Archives: Persephone Forum

After three year as ‘a desert island housewife, unaware of war or peace, and without suet or bottled fruit’, Nona Ranskill returns to an England that she doesn’t understand and which doesn’t understand her.  Having left a country still enjoying a fragile peace, she returns to one where war has become a way of life, bringing with it a set of rules, conventions and priorities which have become so entrenched that only an outsider would dare to question them.

‘Was there any truth in this strange island where laddered stockings, a lack of notice boards and an illiterate song had more power to rouse emotion than death and destruction and the smashing of bombs,’ asks Miss Ranskill, and we can hear the author’s voice, as clearly as we sense her shock when Nona’s old school-friend asks of her airman son, ‘Have you had any good prangs lately?’ War has stiffened upper lips to the point where death must take its place along with other inconveniences, evacuees, billeted soldiers, the non-keeping qualities of flour and rough hands.

 

 

Nona’s desert island has been shared with the Carpenter, the capital letter indicative of the fact that this is no ordinary carpenter, and that any similarity to the best known of all carpenters is purely intentional. Both Miss Ranskill, as he addresses her, and Reid, as she addresses him, in accordance with the old social niceties, have been washed ashore following somewhat implausible accidents, he some years before her, as a result of ‘something to do with a winch’, she in an attempt to retrieve a dropped hat. The allegorical nature of the opening chapters is barely disguised: we are dropped straight into a sort of pre-lapsarian paradise, in which social rank counts for nothing and a man and a woman can live chastely side by side, where fresh water flows sufficient to slake  their thirst and there are wild plants and fish aplenty to eat. Wood and shells can be whittled into shape as bowls and saucers, beds and a boat, bones shaped into needles and Nona’s long hair twisted into thread. Redundant ten-shilling notes find better use as kindling for the fire and a few stones create a hearth to ‘make it more homely’,  one of the Carpenter’s favourite phrases.

For Nona and for the Carpenter, home, conjured up in their touchingly evoked game of ‘going to the pictures’, is, for one, bread and milk by the nursery fire, with her sister Edith in their red dressing-gowns, and for the other ‘a cat on the rug, a plant-pot in the window and a bunch of flowers on the side-table’. But there is a cruel irony in the title. Having buried the Carpenter (not a spoiler – this is in the opening paragraph) Miss Ranskill does come home, as the title says, but it is not home as she had pictured it during all those years. ‘All the comforting small pictures she had made for herself of bedroom armchairs, tea by the fireside, the welcome of friends and the safe luxury of houses had left her mind. There was nothing left of them.’ And this is before she has been faced by baffling demands for coupons, or the sheer impossibility of buying stockings, or bananas, or hair-grips; and before she discovers the need for an identity card or hears talk of Objectors, and conchies, and Quislings and Nasties and the ATS, and the WAAF and ARP. ‘Even the language was secret from her, full of strange words and alphabetical sequences.’

 

 

 

 

‘Was she perhaps a trifle mad?’ If Miss Ranskill doesn’t understand the country in which she has landed, they most certainly don’t know what to make of her, a scarecrow (this is the author of Worzel Gummidge) of a woman, with straggly hair, threadbare, shrunken clothes and no shoes, who thinks it is possible to pick clothes from the dress shop racks and pay for them in the old way: no wonder that before she has even gone, empty handed, through the door, the rumour is already rife that she is a German spy, and the police are on her trail. In other hands this might be the stuff of nightmares, but Barbara Euphan Todd treats it with such a light touch that very quickly it is not Nona we worry for,  but everyone else, seen through her ‘innocent’ eyes, behaving in ways that defy common sense and to an outside observer border on madness. The description of her bossy old-school-friend, Marjorie, leading her team in ‘extinguishing an incendiary bomb’ in the greenhouse, with a stirrup-pump is gloriously funny. Why should Nona think it is anything but serious, until Marjorie is once more recognisable as the school prefect she remembers, not over fondly, ‘Jebb, your tunic isn’t buttoned properly, Sprink, your shoe lace is untied. You might have tripped and upset the bucket …’.

 

 

For Marjorie, as for many others, whose development like hers has been ‘arrested midway through the last term in the sixth form’, the war, for all the loss and discomfort it brings, has provided a setting in which one time Head Girls can take up their old places, put on their uniforms and lead their teams out onto a fresh playing field. Up against a very different team from the girls from the Towers, they can bring the Nasties down to size by ensuring adequate supplies, no longer of pens and India rubbers, but of soup, tinned fish and candles. They can make their little bit of England a safer place by turning their rose beds over to lettuces and parsley. ‘Dig for Victory’,‘Jump to It’, ‘Be a Sport and Save the Soap’, ‘Make Do and Mend’, echoing the language of school assemblies, the new rules, lest anyone forget, them can be hung on walls, painted on oil cloth, poker worked into panels.

With their girls behind them, Marjorie Mallinson and Miss Philips, Nona’s compliant sister’s reluctant landlady, and thousands like them will carry on bottling fruit in place of the unobtainable tinned fruit, which none of them ate when it was obtainable; they will carry on making rose-hip syrup for the children, when they have long ago and with sighs of relief seen off their unwelcome evacuees; determined to keep up standards that were shallow in the first place, they will make clothes out of old bedspreads when they have more clothes than they need in their wardrobes. When Miss Ranskill arrives and asks why – Why not spread the butter ration thickly one day and enjoy it, rather than suffer bread and scrape for seven? Why not have ten inches of hot water in the bath rather than six, when the unused water will go cold? Why wear shoes when one is more comfortable without?  ‘… like a kindergarten child who had been jumped into the sixth form of a high school’, Miss Ranskill asks the questions a child might ask, unintentionally, but effectively challenging rules and priorities.

 

 

Her island years, with the thoroughly good and honest Carpenter, have washed her clean of the old prejudices and assumptions. Her easiest and most comfortable encounters are with children and with the young. She understands the significance of a lost penknife, and is happy to be instructed by a small boy as to the varying tones of the air raid siren and on how to use a gas mask. She knows how to reassure a child,  understands that a warm hug is more effective than exhortations to brace up. And she appreciates why a young airman might want to defy the social expectations of his parents and choose to marry a girl because she was ‘comforting’.

 

 

 

Barbara Euphan Todd’s is too subtle and too easily amused for her irritation to evolve into full blown anger, but it comes close in her damning descriptions of the do-gooders who do no good, and haven’t an ounce of ordinary everyday humanity in them, cutting them down to size with a throwaway phrase. To reverse the old dictum it would be tragic if it weren’t so funny. Touchingly sad and ordinary encounters are balanced by sparklingy funny set pieces, as well as perceptive and troubling visions of a post war future, when the old values are going to need to be dusted down and revived. A generation of fatherless boys who have grown up in the war years will have to learn how to live correctly; young servicemen – and Todd has seen this after the First World War – will have to forget that they were once heroes and cut a new path.

The message of Miss Ranskill Comes Home is one of quiet and unassuming goodness, embodied first in the Carpenter, whose spirit lives on in Miss Ranskill, and who continues to deliver strength and courage to her in their posthumous conversations. His ghost does not rest until she no longer needs him. Barbara Euphan Todd’s husband, Lieutenant Commander John Bower, died in 1940. During the first dark years of her widowhood, the petty rules and increasingly obsessive concern with material things on the part of those around her must have appeared painfully absurd, when weighed against her grief. The naval commander was the younger son of a baronet, the Carpenter just a carpenter. Is it fanciful to conjecture that the two have been melded?

‘A darting sunfish,’ wrote Angus Wilson of Frances Towers. She would surely have loved the image. The play of light and dark, shadows and reflections, what one of her characters refers to as the ‘chiaroscuro in the picture of her life’, ripples through all these short stories, often literally. Furnished is waxed to a sheen, silver polished, jewels scintillate, a witch’s ball hangs in a cottage sitting-room. But there is something mysterious, unstable about light; reflected light is particularly unreliable, revealing, concealing and distorting reality.

 

 

Violet, a strange, diminutive housemaid arrives and the first sign of her unsettling power over her employers is the ‘darker stranger glow of the furniture’. The brass witch’s ball reflects ‘a small enchanted garden on one side and on the other a mysterious white room’, but Lucy and Florence’s garden, in ‘The Chosen and the Rejected’, is not enchanted but bordered by a sinister wood, ‘a beggarly, untidy place, rather sodden, with a smell of something dead in it.’ Their sitting-room is neither white, nor mysterious, and the diamonds dripping from the wrist of their far richer neighbour, whose unexpected visit will change their lives, as Violet changed those of the Titmusses, far from casting a glitter over it, seemed  ‘to attract and hold all the light in the room’. Light can obscure. In ‘Lucinda’ Venetia Quarles complains that her mother, with her excess of common-sense, is ‘like electric light in a room which a moonbeam is trying to enter’, preventing her children from seeing the family ghost. She is wrong about the common-sense: Mrs Quarles firmly, and wrongly, believes that the figure she sees reflected in her mirror is the ghost. Mirrors can confuse and more often than not when we are confident of seeing the whole picture and seeing it clearly, we are mistaken.

 

 

‘There were no dark corners in our house, and none, it was assumed, in our minds, which, said my mother, were an open book to her’, writes Elsa in ‘Don Juan and the Lily’. But daughters in Towers’ stories are more often than not closed books to their mothers,literally closed books in some cases: Sophy (‘Violet’) and Prissy (‘Tea with Mr Rochester’), although in her case it is the prying eyes of an aunt that she is escaping, commit the truth, their truth, to carefully concealed diaries. Mrs Craigie knows no more about Elsa, than Mrs Dellan knows about her deluded daughter, Elsa’s office friend Anne, who has reinvented herself as Georgia, reconfiguring the world around her at the same time: her employer is no poet, nor when he marries Elsa has he accepted second best.

Anne/Georgialeaves behind the reality of the bookless, flowerless, airless Bayswater house that she shares with her mother, along with her given name. Prissy escapes the careless cruelty of her aunts, Athene and Elena, whose ‘kiss was like the peck of a hen, so perfunctory that it bereft one of affection’, by bouncing a ball ‘to spin out of herself an imaginary world and people it with characters’. The gossamer thin curtain between reality and the world of imagination is torn when Prissy is taken to tea with the man, as it were, of her dreams, Mr Considine, her Mr Rochester (Prissy lives in books, forbidden books), taken along by her aunt ‘as she might have taken a Pekinese or a sunshade’.

 

 

Aunt Athene lives in a dully material world, a prosaic world, a poor alternative to the poetic universe of the imagination. Aunt Esse, in the final story of the collection, ‘The Golden Rose’, has reached, if not old age, then late middle-age (curious how hard it is to guess the age of most of these characters – probably far younger than we think), happily single because to have married the man she loved would have been to risk her ‘poetry dwindling into prose’. This is no mindless drift into romantic fiction: Aunt Esse, aka Frances Towers, pins herself, her niece and the reader wittily to reality, when having explained to her niece, Emma, that the man’s wife  had run away, ‘Not,’ she added hurriedly, ‘that it is a wise proceeding to fall in love with men whose wives have left them. Much better not.’ A practical piece of advice, but Aunt Essie, the slightly dotty, poor relation, kept at arm’s length by Emma’s ghastly stepmother, ‘who had come into our lives,’ says Emma, ‘fortuitously, bringing her own world with her and blowing out the one we knew like a soap bubble.’

 

 

Emma recalls her own mother as ‘a light in the mind and a fragrance in the memory’. In her story it is the scent of roses that is evoked (roses abound in this collection, sniffed and plucked and stripped gently of their petals to explore their hearts) but also and as evocatively the scent of a tea chest lined with silver foil. Pleasant smells, flowers, wood ash and sandalwood and coffee beans, melting wax waft through the pages, along with some less pleasant, copying ink and gum, and others which not all of us might recognise:  the smell of occultism? Are we to believe that the sense of smell is more powerful, more reliable than sight? Little Violet’s is certainly quite remarkable: Violet can smell secrets, but then Violet reads the cards. The supernatural is never far away. Only one of the stories in the collection is a true ghost story and yet there is something of the ghost story about almost every one.

These are beautifully structured stories, centred on individual families, and apart from an occasional venture to an office interior or a school, perhaps a short walk in a garden, contained within one or at most two houses. But we quickly learn, for the stories build on each other, not narratively but in mood, that a house is not necessarily a home, nor a family a place of love and warmth. There is little love remaining between husbands and wives, and children, mostly sisters, too often live ‘shut up in their private worlds, like grubs in their cocoons’.

 

Into each of these dysfunctional families,  in some of which relationships are quite hard to discern, as though we had been thrown into a room and left to establish from a series of tiny clues who each person is, a slightly enigmatic figure is introduced, often disappearing as mysteriously as they arrived, but leaving change behind them. So subtle is the narrative that is hard to say exactly how the change has been brought about it, and even to be sure if it is change for the good or for the bad.

Comedy or tragedy? Wise and gentle Esse knew ‘that life can be terribly sad and utterly ridiculous, sometimes at the same moment’. That is what Frances Towers knows and what makes the stories in Tea with Mr Rochester so richly satisfying.