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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

"What about tomorrow?"

"All right, darling. Of course."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

"More bangs?" she asked hopefully.

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

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

VERILY ANDERSON, Our Square (1957)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VERILY ANDERSON, Daughters of Divinity (1960)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading diary: ELIZABETH BERRIDGE, VERILY ANDERSON

ELIZABETH BERRIDGE, Across the Common (1964)

I occasionally waver a bit regarding the date limits of this blog and of my Overwhelming List.  I wrote a little bit early on in my blogging about the 1910 start date and my justification for that—using Virginia Woolf's convenient comment about a change in human nature around that year.  But I also ponder the 1960 end date sometimes.  It was rather random, really, and I've come across more than one interesting writer (think Mary Hocking) who only published their first works in 1961 or 1962.

But then I read a novel like Elizabeth Berridge's Across the Common, from 1964, and I think, okay, the 1960 cutoff makes sense after all...

It’s not that I actively disliked the novel.  Berridge is a masterful writer, and her earlier collection, Tell It to a Stranger, with its wartime stories, is a favorite. And it’s also not (he said defensively) that there aren’t numerous writers from after 1960 whose work I admire and enjoy, even if I don’t often write about them here.

It’s just that Across the Common seems to highlight the possibility that on or about 1960 human nature may have—unbeknownst to Virginia Woolf—shifted again.  The story of Louise, a troubled young woman who leaves her husband and returns to the home where she grew up and the three eccentric aunts who helped raise her, and while there uncovers a dark secret from the past, the novel possesses the signature Sixties confessional style—the first person narrator who meticulously analyzes the significance of her or his own personal experience and feelings.  As in Doris Lessing’s trailblazing The Golden Notebook two years earlier, or the dark poetry of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, both of whom had only recently appeared on the literary scene, self-analysis was, clearly, the thing. 

I would guess that this could be explained in part by the rise in popularity of psychotherapy about this time.  And, perhaps particularly for women writers and readers who were pushing for or simply trying to adjust to changes in the world around them and that world's expectations for women, it must have been a very liberating, very necessary form of self-exploration.  But it is certainly rather different from most of the writers and works that came before.  There have been first-person narrators since the birth of the novel, but the earnest belief in self-exploration as a serious and crucial undertaking seems to have been an innovation of the Sixties.  

One of my most inspiring undergraduate professors, who taught a brilliant course called British Women Writers and—apparently—had a rather considerable influence on my future interests, when I mentioned having read a Margaret Drabble novel, cringed slightly and said, "Oh, yes, women in dreary flats," and—while, to be fair, that hardly covers the breadth of Drabble's work—I have a feeling she may have meant something like what I'm trying to express here.  The “feminine middlebrow” seems, in the Sixties and beyond, to be evolving into something a bit different—more overtly political and concerned with rather different themes.  So I think perhaps I have my justification for the 1960 end date after all.

At any rate, apparently this style—in Berridge’s novel, at least—can rather grate on my nerves.  As much as I love some good soul-searching à la Margaret Atwood (or, indeed, Margaret Drabble), my initial notes on Across the Common rather snarkily refer to “subjective self-absorption and the over-inflated, portentous significance of personal experience,” so it had obviously made me a bit cranky.  That might be a bit overstated in retrospect, but it is true that Berridge seems to attach tremendous meaning to the secret violence in the past, which Louise is driven to uncover as if it’s the Holy Grail.  The trouble is, the actual violence, when it is revealed, is actually rather anticlimactic.  I mean, it’s a terrible event, but it’s hard to see why it would have had the tremendous repercussions of repression and neurosis that it did—and on multiple family members, no less.  

This may be quite intentional, I suppose, to indicate that the past, once revealed, is rarely as horrifying as it might have come to seem.  But even so, the effect on me was that I wound up thinking, "Seriously?  That's it?"  I was left with the feeling that a lot of drama and hushed revelation had had to be harnessed merely to help the annoying, self-absorbed narrator decide to go back to her ridiculously kind and understanding husband. (Though I can't resist saying that perhaps too little effort went into convincing the reader why he would want to have her back…)

Ahem. 

Having been just a bit snarky about the novel, I will go on to say that there are still entertaining elements in it.  Berridge’s prose is sharp and polished, and the spinster aunts, in particular, provide worthwhile high points (I do love a good spinster aunt—how I wish I had one of my own!). 

Here, from the earliest pages of the novel, is Louise pondering her inimitable Aunt Cissie:

Aunt Cissie had the same effect on me as a lemon was supposed to have if sucked in front of an unfortunate trombonist. She dried up my juices. Her whole life had disbelief as its pivot and for this reason I had always been wary of her. Once, years ago, she had been recklessly, dogmatically sure of herself. She would argue with the wry humour of the convinced, a person on the right side of life. Since the war, which had robbed her of her second husband and her only son, something had shifted in her. A new, unbalanced cynicism revealed itself by a sarcastic twist of the mouth, a semi-quaver of a shrug. Nothing, now, could move her. She would have turned the pages of Nero's music, one felt (had he had any), whilst he fiddled, glad of the light of the flames. At seventy she believed in nothing but her own and other people's wickedness.

Ah, if only the rest of the novel had focused primarily on the aunts, rather than their irritating, wishy-washy niece, I would likely be singing a different tune!

VERILY ANDERSON, Scrambled Egg for Christmas (1970)

I've mentioned here before that Verily Anderson's Spam Tomorrow (1956), a memoir of her experiences during World War II, is one of my favorites.  I've been gradually tracking down and reading her other humorous memoirs, of which Scrambled Egg for Christmas seems to have been the last (there were other works about her family history, but no more memoirs of her own life, as far as I can tell). I wrote about one of her earlier memoirs here, and I find they're always enjoyable and are perfect for light bedside reading or days when you don't feel like thinking very much.

Anderson's memoirs, which started so cheerfully with Spam Tomorrow and Beware of Children (1958), took a darker turn, naturally enough, when her husband died suddenly not long after the latter book was published, leaving her with five children and little means of support.  Reportedly, when she became friends with actress Joyce Grenfell in the mid-1960s, Grenfell was shocked by her poverty and bought her a house in Norfolk.

Not surprisingly, then, some of this worry and darkness comes through in this volume, which, though presumably written after her economic condition had improved, deals with those years of hardship.  Here, she and her children move to London on the suggestion of a friend, attempting to rent out their old farm; she undertakes translation work without a contract, so is taken advantage of; she has a serious illness (which a friend puts down to hysteria); one friend commits suicide, another dies suddenly, and on top of everything else both Flo the horse (introduced in the earlier memoir The Flo Affair, which I reviewed in brief here a while back) and her cat Chastity die.  Hardly the stuff of farce.

Verily Anderson in later years

But the book is still highly readable, and Anderson's is a charming personality to be with, even when she's not at her best.  If the book is a little unfocused (sometimes about the move to London, sometimes about a trip to Malta and then the U.S. for an abortive lecture tour, and sometimes about her children's mild misadventures), it is still entertaining, and there are some hilarious high points.  There are two I can't resist sharing.  First, an experience with a hairstylist:

As it turned out, when I kept [the appointment], I might just as well have come straight in from the street without having made it, as did the more forceful customer who was shown into the salon in front of me. After ten more minutes wait I was about to walk out when a young faun leapt out from behind a row of coats and, flinging a nylon cape round me from behind, guided me with part of it still in my mouth to a wash basin, where he tilted my head back and wetted my hair just enough I to prevent my trying to leave again. Twenty minutes elapsed before a girl came and added the shampoo.

'Shall I give you a rinse?' she asked.

'Yes, please,' I said, supposing that otherwise I should have to wait another twenty minutes for someone else to wash the shampoo out. Too late I realised she was dying my hair what turned out an hour and a half later to be a vivid shade of particularly metallic yellow that looked like a teazle and felt like wire netting. The bill, when it was presented, bore no relation whatsoever to the price list outside.

Ah, how many cape-flinging fauns one encounters at hairdressers!

And next, here is a rather more topical (and long, but I can't resist) description of Anderson's experience as part of a BBC documentary on single women:

At the B.B.C., the producer was apologetic about forgetting the existence of widows. She had only recently married but now she would really be able to make her point over the raw deal eked out to the unwed.

'If you could just say how beastly people are to you now you're a widow,' she explained, 'and how they don't ask you to parties any more—'

'But they aren't and they do.'

'Yes, but for the purpose of tying the thing up neatly, I'm sure you could think of some occasion when you've been slighted.'

'It isn't like that. Sometimes you're sad, or awfully disappointed or lonely or you don't know how to saw a plank in half. But, if anything, people are extra considerate. The only ones who don't ask you to parties any more are the ones who only asked you before because they wanted to get something out of your husband. Really, I just can't say that widows automatically get second-class treatment.'

Nor could the career girls, the divorcee and the separated. Our producer seemed disappointed.

'It's not really how I want to play it at all,' she said. 'You see, since I've just got married, I notice an enormous difference.'

'You would,' said one of the career girls snidely and the other one tittered.

Having gathered us up, however, the producer had to make the best of her material. Some of the speakers complied a little with her wishes to sound hard-done-by but mostly we were almost exaggeratedly boastful of the brighter sides of our circumstances.

'Personally, I feel more respected, not less, now I'm on my own again,' said the divorced wife. 'I can spend money how I like, sleep with the window open, and eat green peppers which my ex-husband abhorred.'

'Yes, and it's bound to give one a bit of prestige being rid of that perpetual fear of pregnancy without even having to go on the Pill,' agreed the separated.

'I can't think what listeners will get out of what we've just recorded,' one of the career girls pointed out. 'It all sounds desperately insincere.'

'Don't worry.' The producer gave a satisfied smile. 'We can easily cut it to give it the angle I have in mind.'

Some of the women's comments might give one pause, but they are certainly amusing, and a producer's efforts to slant a documentary are unquestionably not a thing of the past!

Recent Reading (VERILY ANDERSON, ELIZABETH CADELL, BARBARA PYM)

Every now and then I go on an absolute binge of ice cream for the brain—those books that entertain but aren't necessarily intended for profound analysis or deep enlightenment.

Recently, I've been delving a lot into the joys of humorous memoirs and cozy fiction.  Since there's not always a huge amount to analyze or discuss in these books, but since they're great fun and some of them aren't widely known or written about, I thought I'd write just a little about them in case others are interested in exploring them too.  I might do this occasionally as a catch all for books that are of interest but don't require a full post all to themselves.

Here are a few examples from the past few weeks:

VERILY ANDERSON, The Flo Affair (1963)

Verily Anderson is the author of one of my favorite World War II memoirs, Spam Tomorrow (1956), her humorous (and sometimes harrowing) experiences with love, marriage, and childbirth in the midst of the Blitz, rationing, and other bleak realities of war.  This was followed by Beware of Children (1958), her humorous (and also sometimes harrowing) memoir of starting a children's vacation home with her husband in their house in the country.

I hadn't had much luck finding out details about Anderson's other books, but I recently found The Flo Affair for cheap at Awesome Books and couldn't resist.  I knew Anderson did several historical works in later years, so I figured, based on the title, that this was an account of some torrid, long-forgotten scandal.  In fact, it turned out to be a continuation of Anderson's humorous memoirs, focused largely around her and her five children's experiences with Flo, an elderly horse they adopted, who one summer has a late-life crisis and begins a series of hookups with a nearby stallion (so I guess it is torrid after all!). 

Verily Anderson

This memoir is perhaps a little "lighter" on content and a little less focused than the two earlier books, but lately I am apparently a sucker for light, humorous tales (as this entire post must show) and found it enjoyable and readable.  And it does also have its darker undercurrents.  Anderson mentions that her husband has died only six months earlier, leaving her with five fatherless children to raise.  Meanwhile, a similarly large family nearby is on the verge of starvation and homelessness due to the mother's propensity for installment shopping.  While the former is mentioned only briefly and the latter is largely played for laughs, these elements perhaps explain the less rollicking tone of Anderson's writing here.

But nevertheless there are some laugh out loud moments, such as this one when Anderson consults a local attorney about the costs demanded by the owner of the stallion with whom Flo has had her fling:

‘I mean’—I tried to allay his fears—‘there’s nothing we can’t discuss.’

‘No, of course.  But if it’s divorce,’ he said quickly, ‘I know of an excellent woman solicitor—’

‘Oh, no, it’s not divorce,’ I said, as though tossing aside such an improper suggestion.  I tried to think of some really legal-sounding expression to cover Flo’s troubles.  ‘It’s only rape and impoundment.’

And a little later, after another of their neighbors has threatened to shoot the family dog if it strays onto her property again, Anderson takes her son to try out for the choir at an exclusive boys' school.  While awaiting the outcome of her son's audition and pondering their trigger-happy neighbor, she has the following exchange:

A kindly parson, whose own little boy had just been safely returned to him, leant across an empty chair to say consolingly:

‘It is a strain, but over very soon.’

‘Do I look worried?’ I asked.

‘Very, but so, no doubt, did we.’

‘I wasn’t actually thinking about my son’—I smiled—‘I was just wondering whether my daughters might get shot tonight.’

The parson looked startled and edged away, evidently accepting the fact that this particular form of mental strain took parents in extreme ways.

Completely silly stuff, indeed, but perfect ice cream for the brain.

ELIZABETH CADELL, I Love a Lass (1956) & Out of the Rain (1987)

A couple of years ago at the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Book Sale (around which I seem to build my life, judging from the number of times I mention it here), my partner Andy, as usual, diligently sifted through table after table of books in search of novels by my list of "high priority" writers.  This list is generally about six or eight of the more popular but inexplicably out-of-print women, like Elizabeth Cadell, D. E. Stevenson, Margery Sharp, Rumer Godden, and so on, which I know other savvy readers will snatch up in a moment.  It's kind of cruel to give Andy that list, really, because it's only rarely that he gets the pleasure of actually finding one.  But on this occasion, he happily came back from his searching with an Elizabeth Cadell—her very last novel, Out of the Rain—and in pristine condition, no less.

Naturally, I bought it—a Cadell is a Cadell, after all—but I admit that I was ambivalent about it and kept it on a lower shelf of my to-read bookcase for the past two years.  I was afraid that, seeing as Cadell's "prime" seemed to be in the 1950s and 1960s, the book would be only a pale imitation of wonderful, sparkling, witty, comfy-cozy novels like The Lark Shall Sing (1955), The Yellow Brick Road (1960), or Mixed Marriage (1964).  And I was afraid that, like many writers, Cadell in later life might have become too stuck in her formula, her inspiration gone, and might just have been rehashing standard plot lines and standard characters.

Well, that's a long introduction for very little payoff, but at this spring's book sale (which I've already written about at length—of course, seeing as how it's so central to my life…), I stumbled on another Cadell, I Love a Lass, from the very heart of her prime.  I couldn't resist diving right into it one weekend soon after, and it was over before I knew it.  I think I finished it by Sunday morning and wished it was twice as long.

It's hard to put my finger on what exactly makes an Elizabeth Cadell novel work so well despite the merest frolic of a plot, the shallowest of character development, the most obvious of love stories, and the simplest of prose.  Yet, somehow they are completely addictive—even while I find most "romance" novelists, about whom the same things could be said, tedious to the point of slumber. 

I Love a Lass is about two friends spending their holidays in France, whose plans are disrupted by a transportation strike.  They end up in a French village with an eccentric and stingy Comtesse, her would-be-playboy nephew, the young English girl the nephew has tried and failed to marry for her money, and the Comtesse's lovely neighbor.  The two men fall in love with the wrong girls, fall in love with the right girls, and solve everyone's problems in a rollicking, humorous, and fast-paced way.  And I can't even say I'm embarrassed that I absolutely ate it up.

So much so, in fact, that I couldn't resist pulling that lovely pristine copy of Out of the Rain off its lower shelf, dusting it off, and diving right in.  And you know, although it's true that, 31 years after I Love a Lass, Cadell was indeed still following the same kind of formula, it actually still worked surprisingly well.

Elizabeth Cadell

The novel must have seemed a complete anachronism when it was published in 1987, because—thankfully—Cadell made little effort to update her plots to fit the times.  (I think of Agatha Christie as an example of how awkward and tedious a great writer can be when she feels pressured to write about more "topical" issues—just thinking of those mysteries with delinquent youths or international drug rings at their centers can make me shudder for brilliant Dame Agatha.) 

In Out of the Rain, Edward Netherford, a London attorney without any emotional attachments, goes to York in pursuit of the stepmother of his clients, who is refusing to give up the Impressionist paintings her husband left to them.  He plans to stay at a hotel owned by a school friend of his, but a fire at the hotel drives him to a bed and breakfast owned by a charming young mother of three along with her mother and grandfather.  The rest is predictable enough.  You can see the romance coming a mile off, the plot developments are obvious, but it's all done charmingly and lightly and the pages turn themselves.  The humor is perhaps a bit more muted than in Cadell's earlier works, but it definitely still counts as ice cream for the brain.

As a result, I was inspired to pick up two more Cadells for cheap from Awesome Books—The Fox from His Lair (1965) and Home for the Wedding (1971).  I'm sure you'll hear more about those here in the future.

BARBARA PYM, A Glass of Blessings (1958)

Early this year, I started gradually working my way chronologically through all of Barbara Pym's novels.  A Glass of Blessings was one of the ones I hadn't read before, so it was particularly fun to finally get around to it.  Since so many people—scholars and bloggers alike—have already written so much about Pym's works, this entry is really just an excuse to share a few of my favorite quotes.

My favorite characteristic of Pym's writing, and one at which she is an incomparable master, is what I might call her "as if" strategy, wherein she creates campy, absurdist images to elaborate, usually, on a character's expression or intonation or other mode of behavior.  Here's an example that made me laugh out loud:

I also noticed two well-dressed middle-aged women with a young girl, whom I remembered having seen in church sometimes.  Near them stood a thin woman with purple hair and a surprised expression, as if she had not expected that it would turn out to be quite that colour.

Later on, Rowena, the narrator, looks through a catalogue and sees a photo of one of her acquaintances who is a model:

It seemed as if he might have stood there patiently while some busy woman knitted the jacket on to him.

Of course, it's not always literally an "as if."  Sometimes it's just a miniature flight of fancy the narrator engages in:

‘…the old people don’t like fish,’ I heard Mary Beamish saying.  ‘It’s funny, really, Mother is just the same.  She seems to need meat, and yet you’d think that somebody over seventy—’ she gave her bright little smile and made a helpless gesture with her hands.  I imagined old Mrs. Beamish crouching greedily over a great steak or taking up a chop bone in her fingers, all to give her strength to batten on her daughter with her tiresome demands.

These wonderfully absurd images, exaggerating whatever little foibles or insecurities are being encountered, are ridiculously hilarious to me.  Andy probably hates it when I read Barbara Pym, periodically giggling like a mad scientist beside him.  For good measure, here's one more of the passages I giggled at,  as two clergymen tell Rowena about their need for a housekeeper and cook:

‘…We can just about boil an egg between us!’

I saw them at the stove, anxiously watching the bubbling water; then, watches in hand, lowering the eggs into the saucepan.  I wondered if they would know what to do if they cracked.  I never did myself.

Barbara Pym

By the way, for whatever reason, this technique is so 
common among my gay friends and acquaintances that I found myself wondering if 1) Pym had influenced whole generations of gay men to the extent that they've absorbed her humor, or 2) if Pym swiped her ironic strategies from the various gay friends and acquaintances she seems to have had.  Seems like a dissertation waiting to happen (if in fact some enterprising grad student hasn't already written it)!

And along those lines, I wonder if there's any relevance in the following statement:

“Apparently a friend of Dorothy’s—that’s his sister’s name—always joins them…”

Surely Barbara Pym, with her numerous gay friends, must have known the meaning of “friend of Dorothy,” long used—in darker, more secretive days such as those in which Pym was writing—as a code to indicate someone who is gay or lesbian.  (Stemming, apparently, from "The Wizard of Oz" and Judy Garland's large gay fan base?)  It's not very meaningful here one way or the other, as the friend of Dorothy doesn't ever actually appear, but perhaps that makes it even more likely that Pym just tossed it in superfluously as an inside joke for the friends of Dorothy in her life?

Also, fans of Pym know that in most of her books she drops in a mention or two of characters from her other novels.  In A Glass of Blessings, we learn that Rowena and her friend Wilmet were WRNS in Italy during World War II and were infatuated with Rocky Napier from Excellent Women (1952).  They mention that he has remained with his wife despite their troubled marriage in the earlier novel and the two now have a child.  Later on, we also learn that Prudence Bates from Jane and Prudence (1953) has been engaged to a Member of Parliament but (typically) broke off the engagement.