Archives: Persephone Forum

‘Catherine had always supposed that a family was a united whole from the beginning. Life wasn’t as easy as that.’ Hostages to Fortune opens with the birth of Catherine’s first child. The birth of a first child to Catherine and William, how fortuitous that this should be the Forum book for this month.

 

 

But this is 1915. William, Catherine’s husband, a doctor, is at the Front and she is alone when she experiences that first astonishing realisation, surely familiar to every new mother, ‘That’s not a baby, it’s a person’. She cannot share it with William , who celebrates the arrival of his daughter according to convention by offering his friends a dinner of Langouste Américaine.

They are no closer when he returns from France. She ‘felt that the War had given her back quite a different person from the one she had married’, while ‘William’, writes Elizabeth (it is a feature of Persephone authors that sometimes one finds oneself thinking of them by their first name, not always but often, and Elizabeth Cambridge is one of these), was disappointed’. His wife, the bride he had come back for, looks shabby: baby Audrey has taken Catherine from him. He responds by taking Catherine back for himself. Catherine must hand her tiny daughter over to Nanny. From the beginning this little family is far from united.

 

 

Three years of gangrene, mud and marauding aeroplanes, when planning a road provided a welcome measure of sanity, and order, have left William with an uncomfortable need to control house, garden, children, Catherine’s wardrobe if he could. She like other women of her generation is tired, daunted by an overlarge house, ‘the exact opposite of the house of her dreams’, lacking the staff for which it had been built: Quentin Bell in his life of Virginia Woolf urges us to remember all the labour saving devices we take for granted before we scoff at our forbears for their dependence on servants. And Elizabeth does not overlook the dire conditions from which Catherine’s loyal maid of all work, Irene, springs, nor the bleak future facing her family.

 

 

The war, which ‘absorbed her generation like a sponge’, has left those who remain not ‘ripened’ but ‘scorched’. Husbands, sons, lovers, friends have been lost and dreams turned to dust. Catherine’s determination not to ‘hand that pain and weariness on to her children’ cannot keep the shadow of the War from casting a pall over their early years, a time of shortages, and inflation, change, and regret for lost opportunities. It is a weariness that will not leave them: in the early 1930s her friends, robust women like her, complain, ‘We started doing too much in the War, we found we could do it and we went on doing it. Now the bill is coming in.’ And, of course, what they don’t know and what Elizabeth didn’t know, was that a new challenge was already looming, one that would threaten and maybe take the lives of the very children to whom they had devoted so much energy.  Hostages to Fortune was reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement on 23^rd June 1933. Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany for six months.

Curiously, the reviewer described Hostages to Fortune as ‘a very happy novel’. Extraordinary – but perhaps no more so than The Times obituarist in 1947 who summarised it as ‘a finely observed interpretation of the life of a country doctor’! Surely if Hostages to Fortune  has a message it is that contentment is achieved only when happiness has been recognised as the chimera it is. It is not reached by striving for it, any more than the perfect child is produced by consulting manuals, or feeding them on raw vegetables. Hilary’s mother, Catherine’s practical friend, is more use to her than Robin’s: ‘that’s life’, says the first, ‘or if it isn’t life it’s all that you or I are going to get my dear’, while the second seeks the key to perfect parenting in Freud and Froebel, Coué and carrots.

‘Hilary’s mother’, ‘Robin’s mother’: that is how we know them. Is it any surprise when Catherine says of herself, ‘she was Adam’s, she was Audrey’s, she was William’s’, and,  when Jane, her sister’s unsatisfactory  daughter, (only unsatisfactory because she did not follow the narrow, home bound path her mother had selfishly planned for her) argues for ‘a life of one’s own’, the concept makes little sense to Catherine, whose own dream of being a writer has been put away with her novel at the back of a drawer. Life for women, married or single was hard and the prospects for daughters, as Catherine is all too well aware limited. Men in the thirties were not having an easy time either, and William too is exhausted. A country doctor serving twenty-seven villages, making up his own medicines and constantly worried by debts, there are times when he hates his work.

 

 

But while neither is ‘very happy’,  they are not unhappy. She is reconciled eventually to country life, adapting to the rigid village hierarchy. They find great happiness in small things, he in a row of fruit trees planted, and growing well, she in a house smelling of flowers and beeswax, in feeding a baby, in lying in warm grass listening to the bees. There is a sort of peace in quiet evenings together: ‘When they were not speaking they could think kindly of each other, glad to be together, much as two horses will stand together out of harness under a tree’  and joy in looking at her children, when she does not feel ‘obliged to interfere or correct them’. Time and again I wanted to say, ‘yes, Elizabeth, that’s exactly how it is, still’.

As a new mother Catherine recognised that Audrey was a little person, ‘all there … as a piece of fine material is packed in a small box’.

 

 

It is a shock to find herself not always liking the person: Audrey is bossy and knowing, while her brother Adam is sweet and sensitive but not as clever as she would like, and the youngest, Bill, too masculine and aggressive.  But Catherine is more accepting than William, who firmly believes that children of his own flesh and blood should have like natures, while she sees them as ‘acts of an incalculable God, created in the likeness of relations she had far rather they didn’t resemble.’ Elizabeth’s wry humour makes Catherine even more sympathetic.  Worried that they have too few friends nearby, she finds her children getting ‘very cornery’ . What a perfect description; we know exactly what she means, just as we can feel and share her pleasure in ‘the slippered ease in being simply three women together’, and picture her clothes, that William hates for their ‘draggled, worried look’. I love the fact that my spellcheck is thrown into confusion by so many of her words.

Parenting is hard, Catherine is not the perfect mother, nor William the perfect father. Marriage is hard, and, against all expectations, being parents together doesn’t make marriage easier. Catherine senses rightly that William loves her for all the reasons for which she doesn’t want to be loved. She sees the two of them as starting ‘at opposite sides of a dense dark jungle’, and Elizabeth does not gloss over the black periods, times when ‘the sourness, the disillusionment, the mutual disappointment were poison to both of them’. In what the younger generation might disparage as a rather old-fashioned way they hold on, until ‘somehow a real friendship, a real need for each other’ has grown up behind their differences and disappointments. Their contentment has been hard won, but finally William is able love her for the person she is: ‘… she was a trier. Valiantly, in blind ignorance and recurring dismay, she had kept his house and brought up his children. Even if her efforts weren’t always successful, it was for them that he loved her.’

The title reminds us of Bacon’s epigram, but the novel challenges it; far from being ‘impediments to great enterprises’, their children and their marriage have proven to be the great enterprises. Is it a happy ending? I don’t know. I closed the book with tears in my eyes.

 

 

 

 

‘I don’t know what I’m going to be yet; whether I’m going to be important in myself or just married.’ Christine and Penelope Marwood divide their female acquaintances into sheep and goats: the goats get away, the sheep stay within the fold, and, if unmarried, ‘still girls in outlook and behaviour’ even at forty, and ‘still dressing on the allowance allotted to them at eighteen.’ The sisters dream ineffectually of being goats, but it is the late nineteen-thirties and,  although things were changing, and daughters, even of ‘good families were breaking away in all directions’, going to universities, ‘on the films’, or ‘sometimes just going’, more typically the lot of the unmarried daughter, when her family could afford it, was to remain at home. Lacking the education thought essential for their brothers, learning what they could from schools ‘where the pupils were not encouraged to know too much, but where the tone was nice’, or from more or less inadequate governesses, for most girls importance was a somewhat idle ambition, and marriage not a certainty. For many of their class all that beckoned was an infantilised, more or less idle middle age, and the Marwood girls are more infantilised than most.

Christine is twenty, Penelope nineteen and they have never left the nursery, either emotionally or physically. Indulged rather than loved, they still share their childhood bedroom, and spend their days sewing and reading and dreaming in the old school room, where their old books clutter the shelves and in one corner the dolls’ house still stands. Meals are carried up to them on trays by, understandably, grumpy maids, and neither their widowed father, nor his unmarried artist-sister object nor show any inclination to adopt a more familial pattern, since they too prefer on the whole to keep to their own quarters, and Saunby, the Priory of the title, is large enough to accommodate their selfish eccentricity – large but cold and dark, and not only because of Major Marwood’s sparing use of the ancient electricity plant.

 

 

Dorothy Whipple paints the house and its occupants, upstairs and down, with short telling strokes and warm humour. ‘The servants’, she writes, ‘ lolled round the fire.’ Only lazy, unmotivated, bored and undervalued servants ‘loll’ behind the green baize door. Aunt Victoria, is an Artist, and thus above managing either house or servants. Buffalo heads, trophies of earlier travels and hunting triumphs, hanging on the stone walls of the hall, have beards of cobwebs in addition to their own.

 

While the dust has gathered in the house, the surrounding estate has shrunk, no game in the coverts, no horses in the stables, the woodland is overgrown and all that remains of the kitchen garden are antic stumps of Brussels sprouts. Francis Marwood, the proud young soldier who arrived at Saunby with a beloved wife and three small children, and every prospect of a bright future, is tall and handsome, fifty and bereft.  ‘When death removed the mistress, it removed the retaining pin of the household. The pieces fell apart and so far had never been reassembled.’  For nearly twenty years, time at Saunby has stood still. The house and the Marwoods (apart from the girls’ brother Guy who had both the education and the wit to escape, to a career and a family of his own) have remained frozen in time. Ignoring both paternal and estate duties – bills are unpaid, and he shows little affection to his motherless daughters – the Major lives only for his  cricket festival (and even that depends on an ex-miner, turned chauffeur, the charismatic charmer Thompson), while his sister  daubs away at pictures that ‘could well have been reproduced in the competition corner of a children’s paper with prizes offered for those who could point out what was wrong’. Upstairs at Saunby there are no grown-ups.

Change must come. Even the wilfully blinkered Major recognises that his daughters should be helped to flee the nest, if only to reduce the strain on the diminishing Marwood coffers. ‘Someone would have to see about getting them married,’ not him, not their father, but someone. ‘The household expenses must be cut down. The servants must be looked after. The girls must be looked after. He must be looked after.’ The answer: a suitable wife. His first wife had been lovely, ‘he was young, they were both in love’. But this would be different. Poor Anthea. What a basis for a marriage, and what a chasm lies between them, both in their ways emotionally crippled: he by class and upbringing, she, inadvertently, by her family – the plain, eldest child who has outstayed her time in the nest and reads unhelpful books on happiness.  The Major doesn’t love her, she soon realises that, her step-daughters don’t want to be looked after, the servants don’t respect her. Anthea fails the suitability test, it is not a happy marriage, and she must abandon her girlish dreams, but, finding a staunch ally in her children’s nurse, she more than holds her ground, making alterations to Saunby that go far beyond the furniture.

There are many neatly interwoven threads in The Priory: love, or the lack of it, or the difficulty of expressing it; marriages , good and bad, marriages of the rich and of the poor; lost mothers, lost children; lost dreams, and the acceptance of loss. But most of all it seems to me a novel about change and about growing up. Dorothy Whipple takes her reader through something of the same process – lulling us into the gentle security of the eccentric upper class household, allowing us to hope that the major will be softened by marriage and fatherhood that the girls will find Mr Right, or nearly Right. Subtly and unexpectedly and without moralising she shifts her reader as well as her characters out of their comfort zone. This is a coming-of-age novel, the ‘bildungsroman’ at which she excels, and it works on several levels.

Overseen by Nurse Pye, the dusty detritus of Christine and Penelope’s childhood is cleared out of the nursery so that the girls who have long outgrown it but cling to its security and familiarity are forced to make way for a new generation, and confront their own futures.  The novel opens and closes (almost) on Christine, the older, gentler, less selfish of the sisters, and, although she is not always centre stage it is essentially her story. A twenty year old child becomes a twenty three year old adult. She is compelled to make difficult and painful decisions , to reassess her relationships, and her responsibilities. Her growing up has started late and is accelerated by circumstances.

The Priory covers barely more than two or three years, two or three cricket seasons, years in which Europe was moving inexorably, if imperceptibly to Mumfordshire society, towards war and seismic changes were taking place in society, and the dust of crumbling conventions and assumptions was being swept away.

Women were finding their voice. Strong single women play pivotal roles in the novel: Miss Vanne, who is putting her son through Cambridge on the income from her beauty parlour, provides employment for the unemployable Christine; Nurse Pye, having put Saunby on track for a more secure future, when the mature Christine is wise enough to perceive her virtues and humble enough to appeal to her, saves her sick baby. Even Aunt Victoria proves strong enough finally to leave her childhood home and live independently and happily in a room over the village pub, painting, and selling, her dreadful paintings.

 

 

The land-owning class was losing its hegemony. The Marwoods are forced to recognise that the old money that has cushioned them for generations is exhausted. The tenants must come to the rescue of the landlord. The sale of Top Farm to the Spencers, whose natural ties are with Saunby’s ‘downstairs’, provides temporary respite. But it is the money and the wisdom of the parvenu that saves Saunby for the future. The Ashwells, Christine’s Lancashire factory owning parents-in-law, who, once she is ready to learn, teach her so much about family life and love, provide the Major with a utopian solution for the Priory, one that will bring together all those who are deemed capable of working for the common good. Even the wayward Thompson and his unpleasant wife are brought back into the fold. Penelope, still the self-centred child, is a notable absentee.

Sir James Ashwell quotes William Morris, ‘… do not let us sit deedless like fools and fine gentlemen, thinking the common toil is not good enough for us and beaten by the muddle …’

Major Marwood is grateful and happy, his boyish expectation that ‘something would turn up’ fulfilled, but it is hard to see him putting his shoulder to the wheel. The fine gentleman in him lingers on, and perhaps the muddle has been too much for him. Jobs are found for everyone else  – it is a little disappointing that while Sir James plans to send his son to Agricultural college to learn about land management, Christine is to learn to make butter and cheese ‘and all that’!