These Wonderful Rumours!

I do like Home Front diaries.  May Smith was a 25 year old school teacher living with her parents in 1939.  She kept a journal which is fresh and uplifting to read despite the devastating impact of WW2.  When the air raid sirens started - often in the early hours of the morning - she had to get out of bed along with her parents, grab her gas mask and go to her grandparents' house next door and sit in their cold cellar for two or three hours.  Only when the all-clear was given could she go back to bed and still have to get up early the next day to teach classes of 48-60 children including evacuees. 

May was a voracious reader and meticulously records her reading lists in her diary.  She loved Jane Eyre, Rebecca, The Code of the Woosters and avidly read The Provincial Lady which was then serialised in Time and Tide magazine.  She mimics E M Delafield's style rather well:

Wednesday May 22nd 1940 Mrs W has finished my voile frock, in which I duly paraded.  It's very sweet, I think.  It's trimmed with blue velvet ribbons and little mauve pearl buttons.  Mother took one look and remarked without enthusiasm that That Sort of Dress Looks Nothing without A Lot of Sun.  Very dampened by this remark, but still like it very much.

Fond of tennis, she played regularly and rode her bike around the village. She had two admirers and also pined a little for another who rejected her.  There is a constant ongoing battle with the local dressmaker who never completes her tennis dresses, coats and day dresses on time and her love of clothes is severely curtailed when ration books come in.  Proud of working and earning money she nevertheless lives from one pay packet to another and her father regularly subsidises her.  I loved her father who teases her about her choice of hats referring to one hat as a 'pigeon trap' and can't control his mirth when he first sees May and her mother in their gas marks.

Bombs fell close to home, and just when May was getting blasé about the air raid sirens preferring to stay in bed than go down into the cold cellar there were huge explosions close by.  May's family also had a lodger who was a Conchie (Conscientious Objector) who suffered abuse from the villagers.  One diary entry tells of a 'woman just over 30 who lost her boy at Dunkirk and is only just recovering, and it has sent her quite grey. She has to rest in the afternoons.'

But life goes on and there are wartime romances and wedding cakes with cardboard icing because of the rations.  May decides between her two admirers and chooses Freddie (although I rather liked the other one, Doug).  May's diary is a delight to read and her youth and humour and exuberance speaks to us across the years.

The Provincial Lady in Wartime

For those of us who feel it is necessary to have The Provincial Lady with us At All Times  the Macmillan Collector's Library edition is small enough to fit into a handbag or pocket and also has the wonderful Arthur Watts illustrations. 
 
The Provincial Lady in Wartime (not in this edition) is one of the most vivid and humorous accounts of life in England during the beautiful September of 1939 - the time of the Phoney War. A huge wave of patriotism sweeps the country and everyone agrees that ‘we’ve got to show 'Itler he can’t go on like that, haven’t we?’ In her Devon home, the garden is full of Michaelmas daisies, dahlias and nasturtiums and the weather is lovely. It is difficult to believe that war has been delclared. The Prov Lady receives two little evacuees Margery and Marigold. Husband Robert is an ARP Officer and takes his duties extremely seriously, and daughter Vicky and son Robin are still at boarding school. 

Determined to help the war effort the Prov Lady takes a flat in Buckingham Street in London hoping to find work using her literary skills. This proves impossible as there are many more volunteers than available work and she finds a job taking shifts in the all-night canteen operating in the ARP station under the Adelphi hotel. Here she meets some wonderful characters including lovely friend Serena, awful Mrs Pussy Winter-Gammon, a Society Deb whose mother eventually takes away and the female Commandant who dashes around raging that she is the only one who realises that England is at War to which everyone replies It Hasn’t Started Yet.

 

Never impervious to clothes, the Prov Lady buys herself a navy siren suit and throws a sherry party at which everybody discusses the war and friend Rose declares it will be Over by February. 

 

The Provincial Lady in Wartime is the last of four volumes.  Tragic events in E M Delafield's own life meant that she could no longer continue to write in the same humorous and semi-autobiographical style and there is a tinge of sadness to this final volume.  

Guard Your Daughters

I’d kind of dropped out of the loop a bit with Persephone books but Diana Tutton’s Guard Your Daughters was prominently displayed in the Cambridge Heffers just before Christmas so I bought a copy and raced through it in a couple of days.

This post-war novel features one of those bohemian, female-centred households consisting of five sisters and narrated by nineteen year old Morgan who has something of the charisma of Cassandra from I Capture the Castle. I loved the rambling old house and the episode where the sisters are initially reluctant to play French cricket in the damp garden with a soggy ball but get completely involved and finish the game in high spirits.  

I liked the daughter Cressida who cares how things look and the elder married sister Pandora who is unafraid to challenge her parents. When her father objects to a young man visiting because it upsets their mother (who is clearly not well) she calmly asks ‘Are we a convent father?’
 
 A review I read somewhere complains that the sisters call each other ‘Darling’ too much but those of us who have read a lot of Nancy Mitford and all five volumes of The Cazalets are well used to that! Just when you think the novel is getting a little twee towards the end the dark undercurrent resurfaces and although the attitudes towards mental health would now be questionable it is sympathetically written. Highly recommended.
 
I’m also ploughing through Violet Powell’s leaden biography of E M Delafield. Waaaaay too much recounting of every plot of every novel and Delafield was very prolific.  The only time the biography really comes to life is the chapter in Elizabeth’s own words which describes  her life as a postulant in a convent at the age of 21 and the touching reason she decided not to become a nun.

Occasionally when Violet Powell describes Elizabeth packing empty Christmas cracker boxes with earthy primroses to give to friends or the moment a robin from her Devon garden flies into her bedroom after her death at only 53 you get glimpses of what this book could have been.  We are well overdue for a definitive biography of E M Delafield.  Happy New Year!

The Provincial Lady in America

Miss S. of the Post-Office draws me aside to ask if it is true that I am going to America? I admit that it is, and we agree that America is a Long Way Off.

I’m not sure about the cover of this Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Diary of a Provincial Lady, somehow it doesn’t say 1930's to me. Good introduction by Rachel Johnson, though. With each re-read I’m struck by how fresh and funny these fictional diaries are. I’ve also read the Violet Powell biography of E M Delafield but I think we are overdue for another examination of her life and work.

 

Invited by her American publishers to take a literary tour of the United States the Prov Lady boards the passenger liner for the crossing and finds herself feted in America although (as usual) her wardrobe never quite comes up to scratch and she bitterly misses Robin and Vicky and Robert. Her publishers have her on a relentless schedule, but upon reaching Boston she insists on taking a trip to Concord to visit the family home of Louisa M Alcott.

All is snow, silence and loveliness, with frame-houses standing amongst trees, and no signs of either picture-houses, gasoline-stations or hot-dog stalls. Can think of nothing but Little Women, and visualise scene after scene from well-remembered and beloved book.  

Could willingly remain there for hours and hours. Time, however, rushes by with its usual speed when I am absorbed and happy.

This theme comes up again when the Prov Lady runs into Mademoiselle in New York and they go to see a film of Little Women. This must have been the 1933 film with Katherine Hepburn as Jo March.
 

Home again where Robert is Glad to See Her and Our Vicar’s Wife hopes they will come to tea on Thursday, five o’clock, not earlier because of Choir Practice.

 

The Provincial Lady Goes Further

June 18th. Heatwave continues and everybody says How lovely it must be in the country, but personally I think it is lovely in London and am more than content.  

I've always said that the first volume of the Provincial Lady's diary is the best but I'm now going to Eat My Words because I've been re-reading The Provincial Lady Goes Further and finding it rather wonderful.

In this second volume the Prov Lady has had considerable literary success but this has not translated into very much cash and she is still tormented by her limited budget for clothes and the presents she would like to buy for the children.  She has however, rented a property in Doughty Street, Bloomsbury, the heart of literary London, where she has time and space to write and can attend bookish events with 'dear Rose'.

Sadly, there is very little Lady B in this volume - she has moved abroad - but there is plenty of Our Vicar's Wife, Robert the undemonstrative husband, children Robin and Vicky and even Mademoiselle makes a welcome appearance.  Helen Wills is still around but thankfully has not produced any more kittens and Cook as usual has the last word.  There is also the scandalous Pamela Pringle who rings up in the middle of the night asking the Prov Lady to cover for her numerous indiscretions.

As always the Prov Lady is dissatisfied with her appearance but philosophically concludes that it is Useless to Struggle against Middle-Age.  She has no truck with  pretentious literary types and is quite capable of skewering sycophants with her wit.  She feels guilty about sending Vicky to boarding school and worries about Robin.  Her account of taking Vicky to half-term Sports at Robin's school and dissolving into tears when he wins a cup is very poignant.

As always I find myself fascinated with the details of 1930's England - Lyons tea shops, shampoo and sets, dresses made of delaine and tussore, Time and Tide magazine and rainy picnics.

I'm now re-reading The Provincial Lady in America.  Which is your favourite?

Wartime Diaries

Thank you for your comments on Nella Last's Peace and for being kind enough not to point out that I'd got the apostrophe in the wrong place! Let's hope the much anticipated third volume has a less cliched cover. Caustic Cover Critic has a very good post on the way the 'Gorbals boys' images are edited for many social history book covers. I'm now reading Nella Last's War and Mary's comment about whether she was a truly likeable women has intrigued me. Certainly she had a kind heart, but does the fact that this is a diary necessarily mean that everything is true? Nella states that she wishes she was closer to her daughter-in-law but feels her daughter-in-law is jealous of her close relationship with her son. I couldn't help wondering whether Nella was a teensy bit jealous of her daughter-in-law!

What is in no doubt is her gift for writing. Nella reminded me a little of Jane Austen who remained unpublished for much of her life but never doubted her literary genius. To a certain extent, Nella did have an admiring audience for her writing. She was known for writing brilliant letters and when poor Jess had a complete nervous breakdown - what we would probably now call severe post-natal depression - she kept the doctor and matron in the hospital entertained with Nella's letters.

Nella writes with empathy of the unbearable strain that women were under with poverty, blackouts, food shortages and men going off to fight:

One woman I know - a big-made woman of about fifty-six who took on an air-raid warden job - has had a nervous breakdown. Her niece said she had always had a fear of the dark and, now she knew she would have to take her turn in the dark all winter, she has cracked up.

I want to read more about the blackouts so I've looked out The Provincial Lady in Wartime and I'm pretty sure there are some descriptions of the blackouts in Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn. Maybe somebody can remember?

Bank Holiday Weekend Reading

We're off to the Isle of Wight for the long weekend. I'm taking this old favourite in its fancy new cover. Of course, it's E M Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady. We're hoping for sunshine, shell-collecting and breezy walks along the beach. Looking at the weather forecast it may be rain, wind and storm. Unfortunately, Life is Like That.