They're (very nearly) here!: New Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press

It's almost time! Back in May, I announced our six new "cheerful village comedies" to help alleviate coronavirus and other stresses (well, originally planned to be happy, page-turning holiday reads for the summer, but now more likely to be used as antidotes to the news and to thoughts of cancelled summer travels). And now they're finally here, as of August 3. To tantalize you just a bit more in these final days of waiting, I'm revealing the full covers (complete with cover blurbs extensively agonized over by yours truly, who always makes very heavy weather of them indeed). I also have to mention our brilliant intro writers, as I neglected to do before.

 

First up, for the incomparable Miss Mole, we have a lovely new introduction by author and novelist Charlotte Moore, who has introduced other of our books, including Romilly Cavan's Beneath the Visiting Moon and E. Nesbit's The Lark. She has a marvelous way of summing up what makes a novel special, as in this brief excerpt:

 

Her sense of place is impeccable, her seasonal details exactly right. She knows for certain what her characters wore and ate, how they walked and talked. You won't get anywhere with this novel if you don't respond to Hannah - but who could fail to feel sympathetic interest in "a woman for whom repentance had no practical results"?

Who indeed!

 

Next is the wonderful Ruth Adam and her humorously autobiographical A House in the Country. Adam always reveals—even when making us laugh—a keen social awareness, as she did in her most famous work, her second novel I'm Not Complaining, which was reprinted in the 80s by Virago. It's only fitting, then, that her intro should be by journalist Yvonne Roberts, who brings her own incisive social consciousness to the intro and gives us some irresistible peaks at the reality behind Adam's novel. If her summing up of the house in question doesn't pull you in, nothing will:

 

The house is in Kent built in Tudor times by Flemish weavers with the curved gables of their homeland. It has 33 rooms, a resident bat, a temperamental insatiable geriatric boiler and five kitchens. It is home to lilacs and roses and swallows in the stable. Over the years, its powers of seduction ensnare not just the small band of Londoners but also a succession of domestic staff, weekend visitors, foreign paying guests and tenants. The whole is presided over by the magnificent figure of Howard, the head gardener. 

 

Now we come to Dorothy Lambert's frothy, funny Much Dithering, which is not only the title and a fair description of what goes on in the story, at least among some of the characters, but also, delightfully, the name of the village in which it all happens. Scholar and researcher Elizabeth Crawford is our go-to introducer for our least-known authors, and she never fails to find delicious tidbits (as when she was able to quote from Elizabeth Fair's unpublished diaries, or when she has enriched our readings of previously lost authors like Marjorie Wilenski or Barbara Beauchamp by unearthing hitherto unknown details of their lives and histories). We really put Elizabeth to work this time around, writing intros for all four of our remaining new titles, and she didn't let us down. It's amazing what she has unearthed about Dorothy Lambert, and not only that, she was able to trace the origins of some of Much Dithering's most notable characters in a Christmas play written by Lambert four years earlier! 

 

I don't like to play favorites with our books, since all of them are by definition favorites or we wouldn't be reprinting them, but Dorothy Evelyn Smith's Miss Plum and Miss Penny might have to be an exception. One of my earliest "discoveries" as a blogger (though obviously some savvy soul had discovered it before me since it had already been suggested as "possibly Persephone" at one of that publisher's events—happily for me, they didn't pick up on the suggestion!), it will always hold a special place in my heart. And Elizabeth Crawford again uncovers fascinating details about this rather private author, and I can't resist sharing this wonderful summation of the novel's characters via a tidbit about Smith herself:

 

Dorothy Evelyn Smith does not seem ever to have been interviewed by the press and, 50 years after her death, family memories are fading. But recollections that survive are of a woman who, besides listening to and making music, loved reading poetry, in particular Dylan Thomas’ 1954 publication, Under Milkwood. Knowing this, we can derive added pleasure as we encounter Alison Penny reading it at intervals throughout the novel, ‘faintly worried’ by some of the ‘confusing passages’. ‘It was rather more outspoken than she had bargained for...So very Welsh.’ Sly Miss Plum confesses to have been reading the book in bed, the implication being that no passages would have confused her. 

Finally, we have another author I stumbed across early on, Celia Buckmaster, and her two delightful comedies with a bit of an edge, Village Story and Family Ties. In her research for these intros, Elizabeth was able to track down no lesser source than Buckmaster's daughter, Loulou Brown, who provides wonderful insights into her mother's work and life, but also revealed (bestill my pounding heart) that the family possesses the manuscript of an unpublished third novel! Music to my ears, of course, and if the world ever returns to any semblance of normal, we hope to have a look at the manuscript and see what's what.

And that's all for this slightly smaller batch of new titles, but hopefully enough to keep you happily thinking for some time of eccentric village life with no trace of COVID anywhere!

And I just can't resist noting that we have, just this week, finalized plans for our next batch of titles, coming in January 2021, and oh boy! I can't reveal them yet, but I can say that I'm perhaps more excited than I've ever been before. Eleven titles, two authors, both new to our list—I can say no more, but stay tuned…

War looms over village life: RUTH ADAM, There Needs No Ghost (1939)

I've been meaning to get around to this rather odd and quite obscure novel for ages. I've written about Ruth Adam several times before (see here), and I always find her an interesting—and still under-rated—author. Socially-conscious, sensitive, and observant, but also frequently humorous and completely down-to-earth, she tends to provide a unique perspective on the life and culture of the 1930s-1950s.

Ruth Adam

She particularly found her niche, as you may already know, with her final book, A Woman's Place 1910-1975 (1975), a wonderfully readable social history of the ever-changing positions and expectations for women in the 20th century, which is available from Persephone. And her second novel, I'm Not Complaining (1938), about a schoolteacher's growing political involvement in Depression-era England, was reprinted by Virago in the 1980s but has sadly been out of print ever since.

There Needs No Ghost followed just one year after I'm Not Complaining. It's set immediately before, during, and just after the Munich Crisis of 1938 (see here to refresh your memory—I had to) and features two narrators—a vicar's sister in Caledon, a small village north of London, and a young, unmarried mother from Bloomsbury, a former actress and bohemian, who retreats to Caledon out of a desire to protect her child from the inevitable bombing raids expected any day.

Honestly, it sounds a bit more rollicking and entertaining than it really is. Adam takes her subject matter seriously, as is appropriate for the time of crisis she's describing, but although there's certainly humor here and there, the urgency of Adam's mission—to show the contrast of values between urban and rural England, and how they may be brought to terms so that everyone will ultimately be pulling together—doesn't necessarily make for scintillating reading, and it struck me as largely surprisingly dry and lifeless.

Oh, how I hate to be more or less in agreement with Queenie Leavis, the high-brow literary critic who enjoyed being condescending about most of the authors I love the most. But in this case, Leavis, writing in Scrutiny in 1939, could be echoing my own feelings:

Apart from being less well written and of a piece than I'm Not Complaining, Mrs. (not Miss as previously stated in these pages) Adam is less successful in her choice of her chief mouthpiece—the Vicar's sister, though the last drop of juice is wrung out of her, is a bit too limited to have so much rope and her style of thought a bit loosish to enjoy for long. The other chronicler, the Bloomsbury young woman, is first-rate in the line of the recounter of I'm Not Complaining. With all these reservations, the book is good entertainment literature and something over. There is some good back-chat between the Bohemians, an acute account of the emotions set up in complicated people by the Czech affair, and a more than acute display of the process by which the artificial, i.e., mental, values of Bloomsbury give way, in a village environment and in face of the realities of life, to the real values which tradition has found for a class of people who could never have afforded the luxury of artificial ones. Exposure of false values is always Mrs. Adam's strong suit. She is also masterly here in demonstrating the ineffectiveness of simple goodness in grappling with the political scene as well as the unexpected strength of the anima naturaliter christiana [translated roughly, the "natural Christian soul"—yes, I googled it] in personal relations. I for one consider a novel by Mrs. Adam, who has a point of view, a lively feeling for Character as well as for characters, and a personal sense of values, far more worth having than a sackful of art-novels (for instance, those of Miss Elizabeth Bowen and Miss Kay Boyle). Mrs. Adam remains a novelist not only to read but to watch.

Well! One does wonder what poor Elizabeth Bowen and Kay Boyle ever did to Queenie, but otherwise I concur with all of this (which worries me somewhat).

But even if it doesn't all quite add up to the sum of its parts, many of the parts are quite interesting. Ethel Perry, the poor vicar's wife, is limited as a narrator because of her ignorance of world affairs and a general naiveté, but one can see why Adam might have wanted to tell the story from her perspective, as she represents a large portion of any population, of those who are good-hearted and kind but unsophisticated. Naturally, sometimes this results in some good-natured humor at her expense, such as in these two passages:

So I was all alone that day, since Chris had been obliged to re-write his sermon completely since Hitler had changed his mind, and although one was so deeply thankful that he had, it seemed a pity that it should not have happened till the end of the week when the previous sermon denouncing him was already written.

...

I was sitting in the dining-room, reading in the paper about how delighted the villagers in Czechoslovakia had been to see Hitler and his soldiers, and feeling quite surprised to think what a terrible mistake we had almost made in trying to defend them from something which, as it turned out, they had been looking forward to so much. I could not help thinking that, although our splendid Government had done everything in their power to study the problem, it seemed a pity that someone, perhaps Lord Runciman, had not  cleared up this little misunderstanding before we all had such an anxious time.

I can relate a bit more to Kay, the unmarried mother, whose intellectual cynicism is rather poignantly in conflict with her love for her child:

I wondered how other women managed, and came to the conclusion that they must pick up more of the elementary information about how to run the women's side of life, from being brought up within sight and sound of it all. But I had been in dramatic school since I was sixteen and with touring companies for six years after that, and then with Philip in our studio. And I knew at least a hundred parts by heart and two languages and quite a lot about European politics and was too independent to keep any of the ordinary rules of society, but I did not know whether you could send for the doctor at three a.m. to look at a coughing baby. I wished I had been brought up quite differently, but then, like Alice in Wonderland, I shouldn't have been myself at all, and the situation would never have existed anyway.

And one gets the feeling that the Bloomsbury perspective on the crisis may be more or less shared by Adam herself. There's some passion in the following passages describing Kay and Philip's feelings:

When I had left a message with him, and arrived at the cottage for breakfast, I glanced at the paper, and found it was in a fine state of indignation because the British and French Cabinets had agreed on something, though no one knew what. Philip said it was plain enough they had agreed to sell up the Czechs and give the world meekly up to Fascism. In six months' time, he added savagely, I should have to be entering the baby for his first labour camp, and start embroidering nationalistic slogans on his bibs. At three he would give him his first dear little gun and start teaching him that his first duty was to hate all naughty little Communist boys and dirty Jewish girls.

...

First, the papers said the Czechs had accepted the plan. Then the radio said they had not. Then the papers said they had, but that Czechoslovakia was in an uproar and wanted to fight or have a revolution. It was like being tortured, given a drink and then tortured again.

Here and there there are also some lovely details of the period. I liked this glimpse of the practicalities of war preparation:

There was a knock on the door and I went weak with relief, thinking it was Philip at last and the awful waiting was over. But it was a man and a woman delivering gas-masks. They seemed afraid I was going to shut the door in their faces or insult them. They reminded me of young men giving you a free demonstration of their vacuum cleaners. I used to get all my carpets cleaned that way and so I never needed to buy one.

The mind rather boggles at all the varied reactions that poor man and woman must have encountered in delivering those gas masks. Many people must have been bewildered by the delivery, others laughing it off, and still others reacting angrily, our of their denial of the possibility of war, to the renewed fears the masks would have awakened. Not the most pleasant job I could imagine (though undoubtedly better than those who organized billets for evacuees).

There Needs No Ghost is a quite interesting novel, and I'm so thankful to Grant Hurlock for offering to share his copy of this vanishingly rare title with me (after my last Hopeless Wish List ages ago—good heavens, it does take me forever to get round to things). It's not, I think, a book for everyone's taste, but historians of the Munich Crisis or of England's preparations for war would certainly be wise to consult it. And Adam's unique perspective and sensibility is always wonderful to engage with.

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 1: RUTH ADAM, Murder in the Home Guard (1942)

At long last, I am ready to share with all of you the first of the FIVE practically nonexistent titles from my new Hopeless Wish List that Grant Hurlock very generously shared with me just before we jetted off to Italy. No doubt many of you have been losing sleep anticipating this revelation...

Ruth Adam has long been an author I've meant to explore more fully, after loving both her quite serious and politically engaged early novel I'm Not Complaining (1938), about a schoolteacher swept up in the political turmoil of the Depression years, and her late, still politically engaged but also hilarious, semi-autobiographical novel A House in the Country (1957), which I reviewed ages ago and raved about.

But it certainly looked as though her one murder mystery, tantalizingly set during the Blitz, was a hopeless wish list item if ever there was one. It seemed to exist only in the British Library. So imagine how happy I was when Grant emailed me and casually mentioned that he would share his copy with me (in addition to the the other four novels that had seemed almost as hopeless, of course). It was a bit like an ornithologist out for a casual stroll coming into a clearing and finding a small flock of whooping cranes. I know I'm a geek of the highest order, but that might have been the most excited I've been about anything this year (it would certainly be given a run for its money by our travels in Italy, and perhaps by having landed a new job, but I'm not absolutely certain which would win...).

Murder in the Home Guard is set in the little town of Longmarket, located in the countryside but crucially not far from an airfield. The novel opens with the town experiencing its first real bombing raid—more or less an accident, as an ineffectual German pilot mistakes the town for the airfield. As the town catches its breath the next morning, the residents discover the body of a young Home Guardsman, Philip Spencer, the troubled young son of the town grocer, who has been shot through the temple. It emerges from his final report that he had spotted flashes of light which appeared to be signalling to the German bomber, and which perhaps brought on the erroneous bombing.

Certainly an intriguing enough situation, no?

But I have to note right off the bat that if you're looking for an enthralling mystery with a brilliant, unexpected solution, you might be barking up the wrong tree to choose Adam's one experiment in the genre. Her experiment features an unusual structure: once the stage has been set with the bombing and the discovery of Philip's body, Adam follows up with three long flashbacks, each focused on a different character who has featured in the Chief Constable's initial investigation. The Chief Constable's musings on the case set the stage for the flashbacks, and they're too irresistible not to share:

The Chief Constable sat in his office and drew on the blotting-paper. He pictured Longmarket as a town of ants under a huge stone, with each little ant scuttling about its important business, heedless of the fact that the stone had been lifted off, and that a gigantic human monster hovered over it, ready to crush it to pieces. Last night the German war machine had hovered for a moment over its thousand homes, but the little ants below had gone on blissfully running about on the adventures of their own little lives just the same. He wrote on the blotting-paper:

"Sally was in love."

"Philip Spencer wanted to be a poet."

"Betty was homesick."

He stared at them and scribbled them out. He sighed to himself, and murmured Mr. Maxwell's comment:

"The facts look quite different when you know the whole story."

The three flashbacks focus on Sally, a young nurse who idealizes her profession and fancies herself a feminist and a selfless heroine (but who turns out to be a pushover for a young soldier); Philip, the victim of the crime, the son of the local grocer, who has had an affair with a middle-aged male poet but may now be questioning his sexuality again (and Adam's portrayal of both the affair and the questioning is quite sensitive and complex for its time); and Betty, a sassy young evacuee who has been bounced from billet to billet because she is a bit of a problem child.

The flashbacks include considerable digressions from the background of the murder—Adam is far too fascinated with character to merely sketch out the evidence and the pieces of the puzzle—and the digressions perhaps either lift the novel beyond the usual level of mystery writing into the realm of literature, or, depending on your perspective, render it merely a failed thriller. (I think I might fall somewhere in between.) I enjoyed them a lot, because Adam is always breathtaking at making the reader feel and understand her characters, but I confess I did also feel by the end that the plot was flying off the rails.

However, to be fair, Adam herself started off this book with a wonderful "Apology," explaining the genesis of the novel and the conditions in which it was written, which were challenging to say the least:

I am sorry about this.

Almost every night, during the time I was trying to write this book, there used to be a German plane wandering about the sky. I got to think of it as being always the same German plane, with the same German pilot.

Adam nicknames the pilot Hans, and she has considerable fun at his expense:

Hans never seemed to do much good (good from his point of view, of course). He seemed an indecisive Hamlet of a man, given to chugging endlessly round the same few square miles, trying to make up his mind about murder.

Sometimes he dropped bombs. There was a golf-course near by which seemed to have a fascination for him. Once he put five in a row in the fields in front of our house. But it never got to be a habit.

This Apology alone is almost worth tracking down the novel for. It provides a humorous and entertaining glimpse of what life was like for a novelist trying to be creative in the midst of chaos and destruction.

I have to share a couple of examples of Adam's brilliance in sketching out her characters and capturing the humor of even the darkest situations. There's Mr. Maxwell, for example, for whom the unexpected bombing in the town arouses fantasies of casual heroics:

It was as though the casement window of his tidy little house opened on perilous seas, when he only had to walk out of his front gate and wait for his parachutist to land nearby and then be home again in time for breakfast. For a moment he fell into his dream and reflected as to whether it would be desirable to have him land actually in the garden. He pictured himself showing friends who came to dinner, in festive post-war days, the exact spot. One might even have a stone put up, with a tablet about it. Or perhaps it would be better to refer to it with studied carelessness. "That rambler's never been the same since that Nazi dragged his parachute across it simply ruined the roots."

There's Mrs. Dimond, an evacuated mother-to-be who hasn't quite settled in to country life:

She stood at the door watching them go down the garden path under the arches of roses. The sweet scent drifted up to her on the summer breeze. She sniffed it, dreaming of the Caledonian Market on a Friday afternoon, when you could buy a bunch of glowing red for a song. and take it home triumphantly and say, as you put it in an empty jam-jar, "Smells like the country, don't it?" But that didn't mean you wanted to go to the country, any more than when you talked about heaven you would go and put your head in the gas-oven.

And finally, Adam is always concerned with children, and is savvy and convincing in her portrayals of child psychology. She has a field day with Betty, who cheerfully goes from billet to billet, always rejected—for nits in her hair, for an eagerness to discuss the facts of life with her hosts' other children, or for sundry other reasons. Clearly, she has a strong sense of self and isn't overly concerned about the negative reactions of others:

Betty was not in the least like the child of the psycho-analyst's textbooks who suffers agonies from the suspicion that her parents do not really want her. She had no need to suspect it. She knew. She was told so half a dozen times every day, and throve on it. She knew that she was a bother. She knew that she kept her Mam away from the pictures and the pub and wore her out, body and soul. But it didn't trouble her. What was the use of worrying about the soul-searchings of Mam and Dad and their emotional attitude towards her? They were there. They would protect her, feed her, care for her, provide a roof over her head. She would just as soon have started speculating about whether the teacher at school wanted to teach her, whether the bus-driver wanted to drive her to the Clinic, whether the sun wanted to rise each morning and warm her.

So, would I recommend Murder in the Home Guard as a mystery? Well, no. Apart from its other weak points, plot-wise, part of the solution to the murder here involves a considerable bit of propaganda, and characters behaving in a way that—although there is a kind of stark logic to it—is so idealized that it's completely impossible to believe. No author writing in peacetime would have been likely to try to convince their readers that such behavior could happen, but Adam, her head in the heady clouds of noble, stiff-upper-lip, Britain-can-take-it morale-building, dives wholeheartedly into it.

But as a wonderfully entertaining, smart, funny novel of wartime life, I could hardly recommend Murder in the Home Guard highly enough. If it isn't Adam's best or most cohesive work, or a particularly effective murder mystery, it still has many high points, and I'm still thrilled to have had the chance to read it. Thanks again to Grant for the opportunity. And more revelations soon about the other four books he shared with me...

RUTH ADAM, A House in the Country (1957)

This book is clearly directed at me. 

Now, I realize that Ruth Adam, writing in the late 1950s, a decade or so before I was born, may not have been aware that she was writing for me personally, but I'm convinced that it's true nevertheless.  For surely few people reading this book could have contracted a more virulent strain of idealized fantasizing about life in the British countryside than the one I have.

And that's exactly what A House in the Country is about.  In it, a group of six friends who have spent the dark years of war fantasizing together—while stuck in air raid shelters and food queues—about an idyllic life in a country house, seize, as soon as the war ends, on a seductive newspaper ad and rent an authentic old 33-room manor house in Kent—complete with four acres of lavish gardens and an elderly gardener seeking to return the house as far as possible to the functional bustle of its glory days.

Although the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes A House in the Country as a novel, it's certainly written in a memoir style and Adam uses her own name for the narrator.  She even opens the book with the assurance that it's a true story:

This is a cautionary tale, and true.

Never fall in love with a house. The one we fell in love with wasn't even ours. If she had been, she would have ruined us just the same. We found out some things about her afterwards, among them what she did to that poor old parson, back in the eighteen-seventies. If we had found them out earlier... ? It wouldn't have made any difference. We were in that maudlin state when reasonable argument is quite useless. Our old parents tried it. We wouldn't listen. "If you could only see her," we said.

Despite this dire warning, however, early on in the book there is plenty of food to feed my fantasy.  There's an amazing description of the magnolia tree outside of one of the main room's enormous windows, bursting suddenly into bloom one day, and Adam is thrilled when the elderly gardener asks her what flowers she likes best so he can plan the greenhouse accordingly.  Then there's this simple description of the space available in the house:

The south wing had the family rooms and the east wing the largest and grandest ones—the great dining-hall and the Best Guest above it, which looked out on to rolling lawns and a copper-beech tree. The New Wing, which was the north one, had servants' quarters. There were five main kitchens and four smaller service rooms. The west wing had sewing-rooms, preserving-rooms, and the lady's maid's room.

...

Every bedroom had a dressing-room. We all became remarkably tidy. You wouldn't have known our bedrooms as belonging to the same people who had once had coats flung on the bed and overflowing suitcases on all the chairs. The house imposed order upon us, whether we liked it or not. When you have thirty-three rooms, you feel obliged to keep something in each one, and the possessions which had filled the little suburban house to bursting-point now vanished quietly into the depths of the manor.

At first, it's difficult to place this book in the context of Adam's other works, which tend to be rather serious and socially concerned.  War on Saturday Week (1937) theorizes about the causes of war as a new one approached; I'm Not Complaining (1938, reprinted by Virago in the 1980s) is about a schoolteacher during the Depression; later novels like Fetch Her Away (1954) and Look Who's Talking (1960), deal with social work and disadvantaged children; and of course her final work was her wonderful history of the shifting roles and expectations of women, A Woman's Place 1910-75 (1975, available now from Persephone).

But gradually it becomes clear that some of the same concerns are present here, albeit treated more lightly.  And this is what, for me, makes A House in the Country a cut above the numerous other humorous memoirs about people adapting to new homes, new lifestyles, new countries, etc.

One of my favorite examples is that Adam—as the one member of the group who does not work outside the home and who is therefore stuck with most of the housework—imagines she sees the ghost of a scullery maid, who would have lived virtually all of her life in the impractical, unpleasant, dungeon-like scullery:

I got a haunting idea that the house was paying me back for the generations of women who had slaved to keep it clean and warm. There was a dreadful little scullery, with a low stone sink which seemed to break your back in two when you used it. It had a dark window and a stone floor and plaster crumbling off the walls. In the old days there had been one little girl who spent her whole working life in it, standing washing dishes from six in the morning until eleven at night. If I went in there in the half-dark I used to think I saw her, bent over the sink. Seen from belowstairs, the manor looked quite different. I began to think our experiment did not deserve to succeed. The gracious life in the front wing, after all, depended entirely upon service in the back wing, and it didn't seem a justifiable way of living.

The unfortunate scullery maid (I can't help but imagine Daisy from Downton Abbey) would have been essential to comfortable living in the manor house because the house, though beautiful and lushly comfortable to its "upstairs" residents, demanded slavery "downstairs":

If you have a house three times too big for you, it ought to be possible to shut up two-thirds of it. There was only one way we could have done this with the manor—by moving ourselves into the servants' quarters and staying there. No group of people could support themselves in any other part of the house. In our long struggle with the manor, she always defeated us because she had been built as a gentleman's residence. The north wing, holding the kitchens, was the engine-house of the great building. And the engine-house had been deliberately placed as far as possible from the gentry's quarters. If you wanted to keep a log-fire to warm yourself in the drawing-room, the most southerly point of the building, and also to keep in the boiler—the most northerly—you would not be able to sit by either. It would mean, instead, a continual journey to and fro—through the hall, through the great dining-hall, down the kitchen passage, and back again, round the other side of the square, along the west corridor, past the preserving-room and the store and the wine-cellars, though the double doors which led into the back hall, and through the second double-doors into the front hall again. ...

"[I]f only we could make the manor subscribe a little bit towards her own upkeep," we fretted.

But she was an aristocratic lady on our hands. All ideas for making her work for a living were wrecked on the fact that she was born to be served and not to serve.

They quickly discover that they must have help, but equally quickly learn that no one in the village will come to the manor because they know of the herculean work involved.  They find one "fast" young girl who promptly gets pregnant by a soldier and leaves them, then another who seems saintly until she goes after the cook with a knife.  When they are finally able to find a pair of girls who work well together, Adam describes their painstaking efforts to offer the girls a 40-hour work week with overtime for any extra hours.  When those girls reluctantly leave, they find a live-in couple, the Williamses, who are hardworking and efficient, and transform life at the manor until their own lives become a little too much like a "twentieth-century Wuthering Heights."

And other problems arise too.  Over time, the friendships forged in the hardships of war begin to fade, and members of the initial group depart, leaving a devastating gap in their financial resources.  They attempt to fill this gap, hilariously, by selling vegetables and flowers from the garden, raising pigs (and curing the resulting bacon), and, finally, taking in holiday guests.  One of the guests, a young Frenchwoman who had been in the Maquis during the war, tells them (with the children present) a harrowing story of brutally eliminating a collaborator.  Another, and my favorite (surely not for any similarities between myself and her...) is a Swedish Anglophile:

She arrived at the manor, bewildered by walking into her dream at last, on the very morning when the magnolia burst into bloom. With her, we had no need to put on a painstaking act of the British Home Shown to Foreign Tourists. She assumed that everything we did was wonderful, and so we could afford to be ourselves.

The first evening it was chilly and Mollie lit the kindling under the logs in the hall. We pulled up the chairs and turned to her. A sweet smile broke over her face.

"So you really do it?"

We were startled.

"It says in the books that when the English light one of their open fires they pull the chairs up and sit in a half-circle round it. I always wondered if that was correct."

...

She loved to hear someone tell a long, painstakingly funny story brought back from the village pub. She never could follow the story. It was the reception she waited for.

"So the English really do laugh out loud when friends are together," she would say contentedly.

We supplied her with The Edwardians to read in the evenings, explaining the phrases to her when she got stuck. Then we sent her off, with a packet of sandwiches to spend the day at Knole, telling her it was Chevron House, in which the book was set. We awaited her return with sympathetic interest. She came in and looked at us speechlessly.

"It's too much," she said at last. "It was too beautiful, and too large. I'm going straight to bed."

Absolutely none of this, of course, reminds me in the slightest of my own first, long-awaited visit to England last year.  I'm sure I was much more stoical and less idealizing. (Or not.)

But despite their inevitable ultimate failure, they keep struggling to make ends meet and maintain the manor:

But we could not make ends meet. However much we tried to eliminate luxuries, we were paying for the most expensive luxury of all—privacy, space—our own piece of land. We might eat boiled cod and parsnips, and wear ragged clothes. But we woke, between our patched sheets, in large lofty rooms, with the sun blazing through great mullioned windows. On the wide grass stretches, enclosed from the road by ancient trees, our own footprints would be the only ones in the dew. And our children's life was stripped of everything cheap and harmful and full of everything that is right for childhood. We were willing to do without everything else; but even so we could not pay for these things.

In the end, it takes a personal tragedy to put a final end to their fantasy of country life (and they do finally discover what happened to the poor old parson who had tried to live in the house in the 1870s), but in the meantime the reader is treated to a constantly entertaining tale full of fascinating detail about life in the immediate aftermath of the war (and some vivid flashbacks to the war itself), and about the realities of life in the kind of house most of us will only experience via "Downton Abbey" or "Upstairs, Downstairs."

By the way, for anyone keeping track, there is yet another example here of a baby being left outside to sleep:

Howard built a wire-netting cage, with a gate in it, for the baby's pram, so that he could lie anywhere in the garden without fear of marauding cats or snakes.

(!!!)

I mentioned recently that Rachel Ferguson's A Footman for the Peacock was one of the books that made me want to start a blog, the purpose of which would be to share my pleasure in books that are little known and little read but which might bring pleasure to other readers too.  This is another such book.

[And as for my own fantasy of an idyllic life in the English countryside?  Well, of course I realize how absurd a fantasy of life in a manor house would be.  Completely impractical!  But I'm sure there could be no disadvantages to life in a cozy thatched cottage (but with room for a sizeable library) near the Salisbury Plain.  Right?...]

*     *     *     *     *

On a side note, for those interested in the many book clubs that seem to have thrived at mid-century, my copy of A House in the Country is a low-cost edition created for the Country Book Club, of which I had never previously heard. On the back dust cover is a selection of "CBC Past Choices." I've never heard of any of them either, though some could be of interest:

For anyone out there who's as obsessive as I am, here are the front flap (who doesn't love free books?):

and the back flap (all told, I think "£2 0s 6d" is a fair price for six books—I recommend joining!):

Has anyone out there come across this book club before?