Greenery Street: A Road with a Life of Its Own

The street consists of thirty-six narrow little houses – all, at a first glance, exactly the same: and a mental picture of it generally includes a large pantechnicon van, backed against the pavement and collecting or discharging household goods. For though every young married couple that comes to Greenery Street does so with the intention of staying there for life, there are few streets where in actual fact the population is more constantly changing. And the first sign of this change is in almost every case the same. It is seen in the arrival of a brand-new perambulator. 

This is Greenery Street, off Paradise Square, in the heart of London. And Greenery Street has a starring role in Denis Mackail’s novel of the same name. For Greenery Street has a life of its own. It lures young couples into its confines, wooing them with its sheer perfection, charming and beguiling them with a vision of domestic bliss. But the dream is shattered by the arrival of children: at this point houses seem to shrink, corridors are narrower, rooms smaller, and there is never enough space… so the happy couple reluctantly move on to a larger, better house, and another set of newly-weds take their place in Greenery Street. 

Walpole Street: The road which inspired Greenery Street
(courtesy of rightmoves.com.uk).

Apparently, the road was based on Walpole Street, where Mackail lived with his wife Diana when they were first married, and where he was blissfully happy – it was a time he never forgot, and he incorporated elements from it into this novel, which was written in 1925, and is very much of its period. He was the younger brother of Angela Thirkell and, like her, wrote about what he knew. I haven’t read his other novels, but this one seems to be written from the heart, following the first year in the marriage of Ian and Felicity Foster.

The couple are like children let loose in a sweet shop, and their joy at being together in their own home is infectious, as is their delight with each new thing (decorations, possessions, a pet dog). But it’s not quite as sweet and light as the early chapters led me to think. Ian and Felicity struggle to keep their heads above water financially: they start married life owing a huge sum to the builder/decorator for work carried out on the house, and the situation is not improved by Felicity’s inability to understand her accounts book. Given how impecunious they are, it seems extraordinary that they should live in some style, in a five-storey house (including the basement) with two servants (a cook and a housemaid, who seem to live and work in the basement).

They are scared of the servants, who are rude and inefficient, and their neighbours take advantage of them, borrowing things which are never returned. In some ways they remind me of David Copperfield and Dora, and are just as ill-equipped to cope with the demands of adult life. 

But gradually they grow up and take control, and they are able to seize the initiative and avert scandal when Felicity’s sister plans to leave her husband for another man. Hard on the heels of that comes another crisis, as they return to their beloved home, to discover the servants have run away, and there has been a break-in, though one of the policemen at the scene is more than a little dismissive about the incident. “You wouldn’t hardly call it a burglary, not in a house like this,” he tells Ian. The couple are surprisingly resilient about the disaster, a sign perhaps of their growing maturity, and we leave them preparing for the birth of their first child.

I enjoyed Greenery Street. It’s warm and humorous without ever being cruel, a kind of jubilant, joyful  hymn of praise to married life, which nevertheless manages to poke gentle fun at the institution of marriage, home improvements, parenthood, servants, tradesmen, families, and middle class society in general. And I rather like Ian and Felicity, who are a bit dim really, and sometimes irritating, but are quite prepared to admit their faults and beg forgiveness. Once married they find they have to get to know each other – which is often what happens in real life. And, just like real life again, they quarrel about small things of little consequence, then kiss and make-up, so I found myself hoping that their love endures, and that their relationship will grow and develop in the years ahead.

In fact, when it comes to relationships I thought it was fascinating to see how the Fosters’ marriage differs to that of other couples in the novel, such as their neighbours the Lamberts, Felicity’s parents, and her sister Daphne who is married to kindly, generous Bruce, a shy but fabulously wealthy businessman. I would like to have seen more of Daphne, with her odd looks and odder behaviour. She may only have played a small part in the novel, but I thought she was most complex and interesting character, who deserved a book to herself – I ended up writing stories about her inside my head! On the face of it she has everything she could want, but she and her husband don’t seem to be a couple at all, and she can be unexpectedly cynical, as well as revealing moments of deep sadness and unhappiness.

The endpapers and bookmark are from a 1925 block printed
 cretonne by George H Willis for the Silver Studio.

Short Story Sunday: Forbidden Love

It’s Sunday, so it’s short story time again, and this week I’ve abandoned Persephone for Virago and I’m dipping into Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Selected Short Stories, which are every bit as wonderful as I hoped they would be. These tales, written between 1932 and 1977, are as sharply subversive as her other work led me to expect, her prose is faultless, and the humour is as dark as ever. She’s the antithesis of Angela Thirkell, and the perfect restorative for those times when you feel you’ve had a tad too much light-hearted sweetness and a surfeit of happy endings – and even I reach that point sometimes. Actually, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Angela Thirkell are so very different that I find it hard to understand how I can like both of them so very much. I guess it just proves that variety is the spice of life.

In the first story, A Love Match, we meet brother and sister Justin and Celia Tizard, both damaged by the horrors of the First World War, who find comfort and healing in an incestuous relationship. They fall into it almost by accident. Left alone when her fiancé is killed, Celia welcomes her brother home on leave, but she cannot bear to listen to his night terrors as revisits the hellish scenes of the conflict. So she goes to him, to quiet him, and comfort him, and things go on from there.

After the war they live abroad for a time, but they return to England, and are accepted by the residents of Hallowby as a ‘disabled major’ and his ‘devoted maiden sister’ who seem middle-aged long before they are. They know their relationship is wrong, but they love each other, and I think they quite enjoy having a secret life, and the thrill of constantly watching what they do and say to ensure they are not discovered.

Returning from their sober junketings, Justin and Celia, safe within their brick wall, cast off their weeds of middle age, laughed, chattered and kissed with an intensified delight in their scandalous immunity from blame. They were a model couple.

Years pass, and life continues: they make friends and involve themselves in the community. Then Celia receives a series of poison pen letters from someone who obviously knows about the couple’s illicit relationship.  The perpetrator turns out to be a young girl, who has made advances to Justin and been rejected (or so he says). He promises to ‘settle’ her, and we never know what happens, but the letters stop, and the girl is left unharmed (but bad tempered).

If anyone else has any suspicions they never mention the matter. It is death which finally exposes the brother and sister. They fall victim to a bomb which hits their house, and are discovered dead, in bed together, amid the wreckage of their home. Even then, their kindly neighbours either cannot, or do not want to, consider the truth of the situation, so they decide Justin must have gone to comfort Celia during the raid.

It’s a sad little tale and, like so many short stories, I feel there is a degree of ambivalence. Was Justin carrying on with pretty little Mary Semple? And do people realise just how close the major and his maiden sister really are, but choose to ignore it? And their death seems almost like some kind of retribution because they have broken a taboo, like something out of an ancient Greek play.

Wild Strawberries - Sweet as Saccharine...

The Leslies, who star in Angela Thirkell’s Wild Strawberries, lead a charmed life in their beautiful ancestral home, cared for by faithful servants, and looked up to by local villagers. There is no shortage of cash, no nastiness, no rain, and everything is bathed in a golden glow. It’s all as sweet as saccharine and as frothy as cappuccino, but very enjoyable nonetheless, although it did leave me feeling a need to read something with a little more bite and substance.

First published in 1934 (a year after High Rising, which seemed sharper, and which I love unreservedly), it portrays the kind of world that Thirkell knew. It’s hard to imagine that world now, with its strict social codes and class structures and the deference of working folk towards those higher up the scale. For example, I’ll bet you wouldn’t find a local vicar these days hanging on to start his service until the arrival of the local gentry, but that’s just what happens here. Not only that, but when the Leslies do arrive (late), scatty Lady Emily takes a long time to settle herself and her family, and she continues to talk to them throughout the service.

Lady Emily, who heads three generations of Leslies, is delightfully dotty. Vague and forgetful, she is constantly in a muddle, always mislaying her possessions and getting hold of the wrong end of the stick in conversations. She is always drawing up complicated plans to organise the lives of her family, servants, visitors and villagers, in the belief the belief that she is helping them – but everyone ignores her efforts and goes their own way, just as they have always done. The blurb on the back of my copy (Virago, 2012), describes her as a matriarch, which I always think implies a woman of great force and determination, and Lady Emily is neither. She may interfere, but since no-one takes any notice, she does no harm, and she is incapable of imposing her will on others – indeed, for much of the time she seems to have little will of her own, fluttering from idea to idea, and from one activity to another, without ever settling. But she’s so warm and friendly, and kind and caring, that it’s impossible not to like her.

Her husband is much quieter and calmer, who tolerates his wife’s idiosyncrasies, and is occasionally exasperated by her actions, but the relationship between them is actually quite touching. We don’t see a lot of him, and we don’t see a lot of the two of them together, but there is genuine affection between them, and they still grieve for the loss of their eldest son in the First World War, and appear to support each other in their loss. 

Their family comprises surviving sons John, a steady, hardworking widower, and idle, feckless David, who has an eye for a pretty girl but no intention of settling down, and their beautiful, placid daughter Agnes, as well as her three young children, and grandson Martin who, as the son of the dead eldest son, will inherit the estate.

Then there’s the servants: Nannie, Ivy the nursemaid, Macpherson the agent, Gudgeon the butler, Conque, Lady Emily’s French maid (universally known as Conk), and various others who make brief appearances but have no role to play in the story. And there’s a full cast of other characters, including the vicar; the Boulles (a French family who have hired his home for the summer); assorted villagers, and one of David’s friends, highly educated, cold-hearted Miss Stevenson, one of the few women to hold a responsible job in radio.

Wild Strawberries also features Mr Holt, a social parasite who spends his life sponging off the rich and famous, inviting himself to stay at their comfortable homes, and to be ferried around by their chauffeurs, enjoying their food and drink, demanding the attention he feels he deserves. He has built a reputation as a gardening expert (although he has no garden of his own) and it was this expertise which provided his opening into society, when he was younger and wittier than he is now. Thirkell gives us a rather cruel – and sad – picture of an ageing man, a bore and a sponger, who is no longer welcomed by people he thought were friends.

And, of course, there is pretty Mary Preston, the kind-hearted, penniless niece of Agnes’ husband, who has been invited to Rushwater (the family estate) for the summer, and promptly becomes infatuated with David, although Lady Emily and Agnes think she would make an ideal wife for John…

Novelist Angela Thirkell.

The plot, such as it is, is not strong. It’s another of those novels where not a lot happens, and the focus is very much on the small, everyday things in life, and the relationships between the characters, but that’s very much the kind of novel I always enjoy. Here the portrayal of the life led by the landed gentry in the early 1930s is superb, and there are some brilliant cameo portraits of the lesser characters, like the horrendous, overbearing Madame Boulle, who is convinced that everything French is best, and that she is always right (she reminded me of the German girl who once stayed with us on an inter-school exchange, with the difference, of course, that our little fraulein believed Germany reigned supreme).

In his introduction (which I looked at after I completed the novel), Alexander McCall Smith) compares Wild Strawberries to a Noel Coward play. Personally, I don’t think Thirkell is as witty as Coward, but as I can see what he means, because much of the dialogue is very mannered and stylised, and as I read I could see the story unfolding before me like a Merchant Ivory film.

Short Story Sunday: A Flawed Treasure and a Good Mother

The Exile, by Betty Miller, is a little odd, and I didn’t really enjoy it, but it was interesting. Here we have the Moores, Edmund and Louis, and his young brother Arthur. They are middle class and well-off, leading comfortable, cosy lives but are made uneasy by the appearance of their new servant. Russian Irina is pale, effacing and reserved, with a ‘surprisingly deep and vibrant’ voice. On the face of it she is perfect. She’s an ‘exquisite’ cook, ‘adept and thorough’ at the housework, ‘incredibly willing’ and a ‘very hard’ worker. She is, as Lois tells everyone, a treasure. A real treasure.

So what is wrong with her you ask? For something must be wrong. And so it proves. Their Domestic Goddess isn’t a murderer, she doesn’t run away with Edmund or Arthur, she doesn’t steal, she’s not a political agitator (I might have preferred the story if it had gone down one of those routes). She doesn’t intrude, or disrupt, or take over, or turn their lives upside down. She simply makes them feel uncomfortable and, since they are not used to being made to feel uncomfortable, they do not like it. It transpires that Irina has a tragic past. She tells her tale, dispassionately, without emotion, unable to move on from what has happened and start living again. She calls to mind The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Sarah Woodruff’s determination to reject the chance of happiness and stick with misery. Personally I’ve always found Fowles’ ending thoroughly unsatisfactory, because it seems out of character – Sarah’s final choice of lifestyle (whichever ending you opt for) is at such a variance with her earlier character. Anyway, Irina could never be accused of lack of consistency.

…it became startlingly obvious that what remained of her life after that time had been blighted: consumed by the past, by those strange, tragic months. She was bound by that past situation: it claimed her, used her up. So that her life in the present was meaningless: she existed, imprisoned in our day-to-day sequence, imprisoned in Time. She was an exile, not only from a country (a geographical area can, after all, be reclaimed), but from her own real life. As a personality she was dead.

The house has never been so well run, but life means nothing to Irina, and her ‘deadly

Betty Miller.

negativeness’ destroys the family’s own joy and pleasure in life, undermining their values and drawing them close to the void. But they never actually fall. Irina is asked to leave, and I assume that they forget their frightening glimpse into the abyss, and their brush with thoughts of death, and that life proceeds as normal.

To a large extent I suspect my reaction to the tale is very similar to that of the Moores to Irina, and I wondered if Miller had, perhaps, banked on that, and wanted people to think about things they had rather not (does that make sense?)  She was the mother of Jonathan Miller, the doctor and director, which is interesting, but has no bearing on this story, and didn’t make feel more kindly about it. I gather that she wrote seven novels, as well as short stories, none of which I feel any desire to read, and a biography of Robert Browning, which sounds more tempting because I like his poetry.

I’ll tell you what, since I am feeling generous, I shall add in my thoughts about the next tale in The Persephone Book of Short Stories, because it is a very short short story, and although I loved it I don’t have a lot to say about it. Themes explored by Dorothy Canfield Fisher in The Rainy Day, the Good Mother and The Brown Suit will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has read The Home-Maker – and if you loved that you will love this.

Here the Good Mother has followed all the instructions in ‘The Happy Child is an Active Child’

Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

to keep her three children occupied on a rainy day, but they are unaware of what is required of them. Indeed, the only thing little Freddy wants is to wear his brown suit, which has been washed, and is still wet. A battle of wills ensues, and everyone is miserable until the mother’s young cousin arrives, tells a silly story, plays a silly imaginative game and discovers that what Freddy wants is not the brown suit itself, but its holster pocket where he can carry his pretend pistol. Easy peasy, says the student cousin (well, not quite in those words, after all, this was published in 1937). Let’s all sew pockets on our clothes. At which point he rushes off to catch his bus, and the Good Mother comes to the rescue with material so the children can sew ‘queer pockets’ in ‘queer places’ on their clothes. All is sweetness and light, and after lunch they give her the starring role in their play, because she was too busy to join in their earlier version.

Anyone who’s ever watched their offspring ignoring expensive and thoughtfully chose birthday and Christmas presents in favour of wrapping paper, ribbons and boxes, will recognise the truth of the picture drawn here, and sympathise with the harassed mother, who loves her children dearly, but does not always have the time to really listen to them, and cannot always see that you don’t need lots of posh or toys or complicated games, you just need some imagination.

Delightful Mrs Miniver

It was lovely, thought Mrs Miniver, nodding good-bye to the flower-woman and carrying her big sheaf of chrysanthemums down the street with a kind of ceremonious joy, as though it were a cornucopia; it was lovely, this settling down again, this tidying away of the summer into its box, this taking up of the thread of one’s life where the holidays (irrelevant interlude) had made one drop it. Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays:  but she always felt - and it was, perhaps, the measure of peculiar happiness – a little relieved when they were over. Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half-afraid to step out of its frame in se one day she should find herself unable to get back. The spell might break, the atmosphere be impossible to recapture.

Mrs Miniver, as you can tell from the opening passage of the novel which bears her name, is a fortunate woman, and she is well aware of that, and is always prepared to count her blessings. But wealthy, happily married women face trials and tribulations just like anyone else, even though they may pale into insignificance compared to what else was going on in the world. Jan Struther’s classic tale of family life is utterly charming - forget about that dreadfully sentimental old film, and read the book! Mrs Miniver is actually a rather endearing character, and I found her easy to warm to, despite the difference in life-style (no say nothing of income) and a gap of well over 50 years.

It’s set in the months immediately before WW2, and takes us through to the onset of the conflict, ending at Christmas 1939, by which time Mrs Miniver is doing war work in London, leaving staff at her country home to care for seven evacuees and her three children (when they are not away at school. To be honest, for much of the time you wouldn’t know how grave the situation is. But her tone gets more serious as things worsen, and there are unexpected glimpses of the way life changes. She describes the difficulties of getting around on a moonless night in the blackout when, she says, one ‘confines oneself to neighbours who are within groping distance’, and in the evening there is so little traffic that ‘people’s footsteps on the pavements make quite  a loud clatter’. And she mentions the beneficial effect on people’s health, telling us: 

And apropos (literally for once) des bottes, you’ve no idea how all this walking has improved people’s figures. Men with incipient pots, women who were developing Dunlop ridges above the belt, are now sylphlike.

 I just love that description.

However, for me the most moving and thought provoking comment on the war is her account of the lack of children. My mother’s family took in evacuees, and an entire school was moved out of London to the small Surrey town where she lived, so my view is based on her memories, and the impact made by this sudden influx of children and their teachers. But, of course, those extra youngsters in that one place meant fewer young people somewhere else, a fact which I’ve never considered before – and I don’t think I’ve seen it referred to elsewhere.  Anyway, Struther, writing as Mrs Miniver, confides:

The other thing I miss, terribly, is children. Not only my own - I do at least see them (and plenty of others) at weekends: but children in general, as an ingredient of the town’s population, a sort of leven. It may be different in some parts of London, but around here they have acquired a rarity interest. They used to be daisies and are now bee orchises.

Her view was interesting, especially as I am taking a leisurely stroll through Vere Hodgson’s wartime diaries. But this book isn’t about the war, or politics, or current affairs: it’s about people, and the way they react with each other, and the odd things that make us love our families, and above all it’s about Mrs Miniver’s thoughts on Life, the Universe and Everything. And that’s where it’s strength lies, because it’s warm, and funny, and very joyous and life affirming and, surprisingly, it’s very easy to identify with Mrs Miniver (especially as she has the ability to laugh at herself) and her concerns with her family and the small things of everyday life.

Like many other novels issued at this time, Mrs Miniver was originally published as a regular column in a newspaper. Stuther, a poet and essay writer, was asked to produce pieces to liven up the court page in The Times! Peter Feming (Ian’s brother) wanted her to create an ‘ordinary sort of woman who leads an ordinary sort of life – rather like yourself’. Her pieces, gathered into a book in October 1939, were immensely popular, and are thought to have been based on her own life and family.

They mostly take the form of straight forward, short narratives, with one topic for each chapter, but my 1989 Virago edition includes four  ‘letters’ written by Mrs Miniver after the book’s original.

There’s no overall plot, so if you like a book with a strong storyline, this is not for you, as it’s really a series of reflections on different topics and situations. Funniest of all is Mrs Miniver’s account of how she and her husband track down a mystery smell in their country cottage. They fear it might be drains, or a dead rat – but it turns out to be two boxes of fishing bait (once alive, but now in an indescribable state) left behind in a bag abandoned by their eldest son!

A portrait of Jan Struther by Fritz Reichl,
 in the National Portrait Gallery,

Some things, it seems, never change. A visit to the dentist was every bit as unpleasant then as now, despite the padded cushions on the adjustable chair, and the ethics of shooting are just as controversial. But the way of life has altered. I suppose there are still people who enjoy shooting parties, and country house weekends, but for most of us it’s a lifestyle that’s difficult to imagine.

And Jan Struther has created such a warm, humane character that class has no place here. How could you not like a woman who keeps all her old Christmas present lists (there are 17 of them taking up space in an overcrowded drawer) because they evoke happy memories, a ‘memory-film’ of the past… the early days of her marriage, her husband building his reputation as a successful architect, the birth of her children, their growth and changing interests… She is so delightful, I cannot think how I have passed her by for all these years.