless No More Part 2" by bemoaning how ridiculously long (i.e. two months) it had taken me to get back round to part 2 of 5 planned posts on WWII-related books happily made available to me for reading by Grant Hurlock, a kind friend of this blog. But two months is looking pretty darned timely compared to the year and a half plus it has taken me to get round to part 3! Sigh. I don't even know how or why it could have taken me so long to get round to reading another of the books, which I was really genuinely so excited about, so how about if we just pretend that I only just happened across it and am gleefully sharing my discovery with you in a prompt and efficient manner? Are you game?

That summer was the finest summer that anyone could remember in England. The sun shone all day, day after day, and it seemed that there never would be rain. Everyone said all the time "What lovely weather, if only we were able to enjoy it." For in England everyone feels that they must enjoy a fine day because in ordimry summers more than one fine day at a time is so rare. But nobody was able to enjoy that wonderful series of fine days because it was the summer of 1940 and nearly everyone was working all day and often all night in offices or factories or A.F.S. or A.R.P.,and there were no week-ends and no summer holidays. So in the daytime all the glorious sunshine was wasted and at night the rooms were stifling behind the blackout curtains.

So begins this imperfect but highly entertaining novel of London office life just before and during the Blitz. It follows a group of women translators at the (fictional, I think?) Ministry of Foreign Intelligence in London as they bicker and maneuver and form shifting allegiances, particularly around the pending selection of a new Deputy Language Supervisor to be chosen from among them. The tale particularly focuses on two of the women, who are in sharp contrast to one another—smart, successful, but hopelessly cranky Elsie Pearne, middle-aged and permanently disappointed and bitter about life, and the bright, cheerful, pretty new addition to the office, Anne Shepley-Rice, whose formerly wealthy family has now fallen on hard times.

The novel, which I first came across while reading Jenny Hartley's marvelous Millions Like Us: British Women's Fiction of the Second World War, is wonderfully bitchy at first (which I certainly mean as praise). One almost feels it's the kind of writing Barbara Pym would have done if she had really let it rip on a cast of interesting and eccentric women who don't particularly like each other. The other women include kind, elderly Mrs. Doweson, who irritates her colleagues with her fresh air fantacism and turns out to have been an important figure in the Red Cross during World War I; the inept supervisor Miss Saltman, who would lose everything important if not for her irreplaceable deputy, Mrs. Just; Miss Purbeck, a lifelong lady's companion with a joyfully negative attitude toward the war and indeed all bad news and disaster ("She never allowed any expression of optimism to go unchallenged in her presence and she was able instantly to put her finger on the weak spot in good news of any kind. She was thoroughly enjoying the war."); and finally, the two who seem particularly familiar to me from my own office experiences: First, the dithering, incessantly chatty Mrs. Jolly:

Mrs. Jolly trotted off obediently. She was about fifty, short and fat and she had her hair dyed bright gold and wore it in little fluffy curls all over her head and she had a rather pink face which was almost always flushed because she was almost always excited and hot with the exertion of talking so much. She wore dresses which fitted her tightly and the general effect that she made was that she was bursting—talk bursting out of her lips and her body bursting out of her clothes.

And then, Miss Younge, a busybody who tries to avoid doing actual work:

Miss Younge went through all the miscellaneous odd jobs that she had done in the last ten months. For she was one of those people who prefer to do any work except the work they are paid to do and she was always looking for something which gave her a chance to look busy and avoid translating which very much bored her; and she particularly liked jobs which kept her in the neighbourhood of Miss Saltman's desk where she could pick up a little information and where she liked to think she was a sort of Deputy-Deputy.

Is there anyone who has worked in offices for any length of time who hasn't encountered such colleagues? Most of the office scenes in the novel could take place in any modern office without an ounce of revision.

The novel's weakness, such as it is, is that Wilenski seems to have had some trouble deciding between the two main perspectives she presents—Anne's rather bland view of the world, her cheerful, perky romance with wealthy Sebastian, her blithe taking for granted of all the advantages that her background and looks bring her way, and Elsie's far more lively and entertaining (for me, at least) bitter, snide, cynical view of it all, and the rather tragic sabotage she keeps perpetuating on herself. 

But when the focus is on Elsie, there's just so looking away. She's one of the most interesting and unique characters I've come across in fiction of this time period—a middle-aged, professional woman, never particularly attractive but quite smart and capable, who allows her own insecurities and selfishness destroy every chance of romance, friendship, or companionship that she has come across.  She's admittedly a rather bleak character, and I assume that boring Anne was meant to provide an antidote to Elsie's negativity, but where else can one find, in such a central role in a novel, such an unsympathetic, unromantic, and yet professional, competent, and serious-minded female character—and a middle-aged one, no less! 

And Wilenski does give us the occasional glimmer of Elsie's vulnerability and personal sorrows (when one learns, for example, late in the novel, the details of the one great romance she remembers fondly decades after its end, it's quite heartbreakingly pathetic). By comparison, the perky Anne, who will undoubtedly make the best of whatever mild dilemmas country life with a wealthy husband puts in her way, seems to be made of cardboard. All the more reason, then, for me to wish that the Wilenski had kept her focus more sharply on Elsie—though I suppose that might have made the novel a bit too bleak.

But despite this quibble which makes the novel just a bit misshapen (if only Wilenski could have gloried in Elsie's bleak perspective and made hay with it the way Pym or Rachel Ferguson might have done!), this remains one of my favorite reads of the year. This is first because, as I already suggested, it's strengthened throughout by vivid details about an area of women's lives that seems to be little documented in fiction of the period—office work. But it's particularly a goldmine in showing us how that underrepresented population experienced the beginning of the Blitz.

The story begins after the Blitz has begun in other parts of England, but before London itself had actually been hit. Londoners blithely stop during their lunch hours to watch the Battle of Britain unfolding in the skies overhead, and express a smug confidence that England's air defenses have proven too strong and the Germans will never be able to get through to London at all. There are fascinating descriptions of the way life went on during air raids:

In these early days of air-raids all the traffic stopped when the sirens sounded. Outside the Ministry the street was as quiet as a street in some country village and what made it look more like a village street was a row of horses and carts standing along one side by the pavement, with the horses unharnessed and tied to the backs of the carts and the drivers standing about in groups and chatting, just as if they were all waiting for the market to end. The few other people who were about were either hurrying to their destinations or walking deliberately slowly to show that they were enjoying the sunshine and were not afraid.

It is only nearly halfway through the novel that the first raid on London actually occurs. We are presented vividly with Anne's experiences that night, leavened with humor about the women's conversations the following day:

They were all telling their stories and interrupting each other and no one was listening to what anyone else was saying, when old Mrs. Doweson said, "What has happened to Miss Jones? Shouldn't she be here to-day?" Everyone stopped talking and looked vaguely round for Miss Jones. ''Perhaps she has been bombed. It's awful to think that there are nine of us here to-day at this table and in six months' time we may all be dead," said Miss Purbeck. "There were thousands killed last night, so the bus conductor told me."

"You certainly are our little ray of sunshine," said Elsie scornfully.

And perhaps most interesting of all for me were the descriptions of the practical implications the Blitz had on workers' commutes (always a sore subject with me—suffice it to say that SF MUNI is not my favorite organization in the world). Lately, as one terrible story follows another in our present day news cycle, I have found myself thinking of the Blitz as a kind of reassurance, and the practical realities of keeping going despite anxieties and inconveniences. Imagine (I tell myself) if my commute were more like this:

It was slow work getting to the office. Diversions were more usual than a straight road and the buses wandered through narrow streets hardly large enough to hold them, where from the seats on the top you could see right into the front floor rooms of the houses on either side. The roads were strewn with broken glass which was being swept up into great piles like heaps of snow waiting to be taken away. Glass was everywhere except in the windows, the tyres of the cars rolled over it, the shoes of the passers-by crunched it to smaller pieces. Bombed houses were already too much of a commonplace to be noticed; they lay in depressing heaps half across the roadway and the traffic squeezed past in the space that was left or went by ariother route. One house attracted Anne's attention as she passed it.

…

For the extraordinary had to be tamed and ignored and overcome, it had to be reduced to the ordinary as quickly as could be done; conditions were chaotic but chaos had to be conquered. The first thing everywhere and all the time was to get small things straight. There was no time to stand and stare, there were too many practical problems to solve. True, a country cousin up for the day to look at London's ruins might gape and gaze at the great craters in the streets; these immense fantastic holes only astonished Cockneys on Monday—by Friday they were just a familiar and tiresome obstruction to the traffic; there were too many other things to think of—how to get to work and how to get home again, how to cook the breakfast on the faint glimmer of gas that was all most people could coax from their burners, how to make the tea, let alone how to wash or bath, when there was no water at all in the taps. Scrambling over the broken houses, through the dust and the rubble, picking their way through the broken glass and the broken pavement stones, few people had time to look up at the battle which went on overhead by day and by night.

There are numerous other such interesting details in Table Two, and if the dark humor of the first hundred pages or so doesn't appear quite frequently enough in the rest of the novel, it does occasionally surface to lighten (or darken?) the mood. And it's all so readable and compelling in its setting that I very much regret that this is Marjorie Wilenski's one and only novel. If she was this strong, and created such vivid, funny, and moving characters and striking situations, what might she have done if she'd dedicated herself more wholeheartedly to writing? But alas, the same can be said of many other women of the time.

Little seems to be known about her, though I was able to find that she was married to Reginald Howard Wilenski, a well-known art critic and historian, who has his own ODNB entry. That entry notes that he was in the intelligence department of the War Office during World War I. One suspects that Marjorie must have been writing out of first-hand knowledge of a ministry job herself, but I can't say that for sure. Regardless, she clearly knew how to vividly capture the tensions, pettiness, and rivalries that surface in any office, let alone during a historic time like the Blitz.

This is indeed an almost "hopeless" book to track down, so I send my thanks once again to Grant Hurlock for making it possible for me to read it. It deserves to be much better known.

Now, I'm not even going to promise when I'll get round to my fourth and fifth "Hopeless No More" posts. But I'm hoping it won't be a year and a half from now…

Reading diary: EDITH MILES, MABEL ESTHER ALLAN

EDITH MILES, The Girl Chums of Norland Road (1930)

Barbara at Call Me Madam noted in a comment on one of my earlier posts on girls' school story authors that this book was well worth reading, and I have to thank her for that. When I finally had a chance to grab an inexpensive copy, I remembered her recommendation and indeed it turned out to be great fun, even while it's possibly the least eventful school story I've read. If you like fires and near-drownings and spies and smugglers and mudslides by the dozen in your school stories, then I'd think twice about this one, but if you enjoy quiet, uneventful tales that present a relatively realistic, only somewhat idealized view of what school life must have been like for many girls, then Girl Chums might be for you.

Sims and Clare note that Miles has a tendency to go "over the top" with her madcap characters, but that doesn't seem to be the case in this book. The story opens with Doris Endell (who is certainly not a madcap) arriving in London to stay with her aunt and uncle and to attend a girls' day school. Her parents—unlike those of so many school story main characters—are not in fact dead, or even in India or Burma or Africa, but have merely sent her to this school to give her the opportunity of experiencing London and of preparing for her scholarship exam at the end of the year.

Doris is placed initially in a class with other girls the headmistress is considering shifting to other forms, including some of the most difficult or lazy, and Doris alienates these girls with her shyness and intelligence. The rest of the story follows Doris's eventual move to another class, her success in making two good friends (no idea why the book's cover shows only two girls, when they are firmly a trio throughout), and such major events as preparation for the scholarship exam and Doris's efforts to learn to swim. Her uncle provides comic relief with his kidding of the girls and his tales of his own exploits.

And that's it really. That's the novel's plot. But I have a high tolerance, as you all must know by now, for novels that are light on plot, and this one is so charmingly written that I didn't mind at all the focus on mundane day-to-day events. In addition, as Barbara had mentioned in her comment, The Girls of Norland Road is relatively unique in its urban setting and the fact that the girls attend a state-run school and are clearly middle-class. There is no excess of wealth here—no princesses in disguise or daughters of aristocratic families whose homes are now tragically owned by the National Trust—and the story is all the more interesting for that.

It is true enough, by the way, that one of Doris's friends, Ethel, might be seen as something of a madcap, but only in a fairly muted way, and if anything in Miles's tale is over the top, it is merely that problems are solved more neatly and conveniently than in real life, but then this is hardly an unusual characteristic of school stories or even of other fiction more generally. Presumably, Miles went a bit more berserk in some of her other books, but this one struck me as a charming, quiet little story with likeable girls and interesting, ordinary activities. Has anyone read any of Miles's other work?

MABEL ESTHER ALLAN, Here We Go Round (1954)

I've written before about my fondness for Allan's books, and I knew I had to pick this one up right away when Girls Gone By reprinted it. It's a girls' career story, about being a nursery school teacher, which in itself appealed to my interest in school stories written from the perspective of teachers and other adults as well as the students.

But what made the novel completely irresistible is that it is also based on Allan's own wartime experiences as a nursery helper. Clarissa Cridland's introduction to the Girls Gone By edition includes a fairly lengthy quotation from Allan's late self-published memoir To Be an Author (1982) about the book's genesis. Here's a snippet:

I was at [Bromborough Preparatory School] for over a year then the war caught up with me again, and I wasn't allowed to stay there. I was directed to become a Nursery Warden and was sent to Bolton in Lancashire for training. I was billetted in Ivy Road and had to share a bedroom with three strangers.

…

I finished my training in Liverpool and was then sent to be in charge of the nursery at Gwladys Street School in Walton, close to Anfield Cemetery and Stanley Park. It was a dreadful journey in the early morning, the last part in a rocking, overcrowded, highly smelling tram. It went along Scotland Road, of blessed memory to some. The long thoroughfare, very badly bombed, had a raw and brave life, but its inhabitants were hard to stomach early on a winter's morning.

The quotation goes on to describe in more detail her real life experiences, but I don't want to spoil the novel itself by sharing too much. It is surely the semi-autobiographical nature of the novel, however, that lends it its diary-like quality and makes it seem so vividly real. In this sense, it seems quite distinct from the other Allan novels I've read, as good as those have been.

In short, the story (recast into the postwar years, sadly—one wonders just how many other novels of the late 1940s and 1950s, some of which we may know and love, were rewritten to excise the wartime content they originally contained?) follows Mary McBride as she spends a year in a nursery (presumably in or around Liverpool?—I was a bit vague on the exact spot, if indeed Allan ever mentioned it) before going for additional training to become a nursery school teacher. The neighborhood of the nursery, wherever it may be, is certainly urban and poor, and one of the great strengths of Allan's tale is that she is completely realistic about the problems of neglected and poorly-cared-for children, and her story doesn't offer any idealized solutions to those problems. The nursery helpers and the teachers of the attached school try to do their best for the children's health and education, but are sadly aware that they can only do so much to combat the conditions of their daily lives.

Allan always excels at descriptions and at making her readers feel that they are experiencing the action of her novels, but this novel is rather different. Here, it's not so much a sense of a storyteller—even an excellent one—weaving a tale, but rather a friend telling one of her experiences, in fascinating detail but without all of the bells and whistles of trying to make a dramatic tale of it. It's possible that, for readers expecting a tidy tale with a comfortable happy ending, this characteristic could prove slightly disappointing, but for me it was a huge plus.

The GGB intro also made me hunger for another of Allan's early titles, of which I had already tried to track down an affordable copy (and failed). The quoted passage from Allan's memoir begins with what is obviously the end of her discussion of another book:

I had a brilliant idea ... I still had the manuscript of the Land Army book, Room for the Cuckoo. Why not turn part of it into a book for girls? Cut out the war, of course, and just make the heroine be doing a year of practical farming before going to an Agricultural College. I was wildly excited and soon set to work.

I did make a story of it, but it was basically some sections of the same book. Whole cobs of my farming experience were almost unaltered, but I had to shape a plot and introduce a hero. I used for the most part my life on a mid-Cheshire farm, disguised somewhat by moving the great salt flash I had actually known months later at a farm near Sandbach.

Although I might vehemently wish that Allan's original manuscript for her wartime Land Army book—minus the hero and the shaped plot—still existed and might be published, I'll still happily take a copy of the revamped version, and I hope that this little teaser for it means that Room for the Cuckoo might also be on Girls Gone By's reprint radar.

MABEL ESTHER ALLAN, Swiss Holiday (1956, aka The Vine-Clad Hill)

I keep swearing that I'm going to stop writing so much about Allan here, because I figure that some of you might be getting pretty bored with hearing about her now. Plus, I've been on a bit of an Allan kick lately, and considering that she published nearly 200 books in all, I'm in some danger of turning this blog into The Mabel Esther Allan Show if I keep mentioning everything of hers that I read. I had no intention of discussing this one, which I picked up during a little gift card buying spree at Amazon, but as it has now become one of my favorites of Allan's novels, I can't resist just mentioning why.

Allan seems to have run the gamut from writing for relatively young children to writing for teenagers and on to writing for girls who are just on the cusp of adulthood. She wrote several school stories, which aren't always thought of in relation to the school story genre as a whole (they are somewhat atypical, with highly progressive schools and a focus on individual development and realistic action over sports and school life as a whole), but she also wrote various family stories and holiday tales. Swiss Holiday, the American edition of her novel The Vine-Clad Hill (I came this close to buying copies under each title before I read that they were one and the same book), is one of her holiday stories, but, like Margaret Finds a Future, which I briefly discussed here, it's also really a coming-of-age story, and (as I also mentioned in relation to her excellent early novel The Return to the West, which Greyladies reprinted) Allan handles that sense of being partly still a child and partly a young woman extraordinarily well.

Front flap of my copy of Swiss Holiday

In this case, the young woman in question is Philippa (who prefers to go by Philip, though her aunt irritatingly calls her Pippa), who is spending one final summer before beginning school work at Cambridge in the fall. Her family is distinctly middle-class, and she has planned to work as a waitress for the summer to make money for new school clothes. However, her rather wealthier and more pretentious Aunt Millicent offers her the opportunity of traveling to Switzerland with her and her family, in order to take care of her two spoiled rotten younger children, Gay and Gordon, and serve as a kind of companion to her older daughter, Tilda, an awkward, dreamy girl who has always suffered by comparison to her grown sister Clemency.

Of course, Philip will ultimately prove herself invaluable, and happy endings will be found for all, but it's told so skillfully and in such a low-key way that somehow it feels completely realistic, and as always Allan's descriptive abilities, which make the reader feel they are right there with the characters in the towns and sites described, are in full flower here. But what really makes this a stand-out among books about young women is Allan's subtlety in presenting Philip's increasing maturity and her dawning awareness of both her competence and abilities and her attractiveness to men. I'll just share one passage which helps to demonstrate the latter:

I stood there dreamily, clutching the flowers, knowing that I was going to love Bellinzona, and sure, even before I had seen Lugano, that I would not for worlds have found myself in any crowded vacation spot.

But time was passing, and perhaps Aunt Millicent was lying on her bed, longing for the solace of aspirin and cologne, though I told myself that she had probably fallen asleep long ago.

I turned and passed the big, silent building again, and I was suddenly much disconcerted to see that someone was standing halfway down the staircase, leaning on the balustrade and staring at me. I stopped for a second and stared back, perhaps hypnotized by that handsome face. For it was a young man in a white silk shirt. His brown arms lay along the stone, and his sun-tanned face was startlingly good-looking.

He smiled, and something in his expression made me feel shy and awkward. As he said something in Italian and began to descend the stairs, I made hurriedly for the door by which I had entered. For some reason, though, I couldn't help looking back as I reached it, and he was standing on the bottom stair, staring after me, and there was no mistaking the fact that his eyes held-well, appreciation, admiration.

Then I was out in the street again and hurrying back toward the druggist in the Viale Stazione.

"I don't think you were trespassing, but you've been out long enough, my girl," I told myself. "And as for that young man-he probably looks at every girl like that." But all the same, it was the first time that anyone had shown such interest in me, and the experience was oddly heartening.

From reviews and mentions online, it seems that I'm not the only one who sees this as one of Allan's best novels. If you're interested in travel-oriented novels with strong characters and a hint of romance, it's really worth tracking down, and indeed I hope that Girls Gone By or another publisher will consider reprinting it. GGB has just in the past week or two reprinted another Allan title with a similar setting, Three Go to Switzerland, written two or three years before this one, so perhaps this would make a good companion-piece?

Back flap of my copy of Swiss
Holiday, with author bio

I have about six more Mabel Esther Allan titles on my TBR shelves. Which one will I choose next (and will I be able to resist telling you about it)?

JOSEPHINE ELDER, Sister Anne Resigns (1932) & Doctor's Children (1954)

Josephine Elder (better known to most readers for her school stories) is anything but a literary writer when it comes to her adult fiction. She is completely matter-of-fact and no-nonsense in her approach—no fancy symbolism or gushing, poetic prose here—and her stories are basically socially-conscious melodramas. But if that sounds like the beginning of a negative review, think again, because she is also—as many readers of her school stories would attest—a stellar storyteller. It's terribly hard not to care about her characters and the often fascinating events of her novels, which offer wonderful slices of life and—particularly—insights into her characters' professional lives. That her books are not always entirely satisfying as novels ultimately takes a back seat—for me, at least—to how interesting they are in other ways.

I read my first adult novel by Elder, Lady of Letters (1949), more than a year ago, and I confess I was a bit lukewarm on it. I don't remember a lot about it, and may have to re-read it soon in light of how much I liked the second and third of her novels that I've read. Somehow I knew that her other novels were going to pay off more, and I quietly collected several of her other books for my TBR shelves. I've since read two of her girls' stories (including The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge (1926), which I reviewed here), and now I've read two more of her adult novels and enjoyed them very much indeed.

In my earlier post, I noted that one of my favorite things about Scholarship Girl was that it’s one of the only novels I know of in the early to mid-century years in which the main character is a young woman whose scholarly and career ambitions are consistently given validity over and beyond her potential for romance. When does that ever happen in middlebrow fiction? A heroine without a hero? Absurd! It might perhaps be a bit less of an anomaly in the context of a school story, where romance is more or less necessarily absent, but the heroine of Scholarship Girl is, after all, a college-aged young woman, so at the very least some fantasies of romance, even in lieu of a real live paramour, might have been expected. 

Blurb from back cover of Greyladies edition of Sister Anne Resigns

In fact, I've been trying to think of other novels of the period in which a woman's career is given such a central focus. Dorothy Whipple's High Wages comes to mind, and perhaps one or two others, but in the enormous majority of novels I recall, the heroines may sometimes have friends—or enemies—who are very concerned with their work, but they are rarely ambitious professionals themselves. And in the presentation of such supporting characters, serious career concern in a woman—serious enough to put at risk one’s chances of marrying and living happily ever after—seems generally to be a subject for criticism or outright mockery.

If I recall correctly (it's been a while), this is true, for example, of E. M. Delafield's Faster, Faster, in which the main character pushes herself beyond her limits because (the novel seems to be saying) of her over-inflated and rather self-righteous sense of her own importance. That "type" even becomes a sort of stock character in humorous fiction of the time—the tireless campaigner determined to save the world but boring everyone around her senseless with her pontifications and, usually, her socially inept personality and self-absorption. When they're taken at all seriously, they're most often dismissed as trying to be like men, or having lost touch with the real meaning of life, or else as frumpy women destined for spinsterhood, rather than as women who are ambitious and talented and capable. And these are just the women writers—it's hardly necessary to note that male authors were very often even more critical and mocking of career women.

Alas, all of this is often enough still true today…

So I found this career focus in The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge to be an irresistible change of pace. And to some extent the same focus is at the heart of Sister Anne Resigns, published six years after Scholarship Girl, and of Doctor's Children, published more than two decades after that.

As you might expect from the titles, Sister Anne Resigns deals with a young nurse, while Doctor's Children traces the experiences of a middle-aged doctor and her family. As Elder (whose real name was Olive Potter) was herself a practicing doctor at a time when relatively few women occupied such a role, the details of both characters' professional lives are fascinating and clearly drawn vividly from real life.

I found both novels to be compulsively readable, but I particularly recommend Sister Anne Resigns for those interested in the medical angle. Specifically, its strength is its portrayal of the various kinds of women who become nursing sisters, and the effects that a gruelling, rigidly disciplined profession can have on them. Some are kind, some are cruel, some are practically demented with the petty powers they wield, and some are merely absorbed by their work at the expense of social interaction. All of them are interesting, though, and they ring so true that they must have been based on Elder's own experiences. And when, for example, I was reading about Anne trying desperately to save three children, each near death from different ailments and all arriving in the ward in a matter of hours, it would have been hard for anything short of a major earthquake to distract my attention (a minor one would surely have been a mere annoyance).

Doctor's Children, on the other hand, focuses on a heroine who takes up her largely abandoned medical career again when her husband abandons her and their children. It's a bit more concerned with family life and with the difficulties of the children and a bit less concerned with Barbara's work life. But what there is of her career is particularly interesting because she reactivates her career as a doctor just as the National Health Service is being implemented. Elder offers insight into the impacts of the NHS on various of the medical professionals in the novel, and the discussions about it (largely negative) are quite interesting. I found the sections focused on Barbara's children to be less entertaining, but even there, her son's involvement with an early version of a street gang offers some insight into the delinquency that became a major social concern after World War II.

I should certainly mention that in both of these novels Elder reveals some degree of anti-Semitism—both in stereotypical portrayals of Jewish characters and in her characters' condescending or contemptuous reactions to them. It's rather odd and puzzling, since, for example, in Sister Anne Resigns, Anne becomes friends with one Jewish character (who doesn't fit her stereotypical ideas) even while being scornful of some of the Jewish women she treats in the course of her work (who apparently do fit her stereotypes). This is not any kind of dominant or prevalent theme in either novel, and there is less of it in Doctor's Children than in the earlier work, but it's something you should be aware of before reading the novels. It rather took me by surprise, since Elder is in so many ways so ahead of her time and is generally such a sensitive author, but obviously racism (as well as other –isms) has been a blind spot for many writers.

Blurb from back cover of Doctor's Children

It's also a bit frustrating for me that in these novels, unlike the earlier Scholarship Girl at Cambridge, Elder seems unable to allow her characters to continue to prioritize their careers over romance. I wonder if she was pressured by her publisher to provide "happy endings," because in neither case does the romantic plot development ring completely true, as if Elder herself couldn't relate to it. How I would have loved for her to be able to produce a novel about an unmarried professional woman like herself without such developments! But at least Elder acknowledges the complications and conflicts in her characters' decisions, and perhaps, in view of the times in which these novels were published, the characters are already radical enough just by virtue of having careers.

All but one of Elder's adult novels have been reprinted by Greyladies, though only two remain in print at the moment. Sister Anne Resigns is one of those two, however, and the other, The Encircled Heart, also about a woman doctor, is on my TBR list as well.

If Elder's novels are not always completely satisfying, they're nevertheless some of the most fascinating records I've ever come across of one area of women's experiences in the first half of the 20th century, and an area that is woefully underrepresented in other fiction of the time.

DORITA FAIRLIE BRUCE, The "modern" Colmskirk novels (1945-1955)

One of my favorite subgenres of middlebrow fiction is that dedicated to stories about young women finding careers. It's either a surprisingly small genre or I'm just missing out on a lot of the works that fit the genre, but it's always nice to come across one. [Hmmmm, one wonders if a list of such titles would be a possible goal?]

I wrote very briefly about Dorita Fairlie Bruce's The Serendipity Shop (1947) after I read it on our trip to Italy last year. It got me through my jetlag, for which I was very grateful, and I enjoyed it a lot and immediately bought two more of Bruce's Colmskirk novels for my TBR shelves.

The Colmskirk novels, for those who don't already know, and according to the Girls Gone By intros, were a series of nine novels Bruce wrote in the 1930s to 1950s, all set in or around the same Scottish village of Colmskirk. Four of the novels are truly historical in nature, set well before the 20th century, one more—Wild Goose Quest (1945)—is classed as historical by Girls Gone By because it seems to have been written and be set in the 1930s, and four were "modern" (i.e. set in the late 1940s and early 1950s when they were written). The novels all stand on their own and feature different main characters, though there are both some "guest appearances" by characters from one novel in others of the series and occasional loose connections between modern characters and those from the earlier historical volumes. It's a charming concept, and Colmskirk itself (apparently fictional though based on Largs in North Ayrshire) makes one yearn to visit and perhaps even take up residence. (Admittedly, though, I would take up residence just about anywhere in the U.K. at the drop of a hat—if only immigrating were easier…)

The first of my Colmskirk acquisitions after The Serendipity Shop was Wild Goose Quest, which I confess I was a bit luke-warm on. It had such a promising plot—a sort of treasure hunt involving, among other things, a girl who has lost her memory due to a completely far-fetched personal trauma—but just never really took flight for me (no pun intended, should you be familiar with the plot…). It's entertaining enough, however, and if you find yourself interested in the Colmskirk series, then you'll certainly want to check it out.

After that, I was my usual slow self about getting round to the other book I'd picked up, but when I finally did, any reservations that Wild Goose Quest had inspired were promptly dissipated. Triffeny (1950) is about a spoiled girl yearning for an artistic career in London, who finds herself instead discovering a possible future in the family's pottery studio. I've long known (and you've surely figured out by now) that I'm more likely to get excited about novels with women as main characters than I am about stories featuring men. Go figure. But that might have something to do both with my luke-warm response to Goose, which focused more on male characters, and on my eager enjoyment of Triffeny, which has not only a female lead but several important supporting actresses as well. Plus a "finding a career" plot.

The introduction to the Girls Gone By edition of Triffeny notes that the heroine "must be one of the most quickly reformed teenagers in fiction," and it's true that Bruce's portrayal of Triffeny's recovery from being spoiled is rather blithely unconcerned with realism. But then, I wasn't exactly seeking realism when I picked up the book, and you shouldn't be either, but it was a hugely enjoyable read from beginning to end.

After which, naturally, I had to pick up the remaining two modern Colmskirk novels, The Debatable Mound (1953) and The Bartle Bequest (1955). And The Debatable Mound instantly became my favorite of the series so far. (By the way, GGB hasn't reprinted any of the historical volumes from the series yet, though there was a hint that they might be thinking of it. Fingers crossed that they do.)

The Debatable Mound is all about the arrival of an eccentric archaeologist, his children, and their wonderful middle-aged cousin, Miss Pennycuick, to take possession of a house located next to a mysterious ancient mound. He has purchased the house with the specific intent of digging on the mound and determining its history and purpose, but it emerges that the owner of an adjacent house, the crotchety Admiral Majendie, believes that the mound is his property. The subsequent conflicts and the ways in which family members and other characters both complicate and help resolve the issue are the structure on which the plot rests.

But undoubtedly the principal pleasure of the novel for me is Miss Pennycuick herself, who, although she certainly helps to maintain and watch over the family in the absence of the children's dead mother, also has her fair share of spunk, independent thought, and a tell-it-like-it-is sensibility, setting her apart from the standard "maiden aunt/housekeeper" stock character she at first seems to represent. Her personality and spirit inform the entire plot, even if she is not a constant presence. Here, for example, is Miss Pennycuick telling one of the girls about the car she purchased for herself for the move, and her experiences in learning to drive it:

'I believe,' replied Miss Pennycuick, with modest pride, 'I must have a natural flair for driving; it was no trouble to learn—no trouble at all. Only once did I make a really serious mistake, and that was a week ago, when I put my foot on the exhilarator going into the garage, just as my instructor was opening the door.'

'And was he very much exhilarated?' asked Lalage wickedly.

Miss Pennycuick eyed her with severity.

'Nobody was hurt,' she answered coldly, 'and the door was only slightly damaged.

And here, in a scene at the mound excavation site, is her no-nonsense reaction to the unpleasant use to which the site may have been put:

"I have found undeniable traces of their activities to-day. That stone on which you are sitting, Miss Pennycuick, has undoubtedly flowed over with the blood from human sacrifices.'

Cousin Pen settled herself more comfortably on her seat.

'Very disagreeable, indeed,' she assented, 'but it happened a very long time ago and has been well washed by the rains of several thousand years, so I'll just stay where I am.'

Added to such exchanges, her ongoing conflict with the Admiral about his complete inability to recall her name— and his substitution of such alternates as "Pennyfeather" or "Pennyfarthing"—adds humor to each development of the plot. In fact, of the Dorita Fairlie Bruce novels I've read so far, The Debatable Mound is undoubtedly the funniest and the one most obviously infused with high spirits and energy.

Although Bruce is clearly most famous for her school stories, and although even the Colmskirk novels were likely aimed at (or at least marketed to) a readership of teenagers or young adults, in the case of The Debatable Mound I feel like any fan of humorous village stories would get quite a lot of enjoyment from it. This might also be true of The Serendipity Shop and maybe even Triffeny, but The Debatable Mound in particular reminded me just a bit of Miss Buncle's Book or The Stone of Chastity and other village tales that are among my favorites.

All the more disappointing, then, to proceed eagerly to the final modern Colmskirk novel, The Bartle Bequest. Although this novel again features young working women as central characters, as well as some prominent cameos by characters from the earlier novels, and although it certainly has an entertaining enough plot—involving the establishment of a local museum, the young woman who becomes its first curator, the 16-year-old orphan girl she adopts as her companion and household help, and the sleazy young man who nefariously profits from the new curator's misguided trust—I also found it irritating in a couple of ways.

After I mentioned The Serendipity Shop last year, a reader emailed me and mentioned that she had enjoyed the whole series except for the sexism of The Bartle Bequest, and I think I know what she meant. Without giving too much away, let's just say that these novels, which are otherwise so intriguingly concerned with young women finding career fulfillment, mostly end with them giving up those careers in favor of being wives and mothers. Now, I can take that with a grain of salt, since that was indeed the way things often unfolded for many women in the middle decades of the 20th century, and it may even have been an improvement on their grandmothers' lives, where even a year or two of career fulfillment might have been impossible. But somehow, in The Bartle Bequest, it all just seems a bit more condescending and insulting than in other books in the series.

What's more, there's the case of Miss Pennycuick, whose praises I've already sung above and who appears in a supporting role here. When she first appeared in The Bartle Bequest, I was delighted to encounter her again, but that delight dissipated quickly. By the time this novel begins, Miss Pennycuick is a married woman herself, but more importantly, she seems to have had some sort of psychotic break. We learn, for example, that she has developed a sort of superstitious phobia of Egyptian artifacts such as some of the ones in Professor Crawford's home. What? The woman who shrugs off sitting on a stone where human sacrifices have been performed is now so frightened of the headdress of a young Egyptian woman that she can't bear to have it in the house? This seems quite ridiculous, and one wonders if all the overlapping characters didn't just finally get the best of Bruce, so that she forgot how vividly independent and no-nonsense Miss Pennycuick had been in the earlier novel. Regardless, the affection I felt for Miss Pennycuick in TBM was nowhere to be found while reading TBB. And Professor Crawford himself—a kindly, absent-minded father and scholar in the earlier novel—here appears only once, flying into such a rage that the museum curator tries to lure him into the office so she can lock him in and call the police.

Despite my obvious annoyance at these (mis-)characterizations, I do hasten to mention that these two characters appear only briefly in The Bartle Bequest, so for many readers they may not weaken one's reading experience very much. (And of course if you haven't read The Debatable Mound, then you won't mind them at all.) The novel is quite entertaining otherwise, and certainly worth reading if you've enjoyed the other Colmskirk novels. But while I can imagine re-reading The Serendipity Shop and The Debatable Mound, and quite possibly Triffeny as well, I believe I've finished with The Bartle Bequest for good.

I should note, for fans of Bruce's school stories, that the young curator of the museum in this novel is none other that Primula Mary Beaton, who apparently appears briefly in Bruce's Springdale series. At one point, too, Primula mentions her wartime service as a Wren, during which she became friends with Dimsie, the main character of that series. Among the other guest appearances here are Julia Lendrum, who was introduced in The Serendipity Shop and who seems to be quite a mover and shaker in Colmskirk, as she figures prominently in all the subsequent books. Julia's sister Merran, along with her Serendipity Shop, appear briefly, as does Susan from The Debatable Mound, and Triffeny is mentioned but does not appear in person.

On the whole, I'm very happy to have been introduced to the modern Colmskirk novels, even if I have a few reservations about them. Now, of course, I'm curious about the four historical novels from the series—The King's Curate (1930), Mistress Mariner (1932), A Laverock Lilting (1945), and The Bees on Drumwhinnie (1952). As luck would have it, a random Abe Books search has resulted in an affordable copy of A Laverock Lilting setting forth on its merry way toward my overcrowded shelves even as I write this. The other volumes are either virtually nonexistent (the first two) or prohibitively expensive (the last), so here's hoping that Girls Gone By will come through with new editions of all of them.