This is another used book that I bought at the English bookstore in Paris when I went there to visit my mother and she abandoned me the day after I arrived.1
This book takes place just before and then during the early days of WWII. It opens with the wedding of Rose, the spoilt eldest daughter of the Head of a boys school, renowned for her ability to make even the most level-headed of the oldest schoolboys and the youngest schoolmasters fall in love with her and lose their minds. (In that order.)
In this case, however, she has met her match with “old boy”, Fairweather Senior. Her mother, seizing the moment, sweeps Rose off to London for “such an orgy of dress-buying that even Rose’s delicate frame, proof against a twenty-four hour day of cinemas, driving in fast cars, dancing and nightclubs and listening to the wireless at full blast while she talked to all her friends, was slightly affected.” That, in addition to her devotion to learning a particularly annoying musical instrument, distracts her enough that she doesn’t have time to break off her engagement and fall in love with someone else.
Her father is additionally distracted by several other trials: first, the older boys are all swept away by the romantic idea of joining the armed forces and sacrificing themselves in the war and they are throwing themselves against the fact that the armed forces don’t want them at their young age yet2; second, he has been asked, in the event that London is evacuated, to take in an urban boys’ school, consisting of working class boys, with all the challenges of finding rooms for the boys, housing for masters who don’t share their social mores, and rearranging the classrooms and schedules to allow both schools to function; thirdly, his staff is at risk of being drafted, leaving him short of teachers and without a secretary.
Don’t worry, it all works out in the end, hilariously.
The masters are more than able to manage the boys eager for derring-do; they manage to figure out the logistics of housing and class-rooming the boys, find adequate housing for the masters; and a friend – a writer disorganized of conversation and mind3 – has given up her own nearby house to a London friend with a young family, and comes to stay at the school and act as the headmaster’s secretary. The wedding goes off without a hitch, the new son-in-law more than able to manage his silly new wife. And, as a bonus, the headmaster’s other daughter (who is in the habit of developing crushes on the most awful young men) marries her new brother-in-law’s younger brother, Fairweather Junior, leaving the headmaster and his wife free to focus on other responsibilities.
This book has one of my favorite scenes in this series – and, in fact, in any book.
In this scene, we see Lydia, a young woman who, throughout earlier books, has been a bumptious young filly, winning coconut shies at fairs, riding merry-go-rounds endlessly, and treating any spare bachelor as someone she can coopt into helping to round up chairs, clean boathouses, or do any other number of chores, without a romantic bone in her body, tearing the sleeves of her dresses and getting mud on her shoes at the same time.
Throughout this book, Lydia’s bosom buddies have all gone on to exciting war work at hospitals, or as land girls, or WRENs. Lydia’s father was killed in a foolish accident – stepping into a street between two parked cars on a dark night, something many of us do without thinking about it, and getting struck by a car whose driver couldn’t see him – and Lydia’s brother is single-handedly holding down the family law firm in town.
Her mother has developed “a heart” which, by her behavior, seems to indicate frailty plus the onset of Alzheimer’s. The men who worked on her parent’s estate have mostly gone off to war, and the house staff is down to bare bones. So, rather than join her friends on their adventures, Lydia has stayed home, where she tends the land and the house, manages her mother’s social calendar, ensuring that her mother has enough sewing parties to keep her occupied, without so much that she’s overwhelmed.
One day a week, Lydia volunteers at a local soup kitchen, which has the mission of feeding all the children who have been evacuated from London and come to stay in their town. Together with other volunteers, Lydia cooks rabbit stew, cuts up canned cake and pours pudding over it, and fills glasses half-full with lemonade – which the stinky children refuse to eat and spill all over and smear on the tables before rushing out of the hall. Then, with a diminishing number of coworkers, Lydia cleans up, as one by one the other volunteers make excuses and slip away.
Noel, one of the county’s most eligible bachelors (and one of the men that Lydia coopts for chores), a barrister who has been invited to join the intelligence corps, drops by unexpectedly to give Lydia a ride home. When Noel enters the room, she has just taken a seat on a wooden chair, while folding her apron. “For one moment, her hands lay slack on the flowered bundle and she looked down.”
It’s the first time Noel has ever seen her sit still with her hands in front of her and realizes that she “could feel fatigue or strain. […] When she sat so still for a moment, her hands idle on the folded coverall in her hap, he had seen what he had never seen before, a Lydia putting down her burden before she shouldered it again.”
It throws him for a loop. He begins to worry about her and he wants to reach out, to tell her that he’s worried about her. But he’s not in a position to do anything about his worry, and neither is she: sharing it would only add to her burden. And so he says nothing.
But he begins to think about Lydia in a different way, as an adult, rather than a child. As a woman.
Something about this passage strikes my heart. I like to think of the hard-working, if ungraceful, young woman winning the heart of the committed bachelor.
- See February post about Northbridge Rectory. ↩︎
- Easy to say when the war hasn’t started yet. ↩︎
- I always wonder if Thirkell created this character as a way of poking gentle fun at herself. The character often tells people that her books are all “exactly the same” – much like Thirkell’s own Barsetshire series. Kind of like Ariadne Oliver (book not movie) and Agatha Christie. ↩︎
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