Archives: Persephone Forum

Relinquishing a prosperous, if bohemian, pre-war life in London for a ‘conchie’ commune in Devon, Margaret Bonham honed her pen on these vignettes of village life, with an occasional glance back to London, Bath, and the North coast of France.

 

 

Divorced from a ‘card-carrying’ pacifist of the 1930s, and newly married to a Second World War conscientious objector, Bonham’s war, to judge by this collection, was very different from that of other Persephone authors, Mollie Panter-Downes, Jocelyn Playfair, Elizabeth Berridge, or last month’s Barbara Euphan Todd. There are no bombs, no obvious shortages, no queues, no evacuees, no on-going rationing. The spirit of make-do-and-mend is noticeably lacking. Indeed a positive aversion to it is a shared by the strongest and most independent of the women. Lucy in ‘The Two Mrs Reeds’ – the closest, according to Bonham’s daughter, to a self-portrait –  who is ‘not much interested in other peoples’ children’ and likes ‘the wrong kind of house’, does not knit, nor does Emmy, in ‘The River’, a free spirit, with advanced views on child-rearing, who also refuses to make blouses out of curtain lace. Only a few oblique references and small but telling details set these stories in their time: a WAAF officer in uniform, maternity hospital visiting hours relaxed for serving fathers on leave, Utility tables, a lasting reminder, along with the County War Agricultural Committee and ‘an indefinite number of white babies and three black ones’ left behind, along with ‘a way of dancing, a way speaking’ by departed soldiers (‘Inigo’).

American soldiers have departed, English soldiers have not returned. Not until 1951 would the balance of sexes right itself, and then only for the under 30s (see A Woman’s Place by Ruth Adam. Persephone Book No. 20). This is a world from which, with one or two vivid exceptions, men are absent.

 

 

 

Women make up bridge fours and dance with each other. Children (mostly girls) are cared for by mothers alone, aunts, grandmothers or eventually strangers. The relationships are not for the most part warm. A mother nurses unattainable literary ambitions for her daughter, a precocious daughter bossily tries to educate her mother, a wildly imaginative three-year-old, having exhausted her mother, sees off a mild but tiresome minder: Miss Jenner, a clergyman’s daughter, vainly tries to tame the child (‘I aren’t Britta … I’m a bull’) with whimsical stories of fairies in flowers (‘…all children are alike you know – they all have these charming fancies.’), only to find her fancy trumped, when Britta plucks Miss J’s little red fairy, with little green wings from inside the japonica petals, and stamps on it. ‘I’ve killed it’, she says grimly, before setting off on an imaginary, but nonetheless awkward, bicycle.

Grown-ups, with their affectations and their need for secrecy, are rarely a match for children, who continually baffle them with their straightforwardness and their capacity to live in and for the moment. Even the most caring and sensible parent, an ‘older father’ in ‘The River’, whose weekly walks along the riverbank with two-year-old Frankie, provide delight for them both underestimates his small daughter’s resilience. William moves heaven and earth (almost literally) to replace an old shoe and a marrow, much loved riverside flotsam swept away in a flood, and is astonished, almost disappointed, to find her unimpressed by their reappearance:  what Frankie misses is the thrill of the rushing flood water. And this is a father, who like his wife, and one must assume the author herself, believes that ‘children have more sense than they are credited with’. Only such confidence in the hardiness of children can explain the apparent contradiction between Margaret Bonham’s two year long abandonment of her own children and her acute and sensitive insight into the workings of young minds.

Anxious Joe, takes courage from his overbearing father’s broken revolver, shows unexpected (almost excessive) cool headedness at the scene of a bloody train derailment, then, no longer the hero of the hour, regresses to boyish excitement reliving ‘with ecstasy’ the moment of the crash. Bonham sees this as natural, and she may be right. Her psychological acumen is evident, although not overplayed, in the title story. Three English girls with their French friend, all in their late teens, obtain permission to go to Casino. Kitty the eldest and most eager, is, inevitably, disappointed; Rhys is a nervous and reluctant participant in such a perilous adventure. Only Valentine fully enjoys it: a young painter, content to observe, is thrilled by the colour, the clothes, the lights.

 

 

Valentine has the author’s eye.  Bonham’s images are brilliant: ‘the water in each hollow, fringed with brown weed, was clear as gin’; the sea, ‘the same milk blue as the sky, but polished with light’; a woman ‘walks in her bracken tweeds as undisclosed and uncompromising as a moving piece of country’.  ‘… a diamond brooch as big as a saucer lay so flat on her bosom she could have put a cup on it’, conveys the size of the jewel, the stoutness of its wearer, and wittily suggests the vulgarity of both. Bonham rarely wastes a word. Invited to share his fiancée’s delight in the countryside, a temporarily uprooted London businessman replies, ‘ “Charming” … flicking towards the river the kind of glance he would have awarded a gasometer’.  His impatience, his lack of sensibility and his preference for the dully functional over the natural, and the incompatibility of the couple are all there. An unexpected juxtaposition of words speaks volumes: a house has ‘the charm of stark architectural lunacy’ (‘Inigo’); little Britta’s mother shuts the child’s door, and leaves holding an imaginary hedgehog in her hands with ‘absent care’.  At the bridge table, ‘the married couples, on bidding but hardly speaking terms, began another rubber’ (‘Annabel’s Mother’). Even punctuation is used with rare comic effect: ‘… Lucy felt a little more amiable towards Thomas; but not much; she could not forgive the caravan.’ (‘The Two Mrs Reeds’).

Bonham has little time or sympathy for sentimentality. Romance occurs somewhat fortuitously, marriages are made for motives of practicality: a couple brought together over a cat, another over an abandoned baby. The history of poor Mrs Greene’s married life is summed up in less than half of the opening paragraph of ‘The Blue Vase’, and it is hard to avoid a cruel smile when we learn that Mr G. ‘had first begotten a child and then collided with a lorry.’ The humour is not kind, but it is seductive and it is (relatively) even-handed, aimed at Chelsea intellectual poseurs as pointedly as it is at the pettinesses of village life. At their best these are stories which stand comparison with some of Saki’s, and, for twists in the tail, O’Henry’s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking round the bedroom that had been hers, now empty of furniture, Rhoda reflects that ‘she had borrowed the room from the house and given it back to it. The house had received it again, taking no notice of her. She stood there, a stranger.’ The old house is no longer home, and the new house has yet to become home. The familiar furniture, the cherished ornaments, the linen, the pictures, the mementos, have been packed and  stacked in vans, a sort of limbo, awaiting re-incarnation within different walls. It is a period between two ‘normalities’ and Rhoda Powell finds herself enjoying an unexpected sense of freedom, as if a rope that tethered her had been cut. The prospect of new things and possible adventure opens up before her: new house, new life.

 

 

The New House opens with Rhoda’s waking in one bedroom and ends with her falling asleep in another.  Surprised by the lack of drama attendant on the leaving of Stone Hall, the family home of thirty years, ‘just as if you were going for a drive in the morning and coming back for lunch’, she is nonetheless keenly aware of the importance of the day, ‘like a crack in my life. Things are coming up through the crack, and, if I don’t look at them, perhaps I shall never see them again. Ordinary life in the new house will begin tomorrow and grow over the crack and seal it up.’ Less of a physical wrench than she had expected, moving day, or ‘removing day’ as it was known in the thirties, generates a powerful psychological force, bringing to the surface memories and feelings, and providing a moment to pause and reflect on them. Rhoda is not alone:  other members of the family, gathered to help with the move, find themselves similarly thinking about the past, the future, the possibility, or impossibility of change for themselves, and for the wider world.

 

 

A convinced socialist and an equally convinced Freudian, Lettice Cooper deftly (and unexpectedly humorously at times) weaves the message of the need for social change with the belief that patterns of adult behaviour are (almost) immutably determined in childhood, a belief which makes her interestingly quite forgiving of some of the worst traits of her least attractive characters. Rhoda’s mother, Natalie Powell, is bad, but not all bad,  ‘busy, exacting, sometimes tender’; her late father, she remembers as ‘laughing and playing’: clearly the more attractive parent, but unable to protect her (or himself) from his self-centred and demanding wife (not her fault – her mother was like that). Indulged by her mother, spoilt by her older sister, consistently given in to by her husband, she, Natalie, has an exaggerated but rarely challenged sense of entitlement, ‘the potency of someone who never questioned the absolute rightness of her own wishes’. It seems rather harsh to blame those around her, but there must be some truth in Lettice Cooper’s assessment that unselfish people make selfish ones. In an eye-opening moment, watching her mother defeated in argument by her sister’s outspoken fiancé (a refreshing voice from outside the family), Rhoda recognises that ‘tyranny is not all the tyrant’s fault.’ She acknowledges that she, her father and her brother have all yielded too readily. What she never quite acknowledges, although Lettice Cooper makes it clear, is the extent to which she has used her mother’s manipulative neediness as a crutch: a timid child, a nervous schoolgirl, an unadventurous twenty-year old – it has been easy to conceal her lack of courage under the guise first of the obedient, later of the dutiful daughter. Fearing both her mother’s rage and her tears, for Natalie had always got her way ‘by being either angry or crying’, Rhoda has remained at home, letting life and love slip by, so that at thirty-three she feels old: ‘It’s not old if you done things before you get there’, she says to her sister, ‘but it is if you haven’t.’

 

 

Maurice, the home-loving, equally dutiful son, cast in the same mould as his gentle father, has found the courage to leave, because that is what men do, but has married a woman who is (although neither the arriviste Surrey girl, Evelyn, nor her snobbish mother-in-law would admit this) in many ways like his own mother. The sale of Stone Hall, which he has continued to think of, and, to his wife’s understandable irritation, refer to as ‘home’, long after their marriage, forces him to face up to life not as a son, but as a husband. The house he shares with Evelyn and their daughter must now become home. He had thought himself more fortunate than Rhoda, having both his work and his family, while she had ‘nothing of her own to which she was necessary’, but making money and maintaining moral values do not, as he had hoped, sit comfortably together, and his marriage is not the bed of roses he had envisaged as a young lover. ‘If you’re a whole person, you can be free anywhere,’ says Rhoda. ‘But we aren’t whole , you and I,’ he replies. The truth is that for all her disadvantages as a woman, Rhoda, unshackled by property and business, has a chance of freedom that he has not. Will she prove brave enough to seize it?

Delia, the youngest, having always accepted that she was the outsider in the family, favoured neither by her father, like Rhoda, nor by her mother, like Maurice, is not bound by the same tethers. Even as a child, when her older siblings longed for the holidays, she had thrilled to the excitement of school; as a young woman, she looks to the future, finding little difficulty in putting failure and disappointment behind her. Aware that she is not the prime recipient of her mother’s love (a commodity in very short supply), she makes no effort to secure her approval, and, as a consequence, meets her on equal terms. Having made the break long ago, the old home represents for her neither a refuge nor a prison. She does all she can to help her sister get free of Natalie’s clutches. Delia might have been impatient, Rhoda resentful, but, different as they are, the two have a warm relationship. Rhoda appreciates her younger sister’s life-enhancing qualities. Delia sympathises with Rhoda’s predicament.

More perceptive, and more objective, than either her sister or Maurice, she also sees in her mother, what the others are blind to, that ‘If she’d ever been taught to use her brains for herself, instead of depending on other people, she’d have been a very capable woman.’ The New House raises a number of questions about the position of women in nineteen-thirties Britain, a time when few upper-middle class girls needed to work, but not all were rich enough to enjoy much of a life until and unless they married. Rhoda rightly fears becoming like her mother’s spinster sister Ellen, selfless, kind and unregarded, and too poor and too old for any new venture.

 

 

Ellen, like Rhoda, has loved and lost in her youth, but she is capable, like her younger niece, of putting past sorrows behind her and seeing that the new house, which might turn out to be Rhoda’s prison, could be a haven for her: ‘If she could really be living in a house again, able to make a cake or do some flowers for the table, or look through the linen and see what needed mending.’  ‘Practised in resignation’, Ellen is a survivor. So too is the much younger Ivy, maid of all works to the Powells, and the first to settle in the new house, cheerfully making order, of a sort, in the confusion of kitchen utensils and china. She had, as Rhoda grasps, ‘been making herself at home in other people’s houses since she was fourteen. She had the experience and temperament of a soldier of fortune.’

 

 

Ivy will be the only servant. The new house boasts no green baize door. A new social order is dawning. The old house, already reduced to a staff of two, will be pulled down. As Delia observes, ‘there was a removal going on all over England that was turning out that cupboard [the cupboard into which families like hers had pushed away out of sight all the social mess that they did not want to confront], and a good job too, even if it spoilt the tidy room.’ Homes will be built for families struggling in cramped slums. There will be better jobs for women, and for some the freedom to live and love more like men, like Delia’s boss, Doctor Nella Dunn, who ‘pursued free love conscientiously, making new contacts like a good, but rather tired commercial traveller.’

The New House is a novel about a change, written, like many Persephone novels, at a time when undreamt of change was just below the horizon. It is almost impossible to close it without saying to oneself, ‘if they only knew …’