The hospitality of parenthood: BARBARA WILLARD, Winter in Disguise (1958)

It was her father's turn to offer Clare the hospitality of parenthood.

As intriguing, concise opening lines go, you could do a lot worse than this one. A "widening world" novel focused on Clare Saville, 15-year-old daughter of divorced parents—father a film star just past his sell-by date, mother an icy diva who has remarried and prefers her younger children—Winter in Disguise at its best reminded me of a masterpiece of this genre, Pamela Frankau's A Wreath for the Enemy.

Most of Clare's childhood has been divided between her convent boarding-school and her grandmother's home, as both parents were too indifferent to bother with her. But now, following her grandmother's death, she has spent an uncomfortable time in her mother's home in London, and is now being shipped off to Ste Amélie in France, the set of her father's latest film (in which he has been unhappily relegated to playing second fiddle to a child star). She has rarely seen her father, and her slightly romanticized recollections of him soon fade against the more cynical reality, which Willard effectively conveys in his first encounter with Clare:

Steve glanced over Mr Hyams's head and saw Clare frozen halfway down the stairs. He was still. His face was instantly wiped clean and he prepared for the re-take. Grouped about the hall, the rest stood waiting for him to play his big scene. Newcomers entering noisily were shushed into silence.

The novel focuses primarily on Clare—who soon begins to plot how to get back to the safe haven of her boarding school—but a significant role is also played by the uneasy, ambivalent three-way friendship she forms with Essex Dorincourt and Michel Durand. Essex, the child star, is part enfant terrible and part the vulnerable victim of a vulturous, hysterical mother and a mentally unstable father, who has previously kidnapped Essex (at least according to Essex) on multiple occasions. Michel, meanwhile, is Essex's stand-in, whose mother runs a hotel in a nearby village, and is the grounded, down-to-earth, responsible vertex of the triangle, despite the tragedy of having lost his father in WWII and the responsibility of providing financial support with his film work.

Clare and Michel get swept up in Essex's fantasies that his father will soon kidnap him again, an event he eagerly awaits—both to rescue him from his mother and for the publicity it will provide for his career. But as it turns out, his fantasies have a disturbing tinge of reality, which will influence the lives of everyone involved. (By which I don't mean to suggest that the novel becomes a thriller, but there is a certain amount of emotional tension and uncertainty surrounding the events that unfold.)

I previously read and reviewed Barbara Willard's earlier novel Echo Answers (1952) here, and I enjoyed it a lot but wasn't completely raving about it. However, it has had the odd effect on me, which some books do, of staying firmly in my mind nevertheless, and its recollection evokes strong positive feelings. As someone who can usually quite easily forget every detail of a book I've only read once (a second read tends to solidify my memory), this makes me think there's more to it than I first thought, and Winter in Disguise too is leading me to think I must read more of Willard's work soon.

Willard is of course best known for her historical Mantlemass children's series and for her other children's books, but she also wrote 14 novels for adults, of which Winter in Disguise is the last. All of the characters are believable and vivid, but the great strength here is Clare, who came alive for me in a poignant, witty, and sometimes vulnerable way. Clare has learned a defensive "pertness" that can be irresistible—she may be only just realizing some of the complexities of life and relationships, but she already has a striking awareness of (and confidence in) her own perceptions, as in this encounter with her mother from late in the novel (no spoilers):

'Shall I tell them to send Clare's breakfast up to this room, Mrs Heathcote?'

'I'm not at all certain that Clare deserves any breakfast, Miss Dunbar.' She stood with her chin tilted and her eyebrows slightly raised. 'Do you intend to kiss me, Clare?'

'I'm not at all certain that you want me to,' Clare replied, pertly echoing.

And Willard has a flair for summing up complicated emotional situations with concision—as in the passages above, and especially in these two brief sentences:

Her mother meant nothing to her, nor her father. It was their lack that meant too much.

If you enjoy widening world stories, or vicariously visiting film sets, or just unsentimental, carefully-delineated, and well-written dramas of mixed characters in a more or less confined setting, this one might well be for you.

'Frightful' women: ELIZABETH COXHEAD, The Figure in the Mist (1955)

It was a pale blue and golden rampart, a wall of peaks springing cleanly out of the satiny blue-grey water. Or, if you liked, a blue silhouette in tissue paper, transparent towards the top and filtered with patches of gold. Great cliffs must hem it in. Grappling-irons would be needed to gain a foothold. For the first time in her nineteen years the child of the Essex flats looked at beauty, and in the screaming of the gulls heard the music of the west.

A young girl discovers the beauties of Scotland and the complexities of grownup social life while serving as a live-in help for a London University professor, his wife, and their young son on summer holiday in Arran. Along the way, she develops an affinity for rock climbing and meets a chatty young man.

Surely this is a Mabel Esther Allan novel? Or a charming, cozy romance?

Well, certainly The Figure in the Mist has all the elements of a cozy family holiday story, complete with armchair travel and likeable locals. But it's ultimately a bit more complex, and these familiar plot devices are quite nicely interwoven with issues of class, gender, education, selfishness and vulnerability in young and old alike, and helicopter parenting vs freedom and challenge. Not quite the simple resolutions one might expect either.

Coxhead's heroine here is the appropriately named Agnes Flint, who during this Scotch summer must begin to learn to be a bit less hard and to forgive her fellow beings' shortcomings. She has grown up in a rather dreary middle class suburb, a tough, smart, no-nonsense kind of girl. Her first sight of Arran from the boat, quoted above, makes clear that Scotland will have an impact on Agnes, but she'll learn even more from her interactions with charming Matthew Ogilvy and his insecure wife Margaret, their overprotected, neurotic, but lovable toddler son Adam, Mrs Gillies the manager of the local hotel and an old school friend of Margaret's, and Patrick Hadley, a student of Matthew's who visits for a week. She even gains a bit of self-knowledge from the rock-climbing Matthew teaches her (Coxhead was herself a climbing aficionado and made it central to another of her novels, 1951's One Green Bottle, now added to my TBR list) and the "figure in the mist" she encounters during a climb…

Elizabeth Coxhead mid-climb

Professor Ogilvy is kind to Agnes and helps her with her difficulties, though he's also undoubtedly rather selfish and loves the attention he gets from her—as well as, apparently, many of his female students. Adam is a delight for Agnes (whom he calls "Angus") from day one. But Margaret is distinctly prickly, and the challenging relations between Agnes and Margaret are the real centerpiece of the novel—even when Margaret disappears for two pivotal weeks to visit her ailing father. And Coxhead handles Margaret with rather wonderful compassion—even if we don't quite come to love her, we certainly come to understand her foibles. Soon after Agnes's arrival, she is confused by how kindly Mrs Gillies responds to her initial complaints about Margaret—"She wanted a reassurance that Margaret would be kind to her, while Mrs. Gillies—was it possible?—was asking her to be kind to Margaret."

After Margaret has urged Agnes to get a shorter haircut because it will be flattering to her face, and then been overheard gloating behind her back to Matthew ("Touching, isn't it? The sincerest form of flattery. Just about as close as she could come to a faithful imitation of mine."), Mrs Gillies is unsurprised:

"It's certainly no news to me," said Mrs. Gillies, tranquilly resuming her knitting, "that poor Margaret is a fool. She was aye a fool—that's why I'm sorry for her.

And of course, after Margaret leaves for two weeks and Adam blooms without her neurotic hovering, more serious tensions arise upon her return.

Although rock climbing isn't the main subject of the novel (those uninterested in climbing will be more than compensated by the scenery described in the main climbing scene), there is one climb that forms the centerpiece, and something of a turning point, in the novel. It made me want to be out there scaling some heights myself (particularly in Scotland), though I have an anxious suspicion that I'd be like the one inevitable girl in every school story who manages to twist her ankle and spoil everyone's fun. And although Agnes is a complicated character, it's hard not to love her—and Coxhead—for the scene in which the blunt Agnes firmly tells off the self-absorbed and talkative Patrick. It's long, but I can't resist quoting it:

" ... but you do agree, don't you, that it was pretty discouraging? I mean, you'd have done the same in my place?"

He had stopped in his tracks and was demanding an answer, demanding her interest, her precious attention, so that she was forced to bring it back from the sea and sky. "I'm sorry, Patrick," she said. "I'm afraid I wasn't really listening. Tell me again."

He stared at her, his mouth open; it took him quite five seconds to grasp that she had not been listening. "Well, I must say, I think you're damn' rude."

"Do you? " said Agnes, her control snapping. "Well, if we're going in for home truths, I'd better tell you that I think you're damn' boring."

"Look here—"

"Why, just tell me why, should I be interested in your essays? Why should I care what you do or don't say to your tutor? Why do I have to spend my free afternoon on a re-hash of your academic career? What would you say if I started reeling off my essays? Would you find them interesting? Or is there to be one standard of entertainment for you and another for me, just because you happen to be a man and I a girl?"

It was really funny, seeing him goggle there, his frank blue eyes cloudy with bewilderment, the colour coming up into his handsome face. At length he said:

"I think you're frightful."

"Oh, splendid."

"I never in my life met a woman as frightful as you are." He sought for words which should express it more clearly. "You're the most frightful woman I've ever met."

"All right, it's penetrated."

"And you can damn' well finish your precious afternoon by yourself." And round he turned, shuddering with outrage, and striding back by the way they had  come, was soon out of her sight.

Oh, the relief at being rid of him! She felt no more compunction than if she had brushed off a persistent fly.

Oh dear. Rather harsh, indeed, but how many times have we all wanted to say something similar to some clinging bore?! But Coxhead lends the scene greater depth when, a few pages later, Matthew teases out a bit more compassion from Agnes—compassion that will undoubtedly be needed in dealing with Margaret later—and I related even more to her:

"I didn't realise till I'd done it just how young he is. It was as if I'd hit Adam. He just stood there saying 'You are a frightful woman,' over and over. He hadn't even words to curse me with."

"Poor young ass. I like to think Adam would have stood up for himself more efficiently. Perhaps next time callow youth annoys you, you'll make the necessary allowances."

"I'll try." She sighed. "But you know, one's always being told to make the necessary allowances for children and the aged. It's a bit hard if one has to make them for one's contemporaries also. Is nobody ever to be treated as an equal?"

"You will be safe to make allowances for everybody always." He gave her a sideways grin. "Bit of a tough nut, aren't you, Agnes? I mean it as a compliment, I rather like tough nuts, in fact I'm a bit of one myself. But we ought to pay for our privilege by modifying our toughness for the weaker brethren."

The wrapping-up of the relationship between Agnes and Margaret, which is also the conclusion of the novel, is handled in a similar way. Agnes is young and rash, a bit impatient and intolerant, but she also grows as a character and returns to her home and school as a more mature, complex young woman.

I first read Elizabeth Coxhead way back in 2015, and reviewed her 1952 novel A Play Toward here. I was a bit ambivalent about that one, though in light of my enjoyment of The Figure in the Mist I'm wondering if a re-read could be in order? First, though, I think I'm going to need to get hold of One Green Bottle—first, because I want to figure out what the deal is with that title, and second, because the dustjacket for A Play Toward contains an enthusiastic blurb about Bottle from no lesser critic than Marghanita Laski.

Schoolgirls and Nazis (but not quite what you might think): JOSEPHINE KAMM, Nettles to My Head (1939)

Publicity photo printed with review of
Kamm's previous novel, Disorderly Caravan

"One must have a few compensations," said Enid, "for being beyond the pale.''

"I don't see why," said Molly amiably. "After all, you did kill Christ."

"Molly, how can you say things like that! And anyhow it's not strictly true." Phyllis was flushed with embarrassment. "What must Enid think of you?"

"Enid doesn't mind." Molly handed her a biscuit. "You don't mind, do you, Enid?"

"Not a bit," said Enid, who knew that Molly's comments were never animated by malice. "It was rather a good remark when you come to think of it."

Nettles to My Head is a part school, part widening world story, but with a difference made fairly obvious from this quote early on. Enid Abel, who is sixteen when the novel opens, is the only Jewish student in her school, and is never allowed to forget the fact for long. Her classmates are mostly indifferent, even if constantly aware, as seen above. She has to sit out prayers, and can't even attend occasional talks about missionary opportunities (in which sense she is surely rather luckier than the other girls, really):

"I have to stay away from missionary talks, but I'm not exactly out of them because some of the girls are always praying for me. Phyllis Johnson has a prayer list at the end of her Bible which starts off with cannibals and ends up with me. I don't mind, you know; but I believe I'd be a tougher customer than a savage when it came to converting."

And the rather pathetic headmistress of the school never hesitates to remind Enid that she doesn't quite fit in:

"Poor Miss Farrow, she just can't help being anti-Semitic. We hardly ever have any Jews here, but in the scholarship exam last year Enid's papers were so undeniably better than anyone else's that she had to accept her. She takes it out of her in small ways, though."

Ultimately, this is a surprisingly enjoyable tale, even if it's a bit uneven here and there. Its themes of the anti-Semitism encountered by a young girl at boarding-school and then, in the second half of the novel, in the "widening world" could have become preachy or obvious, but in Kamm's hands it's explored with humor and some striking depth. Enid is spunky and more or less unbothered by the obvious biases she encounters, and she also encounters good people and those who are simply oblivious. One of the latter being Mary Cross, the school's new matron, who takes Enid under her wing as best she can against Miss Farrow's resistance.

The first half of the novel is really quite as entertaining as any school story, but with an added depth and intelligence not always present. The girls are often funny, and much is made of the foibles of some of the mistresses—particularly Miss Roberts, the history mistress, who fawns over Miss Farrow and dreams of retiring to a shared home with her, but is repeatedly shot down, and Miss Wheeler, the earnest French and music mistress, who lives in a romantic dream world of unrealistic fantasies about her quite run-of-the-mill fiancé, whom she rarely sees in the flesh. The latter is often the butt of the girls' jokes, especially the following passage which for some reason made me giggle more than anything else in the book. The school is on a field trip to Silbury Hill, mostly chattering away and ignoring the illustrious professor discussing its historical significance as they make their way to the top:

"Whew!" breathed Molly. "There ought to be an ice-cream man up here. I could just do with a tub."

"Sssh!" said Enid. "Let's watch Miss Wheeler seeing things."

Helen had taken off her hat and was fidgeting with one of her plaited coils of hair. Her eyes were half-closed and her lips moved silently.

"What do you think she's saying?"

"Something about a centuries-old habitation of a savage people, or earth piled upon earth as a monument to mankind. You know the sort of muck, Molly."

"You'll write a really juicy essay if you put things like that in it."

"I shan't. They make me squirm."

"Miss Wheeler's going to make an intelligent comment to the professor," said Molly. They sidled up behind her to listen.

Oh, that last comment keeps getting me every time I read it.

The second half of the novel, when Enid leaves school, becomes more serious and a bit more uneven, but Enid is always a delightful character to spend time with. She is pressured by her grandfather to only consider dating Jewish men, and is repeatedly thrown together with David, a friend of the family, who is obviously her grandfather's ideal grandson-in-law. But she makes her own way, dating Stephen, a glib young man who, it gradually dawns on Enid, loves her in spite of her Jewishness.

I love old library cards, and both of these were in the copy of Nettles
that I read, but...what's wrong with this picture that tells us that
the card on the right had been mistakenly placed in the wrong book?

There are occasional passages that might jar some readers today. For example, I simply can't hear the word "Jewess"—even spoken by a Jewish character in a novel by a Jewish author and intended, as here, to benignly refer to a Jewish woman without any suggestion of anti-Semitism—without cringing, but it does makes me wonder if other uses of the term in other books of the time might have been more benign than I have assumed?

And I'm not sure that many readers looking back with the benefit of hindsight instead of merely anxious about the Nazi threat would laugh very much at Enid's mother's joking to Mary about her terrible brothers-in-law:

"They were quite odious; as different from my husband as they possibly could be. Enid and I call them Crime and Punishment, and we've decided that if ever we had to choose between a concentration-camp and marriage with one of them—which luckily isn't at all likely—we should choose the concentration-camp."

In part, she's obviously using humor to dispel some of the anxiety of an increasingly disturbing situation, but it's probably safe to say that any joke involving concentration camps hasn't been funny since, well, not long after this novel was published!

The overall effect of Kamm's story, though, is to highlight some of the conflicts and pressures faced by Jewish characters that others might find hard to imagine, however unbiased they might be, and to do it in an entertaining and amusing way. Enid can be blasé about most of the casual racism she encounters, but there's also a sort of darkness in her personality, a tendency to dwell on troubles, especially that rising horror of Nazism unfolding in the novel's background. And those fears can't be reassured away, even by well-meaning Mary blandly assuring Enid that such things could never happen in England. (Undoubtedly they're exacerbated, too, by the dawning realization that Stephen is a jerk.)

This is the third of Josephine Kamm's five novels for adults. I wrote about the fourth, Peace, Perfect Peace (1947), back in 2016 (see here), and I just announced last week that Dean Street Press and I will be reprinting it as a Furrowed Middlebrow book in July! 

Some time after that I read the last, Come, Draw This Curtain, but never got round to reviewing it. After the many high points of Peace, I was a bit disappointed by Curtain, which is probably why I never managed to post about it. But Kamm always seems to be an earnest, socially-involved author, not unlike Ruth Adam, and is therefore always interesting and thoughtful even if the overall results aren't great literature. Based on the blurbs for them in the front of my library copy of Nettles, I may very well have to add Kamm's first two novels, All Quiet at Home (1936) and Disorderly Caravan (1938), to my new Hopeless Wish List. They sound lighter and funnier, perhaps, and would undoubtedly be great reads, but seem to be nonexistent in the U.S. [Cue sad violins.]

Clearly, too, Nettles to My Head belongs on both my Grownup School Story List (half the book qualifies, at least) and in the "approach and early days" section of my World War II Book List. It's a two-for-one deal!

'They **** you up, your mum and dad': MONICA REDLICH, No Love Lost (1937)

(To give credit where due, I was drawing a blank on a name for this post until I recalled Philip Larkin's rather wonderful if slightly profane "This Be the Verse," which fits this novel like a glove...)

I owe acknowledgements and enthusiastic thanks to no fewer than three other kind souls who contacted me regarding my recent Hopeless Wish List and each made it possible for me to read one or more of the books I didn't have a snowball's chance of getting hold of on my own. You'll certainly hear about them all in due course, but this one, like the Mabel Esther Allan titles and dustjackets I wrote about recently here, comes to me courtesy of my Fairy Godmother, and there are still other odes to her generosity to come...

I've been a casual fan of Monica Redlich since happily stumbling across her first children's title Jam Tomorrow a few years ago (before I started blogging, so I didn't write about it here). After that, I was hot on the trail of her second and final book for children, Five Farthings, which turned out to be a delight when I finally tracked it down and reviewed it here. By that time, I knew that she had also published The Young Girl's Guide to Good Behaviour (1935), which was reprinted in 2010, as well as a handful of travel books, including Danish Delight (1939), The Pattern of England: Some Informal and Everyday Aspects (1947), and Summer Landscape: Denmark, England, U.S.A. (1952). But I was extraordinarily dense about coming across her adult fiction, which includes no fewer than four novels, now mostly buried beneath the sands of time.

The first two, Consenting Party and Cheap Return, both appeared in 1934. No idea, therefore, which of these was properly her first novel, but of Consenting Party I've been able to find only an intriguing but not terribly informative advertisement from Hamish Hamilton, which appeared in the Observer late in 1934. 

Perhaps it's time to add this one to my Hopeless Wish List as well (particularly if E. M. Delafield seems to have enjoyed it)?

And perhaps Cheap Return too, based on a promising review I came across: The Age, Melbourne called it "clever and amusing, though it is impossible to approve of the lax moral standards of the central figure." That heroine attends a girls' college at London University, and the novel seems to concern the tribulations of her love life, but The Age does go on to say "the book is entertaining because of its gentle satire and its lively presentation of life in a girls' college."

By fourteen years later, when Redlich published her final novel, The Various Light (1948), she had progressed to what sounds a very odd plot indeed. I previously knew nothing about it except that Carl Jung, of all people, had recommended it to a colleague, but when I mentioned it in my wish list Grant Hurlock (who has apparently read everything) explained that Jung's interest was likely because "its adultery-minded ensemble of characters exist simultaneously in two different realms, one earthly and the other astral/heavenly that resembles a collective unconscious." Hmmmm.

1937's No Love Lost, then, falls between those two early works and the much later, more experimental one, and all I knew about it before was a blurb calling it "a simply-told story of the reactions of a schoolgirl to the unhappy marriage of her parents." More or less accurate, but perhaps just a bit reductive. As the novel begins, Hilary Leighton is leaving school for the last time (so she's only a "schoolgirl" for the first few pages—which also means this title doesn't belong after all on my Grownup School Story List, alas, though it could fit on a "widening world" list, if I ever got around to that), and finds that her parents are moving to the country.

Hamish Hamilton blurb in the Observer, 1937, with praise
for No Love Lost just above a blurb for Ursula Orange
(featuring more praise from E. M. Delafield, no less!)

The first part of the novel reads a bit like a less clever Guard Your Daughters, as here when Hilary is coming home from school for the last time, full of youthful enthusiasm:

Even a bus-ride, to-day, was different from any she had ever taken before. She was not a schoolgirl, checked off on a list and anxiously waited for until, at some stated time, she should reappear. She was a grown-up, a young woman, going where she chose to go in her own good time. The swayings and rockings of the big red bus filled her with delight; it might have been a ship, plunging into uncharted oceans.

It's not long, however, before the darker undercurrents of tension between her parents, Edmund and Francis, come in, along with what certainly appears to be some form of mental health condition in Francis—touchiness and paranoia, self-destructive behavior, much time spent in bed, and, of all things, compulsive gardening. And this part, describing what it's like for a young person to deal with a parent's mental illness, is one of the strongest bits of the novel. Redlich seems to know very vividly of which she speaks:

Hilary nowadays divided all remarks into three categories: those which were certain to start things off, those which looked risky, and those which, as far as she could see, might be perfectly safe.

As far as she possibly could she censored every remark before allowing herself to make it, and permitted none that had about them the slightest suggestion of danger. Not that one could ever be certain, of course.

Early in the novel, Hilary introduces her parents to Cynthia, a former schoolmate who is now a successful actress in London, and this too has important repercussions later on.

It's hard to discuss this book much without spoilers, so consider this my SPOILER ALERT.

Monica Redlich (second from right) and family

In short, Hilary's mother dies fairly suddenly (following a particularly excessive bout of gardening—no kidding), and the handling of her illness is odd indeed and takes away slightly from the power the scenes could have had. The doctor mentions both "hysteria" and some form of kidney ailment, but it's rather confusing where one stops and the other begins, particularly as we are also given to believe that she has simply stopped wanting to live. Subsequently, Hilary's mild romance with a school friend's brother ends because he fears her mother's instability could be hereditary, and thus begins the obsessive analysis of her parents' relationship and of her own personality that occupies much of the rest of the novel.

Later on, there's another effective passage about the haunting that Hilary can still sometimes feel even long after her mother's death:

She opened the front door and walked into the hall, her mind busy with some detail of housekeeping: and, in the instant while she pushed the door shut behind her, she was shaken violently from her preoccupation back into the present. Or was it the present—or was it perhaps the past?

She did not know. All she knew was that, as she stood there, the hall was full of foreboding, and fear, and unhappiness—not her fear, and not her unhappiness. The house was very still, but it was not the stillness of a winter morning. From upstairs, faint but utterly unmistakable, came the one sound that she would never, never forget. Francis was sobbing.

No Love Lost is ultimately a wild and woolly, intriguing mess of a novel. It undoubtedly fails on all kinds of levels as a novel, and yet somehow manages to be entertaining, readable, and even moving at times. In a way it's a rather traditional kind of novel, a bildungsroman even (how's that for a bit of lit-crit memorabilia?!), tracing a young girl's development from careless youth to maturity, via her mother's tragic death, failed romance, eventual marriage, and her subsequent coming to terms with her fears of her own emotional weaknesses. That the novel's tone varies with each stage of the plot—from the perkiness of a school story to melodramatic family angst to gushy romance to soul-searching and philosophizing—is only one of the odd elements here. At 320 pages, it's too long for the story it tells, and the last 30 pages are rather ridiculous and a bit tedious, as Hilary chews (and chews, and chews, and chews—like that bit of stubborn gristle you struggle to make swallowable at a public dinner because you don't know what else to do with it) over her parents' relationship and compares it with her own.

Most of it isn't very elegantly done, either, so by rights none of it should work…

And yet strangely it kind of does. Most of the time I found it surprisingly hard to put the novel down, and I think this has to come down to the charm and sincerity of Redlich's writing. I don't know enough about Redlich to be able to say for sure that No Love Lost is autobiographical, but it's hard to believe it's not. There's an author's note at the beginning:

Of the characters of this book two have been drawn in part from real people, both now dead. The others are imagined. - M.R.

Now, a bit of searching on Ancestry reveals that Redlich's mother Matilda died in 1927 at age 52, when Monica was only 18. That could match the details of the book, and Matilda might be one of the two real people mentioned. But Monica's father in fact lived until 1960, only five years before Monica's own death, so he can't be the other. Redlich's husband, Danish diplomat Sigurd Christensen, whom I thought could have influenced her portrayal of Hilary's husband, outlived Monica, so he can't be the other one either. Perhaps Cynthia is based on a real friend of Monica's? But her father's second wife, according to an Ancestry tree, though indeed 40 years his junior, as Cynthia is far younger than Edmund, lived until 1980. The trail goes cold.

At any rate, it's clear that at least some of the novel's events come from Redlich's own life. Much of No Love Lost has the immediacy and urgency of a letter from a close friend, and as such it's a rather special novel despite its many flaws. Thanks again to F.G. for the opportunity to read it!

By the way, it's odd to think that this novel was published the same year as Redlich's first children's book—perhaps that partly explains the varying tone of this book? But one mention in No Love Lost that caught my eye was of the "lovely church that deserves to be by Wren, only it isn't," pointing the way directly to her second children's book, Five Farthings, which, as some of you will know, is much concerned with Wren churches…

My first book introduction!: MABEL ESTHER ALLAN, In Pursuit of Clarinda (1966) (and some other recent MEA reading)

The lovely cover of the new Greyladies
edition of In Pursuit of Clarinda

A few weeks ago, I was delighted (and a bit anxious) to receive an email from Shirley Neilson at Greyladies asking if I would write an introduction to her new edition of this romantic suspense novel by one of my favorite authors, Mabel Esther Allan. (I've written about Allan several times before—see here.) I initially hedged, noting that while a fan I'm hardly an expert on Allan and couldn't speak with any authority about her. Shirley quickly assured me that authority wasn't what she wanted at all, but rather something more quirky and idiosyncratic. I considered this, agonized a bit, and then told myself that if there's anything I can do (and perhaps can't avoid doing), it's being quirky and idiosyncratic. So that was that. A few hours later I had a PDF of the book on my Kindle and was eagerly diving in.

And the book's original cover

And now I'm excited to say that the book is being released (complete with quirky, idiosyncratic intro), and Allan fans should be quite excited. Not about my intro (though of course you'll be excited about that too), but because In Pursuit of Clarinda is one of the rarest of Allan's titles—at the time of this writing, not a single copy is available on Abe Books for love nor money—and it's also one of her most entertaining and satisfying.

Allan wastes no time at all diving into her story. Eighteen-year-old Lucy Bucknall has been staying alone in London for a week while her parents are away visiting her elderly grandmother who has been ill. She's been enjoying herself, but now her friend Sally has gone on holiday and the joys of solitude are wearing thin. Staring idly out the window, she sees her handsome neighbor William Drake and resolves to go out in order to just happen to run into him (mmm-hmmm).

But William has disappeared from sight and Lucy strolls on into nearby Hyde Park, where she encounters instead a charming, slightly disabled, jumpy young girl named Clarinda, who after brief small talk about the relatives with whom she's staying, tells Lucy, 'I expect you’ll think I’m mad, but I have to tell someone and you’re so nice. I think they’re planning to kill me.' She elaborates on a hard-to-believe tale about the inheritance she will come into in a matter of days—if she's still alive—her fiancé who is recovering from a motor accident in far-off Scotland, and the diabolical uncles and aunts with whom she's trapped without any evidence of their evil intent except for a near miss with a gas fire, which they blamed on her own absentmindedness. In a few days, her relatives are planning to take her first to a remote farm in Wales and then on to the National Trust house where her Aunt Ann is a caretaker—complete with an ominous moat into which Clarinda imagines she might, because of her disability, just happen to tragically fall.

It's a far-fetched tale, but Lucy agrees to contact a friend of Clarinda's and help her go to stay with her until after her pivotal 21st birthday. The next day, however, when Lucy asks for Clarinda at her hotel, she finds that she and her relatives have suddenly cleared out, though a hotel maid gives her a clue Clarinda has left for her. And from there, with the help of William (whom she really does run into by chance this time) and William's gung-ho sister Della, she's off on a chase across England and into Wales.

It's an irresistible, fun, and page-turning plot, very tightly plotted and entertaining. I wrote before about another of MEA's romantic suspense novels, A Summer at Sea, in which the heroine, another eighteen-year-old named Gillian, was such a mopey, navel-gazing drip that I quite wished she would be washed overboard. But although Lucy has one or two moments of playing the dim-witted damsel (would any Brit for even a moment imagine that a scrawled clue from Clarinda, in which can be made out "Buck", was an attempt to write "Bucknall" rather than the obvious abbreviation for Buckinghamshire? even I, a dim-witted American, knew better), she is more often brave and resourceful and practical, and the new challenges she's facing (as well as the possibility of romance with William) make this a highly enjoyable "widening world" novel as well.

The book also bears the imprint of Allan's tendency to include excellent armchair travel in her fiction. In my intro to the book, I pick out some of the references along the way that would make it possible to pretty precisely recreate the journey Lucy and her friends make, and there are lovely details along the way. 

And the climax of the novel takes place in a fictional National Trust house called Brynteryn Manor which is brought to life so vividly that I thought it simply had to be based on a real house. And indeed, as Shirley figured out from some savvy googling, it turns out that MEA gave a pretty clear clue as to the house's true identity. At one point, she describes the house as "very like" Old Moreton Hall in Cheshire (now more commonly called Little Moreton Hall, though "little" isn't a term most would use to describe the house, if you look at some of the photos and videos to be found online). Indeed, Allan's descriptions of the house make it quite clear that she has merely lifted that house, Wizard of Oz style, and dropped it into Wales.

All in all, the book is great fun, and I'm thankful to Shirley for putting it on my radar—and for thinking of me for the introduction! (I should also mention, by the way, that I also make a special appearance in the newest issue of The Scribbler, which Shirley also publishes. I just received my copy yesterday and have barely been able to restrain myself from reading it in one sitting.)

As it happens, Shirley's timing was excellent, as I had just been reading a lot of MEA, and have continued to do so since finishing Clarinda. Allan wrote billions of books (really a bit less than 200 in all, but you have to admit that's quite a lot), so happily I'm in no danger of running out. I thought I'd use this opportunity to catch you up a bit.

Now easily my favorite of the MEA school stories I've read—and nearly up there with all-time MEA favorites like Changes for the Challoner and The Vine-Clad Hill—is School Under Snowdon (1950), which has been on my TBR shelves forever and turned out to be really wonderful. I've read some of Allan's other school stories, and was particularly fond of Chiltern School, but there's something about the charming characters, the interesting progressive school portrayed, and the way Snowdon rollicks along hardly giving the reader time for a deep breath.

An unhappy orphan is sent to a new school in Wales (three guesses what mountain is nearby), where she makes trouble alongside Gwenllian, another mysteriously discontented girl. The school features climbing as a popular extracurricular activity, and there are conflicts over the rules (Gwenllian is in fact an experienced climber, but is deemed too young for the challenging climbs). There's a particularly snowy winter, and a dramatic rescue is needed... The adventurous scenes are entertaining, but it's really the likable characters, the humor, and the scenery that makes the book. I loved it right from the first page, and wished—as many other MEA fans have before—that Allan had tried her hand at writing a school series, because I'd love to spend some more time with Verity and Gwenllian.

On the other hand, I was terribly excited a while back when a copy of Allan's Room for the Cuckoo (1953) came up at World of Rare Books for not such an exorbitant price, but this one proved a little disappointing. I'd been yearning for it ever since reading that Allan's first version of the book was actually a non-fiction memoir of her time in the Women's Land Army during World War II, subsequently revised into a girls' career story about farming because publishers were no longer interested in wartime memoirs. I can't help feeling that this is a tragic loss, and I still wish it were possible to read Allan's original version, because Room for the Cuckoo turned out to be a rather lackluster read. I'm sure some of the details about farm life were from Allan's actual experiences, but without the wartime background, and without any of the armchair travel or armchair adventuring that her books so often provide, it was all a bit drab. My little Dent copy of the book, with dustjacket, is nice to look at though...

I read MEA's The Ballet Family (1963) several years ago, but inexplicably only got round to the sequel, The Ballet Family Again (1964), very recently. It reminded me just how good the first book was, and also how extraordinarily good MEA can be at family stories. Each character has a distinct personality, distinct interests, and each is therefore likeable in his or her own way. And it's all making me think it may be time to finally sample MEA's Drina stories, written as Jean Estoril. I don't have any particular interest in ballet, but the Ballet Family books are making me think that’s not a prerequisite for enjoying well-done ballet stories.

Strangers in Skye (1958) is another of MEA's widening world novels, as 17-year-old Elizabeth Falcon, who has been a bit too obsessively studying and preparing for university, unwillingly arrives in Skye to spend a summer of rest and outdoor life. Her brother John is managing a fledgling youth hostel there, and facing some resistance from the locals. Of course, Elizabeth discovers a love for the outdoors, makes friends, and finds romance, as one would readily expect, but it's quite enjoyable and one can practically feel the brisk air of Skye in one's hair while reading it.

MEA obviously liked the sickly heroine plot device quite a lot, as it's also what gets Flora of Flora at Kilroinn (1956) to the Western Highlands for the summer after suffering from colds, measles, and mumps all in the course of one school year. (Why can't I get a doctor to send me to the Highlands for a couple of months, dammit?) This is another perfectly enjoyable story, but unfortunately far shorter than most of MEA's books (less than 100 pages), so it never seemed to be able to quite spread its wings. I wonder if it was written as a longer book and then harshly edited by the publisher?

And finally, I sampled one of MEA's late titles flirting with the supernatural. In A Chill in the Lane (1974), Lyd Allbright arrives in a small village in Cornwall with her adoptive family. The location is idyllic, and of course there's a handsome boy at hand, but Lyd has visions of a tragic scene of violence every time she passes a certain spot in the lane leading to the family's holiday home. It's a very light kind of ghost story, and never more than faintly eerie, with Lyd merely witnessing historic events rather than interacting in any way with ghostly figures, but it was enjoyable enough and all the story's elements link up satisfactorily in the end.

Wow, I really have done a lot of MEA reading lately! And, judging by my TBR shelves, I have more to come (thanks to another recent World of Rare Books sale):

  

Then there's New Schools for Old (1954), just reprinted by Girls Gone By...