Archives: Persephone Forum

Young Anne, the last of eight to be published by Persephone, was Dorothy Whipple’s first novel. Surely no Persephone reader will be coming to this without having read some or, more likely, all seven (and the collected short stories).

 

 

Going back to the beginning is like turning to the early pages of a photograph album. Familiar with the kindly, open face of the older woman, would we recognise her in the young Dorothy? The young woman, perhaps in her thirties, is more demure, more self-conscious, a little less confident, but the piercing gaze and the dimpled chin, are there, and a smile about to break, a desire to engage. We open Young Anne looking for intimations of the novels to come. And we are not disappointed.

 

 

Young Anne was published in 1927. Dorothy Whipple was thirty-four. Her first and great love, George Owen had been killed in the first week of the War, and in 1917 she had married Henry Whipple, twenty-four years her senior. Her (precocious) literary career had begun some twenty-two years earlier. She was a regular contributor to the ‘Children’s Corner’ of the ‘Blackburn Weekly Telegraph’, where more than forty of her short stories appeared between 1905 and 1910, when she left her convent school, and, more or less, stopped writing. We can only conjecture as to her reasons for giving up, and for starting again nearly twenty years later. Was she motivated by Henry Whipple, perhaps because they had not had the children for which they had hoped?

Largely autobiographical, Young Anne has at its heart the moving account of a writer’s apprenticeship, a precocious beginning,  a sudden unhappy laying down of her pen, and an eventual return many years later to her desk, encouraged by her husband, eighteen years older than her, and a man of few words, ‘Work’s the thing … It’s time those notes and tales were turned to account. Time you began to hack them into shape.’

In a typically succinct opening chapter, Whipple introduces the ‘cast’, gathered in church, each family in its own pew, seen first through the innocent gaze of her eponymous five-year-old heroine, chewing the top of the pew, her hair coming ‘diffidently out in tendrils of gold, and puzzling (as we all did at her age) over the requirement for a  green hill to have a city wall.  Great-Aunt Orchard, has ‘a face like a cat, complete even to whiskers’, and purrs at clergymen. ‘Out of sight at the end of the pew was Jane, the maid. Aunt Orchard always took the maid to church on Sunday mornings. The maid didn’t seem to like it much.’ Out of the mouths of babes …  Vera Bowden, her niece,  has a ‘red, red mouth, an exquisite lace frock, gold bangles and pearls’. She also has a new wedding ring, something the child might have missed, raises her dark lashes and smiles across ‘at Charlie Brookhouse, to whom she had once been engaged’. Note the comma – a barely perceptible pause, just time for the writer to raise an eyebrow, a nod and a wink to her reader: Mrs Bowden, we understand, is trouble. Whipple fills us in a little on Aunt Orchard too: this pious monstress has ensured her position of respect in the Parish, giving ‘the reredos, the East window and part of the pulpit in memory of her husband, Ephraim Orchard’. A lesser writer would have had her give the whole pulpit.

The little girl looks over at the newly-rich Yateses: Mr James Yates, a small and highly-polished person, with a neat, round stomach ‘festooned with gold watch chain, which reminded Anne of the looped railings round the bandstand in the church’. The bust and hips of his wife are ‘encased in an expensive silk dress. She wore a feather boa and tight white kid gloves.’ Mrs Lockwood (Because of the Lockwoods. Persephone Book 110) similarly stout, wears a ‘tightly-fitting pink gown with the ospreys waving’ and has small puffy feet, like marshmallows.   The Yateses are the prototype social climbers, of whom we will meet many more in Whipple’s later novels, and of whom she is consistently unforgiving.

Long before she could form her letters, sharp-eyed little Anne Pritchard was making mental notes. With a stubby pencil, in the unused pages of her brothers’ old exercise books, she had written her first stories before she was ten. On her tram journeys to her convent school, she observes her fellow passengers, ‘the woman with a face like a frog, all merged into neck; the man with the thick face, who led, she was sure a greasy life and liked fat pork with slodgy stuffing …’ ‘Let me remember,’ wrote Anne in a very private notebook. ‘To dwell on the bald heads, the heave of the stomach, loose necks of middle-aged men. Let me point out their tooth-picking ways, their eructations after food.’ The notebooks will  be the novelist’s source material, a solace at times, and much later, ‘her safety valves’.

 

 

A visit to the hairdresser is a writer’s field trip. Madame Juliette, hairdresser (and occasional poetess – ‘she wrote chaotic verses which appeared at times beside Anne’s tales in Weekly News’ ) pauses with the hairpins and wisely advises against early marriage, ‘establishing herself as a personality, thrusting herself on Anne’s consciousness.’ ‘Strange how people were always doing that’, reflects Anne, the budding novelist, observing, listening, picking up telling details, imagining the back stories, and tucking them away for later use. Madame Juliette ‘believed that each soul had its affinity, and had hers in the shape of a little tailor in the shop downstairs. He was, of course, unhappily married.’ The hairdresser who plays no more than a walk-on part, is brought to life in that one detail, one stroke of the pen, the inevitable cliché of her plight captured in the ‘of course’, slipped between commas.

Whipple made no secret of the fact that she was more interested in character than in plot, and the plot of Young Anne is, as Lucy Mangan says in her introduction slight. What interests Whipple, and what drives this novel and later ones, what makes us want to turn the pages, is our need to know how people, in whom we absolutely believe, turn out. Good or bad, will they get their just rewards? Fulfilment, or comeuppance? Their cards are marked from the start. Alongside Anne in the pew is her father, dyspeptic, cross, and thin – the author’s prejudices on body-mass were already well entrenched.  Olive Pritchard is vague, self-absorbed, and happy to leave the care of her daughter, and her two sons, along with the running of the house to Emily, their maid-of-all-work, who willingly shoulders the task  ‘of running the house, of keeping Gerald in his place, Anne out of scrapes, Philip from overeating, of coping with her mistress’s indifference, her master’s indigestion and his righteousness’. In one sentence the young Whipple sums up the family dynamic: no surprise that a click on ‘Family’ under Categories on the Persephone website brings up every one of her novels.

Emily is a kind and generous woman. It will be with her encouragement, and, in a reversal of the social order (Whipple fans will recognise the theme), her financial assistance, that Anne is able to enter the world of real work, escaping the tyranny of Aunt Orchard, on whom circumstances have left her dependent. With an abundance of native intelligence, and good judgment, Emily Barnes is the precursor of Nurse Pye and Miss Vanne in The Priory (Persephone Book 40), of Carrie, the barmaid and part-saviour of the Blakes, in They Knew Mr Knight (Persephone Book 19), Oliver Reade, the self-educated, hard-working market stall-holder in Because of the Lockwoods.  Emily like her siblings-under-the-skin, would seem to have come into the world fully formed, endowed with good judgement, a capacity for hard work, and no sense of entitlement, free of what Jeanne in Because of the Lockwoods calls ‘the malady of the ideal’.

 

 

If Young Anne is about growing up, it is also about giving-up, letting go of unrealistic dreams. ‘It is one of the properties of youth to be forever building out of its imagination innumerable palaces wherein to dwell, and to accept them later for the mud huts they turn out to be.’ Whipple’s message, her credo, is that we must learn not merely to accept the mud huts, but to make the very best of them, to adapt to living in them, accommodating the dream to the reality. We should not expect this to be easy. Work, as Anne’s husband, wisely advises, is the thing

 

Unlike the Persephone Post, or the Letter, the Forum, taking each book strictly in order of publication, seldom touches on current affairs. But this December 2019 we have been reading Tory Heaven or Thunder on the Right, a rare synchronicity that I like to think might have pleased its author, Marghanita Laski, a writer with politics quite literally in her DNA.

Her uncle, Harold Laski, the Labour Party Chairman, was among the principal speakers at Central Hall, Westminster, celebrating the astonishing result of the General Election on 26th July 1945, while his arch-enemy Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express, was condoling with his guests at Claridges, where a planned victory feast had unexpectedly turned into a wake. The result of our own recent election was not such a shock, but the size of the majority, though no match for Labour’s in 1945 – 80 compared to 146 – was definitely a surprise, the consequences of which we must await, with despondency, or enthusiasm, each to her own: Tory heaven, or thunder from the right. Persephone readers will know where we stand.

The Persephone catalogue suggests that some might find the novel too political, and others ‘both funny and disturbing’.  The first time I read Tory Heaven, in 2018, I found it funny, and just a little disturbing. Re-reading it, I still find it funny, but a great deal more disturbing than I did two years ago, not because it is too political, but because aspects of the politics seem so immediate. How could Marghanita Laski have guessed?

Writing in 1947, she imagines a post-war England in which, having initially overwhelmingly endorsed a Labour programme of egalitarian rule, the public has become rapidly dissatisfied, and, given a second chance, voted even more overwhelmingly for a Tory government, ‘to do away with all that nasty equality bosh’, which had burgeoned during the war years of shared hardship and danger.

The country has reverted to traditional principles: the rich man is comfortably in his castle, the poor man firmly at the gate, and he is not alone there. Based on the belief that ‘people like to know where they are … and they like to know where other people are too’, the population has been formally divided into five classes (three more than Mrs Alexander had reckoned for in 1848 in writing the words to ‘All things bright and beautiful’), rated from A down to E, a classification reckoned by the Prime Minister to represent ‘the perfect flowering of the class system’. ‘Perfect’, but subtle, easy to get wrong, hard to navigate, with more snakes than ladders.

The innocent abroad, baffled by seemingly bizarre customs, and uncertain of the rules, is a familiar character in ‘politic0-philosophical’ fiction – Gulliver or Candide for example. The innocent returning from abroad to his or her own country after a prolonged absence, serves a similar purpose: exposing inherent absurdity to the light, Miss Ranskill is a perfect PB example (in Miss Ranskill Comes Home PB 46): ignorant of wartime regulations and rationing she assesses them with a cool eye, unintentionally but effectively challenging the logic behind them: why not for example use a week’s butter ration on one delicious piece of toast, or fill one blissfully deep bath, rather than seven mean basins.

In Tory Heaven Laski’s five characters, rescued from a lengthy Far Eastern island exile, return to a post-war Britain of which they have had only scant and inaccurate news, and which in any case holds little appeal for any of them. They have all had good reason to leave and little to go back to. A super-bright, zoologist, engaged in a government sponsored study of the effects of submarine blast on embryonic barnacle-geese (Laski doesn’t take her quintet too seriously), would prefer to pursue a new variety of Hippocampus discovered on the island. A ‘fishing fleet’ failure in her late twenties – no husband found in India, Egypt or China – is likely to be  condemned to breed Angora rabbits on the family estate in Shropshire. A retired Passport Control officer, with (distant) aristocratic forbears and a mistress in Maida Vale, dreads life in London on a pension too meagre to stretch to more than a Bloomsbury bed-sitter. A rackety, beautiful blonde, whom we suspect of being no-better-than-she-ought-to-be, pins her hopes on Claridges being spared nationalisation. Our hero, nice but dim, has been sent to all corners of the world in the hope that he might find some area in which he might make some sort of a living, has tried, and failed in coffee, sheep, and rubber. This ex (minor) public-school boy can dance, ride and mix a cocktail, is good-looking, and has a hyphen to his name, but James Leigh-Smith faces a future selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door.

But the new class structure turns out to favour James, and the Passport Officer, Ughtred, and Penelope, the rabbit breeder. They will be As, and carry a gold disc by way of proof. A few simple questions suffice for James to qualify: did he play cricket? Had he any titled connections? What were the addresses of his nearest relatives? Had his mother been presented at Court? All boxes ticked, he won’t be selling carpet sweepers, but positively encouraged to follow his dream path. He is to be ‘a Man-About-Town’, given £3000 a year (in gold coins), and appointed to three directorships. Ughtred, on similar terms, is to be a ‘clubman’. Neither will be troubled by rationing but will enjoy an abundance of pre-war luxuries, only dreamt of by classes B,C,D and E. From soap, to foie gras, fine wines and cigars, James’s every wish is granted, up to an including a brand new old style Lagonda, ‘the sort with outside tubes and a strap round the bonnet.’

Not all A’s it emerges are idle and rich. The system is more nuanced than that. High ranking civil servants are admitted, as are Naval officers, and Army officers, depending on their regiment (all Air Force officers are B’s), and a limited number of University Dons. Birth is a given. Money helps, but does not suffice. Common to all A’s however is ‘an attitude of easy superiority’, a little phrase that would be less disturbing had we not heard so much recently of the defining Etonian ‘effortless superiority’. Ughtred, we learn, was James’s ‘idea of an educated English gentleman, which meant that he could discourse  pleasantly on any decent subject without knowing enough to become boring about any of them’. Ughtred is no ‘girly swot’.

There is no place for girly swots, of either sex, in Tory Heaven: disapproved of in A men, it is forbidden for girls. There is to be no more university education for A girls, nor any work, other than charity work.

A’s are vastly outnumbered by B’s, who have silver discs and range from rich businessmen to small shopkeepers, with a tendency to congregate in suburbia or home-counties commuter-belt. ‘They may look like one big group to us [A’s]’ explains James’s father, ‘but inside themselves they’ve got literally thousands of different classes … they’re always much too busy keeping up their own little barriers inside themselves.’ It is incidentally this group, winners and losers in post war Britain, reacting in their different ways to the real Labour government with its radical programmes for health, housing, pensions and education, that Laski describes with such sensitivity, wisdom and balance in her later novel The Village (PB 52), which deserves to be read at the same time as Tory Heaven.

The C’s carry discs of solid oak, for which no explanation is needed. In a quasi-symbiotic relationship, they have chosen to wait on the A’s, ‘just to be in touch with them’. These are the loyal servants whose failure to return after the war so radically upset the ease of upper-class life. David Kynaston, in his introduction, quotes from Mollie Panter-Downes’s post-war stories, Minnie’s Room (PB 34), but could have chosen several others. The C’s are the embodiment of the yearning for the past that runs through Tory Heaven. Their presence in pubs, on the far side of the bar, adds atmosphere. They are useful (overloaded) recipients of the charity that A women are required by law to distribute. But in the house they are the spies and the eavesdroppers: the Leigh-Smiths’ butler keeps them up to the mark, ensuring that they use the best silver, every day, cook ensures that they never relapse into the wartime comfort of beans on toast in the kitchen, or the sort of familiarity with B’s that they enjoyed during the war years, and miss, but dare not risk.

Throughout the novel the Degrading Court, which also deals with the far knottier problem of Upgrading, looms large, extending even to the wardrobe. The style police are not without power. No A would be seen dead in embossed velvet, only a little black frock and a string of pearls will do.

Rules are rules. The State must be obeyed. But this is not Fascism. Fascism, explains Ughtred ‘is a nasty foreign notion, whereas the anti-egalitarianism I am describing seems to be totally and basically English.’

D’s wear bronze discs and are Trade Unionists, but as all strikes have been declared illegal, they are no longer a threat. Wages have been cut and piecework reintroduced and their women have had to go into service once more, cooking and cleaning for the B’s to make ends meet. It sounds awfully like a zero hours economy.

Lowest of the low are the E’s, forced to carry lead discs, and casually described as ‘odds and sods’, ‘tramps, casuals and any such Intellectuals as the police may happen to pick up’. The Intellectuals having insinuated themselves under socialism into almost every position of real power, from the press, to the BBC and even the armed forces, ‘who had let themselves be hoodwinked into believing that wars couldn’t be won without the application of brain-power’, a purge has been found necessary. The Spectator and The New Statesman have been ‘suppressed’, foreign films are no longer being shown, universities have been cleansed. Intellectuals have ‘gone underground’ in their droves. Intellectuals … experts?

Relatively gentle sideswipes at entitled upper-classes, aspirational middle-classes, and fawning lower classes have been generously laced with comedy. A feminist before her time, Laski doesn’t miss an opportunity to pop the bubble of male bombast. James who, regardless of his unbroken record of failure, never questions his judgement or his right to be heard: turning swiftly away from a plain girl sitting alone at his first dance since returning home, he says smugly to himself  ‘that’s the way to treat intellectual women’. He had earlier much enjoyed a conversation (if that’s the correct word for a monologue with pauses for breath) with his island companion: ‘True she did not herself say much; but the opportunities she deftly gave James for airing his own opinions or stating his own views were such as to convince him, by the time the fingerbowls were put on the table, that she was the most accomplished conversationalist he had ever met.’ I think we might say that the spirit of James lives on.

Throughout the humour and the cleverly worked out conceit of the first half of the novel, Laski has been sharpening her pen, until by the final chapters she strikes angrily at the political chicanery at the heart of Tory Heaven: ‘“Since we repealed the Reform Bill,” boasts one, ‘“there hasn’t been a Labour Party. There couldn’t be. There’s no-on left to vote for it.”’ Another dismisses the Liberals, ‘“since everyone takes it for granted that they’ll never get in, hardly anyone bothers to vote for them.”’ The Boundaries Commission have done a most satisfactory job: ‘“Manchester, for example, returns no member now, while our host here … owns two. One is returned automatically by a gazebo in the garden while the other – that for the town of Starveham – will be elected on Saturday … With the present restricted electorate, hardly anyone is likely to vote other than Tory.”’ When James questions the legality of his eventual degrading, he gets a dusty answer, ‘“Whatever benefits the State is legal and if it isn’t today – retrogressive –  I mean, retrospective – the law will see that it is tomorrow.”’

A few days ago, the former Tory leader, Lord Howard said, ‘I think that judges have increasingly substituted their own view of what is right for the view of Parliament and of ministers.’ We can almost hear Marghanita Laski’s melifluous voice with its clipped vowels and careful intonation (troublingly similar to Margaret Thatcher’s!) admonishing us: ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’