The Land of Green Ginger

Another Virago for LibrayThing’s All Virago All August challenge. And I think this one will do nicely for the What’s in a Name challenge over at The Worm Hole – it’s my entry for a book with the letters ‘ing’ in the title. And it fits the bill for Yorkshire, for Reading England 2015 (which you can find over at Behold the Stars).

 

The Land of Green Ginger, by Winifred Holtby.
Not, alas the 1983 Virago, but a 2012 edition,
with a Yorkshire Dales British Railways Poster
 on the cover, which I quite like.

As a small child Joanna Burton is entranced when she passes a street called The Land of Green Ginger. Her aunts hustle her on, but the name conjures up something magical for Joanna: 

To be offered such gifts of fortune, to seek Commercial Lane and to find – the day before Christmas Eve and by lamplight too – the Land of Green Ginger, dark, narrow, mysterious road to Heaven, to Fairy Land, to anywhere, anywhere, even to South Africa, which was the goal of all men’s longing, where Father lived in a rondavel… 

The heroine of Winifred Holtby’s The Land of Green Ginger spends a lot of time yearning for far-flung, fabulous lands. She is born in South Africa, but her mother dies, and her missionary father cannot care for a baby, so she’s sent back home to England to be raised by her maiden aunts in Yorkshire. 

She is highly imaginative, drawing her knowledge of life from books (she’s in love with Walter Raleigh and the Scarlet Pimpernel), and she dreams of travelling the world to see strange, exotic places. But in 1914, aged 18, she falls in love with Teddy Leigh who tells her he has been given the world to wear as a golden ball. At this point I started thinking of Milton, but it was a golden chain which linked Earth to Heaven – but the golden ball was in the fairy tale about the Frog Prince, and it seems that Teddy is paying tribute to Joanna, who is golden haired, tall, and ‘grandly portioned’. 

Teddy Leigh drew towards her happiness and health as a chilled traveller draws towards a fire. She seemed so young, so strong, so sure that life was good. He, who snatched sudden joys from an uncertain world, looked at her with envious longing. She seemed as strong and stablished as a golden tower. 

It is her vitality, her love of life that attracts him - but in the end those are the qualities he comes to hate the most. For Teddy is a kind of Frog Prince in reverse, who can never be rescued by a kiss. Handsome, charming, debonair, he has TB, but Army medics have passed him as fit for active service and he is off to join his unit, and feels he has been handed life as a golden ball. 

He and Joanna marry, and a daughter is duly born nine months after their brief honeymoon. His visit home on a gunnery course results in a second daughter, and eventually in June 1918 the combination of gas and consumption proves too much and he is invalided out and ends up at the Yorkshire Military Sanatorium, where the true nature of his illness is finally revealed to Joanna (but not by Teddy – he never mentions it to her). 

Unable to return to Cambridge and continue studying for the ministry, he uses an Army pay-out to buy Scatterthwaite, a run-down, isolated farm (at the time it was believed open-air life helped consumptives). However, he and Joanna have no money, no experience and no aptitude for farming. “Small debts prospered as did nothing else on the land,” Holtby tells us. 

Teddy, faced with his broken dreams and broken health, is querulous, selfish and demanding. Joanna struggles to make ends meet as she tries to care for him and run the farm. Eventually, to protect the children from infection, sends them to her aunts.  

The Virago 1983 edition -  I'd love this edition,but
can I justify two copies of the same book, even if
it is a Virago?

 

Growing shabbier and shabbier, she develops a reputation for oddness – she’s viewed as a bad housekeeper, a bad mother (because she sent her children away), and a bad farmer. As the local curate observes, she looks strange (she is wearing green stockings on the day he calls). And her behaviour is even more peculiar, for she never says or does what you expect. She’s an unsettling sort of person.  

Things get worse when local landowner Sir Wentworth Marshall employs a group of Finns to establish a forestry project. Local villagers resent the foreigners, and tensions build. But the real trouble comes when the interpreter, Hungarian Paul Szermai, comes to lodge with Joanna and Teddy. Joanna has already glimpsed Szermai in the woods, envisioning him as Tam Lin from the old ballad, or a fairy tale eldritch knight.  There is no foundation for the ensuing scandal, but their friendship is misinterpreted - even Teddy suspects them of having an affair – and the story moves inexorably towards what should be a final tragic conclusion. 

I won’t reveal what happens, but somehow Joanna finds herself again, and sets off with her children to pursue her dream. Life is a good bargain, she tells Sir Wentworth.  

I mean, imagine what it would be like if you were dead, and you looked up and saw people acquiescing in life, and treating it like a poor thing, and saying, “You can’t have the best of both worlds,” as a kind of reason for getting the best of none. Wouldn’t you feel cheated? I should. I’d think, “Here am I who’d give anything, anything to be alive again and there they are treating life like a bad bargain.” Why, it’s the best bargain. It’s the only bargain worth buying if you really live. 

Joanna’s struggle to find fulfilment is played out in the aftermath of WWI, and though she is uninterested in politics and social change, things like employment problems and the peace movement are there in the background. They are never intrusive, but I think they inform much of Holtby’s work. I don't know that enjoyable is necessarily the right word to describe it. Compelling would be nearer the mark. But it's well worth reading - I'd recommend it.

*In case you wonder, The Land of Green Ginger is a real street in Hull (Holtby’s inspiration for Kingsport in novel), and is believed to have got its name because in Tudor times it was the place where green ginger, a conserve of ginger and lemon juice, was sold or made.

 

 

 

 

Their Eyes Were Watching God

There I was, sitting on the floor in the backroom of the Oxfam shop, sorting and pricing books, when I came across a well-thumbed copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. I'd never come across the author before, but it was a Virago Modern Classic, with an eye-catching painting on the front showing a woman in a red dress standing in a doorway, with an empty road running past her, and a brilliant blue sky above (taken from Edward Hopper's 'Carolina Morning'. So I started reading, just to see what it was about, and had to tear myself away because I was supposed to be working.

After that, of course, I had to buy it, and found it was totally unlike anything else I have read. The third sentence in tells us:

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of the sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgement.

It's not only the dead whose eyes are are flung wide open, for folk in the small all-black town, deep in the American south, are scandalised by the re-appearance of this woman in their lives. She is Janie, aged 40, unsuitably clad in overalls instead of dress, with her long hair 'swingin' down her back lak some young gal'. Worse still, the last time they saw her she left with a younger man...

Gradually Janie's story comes to light as she tells a friend about her life. Raised by her grandmother, a former slave, she is married at 16 to farmer Logan Killicks, who is much older than she is, because Nanny believes it will protect her, and give her a better life. She tells Janie:

You know, honey, us coloured folk is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways. Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn't for me to fulfill my dreams of what a woman oughta be and do. Dat's one of de hold-backs of slavery. But nothing can't stop you from wishin'.

And wishing is what Janie does. She wishes love would bloom like the flowers on the pear tree, delicate and beautiful, but her husband is unlovable, and she finds he expects her to help on the farm. So when Joe Starks walks past, with money in his pocket and a smart line in chatter, she is smitten, and she walks out of her old life and into a new one with Joe in a new town. On the face of it things are good. Joe opens a store and becomes Mayor – but Janie is no happier than she was before, and is treated like a possession rather than a person. She's given no life outside her home, and is not even allowed to sit in the porch gossiping with other women, because it's not fitting to Joe's position.

Then, when Joe dies, she meets Vergible Woods, known to one and all as Tea Cake, and discovers what she has been searching for all her life. Tea Cake is younger than Janie, and lower down the social scale, but he loves her, and she loves him. They get married and work alongside each other 'on the muck' (a farm) in the Everglades. They are equals, and Tea Cake is the only man who lets Janie be herself, and doesn't try to force into a role she doesn't want. She has fun with him. He talks with her, and laughs with her.

The novel was written in 1937, in dialect, and is often very poetic, and very moving, but it's Janie's determination to live life on her own terms, and not to settle for second best, which shines out. And the fact that this novel is written by a black woman, about a black woman, is immaterial. Janie's search for a relationship on equal terms, and to be accepted for who is she is, rather than what someone wants her to be, applies to any woman, whatever her colour or creed.

Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston seems to have been forgotten for a good many years, but apparently Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou have all cited her influence on their writing. According to Holly Eley, who wrote the introduction to my edition, Hurston was one of the first African American women writers. Believed to have been born round about 1891 – she herself gave different dates on different occasions - she was brought up in Eatonville, Florida, the first black town in the United States, and held down various jobs before she enrolled at college and began to write. She was in involved in black and white literary communities, and went on to study cultural anthropology, and her work in this field took her all over the world.

She was a well known and somewhat controversial figure, but in the last years of her life (she died in 1960) she alienated the Civil Rights movement because she believed the campaign for integration did not acknowledge the value of segregated black institutions, and she claimed African Americans could be live as they wanted in their own autonomous communities, independent of white society. In a period when African American literature reflected the growing struggle for equality her work fell out of favour. People didn't like her use of dialect, and accused her of writing what white people expected.

The Provincial Lady in a Floral Cover

I picked this up in the Oxfam shop
(again), but I think it looks like a
book on needlework, or a notebook,
or drawliners, or writing paper.

I started reading EM Delafield's The Diary of a Provincial Lady online at Project Gutenberg Australia, which has all kinds of books unavailable on the British site, but they can't be downloaded on to Kindle. Personally, I never find reading online very satisfactory, because I can't sit comfortably with the laptop balanced on my knees, and every time I move it topples off. So you can imagine how delighted I was to find a Proper Book, even if it does have a Cath Kidston floral cover. Not that I have anything against her designs: I'm very fond of them, but preferably on tea towels and tote bags, not novels. I know I rave about those lovely Persephone end-papers, but they are on the inside, not the outside. Besides, this a Virago Modern Classic, and should be dark green, with a painting on the front carefully chosen to complement the writing. Anything else is unacceptable, even if it is a 30th anniversary edition.

Anyway, that's quite enough ranting. You want to know what I thought of the book, so here goes. I LOVED IT. I'm sure I'm one of the last people in the world to read this, and everyone else knows all about it. But just in case someone doesn't, it's a fictional diary of an upper-middle class woman living in a Devonshire village circa 1930. Thought to be based on life of the author, it charts her struggles to balance the household books, and to keep her home running as smoothly as possible while trying to solve various crises and keep everyone happy, from her husband and children to her friends, neighbours, servants and tradesmen. She deals with colds (herself and the children), measles (herself and the children), and a cat who is continually producing litters. Cash is always tight, and her bank balance totters from crisis to crisis, but she avoids disaster by pawning a great-aunt's diamond ring.

It may not sound very exciting, but she records everyday events with self-deprecating warmth and humour – and a wonderfully ironic turn of phrase. She peppers her entries with memos and queries which veer from the practical to the philosophical. The tone is set from the very beginning:

Virago could have stuck with this, which
looks shabby and faded, as one images
The Provincial Lady's home to be.

November 7th.-Plant the indoor bulbs. Just as I am in the middle of them, Lady Boxe calls. I say, untruthfully, how nice to see her, and beg her to sit down while I just finish the bulbs. Lady B. makes determined attempt to sit down in armchair where I have already placed two bulb-bowls and the bag of charcoal, is headed off just in time, and takes the sofa.

Do I know, she asks, how very late it is for indoor bulbs? September, really, or even October, is the time. Do I know that the only really reliable firm for hyacinths is Somebody of Haarlem? Cannot catch the name of the firm, which is Dutch, but reply Yes, I do know, but think it my duty to buy Empire products. Feel at the time, and still think, that this is an excellent reply. Unfortunately Vicky comes into the drawing-room later and says: "O Mummie, are those the bulbs we got at Woolworths?"

I like the way our heroine, who remains unnamed, tries to turn buying cheap bulbs into a virtue by saying she's supporting the Empire, and then her young daughter lets the cat out of the bag by revealing the truth. This instantly shows the Provincial Lady to be short of cash, rather inept, since the bulbs should have been planted long ago, and not as strict with the children as she could be, or Vicky would never have made such a remark in public.

The diarist is much too well-bred to say what she really thinks, or to stand up to other people, and consequently she frequently finds herself involved in things she had no intention of doing, whether it's attending a function at the home of fearsome Lady Boxe, or inviting people she hates to accompany her family on a seaside picnic in the pouring rain. She's equally incapable of exerting authority over the servants, especially the cook, who counters any kind of criticism with complaints about equipment – the range is perpetually faulty.

EM Delafield

Nevertheless, social conventions must be obeyed, and there are certain ways of doing things, as we see when the parlourmaid gives notice and an agency supplies a house-parlourman called Howard Fitzsimmons, which our Provincial Lady feels is a most unsuitable name for a servant. She feels uneasy issuing instructions regarding his duties, but decides she must make it clear that the correct response when receiving an order, is not 'right-oh!'

You wonder how women like her, who didn't work, filled their time, but she organises picnics and children's parties, writes letters, attends parties and literary soirees, entertains at home, stays with a friend, and attends meetings – lots of meetings, for the church, the village show and the WI. She and her friends discuss the latest books and plays, politics, and even birth control, but what really interests them is village gossip.

Reading this through I find I've not mentioned the children, who bicker, and say the wrong thing at the wrong time, and have straight hair, and no musical talent, and lack the charm of other people's offspring - but she loves them very dearly. Or Our Vicar's Wife, who always outstays her welcome (on one occasion Robert, who rarely expresses an opinion - he always seems to be asleep or reading the paper - suggests they prevent her return by turns out the lights, locking the door, and going to bed. Or our heroine's best friend, Rose, who is everything she is not - effortlessly elegant, fashionable and well informed,with wealthy and famous friends. 


Nor have I described the romance between Barbara Blenkinsop and Crosbie Carruthers, who wants to marry her her and whisk her of to the Himalayas, a plan hindered by her mother, who cannot (and will not) be left on her own. And I've not said anything about the sweep, or the bran tub, or what happens when Robin unscrews a hot water bottle top in his sister Vicky's bed. Then there's the Provincial Lady's trip to France, and the story of what happens to the new bulbs, which prompts her to note: 


(Mem: Very marked difference between the sexes is male tendency to procrastinate doing practically everything in the world except sitting down to meals and going up to bed. Should like to purchase little painted motto: Do it now, so often on sale at inferior  stationers' shops, and present it to Robert, but on second thoughts quite see  that this would conduce to domestic harmony, and abandon scheme at once.)


I have often made the same observation and come to much the same conclusion, which shows that things have not changed as much as I thought in the last 80 years.