Tag post-war fiction

Why would anyone need a map or a compass?

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If Mollie Panter-Downes and Barbara Euphan Todd pulled me out of the existential ennui brought on by too much Georges Simenon with their marvellous WW2 and post-war writings, then Molly Clavering has just pinched and patted my cheek and sent me on my way with a spring in my step and song in my heart. You certainly must read her books. You will love them.

The song, incidentally, might be something by Bothwell’s finest Friends Again, for there is something in Clavering’s writing that conjures a similar lightness of touch, an earthy delirium that speaks of late summer morning dews and early autumnal crackling wood fires. There is a parallel too perhaps in their relationships with other, more storied contemporaries. For whilst the Friends Again gang were reportedly deemed too uncool (and a little late) for the Postcard party, so too did Clavering suffer perhaps a little next to the successes of her great friend D.E. Stevenson. So whilst Stevenson’s books sold in terrific numbers, Clavering’s, apparently, whilst hardly bombing, nevertheless sold significantly less. Perhaps then it’s more akin to comparing Friends Again to, say, Haircut 100, with whom they shared a similar chunky knitwear aesthetic but failed to break the charts (or youngsters’ hearts) in quite the same manner. Certainly the band members might have borrowed their look from the dashing young men who feature in Clavering’s books. All shaved back and sides, floppy fringes, plus the sturdy leather boots and Aran sweaters of Naval Officers. I am basing this entirely on the evidence of two books, you understand, but apparently the whole Naval Officer character is a recurring theme in Clavering’s novels. She clearly had A Thing, then. Whether she enjoyed the look or sound of Haircut 100 or Friends Again is unknown, however. She would have been in her 80s when they were making records, so the chances are she would have been unimpressed, but you never know.

My first Clavering, then, was the utterly delightful ‘Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer’. First published in 1953, this is another of those post-WW2 novels that prickles lightly with post-war austerity and the sense of Life Returning To Normal, where Normal is something altogether New. There is less of the sense of that new age being as discomfiting for the Middle Classes (as the characters in the book assuredly are) as there might be in other post-war novels, but there are slight nods of acknowledgement. If there is a criticism of the book it is just that those nods are so slight, particularly in the case of one of Mrs Lorimer’s daughters who spent the war flying aircraft from one place in the UK to another and now appears to struggle to return to earth, as it were. The daughter in question seems hardly to exist in the novel, being mildly ignored by Clavering and the rest of the extended Lorimer family; not exactly Cast Out, but certainly existing on the edges, as if no-one (Clavering included) seems to know quite how to figure her. She would make a fine jumping off point for a historical novel. This is picking hairs, however, for ‘Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer’ is hardly positioned as a novel that intends to make Serious Points about society, people or anything else. Rather, it is an unashamedly light hearted book that giggles and glistens in the sunlight, unafraid to unravel its threads into occasional trip hazards in its relentless and joyous pursuit of pleasure.

The novel is, I believe, to a degree autobiographical. Mrs Lorimer appears to be a thinly disguised D.E. Stevenson, with her dear friend Grace Maxwell as Clavering. The portraits of both women are warm and quietly admiring, and if one might arch an eyebrow and suggest that Clavering has been particularly kind to herself then by all accounts the depiction appears to be accurate, for contemporary descriptions of Clavering describe her as a figure with an marvellously positive outlook and a cheery disposition. Notable dissenters to this opinion at the time of the book’s publication were Stevenson’s children, all of whom necessarily are given at least one prickly character trait that Clavering teases at and weaves her narrative around. By all accounts the irritation did not last long however, and that is no real surprise, for all the little nuances are really just genre-related literary devices and rather obviously so. Still, it’s perfectly understandable to see how they might have irked, particularly in the rather highly strung character of Phillis who is a bit of a spoilt and hysterical adult-child. Whilst we do get glimpses into how the pre-war family experiences might have moulded these characters, this is perhaps not as deeply explored as it might have been in a more, ah, ‘highbrow’ novel. If that kind of interminable raking over of The Past is the kind of thing you enjoy then I dare say that ‘Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer’ would be sniffed at in distaste and left untouched on the shelf. Whilst understandable (we each of us have our Points Of Interest and Areas Of Pointed Ignorance, after all) I cannot help but suggest such an attitude would be a shame, for ‘Mrs Lorimer’ is one of those wonderfully undemanding novels that romps along with a deceptively easy step, every so often dropping a line or two that, whilst not exactly shatteringly insightful into the nature of existence, nevertheless causes one to nod sagely. The more so, I expect, if one has reached the same sort of age that Clavering was when writing (53, since you ask). There are, in particular, some lovely observations on the process of maturing, or not, and when Lorimer/Stevenson reflects on “…what a silly little fool one was at twenty-three” and Douglas/Clavering responds with “Most of us were. Some of us still are. It’s a safeguard to realise it…” one rather hopes that anyone of a similar age or older will recognise a universal truth lightly proclaimed. I know I do.

There is something too, I think, of Clavering in the character of the elderly Miss Balfour in the 1956 novel ‘Near Neighbours’. I understand that this is an unusual entry in Clavering’s catalogue in that it is set largely in an urban (Edinburgh) rather than rural setting. The fact that I have a lifetime ambivalence about Edinburgh no doubt informs my thoughts that the place hardly matters in this context, but unlike in ‘Mrs Lorimer…’ where the lightly fictionalised landscapes around the Scottish border town of Moffat are evidently fired through with knowledge and love, Edinburgh in itself hardly seems to figure beyond some tourist brochure references to the castle and Princes Street (though oddly no mention of the one-o-clock gun going off…). Instead the setting of ‘Kirkaldy Terrace’ (somewhere in the West End?) is little more than a vehicle for placing the characters next door to each other, winding them up and then sitting back to watch them race around bumping into each other. If that sounds harsh, then it is not meant to be so, although it must be said that, as in ‘Mrs Lorimer’, there is enough additional evidence in ‘Near Neighbours’ to suggest that Clavering is just a little clunky in her writing. As I say, that’s not necessarily a criticism, more an observation. There are rough edges. Pieces don’t quite fit together. There are little cracks in the plaster work and some splodgy paint work on the window sills; the gloss not quite so carefully applied as it might be. Yet it is a charming awkwardness rather than an irritating lack of skill. To pull in another obscure musical reference, Clavering reads rather like Marine Girls sounded. The appeal of breathless wonder and purposeful naïveté should never be underestimated, after all.

It is difficult to say anything in detail about ‘Near Neighbours’ without throwing in spoilers, but suffice to say that the novels oscillates mildly between the aforementioned Miss Balfour (in her late 60s and recently come into sole ownership of her large terrace home after the death of a domineering elder sister) and the Lennox family who live next door. It’s the Lennox daughters (all named after trees) and, to a lesser extent the son (not named after a tree, but rather a mint…) who largely dominate the book as each in their own way navigates the post-war landscape of youth and young adulthood. Romance inevitably dominates (it’s Romantic Fiction at heart, after all!) and inevitably too there are numerous roadblocks and diversions on the route to True Love And Happiness for all of them. What raises the novel above the level of Workaday Romance, however, is the figure of Miss Balfour as a kind of unifying element. She acts almost as a peculiar fairy godmother, an angelic figure spreading peace and goodwill. There is, indeed, a lovely line which suggests that “What she did not know and would not have believed was that the people who knew her could not help living up to her belief in their good qualities, or that their virtues were sometimes no more than the reflection of her own shining honesty and kindliness.”, whilst the novel’s closing lines delicately suggest a surprised saintly figure beatifically providing the light by which the other characters travel into this and that.

So whilst there is perhaps something of the character of Clavering herself in Miss Balfour, it’s also unlikely, given the small amount of research I have carried out, to suggest that Molly Clavering would have the nerve to suggest herself as anything approaching saintliness. And yet, perhaps too there is something of a knowing smile behind it all. A twinkling of the eye as the soloing Clavering who, like so many of her generation Never Married, perhaps cast her sight forward to the woman she might (have) be(en). A deliciously soft self-aggrandisement shot through with a wicked barb of deflationary wit as when we are told that “one is usually apt to dislike the unfortunate person whose praises one hears sung too often…. like the books people say you must read because you’ll be certain to love them.” Touché.

Ready for Romance

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If one or two of my more recent forays into the realm of detective fiction have left me a little tired then this is perhaps due to the fact that my attention has been somewhat diverted by Other Things. Notable amongst these have been visitations (and at times re-visitations) to the enormously rich body of work left by Ronald Blythe who passed at the start of 2023 aged one hundred years. What a life. I find Blythe’s writing to be deceptively soothing. Deceptive because there is, in his soft tone, something of the excitable school child flitting hither and thither. There is always a treasure trove of reference points to be chased when reading Blythe.

Yet despite his texts so often being tightly packed with jumping off points for exploration, Blythe also understands that Less Is More. There is little of the extraneous in his writing. Tangents veer off quite naturally and the lines loop exquisitely back into the design of the whole, like some magnificent illuminated manuscript carved as an Edward Bawden print block.

All of which means that my head has variously been turned by dips into John Clare, Francis Kilvert, James Woodforde and of course looking back at John Nash again. Paul too, naturally, and Ravillious and Bawden, all of whom seem to be quite fashionable (again). I’ve also been reading and looking at Thomas Hennell, who I have not noticed Blythe mention yet surely fits into the same universe, being a friend of Bawden and that circle. Hennell was also a lay preacher, which is a nice Blythe connection I suppose. Then there are Kurt Hutton’s photographs and James Hamilton-Paterson’s writing about Ships, Planes, Cars and Trains and the great dismantling of Britain (“the British disease in microcosm: laissez-faire government that, in its ideological obsession with shareholder profitability, puts off planning the nation’s infrastructure in the hope that private enterprise will take care of the future: something that has yet to happen anywhere on earth.”). All diverting and/or peerlessly riveting in turn.

Mostly though I have been distracted from detective fiction by more of those Furrowed Middlebrow books that the Dean Street Press have put out these past years. Foolishly I had turned my nose up at them for some time, assuming that they must surely be trashy romances. And whilst, yes, there is a lot of romance in their pages there is nothing trashy about them. Best leave that to the racey pulps, for which there is most certainly a place, just not perhaps in the drawing rooms of the millions of middle class readers who enjoyed the likes of Susan Scarlett and D.E. Stevenson in their prime.

I wrote about my discovery of Scarlett (or Noel Streatfeild if you prefer) a couple of months ago and really everything said there stands. There is still a place for froth and flimsy just as there is for fun’n’frenzy, and more of Streatfeild’s Scarlett novels remain on my to-be-read shelves as reliable backups for when the world gets just too dark and dreary to bear looking at. She’s been joined there by D.E. Stevenson, whose first Miss Buncle book I so enjoyed last year in a classy Persephone reissue. I admit I am looking forward to the remaining Buncle’s but there is so much else to discover and I rather think they might be lovely Spring and Summer reads, when the garden beckons and the warmth of the sun might heal so many wounds, physical and spiritual. Meanwhile it has been Stevenson’s ‘trilogy’ of novels from 1949 to 1951 that have most recently lit up the darkest depths of Winter.

In many ways 1949’s ‘Vittoria Cottage’ is the odd one out of the trilogy as it alone is set in the balmy Southern climes of England as opposed to the isolated rural farming landscapes of the Scottish Borders that root ‘Music In The Hills’ and ‘Winter and Rough Weather’ (aka ‘Shoulder The Sky’). ‘Vittoria Cottage’ is also the book in the trilogy that is most easily read as a standalone novel since the threads and characters that feed into the next two are fairly minimal. It’s a lovely book in its own right and is fired through with the kind of post-war detail and musing that I am increasingly a sucker for. There is uncertainty and confusion. There are characters struggling to cope with the aftermath of trauma. There are truckloads of insecurity and impulses for self-sacrifice. It might all be rather overwhelming were it not for Stevenson’s deftness of touch and core of warmth and humanity. One rather gets the feeling that Stevenson would ascribe to the notion that neither being an optimist or a pessimist make a difference to the outcome of anything, but that the optimist has a rather happier time waiting.

‘Vittoria Cottage’ then is an optimistic novel, as are ‘Rough Weather’ and ‘Music In The Hills’, in which there may be cads and blighters but you know that in the end Those Kinds Of People will be inevitably sad and empty (they do “nothing but chase pleasure from morning to night without ever catching up with it.”) and will get their comeuppance. Everything in the books is calculated to be largely free from risk and it is hardly a spoiler to say that in the isolating snow storm that inevitably descends in ‘Winter and Rough Weather’ there are no tragedies to speak of and all adventures end happily ever after. This is the kind of book that Stevenson wrote: unapologetically chirpy and none the worse for that. One can imagine them bringing solace to the hardship of a post-war world of rationing, just as they might do in our 21st Century when “the difficulty of existing [might make] existence hardly worth while…”

If ‘Vittoria Cottage’ does a vague job of introducing characters that will be at the heart of the remaining two books, and ‘Winter and Rough Weather’ plays on the resilience of love in the face of adversity (with a side of the unbelievable for good measure) then ‘Music In The Hills’ is the one which feels most wholeheartedly complete in itself. Here Stevenson indulges us with some tremendous invocations of landscape, where the imaginary Drumburly and Mureth are amalgams of aspects of the Scottish Border country that Stevenson, whose father was a first cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson, knew and loved. Whilst many of the place names are fictitious, Dumfries and Lockerbie are both mentioned as is Gretna Green. Indeed Gretna is mentioned in one of the most uncomfortable portions of the book in which closeted 14 year old Eleanor falls in love with a man twice her age and talks about running away to Gretna to get married. Perhaps she had been reading ‘Pride and Prejudice’. To be fair to Stevenson (and her key character of James Derring) the inappropriateness of that crush is well handled and Stevenson uses it to make a nice point about the ‘invisible’ nature of women’s desire. James, confused by the feelings engendered by unexpected devotion, rambles on about how “Girls never talk about men. It isn’t the right thing. It isn’t done. Girls talk about—about hockey and—and things like that.”” Eleanor replies doubtfully with ““I don’t think you’re right… At school the girls talked a lot about their boy-friends…””

‘Music In The Hills’ deals at its heart with notions of a woman’s place within a man’s world and if the views expressed are essentially conservative and traditionalist then at least they are contextualised within the period and none of the women characters are portrayed as anything but accomplished and stoic. Central to the book is Rhoda, an artist who exited ‘Vittoria Cottage’ with head held high and a heartbroken James Dering in her wake. In ‘Music In The Hills’ Rhoda again makes the point that “If I married I could go on painting as a hobby but not as a career. It’s different for a man. A man can do the thing he’s good at and be married too. A woman can’t.” Or can she? The fact that I have already noted that Stevenson is at core an optimist and that nothing particularly unexpected happens in the books might give you the answer to that particular question, but again this is hardly a spoiler. These books are essentially fairy tales for grown ups (one hesitates to say ‘adult’ for there are no Adult Themes in evidence, really) and there is not much wrong with that.

This realm of the Furrowed Middlebrow, then, is one that I find myself being pulled into more and more and there are so many things to discover. I find it intriguing that one can go through life almost ignorant of whole trenches of culture and that the discoveries one makes that feel excitingly unique are in fact quite obvious. It’s rather like ‘discovering’ The Beatles when one is 55 and feeling as though they may be a secret treasure. The ‘reality’ rather bumps one on the head. And of course I say ‘one’ when really all I mean is me. I’m sure that others are vastly different and know immeasurably more about all sorts of things. There was a time when that might have made me feel inferior and rather dim, but whilst I suspect there will always be a trace of that in my response to the world (it may be, as people are fond of saying, “in my DNA”, even though I suspect this is actually all but impossible scientifically speaking) I’m now quite happy to simply enjoy the discoveries and live the moments. James Hamilton-Paterson suggests that one “trick for avoiding the threat of the future [is] to live in the past”. If that is true then roll up Barbara Pym and Stella Gibbons. Let’s be having some more of Margaret Kennedy and E.M. Delafield. Let’s delve into more of the 40 books that D.E. Stevenson wrote in the space of 40 years. Line ‘em up. I’m ready for romance.