Archives: Persephone Forum

“Oh, I do wish she’d been a doll!” Young, beautiful, selfish and shallow, Eleanor Conway finds herself reluctantly charged with her husband’s niece and nephew. Neither is welcome – she doesn’t like any children much – but seven-year old Teddy, fair and golden-haired, will do very well as an accessory for a committed socialite. Not so his little sister, five-year old Babs, dark, square and sunburnt: ‘an awfully plain, rough, wild little creature’ warns Eleanor’s equally selfish husband Charley, who has himself  barely overcome his initial astonishment on finding his new wards to be “little men and women” and not, as he had somehow expected, ‘big dolls’. While the children, the ‘young pretenders’ of the title, breathe life into their nursery toys, Captain and Mrs Conway struggle to contain the small flesh and blood creatures who have been thrust upon them, awaiting the uncertain return of their parents from India.

 

Edith Henrietta Fowler reminds us that what children need is love, and that shared genes are neither a prerequisite nor a guarantee of that. Published in 1895, when so many parents were away in distant parts of the Empire, and so many children brought up by grandmothers, previously unknown relations and old retainers, The Young Pretenders must surely have touched a nerve in many a young reader. A happy childhood in loving surroundings was far from assured for these temporary orphans. For the lucky ones a devoted nanny, a friendly gardener, a jolly young governess, a nursery full of cousins or an uncle with a sense of fun must have made all the difference.

Most loved in Babs’ small world, are her brother, Teddy, Nana, her nurse, Giles, the gardener, and ‘Father-and-Mother-in-Inja’; the mispronunciation makes us smile, the hyphenation makes us weep for a child, who has never known either her father or her mother, for whom the two have fused into one parental cipher, geographically and emotionally remote. Grannie Conway, in whose ‘care’ (hardly that) Teddy and Babs had been left when she was a year old and her brother three, was old and frail and indifferent to her grandchildren. She does not feature in the short list of best beloveds and is not mourned when she dies, though her death precipitates Babs’ expulsion from their rural paradise to ‘the new, narrow life which she was to live in the sunless atmosphere of her uncle and aunt’s selfish life.’

 

 

The Young Pretenders is essentially Babs’ story, covering barely six months, no time for the grown-ups, but a tenth of her little life, told largely in her voice and often in her words. To the twenty-first century adult reader (though not, I imagine, to the younger reader for whom the book was intended) some of these can sound a trifle twee, but Fowler makes brilliant use of  ‘free indirect speech’ (to borrow the language of lit crit) in a way which is both amusing and moving, eliciting a knowing smile, and from time to time triggering a sad tear of sympathy, when the child’s words convey so more than she herself can understand.

The children, Babs especially, are painted in full colour, the grown-ups, seen largely through the children’s eyes, appear as dot-to-dot drawings. Only by joining the dots, incidents observed, snippets of conversation overheard, words inaccurately ‘translated’, can we build up pictures of them, but, spare as they are, Fowler’s details are telling, and the pictures are vivid. At first casually damning of Eleanor, out partying when the children arrive and finding that ‘it was too high up for her to go to the nursery afterwards to see her new little niece’, she hints at an emotional flaw for which the young woman, barely out of her teens, may not be wholly to blame: ‘She did not mean to be actually unkind, only she was utterly ignorant of how great a depth of sympathy and knowledge is needed by those who have the care of little children.’ Shadows are hinted at too, though not explored – this is a book for children – in Charley’s early years. His mother, Grannie Conway, ‘did not know much about children … or perhaps she had forgotten what she once knew. It was so long since the major [the children’s father] and his younger brother were little boys in the Cloverdale nursery, and that dear, dead daughter of hers a baby girl.’ What grief is hidden in those final words?

Little surprise that so much of the children’s ‘pretending’ centres on couples and families, entertainingly if a little worryingly somewhat dysfunctional: husbands turn into princes, or worse still tormentors, then, unpredictably, into lions; children disappear, lose their heads, choke to death at a ‘dinner party’. “Do people ever have the doctor right in the middle of the dinner party?” asks Babs. “They might, if they were very ill,” affirms her brother, with assumed confidence. What little the Conway children know of family life has been gleaned from Teddy’s reading; the world of the dining room like that of the drawing room is quite unknown to them. Life at the family home, has been lived between the nursery upstairs, with their beloved nurse and the kitchen downstairs, where cook was always ready with a slice of candied peel or some currants for a miniature tea party. The garden, the domain of their ‘best’, and only, friend, the gardener Giles has provided limitless space and scope for adventures. Babs and Teddy have been loved, and they have thrived at Cloverdale (what a comforting name) though Father-and-Mother have been distant creatures in a country they could barely name. The distance and their mother’s pain are brilliantly captured in one tiny scene. Aunt Eleanor has engaged a depressing governess, the very epitome of the wretched Victorian spinster, with no money, little education and no affinity with children or gift for teaching.  Babs’ talent for ‘pretending’, does not extend to the casual pretence of everyday life, where truth gives way to politeness, and some thoughts are best concealed; the aptly named Miss Grimston writes to Mrs Conway in India complaining of her charge’s insubordination.  “Beast,” she exclaims on receiving the letter. ‘Thereby echoing her little daughter’s sentiments of nearly a month ago.’ And a further month before any words of comfort would reach the nursery in Onslow Square.

London, complains Babs, “isn’t nearly as big as the country … here you just see nothing but the streets, and there’s no far-away at all”.  Birds in the park and the odd passing cat are poor substitutes for the chickens, and rabbits, kittens and dogs of ‘Cloverdale’; the nursery is ‘a stiff, straight room’ and Babs must exchange her grubby old pinafore, cotton socks and thick boots, for shiny London shoes, silk stockings, a clean white frock and, worst of all tight gloves, all of which are uncomfortable and none of which, to her aunt’s disappointment,  make her look any more like the doll of her dreams.

 

 

Teddy in his charming new sailor suits is so much easier on the eye. ‘Wiser than some of their elders’, both children accept ‘the existing as the inevitable’, but the change in their lives  is harder, more full of potential pitfalls, for Babs than it is for Teddy, ‘who did not care much really about anything’, and who as boy is and will always be on a looser rein than his sister. He will not want for Eleanors in his life.

The two children grow apart.  Teddy goes to school, and learns to prefer organised games in Kensington Gardens, where they had lately sought scraps and stones among the leaves together but where he now ignores his little sister’s tentative waves.  He is ‘quickly becoming the heartless, mindless, soulless creature which is generally to be found in preparatory and public schools’. Eleanor Conway recalls Charley as he was when she first knew him, ‘so superior to nerves in his rackety, fast steeple-chasing moods, which were Aunt Eleanor’s standard of manliness’ – a standard to which her little nephew seems likely to aspire.

 

 

While Teddy’s imagination fades, his sister’s grows luxuriantly, enriching her life immeasurably, but providing fertile soil for childish fears. Books which had provided so much material for their earlier games, begin to gather dust on his shelves: reading is ‘a fag’ for the schoolboy, while for Babs the world of literature is just opening up, ‘I like all stories what was ever written’, even sad stories’. Babs has had far more than we would consider now to be her fair share of sadness in her short life. The tender sensibilities that make her such a lovable character  also make her vulnerable. Her future promises to be more colourful than Teddy’s but less certain. She will never have the same easy, but superficial, charm of her brother, but Fowler’s young readers (and older readers) are reassured that those who come to love her will do so unreservedly.

Babs will recover from the bruises dealt her during her stay in Onslow Square, borne with remarkable courage. What seems less likely is that Eleanor and Charley’s marriage will survive. Quite unwittingly Babs has chipped away at its shallow foundations, exposing Eleanor’s woeful lack of maternal feelings, while, ironically, awakening them in Charley. Fowler does not burden her young readers with lengthy confrontations between the couple, nor any in depth analysis of the flaws in the marriage. Some but not all would recognise the sadness of Charley’s sudden consciousness ‘of a great mistake somewhere, which could never be set right’. For the adult reader the whispered message is clear.

‘Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself’, wise words from George Bernard Shaw. Like all the best books written for children The Young Pretenders, though we hear different things, speaks as clearly to us.

 

‘I’ve been housebound in every sense all my life. For it is being mentally house-bound to expect a family all to share your point of view.’  It’s 1941 and Rose Fairlaw must learn, from scratch, how to run her home, while holding together a family, which today would be thought of as mildly dysfunctional and which then would just have been one among many in which the casualties of one war found themselves contending with another.

Winifred Peck wrote House-Bound at a very low point in World War Two. The disasters of Calais and then Dunkirk had been followed by continued heavy bombing over Britain. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbour bringing the Americans into the War, and they in their turn had suffered further losses. On the home front food shortages were worsening, and an ever increasing number of women were being required to register either to serve in the Forces, or for work in essential factories. The servants’ halls much depleted by the First World War, and never restored to pre-1914 levels, were emptying out, but the houses in whose basements they sat were no smaller, and the ‘mistresses’ of those large houses had acquired neither the strength nor the skills necessary to care for them without help.

Rose Fairlaw, in her fifties, must face the challenges of the Second World War, with the  wounds from the First unhealed. ‘Fear had entered her life in the Great War, when as a mere girl of twenty she had married and lost her gallant sailor husband. It had stalked her in her difficult family relationships all her life.’ Peck reminds us that the dead and the physically injured were not the only victims of war. It left widows and orphans, mothers bereft of their sons, and survivors, men, like Rose’s second husband, Stuart, facing this new war, ‘with sick disgust for the waste of the best years of his life twenty years ago’, finding it easier, because duty requires it and he cannot help it, to let his sons go, than to let his servants go. He clings to them not because, without them, he might find himself obliged to sweep rooms, lay fires, scrub and cook, or even polish his own shoes  – those tasks will fall to his quietly enduring wife – but because for him they represent the old life.  Each departing housemaid hammers a further nail into the coffin of the past, somehow mocking much of what he thought he was fighting for, in the war to end all wars. In his mind a servant class allowed ‘leisured people, to keep culture and beauty alive in the world.’ An avid reader, and lover of poetry, Rose, a delightfully self-deprecating character, in this often humorous novel,  does not entirely share Stuart’s reverence for the ‘culture’ of the upper classes, nor his sense of entitlement: ‘ … we read novels continuously …. that’s how we support literature. We go to art exhibitions, but we don’t buy pictures except when we have our portraits painted’

‘You’ll not be expecting me to manage my house myself!’

‘Millions of women do just that’

A chance exchange overheard in the Registry Office for Domestic Services, where Rose is hoping to find replacements for her last two servants, is the first call to action, swiftly followed up by a chance encounter with an American army doctor. His outspoken criticism of the British class system, where ‘whole ranks of social parasites … depend for their existence on the attendance of others’, combined with sound advice about electrical water heating, provides a further spur. Rose determines to do what those millions of other women are doing.

Major Hosmer is a curious character, somewhat mysterious and with little back history, who has arrived on the tide of war (from Cleveland, Ohio – we know that much) like a deus ex machine, a cross between a fairy godmother (with a cordon bleu certificate in cookery) and Freud. This outsider from the New World, unencumbered by tradition, or conventional notions of behaviour, will deliver fresh wisdom, openness, psychological insight and practical knowledge to a troubled family in which troubles have barely been acknowledged and certainly never discussed. Twenty years before the start of the novel, Stuart Fairlaw, devastated by the loss of his adored first wife, Rose’s second cousin, has suggested to the young widow that they ‘could comfort each other’ and make a joint home for their children. Rose has been caring for his son Mickie, a delicate boy, on whom she dotes, alongside her daughter, Flora, dark and robust and already a difficult child. Nobody spares a thought for how the marriage might affect the little three-year-old girl.

Rose’s parents have died, she is afraid of life alone, she can’t bear the thought of being parted from Mickie: she accepts the dry, undemonstrative Castleburgh (Edinburgh) widower. That he should have been expecting more than companionship surprises her, ‘Stuart’s simple masculine attitudes about graves and beds were entirely different from her own, and though she accepted them dutifully they never seemed a prelude to closer confidence or intimacy in ordinary everyday life.’  She is delighted when a new baby is added to the family, but it is not a passionate marriage, and when Mickie becomes ill and requires careful nursing for two years, it reverts to pleasant friendship, ‘As both Stuart and Rose were reserved and well-bred people, they made no attempt to talk over the estrangement which had come about so naturally, or to remedy it.’ Like decent manners and self-control, not talking about problems is a sign of good breeding. To discuss them openly would be ‘washing one’s dirty linen in public’, to discuss them privately could only make matters worse.

When Flora and Mickie and young Tom are all grown-up, facing problems and real dangers of their own, Stuart’s belief in the virtue of silence is unshaken, ‘their fears and anxieties over their children were a sealed book between them’. Behind Stuart’s back, and unusually for the period, Rose had much earlier consulted a psychoanalyst about Flora, who recommended further treatment in Castleburgh, out of the question because of the necessity to tell her stepfather, and a move to an expensive school in Sussex, where she learnt ‘bee-keeping and Greek dancing, javelin-throwing and the care of pigs, and all those other activities vaguely classed as forms of self-expression.’ Major Hosmer will offer more sensitive solutions, and a more penetrating explanation for her behaviour, while never entirely dispelling her step-father’s conviction that all the girl needed was ‘a good spanking’.

 

 

Stuart is not an unkind man, but he is unimaginative. Family history is what interests him, the ordering of piles of dusty archives of generations of Fairlaws, easier to deal with than his flesh and blood family, with all their untidy emotions and needs, and thoughts asking to be shared. He hates to see Rose looking thin and tired and lined, but is only half aware that she looks that way because she is working all hours to keep the house clean, tidy, warm and comfortable, his shoes clean, and his clothes pressed and to put meals on the table at the expected time. His affection falls just short of offering to help. His suggestion that she bath in the evening and dress for dinner, is rightly dismissed. ‘All he could do for his wife, Stuart supposed, was to keep his own business worries and financial cares from her, without realising that she could have no better tonic than to be asked for sympathy.’ Rose’s emotional antennae are rather more extended but not finely tuned: her ‘real affection for him was just devoid of that touch of mutual understanding which would make her realise that this [the cleaning and the cooking and the shoe-shining] was not enough’.

The American Major sees in Stuart what he would not willingly reveal, nor Rose, in her exhaustion, perceive, ‘a very lonely and unhappy man’, a man of his generation, who ‘risked everything and endured hell for four years in the last war, only to see their work wasted and their sons committed to the same fate.’ There is no role for him in this new war, only ‘the acceptance of unpleasant civilian jobs, and a life of impatient endurance instead of his youthful flame of service.’ Rose’s war is very different,‘… it was’, she reflects, ‘the salvation of unaided women all the world over that there was always some job waiting for them to do.’  Stalwart and uncomplaining, she makes the very best of the situation, writing brightly to her sons, ‘The house is heavenly, darling – it is a castle … where I can lock myself up in complete silence’, to Tom, and to Mickie, ‘In short, I’m house-bound, and there are moments when I really like it, for this is a friendly house, we’ve all agreed.’ Preoccupied by the need to polish taps, count laundry and decide what to cook for dinner, she is spared worrying about the world in general.

 

 

Dismissive of the so-called war work of many of her upper class contemporaries, she paints a wicked portrait of Cousin Mary, whose enjoyment of the war was unsurpassed: ‘The entrance to her house was blocked by bags of wet sphagnum moss and bales of wool and her ARP equipment; some committee or other seemed in perpetual possession of her dining room; her tables bristled with agendas and minute-books and reports. In such intervals as occurred in her busy days she would go off with a spade to dig in her allotment …’. But like culture and beauty, war work depended on a hidden underclass; three, sour, old faithful servants continued to slave away in the basement of Mary’s busy house. From day one it is clear to Rose that the new régime at Laws House, will preclude any possibility of  ‘sitting sewing or knitting or making up parcels of smelly old clothes for the bombed, who mayn’t ever want them’. In fact the work is so hard and the time goes so quickly, she reflects not unhappily, that ‘the war may be over before I’ve finished doing the house once.’

With nothing but the electric water heater, a small sink and ‘the gay little electric stove, all white and enamel, with its hot plate, grill and tiny oven’, as recommended by Major Hosmer, in a tiny makeshift kitchen, and a few literary references by way of inspiration – Dora Copperfield on pastry, and Walt Whitman for courage, ‘Bravely, O pioneers – she sets to, quickly discovering that ‘the tiresome part of any house is that it insists on having all its work done just to be undone, and done again next morning.’  Rose is helped a little and tyrannised a great deal by a formidable daily help, whose ‘manner varied between the respect with which she would have regarded Rose in her youth, as an authentic member of the Scottish county families, and the pitying contempt she felt now for another woman’s ignorance and inefficiency.’ Mrs Childe personifies the unravelling of the old class structure. ‘We’re both in transition’, Rose tells herself, ‘But I’m going down the moving staircase and she’s going up.’

Winifred Peck was the daughter of the Bishop of Manchester, two of her brothers were priests, the older, Ronald Knox the Catholic theologian (and writer of detective stories). Steeped in religion, it is not surprising that she should set her heroine’s defining moment in a church. She is at a memorial service, representing her ‘busy’ husband, who suggests it might be a nice outing. That it isn’t, but it gives her a rare moment of peace and reflection. The saint on whom Rose meditates, while waiting for the service to start, is Martha, the biblical housekeeper, ‘cumbered about much serving’ – what a wonderful word, ‘cumbered’; the New English Bible prefers ‘distracted’, which is not nearly as good.  ‘I never could have been a mystic or saintly Mary, and now I can never be anything but a dense, inefficient sort of Martha.’ The voice of the priest breaks into her gloomy prediction, ‘And Jesus said unto Martha, I am the Resurrection and the Life’. It is Rose’s epiphany. Her new life makes sense.

 

 

It is a moving scene, uncomfortable, perhaps mildly embarrassing, for a twenty first century reader. But like so many women, and so many Persephone heroines, she finds the courage to carry on, in a difficult and not always rewarding situation. The war has not finished with her.  Rose is a heroine we recognise.