Archives: Persephone Forum

 

My husband often laughs at the quantity of post-it slips that protrude from the pages of my ‘current reads’.  Persephone books seem to attract more than most.  I defend my use of them on the grounds that they are useful pointers to sentences, paragraphs that strike me as particularly significant: character, plot, style, wit, narrative themes – any of these can earn a sticker, as can a passage that is, quite simply, beautifully written. My copy of Every Eye already bristling like a hedgehog with little yellow tags, attracts more at each re-read and I have to accept that my husband’s gentle mockery has some foundation. But then I would argue that Every Eye is so rich and so complex, that barely a sentence is wasted, some only revealing their full meaning at second or third reading, others, multi-faceted, suggesting a quite different meaning on re-reading.

 

 

Every Eye charts two journeys, one moving in real time and covering perhaps two weeks, the other a journey already taken, and covering twenty-five years, the two converging at the last page, converging but not concluding.  Thirty nine year old Hatty and her husband Stephen, younger by many years (his exact age is one of many things that we do not know about him) take a belated honeymoon to Ibiza, ‘the most savage of the Balearic islands’. The journey takes three or four days.

 

 

As trains and taxis and ferries move them forward, Hatty looks back at episodes in her life, directly or indirectly connected to her relationship with her aunt by marriage, Cynthia, whose death ‘at the Ipswich County Hospital, just after a cup of tea’, opens the book. We will learn a lot about Cynthia, but not the cause of her death, her age, nor how she happened to spend her last hours in Ipswich County Hospital. And yet from the two wholly ordinary details, and perhaps because of their very ordinariness, we can summon up the scene, from the high ceilinged ward, down to the drab formica bedside locker, and the green ribbed, NHS issue, tea-cup.

She has a sharp eye for surface detail, but Hatty was born with a squint, ‘her right eye turned … fatalistically towards the blind wall of a sharp nose’.  Cynthia’s friend Jasper, Hatty’s first, elderly, lover, pays for the operation that her mother cannot, or will not, afford, but while surgery can straighten her eyes, it cannot alter her vision. Stephen is right when he says ‘I don’t believe you ever see anything dead on, only at a peculiar angle through the corner of your eye’.  To see the world as it is requires more than correctly aligned eyes and Hatty knows that her vision is flawed at a far deeper, moral level, ‘one is born with one’s infirmities … one must carry them always regardless of their visible absence.’ Sight is perhaps not in the gift of men.

Stephen sees what Hatty cannot. She approaches Paris for the first time, anxiously looking not for what is new but, insecurely, for similarities to what she already knows, so that for her the suburbs seem as frayed and dingy as the approach to Euston or King’s Cross.  He, knowing Paris, meets it afresh with his eyes closed, thrilling at the smell of the gasworks, the stinking tunnel, the breeze over the reservoir. He can rely on his inner eye, just as he relies on his inner ear to hear Hatty’s unspoken words, ‘running them together like dropped stitches along a needle’. Looking to the future he can reassure her that one day she will see and be able to accept the past for what it was, and scanning that past with the clarity of one who did not live it, he is able to offer an interpretation not far removed from the truth.

Of Hatty’s early years we learn only what she tells us: a thin, flat-chested child, sickly enough to have needed a lengthy dose of Breton sea air, sallow skinned, with dull brown hair, whose musical gift, which might have been her salvation, ‘had gradually shown itself to be uncoordinated and intermittent, like a small jewel that has always been hopelessly flawed’.  About the rest of her family we know few facts.  Her mother impoverished, cool, and controlling, with thinly cut nostrils, disapproves of her sister-in-law, one of the people in this world ‘who do not know the ropes’. Handsome Uncle Otway is inappropriately, and unhelpfully attentive: over-affectionate, but dismissive of his niece’s musical ambitions. Her father, dead,  once, serving in the Indian Army, shot a tiger, the splayed skin on the sitting room floor being all that remains of either of them. Hatty recalls that he ‘had had a strong will and the brutalityto lay waste any small efforts of survival that did not amount to complete independence’. There seems to have been little warmth even in her young life. Apart from Cynthia’s rabidly political and self-absorbed son, all those closest to Hatty show varying degrees of cruelty towards her.

Little wonder that she reaches the age of twenty-five certain that she ‘could never successfully make a real contact with another being’, and falls, awkwardly, into the arms of Jasper, the enigmatic traveller, apparently an old family friend, but of whom she knows little and discovers not much more. Has he ever been married?  Does he even like women?  Why is Cynthia so unkind about him?  Always ready to conjecture about strangers, Hatty asks few questions of those closest to her, and offers few details.

 And there are no clues either as to what Cynthia, or for that matter Hatty herself, has been doing in the years between their estrangement and Hatty’s marriage to Stephen. We know more about the girl on the train to Barcelona, in her pink waterproof jacket,returning home from a year as an au pair in Preston. Isobel English writes as a watercolourist might paint, paper left blank containing as much information as the small, brightly coloured incidental figures in the background.  And no-one has as much ‘white’ around him as Stephen. He rescues Hatty from herself, and proves a strong and perceptive companion at every stage of the journey, and yet we know next to nothing about him.  He is wise and he is pragmatic, but who is he?

Isobel English is sparing with her details for at one level this complex novella is a mystery story, not resolved until the final page, when the past catches up with the present and the two journeys meet. In ‘real time’, Hatty and Stephen will make the return journey and continue their marriage (or maybe not) altered by what they have seen; Hatty’s personal journey through her own past must begin again in the light of what she has learned. ‘Life is lived forwards but understood backwards’, writes Neville Braybrooke in his preface.

But there is a third journey braided into the plait. Braybrooke makes it quite clear that there is a religious dimension to the novel. Before I opened the book and saw the lines from Auden facing the opening page, the two word phrase of the title had been echoing in my head. Why was it familiar? I found myself humming a hymn tune: was that the reference? ‘Lo He comes with clouds descending’ – the second verse starts Every eye shall now behold Him/Robed in dreadful majesty, based on words from the opening chapter of the Book of Revelation. Auden’s collection ‘Another Time’, from which the epigraph is taken, dates from the period of his re-christianisation: it is hard not to believe that he was unfamiliar with that verse. With so many references to dark and light, English will surely have had in mind  the famous verses from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.

On two occasions she makes direct reference to the Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, which, Braybrooke confirms, held a profound resonance for her. Traditionally the last five sayings represent: Relationship, Abandonment, Distress, Triumph and Reunion. Is it too far-fetched to suggest that one of the many possible readings of Every Eye is one in which Hatty’s journey takes her past these mileposts, until she is able to say, in words that recall Saul’s experience on the Road to Damascus, ‘I feel a curious sensation, as if my eyes were peeled of scales; I feel receptive and calm, stronger than I have ever felt before.’

 

Quotes ….. do share your favourites

 

“To never have the exact knowledge of one’s position is the predicament of human frailty. Compassless, to see the beckoning lights, one advances to find that there is nothing there but a reflection in the deep-rooted blackness.”

“It must have been her peak period. People sometimes go through their whole lives without ever reaching the moment when they are exactly the person they want to be.”

“Nothing is ever lost that is begun, no word spoken that can ever be broken down to unco-ordinated syllables, no tear shed that will leave only a powdering of white salt. Everything must go on, and on, and on, repeating itself and gathering force for the ever that is still only the bright whiteness of eternity meditated on by mystics and recluses.”

 

 

and questions

 

What are we to make of Jasper’s apparent appearance at Cynthia’s funeral?  What are we meant to understand by the final sentence of the novel?

Why did no-one tell Hatty about Jasper’s past? Is Stephen right when he says that  “Cynthia at the time of the trouble was all for maintaining a family front”.

Stephen is a mysterious character. Who is he? Is there any significance in the fact that his mother sends a wreath to Cynthia’ funeral?

 

 

If you have enjoyed this book, you might also enjoy:

 

Consequences by E.M.Delafield (Persephone Book No 13)

Hetty Dorval by Ethel Wilson (Persephone Book No 58)

They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone Book No 56)

Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan (Persephone Book No 63)

What other bloggers have said about this book:

 

Every Eve  has equally fine observations on place and character. Hatty finds a wry comfort in learning that an acquaintance with whom she has little in common will attend a family party. ‘At least we had the barren fields of our incompatibility between us, which made us better than strangers’ she reflects in a phrase that might have come from Elinor Dashwood. When she begins to date men at last, Hatty feels a slight thrill at ‘the almost human expression of the hard blocked toe-caps of their shoes’ with their requisite perforations.

Critics have compared English to Muriel Spark and Anita Brookner – both of whom admired her work – but she is less austere than Spark and takes more risks than Brookner. English has a voice all her own, and it is more interesting than that of many better-known writers. oneminutebookreviews

I find that many novellas sneak up on me: I spend the first 50 or even 75 pages feeling underwhelmed, struggling against the compression of the form, and just when I’ve got into the rhythm of the language and begun to be truly invested in the characters…the thing is over. Such was certainly the case with Isobel English’s 1956 novella, Every Eye. English writes with a careful precision that at first struck me as cold and unapproachable, but later came to seem like a perfect, unassuming vessel for the voice of her main character. She portrays an almost unbridgeable distance between humans, which at first appeared to be a lack of character development, but gradually revealed itself as a conscious philosophical – or at least psychological – stance, a portrait of the protagonist Hatty’s lived reality. As I turned the final page, I ended up feeling that somehow, while I wasn’t paying close enough attention, English’s narrative had grown and ripened into itself, filling completely the space it had made. eveningallafternoon

 

Talking with friends last week about significant books in our lives, we all agreed that Ballet Shoes had to be on the list. Three orphan foundlings delivered by a mysterious and absent elderly professor, to be cared for by a large, practical, warm-hearted nanny, a good plain cook, two maids, and a sensible and resourceful guardian, in a house firmly sited in London’s Cromwell Road, and serendipitously filled with lodgers who in a variety of ways,  magically smooth the children’s paths in life. There is never any suggestion that a lack of parents might be a drawback. Quite the reverse. Parents have needs, and lives of their own.  In the world of Ballet Shoes, and this is what made it such a wonderful read, over and over again, children come first, always.

 

 

 

 

The opening pages of Saplings seem momentarily to be taking us into that world, a world of shrimping nets and spades and sun and no lessons, with a sensible, but indulgent governess and a warm, bulging nanny to bring milk and buns to the beach in her bulging bag. Mum’s camp stool is waiting for her on the sand, and Dad has joined the holidaying family. Big sister, Laurel, turns cartwheels of joy, while brother, Tony, inwardly exclaims, ‘Whoopee! What a day it was going to be’, and adored, beautiful and gifted, but difficult, Kim rates the day as ‘scrumptious’.  Whatever the language might suggest, we have not strayed into the land of Ballet Shoes.

 

There are clouds on the horizon. It is the troubled youngest, Tuesday, who has been the first of the children to sense the adults’ fears, ‘because she was only four, and people underrated her intelligence and spoke in front of her’. In a man to man chat on the beach Alex Wiltshire confides in Tony that he will shortly be returning to London on war work, stressing that he should say nothing of this in his mother’s hearing. A ten-year old boy can be entrusted with information that cannot be shared with his mother.  There is a war starting and the Wiltshire family is not as solidly functional as the opening page suggested.  The coming years will test it beyond its limits.

 

Alex Wiltshire is without doubt the model Dad, solid as a rock, devoted to his children, but not afraid to show a bit of toughness when called for, straight-speaking and, apparently, fearless. Most unusually for the period, for any period, he has, discreetly and without show, taken charge of the children, clearly recognising from the start that his beautiful wife was not of the stuff mothers are made of. Or perhaps he didn’t give her a chance, assuming control of the nursery before she could take her first faltering steps as a mother.

 

By the time we meet Lena, she is the thirty-three year old mother of four, but is quite clear about her role, ‘The children were darlings, but she was not a family woman’, ‘she never even pretended the children came first’. What she wants is to be a wife. Streatfeild does not underplay the importance of sex for Lena; later she will even find air-raids arousing, to the point that Alex worries about his own ability to ‘keep up the pace’ if the nightly bombing continues. She uses all her whiles to keep him up to the mark, knowing that ‘if he was once permitted not to answer smile for smile, and covert look for covert look, he would be one shade nearer that dreary he wanted to be, the perfect father, the family man.’ She wants him to be her lover, and as the saying goes, the children of lovers are orphans.

 

Her own parenting had not given her much of a grounding, ‘Her mother had always been her ideal of all that was feminine and delicious. It had not hurt her as a child to be petted and exhibited one moment and to be shut away in her school room or nursery the next …’.  Mum’s-mum, tellingly not Gran as ‘good’ granny Wiltshire is known, had taught Lena, her only child,  that what mattered most in life was to look nice, to have fun, and to be ‘happy’.  The ‘drearies’ of child rearing are not for her: but she works hard at their appearance – well dressed children make good accessories for the chic mother; and she is good at orchestrating ‘fun’.  ‘Lena’s policy with her children had always been that they should be charmed by her. She would be a mother to admire, who was a little apart from the humdrum side of life’.

 

But even her mother in law concedes that ‘up to a point she’s a good mother’. Her interest in her children is intermittent, and self-centred; in many ways she is still a child herself, but she has a gift for home-making, which Alex appreciates, and the children, rightly, take for granted. With a steady father and the haven of a more than comfortable London house, Laurel and Tony, and Kim and Tuesday could have weathered the storms of growing up. But war, as Lena rightly perceives has ‘no use for delicate adjustments’. The carefully constructed continuity of their lives is first cracked and then broken into pieces. Home would be the first casualty of the war.

 

Bit by bit the family unit is reduced.  Children, as Nannie later reflects, ‘are best where they belong. They miss having their rightful things.’ Sent away from London and the danger of bombs, as the war grinds on they find that they belong nowhere, and that few things are rightfully theirs. For Laurel and Tony things and space become all important. Laurel’s fragile equanimity is shattered when she finds herself moved out of ‘her’ room into her grandfather’s dressing room,to make room for evacuees,  while her brother’s is challenged when he is forced, unfairly he considers, by the influx of boys and the call-up of young masters, to share a desk at school. Neither of the older children is helped by their father’s well intentioned lessons in keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of adversity.  They cannot handle their anxieties, but nor can they share them.

 

The war has not finished with them. In one dreadful blow, temporary evacuation from their home, and temporary separation from their father are made permanent, when a bomb destroys their house and, crushed in the debris, Alex is killed.  Lena alone cannot hold the family together. Ruth Glover, the children’s governess, and the voice of reason (who would later have a ‘good war’ in the ATS), assesses the situation, with anxious clarity: ‘Take away Alex and had she anything to fall back on? Her life had been built like a game of spillikins with Alex as the bottom spillikin on which the whole structure stood. It was impossible that the structure would not collapse when you tore out the bottom spillikin.’

 

 

Countless other women were and would be in the same situation. War was making absentee fathers the norm. Laurel’s headmistress reflects coolly, ‘It’s been my experience that if the mother makes a decent home not much harm’s done’.  Lena does her best to rebuild a home for the children, and comes close to succeeding, but missing the support and sex that she had from Alex, she falls easily into the arms of a visiting American serviceman. The children might have adapted to that. Walter is a good man; the children like him (always the acid test) and, in his way, he cares for them, but he too is called away.

 

One blogger describes Lena as promiscuous, which strikes me as unfair. Had there been no war, Lena might have remained a more than devoted wife to Alex and an adequate mother to her children. She is quite undone by the war.  Her limited reserves of strength are quickly depleted, but she must keep up a good show. What could be easier, or more destructive, than to turn to the bottle?  (The graphic description of her slow, ugly and humiliating decline suggests that Streatfeild had observed the alcoholic at first hand.)  The fragile family unit, just managing to survive the ravages of war, is finally broken by alcohol.

The children are to be divided up between the aunts. Three of them with husbands in the services are coping alone for the duration, and Sylvia, the youngest and closest to her brother, might as well be alone for all the help she gets with her five children from her unworldly vicar husband. They are four very different women, in their thirties and forties, none having much time for Lena – self-indulgent, flighty and over-dressed – and still settling childhood scores between themselves.  Lena may have proved herself worse than most, but no mother is perfect and each of the Wiltshire women represents a different kind of imperfection. Dot works too hard outside the home, Sylvia has more children than she can manage, Selina is overambitious and Lindsey, writer and self-styled child psychologist, for all her professional pretentions knows nothing of the practicalities of parenting, what Dot refers to as ‘the nappies, school bills, sick in the train knowledge’. Nevertheless, it is part of Dot’s scheme to ensure that she does her share. And so Laurel finds herself, in a cruel billeting arrangement, with the aunt least able to care for her.

 

 

 

There is a fourth family, the Parkers. Albert and Ernie, evacuated, at the insistence of their father, are billeted on the Wiltshire grandparents. For all their rough edges the evacuees have learnt something that Lena’s children have missed: ‘the whole of their upbringing had taught them to put the welfare and happiness of small children before everything’. Cruelly it is their mother’s love that kills them – missing her sons so much she insists that they return to London. A bomb leaves Mr Parker a childless widower. Too much love, of the wrong sort, can kill. Not enough can leave a child weakened for life.

 

The Wiltshire children are very different in appearance and character, a diversity contrived to demonstrate the underlying strengths and vulnerabilities that will determine the outcome for each of them. Laura, plain, anxious, at first eager to shine, and, failing that, to merge into the crowd, is mortified when wartime rationing keeps her in a green school uniform, when all the other girls are in brown. Without the war, or rationing, or the loss of her father’s gentle encouragement, she might, as he hoped, have dare to blossom. But a combination of history, bad luck and an increasingly desperate  need for more TLC than was available for any child in such troubled times finally brings her down.

 

 

 

Tony’s fierce sense of right and wrong, gently guided by his father, might have been an asset; without that guidance, it sets him against the world, and the brave little boy becomes a sullen, friendless teenager. Little Tuesday, dosed with powders when we first meet her, is still sleep walking four years later, but no-one has time to worry about her. Only Kim, who was always considered the problem child, and who, ironically is the most like his mother, ‘able to play himself like a Wurlitzer organ’, is by the end, in Ruth’s words, ‘doing nicely’. Is Kim naturally more resilient? Does his strength come from having received the lion’s share of his mother’s love?  Are some children, like Ruth herself, born survivors?

 

Kim speaks for all children, when he explodes: ‘But we’re children. It’s us that people have to bother about. Children don’t have to bother about grown-up people’.  The tragedy of Saplings is that, because of the war, not enough of the grown-up people had enough strength or enough time to bother about the children

 

 

Quotes ….. do share your favourites

 

‘What a picture they must look, and the thought amused rather than pleased her.  There was nothing she liked better than to be envied and admired, but this was not the picture she wanted exhibited.  That picture was of her and Alex.  Of course the children must be there too, but as charming decorations, not interfering with the original portrait of two people.’

‘This passion for being the centre of the picture was dangerous. What on earth would he [Kim] grow up like? It seemed unnatural that before he was eleven he should have found a way to adapt his failings to feed his egoism. If all went well Kim might do anything, but what if things did not go well? He could never be poor. He would always have to throw his weight about, be surrounded with friends, even if he had to rob a bank or forge cheques to do it.’

‘Heaps of  children grew up without much attention and turned out alright in the end … Heaps did, but were they the Laurels, Tonys and Tuesdays?  She [Ruth] herself had grown up all right with very little attention, and little of it wise.All right but bruised. The Wiltshires were having a harder upbringing than she had. If only bruising was all they got out of it. What if they grew mis-shapen?’

and questions

 

Is it possible to speculate about would have happened to the children if there had been no war? If Alex had not been killed? If Elsa had not put Laurel in the Colonel’s dressing room? If Laurel had not moved schools? If she had had the right uniform? Is it big events that alter things? Or does fate turn on smaller points?

Is Lena promiscuous, as one blogger calls her? Sex-obsessed, as Jeremy Holmes writes?

Which of all the mothers that Streatfeild presents to us in Saplings can be termed ‘good enough’?

If you have enjoyed this book, you might also enjoy:

 

Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge (Persephone Book No 41)

The Children who lived in a Barn  by Eleanor Graham (Persephone Book No 27)

Doreen by Barbara Noble (Persephone Book No 60)

The Young Pretenders by Edith Henrietta Fowler (Persephone Book No 73)

Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan (Persephone Book No 63)

What other bloggers have said about this book:

This heart-wrenching and painful book really packed an emotional wallop for me. It is not what I would characterize as one of those “charming” books I love to read. In fact, at times it was downright difficult to read, but I still really came away loving this book. Sounding a bit contradictory arn’t I? I just found this book to be a powerful and moving story about the sad destruction of a family. jeannetesbooks

What a brilliant book Saplingsis. I had never read Noel Streatfeild before (no, not even Ballet Shoes), so I had no idea what to expect. Well, it turns out that she is an excellent writer: subtle, perceptive, sensitive, occasionally ironic, everything that I love. Saplings reminded me a little of A.S. Byatt and (don’t laugh!) of D.H. Lawrence. It was something about the way she uses multiple points of view, jumping from one perspective to another quite frequently, and yet still managing to make it work. I always admire writers who can pull that off, as I imagine that it takes a lot of skill. But most of all, it was the way she wrote about her characters with such tenderness, such care. I loved them; I felt for each and every one of them, no matter how flawed they were. thingsmeanalot

Saplings  is beautifully written. Streatfeild’s descriptions are wonderful: in the first few scenes at the beach, I felt that I could hear the sea, really see the children and the hazy glow, almost as if in my own memory. She paints such clear characters, that a few days after finishing the book they are all still vivid in my mind. Although the book has a central story, I did feel that it was more of a sketch and I do think you need to sort of settle into it rather than being in a rush. I will admit that at first didn’t find myself wanting to pick it up all the time but when I was reading it I became absorbed. I did feel that there were some slightly contrived parts in the novel but similarly I think that this reflects that the book was written for a purpose and to make the reader think novelinsights