Frost in May

Virago Modern Classic Number 1: This is
the 1991 edition, with an introduction by
Elizabeth Bowen. The cover shows a detail
 from Girl and Flowers by Dod Procter.

 Antonia White’s Frost in May, as I’m sure everyone knows, was the very first Virago Modern Classic, published in 1978 after being out of print for many years. I’m not sure why it has passed me by until now; for some reason I think I was under the impression I’d read it long ago. But I must have confused it with something else - I would definitely have remembered this, because it made me so angry.

Written in 1933, it’s a fictionalised account of White’s own childhood, telling the story of Nanda Grey’s time at a repressive Catholic school. Her fall from grace, and the way her spirit is finally broken make for painful reading. And these days the rules governing the girls’ daily lives would probably be regarded as an abuse of human rights.  Is this an accurate portrayal of a convent school I wonder? Did nuns really treat their pupils like this? How could they be so cruel in the name of religion? What about compassion? And whatever happened to the idea of a loving, forgiving God?

It’s not that the nuns at the Convent of the Five Wounds are physically cruel to their young charges: they play psychological mind games which seems somehow worse. And there’s a kind of drip-feed brainwashing because everything in the school relates to God – even the rooms have religious names, and there are pictures and statues, and edifying (but often horribly gruesome) stories about saints and sinners.

The nuns, who see themselves as instruments of God, demand unquestioning obedience to themselves, to the school, and to God. And they have very odd ideas about education. Mother Radcliffe, the Mistress of Discipline, explains:

We work to-day to turn out, not accomplished young women, nor agreeable wives, but soldiers of Christ, accustomed to hardship and ridicule and ingratitude.

Nanda (short for Fernanda) is nine when she arrives at the exclusive girls’ boarding school. She is ‘one of those children who cannot help behaving well’. She wants to please, to fit in, but she is too good, which makes the nuns suspicious. t’s surprising how quickly she adapts: when her parents visit at the end of the first week she already feels ‘unpicked and resewn and made over to a different pattern’.

And there’s a lot of making over to be done. There are all kinds of regulations. There are no

Author Antonia White.

mirrors, the girls must never be naked, and they sleep flat on their backs, with hands crossed on their breast, so if the Lord calls them in the night they are ready! Close friendships are forbidden, so girls cannot go about in pairs. Letters to and from home are vetted, and the girls are watched all the time.

At night the girls opt to show their piety by placing stockings in the form of a cross on top of their neatly folded uniforms. And they indulge in small mortifications, like washing in cold water, and putting salt instead of sugar on their rhubarb, or stones in their shoes.

Lessons, like the girls, must bend to the will of God. Most story books are deemed unsuitable (unless written by Catholics); science is a dubious area, because most scientists are wrong; poetry is fine for the glory of God – but not for personal enjoyment. But poetry and passionate friendships arouse feelings in Nanda that her religion cannot provide. Even her First Communion, eagerly awaited as the biggest day in her life, proves a disappointment. Nevertheless, her faith doesn’t waver:

She accepted the Catholic Church whole-heartedly and tried hard to mould herself into the proper shape of a young Catholic girl. […] She could never, she knew, break away without a sense of mutilation. In her four years at Lippington it had grown into every fibre of her nature; she could not eat or sleep or read or play without relating every action to her secret life as a Christian and a Catholic.  She rejoiced in it and rebelled against it.

That seems to reflect the experience of many Catholic writers – perhaps it’s that tension which enables them to be creative?

Despite her efforts to fit in, Nanda has an independent streak, which sets her on a collision course, and when she is finally sent away, on her 14th birthday, Mother Radcliffe tells her:

Every will must be broken completely and re-set before it can be at one with God’s will. And there is no other way. That is what true education, as we see it here at Lippington, means.

There are all kinds of things I haven’t mentioned: the girls themselves, who are all utterly believable; the constant ringing of bells; curtseying; gloves; the smell of beeswax and incense; cabbage drowned in vinegar, and the sense of being shut away in an enclosed community which becomes more real than the world outside.

Virago non-fiction:There's Something About
A Convent Girl, published in 1991. 

After finishing Frost in May, I re-read There’s Something About A Convent Girl, a Virago anthology edited by Jackie Bennet and Rosemary Forgan, because it makes an interesting companion piece, containing a brief history of convent schools, and varied recollections from former pupils. Some contributors, like Maeve Binchy and, surprisingly, Germaine Greer seem to have happy memories of their schooldays. Others, like playwright Mary O’Malley (author of Once A Catholic), hated the humiliations, the lack of kindness, the bigotry, and the feelings of guilt about sex and life in general.

Her view of convent school life echoes that of Virago founder Carmen Callil, who says she can never forgive the nuns at her convent for the way she was treated. She’s particularly scathing about the view of the Catholic Church on suffering, especially in relation to women, and she gives a moving account of her feelings when she first read Frost in May:

I was absolutely suffused with misery and agony and fury as I read it because I identified with it so much. It told what I felt to be my own story. Not that it was my own story, but the suffering it conveyed and the feeling of mindless repression that the child couldn’t deal with because the child couldn’t understand what was going on and what the reasons were. I felt so strongly about it I actually invented Virago Modern Classics to enable me to publish that book. The world had to read the book again.

 

I think she’s right, and I’d urge anyone to read it, because Frost in May is beautifully written, with some wonderful characters, and it’s as valid and relevant now as it was when Callil reprinted it, and when Frost wrote it. 

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!

 

More Oxfam Goodies

Just look what I found in the Oxfam shop! This… 

And this… I do love book hunting, especially when I strike literary gold!

I’ve been looking out for a copy of Nicola Beauman’s A Very Great Profession for quite some time, so when I spotted this 1983 Virago edition how could I resist? Basically, it’s a study of middle-class women between the wars, as portrayed in novels of the time. By and large the authors featured are middle-class women, writing about the world they knew. Many have been forgotten for decades, while others have undergone something of a resurgence in recent years.

Beauman, of course, went on to found Persephone Books, which now publishes her book, but it was the Virago edition I wanted. There’s something immensely satisfying about those dark green spines…

I’m really looking forward to reading this. I think it’s a fascinating subject, and from a quick glance it seems that the seeds of the Persephone ethos are there in this book.

The women in the novels explored by Beauman in A Very Great Profession may feel frustrated and constrained by the narrowness of their lives, but they’re a world away from those created by Jean Rhys.  Her heroines (if one can call them that) always seem to be cast adrift, buffeted by fate, unable to summon the will or the energy to change things.

She’s not what I would call a happy writer, and I’m not sure her work is enjoyable in the conventional sense – her stories are bleak, and there seem to be no happy endings, but I love the way she writes, and I’ve been hunting for some of her short stories for ages and ages and ages, so you can imagine how thrilled I was to find Tigers are Better-Looking. It contains eight short stories first published in 1939, as well as a selection from a collection originally issued in 1927 as The Left Bank, and I can't wait to start reading - only I have several books on the go at the moment. I would love to be able to read one book at a time.

The Dud Avocado

I had high hopes of The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy, which I bought because it is a Virago Modern Classic, and because the blurb on the back made it sound so enticing:

Sally Jay Gorce, is a woman with a mission. It’s the 1950s, she’s young, she’s in Paris, she’s dyed her hair pink, she’s wearing an evening dress at eleven o’clock in the morning, and she’s seldom had more fun. Having made a vow to go native in a way the natives never had the stamina for, she’s busy getting drunk, having affairs, losing money, losing jewellery, and losing God knows what.

And the opening was promising…

It was a hot, peaceful optimistic sort of day in September. It was about eleven in the morning I remember and I was drifting down the Boulevard St. Michel thoughts rising in my head like little puffs of smoke when suddenly a voice bellowed into my ear …

But thereafter I was disappointed: the book failed to please me, and I’m not quite sure why. It’s well written, the characters are well drawn, and I didn’t hate it. To be honest I don’t think I could even say I disliked it – it didn’t evoke any strong emotions in me. It’s just not my sort of book I guess, and I wouldn’t read it again.

It is, as I’m sure most people know, a classic rites of passage book written by Elaine Dundy, an American actress who married British theatre critic Ken Tynan. It is supposed to be based on Dundy’s own experiences living in Paris (before she met Tynan), but she said: “When I got stuck, I would say to myself, 'What would I not do?' and then I would have Sally Jay do it, and I would be off again."

Sally Jay (generally known as Gorce) is a serial runaway, who is in Paris thanks to her Uncle Roger. When she was 13 he promised her two years of freedom once she has graduated from college – providing she doesn’t run away again. He’ll pay her a monthly allowance, and she can go anywhere she likes, and do anything she likes.

At that point what she wants is to stay out as late as she likes, and eat whatever she likes any time she wants. And she doesn’t want to be introduced to all the mothers and fathers and brothers of the girls at school. She doesn’t want to meet anyone she’s been introduced to.   She wants to meet all the other people and do exciting things and sharpen her wits…

So now Sally Jay, an actress, is in Paris, grabbing every new experience she can. She has a lover, an Italian diplomat named Teddy (they met when she stepped out in front of his car) who takes her to the Ritz, and a circle of oddball acquaintances, who all seem to be outsiders, on the edge of society. They’re not exactly down and outs, but they live a hand to mouth existence. Then there’s Larry Keevil, who was on a drama course with Sally Jay back home in America, and she meets him again and falls in love. But Larry turns out to be very nasty indeed…

The novel rushes along from one episode to another, and there’s a host of entertaining characters to accompany our zany heroine, and on the surface everything is very light and frothy, and often very funny. But there are darker undertones, and some scenes are quite disturbing.

At times the book, written in 1958, reminded me of JD Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, which was published seven years earlier – something to do with the tone perhaps, or the style, or the portrayal of disaffected youth with its hatred of anything phony. For all her outrageous behaviour Sally Jay, like Holden Caulfield, is something of innocent and, like him, she doesn’t really grow or learn from her experiences. She has no thought for the future, and lives for the moment. She’s very bright, and despite the kooky, confident, cynical persona she’s created for herself she’s oddly passive – things happen to her, and she accepts the situation, and goes with the flow, rarely making decisions or initiating action.

The period is wrong, but she could almost be a younger version of a Jean Rhys heroine, before life has saddened her and the promise of good times ahead has disappeared: think of Sasha in 'Good Morning', Midnight. Rhys is far bleaker and grittier, but Dundy’s Paris carries the same sense of seediness and failure, despite the lightness and humour.

And although the ending ought to be described as happy, I can’t for a moment imagine it will be. Sally Jay doesn’t strike me as being a happy-after-person. Each time she meets a new man, or a new situation, she thinks ‘this is it’. But it never lasts. Whatever she does, she never quite fits in, and things never quite work out. There’s a passage early on the book where Sally Jay says:

I was still wearing the evening dress I had in when I’d met Larry that morning, and the funny thing about was that, even though twelve hours had elapsed since then, it still wasn’t particularly appropriate. I mean, I really felt I could expect it to be correct attire at some point of the day – like a watch that has stopped, eventually just happening to have its hands at the right time.

Somehow I felt that symbolised her life, and she’s never going to be correct, or happy, or satisfied.

Jim McDermott's portrait of Elaine Dundy.