Archives: Persephone Forum

‘Plucky’ isn’t a word you often hear now. Did it somehow go out of fashion, in the hedonistic 1960s, the selfish 1970s, years of ‘letting it all hang out’, of putting all one’s chips on personal fulfillment, when to grin and bear it was not just risible, but wrong? If the bed you have made proves uncomfortable, don’t bother lying on it, was the message: make a new one. Pluck seems to be a rather old-fashioned quality: courage not in the face of great danger, but in the face of difficulties, determination in trying circumstances, the kind of courage and determination that we admire and warm to in so many (all?) Persephone heroines. Patricia Crispin, heroine (in every sense) of Princes in the Land is plucky.

 

So, it would seem, was Joanna Cannan. Married in 1918 to, Captain Harold Pullein-Thompson MC, a badly injured veteran of the First World War, it soon became evident that she was going to be the principal bread winner for the growing family. Between 1922 and 1958 (she died in 1961) she published more than forty novels, sometimes two or even three in one year, including a number of detective novels, and nine ‘pony books’, a genre which she is credited with having invented, and which was perpetuated by her three daughters,  Josephine, Diana and Christine Pullein-Thompson (their brother Denis was also a writer, but chose to use his mother’s maiden name – perhaps to avoid identification with the ‘pony-club’). Any reader familiar with the genre – and I confess to having been a young devotee – will know that  ‘plucky’ is the pony-book adjective. To be fair and graceful cuts no ice; rosettes are awarded for bravery not for beauty. A girl must know ‘how to ride at her fences’.

 

 

 

Young Patricia Crispin is a pony-club heroine from central casting, with her carroty hair, her hoydenish (another underused word these days) ways, her ability to run, jump and climb, and her physical courage. The despair of her ghastly mother, who ‘lived between the four walls of seeing and hearing’, thinking only of ‘clothes, money, manners and social functions’, she wins the heart of her delightful grandfather, Lord Waveney, who has come through tragedies well outside the range of the gymkhana, and whose private life would have disqualified him from so much as a walk-on part in They Bought Her a Pony. ‘He wasn’t sober, pious or chaste; but he was honest, charitable, unselfish, long-suffering and brave.’ Fortunately his grand-daughter has inherited his qualities, for this is no pony book, but a very grown-up account of a rapid and rocky trajectory from an upper-class childhood rooted in an already faded Edwardian era, through a socially rebellious, and far from easy marriage, and the joys and disappointments of motherhood: moving, and ultimately uplifting because Patricia doesn’t allow herself to dwell on her sorrows for very long at any point, though there are many on which she might be forgiven for dwelling, and Joanna Canaan quickly raises her readers’ spirits, eliciting a wry smile with a cutting comment or a sardonic aside.

 

Fleshing out her characters with telling details, wittily breathing life into the most minor, Cannan does not linger over history or narrative.  She is mistress of  ‘show, don’t tell’, never showing more than we need, sometimes deliberately tantalizing with a dropped name, or a teasing loose end. The ‘back history’ of the Waveneys of Hulver takes up barely a page and a half, cantering through the deaths of three sons, the tidying away of a certain widow – ‘he had persuaded the widowed Mrs Featherstone that … she would find a prettier cottage and a gayer life elsewhere’ – , and the reluctant arrival of a daughter-in-law in reducing circumstances– ‘Blanche had packed up and left with tears the last and smallest [my italics] of the furnished houses’. The wandering widow in four words!

 

The First World War is covered in a single paragraph: the tragedy – names on the war memorial; the exhilaration of living in the present – oysters and champagne at the Ritz; the drabness of the aftermath. This is not the Great War of the poets, or the historians, but of a young woman, like countless others, meeting the ups and downs of daily life. There is a big picture, but Cannan knows that for most it is more often occluded by the small picture. She lists, not battles or casualties, but the price of butter,and eggs,  not individual deaths but properties sold to meet death duties. She doesn’t celebrate the victory or mourn the loss of a generation, but with remarkable frankness, some bitterness and clearly from her own experience, describes the new order, in which  ‘… purses closed, faces hardened, jokes fell flat’.

 

 

 

For Patricia and her husband, Hugh Lindsay, academic, son of a Peebles builder, upwardly mobile,  but harbouring a self-protective contempt for the class into which he has married, this is where family life begins. Patricia must complete the transition from childhood to motherhood, from a privileged and (thanks to her doting grandfather, not her bitter mother or her bullying nanny) happy childhood in the lost world of Hulver, to a life of ‘cooking, sweeping, dusting, scrubbing, washing, pushing the pram’. She becomes competent at the first five, to which she adds baking and darning and knitting, but it is the pram pushing, tiring as it is, that makes up, more than makes up, for her exile from Arcady. The children are her consolation: ‘for the beauty and the love and the fun and the hope that they were, this shortened step, these aching legs, this end to adventure was a small price to pay.’

 

 

Cannan makes brilliant use of what grammarians call ‘free indirect speech’, so that almost without realizing it, we find ourselves inside the heads of her characters, hearing their thoughts, seeing through their eyes. Most especially we find ourselves inside Patricia’s head, inside her body. We feel her aching limbs, and when she makes up her mind, to lie on the bed she has made for herself, to stop looking back, ‘to give up telling the children about Hulver, and teaching them hunting noises, and carrying carrots in her pockets’, we sense her hand digging into the unfamiliar emptinesses of her coat. The inside of Hugh’s mind is less congenial. We do not discover a doting father. He is pleased that his children look tidy, but requires little more of them. Deploring, and resenting, his wife’s upbringing, he is blind to the fact that it is that which has given her the strength to take on the challenge of life with him. Assuming that women are adaptable, and unaware of her sacrifice, ‘he took for granted and sincerely loved the admirable helpmeet that life had broken for him’. The equestrian ‘broken’ is so apt, and so sad.

 

Hugh has not had to adapt. His journey has been very different from Patricia’s. He has not had to take the ‘jars’ (Lord Waveney’s word) that she has. His path to academic success is smooth, and once he has achieved the summit of his ambition, he can relax. The Oxford professor, released from his jealous disapproval of her forbears, can finally spare a thought for his wife’s needs, giving her a house in the country with land and the all important stables. Allowing at last that his children might have some of the Waveney genes he buys them ponies, and guns. He has reached his goal, and nothing else matters, not his dentures, nor the fact that passion has gone from his marriage, nor the future of his children, who have turned out surprisingly different from what he expected. He is sad that Augustus, the elder, doesn’t enjoy Latin verse, and that the younger prefers Newbolt to Milton, but resigned to the fact the one marries a dull, stupid woman, and the other joins a ferociously muscular Christian movement, while his daughter prefers cars to horses. Because had set little store by their success, they do not greatly disappoint him.

 

How different for Patricia, who has no ambition for herself, who has vested all her dreams for the future in her children, her ‘Princes in the Land’. Children have been her life’s work, but that career path is bumpier and less clearly signposted than academia. The early years, so tiring at the time, prove in retrospect to have been the happiest, so much easier than the later ‘quarrels and complexes, sulks and selfishnesses’,  ‘… for though your legs ache, you can still go on walking, whereas tact, patience, wisdom are apt at any moment to forsake you.’ Still, however trying, the job is worth doing, for what else can make middle-age bearable, compensate for the false teeth and the dull husband. ‘If you’ve got children what does it matter if you grow old?’

 

 

Patricia, as it turns out, is wrong. The job of parenting had to be done, and she did it as well as she was able, with little help from Hugh, single-mindedly focused on his own career, but the rewards prove more limited than she had so confidently expected. Augustus, Giles and Nicola do not turn out as she had dreamed,  ‘… these weren’t the children for whom she had given up fun and friendship, worked, suffered, worried, taken thought, taken care, done without, suppressed, surrendered and seen her young self die.’ She had expected too much. We may find Hugh selfish, criticise him for long ago carelessly burying the red-headed hoyden he had married, but it is hard not to sympathise a little when he tries clumsily to comfort her with the thought that most parents are disappointed in their children. Why, he wonders, but, tactfully, does not ask, does she go on fighting?

 

‘She was forty-six, with scarcely a tooth left in her lower jaw; she was disappointed in her children; her husband no longer took any sexual interest in her …’. But the young rider to hounds deep within Mrs Lindsay, tamed by life, and caged, is not after all dead. Chance takes her past a burning cottage. A child is trapped inside. With blind courage she clambers in, takes the girl in her arms and jumps. The child turns out to be illegitimate, mentally deficient, and not greatly loved, but Patricia has rescued her. The symbolism is obvious, but no less touching for that.

 

Plucky Pat Crispin can still ride at her fences. There is life after motherhood. Patricia is able to let her children go their own ways, not in the ways that she had planned for them, while she, a woman her sons and daughters seem hardly to know, and her husband thinks too old, gets back into the saddle, and finds happiness of her own, small but real.

 

I came across a first edition of It Began With Picotee, the first of Joanna Cannan’s daughters’ pony books. Attached to it was the bookseller’s note: ‘Hardback with very good dust jacket which has some wear to extremities and small amount of chipping and a few minor tears.’ I misread the last word. It seemed like a very good description of Patricia Lindsay.

 

 

On 6th March 1947 Queen Mary opened the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition;it was the first since 1939 and there were queues in all directions.

 

 

For six years the home had been under threat. Husbands, fathers and sons had been away fighting, women had been conscripted into the forces or into factories, and thousands of children had been evacuated. Countless homes had been damaged or destroyed by enemy bombs. For the crowds who thronged the halls at Olympia in 1947 it must have been a kind of celebration of the fact that life was returning to something like normal.

Published in 1949, How to Run Your Home Without Help echoes that celebration. Many aspects of home life were still challenged by shortages. Death and divorce (60,250 in 1947, almost ten times as many as in 1938) had brought many marriages to an end. But for the vast majority of women the time had come to pick up new brooms. Four years earlier, 80% of married women had been working, either in the services or in industry. Of the 401,000 who married in 1947, close to 100% would have spent their teenage years as conscripts or directed workers. For the most part they welcomed the chance to stay at home, only too happy to swap the factory floor for the kitchen floor.

Although many more men returned from the Second World War than had returned from the first, the transition was better managed. Jobs were found, or created, for returning servicemen and ‘… two million – mostly married – women workers melted tactfully away when they began to feel unwelcome … ‘ (A Woman’s Place by Ruth Adam. Persephone Book No. 20).  By 1947 only 18% of married women were in gainful employment. They would have a new role, which they were, more or less subtly, encouraged to embrace or re-embrace, that of housewife, exchanging their uniforms or drab factory overalls for the ‘crisp, easily removed gay overalls’ suggested by one exhibitor at the 1947 Ideal Home Exhibition, who added in his publicity material that ‘smocks, nylon or spongeable aprons look attractive. Wear your hair as you would do for the man of the house’s homecoming.’ He also included a work schedule that makes Kay Smallshaw’s read like a slacker’s charter. Homes would be provided for Heroes, and they would be run by heroines.

 

 

In Kitchen Essays (Persephone Book No. 30) Agnes Jekyll describes the courage and fortitude of women after the Great War, who had come down in the world but kept the spirit alive ‘by gallant and unswerving toil, sweeping the rooms and cooking the dinner, mothering the family and cheering the bread-winner … daily learning to solve the startling problems of house and kitchen … practising the making of drudgery divine.’ Lady Jekyll quotes from George Herbert’s poem ‘The Elixir’, a good Anglican hymn; Kay Smallshaw calls one of her chapters ‘The Daily Round’, a very frequent misquote (correctly, ‘the trivial round’) from John Keble’s nineteenth century hymn, ‘New Every Morning’. The message is the same: approached in the correct frame of mind, the common task brings us closer to God. No woman would be ‘just a housewife’. The angel would be back in the house once more.

Some women, released from war work, were returning to their pre-war life; others would have helped their mothers at the stove and the wash-tub; while some had never boiled a kettle or lifted a duster. A number of public bodies were there to help. The Electrical Association for Women and the Women’s Gas Council set up national networks of branches to teach women how to plan their kitchens, how best to use gas and electricity in their homes, and to provide in addition education on hygiene and social welfare. The Council for Industrial Design supplied information on, amongst  other things, ‘How to Buy Furniture’ and ‘How to Buy Things for the Kitchen’. Guidance on diet and cooking continued to pour forth from the Ministry of Food. Practical advice on how to ‘make do and mend’ and make best use of food rations and clothing coupons – clothes rationing did not end until 1949, food rationing not until 1954 – was offered by women’s magazines like Woman  and Good Housekeeping, where Kay Smallshaw was employed in the mid-1930s.

 

 

 

Her first book, How to Run Your Home Without Help, was aimed principally at the third group, the ‘newcomers’. Although she promises a time-table less exacting than those in older books on household management, her proposed régime strikes us now as pretty daunting. Perhaps it appeared less so to women accustomed over four years to clocking-in or turning up on parade, and was still driven by the vestiges of wartime spirit: ‘1-2 ½ hours for the daily tidying, 3-4 hours for shopping, cooking and washing-up, and 2-3 hours for house cleaning, washing and other big jobs’ – and that is just ‘a starting point’: between six and nine and a half hours a day, with additional time for weekly baking, patching, doing the flowers, keeping accounts and entertaining (entertaining!). Ruth Adam quotes a Mass Observation survey of 1947 recording that the stay-at-home housewife spent between 60 and 71 hours a week on the housework. Kay Smallshaw is not expecting anything out of the ordinary from her novice housewife.

In Charles Frazier’s American Civil War novel, Cold Mountain,  one woman says of another that she ‘speaks only in verbs, all of them tiring’. That is the feeling one gets reading the contents page of How to Run Your Home Without Help, as we move (crawl) from Chapter 6 ‘The Daily Round’, to Chapter 7 ‘The Weekly Cleaning’, to Chapter 8 ‘More Weekly Cleaning’, to Chapter 9 ‘Spring Cleaning’. From time to time Kay Smallshaw timetables in a short break, but still to come are cooking and washing and mending, and ironing, which she indulgently suggests could be done sitting down.

As a new mother following Dr Spock, as we did then, I was advised by a friend to skip directly to ‘Managing with Twins’, in which Dr S. recommends the short-cuts that can be taken without endangering the health or well being of the infant. I like to think of the original reader of How to Run Your Home turning rapidly to Chapter 17 ‘Adapting the Routine When Baby Comes’, and heaving a great sigh of relief on being reassured that ‘weekly cleaning must certainly be cut down’, that ‘it won’t affect the comfort of the home if surrounds are polished much less often and furniture left to itself save for an occasional rub up with the duster’, that one can give up the net curtains, stop starching the table mats, send shirts to the laundry, stop ironing one’s husband’s underwear, and carry on wearing the maternity smock, which does so save one’s clothes. So much for cleanliness and godliness.

 

 

But, what a startling clear picture of late ‘40s middle class domestic life, from the placing of the cooker, and the refrigerator (if ‘you are lucky enough to have a refrigerator’), both gas and both moveable (how relaxing, but what would Health and Safety have to say?), to the need for a flap-table fixed to the larder door, ‘the only place where the wringer and the mincer can be screwed’. The kitchen, while it might not be one of ‘the streamlined masterpieces that meet our admiring gazes in the show-houses at exhibitions’, should enjoy ‘good light, air and enough sun or gaiety in decoration to give a lift to the spirits’ (features not considered essential before the war when the kitchen was the realm of servants). Washing powders and the ‘new liquid soap’ were beginning to replace hard soap and soda, but a washing machine, like a fridge, was a luxury, recommended nonetheless for the young mother (bought on the new Hire Purchase scheme). Mixers were just coming onto the market: the Kenwood Chef made its first appearance in 1947, though it would be a lot longer before the word ‘blitz’ became associated with it.

 

 

The menus and cooking tips, however, can make depressing reading – a three-layered steamer economically cooking a pudding, potatoes, and fish – and Kay Smallshaw does readily admit that ‘a meal that would be greeted with the warmest approval today would have been thought very ordinary before the war’. Never less than positive, however, she adds an encouraging corollary, ‘There are less materials on which to lavish culinary skill, and so less demands on the cook.’ [my italics]. The kitchen appliances may be museum pieces now, and the cleaning suggestions superseded or banned (DDT), but some of the tips cry out to be tested – silver boiled in an aluminium saucepan, fruit tested for setting in a solution of methylated spirits – and the advice on nutrition is exemplary and could hardly be bettered today. Oily fish, pulses instead of meat, National Bread rich in wheat germ, broccoli, citrus fruit, are all highly recommended, fats and sugar (strictly rationed in any case) warned against, ‘taken too generously they result in over-heaviness and sluggishness’.

 

 

 

What is utterly enchanting about How to Run Your Home is that it reads almost like a novel. Our young heroine is newly married to a husband sufficiently modern in outlook to be ready to lend a helping hand, stoking the boiler, washing up supper and preparing the weekend vegetables. He has willingly given up his study to provide a more convenient and better appointed kitchen for his new wife, and enjoys his ‘den’, the old kitchen, where he can store his tools and display his trophies, and when asked, service the vacuum cleaner. She makes friends with the shopkeepers who will then keep things aside for her, and might stop for tea or coffee out with baby in his pram (a remarkably well-behaved baby with improbably regular habits – it comes as no surprise to learn that Kay Smallshaw and her husband were childless).  A friend might bring her mending over so that the two women can stitch away together. He has his friends in for a bridge four and she acts as hostess and kitchen maid. When she invites her friends, ‘he’ll rally round’. He might even cook at weekends, or bath the baby occasionally, but isn’t wholly reliable when it comes to housework, usually making ‘more work than her performs’. But the young couple have talked it all over. They entertain, a few friends perhaps to a ‘spaghetti supper’, with rough Algerian wine. Evenings in together are spent reading or listening to the wireless, while she knits or sews – more mending – and they both smoke contentedly, undisturbed by their sleeping baby. Before retiring, he will clean and re-lay the fire, while she plumps up the cushions and empties the ashtrays. And so to bed: the sheets may be sides to middled, but they will be tucked in with mitred hospital corners, the dusted ornaments will be prettily arranged on the skirted dressing table, the bath and basin wiped round after use.

So many Persephone Books come to mind reading How to Run Your Home: The Home-Maker (Persephone Book No.7), of course, The Carlyles at Home (Persephone Book No. 32) – I was reminded of Jane’s careful budgeting, Greenery Street (Persephone Book No, 35), except that they had two servants, and Felicity lunched most days with her parents – and many more, which leave unexplored the behind-the-scenes practicalities on which Kay Smallshaw’s short but detailed self-help book casts such a revealing light.