Milton Place – Elisabeth de Waal (2019)

I began 2020 with a lovely Persephone book – starting the year with a very me kind of book seemed a good beginning to my reading year. Milton Place is novel about a very English house, and a very English family, during a period of time when such families and their way of life were changing.

“The great house hung like a vast garment many times too big for the shrunken stature of its diminished inhabitants…”

 Large houses were falling out of fashion after the two world wars and hideously expensive to run. Many such places were being acquired by institutions or county councils, transformed from exclusive family homes into municipal buildings. All of that is very much in the background of this novel – the novel itself is much more about the relationships between the people who live in Milton Place, or come regularly to visit.

Milton Place is the second novel by Elisabeth de Waal that Persephone have published, a novel which failed to find a publisher when it was written, and it is published for the very first time by Persephone. Written around the 1950s/60s the setting is clearly a few years after the second world war – I assumed the very early 1950s.

Mr Barlow is the owner of Milton Place, an elderly widower with two middle aged daughters, who pay him occasional visits, and disapprove of him hanging on to the old family home. After the war – during which the house was given over to the military – Mr Barlow stubbornly returned to Milton Place the large country home he loves. Here he lives with a couple of old retainers, his eighteen year old grandson Tony visits during his holidays from school, as his relationship with his parents is complex and quite toxic. Mr Barlow’s existence is a quite lonely one, though he perhaps hadn’t realised that.

As the novel opens, Mr Barlow receives a letter from the daughter of an old friend. Anita Seiler is the now middle aged daughter of a woman Mr Barlow fell in love with as a young man in Vienna many years earlier. The two were unable to marry, and Mr Barlow had carried the memory of his lost love ever since. He is delighted to hear from her daughter, the letter bringing back memories of his young love. Anita is Austrian, a widow, with an adult daughter, now she is looking to move to England and asks Mr Barlow to help her find some kind of work as a housekeeper or similar. Mr Barlow invites Anita to Milton Place – with little real idea of helping her find work, he thinks perhaps his daughter might help with that.

Anita arrives and quickly sets about breathing new life into Milton Place. She appears to be just what the old place, and Mr Barlow need, her very presence is a tonic. She and Mr Barlow become great friends – though they never quite leave the formalities of calling one another Mr or Mrs behind – taking long walks together, delighting in the gardens, talking about everything.

“…walking was living with a place and making friends with it, it needed time and patience and the measured rhythm of your own pace to put you in touch with the things that are near, while the distant prospects shift very slowly and you take them in from imperceptibly changing angles.”

Anita delights in the work she finds herself to do at Milton Place, bringing the rooms back to life, polishing silver, caring for Mr Barlow’s beautiful home with cheerfulness and energy. Mr Barlow is in no hurry for Anita to leave, and Anita is happy, the house and Mr Barlow’s friendship doing much to heal the terrible scars that she is carrying from the war. Her story is a heart-breaking one. Then soon after Anita’s arrival Tony, arrives for his summer visit, school has ended and national service beckons, which the young man can’t help but dread. With Tony’s arrival, relationships at Milton Place change in some surprising ways. As the novel progresses, we learn more about the people who inhabit Milton Place, and those who merely sweep in from time to time and upset the equilibrium.

“One cannot do arithmetics with pain – neither add nor multiply nor divide it. It is always one and indivisible, and everyone carries the whole of it.”

Mr Barlow’s daughters are both quite horrible – though in rather different ways. Emily married well, is constantly busy with good works, charities and local committees, she is constantly scheming to sell Milton Place – and move her father somewhere more sensible. She drops by once a week, seeing it as a duty that she does so. She is unsettled and irritated by Anita’s presence – fearing she might have an agenda of her own. Cecilia meanwhile is a very unhappy woman, though no more likeable for that. Married to provincial doctor with a social conscience and a chip on his shoulder, she is a depressed and bullied woman. Her son Tony, goes to a private boarding school, paid for by her father, Tony’s father is so resentful of this fact, that it has destroyed their marriage and the relationship that Tony has with both his parents. He is aware his mother is bullied and unhappy but is incapable of much sympathy.

The survival or demise of the English country house is a recurring theme in several Persephone novels, and Milton Place fits perfectly into that group. Like de Waal’s novel The Exiles Return, it also concerns itself with the aftermath of war, those scars that people carry with them. Elisabeth de Waal writes lyrically and gloriously about the English garden at Milton Place, the flowers and the pleasure they give those who love them. It’s really quite ridiculous that Elisabeth de Waal was unable to find a publisher for this wonderful novel, so glad Persephone brought it back.