Archives: Persephone Forum

‘… my life has been a very ordinary one; no adventures, nothing dramatic, just the same sort of life as most of the women I meet in the street and think so dull.’ On the eve of her fortieth birthday, Helen Woodruffe looks back over her life, recording ‘the people and the places, and the choices and mistakes …’.

No need to apologise for spoilers: the outline is drawn in the first short chapter. Helen Woodruffe has lived for nine years in a street of ugly houses, with ugly gardens, which she barely notices and no longer minds. She is aware that her youth has gone, and does not mind that.  Memories which she had been afraid to bring to the surface no longer have the power to hurt. ‘I do not mind about anything very much now, except, I suppose, John.’ John we take to be her son, and that ‘I suppose’ is so sad. Walter, in bed, asleep, spoken of without tenderness, must be her husband, but not the man she loved. Numb now to all emotion, she asks herself (and us) ‘if Hugo were alive still, would it be like this?’ Writing over a period of little more than twelve hours, sometimes at a hectic pace, at other times pausing to linger on the smallest detail, often in short, almost staccato, sentences, as though forcing herself to tell a story she can hardly bear, she occasionally lifts her pen and turn to speak directly to us, to explain, what she calls  ‘the deadening’, how a life, once so full of joy, came to be hollowed out.

One person and one place stand out: Hugo, and Yearsly. Yearsly, a Queen Anne house, largely unchanged since the arrival of Helen and Hugo’s, great-grandmother in 1802, full of light and fine furniture, smelling of lavender and old polished floors, surrounded by gardens and woods and water, for which the term ‘spirit of place’ might have been coined, is the setting for Helen’s happy childhood. It is not her parents’ house: her father is dead, and her mother, an academic promoter of women’s causes, shows little interest in her for her first sixteen years, and none at all after she marries again and moves to Canada. The two ‘significant women’ in Helen’s life are her kindly Grandmother, who provides her London home, a comfortably large and elegant house on Campden Hill Square, and Cousin Delia, wife of her father’s cousin, chatelaine of Yearsly, where Helen spends the holidays in the glorious company of her second cousins, Guy Laurier, the golden youth, clever, handsome, strong and ambitious, and his younger brother, the more sensitive, more fragile, adored, less conventional, and more indulged Hugo.

 

 

Cousin Delia, with her half-smile and quiet grey eyes, never scolded, and never disapproved, generated ‘a kind of active peace and contentment’. Effectively orphaned, Helen’s childhood is close to idyllic: the rose garden, the Jasmine gate, the frog pond, and the Happy Tree, a spreading beech named by the children, outside, and for wet days, cardboard theatres, writing and illustrating stories, fresh milk and butter from the home-farm for tea, sent up by Mrs Jeyes, the cook. Still in the background, in the best upper-class tradition, is  Nunky the boys’ nursemaid, who, later, will help Helen dress for her first ball, and, much later, for her wedding. Little wonder that it was the happiest part of her life. Little wonder that Guy’s wife later complains of the brothers and Helen, ‘you live in a world of your own, all long ago and out of date.’ And little wonder that Helen’s husband, Walter Sebright, an Oxford contemporary of the Lauriers (it would be wrong to call him a friend), should think ‘that we were all spoiled, that the realities of life were not brought before us, and that Guy and Hugo suffered afterwards for this.’

Walter had somehow attached himself to their charmed circle, first in Oxford and later in London, but without fitting, or indeed wanting to fit. Socially, intellectually, emotionally Walter is a world apart from the Lauriers, from Helen and from their delightful, and well-grounded, friends Mollie and George Addington, who Helen describes as having ‘a sort of solid nobility about them, a quality she concedes is lacking in her cousins and herself, and barely recognised by Walter. The Addingtons are shocked when Helen announces her engagement. ‘You and Hugo love each other far too well to marry other people,’ warns George. Of all the choices and mistakes in Helen’s life, Walter is the worst and most defining. And, when divorce was barely an option, inescapable.

She admits to not knowing Walter’s mind as she did Hugo’s. The two men ‘spoke different languages – or rather they used the same words for quite different meanings.’ He does not share her love of poetry or her interest in people; he asks nothing about her childhood, and dislikes talk of Yearsly, and she cannot begin to understand his preference for ancient Mycenean fragments over Greek vases.  But Hugo is indecisive and impulsive and even those who love him best – and perhaps he has been loved too much – despair of his ever growing up. By comparison Walter seems strong, and wise. Somewhat touchingly he acknowledges that he is in many ways a dull fellow, and that Helen is ‘the other side of life’. He does love her, and for one fateful moment,  she feels the wonder of being ‘wanted’. By the wrong man, with the wrong mother, a small, narrow-minded, bird-like widow, living in a tall dark house in Earl’s Court, full of dark furniture. If Walter is quite different from Hugo, Mrs Sebright is the very antithesis of Cousin Delia, and ‘He was devoted to his mother’,  writes Helen, in a chilling one sentence paragraph.

 

 

Unusually for girls at the period, Helen had been under no pressure to marry. She had money of her own and knew she would have more when her grandmother died. Discouraged from going to university, she is nevertheless allowed a great deal of freedom, joining the Lauriers and the Addingtons for Oxford picnics without a chaperone, and going with them on walking holidays in Northumberland, to dances and theatres in London, riding in the park and punting on the Thames. She goes on holiday to Ireland with Mollie, who after Oxford takes a job in a laboratory and shares rooms with her brother in Chelsea. Her school-friend Sophia, passionate about Russian literature and politics, lives alone and writes. Helen goes to France and Germany, learns Italian, goes to lectures at Bedford College, and takes ballet lessons, happy to be alive, while wondering what to do. She is not without role models. But she, like Hugo,  is indecisive.

While Helen drifted in marriage, the world was drifting towards war. This was the long hot summer of 1911, the focus of Juliet Nicolson’s book, The Perfect Summer,  subtitled ‘Dancing into Shadow’. Helen and l her circle were indeed dancing into shadow, and barely one of them noticed.

 

 

Married life, if not exactly bliss, is contented, with daily afternoon outings, and tea – tea at home, tea with friends, tea in tea rooms … Her first forays into housekeeping are described in charming detail: trotting down the hill from their Hampstead house to the shops, learning the prices of things, making the breakfast coffee, buying books of French and Italian recipes – for the cook to try.  Reminding herself when necessary that she can bear what thousands of other women have borne, pregnancy and childbirth, the tedium of household accounts, brown paint, mould on the bathroom walls, Helen is stalwart and strangely acquiescent.

All together on the day of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, astonishingly the Lauriers, the Addingtons, and the young Sebrights, barely know who he is – ‘Herzogovina, wasn’t it?’ Holidaying in Northumberland in the summer of 1914 with their little daughter, Helen and Walter are hardly more aware than William and Griselda (PB No. 1, William –  an Englishman) of the immediacy of the threat. Rosalind Murray vividly describes their gradual realisation that war was coming, ‘that it would involve us personally, as individuals’, the way in which ‘the incredible changed somehow imperceptibly into the accepted, the taken for granted, state of existence.’  The young bride and mother, already beginning to struggle with domesticity finds herself facing far greater challenges. The servants leave to go into munitions, less satisfactory replacements are found, and then lost. Helen must shop, and clean, and mend, and care for her children at a time of rising prices, shortages and rationing.  Catching sight of her face in a looking-glass she is shocked to see how the daily drudgery has aged her. ‘I was marking time, we were all marking time, waiting and waiting for the strain to relax, for the war to end; and meantime our youth was going.’

Helen – and Charlotte Mitchell, in her preface – indicates how closely the novel depicts Rosalind’s own life  –  while mourning the loss of the men she has loved, she must also confront the loss, less great, but just as final, of her own youth. She explains to Walter what it is that draws her cousin Guy to a bright young VAD: ‘You see, she is not lame, at all, in any way’. Unlike Diana, Helen is walking wounded. Non-combatants are also among the casualties of war..

Summing up her life, on the morning of her fortieth birthday, in the final sentence of the novel, she concludes that it does not seem very much, ‘I was happy when I was a child, and I married the wrong person, and someone I loved dearly was killed in the war … and that is all. And all those things must be true of thousands of people.’ But that is the very reason why The Happy Tree is such a marvellous read, both a delicate record of the ordinary, and a page-turner: not because of any urgency to know what happens – we know from the start – but because we want to know how and why, and what it has meant to Helen to stick to her pledge to Hugo to ‘hold out till the end’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wilfred and Eileen opens in the summer of 1913. A group of undergraduates at the end of their final term gather in a room at Trinity College, Cambridge, looking forward to the May Ball, and full of optimism for their various futures. They can’t see the gathering clouds, but we can. Apologies for spoilers must surely be redundant. We can already guess that not all will still be alive in 1918, and that of those lucky enough to survive not all will do so unscathed.

 

 

Jonathan Smith has woven a vivid and moving novel from material passed to him by the ‘real’ Wilfred’s mother, material for a book which Wilfred Willett failed to get published, in spite of the best efforts of his wife Eileen Stenhouse. His many bird books were massively popular – British Birds published in 1950 was still in print when Wilfred died in 1961 – but his novels and memoirs never found an audience. Among pages of politico-philosophical writing, Swift spotted a jewel: an account of an unconventional love affair and a remarkable marriage embarked upon in the last months of peace and cruelly tested by the horrors of war.

Wilfred and Eileen are strong individuals, not anti-social but neither of them driven to conform. Only a trifle envious of those like his effortlessly charming friend David, who ‘seemed groomed for life, tailored to fit’, Wilfred considers himself to have outgrown the jocularity, and the scintillating brilliance of Cambridge. He is twenty-two and fiercely ambitious, burning to move on to the next stage of his planned trajectory. Wilfred is headed for the London Hospital, the largest general hospital in England at the time. He wants to be a doctor, not just any doctor, but ‘the greatest surgeon that charitable medical institution has produced.’

 

He is indeed a hard-working, utterly committed medical student, eager to learn from senior surgeons, a diligence that will in unexpected and unhappy circumstances prove to be life-saving.  One year later, among the first volunteers for the London Rifle Brigade, he is determined to be the best officer in the regiment, and the best-loved, which is, although he is unaware of it, quite irritating for his fellow officers and almost equally so for the men serving under him. His attempts at proving himself above petty authority are construed as ostentation, and well-intentioned offers of help, such as carrying the packs of tired soldiers, gain in reward only ‘a subtle mixture of gratitude and distaste.’ Smith tells us that, had anyone  told him this, he would have been shocked. ‘A deep vein of idealism ran through him.’

At Cambridge he had found the occasionally ribald nature of undergraduate wit not to his taste, and he is outraged by the coarse humour of his fellow medical students. Like many idealistic men, Wilfred, is to use an old-fashioned term, somewhat ‘un-clubbable’. Uninterested in conforming himself, or in conformity in others, he allows his May Ball invitee, fashionably dressed in pale rose and lavender, to dance away with one of his more worldly friends, and finds for himself the perfect partner in Eileen Stenhouse.  He describes her to himself as  the ‘sort of person to whom it would be fun to give a present’ – what a sweet and generous thought. Much later, when circumstances force him to rely on her firmness, her realises that this too had been part of her attraction that night in Cambridge. She is ‘taller than most girls’, and while there is nothing outré about her clothes, ‘she dressed if anything rather too casually people thought, without sufficient attention to detail and straightness of hemline – even safety pins had been seen in her dress. ‘ To the May Ball while others wear rose and lavender, she has a dress of cream and light brown, which she has been allowed by her mother to choose. What is unusual is not only the colour of her dress, but that she has chosen it herself.

At a time when a young man was almost as likely as a young woman to find himself under parental control, both moral and financial, breaking free was a risky venture. William sums up his situation, ‘She [Mrs Thumper] had been the proprietor for too long, he knew that now and his father would still be banker when he started at the hospital.’ Though both are of age, for William and Eileen to marry is an extraordinarily bold move, but, of course, delightfully ‘moral’. Much easier just to sleep together. The descriptions of their tentative love-making are full of delight, and never over-sentimental.

Wilfred’s knowledge of sex and women’s bodies has been acquired not from women of easier virtue than Eileen Stenhouse, but from attending a young mother in labour, an event which is described in graphic detail, though not quite as graphic as the operations at which he assists, where every cut and stitch is meticulously noted. A slice of medical history complements the political, social and cultural history. Wilfred reads in the newspapers about ‘the dreadful business in Sarajevo’. The Suffragettes are news, not history. He and Eileen discuss their views on art at the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1913, and on music at the first English performance of Prince Igor. The reader is right there with them.

 

 

War, inevitably, comes and Wilfred, inevitably, leaves Britain for the front. He joins up with the London Rifle Brigade and arrives in France in October 1914. He was one of many thousands of men to do so: The British army before 1914 was tiny in comparison with other powers, with about 250,000 men serving. But the initial call for another 100,000 volunteers in August 1914 was far exceeded and almost half a million men enlisted in two months By the end of 1914 the British Expeditionary Force (as the first experienced troops came to be known) was essentially destroyed, losing 90,000 men in the first few months of war. The army was therefore increasingly reliant on those volunteers such as Wilfred who had had very little training.

The casualties were horrendous and Wilfred will have been faced with attempting to treat injuries unseen during his time in Cambridge and London. Casualty Clearing Stations (CCS) were set up in tents away from the trenches for surgeries and amputations. Although traumatic, amputation saved the lives of many men as it often prevented infection. And infection was rife. Wilfred will have done his best with carbolic lotion to wash wounds and gauze soaked in solution. Severe wounds were smeared with ‘Bipp’ (bismuth iodoform paraffin paste).

We are with Wilfred most painfully in the trenches. The letters he writes home – it is hard not to believe that these are the real thing – are so credible, because the details are so ordinary: the loneliness, the cold, the distance of home and past, the joy of washing in clean water, ‘like going to the theatre’. ‘The only people who even know the enemy are there, out there for sure are the people who’ve been killed or wounded’ – is there a better description anywhere of the ‘fog of war’?

As with the first of Persephone’s First World War novels, indeed the first ever Persephone book, William – an Englishman, Wilfred and Eileen is both a ‘domestic novel’ (about engagements and weddings, family bickering and class expectations) and a ‘trench novel’, fully exposing the horrors of life on the front line. It starts as a seemingly simple Edwardian love story about two young people meeting and falling in love at University and beginning to set up home together: playing billiards on wet Sunday afternoons; Eileen watching Wilfred fish for supper when the weather is fine.

This privilege and promise is shattered by the violence of the trenches: the Great War comes and tests the courage of this young couple as it would have done for all the millions it affected. Reading it now we wonder about how brave we might have been in their situation. And what it really means to be brave at all.

In his letters home Wilfred, the bold young doctor, describes divvying up the scarce rum rations to keep warm in an abandoned Belgian convent and endless marching: for 11 miles one day, 17 miles the next – with bruised feet and sopping wet uniforms. But Wilfred remains, in his letters, stoic. He takes pride in his efficient trench digging and all the physical demands of being at war; he is strong and healthy and determined. But, as Jonathan Smith writes in his new afterword to this edition, this is just as much Eileen’s story as Wilfred’s: ‘How could a woman of her conventional background be so assertive and tenacious and strong? I was overwhelmed by her extraordinary determination. In her refusal to be beaten she was in every way the equal of Wilfred.’

For the turning point of the novel is when we see the real mettle of Eileen Stenhouse. Her bravery goes far beyond the genteel pluck of a young middle-class newly-wed, she does something truly brave (fear not, no spoilers here). Thus this is a novel which wonderfully plays with our expectations of masculinity and, in fact, what it means to be a hero in a time of war. Both Wilfred and Eileen prove themselves to be truly heroic and utterly brave; they both make decisions which force them to confront incredibly dangerous situations.

 

 

Sensitively fleshing out the main characters, and teasingly introducing contemporary detail, Jonathan Smith has written a novel which reads almost like a biography of a fascinating and brave man who owed his life to a remarkable, original and outstandingly courageous woman.