The Woods in Winter – Stella Gibbons (1970)

Well my reviewing is really all over the place at the moment. There are books I read at the beginning of December that I still haven’t reviewed, and here I am writing about something I read a few days before Christmas. However, I was eager to tell you all about this as soon as I could, it was such a delight.

Stella Gibbons was a very prolific writer, and many of her novels have previously been reissued by Vintage with their recognisable red spines. However, they didn’t reissue them all, but the wonderful Dean Street Press have reissued five that were previously unavailable. The Woods in Winter was in fact the last novel that Stella Gibbons wrote for publication first published in 1970 – although another novel also written in the 1970s was discovered not long ago and reissued by Vintage. I had only read about six Stella Gibbons novels before this, and this one has reminded me how remiss I have been.

I know I have read a lot of Dean Street Press books – one day I will do a top ten or something – but The Woods in Winter is definitely one of my top DSP novels. A novel about solitude, ageing, the natural world, and unique relationships it is an absolute joy from beginning to end.

Our heroine is Ivy Gover – a middle-aged, curmudgeonly char woman – and who doesn’t love a char woman? When we first meet Ivy, she is living in one room in London. She supports herself with the pension money from her three dead husbands and money she gets from charring. The opening line of the first page reveals the story to be set around forty years before Stella Gibbons was writing – I couldn’t help but sense an old woman, going back to a time when she was most happy. Ivy Gover’s life on the other hand hasn’t been easy, losing three husbands, cleaning for other people, finding reading and writing a challenge – and always she wanted to live in the country where she had grown up. Miss Helen Green is one of the people Ivy chars for – a young woman uncomfortable with the fashionable set of bright young things she is friends with – unsatisfied in her current romance, yearning quietly for so much more.

Suddenly Ivy’s life changes forever, she receives a letter from a solicitor – that Helen has to help her make sense of – telling her she has inherited a small cottage from an uncle, in the Buckingham countryside, near to where she grew up. Ivy wastes little time. She rescues a dog, that she knows has been tied up and mistreated – and takes possession of her new home as soon as she can.

“…for the first time in her life, she was living as she had always unknowingly wanted to live: in freedom and solitude, with an animal for close companion. Her new life had acted upon her like a strong and delicious drug.”

Her canine companion is Neb – a ferocious beast with anyone but Ivy – the bond he and Ivy has is absolute. She saved him. When Ivy and Neb move into the cottage, it is the start of winter, the thatch in the roof has a large hole – and mice and cockroaches are also resident. Only, Ivy treats all creatures with respect and affection, and lets them be. As the cottage is only leasehold, the land around it is owned by Lord Gowerville – who is not responsible for repairing the roof – and poor Ivy can’t really afford it. Ivy though has other talents – she is a kind of wise woman, at one with the natural world around her.

“Calmly and irresistibly, the singing and light flowing out from the cottage with something else began to pull. They pulled with heat, and luring sounds sweet and harsh, and the other force that has no name. In woods, away across the dark field and up the hill; and in hallows in the hedge, and in crevices which had remained dry under the grass swept sideways by winter winds, this pulling was felt; and strange, microscopically small eyes opened, as soft or horny lids stirred, and faint shivers ran along spines covered in chitin or fur. The wind swept greatly over the great trees, rocking slowly in blackness.”

By curing Lord Gowerville’s dog – she earns his respect and protection and gets her roof repaired for free. Now she is comfortably settled with her dog, the mice, cockroaches, and a pet pigeon. Ivy is very content – yet despite her anti-social instincts she can’t help but to have some surprising effects on her neighbours. We meet Angela Mordaunt, a sad spinster living with her domineering mother, still mourning her dead fiancé, also the romantic local vicar and Lord Gowerville’s unpleasant agent. The Cartaret sisters, friends of Helen Green arrive on the scene – who for something to do it seems – open a tea shop in the nearby village. However, Ivy’s greatest challenge arrives in the shape of a twelve year old boy called Mike, a runaway who shows up at her door. The relationship that develops between Ivy and Mike is poignantly portrayed – and it’s hard for Ivy, knowing that where Mike is concerned she has to do the right thing, even if it breaks her heart.

There is a touching conclusion to this novel – set at the time when Gibbons was writing, which gives us a beautiful sense of time passing, and moving on set within the same landscape. It also highlights the divisions that existed in the 1970s (and still do) between those who push for progress and those who wish to protect the countryside from the ravages of that progress.