Archives: Persephone Forum

Only the large number of unmarried women and the small number of servants in Miss Buncle’s Book attested to the losses of the First World War, but its shadow hung, albeit faintly, over Miss Buncle Married. Arthur Abbott, Barbara Buncle’s publisher and husband to be, had, we learn (in a typical Stevenson aside) spent five years wearing a khaki tunic and a Sam Browne belt, waging war for his country. The uniform he found ‘becoming’ (personal vanity being one of his few faults), and the experience formative. Stevenson does not dwell on the carnage, nor the loss of his older brother. ‘If only he wouldn’t buck so much about his damned war (that old people are so proud of)’ complains his nephew Sam, who had been only four when his father was killed at the front.

 

 

All too soon Sam Abbott would have his own damned war. The seventh of an astonishing eight novels written by Dorothy Stevenson between 1939 and 1945, The Two Mrs Abbotts was published in 1943. The outcome of the Second World War was still uncertain.

Seven years have passed since Barbara announced her first pregnancy to her delighted husband, Arthur, and put down her pen, to do something ‘much cleverer’. Barbara Abbott is now the mother of two: a son not unlike the Golden Boy of Miss Buncle’s Book in appearance, and an enchanting toddler who would seem to have inherited her mother’s disarming directness, a little girl of as yet few words, but clear views on the adult world. Wandlebury, the small commuter town to which Mr and Mrs Abbott moved after their marriage, is, like everywhere else in Britain, greatly changed. What had been a mostly settled population, familiar characters getting on with their lives in more or less predictable ways, has been shaken up and forced to adjust to a new reality. From meat to petrol, everything is in short supply, including people, especially people.

With a few exceptions, the young men and women are away in the forces or doing war work, returning to Wandlebury only occasionally, sick or injured, on leave or home for a rest. Some of the gaps have been filled by strangers, billeted soldiers on exercise, evacuee families, and various displaced individuals. Women are doing the jobs of men, the old are taking on the tasks of the young. Domestic work can fall to almost anybody, as can heroism. The world is a darker place but there are upsides. The humblest tasks are found to be a source of happiness, some of the unplanned encounters that come about as a result of the strange comings and goings of wartime prove very rewarding, and the most surprising people reveal hidden strengths.

Sam, having sown an abundance of wild oats, is fighting bravely, commanding tanks in the Western Desert. His wife, the ‘other’ Mrs Abbott, Jerry née Cobbe, Barbara’s dear young friend and niece by marriage, is doing her best at Ganthorne, their large house, with no electricity or adequate staff, and a regiment camped in the grounds. She misses Sam dreadfully, but, as we discovered in Miss Buncle Married, she is a coper, making do, mending and much, much more. Her livery stable is reduced to two horses. Of four grooms only one remains: Edgar has been killed on the retreat to Dunkirk, Fred is a prisoner-of-war in Germany, Joe a sailor ‘somewhere in the Mediterranean’, and the fourth, Rudge, is desperately trying to avoid active service on the grounds that he also grows the vegetables: ‘it ain’t my war … What’s Poland to me?’ he pleads, but Jerry is having none of it. She will not support his application. They will manage without him.

There must have been happy evacuee families, and happy hosts, but they rarely feature in wartime novels – not good copy. Jerry’s are more trouble than the horses and little better at keeping themselves clean. Mrs Boles is a sluttish, thieving mother, missing Stepney and her husband, with a large boisterous son, and a quiet pale but clever and, as it turns out, willing daughter, both predictably but hopelessly wanting what the Wandlebury children have: ‘… it was a vital problem and one that was being encountered all over the country … and [Jerry] could find no answer to it. She had never liked Mrs Boles but at this moment she almost liked her, for she understood, as she had never understood before, what Mrs Boles was suffering.’

Jerry’s grooms embody the fates of all the Edgars, Freds, Joes and Rudges in the country, and her evacuees typify the worst and best of the experience. A common dilemna tears at her brother’s conscience. Archie Chevis Cobbe has inherited the family estate. The one-time tearaway has transformed himself into a responsible and innovative landowner. Farming is a reserved occupation, he need not, some would say should not, enlist. But his contemporaries are being killed: can it be right for him to stay at home? Stevenson doesn’t labour the question, and, of course supplies a delightful solution. No spoiler!

 

The notion that her readers might measure their own difficulties against those of her characters is no more than hinted at. The deprivations and tragedies of the war are slipped into the narrative without comment. Barbara’s reflection at the butcher’s, where she haggles for a little liver to put with the few permitted ounces of steak, that ‘steak and liver pie for some reason sounded rather nasty’ is sufficient: food in wartime was sparse, unappetisng, hard to get and hard to cook. Arthur’s membership of the Home Guard is mentioned only en passant, as the reason for dinner being a less formal affair than before to enable him to get to the drill hall. The light fingered Mrs Boles would, we understand, be less of a problem were it not impossible to replace pots, pans, kettle and cutlery. Jerry sets off in a pony and trap – no petrol; a birthday present for Dorcas presents a problem – no fountain pens, cups, clocks, saucers, paper or string. Enough said. A brief and shocking history lesson takes up barely three lines: Lancreste Marvell’s friend and fellow airman ‘had flown over Germany fourteen times. He had been to Berlin and Wilhelmshaven. Hamburg, Cologne and several other centres of Axis industry had been the worse for Mr Ash’s attentions’. Not a word wasted. Just occasionally I found myself asking, is it Stevenson’s economical style, deliberate understatement or wartime spirit and decided it was all of those.

 

 

Jerry has her old governess loyally at her side. Miss Mark is one of several returning characters in The Two Miss Abbotts. Barbara’s old nanny Dorcas (subsequently housekeeper, and then personal maid) is in charge of the Abbott nursery. Some, like Mr and Mrs Marvell, the artist and his short-sighted, pathologically lazy wife, who played major roles in the previous novel, have only walk-on parts. Lancreste, their troublesome child, now a troublesome man, on (extended) sick leave from the Air Force, is for some of the time centre-stage. His unfortunate love affair with the gloriously dreadful Pearl stretches Barbara’s talent for sorting out relationships – match-breaking rather than match-making on this occasion. Markie is wonderfully fleshed out, given a rich back story, which astonishingly includes a university degree. A previously unsuspected interest in ethnology supplies a slightly far-fetched plot thread and places Sophonisba Mark (an equally unsuspected and surprising first name) firmly in the action.

The once downtrodden governess was, it turns out, one of the first women graduates of the University of St Andrews – her domineering father proving to have been more lenient than Dorothy’s, who forbade her to take up a place at Oxford (is this a late dig at her own father on the part of the writer?). With something of the New Woman about her, she had made a living, and a life for herself. Jerry has done the same with her livery business. Lancreste’s Pearl shares a flat and runs a stocking business with a friend. Nor must we forget that before she was married Miss Buncle made a living and more from her novels – Archway House is hers. There are some strong women both in Wandlebury, and passing through it.

Writing has been a means of escape from near penury to ease for Janetta Walters, another of Arthur’s authors., visiting to open the WLSP (Wandlebury Ladies’ Sewing Party – is it the pretentiousness of the acronym that makes us smile?) Bazaar. Her ‘high-powered tushery’ (Arthur’s words) have paid for her to move with her sister from a small stuffy house in Bayswater to a generous country house with a large garden and her own study.  With titles like Her Prince at Last and Her Loving Heart Janetta’s books have sold in the hundreds of thousands, bringing in fan mail from all over the world, some, most usefully, attached to food parcels. The sudden onset of writer’s block threatens everything. ‘”I want to write a story about real people,”’ she says to her sister. ‘“It would be ruin!”’ Helen declared. “It would be the end of everything. Think of your reputation! Think of your public! Think of your sales!”’

 

 

In Miss Buncle Married, Barbara and her painter neighbour Mr Marvell discussed the creative process at length. She described writing as being more like hunting than building: ‘You start out to hunt a stag and you find the tracks of a tiger. It’s an adventure you see, that’s the beauty of it.’ Dorothy Stevenson was fascinated by it. ‘My own books,’ she wrote ‘are all novels, as it is the human element which interests me most in life; some of my books are light and amusing and others are serious studies of character, but they are human and carefully thought out …’. The Two Miss Abbotts is serious. The world is at war. But DES cannot help but amuse her readers.

Enid Bagnold described to her husband the sensation of having a new baby as being ‘like having a tiny lover out in the pram’. The italics are mine: in the age of the ‘close baby carrier’, it is astonishing to be reminded that until the 1950s ‘out’ was where most babies spent most of their days.

 

 

Enid Bagnold married in 1920, at the age of thirty, late for the period, and with some well documented affairs behind her.  Her husband, Sir Roderick Jones, was forty-two. It would be a contented if far from passionate marriage, open and resilient enough to bear talk of lovers. The couple had four children, the youngest, Dominick, born in 1930. For years she had nurtured the idea of writing a novel about childbirth. Published in 1938, The Squire was the product of a long gestation, closely and vividly based on her own experiences, of pregnancy, birth and motherhood, as well as love, marriage, ageing, and the strength of women, from the squire (so dubbed in the temporary absence of her husband) to the housemaid. But, above all, it is about the Baby, its last days in the womb, its birth, and his first month. Only the direction of a wedding ring spinning on a hair might (or might not) suggest, in those pre-ultrasound days, whether ‘it’ would turn out to be a ‘he’ or a ‘she’.

The Squire opens with the household waiting ‘in restless suspension and slightly growing indiscipline’ for the Unborn, the capital letter awarded, and indiscipline silently regretted, by Pratt, the curmudgeonly butler, a character who, in a small way, bears comparison with some of the greater literary butlers, Raunce in Henry Green’s Loving, and more recently Stevens in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. An inbetween figure, subtly powerful, and secretive, superior to and unloved by the lower staff, depended upon, reluctantly, by his employers, Pratt is modelled on the author’s own butler, Cutmore, whom she describes in her autobiography as ‘a gloomy, handsome man, a family man, but with an inborn contempt for woman.’ He has been with the squire for twelve years (Cutmore stayed twenty-four), ‘twelve years of staff difficulties’, ‘surrounded by gibbering, untruthful, slovenly women’ (his reported words), and time is passing him by, leaving him ‘embittered by the material he found around him, a trained engineer supplied with tools of tin’. How well Enid Bagnold conveys his tone of voice, as she does the voices of the ‘slovenly women’ – unsatisfactory cooks, and wilful, knowing housemaids: ‘He was no more Mr Lynch than Ruby’s eye and Ruby knew as much’, Mrs Lynch being a temporary cook, more slovenly than most, Ruby a restless maid.

The Unborn sets the pace, and the narrative, such as it is. The squire is in the last days of her pregnancy, picturing the baby, with keen expectation, but no tenderness so long as it remains unknown, ‘its arms all but clasped about its neck … closed, secret eyes, a diver poised in albumin … as old as a Pharaoh in its tomb’. How different pregnancy is now. The sex confirmed, the photo file on the laptop already filling with ultrasound images, that absolutely extraordinary brief relationship with a creature at the same time cherished and unknown, other than  by its kicks and turns, is a thing of the past. A little sad.

The course of labour is so well described. None of the sudden belly grabbing followed immediately by persistent cries, as it appears too often in films, and even in the otherwise wonderful Call the Midwife. At first the squire feels only ‘a touch of pain, a finger tweaking her bowels for a second, like the thick chords of a harp thrumming in the wind’, dismissed as indigestion, then eventually recognised, but without panic. She goes to check on the other children, then settles down for a while to do her accounts. The pain (labour not torture) of the final stages is given shape and not downplayed: ‘fighting to maintain a hold on the pain, to keep pace with it, not to take an ounce of will from her assent to the passage … a little more, a little more, a little longer … she knew her way.’ And then, in a moment ‘she had the creature laid into her arms, clad already in a woollen jersey and woollen leggings’, an unappealing detail, but of its period: Enid Bagnold’s doctor Dr Waller, to whom the novel is dedicated, was a fierce proponent of wool and nothing else next to the baby’s skin for the first six months.

 

 

Harold Waller MD wrote at length too about the importance of breast-feeding. Bagnold’s descriptions of this are startlingly clear, shockingly so to some contemporary readers, taken aback by references to nipples, as she captures the feeling of those early intimate days, when the Unknown in the womb has transmuted into the long-awaited lover, ‘it’ has become ‘he’, his mother’s only focus. The mysterious patina, like the wonderful smell of the newborn doesn’t last. ‘Not for long would she possess the marvel of the newborn … a child in the womb, or at the breast stops time.’ It is this moment that The Squire so perfectly seizes, the moment before she begins to read over the baby’s head (a detail that many of us might recall, with a pinprick of shame), before the other children come bundling in, the oldest caring and responsible, the youngest dethroned princeling, concerned for his position.  Soon the squire, loving the private intimacy of the early days with her new baby, begins to strain at the leash, ready to re-join the household and turn her attention back to her already well loved older sons and daughter.

 

 

Not for nothing were the early days and weeks after a birth known as ‘confinement’. The ‘sentence’ imposed by the squire’s midwife was four weeks, standard for the period: as late as the nineteen seventies, when my own children were born (and perhaps now?), maternity nurses were commonly called ‘monthly nurses’. For those who could afford them, or whose mothers, or mothers-in-law, like mine, both generous, and dubious about new-fangled patterns of babycare, possibly concerned too for the well-being of her son, made a present of them  – Enid Bagnold ‘gave’ Cyril Connolly’s wife a maternity nurse for three months – the monthly nurse was part guardian angel, part despot. My own ‘Nursie’ was ninety percent guardian angel, but when our second baby was born, the nursery cupboard was still arranged according to her plan, and I still had a file card pinned up listing her detailed instructions for ‘topping and tailing’. Already well into her sixties, Nursie prided herself on her Truby King training. Truby King and Harold Waller, Enid Bagnold’s doctor, were the baby-care gurus of the 1930s and their views barely diverged:  feeding by the clock every four hours, ten minutes each side, plenty of fresh air, no rushing to pick up a crying baby. ‘Baby’ must learn, was the underlying message, learn the rules, it’s never too early.

The squire, in a brief altercation with the midwife, unsettled by her assertion that ‘the book of instinct has long, long been closed’, makes a tentative stand against ‘the science guided baby. Labelled, its tears and stools in bottles, its measurements on a chart, its food weighed like a prescription.’ ‘Better than muddle,’ is the midwife’s curt reply. Modelled closely on the author’s own Ethel Raynham Smith, who had seen her through all her confinements, the midwife, un-named like the squire, is a beautifully drawn character, convincing in spite of being given quite deliberately no back history: bound by unspoken vows of confidentiality she can say little about her work, can neither praise nor openly criticise ‘her’ mothers (although she does let slip to the squire that her previous household was ‘wrong, or perhaps it was the mother poor thing’). Perpetually moving from baby to baby, mother to mother, house to house, she can have no home of her own, nor ties, but must ‘pass on from love to love’, hardening her heart on each occasion ‘to leave the baby she had held in the cup of her care to rougher usage.’ What an evocative phrase – ‘the cup of her care’. We know few facts about this almost ethereal woman: she has red hair, light-blue eyes, and is ‘out of the ordinary tall’ – Enid Bagnold can make the mundane magical with the spin of a word – but we feel her passion for the newly born. The growing child is beyond her sphere. ‘To snatch the newborn from the inchoate, to set it on its feet, to get the milk going, the standard in the household fixed, to hold the nebulous moment like a witch’s ball glittering with tomorrow, took all the midwife’s breath.’ The squire’s older children mean little to her, though ‘she had borned them all’ – my italics again, such a brilliant word. It is the beginnings which matter, and, however much methods of baby care may change, few would argue with her belief that ‘all is done in the first few weeks … that the perfection of his introduction to life will reassert itself again and again in all his crises …’  ‘I am virginal and narrow,’ she admits, ‘but I am his gardener.’ Asked by the squire if she has any regrets, the midwife admits to have experienced that ‘long and haunting period when the woman in the nurse is still conscience-stricken about the farewell to sex.’ ‘Men’ says the squire ‘encourage that haunting.’

Still in thrall to men, and the polar opposite to the midwife in that respect, and most others, is the squire’s younger neighbour Caroline, who describes herself as ‘a complaisant victim’, one, the squire reflects silently, ‘who could not live without attackers.’ Comparing herself to her young friend, admitting to getting ‘older and tougher’, the squire modestly accepts that she was ‘never as beautiful, never as made for love’, but more importantly, ‘never such a victim’. Although still happy to listen to Caroline’s adventures in love, and to offer advice, she feels no sense of loss. ‘There’s nothing so difficult to remember as sexual love. How often, where, and what happened? It all goes, it has all gone …’  Old lovers fade into oblivion, but the ‘tiny lover’ in the pram is more precious than any of them. Caroline may have an ‘exquisite young man, full of enemy and conspiring thoughts, moving always towards or away, but never still’ (Bagnold makes language her own – nouns become adjectives, adjectives verbs, word order thrown to the winds), but the squire has put all that behind her. ‘Here for a short while she held in her arms the perfect companion, fished out of her body and her nature, coming to her for sustenance, falling asleep five times a day in her arms, exposing its greed, its inattention, its pleasure and its peace, going red with anger in her arms, and white with digesting sleep.’

 

 

The squire finds ‘a kind of savage joy in getting to the end of the pleasures of youth.’ She watches her children passing ‘like explorers through virgin country, their hands on the door of the future.’ Their future is not only more important than her past, but far more important than her future: ‘now well past forty she was beginning to pack her box’ – what a wonderful image. Like his siblings the nameless one will stand, walk and run and make her burn with pride at the wonder of it. She pictures them all rising like expanding columns beside her. ‘Soon they’ll be past me, and I shall be walking in undergrowth, walking in a wood, sitting in a wood sinking in a wood, buried in a wood, gone.’

Reconciled rather than resigned, the squire welcomes the start of her ‘middle journey’, with renewed strength. In her way, though still clinging to youth and men, Caroline is also taking control. She may be perceived as a victim, but is learning the power of conscious collusion. The moral climate has eased, and she is free to pursue her affairs without attracting too much opprobrium. Domestic service too has changed. Positions are easily come by. Thinking of her bedroom in The Manor as a rabbit hole, the discontented housemaid knows that there are ‘a thousand others in the great warren of employment into which she could pop’.  And pop she does. The midwife is stiffened by her convictions which she does not doubt: strong women all of them.  ‘Her’ mothers (most of them) will care for ‘her’ babies according to the régime she has laid down, long after she has left them.

At the end of the novel, the squire having tucked up her older children, makes her way to the stables in the dark, to gather up the tiny one from his pram for his last precisely scheduled feed. No longer the tiny lover, he is learning the rules. It is tempting to say ‘poor little chap’. This gem of a novel is without question a period piece, but one which cannot fail to resonate with any woman who has given birth, and anyone who has ever watched a new mother with her new baby.