“’I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it?’” (Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery)

To describe my blogging as patchy would be to suggest a productivity that currently I can only aspire to.  Thankfully Simon and Kaggsy are hosting one of their wonderful club events this week, always irresistible and especially so this time, as 1929 is bang in the middle of the interwar years, my reading sweet spot.

(Great badge 🙂 )

I’m hoping to post twice this week, and I thought I’d start here with two Virago Modern Classics.

I probably wouldn’t have been particularly drawn to The True Heart if it wasn’t written by Sylvia Townsend Warner, author of the wonderful Lolly Willowes. The blurb on the back says:

“This is the love story of Sukey Bond and Eric Seaborn. Sukey is an orphan, in service, the lowest of the low. It is 1873, and in her first position as a servant girl on a farm in the Essex Marshes, she meets Eric – gentle, simple […] The lovers are parted by Eric’s rich mother […] But nothing can deter Sukey. Only Queen Victoria, she feels, can help, so she sets off to see her. Extraordinary things happen on this heroic journey, but Sukey’s simple love and courage carry her to final victory- reunion with her beloved Eric and love triumphant.”

Absolutely nothing in that description appeals to me. Well, maybe the Essex Marshes. And Queen Victoria. But nothing else. However, I was quickly won over by this description on page two of Miss Pocock, the Matron of Sukey’s orphanage on prize-giving day:

“She had been up since 4 A.M. putting finishing touches to the orphans housewifery. Now she wore her new purple bodice and her face of state, where the expression never varied, as if her countenance were cased up in invisible stays.”

Having excelled on the prize day, virtuous Sukey goes to work as a maid on a farm, a position found for her by an orphanage patroness, Mrs Seaborn.

“Sukey was still persuaded that there was something very odd and exceptional about her life, though she, of course, was a very ordinary creature. In truth it was humdrum enough and the cares and pleasures that filled her days were those common to any servant-girl on a small farm. Nor were the other inmates of the farm remarkable in any way that appeared to her.”

There she meets Mrs Seaborn’s son Eric, an outsider like Sukey, living alongside the Norman family who run the farm:

“They spoke of him always as ‘Young Eric,’ and by the insistence upon his youthfulness seemed to disassociate themselves from him. He was like a pet lamb, grown too large for the house but whom the household had forgotten to put out of doors.”

Eric has been dumped at the farm by his mother who is ashamed of his ‘idiocy’ and seizures. The two fall in love, each naïve and inexperienced. Sukey soon believes she is pregnant despite knowing nothing of the facts of life and therefore not realising that there is zero chance she has conceived a child. What stops the story from being overly saccharine is STW’s humour, which is gently witty – entertaining but never slyly undermining her characters.

“A baby may grow up and make any number of people miserable. Besides justification, they also require long clothes and short clothes and little woollen socks – and how is an unmarried baby going to find these?”

As the blurb suggests, Eric’s mother separates them and Sukey begins her epic journey towards reconciliation. The story is a retelling of Cupid and Psyche, and the tale does have a mythic quality as Sukey meets various colourful characters on her journey and through some sort of miracle manages to stay safe.  

The tone of The True Heart is so finely balanced. I think as a twenty-first century reader I was waiting for the knowing irony, the askance aside which never came. It made me question if this is how I’m used to seeing love presented in contemporary stories, which is a pretty bleak thought. Yet STW is not remotely sentimental either. Rather she is clear-sighted and compassionate.

“He was sorry for birds. He loved all helpless things, all wild things, all harmless and thoughtless things, for he himself was wild and harmless, thoughtless and helpless. He was sorry for the bird, he understood its distress. Her distress he could not understand. It passed by him like the wind – violent, alien, incomprehensible. Her anger was aflame that would not take upon him.”

A singular novel, thought-provoking and written with the lightest touch.

By contrast, the female protagonist in The Squire’s Daughter by FM Mayor is somewhat jaded by her worldly experiences even by the age of 21. Ron de Lacey – as the title indicates – is from a privileged background and she uses this privilege to enjoy a frivolous, vacuous London life as a flapper (aka living my dream life 😀 ).

“In Ozzy’s set they were all young; for her sex the most successful age was eighteen; the new Cabaret girl was sixteen, she and Nadine were already rather old. Aunt Laura knew spinsters by the score, they were generally political, and Ron hated politics.”

Ozzy is her brother, somewhat estranged from his family due to his refusal to fight in the War, the conflict casting a long shadow even for a generation who barely remember it.

Ron also returns to the family seat of Carne rarely, and seems indifferent to its pending sale despite the pain it causes her father. The heirs care nothing for the country seat, only the staff seem to share her father and aunt’s understanding of what it once meant:

“Carne was like a college to the old servants, and they were its Fellows.”

“The gardener combined contempt for her with a fond respect for gentry.”

However, it is not because she hugely values her London life that Ron feels alienated from Carne. There is a sense that she is entirely adrift, with no sense of purpose or of self anywhere.

“She had been an ultra-smart young woman, extracting every ounce of success from her seasons, and with Ozzy’s set she could be as vulgar and exaggerated as a chorus girl. In repose, however, her eyes were often unsatisfied, and sometimes sad.”

It is during a visit at Carne that Ron falls somewhat inexplicably in love with the most English-monikered man, Bob Manners. I really enjoyed this conversation between them over dinner, whereby Ron attempts to engage Bob in discussion about a literary great:

“‘Do you like Tchekov?’

‘I don’t know what it is? Is it a drink?’

‘No it’s a Russian, who writes plays.’

[…]

‘I think there’s nobody like Tchekov. I know just where I am with him. He’s like all of us. His people drift about, and want something terribly for five minutes, and then want something else, and all the time they don’t know what they want after all.’

‘I’ve never met any Englishmen like that.’ said he, ‘nor do I want to, nor do I believe they exist.’

‘Yes, but I expect my Englishmen aren’t your Englishmen.’”

They begin a tentative courtship, he unused to romance, she overused to its rituals:

“She was neither shy nor nervous. She could not imagine life without frequently going to tea with men who had fallen, we’re falling, or might fall in love with her.”

The novel follows their relationship and those of her family, alongside the disintegration of Carne. Although the tone is restrained, I found The Squire’s Daughter to be really a very sad novel. It was about the long-term damage of war; the pain of failed communication with those you love; the desperate search for meaning to live your life by, across the generations.

“I suppose one had a surfeit of feeling in the war and used it all up.”

To end, a clip of Greta Garbo still managing to be stunning in the world’s worst fitting dress, in 1929 film Wild Orchids (flogging scene at beginning, skip to 1:00 to avoid):