Set in wartime London, Westwood tells the story of Margaret Steggles, a plain bookish girl whose mother has told her that she is ‘not the type that attracts men’. Her schoolfriend Hilda has a sunny temperament and keeps her service boys ‘ever so cheery’. When Margaret finds a ration book on Hampstead Heath the pompous writer Gerard Challis enters both their lives. Margaret slavishly adores Challis and his artistic circle; Challis idolises Hilda for her hair and her eyes and Hilda finds Gerard’s romantic overtures a bit of a bind. This is a delightfully comic and wistful tale of love and longing.
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Stella Gibbons
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter The Last
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Epub ISBN 9781446499153
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Published by Vintage 2011
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Copyright © Stella Gibbons 1946
Introduction copyright © Lynne Truss 2011
Stella Gibbons has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
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ISBN 9780099528722
To
Peggy Butcher
Philippians iv. 8
Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She worked for various newspapers including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short-stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems The Mountain Beast (1930) and her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) won the Femina Vie Heuruse Prize for 1933. Amongst her works are Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.
Cold Comfort Farm
Bassett
Enbury Heath
Nightingale Wood
My American
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm
The Rich House
Ticky
The Bachelor
The Matchmaker
Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
Here Be Dragons
White Sand and Grey Sand
The Charmers
Starlight
This is what everyone knows about Stella Gibbons: she wrote only one book, but it was a very, very good one. Cold Comfort Farm, published in 1932 when its obscure female author was thirty years old, was a brilliant, perfect comic novel, satirising the ‘loam and love-child’ genre of English fiction. It was a huge success on publication and is rightly regarded as a classic eighty years later. But what about its author? What did Stella Gibbons go on to do? Did she ever write anything else? Did she perhaps renounce the literary life and devote herself to bee-keeping? Was ‘Stella Gibbons’ perhaps not even a real person in the first place? After all, how can someone write a huge debut book like Cold Comfort Farm and then not become a literary celebrity?
In fact, Stella Gibbons went on to write more than twenty more novels, one of which was the 1946 novel Westwood you are currently holding in your hand. Like all the others, it has been overshadowed by the success of Cold Comfort Farm (rather than helped by it) which just goes to show the rotten unfairness of things sometimes. I first read Westwood about ten years ago, when I was in the habit of suggesting nifty ideas to BBC radio, and had come up with an intriguing literary hypothesis on which I proposed to build an ambitious season of programmes and adaptations. Was it true, I wondered, that funny women writers are generally allowed only one success in their careers? Wouldn’t it be interesting to examine this rather clever insight in relation to (say) Anita Loos, Stella Gibbons and Betty MacDonald – and then dramatise one (each) of their less well-known books or novels? A quick look through the reference materials told me that Stella Gibbons had published over two dozen books between 1930 and her death in 1989, including a couple of collections of poetry. Just as I had suspected, none of these books, apart from Cold Comfort Farm, was even in print.
So I thought I should probably read some of these neglected books of hers – for one thing, I needed to check they weren’t rubbish. I picked up Westwood under guidance from my frighteningly widely-read friend Deirdre, and it occurs to me as I write this that I still haven’t properly thanked her for the recommendation, because Westwood is a book I loved deeply on first reading and have loved deeply ever since. It is a wise and truthful novel which makes me laugh, and also makes me weep. If Cold Comfort Farm is Stella Gibbons’s Pride and Prejudice, then Westwood is her Persuasion. Sadly, the BBC rejected my idea about the female one-hit-wonders. However, they did let me rescue one element from the wreckage. They allowed me to dramatise Westwood as a two-part ‘Classic Serial’, and it remains one of the most pleasurable things I’ve done.
Westwood makes an interesting companion to Cold Comfort Farm, being concerned just as much with the eternal struggle between romantic illusion and common sense; however, it expresses that struggle much more sympathetically. Set in wartime north London (specifically the Hampstead Heath and Highgate beloved of its author), it concerns the 23-year-old Margaret Steggles, an emotionally earnest, plain, loveless young English teacher who reveres, above all things, poetry, art and drama. ‘I’ve got such frighteningly strong feelings,’ she tells her old school friend Hilda in the first chapter. ‘I think you imagine a lot of it,’ is the matter-of-fact reply. Through the bathetic agency of a dropped ration book recovered on Hampstead Heath, Margaret gains entry into an exciting world of north London intellectuals – the fashionable painter Alexander Niland, his spoiled wife Hebe, and above all, his eminent father-in-law Gerard Challis, a deeply unfrivolous playwright of high renown. Margaret is overwhelmed by this opportunity to share a more intellectually elevated way of life – ignoring the obvious fact that these people are ghastly. Not only do they quite openly mock her sincerity (and high-handedly foist their small children onto her), but they disappointingly sit about discussing mundane things such as the scarcity of matches, just like anyone else. How confusing this all is for an intelligent girl like Margaret. She wants to worship Gerard Challis; she can quote his preposterous plays; she dreams of his beautiful blue eyes. And yet she can’t help it: she still instinctively quibbles with every lordly generalisation he deigns to confer on her.
Margaret’s nervousness was as keen as her delight as they walked together across the faded carpet to the door. As [Challis] opened it, he turned to her once more with his grave searching look, and she experienced a delicious tremor …
‘There is a helpless quality, don’t you agree, about a room that is prepared for a party,’ he observed. ‘The silence and flowers are like victims, awaiting the noise of conversation and the cigarette smoke and dissonant jar of conflicting personalities that shall presently destroy them.’
Margaret had been thinking that the hall looked perfectly lovely and wishing with all her heart that she was going to the party too, but she hastily readjusted her point of view, and answered solemnly, ‘Yes, I know just what you mean.’
Challis is a terrific character. Pompous, vain, self-satisfied, humourless, he speaks as if from a mountaintop, and refuses to compromise with real life, even in a time of war. By way of everyday conversation, his high-minded characters say things like, ‘Suffering is the anvil upon which the crystal sword of integrity is hammered’ – which fits in with the way they quite often step outside and kill themselves on the flimsiest pretext as well. In his play Kattë (written and premiered in the course of the novel), the Viennese heroine’s lover shoots himself offstage; then her father shoots her mother for having borne him such a daughter; he then jumps into the Danube. And in the end, of course, Kattë shoots herself for bringing so much misery on everyone else by her sheer cursed attractiveness.
‘He knew that his plays were good; each one better than its predecessor. Mountain Air, the one about six women botanists and a male guide isolated in a snowstorm in a hut on the Andes, had been surer in its approach and handling than his first one, The Hidden Well, which concerned the seven men and one female nurse on the tsetse-fly research station … while Kattë dealt with an Austrian woman who was bandied about by the officers of a crack regiment in Vienna, and was, he felt convinced, his masterpiece.
He was for ever thinking up new permutations and combinations.’
Challis was rather transparently modelled on the writer Charles Morgan (1894-1958), whose play The Flashing Stream had been a big hit before the war. Morgan had annoyed Stella Gibbons in two significant ways: first, by arguing that a sense of humour was overrated in writers (the great Shakespeare had managed without one, he claimed); and second, for writing exasperatingly dreadful female characters along the lines of Kattë. In Westwood (Chapter 20), Challis’s cut-glass wife Seraphina is devastatingly frank about his lack of realism in this important area:
‘I don’t mean to butt in or be rude, and I do know everyone says you’re such a marvellous psychologist and I’m not highbrow or anything, but honestly you don’t know much about women. The women in your plays are such hags, darling; absolute witches and hags, if you don’t mind my saying so. I don’t know any women like them and I’ve known hordes of women.’
Or, as Gibbons the narrator more drily explains, ‘Like most seekers for an ideal woman, [Challis] did not really like women, believing that they disappointed and failed him on purpose.’
Gibbons punishes the humourless misogynist Challis brilliantly: by making him fall in love with Margaret’s down-to-earth (but very attractive) old school friend Hilda. He is thus placed in an infatuation quite as miserable and hopeless as Margaret’s – but much, much funnier. ‘You look like a painting by Signorelli, in that cap,’ he tells her, ardently. ‘There we go again,’ harrumphs Hilda. Of the three main characters in the book, it is Hilda that is Westwood’s greatest creation. A girl who takes nothing seriously and keeps her service boys ‘ever so cheery,’ Hilda is a life force; every line that drops from her mouth is worth its weight in gold. When Challis tells her that a ‘friend of his’ has written a play, she can’t imagine what for. When he tells her what the play is about (serial Austrian suicide), she flatly refuses to see it. Even the sublime work of Leonardo da Vinci doesn’t impress her. ‘I don’t know how you can bear to have that fat pan looking at you when you wake up in the morning,’ she says, indicating the tasteful Mona Lisa poster Margaret has proudly hung on her bedroom wall. ‘It would brown me off for the day.’
What a modern young woman might find hard to swallow in Westwood is the rather pitiless, matter-of-fact way Margaret’s lack of sex appeal is dealt with. But Stella Gibbons was a doctor’s daughter and she never believed in sugaring the pill. Margaret is described as having ‘tiny ears, fine dark eyebrows, and good ankles – all minor beauties and not in themselves enough to make a woman attractive.’ Naturally it hurts Margaret to be aware of her shortcomings (and to be reminded of them quite so often by her unhappily married mother). But facts are facts: Margaret’s plainness ultimately rules out the possibility of Westwood being the twentieth-century Persuasion, after all. Stella Gibbons is just too honest about the realities of life to provide a happy romantic ending. Men are drawn to attractive women, and they don’t select partners according to any other measure of their worth. In the real world, Captain Wentworth does not reclaim the plain and ageing Anne Elliot; he marries someone else. But that doesn’t mean Gibbons is unsympathetic. Not at all. In fact, re-reading Westwood, I suddenly remembered one of Gibbons’s best-known poems, ‘Lullaby for a Baby Toad’, in which the little, ugly creature is lovingly told that, because it carries a precious gem in its forehead, its looks are actually its protection:
For if, my toadling,
Your face were fair
As the precious jewel
That glimmers there,
Man, the jealous,
Man, the cruel,
Would look at you
And suspect the jewel.
So dry the tears
From your horned eyes,
And eat your supper
Of dew and flies;
Curl in the shade
Of the nettles deep,
Think of your jewel
And go to sleep.
I am so pleased Westwood is finally coming back into print. I’m quite sure that if it hadn’t been written by the author of Cold Comfort Farm, it would have fared a great deal better in the world. Stella Gibbons’s nephew Reggie Oliver, who wrote an excellent biography of his aunt, told me he was sure she felt more proud of Westwood than of any of her other books. This is a rich, mature novel, romantic and wistful, full of rounded characters and terrific dialogue, with a pair of pleasingly intertwining plots, and great comic scenes. It is beautifully written by an author whose precision with idiom was unerring. It deals with heartbreak and hope, longing and disappointment; and is underlined by a genuine poetic love for natural beauty. And it teaches us that integrity does not always have to be forged on the anvil of suffering, whatever the Gerard Challises of this world might think. Sometimes integrity is the cause of suffering, rather than the result of it.
Lynne Truss, 2011
London was beautiful that summer. In the poor streets the people made an open-air life for themselves under the blue sky as if they were living in a warmer climate. Old men sat on the fallen masonry and smoked their pipes and talked about the War, while the women stood patiently in the shops or round the stalls selling large fresh vegetables, ceaselessly talking.
The ruins of the small shapely houses in the older parts of the city were yellow, like the sunlit houses of Genoa; all shades of yellow; deep, and pale, or glowing with a strange transparency in the light. The fire-fighting people had made deep pools with walls round them in many of the streets, and here, in the heart of London, ducks came to live on these lakes that reflected the tall yellow ruins and the blue sky. Pink willow-herb grew over the white uneven ground where houses had stood, and there were acres of ground covered with deserted, shattered houses whose windows were filled with torn black paper. On the outskirts of the city, out towards Edmonton and Tottenham in the north and Sydenham in the south, there was a strange feeling in the air, heavy and sombre and thrilling, as if History were working visibly, before one’s eyes. And the country was beginning to run back to London; back into those grimy villages linked by featureless roads from which it had never quite vanished, and which make up the largest city in the world. Weeds grew in the City itself; a hawk was seen hovering over the ruins of the Temple, and foxes raided the chicken roosts in the gardens of houses near Hampstead Heath. The shabby quietness of an old, decaying village hung in the streets, and it was a wonderful, awe-inspiring thing to see and to feel. While the summer lasted, the beauty was stronger than the sadness, because the sun blessed everything – the ruins, the tired faces of the people, the tall wild flowers and the dark stagnant water – and, during those months of calm, London in ruin was beautiful as a city in a dream.
Then the autumn came with mists. They began early in September, and the beauty lingered while the leaves came slowly down through the still air. On Hampstead Heath the young willow trees growing on either side of a long hilly road did not turn until late October, and they were still in their long full leaf one evening at sunset, when a young woman was the only person in the road, which she was crossing on her way to the open Heath.
She glanced up the road’s length, and gasped as she saw the willows; the scene about her was all gorgeous in deep colours softened by the mist, but each willow tree looked like a streaked fountain of yellow and green and fire-colour hanging down in a blue haze, while, under some large, motionless, yellow and dark-green trees on her left, there spread away a broad lustrous lake of golden water, glowing not on its surface but in its depths. The dim blue sky was streaked with grey and scarlet mist, and the damp grass was blue in the shade.
The air smelled of fog. There were other people hurrying home in the distance, but they were only dark figures against the general gorgeousness and glow.
She looked at her watch. It was nearly five o’clock, and she set off quickly across the Heath in the direction of Highgate, whose church spire looked out at the spire of Hampstead’s church across the intervening small valleys and hills. Her shoes quickly became soaked in the long grass and the masses of black and yellow leaves, and the air grew cold, but she was so absorbed in the beauty of the scene, richly coloured as some dream of a Brazilian garden, that she noticed nothing else. She was a thin young woman of medium height in her early twenties, with a strong dark face, and untidy dark curls hanging about her shoulders. Her mouth was too full, and her brown eyes had an eager look.
Presently she came out on the path below Kenwood that leads directly down to Highgate. There were allotments here with giant cabbages of a rich blue-green colour; the mist, and the dim blue of the sky, and the green of the grass caught up the colour and repeated it again and again almost as far as she could see, and the leaves were huge and beaded with water, for rain had fallen that afternoon. She hurried on with her hands in her pockets, still looking about her, but the colours were quickly fading now, and the greyness of evening was creeping over the fields.
As she was leaving the Heath, between two wide lakes reflecting the last colours in the sky and the clumps of dark roseate osiers, she saw two tall men coming towards her through the mist. The elder wore a closely fitting dark coat and a black diplomatic hat, and carried a leather brief-case, and had eyes of so deep a blue that it was noticeable even in the gathering dusk. The younger wore looser clothes, and a black sweater with a turtle neck, and had no hat.
‘But Henry Moore isn’t –’ the younger was saying as the two passed her, and then he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and the rest of the sentence was lost. Both were walking fast, and in a few moments they had passed out of her hearing.
But she turned once to look after them, attracted by their distinguished appearance and unusual height, and, as she did so, she noticed something lighter than the path lying a few yards away; a small, square, cream-coloured object. She approached it, and on stooping to pick it up saw that it was a ration book.
‘Oh dear,’ she said aloud, looking first at it and then after the two gentlemen, who were by now almost out of sight across the misty fields. Her voice was deep, with a decisive note.
It was no use running after them, she thought; besides, she was late now. She looked down at the name on the book. It was such an odd one that for the moment she thought it was foreign:
Hebe Niland,
Lamb Cottage,
Romney Square,
Hampstead, N.W. 3.
Oh well, I can drop it in the post to-morrow, she thought, and put the book in her pocket and hurried on.
It was almost dark by the time she reached Highgate Village. A figure in a mackintosh and beret rushed out from the shade of a shop door, crying reproachfully:
‘Well, you’re a nice one! I’ve been here for ages! What on earth happened to you? I’m frozen and now we won’t be able to go; Mother doesn’t like me out in the blackout, you know that as well as I do. You are the limit!’
‘I’m awfully sorry, Hilda. I walked over the Heath and it was so gorgeous, I didn’t notice the time. But we must go; come on; if we hurry we’ll just be there before blackout,’ and she put her arm through Hilda’s, and strode away across the road towards Southwood Lane.
‘Oh well, p’raps we’ll just make it, and I don’t expect Mother’ll mind, as there’s two of us. Have you got the keys?’ said Hilda, pacified.
The dark girl nodded and jingled them in her pocket.
‘What’ve you been doing all the afternoon?’ Hilda went on.
‘I went to the concert at the National Gallery, and then I walked about.’
‘Walked about? You are dopey. I say, Margaret, have you thought – there’ll be no blackout, so we shan’t be able to shine a torch.’
‘We shall be able to see all I want to see – if there’s a proper place for coals and all that sort of thing.’
‘Of course there’ll be a proper place for coals! Those houses have only been up about ten years. You’re very lucky to get the chance of one.’
‘I know we are, and I don’t think it’s right,’ said Margaret, grimly.
‘Why ever not?’
‘Millions of people all over the world have lost their homes. Why should we have a new house?’
‘I don’t see that! It wouldn’t make it any better for them if you didn’t have one.’
‘People in England haven’t suffered enough.’
‘If you’re going to start about Russia I’m going straight home!’ cried Hilda, standing still in the middle of the road.
‘I wasn’t going to say anything about Russia particularly.’
‘That’s a wonder. Here, is this it?’ and she darted forward and shone her torch on the gate of a house which was one of a row. ‘Yes, number seventeen. Well, it’s still got a gate. That’s something.’
She pushed the gate open and walked up the narrow crazy-paving path. The dim light of the torch shone on the tall weeds, fluffy with withered seedlings, that brushed against her skirt. Margaret followed, and the gate slammed after them.
‘Are all these house blitzed, I wonder?’ went on Hilda. ‘No, there’s a chink in your next-door neighbour’s blackout. Phew! Doesn’t it smell of bombs! Got the key?’
Margaret was already shining her own torch over the narrow front door, which badly needed painting, and fitting the key into the lock. It was nearly dark. Something so enormous, round and red that for a moment it was hard to realize what it was, was rising slowly between the black houses. Hilda glanced over her shoulder and exclaimed:
‘What a gorgeous moon!’
‘Ominous,’ said Margaret quietly, pushing open the door, which was stiff on its hinges. A little hall and a narrow staircase were revealed in the faint light. The floor was covered with a white substance.
‘So what? Whatever’s all that muck on the floor?’
‘Plaster,’ said Margaret, stepping inside, ‘I expect the ceiling is down.’
‘Never mind, ducks; you said we haven’t suffered enough; you’ll be able to have plaster every day in your powdered egg. Shall I shut the door?’ And she did so, with a bang. Some more plaster came down, but when Margaret flashed her torch upwards the light revealed only a small hole.
‘It could easily be repaired,’ she muttered.
‘Oh, I shouldn’t bother,’ said Hilda blithely. ‘What’s this? The dining-room? Oh, the ceiling is down here, Margaret!’ and she flashed her torch over a dismal mass of white on the dusky floor. ‘Gets better and better, doesn’t it?’
‘But it’s a nice little house,’ said Margaret, flashing her own torch over walls and fireplace. Her serious voice had a slight accent that was not London, nor completely southern.
‘Isn’t it wicked, though, ruining peoples’ places like this?’ demanded Hilda, going out into the hall again. ‘Look, here’s the drawing-room – oh, it’s got French windows into the garden – rather nice.’
The increasing moonlight shone faintly upon canes of dead golden-rod, and clouds of feathery willow-herb gone to seed. A stone bird-bath stood up in the middle of the rank little lawn. Beyond the garden’s end a hill, covered in dim buildings and trees, ran up to a line of houses that were dark against the misty moonlit sky.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ said Hilda, leading the way. Their footsteps echoed all over the house.
There were two fairly large bedrooms and a little slip-room over the front door.
‘One for your father and mother, and one for you, and a spare room,’ said Hilda, going from room to room and flashing her torch into corners and cupboards.
‘Mother and Dad have separate rooms and we shan’t be having anyone to stay,’ said Margaret, going into the bathroom. Hilda made a rueful face to herself in the darkness, as if she were sorry she had spoken, but the next instant said half defiantly, ‘People can be quite fond of each other even if they do have separate rooms; my Auntie Grace and Uncle Jim do, and they’re quite a pair of old love-birds.’
‘Be careful how you flash that torch or we’ll have the wardens after us,’ was all Margaret said.
‘There’s a separate bathroom; good,’ said Hilda, opening a door and shutting it again. ‘Oh, Margaret – the kitchen! We must look at that; Mother says it’s the most important room in the house.’
They went downstairs again. Moonlight was now shining in squares on the bare, dusty boards. The kitchen looked dismal, for the gas cooker had been removed by the outgoing tenants, and the ceiling was down, but there was a large larder (in the coolest part of the room, Hilda pointed out to the silent Margaret) and the sink was actually under the window.
‘Like they always have them in American films,’ said Hilda. ‘Oh, what an enormous spider!’ and she peered into the sink. ‘Do look, Margaret, I’ve never seen such a huge one. I suppose it is a spider?’ looking about for something to poke it with. Margaret made a shuddering noise.
‘Oh, I rather like them,’ said Hilda. ‘The only creepy-crawlies I can’t stand are earwigs. When we were at Bracing Bay the year before the war there was a boy always trying to put earwigs down the back of my bathing costume; honestly, I used to scream so you could hear me all over the beach!’
‘Listen!’ said Margaret suddenly. Far away to the east over the river’s estuary a faint ululation was beginning, and even as the two girls listened it was taken up close at hand.
‘There!’ said Hilda. ‘Oh dear, Mother’ll be having fits. What shall we do? There isn’t time to run home, I s’pose?’
‘Of course not,’ said Margaret decidedly. ‘We’ll go and sit on the stairs,’ and she led the way back to the hall.
‘Gosh, isn’t it hard!’ said Hilda, sitting down gingerly.
Margaret took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one, and Hilda produced a paper bag.
‘Last of my sweet ration,’ she said, holding up a large round greenish object. ‘Sorry I can’t give you half.’
‘Can’t you bite it?’ suggested Margaret, with a reluctant smile in her voice, and they both laughed.
‘Oh, you are a dear old stick!’ suddenly said Hilda, looking up at her friend, as she sat on the stair above. ‘Doesn’t it seem ages since we were at school?’
‘Years,’ and Margaret sighed.
‘You’re different, you know.’
‘How do you mean, different?’
‘I don’t know. Just different. When I saw you at the station, the first thing I thought was, she’s different.’
Margaret was silent.
‘As if something had happened to you to make you – sort of miserable,’ concluded Hilda.
Margaret’s cigarette glowed in the dusk.
‘Is that guns?’ she said.
‘I expect so. Never mind them. What I mean is –’
‘Aren’t you frightened?’ asked Margaret seriously.
‘Me frightened?’ cried Hilda. ‘Whatever do you mean, Margaret Steggles?’
‘Well, how should I know? I’ve never been in a raid with you before.’
‘I’m not frightened of anything,’ announced Hilda. ‘And if you went about with as many Service boys as I do, you wouldn’t be either.’
‘Yes, I should,’ said Margaret in a low tone, staring across the dim hall to the pale square that marked the front door. ‘I’m not so frightened for myself – though that comes into it too, of course. It’s all the other people I think about, all over the world, when I hear that,’ and she jerked her head in the direction of the distant barrage that sounded like giants rapidly and furiously stamping.
‘They’re all right in South America,’ said Hilda.
‘Oh –!’ Margaret moved impatiently.
‘I mean, they don’t have air-raids.’
‘That doesn’t make it any better. You don’t understand.’
‘It’s you that doesn’t understand. It does make it better. I like to think of them having cocktails and all the chocolates they want and silk stockings. It cheers me up to think that someone can.’
‘I can only think about all the people who haven’t enough food, let alone cocktails and silk stockings.’
‘Well, don’t think about them. It doesn’t do any good. You always did take everything so seriously at school and now you worry about your old Russia all the time, and you’re always moaning about reconstruction. Honestly, Margaret, you get me down.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Margaret, politely and bitterly. ‘You make me sound a complete bore.’
‘I didn’t say anything about being a bore,’ cried Hilda remorsefully. ‘You’re ever so much cleverer than I am; I couldn’t be a teacher to save my life, and you know how fond I am of you, you old mutt! It’s only that I don’t like to see you so browned-off and different.’
Again Margaret was silent.
‘I’m sure something’s happened,’ said Hilda. ‘I do wish you’d cough it up, then you’d feel better.’
‘Do you always cough things up?’
‘Well, nothing ever happens to me. I mean to say, only with boys, and I can manage them. Mother and me often have a good old laugh about my boys. She says it makes her feel young again. Isn’t she a scream, though?’
‘You’re happy, aren’t you?’ asked Margaret suddenly.
Hilda gave such an emphatic nod that all the smooth blonde curls on her shoulders danced, but all she said was:
‘I s’pose so. Can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ said Margaret, feeling in her handbag for another cigarette. ‘I never have been, and as I get older it just gets worse and worse.’
‘Your father and mother don’t get on, do they?’ interrupted Hilda, bluntly.
Margaret shook her head; her friend could just see the little movement in the dimness.
‘I always thought so, and so did Mother and Dad (of course, we didn’t chew it over a lot, but you can’t help noticing little things). Well, that’s enough to make you miserable – your parents not getting on.’
‘I suppose it was that to begin with,’ said Margaret slowly, ‘but it isn’t only that. I’ve just got an unhappy nature, I think. I take everything so seriously, and I mind it so much when things are ugly, and I worry about the mess the world’s in, and the war. And the year before last –’
‘I should think the All Clear’ll go in a minute,’ interrupted Hilda, ‘and the sooner the quicker; I’m starving, aren’t you? Go on, sorry.’
‘That time you came up to stay with us – I don’t suppose you remember a boy called Frank Kennett, do you? He was a friend of Reg’s.’
‘Short fair boy. Rather quiet. Nice manners,’ said Hilda at once, as if quoting from a private file. ‘He danced with you nearly all the time at that dance we went to with Reg’s crowd.’
‘That’s the one. But he isn’t short, Hilda, he’s a bit taller than I am.’
‘Well, you’re no giant,’ retorted Hilda, ‘and I distinctly remember thinking of him as a short fair boy. Never mind, go on. What about him?’
‘We used to go about together a good bit at one time. Boys never did take to me much, you know, I’m not like you’ – there was a smile in her voice again, and this time it was a loving one – ‘and we liked all the things – music and poetry and pictures – that the rest of Reg’s crowd didn’t like. Well, it wasn’t so much that they didn’t like them; they never thought about them; all they cared about was the pictures and dancing and getting enough money to have motor-bikes or cars of their own. They didn’t know about anything else; they were all as ignorant as pigs and as common as dirt, and I loathed and despised the lot of them,’ she ended savagely.
‘They didn’t seem too bad to me.’
‘I dare say. You aren’t like me; lucky for you you aren’t. Frank and I used to go to the concerts at the Corn Exchange, and that winter there was a repertory company at Northampton and we never missed a week; they did some really good plays, too; Shaw and Ibsen, and Shakespeare and O’Neill. That was the nearest thing to happiness I’ve ever had.
‘Did he kiss you?’ interrupted Hilda.
‘Sometimes,’ said Margaret, without much expression in her voice. ‘Not very often.’
‘I said to a Raf boy I was out with last Sunday, “It’s a good thing I don’t want to kiss you as often as you want to kiss me,” I said, “or we’d never have time for anything else.” “Oh, Hilda,” he said, just like that. “Oh, Hilda!” with a kind of a sigh. I had to laugh. But he was a nice boy; I gave him one of my new Polyphotos for luck. “You be careful not to drop it over Berlin,” I said, “I don’t want to be one of Goebbels’s pin-up girls.” Go on, sorry.’
‘He worked in Sintram’s; you know, that big wireless factory outside the town; he was something to do with the research they were doing there on short-waves and he was clever. I did like him!’ she burst out resentfully. ‘We were friends.’
‘Were you sort of in love with him?’ demanded Hilda.
‘I don’t know. I just liked going about with him and having a friend who liked the things I did. It was all – kind of quiet and happy. And then Mother started.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Oh, worrying me about getting married. She’s always been crazy about that; you won’t believe it, but she started dinning it into me how a girl must get married when I was a kid of twelve. I don’t know why, because she doesn’t think much of men really, or being married, but she’s very down on old maids.’
‘No pleasing some people, is there? You should worry.’
‘I don’t expect you would have, but she kept on moan, moan, moan, about it until she absolutely got under my skin. I got so embarrassed about it that I made excuses to keep Frank from coming to the house. I think Mother must have spoken to Dad about it, too, because he said something to me once about young Kennett having a good job.’
‘Did she ask you if he’d proposed?’
‘Not so much that. She took it for granted I should tell her if he did. But asking me every time I came in after I’d been out with him if he seemed to be cooling off and giving me hints on how to bring him up to the scratch … it was simply disgusting!’ she burst out again, writhing at the memory.
‘Silly, too,’ said Hilda. ‘And I think all that sort of thing’s so common, don’t you? Besides, it never gets you anywhere. Mother doesn’t know what she feels about me getting married. One minute she’s dying to see me sailing down the aisle in white satin, and the next minute she says she doesn’t know how she’ll ever get on without me. Well, I laugh at her. Go on, sorry.’
‘I felt worse and worse about it. She never gave me a minute’s peace. It was almost as if’ – she hesitated – ‘she wanted to drag me into the worry and sordidness and pettiness of being married.’
Far away, in the silence that had followed the barrage, the All Clear began.
‘Goody!’ cried Hilda, springing up. ‘Come on, you can finish telling me on the way home.’ She opened the front door. The moon was shining brilliantly but a cold, still mist crept among the leafless trees and lightless houses. Hilda thrust her arm through Margaret’s and with the other hand slammed the door of the little house.
‘If I were you I’d decide on that one, Margaret,’ she said, as they hurried down the path.
‘It’s certainly the most suitable one I’ve seen yet.’
‘And it’s so nice and near us!’ cried Hilda with a skip, already planning to introduce Margaret to the most bookish among a multitude of decidedly non-bookish boys who frequented the small house where she lived with her parents.
‘Oh, you must have that one! Go on about Frank, we’ll be home in a minute and I shall be too busy eating to give you my full attention.’ She pressed Margaret’s arm and lifted her small face, with its delicate aquiline features, to the moon whose light sparkled in her blue eyes. ‘Gorgeous night.’
‘So, at last,’ said Margaret heavily, her face and voice unlightened by the haste of her footsteps and the refreshing night air, her whole personality sunk in unhappy memories, ‘I – I asked him outright.’
‘Gosh!’ muttered Hilda. Then, recovering herself, ‘Well, why not? If he was really your friend, he’d have understood.’
‘That was what I thought, you see. I told him how Mother had been worrying me, and how awful it made me feel, and I said I was only asking him about – about how he felt – so that I could have something definite, one way or another, to tell her and shut her up. I – I made a kind of joke of it, you see, really.’
Hilda squeezed her arm again, in silence. Margaret was silent for so long that Hilda at last peeped round at her dark brooding face and said more quietly than usual:
‘And what did he say?’
‘He was very quiet and – and nice, really,’ said Margaret in a low tone that barely concealed her agony of shame. ‘I don’t think he did understand. He seemed surprised that I took it all so seriously. He made a kind of joke out of it too – not unkindly, of course – he was two years older than I was and much more sensible. And he explained – he said – he told me – that he didn’t love me …’
‘But that was all right, because you didn’t love him,’ interrupted Hilda, ‘so you needn’t feel bad about that.’
‘No, I didn’t love him when I told him. But afterwards when I’d had a frightful scene with Mother and she’d told me I’d messed up my chance and I’d probably never have another, then I got thinking about how kind and quiet and sensible he was and how we liked all the same things, and I – I thought I did love him and that made it worse than ever. I was so miserable I wanted to die.’
‘You take things to heart so,’ said Hilda at last, in what was for her a depressed tone.
‘I know. I always have. I can’t help it.’
‘What will you be like when you’re old?’
‘Perhaps I shan’t live to be old.’
‘Go on, that’s right, be really cheerful.’
‘Well, I don’t want to be.’
‘Yes you do; we’ll live together in that little house when I’m old too and all my boys have deserted me.’
‘You’ll be married.’
‘Well, so will you.’
Margaret shook her head. ‘No, I shan’t. I’m not the type.’
‘You aren’t’ – Hilda hesitated – ‘you don’t still care about him, do you?’
‘I’m not still in love with him, if that’s what you mean. I still like to remember what friends we were. You see, I think of him as two people really; the real person who was so easy to get on with, and kind and sensible, and the person I was in love with, who was all romantic and marvellous because he was unattainable.’
Hilda could only shake her head.
‘Did you see him again after you’d told him about your mother?’ she asked presently.
‘No. He did want to, but I said not. We wrote to each other once or twice, at Christmas; just ordinary letters, not long ones. After I’d got over being in love with him I didn’t want to see him again.’
‘Wouldn’t you like to see him again now?’ suggested Hilda.
Margaret did not answer for a little while. Then, when they were nearly at the gate of Hilda’s house, where she was staying, she said:
‘No. I still feel too bad about it. It absolutely did something to me, Hilda. That’s what’s made me “different,” as you say. It was such a shock to me, telling him like that – and then falling in love with him after he’d told me he wasn’t in love with me – and feeling so despairing. I’ve got such frighteningly strong feelings – you don’t know.’
‘I think you imagine a lot of it,’ said Hilda firmly, pushing open the gate of a tiny house whose wintry garden had not a dead leaf in sight or a grass blade out of place, and whose blackout showed not a cranny or chink. The front doorstep was snowy in the moonlight and the metal letter-box glittered.
‘No, I don’t. I wish I did.’
‘Well, never mind now. You’re quite bats but I love you,’ and she gave her a quick hug and tapped out the Victory tattoo on the knocker, ‘and it’s lovely that you’re coming to live in London.’
The town of Lukeborough, to which Margaret returned in a few days, was in Bedfordshire.
Before the Second World War Lukeborough had a population of some seventy thousand, being smaller than Northampton and larger than Luton, its nearest comparable neighbours to the north and south. Evacuees from London and war-workers drafted into its new factories from the Midlands and the North had increased its numbers to nearly eighty thousand by the fourth year of the War, and its natural ugliness and dullness were enhanced by overcrowding in its streets and shops and cinemas, and a chronic shortage of those small delicacies that make life in war-time a little brighter. As a result, the pre-Second World War inhabitants of Lukeborough were bitter about the town’s new population, and the newcomers swore that it was the last place God made and were only anxious to get away from it for ever as soon as possible.
Lukeborough’s growth during the last forty years had been due entirely to its commerce; all its large new buildings were factories, and its small ones were bungalows or rows of neat, boring little houses built to house the factory workers. There was not even a core of gracious country-town architecture buried in the heart of the place, for it had only been a sprawling village with a strong Dissenting tradition, and all that was left of the village was one or two weather-boarded cottages in the High Street which had been turned into cafés and wireless shops, and the Corn Exchange, a hall built in 1882. The sky seemed to be grey for five days out of the seven above Lukeborough, and when it was blue it only stirred in the hearts of the few romantics in the town an echo of loveliness, an aching longing, as they glanced away over the low, mean houses and unpicturesque streets towards the clear, ethereal turquoise heaven.
But although nine out of ten of the inhabitants of Lukeborough were permanently cross and on the defensive, this does not mean that they were discontented with their lot, and pined to make Lukeborough the Athens of North Bedfordshire, flashing with concrete mansions and gracious with gardens where civic pride grew like flowers. So long as buses ran regularly, and the electric light and gas worked properly, and the streets were kept moderately clean, and there were up-to-date films at the Roxy and the Lukeborough Plaza, they did not ask for much else; and if the evacuees and the war-workers could have been removed overnight, their pipkin of happiness would have been full. Life certainly did run on a very low voltage in Lukeborough; we pride ourselves on being able to perceive romance and beauty in the common scene, but even we are bound to admit that at Lukeborough the streets were usually covered with a thin greasy paste that was not quite mud, the air was usually windless and muggy, and the rise in the ground from one end of the town to the other was about half an inch in five hundred yards.
Margaret came out of the station on a typical Lukeborough afternoon, grey and moist, and walked along to the end of the road to catch the bus. It was exactly half-past three. She would arrive at her home – which was on the outskirts of the town – in time for tea at four o’clock.
Her mind was still full of pictures of London, and she felt half-enchanted. She had been there before, but this was the first time that she had been able to wander about by herself and let the spell of the capital sink into her heart. She had stood for half an hour on Chelsea Embankment and watched the sullen pearly river running roughly past the Egyptian massif of the Battersea Power Station, the only beautiful modern building in London; she had seen the rows of ruined houses with their blind windows of black paper, and the charred wood in the doorways of Soho that was like quilted black satin. For a week she had wandered about, searching for a house for her parents to live in, and conscientiously doing what she had been sent by them to London to do; but she had also dreamed more, and found richer food for her imagination, than she had ever found before. London had changed her. The knowledge that in a few weeks she would be returning to London, to live there, was full of wonder and delight.
The bus was entering a road with small detached redbrick houses standing at the end of long narrow gardens. At the next stop she got down.
The houses, which were fairly new and three-storied, had names like Coombe Dene, and Wycombe, and Fiona. Margaret pushed open the gate of one called Ilsa, and walked up the path. The windows were draped with soft curtains of pale yellow, frilled at the edges and crossed, and the doorstep was as white as that of Hilda’s home and the metal-work on the front door as gleaming. Clumps of yellow chrysanthemums stood in the narrow beds on either side of the path and the lawns were neatly mown. Beyond the house could be seen flat fields and elm trees with houses here and there; this was a main road leading straight to Northampton, and provided an excellent example of ribbon development.
She rang the bell, and in a moment her mother opened the door.
‘I thought it would be you, dear,’ she said, and gave her daughter a pecking kiss. ‘Come in and shut the door; the damp makes the oilcloth look so dull, and I’ve only done it this morning. Well, I hope you’ve found somewhere nice for us; you didn’t say much in your letter. Better go up and put your things away; tea’s just on ready. Reg will be here any time after five; he’s got forty-eight hours again. It’s nice having him, of course, but I do wish they’d give you longer notice. I’ve just sent his eiderdown to be cleaned, and Mrs Burrows and I were going to do his room to-morrow. But it can’t be helped. Margaret! You’ve dropped this.’
Margaret came down the stairs again to take the glove her mother was holding out.
‘I can’t say your holiday seems to have done you much good; you look half asleep,’ said Mrs Steggles, glancing at her sharply and discontentedly. ‘Sitting up half the night talking with Hilda, I suppose. Well, hurry up and get washed; I want my tea, and I want to hear all about the house. How we’re going to get everything packed up and ready in three weeks I don’t know. Still, it’s got to be done, so I suppose it will be. Don’t leave the bathroom untidy, dear, it was only done this morning.’