Tears, Lies - and Ice Cream!



My 1990 edition of A Little Love, A little Learning. The
cover shows Weisse Vase Mit Heidekraut by Oskar Moll.

The year Aunt Hat came to us, my main ambition – apart from rescuing someone from drowning, or winning the Victoria Cross – was to go down to Jock’s Icecream Parlour in the main street of Monks Ford and eat as many Knickerbocker Glories as I could pray for. Ellen, our mother, said this was a pretty limited ambition for a girl of 12 and that I ought to have learned by now that icecreams made me sick. Boyd said that was why I wanted them: it was a clear example of a man’s reach needing to exceed his grasp, what else is heaven for?

If an intro grabs me (and this one did – it’s right up there with I Capture The Castle) I can’t put a novel down. Imagine me, if you will, sat on the floor in the Back Room of the Oxfam Bookshop, surrounded by boxes and bags, all stuffed with books that must be sorted, priced and stacked on shelves… But I’ve been sidetracked because I spotted a Virago edition of Nina Bawden’s, A Little Love, A Little Learning, and I opened it (just to have a quick look you understand), and once I started reading I couldn’t stop!

That was some weeks back, and I didn’t get round to writing about it, but I notice the Virago Modern Classics Group on LibraryThing is running its traditional All Virago All August challenge, so this seems an apt moment to post my thoughts.

A Little Love, A Little Learning is a brilliant book. I loved it. And if you’ve never read any of Bawden’s work for adults (she seems to best known as a children’s author) it’s probably a good place to start. It is 1953, Coronation Year, and we are in Monks Ford, a small, suburban town on the banks of a Thames tributary, about 25 miles from London. Factory hands have jobs in Slough, while office workers commute to London. It’s a perfectly drawn picture of lower middle-class life, with all its values and social mores, in that particular location, at that particular time, and Bawden captures the feelings of uncertainty and ‘not-belonging’ that can over-ride everything else when you’re young.

           

Our narrator is 12-year-old Kate, poised on the threshold of adolescence, trying to make sense of the world around her, her feelings, and her changing body. She lives with her sisters, Poll (7), who is going to be Elizabeth I in the Coronation Pageant, but would rather be Henry VIII, and Joanna, who is almost 18 and worries about getting old. Their mother, Ellen, loves them, but finds it hard to express her feelings. For her life is a serious business, and she has sterner ideas about bringing up children than most mothers. Their stepfather Boyd, the local doctor, is wise, kindly, loving and sensible.

In many ways he and Ellen are surprisingly modern for their time. For example, they believe in telling the girls the truth, especially with things like the correct medical terminology for parts of body, and the facts of life - but they conceal their own pasts, which impact on the present.

However, the past comes to light, and tensions surface as Kate and Joanna struggle with the process of growing up. No longer children, but definitely not adults, they are surprisingly mature and understanding about some things, but unable to cope with their own feelings or those of other people. Facts are half understood, and they fail to grasp the consequences of their actions.

Boyd’s abilities as a doctor and his standing in the community come under scrutiny when he inherits money from an elderly, reclusive woman who knew him long ago when she was a spirited young woman and he was a lonely child – a situation fuelled by Kate's lies. And the tale of Ellen’s life with the girls’ vanished father and her relationship with Boyd (which breaks the social codes of the day) is revealed when her old friend Aunt Hat comes to stay, so Joanna tracks their father down and invites him to visit.

Aunt Hat, ‘as soft and sweet as cake’, has undergone a hysterectomy and has been attacked by her husband, who is now awaiting trial for assaulting her stepson from a previous marriage. Unlike Boyd and Ellen, she doesn’t hide her past – she almost revels in it. To all intents and purposes she still loves her violent husband and excuses his behaviour. Kate and Joanna are aware that ‘she doesn’t always see things as they are, but as she would like them to be’. She, and other characters, modify the truth to suit their vision of the world.

This difference between what you feel and what you think you feel, between life as it is and life as we would like it to be, runs through the novel, raising questions about truth and illusion, delusion and lies. And there are issues about the nature of relationships, between friends, between husbands and wives, between parents and children.
 

The themes may be serious, but the book is funny, and sad and touching. Boyd, Ellen, Joanna, Kate and Poll pull through and emerge a little sadder perhaps, but stronger and wiser, than before, still a family, but with more self-knowledge, and more awareness of the things that matter in life. Kate, especially, develops an understanding of Boyd and what he has done for them over the years.

He had given us everything, without asking, and we had given him nothing; he had looked after us, and we had grown, taking his youth with us; he taught us things, played with us, held bowls for us to be sick in, and we had done nothing back. We had not even thought of him, we had lied, deceived, and between us brought him to the edge of ruin and disgrace, but we had not even thought of him now: we had been sitting drinking tea and eating chocolate cake.


I couldn't resist this picture of an ice cream sundae from my mother's
Good Housekeeping Cookery Compendium, published in 1954 -
at that time knickerbocker glories in a café or ice cream parlour
were a much more exotic treat!

 

An Australian Fairy Tale

Lesley hates her name, and decides to change it at the first opportunity. The first opportunity comes when she gets a job as a Sales Assistant (Temporary) at FG Goode, Sydney's most prestigious department store, and she transforms herself into Lisa – but still looks like a badly dressed, under-nourished child. Lisa, as we must now call her (though her bewildered mother finds this hard to cope with), is awaiting the results of her Leavers Certificate examinations, and is hoping to go to university, despite her father's opposition. Poised on the edge of adulthood and a new life, she divides her time between Ladies' Cocktail Frocks and Model Gowns, and listens to the black-clad women who work there.

The Women in Black, by Madeleine St John, is very funny and very charming. The women are beautifully created. There's the elderly Miss Jacobs, who is in charge of alterations and is never seen without her tape-measure and pins, and unhappy, faded Patti, married for 10 years, but still without a child and, much to everyone's surprise, still working – this is the 1950s, when married women are expected to stay at home. Then there's Fay, who wears too much make-up, and has had a somewhat chequered love life (she's been unlucky, says her friend Myra), but underneath it all is a nice, homely girl, who desperately wants to get married and have children. Then there is Magda, the buxom Slovenian refugee who presides over the exclusive, and very expensive, Model Gowns.

Magda, sophisticated, slightly Bohemian, utterly exotic in suburban Sydney, has a heart of gold, but the other women are deeply suspicious of her and her foreign ways:

Magda, the luscious, the svelte and full-bosomed, the beautifully tailored and manicured and coiffed, was the most overwhelming, scented, gleaming, God-awful and ghastly snake-woman that Mrs Williams, Miss Baines and even, probably, Miss Jacobs herself had ever seen, or even imagined. Magda (no-one could even try to pronounce her frightful Continental surname) was just a terrible fact of life which you ignored most of the time... Magda was the kind of woman who always got what she wanted: you could tell. Because Magda (Gawd help us) was a Continental: and weren't they glad they weren't.

She's an unlikely fairy godmother, who turns Lisa into a pretty, slender, stylish, young woman, rather than a plain, gawky schoolgirl, and opens up an exciting new world, introducing her to fashionable clothes and looks, along with new ideas, new foods, and new music. And she also works her magic on Fay, setting her up to meet Hungarian Rudi, whose past life, appears to have been more than a little disreputable, but who is now anxious to find love and security by marrying a nice Australian girl.

Generally, however, the men might as well be absent – indeed, in many ways there are: Lisa's compositor father works nights, so she and her mother rarely see him, while Patti's husband returns home only to eat and sleep, then disappears after a night of unexpected connubial bliss. H turns up two weeks later in Ladies' Cocktail, in what must be one of the funniest reunion scenes ever:

Australian author
Madeleine St John

“Tell him to go to hell,” said Patti.

“Now, now, said Miss Jacobs. Frank at last opened his mouth. “I've been to hell,” he said. “I've just come back. But I didn't have me key. I just came back here to get the front door key from you, that's all.”

'The Women in Black', which should not be confused with Susan Hill's 'The Woman in Black', is the most delightful fairytale which, as all such stories should, has a happy ending, and it's very funny, while exploring attitudes towards women and foreigners which would be considered most un-politically correct today, but were were common-place in the middle of the 20^th century. I hadn't heard of Madeleine St John, but apparently she wrote three other novels, which I'm hoping to find, because I enjoyed this so much.