Anna Apparent – Nina Bawden (1972)

There is always great comfort in returning to the familiar voice of a favourite author. Nina Bawden is a writer I have come to love as an adult – she was the author of one of my favourite children’s books too; Carrie’s War. Despite being remembered by many as primarily a children’s writer, she did in fact write more books for adults. I snapped up this copy of Anna Apparent when I was book shopping in London recently with Karen and Jacqui. The opening returns us to that world of Carrie’s War – a station platform thronged with people leaving the city – children being evacuated, it’s a typically good Bawden opening, she has a way of grabbing her reader’s attention immediately.

“One autumn evening in 1940, when she was four years old, Annie-May Gates passed within a yard of her future husband, her future mother-in-law, and neither of them noticed her.”  

In this novel Bawden considers the question of nature versus nurture and the effects of childhood trauma. Who exactly is Anna? The carefully nurtured daughter of an adoptive mother, the younger second wife of Giles, casual lover to Daniel? While she is all of these things in time, she is also an individual. Anna’s view of herself is disrupted in the wake of a tragedy. This much we learn in a very brief prologue. We are all products of our upbringing and environments, and to understand Anna, Bawden first takes us back to her childhood, and introduces us to the people who surround her.

At the beginning of the war, Crystal Golightly is in her late thirties, saying goodbye to her eighteen year old son. Crystal is leaving London to live with her mother in the country, her son will soon be joining his unit. Crystal is a rather smug, self-satisfied woman, beautiful and self-regarding the war upsets the rhythm of her life, her husband Basil in London, her son overseas, being back in her difficult mother’s home is less than satisfying.

Little Annie-May, who Crystal and her son Giles passed unknowingly in the station, has been evacuated to the village where Crystal is living with her mother. She and her young, unmarried mother end up on a local farm, the old farmer takes to them, and shows them nothing but kindness. However, when Annie-May’s mother goes back to London for a visit, she is never heard of again, and it is presumed she has been killed in the blitz. The Owen family at the farm, decide to keep Annie-May despite this, but when old Owen dies, his son and daughter don’t care for Annie-May properly, are both neglectful and abusive. When Annie-May has been living at the farm for two or three years, miserable and almost invisible, Crystal meets her in the village shop, struggling to get her words out, having developed a crippling stammer. Crystal is drawn into the world of Annie-May – who isn’t the most appealing little girl at this point – and is horrified when she discovers how the child has been living. 

Crystal takes on the responsibility for Annie-May, and when the war is over, she adopts her. Her son doesn’t need her anymore, and her marriage ended during the war, Annie-May, now called Anna, becomes her whole focus. Anna is devoted to Crystal, and as she grows, she seems to be cast more and more in Crystal’s image. Giles – never really much of a brother figure in Anna’s life – returned from the war with Tottie, who he met when he was liberating Belsen, just ten days after Tottie had arrived there. Tottie has a story she tells about the camps, and in time has shaken off the realities of the horrors she encountered more than the people around her, who are frequently embarrassed by them, terrified of saying the wrong thing. Giles is haunted by what he himself might have been forced to become, had he been born in a different place.

“How could he be sure that in their position he would have behaved differently? Oh, he wasn’t a sadist, a pervert, but he wasn’t a natural martyr either. For every monster, there were hundreds of ordinary men who had simply carried out orders. Ordinary, frightened men with wives and families – what else could they do? Become victims themselves? What would he have done? Could he really sit here, in comfort, hand on heart, and swear he would not have behaved as they did?”

When Giles’ marriage to Tottie ends he marries Anna, fourteen years his junior and his mother’s adoptive daughter. They settle into comfortable middle class domesticity, similar to the type of marriage Giles’ mother once had.

Anna is more than just Giles’ wife, more than a mother to two boys at boarding school – Anna is also the child who Crystal discovered tied up in a barn. There comes a time, when Anna must start to acknowledge – at least to herself who she really is.

Bawden’s exploration of Anna and the flawed people around her is as good as ever, and while this is not her best novel, it is still a good, involving read, offering some sharply observed character studies.

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Delving into the archives for the #1965club

Well I have finished reading The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark my second book for the 1965 club, but as I am currently away, I don’t think I will get it reviewed before Sunday. So, I have taken a little look into the archives – and it does seem as if 1965 was a pretty good year all round.

A Dedicated Man by Elizabeth Taylor

Undoubtedly one of my favourite writers, this is one of four collections of stories published during her life time. As well as a gifted novelist, Taylor wrote extraordinarily good short stories too, and this collection is no exception.  In these stories Elizabeth Taylor considers the relationships between mothers and daughters, and husbands and wives, between neighbours and that terrifying creature the Englishman/woman abroad. She reveals small snobberies and the selfishness of the truly callous. Several years after reading them, I find some of these stories remain quite vividly in my mind. Taylor explores her characters with such precision that we understand them immediately – whether her characters are likeable or not – her cool observing eye is quite merciless.

The Carlyles at Home by Thea Holme

I only read this Persephone book last year – a title I had continually overlooked in favour of others. Yet it proved to a rather lovely little book, which has some delightful illustrations. Written in the 1960s, The Carlyles at Home portrays the home life of writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane, during the thirty odd years they lived at Cheyne Row in Chelsea. Thea Holme; the author, wrote it while she and her husband were living in the house as custodians. She confines herself to everyday matters in the Carlyles lives, staying well away from the nature of the Carlyles marriage for example, Thomas Carlyle’s work is mentioned almost in passing. Small domestic concerns, problems with servants, home improvements and noise from neighbours. Each of the eleven chapters focus on a different aspect of the Carlyles lives at Cheyne Row.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was someone I was fascinated by in my late teens. I bought this pretty little hardback edition so I could reread these poems a few years ago.

Ariel; published posthumously two years after Plath’s suicide – was her second collection of poetry – and it is deeply personal, often intimate, and frequently challenging. Her themes are those of marriage and motherhood, sexuality, depression, death and suicide. Plath’s poetry is lyrical and though often dark there is a strange luminosity to many of her images.

Friends and Heroes by Olivia Manning

Just the other day I forced my mother to buy the omnibus edition of The Balkan trilogy while browsing bookshelves in a charity shop – telling her it was so good I have read it twice. This is the third book in the Balkan trilogy – and this novel finds us in Greece – after the Pringles were forced with other ex-pats of their acquaintance to flee Bucharest. In Friends and Heroes, the peace that Guy and Harriet think they have found in Athens is destined to be short lived, and soon the war which is raging across Europe creeps ever close to their door. Again, Manning is superb at recreating the testing times in which she herself lived while abroad during the war. She writes so well.

Slaves of the Lamp by Pamela Frankau

Slaves of the Lamp is also part of a trilogy. It is the second book in Frankau’s Clothes of the King’s Son trilogy. The title; Slaves to the Lamp refers to those who take comfort in their belief in spiritualism, faith healing and other mysticisms. Faith healers and their followers form just one strand of this slightly unusual – though enjoyable – novel. In true Pamela Frankau style – the canvas here is large, set in both England and the South of France, Slaves to the Lamp follows the stories of several characters, which inevitably weave together. While this isn’t my favourite Frankau novel – it is enormously readable, and I have yet to read anything by her I haven’t enjoyed. The best thing about this novel is Thomas, such a lovable character.

A Little Love a Little Learning by Nina Bawden

I love Nina Bawden – regular readers will know that. A Little Love, A Little Learning was published more than ten years into Nina Bawden’s long publishing career – it is a great example of all she does well. She understands the dynamics and difficulties, and here she brings her knowledge of step-families to this revealing portrait, which shows just how fragile happiness can be. This is one of those novels where in a sense not a huge amount happens – and yet it remains very compelling, and perfectly told. I think Bawden is at her best when portraying middle-class families, especially children within those families.

Three more recommendations from 1965 – books I don’t have copies of it would seem.

Stoner by John Edwards Williams

Well everyone seemed to be reading this at one time. A novel which enjoyed a huge renaissance a few years ago. In my mind I categorise Williams with writers like William Maxwell – and of the two I prefer Maxwell. Stoner is a beautifully written, poignant novel, a novel about love and the disappointments dished out by life. Stoner – is the story of an unremarkable man – and yet he is a kind of hero. This is a story of love – but it is not a love story, but about the love William Stoner has for the women in his life, for literature and the university, and the great love he had for his job. Stoner’s life is just like that of most of us – we have our loves, disappointments sadnesses those daily routines that go unremarked for years and years. William Stoner enjoys some small quiet victories in his life, but after he is gone there remains little to prove that he ever lived.

A Backward Place by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

I borrowed this book from Liz I think, and really loved it. I am reminded I haven’t read Prawer Jhabvala for ages – and there is plenty of her work I have never read. A Backward Place is a kind of comedy of manners centred on a group of westerners living alternative life-styles in Delhi. Judy an Englishwoman is married to Bal – living in a small house and courtyard with his family. Clarissa is a dishevelled artist, claiming to appreciate a simpler life, while Etta is an ageing Hungarian beauty determined to keep hold of her Parisian chic and mysterious allure. Dr and Mrs Hochstadt are a German couple on an extended though temporary visit to experience India.

The Red and the Green by Iris Murdoch

It’s eleven years since I read The Red and The Green so my memory of it is a bit shaky, so not linking to my review as it only amounts to a few sentences – though I do know I loved it. The setting is Dublin in 1916 as rebellion looms. An Anglo-Irish family provide all the main characters, the relationships between all these people are complex and frequently unorthodox.

Have you read any of these? What have you been reading for the #1965club?

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Dear Austen – Nina Bawden (2005)

“…I cannot feel what I long to feel: the contentment of you being within reach.”

In May 2002 a passenger train crashed into the station at Potter’s Bar in Hertfordshire. Seven people were killed, and many, many more injured. One of those killed was Austen Kark, the husband of novelist Nina Bawden. The couple; in their seventies, had been on their way to Cambridge for an eightieth birthday party. Having treated themselves to the small indulgence of a first-class ticket, the train left London at 12.45, they were surrounded by newspapers, smiling at one another across the carriage, as the train came off the tracks at Potter’s Bar, Nina never saw Austen again. They had been married for forty-eight years.

“…someone spoke to me from a great distance, the far end of a dark, hollow tunnel. You have been in a train crash. Austen is dead. It was a bad dream. I thought, wake up, you fool, that’ll stop it.”

Dear Austen is the letter Nina wrote to her beloved husband, telling him of everything that happened at the time of the crash – and later. She talks about her painful, long recovery, although she doesn’t dwell for long on her physical problems, one of those stalwart women who don’t feel it necessary to bore others with her stories of ill health. After leaving hospital though, she finds things are changed – a bit nervous in the house, her daughter moves in for a while, and later a Canadian lodger – Nina likes to hear the sounds of another person in the house.

Nina Bawden reflects on her life with Austen, their happy retirement in their apartment in Greece. More than anything she misses him, has so much she wants to tell him, expects him at any moment to walk into the room. She finds herself wondering what he would think about things that had happened in the world since he had died.

“Would you have been part of the of the enormous crowd that marched against the war in Iraq as our middle daughter and your granddaughters were? As I would have had my ankle allowed me to walk that sort of distance. What would you have said, what would you have done? Would you have walked with them?”

She talks to him particularly of the fight the families of the dead and injured had to get Railtrack to accept liability for the crash. She talks about the chilling attitude of the corporate machine, the company chairmen and executives – Snakeheads she calls them – who stand up so calmly and make statements that mean so little. (*disclaimer* I may, from now on adopt the term Snakeheads for all executive/corporate types).

As always with these kinds of disasters there were obvious errors, chances missed to avert the disaster to come. Families, going through the worst moments of their lives are left wondering who is to blame, made to feel guilty if the word compensation is even mentioned – and some told that because a loved one had been elderly and no longer contributing to the economy, their lose is worth less in purely monetary terms. It takes too long for Railtrack to accept liability, and Nina ends her letter in 2005, she couldn’t have known what would come next or how long the legalities would drag on. I found a Telegraph article which sets out the events chronologically, and the list ends in 2011 when Network Rail are fined £3 million. I find that time scale an act of cruelty.

Nina talks movingly of the other families, the people who were killed, and the families they left behind – who she gets to know through various meetings and memorials. There is the mother of the Ph.D. student who was killed, the widow left with four children the families of the Taiwanese girls whose ashes had been returned to their country in an unmarked box.

Nina Bawden reveals the shocking unaccountability of the large corporation. She writes in a deceptively simple style, but quite touchingly beautiful, and her meaning is always clear. She doesn’t descend to shrieking outrage – she is subtler than that – and this book is better and more poignant for it.

“It seems like a dream now, our life together. I try to remember specific occasions: meeting you on Hungerford Bridge in the early days when we were still married to other people, seeing you waving to me from a distance, then breaking into a run.”

Nina Bawden’s sadness is palpable, her sense of wrong done – not just to her, but to all the families is strong. But through it all we see a woman living with her grief.

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Who Calls the Tune – Nina Bawden (1953)

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a quite a fan of Nina Bawden, known to many for her children’s books like Carrie’s War. She was wonderfully prolific, and actually wrote more novels for adults than she did for children. I tend to think her later novels to among her best – her stories well controlled with superb characterisation. Who Calls the Tune was her first novel – one of those Bello ebooks I bought a couple of years ago, that have remained unread on my kindle ever since. If I’m honest I hadn’t expected much of it – I have read a couple of Nina Bawden’s early novels before – and they were fine, but really nothing special. Perhaps we can think of those early Bawden novels in the same way as those Graham Greene novels that Greene dubbed ‘entertainments’. Anyway, Who Calls the Tune is definitely entertaining, a quick compelling read, I thought it was much better than I had expected, and in it we see Bawden’s burgeoning skill at characterisation – one of the things I have always liked about her writing.

As the novel opens our narrator Paul is being picked up from the station by Brigid. Brigid and her young son Sebastian are already house guests of Venetia, and Paul has arrived to join them. Cleverly, Bawden doesn’t reveal exactly what the connection between these three are, so we don’t know if this is important, though we know from the beginning their association is a long one going back to childhood.

“I saw Brigid when I was half-way up the platform; she had been in front of me all the time and I had not recognised her. She was just a stranger in a shabby blue coat that wrinkled at the waist, hatless, and with too sturdy legs in the wrong sort of shoes. The station was almost dark, the lamps were misty through the raw, coughing air, and somewhere a wireless was blaring out the weather report, the megaphone muffling and distorting the prim, righteous voice.”

Venetia is a mesmerising woman, a beauty who seems to captivate everyone around her. She is clearly a key figure in the lives of Paul and Brigid, the kind of woman though, around which everything revolves.

At the beginning of the war – when Venetia was fourteen she lost a leg in an air raid, and now wears a prosthesis. Venetia is married to Henry – but the marriage has not been a success, and the couple sleep in separate rooms, and Venetia has been enjoying the attentions of an Austrian man staying nearby. Tom Adlesburg and his daughter Rella are staying in a cottage close to Venetia and Henry’s home. Paul recognises Adlesburg, there is, it seems, some secret about what he did during the war. Is Rella, really his daughter? Brigid has left her husband Tony, and it seems that Paul’s marriage is also over – it is some time since he last saw Venetia, and he last saw Brigid’s nine-year-old son when he was a baby.

Young Sebastian seems oddly fearful, he claims someone is trying to poison him, a claim the adults all seem to dismiss as fanciful, make-believe – the result of an active imagination. Though when the dog, Childe Roland is killed eating food meant for Sebastian, the child is terrified.

Bawden creates a wonderfully taut atmosphere – we know instinctively that something in the house is not right – though we don’t know who we should be concerned about.

“I think I must have gone to sleep, because I came to, suddenly, feeling very cramped and cold and with the feeling that something was going to happen. I lay quite still on my bed, and listened. Then I heard something. It was a squeaky, sliding sound. A sound that might be made by someone sliding up a stiff sash window. Then there was a thud. I got off the bed silently, and as slowly as I could so that the springs wouldn’t creak. I padded across the room and opened the door. The corridor was black and still. I listened by the door of the first room I came to, but there was no sound. I went on, and up a flight of stairs. There was a line of light along the bottom of the door of Venetia’s room. I opened the door and went in.”

Early the next morning Venetia is found to be missing from the house. The countryside is deep in snow, the air icy and bitter. A search is made, and Venetia’s abandoned car is found, and soon after Venetia herself is discovered, dead is suspicious circumstances. Who though, would want to harm her?

Who Calls the Tune is an atmospheric, compelling read, and while it certainly it isn’t among Nina Bawden’s best it is an enjoyable, entertaining read for fans of Bawden’s work. I would not recommend starting with Nina Bawden’s early novels if you haven’t read her before – better to look to those novels published from the mid-1960s on – as she really did write some excellent books. Still, as a debut this novel is good and as a fan it is nice to see where she started.

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Nina Bawden giveaway

Christmas must have come early. I have decided to share some lovely Nina Bawden books with you all.

Last week Little Brown UK sent me these lovely editions of two Nina Bawden children’s books. Carrie’s War and The Peppermint Pig. I decided I would give them away, there may be a child in your life who will enjoy curling up with these lovely books, transported by Bawden’s consummate story telling. Or perhaps you would like to revisit your childhood favourites for yourself. So, the first giveaway is for BOTH these titles.

Giveaway 1.

When I was a child I adored Carrie’s War – I devoured the book, and watched the TV adaptation, I even watched the remake as an adult. It is a story I carried with me for many years and I think I had a slightly romanticised view of evacuation because of it. It tells the story of three children evacuated to Wales during World War two – such a wonderful cast of characters, it was definitely the book I loved most as a child – and still love now. I can’t remember if I read The Peppermint Pig, but I don’t think I did. The Peppermint Pig appears to be the story of a family living through a difficult period who are healed by the laughter a clever, mischievous little pig brings to their lives.

Giveaway 2

Of course, many, many years later, I discovered Nina Bawden’s adult novels, she was very prolific, and I have enjoyed quite a number of them now. So, I have purchased a new copy of The Birds on the Trees, one of my favourite Bawden novels for adults as giveaway number two (It has yet to arrive – so the image of the cover is only what was shown on a certain well-known shopping site – the images are not always correct, I find).

The Birds in the Trees is beautifully observed with great insight and honesty, it is a novel about parents and children and family life with all its complexities. In 2010 The Birds on the Trees was nominated for The Lost Booker – voted for by readers, Bawden lost out to Troubles by J G Farrell (another excellent novel). The Lost Booker was for books published in 1970 – as changing Booker rules that year meant many novels lost out on being considered.

Toby Flowers is the boy/young man at the centre of this novel – which is told in the varying voices of his family – his mother and father, younger sister and grandmother. These first-person narratives dropped into what is largely a third person narrative, works so well – giving the novel an added intimacy.

To enter simply tell me what your favourite children’s book was (I’m just being nosy really) and let me know which giveaway you would like to win, the two books for children or The Birds on the Trees. The Giveaway is open worldwide – and winners will be drawn next Monday, using a random name generator.

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Familiar Passions – Nina Bawden (1979)

During September the Virago group over on Librarything were reading the novels of Nina Bawden, Familiar Passions was the second I read, and my final read of the month.

In this novel Nina Bawden considers how those familiar passions of the title – which are found within all families – are apt to be repeated in successive generations.

Bridie Starr is a mere thirty-two – and perhaps the one thing that dates this really very good novel is that Bridie is viewed by almost everyone around her as being more matronly than any thirty-two-year-old is seen these days. At nineteen Bridie married James, swapping the warmth and security of her parents’ home – where she was their most cherished adopted child (they lost a child in infancy) – for marriage, motherhood and a new name.

“Bridie, love,’ he said. ‘Bridie Starr. A pretty name. At least I gave you that, if nothing else. If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be Mary Mudd.”

Before her marriage she was Mary, but her insufferable, new husband’s mother bestowed the name Bridie upon her and it stuck. Step-mother to James’s two children, of whom she was very fond, Bridie later had her own daughter Pansy – now eleven and at boarding school.

After an expensive dinner on their thirteenth wedding anniversary – James drives Bridie home in silence – where he calmly announces that he wishes their marriage to end. James explains that he is being transferred to Paris, that he doesn’t want Bridie to accompany him, but in fact remain behind as a sort of housekeeper to take care of the house and perhaps cater for any future guests. Nice! We are left in no doubt about what kind of a man Bridie has been married to, an unpleasantly selfish man – who congratulates his wife on having produced a pretty daughter – what with her being adopted he could never be sure what genes she might be passing on. Bridie leaves the family home in the very early morning, going straight to her parents’ home in London – with not too much regret for the marriage that is behind her. Hilary and Martin Mudd envelope her immediately in their unconditional parental love and support – outraged at the treatment of their daughter by her thoughtless husband.

“Standing at the foot of her parents’ double bed, raincoat dripping on the fluffy carpet, Bridie smiled. How James would laugh if he could these tired old phrases – what he had called her mother’s ‘original remarks.’ How dare he laugh, she thought, remembering with shame how she had once laughed with him. How sycophantic she had been, how treacherous, how ignorant! Her mother simply spoke as she thought and felt, innocently using, in pain or happiness, the words others had used before. And why not? The crucial human situations never changed.”

Bridie is afraid though that she will have no future. Feeling rather redundant back in her parents’ house, she is worried for the relationship she has with her step-daughter who is about to become a mother – and wondering how her daughter Pansy will react to the news. Having spent some time back in the parental home, Bridie takes over the flat of an elderly lady – Miss Lacy, a patient of her Psychiatrist father. Visiting her sister in America Miss Lacy requires a tenant to care for her cat Balthazar. Bridie is grateful for what she sees as a temporary refuge.

Bridie realises that she wants to know something of her own mysterious past, following a conversation with a lonely old woman at the side of a canal.

Bridie decides to ask her dad about the circumstances of her adoption – and surprisingly he points her toward her adoptive mum, saying – that she had known her mother best after all. Gradually the story of Bridie’s birth mother and the circumstances surrounding Bridie’s birth during the Second World War is revealed, unearthing family secrets.

Bridie sets off on a journey to retrace the steps of her birth mother and adopted mother – who both spent time sheltering in the countryside during the Second World War. It was a time of isolation – the men off fighting there was little to do in the countryside marooned in a tiny cottage with an ailing aunt or on a farm with two young children to keep occupied. Bridie learns something about her birth mother’s unhappy marriage, and the mistake she made during the war which resulted in Bridie (then Mary). Bridie finds the farm where her birth mother was staying during the war, and here she meets Philip, it’s pretty much lust at first sight, and she is soon back in her flat practically waiting by the telephone – in the way one did in those far off days before mobile phones.

As Bridie contemplates the possibility of meeting the woman who gave birth to her, her parents are anticipating the arrival of Martin’s two warring sisters – who have not spoken in many years.

As I have said before Bawden writes families perfectly – and she does so here too. It is very much a novel of the seventies – women marry young, are dependent upon men and either seek to replace them when everything goes wrong, or, as in the case with Bridie’s birth mother, stick with destructive relationships.

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Family Money – Nina Bawden (1991)

Family Money; Nina Bawden’s 1991 novel is the kind of novel that I think Nina Bawden does particularly well. A novel of family, concerning money, old age and the battle for independence, it’s one which feels very topical still.

London, and a huge spike in property prices means that houses bought many years earlier are now worth a small fortune. As the novel opens, a group of friends gathered together for dinner, discuss the possibilities that the properties owned now by their respective mothers could afford them.

Bawden’s characters do tend to come from the upper middle classes – though like Bawden herself, many of them also have a social conscience or left-wing sensibilities. One of the peripheral characters in Family Money is a labour peer – while another is a working class, daily housekeeper who has always dreamt of owning her own home, coveting the security it would give her, for the first time in her life.

Fanny Pye, Harry and Isobel’s mother – owns a large house backing on to the canal. Bought years earlier when Fanny and her husband returned from ambassadorial duties abroad – it is now a potential goldmine. Now, her husband is dead, and Fanny is living alone quite ably. Still active she thinks nothing of dining alone at her favourite restaurant, where she is well known, and walking home through the dark precinct lost in her own thoughts and memories.

“Lonely suddenly, she turned from the window and marched sturdily through the rest of the precinct towards the road at the end; not a main road, but a wide one that was always lined with parked cars and busy at night, especially around the time the pubs closed. They must be closing now, Fanny thought, hearing car doors slam, voices shouting. She had not thought it was quite so late.”

When Fanny intervenes in a street brawl late one night she is hospitalised and briefly struggles to remember the most basic things. Fanny is horrified when she forgets her daughter-in-law – and feeling suddenly horribly vulnerable she does her best to cover up her memory lapses in front of her family.

“She didn’t feel fine. She felt papery. The word came into her head, unsought for, unbidden. While Ivy settled her in the comfortable Victorian chair in the ground floor room – Daniel’s study, that was her study now – she puzzled over its origin. If her mind was going to play tricks on her, she must learn how to deal with them. If she could trace the source of each random thought, hold tight to the thread that wound through the labyrinth, then she would be in control again, not at the mercy of her own mind bent on mischief. ‘Papery,’ she said aloud, but speaking softly so that Ivy, on her way down to the basement kitchen, would not hear her. The word was flimsy on her dry tongue. Crumpled. Tissue paper. Smooth tissue paper between the folds of silk dresses. Flat. One-dimensional.”

Fanny is allowed home, most of her memory has returned but frighteningly she still can’t remember exactly what happened that evening, when a man died. Her family think she should sell up and move somewhere smaller – but Fanny doesn’t think quite the same as they do about property and inheritance. Some of her ideas shock Harry and Isabel, who worry about showing their concern, should anyone think them mercenary.

Following her return from hospital, Fanny’s niece Rebecca moves in to the top floor. Fanny slowly attempts to return to normal, the shadow of that evening hanging over her. As Fanny stands at her bedroom window she sees a young man standing on one of the houseboats on the canal who always seems to be staring straight at her house. Fanny finds herself becoming oddly drawn to the young man from the houseboats, after running into him at the library, what is it about him that has made her begin to feel so uneasy one minute, while finding him friendly and neighbourly the next.

Nina Bawden combines the tense uncertainty of a thriller with a wonderfully astute novel of family. Fanny might well be my favourite Nina Bawden character to date. As Fanny struggles with feelings of over whelming fear, she has to make decisions about her future – as her family continue to let her know exactly what they think she should do. In the midst of all this Fanny runs into an old friend, who she and her sister used to call Dumbo.

There is also a lovely (slightly ambiguous) twist, right at the end which I thought was rather brilliant. All in all, Family Money is a really excellent Bawden novel.

The Librarything Virago group have chosen to read novels by Nina Bawden during September – I ws pleased by the selection as I already like her writing very much. I was hoping to read another before the end of the month but as September is turning out to be a very slow reading month indeed – I have no idea if I will get another squeezed in.

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Afternoon of a Good Woman – Nina Bawden (1976)

Nina Bawden’s 1976 novel Afternoon of a Good Woman, is a slight, serious novel about a woman’s self-examination and guilt.

As the novel opens we learn that Penelope has decided to leave her husband.

“Today, Tuesday, the day that Penelope has chosen to leave her husband, is the first really warm day of spring. Her decision, last-minute but well researched, happens, through some chance (or perhaps characteristic) ineptitude, to coincide with her sitting, at ten o’clock in the morning, in judgement on her peers.”

Penelope is a magistrate, proud to be the good woman of the title – she is a good mother and a good wife of twenty years. Her husband; Eddie, writes successful tv dramas, and once wrote a novel which has been an enormous success, but now he has become lazy in his routine, and Penelope feels she must nag him into work. Eddie’s fist wife is in a psychiatric hospital – where she has been for years, and where Eddie still visits. His guilt, that he drove her there with his novel which she saw as a terrible betrayal – and about which Eddie was forced to think differently when he looked at it through her eyes.

Today Penelope will become more aware than usual of the fragile line between good and bad. The cases which will come before her on the day she leaves a note on Eddie’s typewriter keys – will be sad, pathetic and unglamorous – but will give her plenty to think about. The case of a middle-aged man charged with indecent exposure – forces Penelope to wonder how her own sex life might sound the details were blandly and emotionlessly read out. Then there is the more convoluted case of theft brought against Abel Binders, which the judge instructs the jury to dismiss – but the jury have other ideas and want to hear the defence after all – much to the irritation of the bench.

“Apart from one woman who has fallen asleep, plump chin on fur collar, the jury listen attentively to the Judge’s instruction like good children in class. When he has finished some of them frown as if the intrusion of what seems a subjective moral assessment into this court of law is somehow improper. How are they to know what has gone on in Abel Binder’s mind? Or perhaps they are simply confused. One elderly man is cupping a blue knuckly hand at the back of his ear, although he has not appeared deaf before. It is confusing, of course that innocence should emerge in the course of prosecution evidence. Incongruous anyway.”

Throughout the day, as the business of the court rumbles on – Penelope reflects on her past, the things for which she still feels guilt and sadness. She remembers her step-mother Eve – who she had loved so jealously when her father brought her home, that she had resented Eve’s own children. The young Penelope had not really understood Eve’s fragility and vulnerabilities – had enjoyed caring for her when her father was working away, caring for Eve the best she can before and after school. Not realising she should be getting help for Eve, Penelope unwittingly leaves her in harm’s way. When Eve ends up hospitalised Penelope goes to live with Auntie and Uncle – a house in which she feels awkward and constrained, and where Eve’s illness is never mentioned. She remembers the lies she told in that house.

“When she first became ill, I enjoyed looking after her. If I came home from school to find her still in her nightdress, sitting limply before the empty grate, or weeping into a stack of dirty dishes in the kitchen, I lit the fire, washed the dishes, made supper for us both. If there was nothing to eat in the house, I took Eve’s purse and ran to the corner shop, later on; when it seemed that Eve was feeling too tired to go out at all, I took charge of the ration-books and began to shop regularly, on the way to and from school. I felt strong and competent, looking after my poor little stepmother, and though I hoped she would be better soon, for her own sake, I was glad to have been given this chance to show what I could do for her.”

Penelope examines her difficult sometimes heady relationships with her step-siblings, which included meddling in the abusive marriage her step-sister entered into – and which led indirectly to a sudden tragedy. Looking back at her adolescence and young womanhood, she explores her first all-consuming love – which has never gone away, comparing it with how she has felt about Eddie.

As the court day ends. Penelope will leave, carry out her plans, she telephones Desdemona, Eddie’s friend and editor, a sign perhaps of Penelope’s guilt, though she is certain she is doing the right thing for both of them.

As ever, Nina Bawden brings her unique understanding of complicated families and the relationships inside them to this novel. It is an intelligent novel about people who feel very real. Penelope is a flawed heroine; many readers won’t like her – though I find such characters so much more interesting.

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A Little Love, A Little Learning – Nina Bawden (1965)

Nina Bawden writes families particularly well. She understands the dynamics and difficulties, and here she brings her knowledge of step-families to this revealing portrait, which shows just how fragile happiness can be. A Little Love, A Little Learning was published more than ten years into Nina Bawden’s long publishing career – it is a great example of all she does well.

People have asked me before which Nina Bawden novel they should start with, well this wouldn’t be a bad place to start – although I could also recommend Devil by the Sea, The Birds on the Trees and Circles of Deceit and Ruffian on the Stairs. Certainly these novels of family are all faithful recreations of domestic life and its complexities.

It is the year of the coronation, and Joanna, 18, our narrator Kate 12 and seven-year-old Poll are living happily in Monks Ford – a suburban commuter town on the banks of the Thames – with their mother Ellen and their adored step-father Boyd. The children play in their garden, building a camp under the trees, walk to and from school, part of a friendly suburban community who all think the world of Boyd – the local doctor. Boyd has surrounded his step-daughters with wise, unquestioning love, he and Ellen always answer their questions with honesty – the children have grown up with a strange encyclopaedic medical knowledge, quite matter of fact about all kinds of things their peers have no idea about. Ellen and Boyd are very modern parents allowing the girls to develop understanding about things other 1950s parents are still shielding their daughters from. While Boyd is attentive and loving, Ellen is sterner, finding it much harder to show her feelings.

Kate, is fascinated by Boyd’s patients, so proud of the only father she has ever known, she is resentful of Poll’s teacher and their neighbour Miss Carter whose devotion to Boyd verges on the embarrassing. Joanna has reached the brink of adulthood, about to finish school forever, concerned about getting old she has her sights set on local swain Will. Often full of complaint about her younger sisters, she is allowed to have the bedroom she shared with Kate to herself, Kate is therefore forced to share with Poll. Poll loves to play make believe games, and sometimes Kate plays with her, although the games seem a little old for her now. Kate is very impressionable, imaginative with a wonderful sense of the dramatic, she is also prone to telling the odd lie – and digs herself into all sorts of uncomfortable holes. Like so many other great child narrators, Kate is growing up and struggling to understand everything around her – she simply doesn’t grasp the possible consequences of her lies and interference.

“The year Aunt Hat came to us, my main ambition – apart from rescuing someone from drowning or winning the Victoria Cross – was to go down to Jock’s Icecream Parlour in the main street of Monks Ford and eat as many Knickerbocker Glories as I could pay for.”

Everything starts to change when Aunt Hat comes to stay. Aunt Hat isn’t a relative, she was a good friend of Ellen in the days before Boyd came into her life. It was a different time that the younger girls can only remember dimly if at all, and Aunt Hat was Ellen’s only friend. Aunt Hat is very different to Ellen, working class, gossipy and a little indiscreet she hints at problems in the past, and helps to evoke the memory of the girls’ absent father – who they have been oddly incurious about thus far.

“She sat with her skirts lifted to the flames and looking quite ordinary. I felt a slight disappointment – only slight, because Lady Macbeth would really have been rather difficult to live up to – and then shyness. She was a complete stranger to me. She said, ‘I don’t suppose you remember your funny old Aunt Hat, do you? Well, here she is, turned up like the proverbial bad penny.
For a moment I had the queer feeling that there was someone else in the room. It was a feeling that was distantly familiar, a faint echo in my mind. Then I remembered slices of fresh bread, buttered, and stuck with brightly coloured hundreds and thousands. I could almost taste the grittiness of the sweets on my tongue: it went with grazed knees, consolation, and a strange habit of talking about oneself in the third person.”

Though Kate is almost disappointed in her first sight of Aunt Hat – having imagined her to be some kind of Lady Macbeth character she is quickly won over. Aunt Hat’s background seems wonderfully colourful to the three sisters, her husband imprisoned for beating her and her son. Temporarily homeless, Hat brings her noisy, chaotic world to the polite, ordered world of suburban Monks Ford. Aunt Hat is a fabulous character, though as it turns out it may not be Hat’s indiscretions that turn everything upside down, but the girls themselves.

Boyd’s medical practises are brought into question through local gossip, when he inherits some money from a neighbour and old friend. Miss Fantom has been living in reclusive disharmony with her brother who has never got over having to leave India. The two live in separate parts of the house, and Boyd and the children some of their only visitors. The children have often played in the Fantoms’ garden. Many years earlier, when Miss Fantom was about thirty, she befriended the lonely teenage Boyd – an innocent friendship which was naturally gossiped about. When Miss Fantom dies, Kate’s silly lies look like they could cause trouble for her step-father who has been left a sizeable amount of money by his patient.

This is one of those novel where in a sense not a huge amount happens – and yet it remains very compelling, and perfectly told. I think Bawden is at her best when portraying middle-class families, especially children within those families. Bawden manages to make this both poignant and funny – she strikes the balance just perfectly.

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The Birds on the Trees – Nina Bawden (1970)

Following on from my reading of In my Own Time by Nina Bawden – I was anxious to read the novel she wrote based upon her experiences as mother to a son later diagnosed with schizophrenia. In life, of course, Nina Bawden’s son Niki killed himself in 1981, so for me there was added poignancy to a novel only published in 1970 – a time when perhaps she believed the worst of his problems were behind him. Some of the stories about this fictional son I recognised from In My Own Time as being stories of Niki.

The Birds in the Trees is beautifully observed with great insight and honesty, it is a novel about parents and children and family life with all its complexities. In 2010 The Birds on the Trees was nominated for The Lost Booker – voted for by readers, Bawden lost out to Troubles by J G Farrell (another excellent novel). The Lost Booker was for books published in 1970 – as changing Booker rules that year meant many novels lost out on being considered.

Toby Flowers is the boy/young man at the centre of this novel – which is told in the varying voices of his family – his mother and father, younger sister and grandmother. These first-person narratives dropped into what is largely a third person narrative, works so well – giving the novel an added intimacy.

“Mummy and Daddy are dead,’ the child said, softly but distinctly, so that Mr Tilney could not pretend he hadn’t heard. Not that he wished to: after the first chill, the sad little statement opened doors in his mind that had been closed for a long time.”

The novel opens with a prologue – in which we meet Toby as a young boy. Toby arrives at a neighbour’s house – late on Christmas Eve saying no one is at home. The neighbours are naturally concerned, have had experience of a hungry Toby turning up in their kitchen before – of course none of it is true. Yet Toby is a lovable little chap – he doesn’t seem to know he’s lying and causing acute embarrassment for his young parents.

Toby’s mother is Maggie, a writer, his father Charlie a journalist. Since early childhood Toby; the eldest of three siblings, has been self-absorbed and awkward, but as he gets older his behaviour gives his family even more cause for concern, when there is a suggestion of drug use. Toby’s ideas for his future differ from those of his mother, when he is expelled from school in his A level year – it highlights the fact that Toby is unlikely to fulfil the expectations his parents once had for him. Toby refuses to discuss his obvious unhappiness and Maggie and Charlie struggle to understand and support the son who they love so much. As Charlie says:

“”All generations face, on the surface, much the same problems; each knows its situation to be unique. Ours, for example. Children before the war, emerged through it into parenthood, Freud in one hand, Spock in the other, into a world where truth is relative, uncertainty a virtue, nothing known… Except guilt, possibly. That is our hall-mark. Out parents did their duty, knew what was right; our sins were original, no fault of theirs.”

Maggie’s mother gives her advice from a distance – which infuriatingly is of the ‘he should cut his hair and knuckle under’ variety. Aunt Phoebe – Charlie’s wealthy, widowed sister, is unhelpful too when she visits – incurring the wrath of twelve-year-old Lucy, who adores Toby and is quick to defend him. Toby has taken to wearing a burnouse pulled up over his head – in which he seems to shield himself from the world. Later, Lucy becomes convinced – following a throw away remark from her younger brother Greg, that the two of them must be adopted – Toby so much the focus in their young minds for all the love affection, worry and attention in the Flowers household. Lucy is a fabulous character, she’s observant, yet only partly knowing, she is rather afraid to fully understand the things she only has an inkling about, the things she overhears. She is often isolated from everyone else, the middle child, the only girl, she is anxious and lonely. The fragility of the relationships within the family are exposed by everyone’s concerns over Toby, memories of former times triggered in Sara (Toby’s grandmother) and Maggie. We get a glimpse of Sara long married to a wildly eccentric, difficult man, Maggie thinks she should leave him, carve out a few years of happiness for herself, yet here too we see one family member not fully understanding the point of view of another. Bawden is brilliant at recreating these family dynamics.

Maggie and Charlie’s friends are drawn into the drama too, Including Elsa; the promiscuous widow of Charlie’s best friend and Angus a psychiatrist friend – married to an old school friend of Maggie’s who Maggie and Charlie decide to consult professionally about Toby. At a party hosted by Elsa, for her son’s twenty-first Maggie and Charlie, are accompanied by Toby (wearing his burnouse) – who having grown up with Hugh is a good friend. Elsa is all bright, unconcern about Toby, while Maggie tries hard to like her.

“’Darlings…’ Her cool cheek touched theirs, her lips sucked air. She took Toby in her arms and kissed him on the mouth. ‘Sweet Toby, you look marvellous in that get up. The girls will go down like ninepins. Go and take your pick – they’re all down in the boat house.’
Bright red and breathing hard, Toby retreated backwards, as if leaving a royal presence. ‘That is the most super boy,’ Elsa said. ‘I wish I were younger.’ She sighed, put her hand on Maggie’s arm. ‘It really is the most frightful thing about the school. I’m so terribly sorry.’”

In this novel Bawden is particularly adept at portraying the truth of a family in crisis, the self-recrimination which goes on, the guilt, arguments, grief the small (and not so small) betrayals which come out of dysfunctional family life. Maggie and Charlie can’t help but project their own wishes for Toby on to him, this is difficult for Toby to cope with, he is very clear about what he does and doesn’t want. Bawden doesn’t give us a nice and tidy resolution, there are none in such cases – although there is definite hope. Reading, The Birds on the Trees with the benefit of hindsight I am struck by how even that small amount of hope was denied her in the end.

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