Author: The Good Reader

Grass by Carl Sandburg

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I don’t think Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) is as widely read in the UK as he has been in his native United States. Perhaps his declamatory, free verse style is more of an American taste. I had never even heard of him when I saw this poem displayed in a tube train carriage as part of the Poems on the Underground initiative some years ago. I think it was published in 1918.

What brought it back into my mind more recently? I think it must have been an article about the Ukraine war that I read not long ago, illustrated with a photograph of a trench that could have come from the first world war.

Nothing changes, I thought and that is the message of this poem. War seems to be a permanent part of the human condition. People forget. They don’t like to think about it, so nothing changes. The personification of the grass in this straightforward and direct poem represents the process of forgetting.    

Grass by Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
                                             I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
                                            What place is this?
                                            Where are we now?

                                            I am the grass.
                                            Let me work.

Oft in the Stilly Night by Thomas Moore

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Thomas Moore (1779–1852) was an Irish poet and composer and a friend of Byron and Shelley. Oft in the Stilly Nightwas part of his major poetic work, Irish Melodies, a group of 130 poems set to music, some of which was by Moore himself. Performances of these in London created interest in the Irish Nationalist cause.

I suppose we have to wonder whether this should be considered a poem or a song lyric. I came across it in The Oxford Book of English Verse. I have never heard the musical version. It was chosen for that volume by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, where he gave it the title The Light of Other Days. But then, he included quite a lot of verses that might be considered songs, many of them by that old favourite “Anonymous”.

Song lyric or poem, it is powerfully nostalgic, with the “slumber’s chain” metaphor nicely extended to describe “the friends, so linked together”. I find it rather similar to The Old Familiar Faces by Henry Lamb and it speaks to the same emotions.  What starts as “Fond memory” becomes “Sad memory”.     

Oft in the Stilly Night by Thomas Moore

Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood’s years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimm’d and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus, in the stilly night
Ere slumber’s chain hath bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me.

When I remember all
The friends, so link’d together,
I’ve seen around me fall,
Like leaves in wintry weather;
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me.

Messmates by Henry Newbolt

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Henry Newbolt’s naval poems of the late nineteenth century often tend to be rousing ballads that celebrate Britain’s naval history. They tell tales of great admirals and famous battles of the past. Messmates is a bit different though, closer to Kipling perhaps in its concentration on the ordinary seaman and rather sadder in tone.

A word about the maritime language used here. “Watch” is roughly equivalent to “shift”, the division of time on board ship. But it also means the team to which a sailor is allocated, so keeping a “lone watch” emphasises the isolation of the man who has died and been buried at sea. And on a sailing ship, the mess was the area in which a group of men lived, ate and slept, so a messmate was a member of a close-knit team.

The page layout and spacing is Newbolt’s own and I have taken it directly from Collected Poems 1897–1907.

Messmates by Henry Newbolt

He gave us all a good-bye cheerily
   At the first dawn of day;
We dropped him down the side full
      drearily
When the light died away.
It’s a dead dark watch that he’s
      a-keeping there,
And a long, long night that lags
      a-creeping there,
Where the Trades and the tides roll
      over him
   And the great ships go by.

He’s there alone with green seas
      rocking him
   For a thousand miles round;
He’s there alone with dumb things
      mocking him,
And we’re homeward bound.
It’s a long, lone watch that he’s
      a-keeping there,
And a dead cold night that lags
      a-creeping there
While the months and the years
      roll over him
   And the great ships go by.

I wonder if the tramps come near
      enough
   As they thrash to and fro,
And the battle-ships’ bells ring clear
      enough
   To be heard down below;
If through all the lone watch that
      he’s a-keeping there,
And the long, cold night that lags
      a-creeping there,
The voices of the sailor-men shall
      comfort him
   When the great ships go by.

The Old Year by John Clare

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This one speaks for itself, really. I was looking for a poem for the New Year. I felt that I couldn’t use Tennyson’s Ring Out, Wild Bells again, so I had a look and found The Old Year by John Clare (1793–1864).

John Clare is probably best known today for two things. The first of these is that he had some kind of mental breakdown that led to him spending the later part of his life in what was then known as an asylum. It was during this time that he wrote his well-known poem I Am.

The second is that in 1841 he absconded from the asylum in Essex and walked the eighty miles back to his home at Northborough in North Cambridgeshire. It took him four days.

In the poem below, I assume that the word “cot” in the second verse is short for “cottage”. The “time once torn away” line makes me wonder if Philip Larkin was inspired by this poem for the line “time torn off unused” in his poem Aubade.

The Old Year by John Clare

The Old Year’s gone away
     To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
     Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
     In either shade or sun:
The last year he’d a neighbour’s face,
     In this he’s known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
     Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they’re here
     And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
     In every cot and hall–
A guest to every heart’s desire,
     And now he’s nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
     Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
     Are things identified;
But time once torn away
     No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year’s Day
     Left the Old Year lost to all.

    

Old Man at a Cricket Match by Norman Nicholson

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I found Old Man at a Cricket Match by Norman Nicholson (1914–1987) online almost by chance. I had never heard of this fine poet, but a little research reveals that he lived almost all of his life in the town of Millom in Cumbria, where he was born.

He was not part of any poetic trend, movement or literary “school”, although he was influenced in his depiction of the northern landscape by W H Auden. He had no real connection with the London literary world, although he was published by Faber. I suspect that, like a few other poets, he might have been discovered and encouraged by T S Eliot.

He seems to me to be the poetic equivalent of the kind of painter who is dismissed with a sneer as “provincial”. But as Robert Frost put it: “In order to be universal, you must first be provincial”. I think Nicholson’s poetry deserves to be much more widely known.

I like the vivid imagery in this poem and the slightly unusual use of language, the word “mending” perhaps being part of the local dialect.

I’m not quite sure when the poem was written. I’ve seen it dated 1956, and I believe it was included in Nicholson’s 1972 collection, A Local Habitation, which takes its title from lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “. . . .and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.”    

Old Man at a Cricket Match by Norman Nicholson

‘It’s mending worse,’ he said,
             Bending west his head,
Strands of anxiety ravelled like old rope,
     Skitter of rain on the scorer’s shed
                 His only hope.

             Seven down for forty-five,
             Catches like stings from a hive,
And every man on the boundary appealing —
     An evening when it’s bad to be alive,
                 And the swifts squealing.

             Yet without boo or curse
             He waits leg-break or hearse,
Obedient in each to law and letter —
     Life and the weather mending worse,
                 Or worsening better.

Mrs Bathurst by Rudyard Kipling

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Rudyard Kipling’s story Mrs Bathurst was published in 1904 and reveals Kipling as a rather more modern writer than he is usually considered to be.

The plot makes use of the cinema and it may well be the first piece of fiction to do so. The fractured style of the story may be modelled on the cinema, rather in the way that one can see the early poetry of T S Eliot making use of cinematic imagery.  

The term “It” to describe a woman’s appeal to men appears here, a usage that Kipling is thought to have invented, to go alongside the many phrases he added to the language. What makes the story feel modern is the way it is told and it may be that part of what Kipling is telling us here is the impossibility of ever really knowing anyone else.

On the South African coast, just after the Boer war, the narrator is sitting and talking to his railwayman friend, Hooper. They are then joined by a royal marine, Pritchard, and a sailor, Petty Officer Pyecroft, who is a recurring Kipling character. At first the story seems to be going nowhere, as the four men chat about the idea of going absent without leave, as opposed to desertion.

But as the tale progresses, the first-person narrative gives way to dialogue. The narrator is merely a convenient device to set the scene for the anecdote that follows. There is no authorial voice or viewpoint. The tale is told in a fragmented way, mostly by Pyecroft, who does not quite understand the events he is recounting. As he says “all I know is second-hand so to speak” and there is no help given to the reader to interpret any of this.

He tells of his shipmate Vickery’s obsession with a Mrs Bathurst who kept a small hotel for sailors in Auckland, New Zealand. It’s never made clear exactly what the relationship between Vickery and Mrs Bathurst might have been in the past. The marine, Pritchard, is also familiar with her and the hotel and he describes to the others what she is like.

The finale with its striking visual image of two charred corpses is provided by Hooper, who has dropped hints about this earlier in the tale. One body can only be identified by false teeth and a tattoo, and the identity of the other remains a mystery. Different parts of the story have been told by Pyecroft, Hooper and Pritchard, who were more witnesses to events than participants, and the reader must piece it all together as best they can. Everything has been seen from the outside.

Not every question raised by the story is answered at the end. What exactly took place in the meeting between Vickery and the captain of his ship before he was sent ashore? And at the very end it appears that Hooper is going to remove the false teeth from his pocket but thinks better of it.    

The use of the film image of Mrs Bathurst herself is very interesting. It’s mentioned that someone in the audience jumps when they see the image of the train pulling into the station. Was Kipling familiar with the story about the audience reaction to the Lumiere Brothers’ first showing of their film or was this the true source of it?

There is also the question of just why Vickery is so obsessed with the film of Mrs Bathurst. He thinks it was taken in London, gets drunk after seeing it, then insists on going back to see it again four nights in a row, with Pyecroft in tow to confirm that it is indeed her on the screen. It has been suggested by Dr Oliver Tearle that Mrs Bathurst is dead. There are hints in the story that this may be so. That interpretation would make it a sort of ghost story. On the other hand, it is very difficult now when we are surrounded by moving images of people both alive and dead, to feel the impact that early films made on their first audiences.

However one reads it, this is certainly one of Kipling’s most cryptic tales. In his memoirs he wrote about his method of writing, which was to cut, lay the story aside for a while then go back to it and cut some more. He considered that what had been cut would have a lingering influence on the words that remained. One can see how this story might have been written in that way.

Rather ironically perhaps, there is no known surviving film footage or audio recording of Rudyard Kipling himself.

High Wood by John Stanley Purvis (Philip Johnstone)

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I found this poem printed in a copy of The Old Front Line by John Masefield. It’s quite appropriate that it should be there because it uses a similar conceit. Just as Masefield describes the 1916 Somme battlefield from an imagined future after the war has ended, High Wood imagines the old trenches becoming a tourist attraction in peacetime.  

John Stanley Purvis wrote it under his pseudonym of Philip Johnstone in 1918. He served as a lieutenant in the war and was invalided out of the army after the battle of the Somme. It took the British three months to capture the German stronghold of High Wood in that battle.

He is not particularly well-known among the Great War poets, but deserves to be remembered for this striking poem. Its realistic and cynical tone still seems modern, resembling the work of Siegfried Sassoon, perhaps, rather than any of the other famous names.

It’s a reminder of how the first world war is the dividing line between two different ways of thinking about war and that after poems like High Wood, it was no longer possible for the more heroic sort of war poems, such as those by Tennyson or Newbolt, to be written.   

The poem has gained in force, because today we can see that exactly what he predicted came true. And after all this time tourists still visit the first world war battlefields.

High Wood by John Stanley Purvis (Philip Johnstone)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is High Wood,
Called by the French, Bois des Fourneaux,
The famous spot which in Nineteen-Sixteen,
July, August and September was the scene
Of long and bitterly contested strife,
By reason of its High commanding site.
Observe the effect of shell-fire in the trees
Standing and fallen; here is wire; this trench
For months inhabited, twelve times changed hands;
(They soon fall in), used later as a grave.
It has been said on good authority
That in the fighting for this patch of wood
Were killed somewhere above eight thousand men,
Of whom the greater part were buried here,
This mound on which you stand being…
                                                            Madame, please,

You are requested kindly not to touch
Or take away the Company’s property
As souvenirs; you’ll find we have on sale
A large variety, all guaranteed.
As I was saying, all is as it was,
This is an unknown British officer,
The tunic having lately rotten off.
Please follow me – this way…
                                                the path, sir, please,

The ground which was secured at great expense
The Company keeps absolutely untouched
And in that dug-out (genuine) we provide
Refreshments at a reasonable rate.
You are requested not to leave about
Paper, or ginger-beer bottles, or orange-peel,
There are waste-paper baskets at the gate.

1918

The Haunting of Lamb House by Joan Aiken

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The Haunting of Lamb House by Joan Aiken is a novel published in 1991. Lamb House, a Georgian building in Rye, Sussex, has been home to several writers over the years. Henry James lived and wrote there, as did E F Benson and later on, Rumer Godden. James wrote The Turn of the Screw there; Benson wrote his Mapp and Lucia novels, in which the house itself features, as well as many ghost stories there. It is now a National Trust property. Joan Aiken was born in Rye and lived not far away all her life.

This is an atmospheric and fascinating novel, an intriguing mixture of fact and fiction. It is composed of three linked stories. In the first, Toby Lamb, son of the builder of the house, tells the tale of tragic events in his childhood and youth. This is a very credible recreation of life in early eighteenth-century Sussex. We find out towards the end that what we have been reading is his own manuscript, written later in life, which he conceals behind a wall in the house.

Many years later, Henry James becomes the occupant of the house. This story is written in the third person in a style rather like James’ own. He feels as if the house has chosen him, rather than the other way round. A mysterious fire leads to some reconstruction work and the discovery of the manuscript. There are troubling similarities between Toby’s story and James’ own life. James considers publishing the manuscript as it is, but his brother William dissuades him. James considers that Toby’s use of the first-person style is a weakness and he re-writes it. He shows his new version to his friend and fellow-writer Edith Wharton. She considers that the work is not up to his usual standard.

After James’ death the house passes to E F Benson. He too has the feeling that the house is calling to him in some way. This story is the shortest of the three, written in the first person in the style of one of Benson’s ghost stories. Behind a garden wall he discovers another secret garden in which he erects a writing hut. It is while writing there that he sees the apparition of a man in black, a figure who featured in the first story, when Toby saw him in the garden. I shall not spoil things by saying who he is. A meeting across time resolves things in a satisfying way but also with a suggestion that the cycle will carry on when Benson says: “Perhaps you and I, Hugh, will be the next pair of ghosts to take over the lease. Perhaps we shall be occupying the secret garden here in the year 2030!”

This is as much a meditation on ideas of literary quality and posterity as a conventional ghost story. James is disconcerted by the fact that Edith Wharton’s novels sell so much better than his own, which he considers to be of higher quality. Benson is aware that although his own novels are successful, they do not really go deep enough.

Joan Aiken’s reader’s note is slightly misleading, perhaps deliberately so. She says that Toby’s story is completely fictional, yet elements of it, such as the visit of King George, are part of the history of Rye. She acknowledges that she has drawn on writings by and about James and Benson for their stories. She says that the ghosts are entirely fictional. What she does not say is that the description of the man in black is taken almost word-for-word from E F Benson’s 1940 autobiography, in which he describes an encounter with what he took to be a ghost.

How much you like this novel will probably depend on how much you like the writing of Henry James and E F Benson and whether or not you have been to Rye. For an admirer of E F Benson’s ghost stories like me, it’s a real treat. I have the feeling that there’s been something of a competition over the years as to whether Lamb House should be a literary shrine to James or to Benson. I know James is generally considered the superior writer, but Benson wrote not only in the house but about the house, so for me that secures his claim to it. After all, he lived there much longer than James, from 1918 until his death in 1940.

I have also written about E F Benson’s stories The Temple and Pirates.

Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald

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One of the things I like about being a bit older is going back and reading books that I read many years ago to see whether they pass the only test that matters in literature, the test of time. How accurate were my earlier judgements and how much were they a product of the enthusiasm of youth?

Tender is the Night, published in 1934 is not quite as well-known as Fitzgerald’s earlier novel, The Great Gatsby. It is longer and more complex than Gatsby, and does not quite have that sense of perfect construction. It’s a more difficult read but perhaps a more satisfying one.

I always preferred it to Gatsby though, and going back to it, I’m stunned at just how good I still find it to be.

It is the story of American psychiatrist Dick Diver and his marriage to wealthy heiress Nicole Warren, who is his patient before becoming his wife. This takes place mainly in the glamourous locations of the French Riviera and Switzerland in the 1920s. There is also the wider background of the aftermath of the first world war, something we are reminded of during a visit to the abandoned trenches of the western front.

At that time a favourable exchange rate meant that Americans found the dollar went a long way in France. At Gausse’s hotel on the Riviera, the Divers have gathered a group of friends around them, including alcoholic composer Abe North, French-American soldier Tommy Barban and would-be writer Albert McKisko.   

This tale of wealthy American expatriates in Europe inevitably recalls the writing of Henry James and Edith Wharton, but there is a lush, poetic feel to the language here and the title is taken from Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. Yet it is faster paced and there is a fluidity of time that shows the influence of modernism. We are in a different era, the characters are more volatile and there is an undercurrent of violence here with events such as a duel and a shooting featuring in the story. Some of this is similar to the world depicted in Hemingway’s Fiesta.

It’s a very American novel in that most of the references to the British are negative, mentioning the decline of the empire, and one of the few British characters, Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers, is quite decadent.

The novel has a clever flashback structure, opening in the south of France at what is actually the middle of the story, before going back to the beginning in Switzerland in 1917 then resuming in the 1920s and going on to the tragic ending. This gives a mystery element and a dramatic tension to the whole opening part of the novel. What is the secret behind the Divers’ idyllic world and seemingly perfect marriage?

This is enhanced by the whole of that opening section being seen through the eyes of Rosemary, the young film actress who is attracted to Dick Diver. We see the Divers and their seemingly perfect world through her eyes. Dick is attracted to her as well, but it is not immediately apparent why a seemingly happily married man might be tempted to stray. The tensions in the Divers’ marriage are gradually revealed.    

Throughout the novel Fitzgerald subtly varies the point of view. This is particularly effective in conveying the way in which Dick declines and Nicole rises, as their relationship changes. At first, the reader hardly notices what is happening, as Dick begins to drink more, and his charm and perfect manners begin to drop away, alienating their circle of friends. The tipping point of the story after which the balance between them shifts is when Dick has an affair with Rosemary in Rome, gets into a fight and is beaten up by the police.

There is some very murky psychology on display here. Nicole’s mental troubles have been caused by sexual abuse by her father. Dick is as much her doctor as her husband, a figure of authority. “Control yourself!” he snaps at her as she begins to unravel. The film that has made Rosemary a star is called Daddy’s Girl. Her mother, too, is a controlling figure who encourages her relationship with the older, married man.

The novel has an autobiographical element, based as it is on Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda and their life in France.

Finally, Dick is corrupted by wealth, drink, and endless leisure, his plans to do pioneering work in psychiatry abandoned and his career in tatters. At the end, Nicole and Dick divorce and he disappears into an obscure life as a local doctor back in America. With Nicole cured and now married to Tommy Barban, Dick has served his purpose as far as the Warren family are concerned. “That’s what he was educated for” her older sister cynically says. She had planned for Nicole to have a doctor husband all along, she just didn’t necessarily think it would be Doctor Diver. The reader knows it was a real love, on both sides. As Nicole said “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.”

The final image is very poignant, as Dick says goodbye to the beach in front of the hotel where the story opened. He and Nicole created a world and now it is all gone.

The later parts of the novel are almost unbearably sad. It is beautifully written and an absorbing, heart-breaking reading experience. It was Fitzgerald’s own favourite of his books and he was rather puzzled by its relative lack of success on first publication, but its reputation has risen steadily ever since.  

The Pursued by C S Forester

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The Pursued is the third of C S Forester’s inter-war crime novels. It was written in 1935 but not published at the time. The manuscript somehow went missing, to be rediscovered and finally published in 2011. Like the two earlier novels it’s a tale of dark deeds in suburban London, but it’s slightly different in that here the female characters are given more prominence. I suspect that the real reason it was not published at the time was a frankness about sexual matters unusual for an English novel then. It’s also perhaps the closest of the three to the writing of Patrick Hamilton, with the same sensitivity to the position of women in that era. Like many crime novels of this vintage, there is an echo here of the events of the real-life Thompson and Bywaters case.   

Housewife Marjorie Grainger, ten years married with two small children, returns from a night out visiting an old school friend. She finds a strong smell of gas in the kitchen and her sister Dot, who has been babysitting, lying dead on the floor with her head in the oven. At the inquest it is revealed that Dot was pregnant and a verdict of suicide is returned. It is a mystery as to who the man responsible could have been. Dot was twenty-eight, had always lived with her widowed mother and her job did not bring her into contact with men very often.

Marjorie is puzzled by her discovery of two broken wine bottles in the dustbin. She has already noticed her husband Ted’s unusual excitement on the night of Dot’s death. Then she finds that he has lied about his movements on that night. And he works at the local gas showroom and is knowledgeable about gas appliances.

When her chatterbox four-year-old son blurts out what he saw on the night of his aunt’s death, Marjorie realises in a flash that it was Ted who had an affair with Dot, got her pregnant and then killed her by getting her hopelessly drunk and leaving her with the gas tap turned on. It appears that Marjorie’s mother, Mrs Clair, has reached the same conclusion, because she says that the boy will not repeat what he has just said. It’s crucial to what happens later that the two women never really have a direct and open conversation about what they both suspect.

Marjorie suggests that Mrs Clair could now come and live with Ted and her. Ted is not keen on this and proposes instead that Mrs Clair, who lives nearby, takes on his junior employee George Ely as her lodger.

The auditors are due at Ted’s firm, so rather than cancel the usual family holiday in Sussex, they agree that George should take Marjorie, her mother and the children in his new motor car. For Marjorie, this is a longed-for break from her sexually demanding husband who she no longer loves and now believes to be a murderer.

For Mrs Clair, it is something rather different. She has realised that if Ted were convicted of murder, it would ruin Marjorie’s life and taint the children forever by association. She is coldly planning a different sort of revenge on Ted. During the long sunny days, she takes every opportunity to bring Marjorie and George together. She suggests that they go out for evening trips in the car. As she has intended, the inevitable happens and Marjorie and George become lovers.

When Marjorie tells her mother that she does not want to return to her husband and hints at her belief that he is a murderer,Mrs Clair pretends to misunderstand. She plays the innocent leaving Marjorie to think that she alone knows the truth and that her mother has no idea that she and George are lovers. George and Marjorie spend the last few days of the holiday in a panic about what they are going to do. Ted is George’s boss. Ted’s manager Mr Hill is very strait-laced, and will sack anyone at the merest hint of impropriety. Marjorie realises that it may be fear for his job that led Ted to kill the pregnant Dot.

Marjorie returns to the family house but George is unhappy about this. He doesn’t want her to submit to George’s sexual demands. There is a path running along the back of the houses next to the railway line. George uses this to visit Marjorie for snatched moments of passion in the garden. He is a tender and gentle lover, younger than Marjorie and a complete contrast to her husband. What neither Marjorie or George realise is the extent to which they are being manipulated by her mother.

Meanwhile, Mrs Clair is planning her next move, buying a hatchet from the hardware store and hinting to the local police constable that Ted is in a peculiar state of mind.   

Marjorie has put Ted off with excuses about her monthly cycle but she knows that he will work that out soon enough. When she finally tells him that she will not submit to his demands anymore, he threatens to hurt her daughter if she does not give him what he wants. A distraught Marjorie runs to her mother’s house. This is the crisis that Mrs Clair has been working to bring about. The now furious George, Marjorie and Mrs Clair return to Marjorie’s house. Mrs Clair is carrying the hatchet in her bag, and utters the fateful words “we’re going to kill him”. This dramatic moment is not the end of the story by any means.        

This is a short novel, only just over two hundred pages, but it’s very intense with a lot packed into it. Forester is a master of succinct prose and there is not a word too many. The final most tragic part makes the reader think about the difference between moral guilt and physical guilt, and the plot shows how chance events can disrupt the best-laid plans. This is not a novel that the reader will forget and it leaves one at the end thinking about just who is a villain and who is a victim. A final twist in the very last sentence reveals that for one character at least there has been a sort of natural justice.

Does Mrs Clair take her motherly devotion too far? Or is the course of action she chooses the only one she can take, given her circumstances and those of her surviving daughter?

For this is the world of shabby suburban London, where the furniture and carpets are threadbare, people have just enough money to get by on and the neighbours take a keen interest in each other’s doings. This was the time when it was a woman’s role to run the house, with even a fit young man like George not expected to lift a finger to help. Ted expects domestic and sexual slavery from Marjorie as no less than he deserves in return for earning the money. For women the only alternative is to live in a cramped bedsit in a boarding house for professional women as Marjorie’s schoolfriend does.

I was surprised at the end to find out that Mrs Clair is only fifty-nine. She is constantly referred to as elderly and I thought she must be over seventy at least. That’s another way in which the world has changed.