Our Spoons Came from Woolworths – Barbara Comyns (1950)

When my book group chose to read Our Spoons Came from Woolworths – at my suggestion, I was both delighted and nervous. To have an excuse to re-read the novel that first introduced me to Barbara Comyns was wonderful, but of course I worried that everyone would hate one of my favourite writers. I have read everything by Barbara Comyns and couldn’t love her more – her unique voice, that slightly altered way of looking at the world. I had various conversations on Twitter lately about reading Comyns and re-reading …Spoons, and someone said that reading Comyns is an absolute joy – until it isn’t, and that is true, because there are moments when she plunges her readers into very real darkness, but her tone, her wit and her eye for the absurd lift us back out too. 

Of course, Comyns writes in a very matter of fact style, the voice of her narrators naïve and rather childlike at times. However, there is so much going on beneath the surface. In her novels, Comyns tells a truth about poverty, about relationships and about chaotic childhoods that she herself knew from the inside. In Our Spoons Came from Woolworths she tells the story of a young couple, who marry despite having few resources, she doesn’t waste our time or intelligence with any romantic notions of being poor and in love, this is the grinding reality, told in the only way Comyns could tell it. Here though Comyns lets us know right away that here at least there will be a happy ending. 

“I told Helen my story and she went home and cried. In the evening her husband came to see me and brought some strawberries; he mended my bicycle, too, and was kind, but he needn’t have been, because it all happened eight years ago, and I’m not unhappy now. I hardly dare admit it, even touching wood, but I’m so happy that when I wake in the morning I can’t believe it’s true. I seldom think of the time when I was called Sophia Fairclough; I try and keep it pushed right at the back of my mind.” 

When Sophia hastily decides to marry artist Charles, she is just twenty-one and he is just a little older. Sophia is a typical Comyns heroine; she carries a newt around in her pocket and is terrifyingly ill-equipped for life. Both Sophia and Charles are optimistic about the future, determined to act against any and all advice of the older generation, who are fairly united in their disapproval of their plans. This is 1930s bohemian London, where there was little help for those who were struggling and quickly it seems as if everything is set to conspire against Sophia who really can’t cope with the realities of poverty and running a home, however humble it is. Charles locked into his own artistic world, barely ever brings home any money, so it’s Sophia’s scant earnings first in an artists’ studio and later as a live model that keep them going. Few people around them realise just how bad things are for the couple, but neither Sophia nor Charles welcome the advice of the older generation – no matter how well meant that advice might be.  

“She cleared her throat once or twice, and said something about poor people should eat a lot of herrings, as they were most nutritious, also she had heard poor people eat heaps of sheeps’ heads and she went on to ask if I ever cooked them. I said I would rather be dead than cook or eat a sheep’s head; I’d seen them in butchers’ shops with awful eyes and bits of wool sticking to their skulls. After that helpful hints for the poor were forgotten.” 

Sophia and Charles seem rather shocked when the inevitable happens, and Sophia finds herself pregnant. In many ways this is a disaster and Charles is furious and wants nothing to do with the pregnancy or the baby when it eventually arrives. Poor Sophia suffers horrible indignities at the hands of the midwives, an experience she was totally unprepared for, she seems to be punished for having had a baby – and her experiences are told by Comyns in a such a way that the reader both laughs and almost cries at the horrors.  

With a baby in tow things are harder than ever, and Charles is little if any help. Sophia goes away to stay with her brother for a while, but very much out stays her welcome as she hasn’t the fare to return to London and can’t bear to admit it. Working as an artists’ model she meets Peregrine a much older art critic and begins an affair. Charles seems less and less important to Sophia and is in fact we can see a big part of the problem. Another pregnancy follows, and this time Charles bullies Sophia into a backstreet abortion, though Comyns spares us any details as poor Sophia can’t bear to talk about it. When things get really bad, Sophia’s baby son, now a toddler is sent away to Charles’ relatives, and it is months before Sophia can get him back – Charles is totally unconcerned by his son’s disappearance, his cold indifference quite upsetting. Soon enough Sophia has cause to regret both her marriage to Charles and her affair with Peregrine.  

Sophia makes a decision and leaves it all behind, taking her son, she finds a new life in the countryside. Life isn’t perfect, she must work hard, but she is on the road to that new greater happiness that is hinted at in those first few sentences.  

Of course, I loved my re-read and I am anxious to know what my fellow book group members thought. At the time of writing, I am just a couple of hours away from finding out.