Love in the Sun - Leo Walmsley

Love in the Sun is a novel about a young couple in love, trying to make a new life for themselves far from the troubles of their past. I'll call the narrator Leo because he is never named & the book seems to be based on the author's own life. Leo & his girlfriend, Dain, have been living in a Yorkshire fishing village, Bramblewick. Leo's marriage has broken down & the resulting scandal means that the lovers have to leave Bramblewick while they wait for his divorce to come through. They want to live in Cornwall & the book opens with Leo searching for a place to live on a cold Christmas Day with very little money in his pocket. He arrives in St Jude, a fishing village near Porthkerris & discovers an ex-army hut in a secluded cove. He arranges to rent it very cheaply from the local boatbuilders, the Hoskins family, & he agrees to work on the hut & the garden.

Dain soon joins him & they begin work. The hut is in terrible condition but Joe Hoskins gives them the materials they need to start work & sells them anything else they need very cheaply. Their first night is a disaster with rain coming in on them as they sleep so obviously fixing the roof becomes their top priority. One of the charms of the book is reading about how they set about making the hut into a home. Leo & Dain are resourceful & handy, able to make furniture from boxes, remove interior partitions to open up the interior & also work on the garden to provide vegetables & flowers. They rescue a kitten, thrown overboard from a container ship & name her Choo-i. They explore the coast & coves in a dilapidated boat & dream of the cruiser they will own someday & the trips they will take.

At first, they're apprehensive about their circumstances becoming common knowledge. Leo has also left some debts behind in Bramblewick &, although he intends to pay them, he wants to be left in peace to make his new life. Dain is endlessly enthusiastic about every obstacle they encounter. She seems to be much younger than Leo, who has a more realistic idea of their predicament, although he's not above being caught up in her enthusiasms even when they lead to near disaster. Gradually their seclusion calms their fears. They realize that they're probably the objects of village gossip, especially when it becomes known that Leo is a writer but they ignore it. The unexpected arrival of a face from their Bramblewick past frightens them but they concentrate on their projects & plans for the future.

Leo writes his book, a novel about Bramblewick, & they wait anxiously for news from the publishers. The book is published, gets enthusiastic reviews but doesn't sell. He writes another book about his failed invention of a lobster-pot, which never got off the ground because of the economic depression. This is also enthusiastically reviewed but is not a best seller. They make ends meet by collecting bugs for a laboratory &, when all else fails, they live on sheep's head, the fish they catch & the vegetables & fruit they grow. In this way they can get by on very little money. They get married quietly when Leo's divorce comes through & have a daughter, Amelia. Leo begins another book, this time a memoir of his Yorkshire childhood & they rashly buy a boat to convert into a cruiser.

Love in the Sun is a charming book with a serious undertone. Set in the 1930s, the Depression is a constant theme. The Hoskins' boatbuilding business is at the point of collapse, they're always laying off workers who then have to go on the dole. Leo's lobster pot invention was another casualty of the economic situation. The resourcefulness of Leo & Dain, & the inhabitants of the Cornish villages was necessary if they were to make a living. Leo & Dain's love & faith in the future is strong enough to keep them positive as they tackle the many obstacles they confront them. This is a simply told story that deserves to be better known. I first heard of it through reading Fleur Fisher's enthusiastic review & it's since been reprinted by the Leo Walmsley Society. There's also a sequel, Paradise Creek, set some years later, which seems to be a more sober book. I've downloaded a sample chapter of it & I look forward to reading it soon.

Fair Stood the Wind for France - H E Bates

Apart from Bertie Plays the Blues, I can't remember the last modern novel I read. I've found myself mostly back in the 19th century with occasional forays into the early 20th. I also haven't read any non-fiction for some time, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia was the last, over a month ago. Reading the many Persephone titles written during WWI & WWII has spoiled me for modern fictional recreations of those times. I love reading a book where the author didn't know how the war would end. It gives the story such tension & immediacy, the same kind of immediacy I get from reading diaries & letters of the period.

Fair Stood the Wind for France is by H E Bates, probably better known these days for his Darling Buds Of May novels about the Larkin family. It's the story of John Franklin, a bomber pilot & his crew, forced to land in Occupied France on the way home from a raid. The camaraderie of the crew is quickly established as a routine flight home almost turns to tragedy when an air-screw comes loose & they have to make an emergency landing. Franklin lands in a marsh & while the others are uninjured, his arm is badly damaged. They set off to make their way south to Spain & home. When their food runs out, & Franklin's injury is slowing them down, they realise they will have to ask for help. They come to a mill where a young woman doesn't hesitate to take them in, feed them & hide them until her father can arrange for their escape. Franklin realises how dangerous their presence is. If the Germans find them, the airmen would be taken to a prison camp, the family would be shot.

At first, there is distrust on both sides. The airmen can't be sure that the family will not betray them to the Germans & the family must rely on the airmen to do as they're told & take no risks. The young woman, Françoise, & Franklin soon become close. She arranges for a doctor to see his arm & the scene where they go to the village to see him is full of tension. Françoise waits for Franklin in the church & he finds her there, praying for all of them,

'I had faith that you will get away safely, and I know that it can happen. I have prayed very hard for that.'
He did not know what to say. He felt small because of her simplicity and the great assurance behind the simplicity. She did not speak for a moment or two either. He knelt there looking at her sideways, watching her black hair curl against her face, and the lips firmly and quietly set in the shadow of her hands. As he knelt watching her the feeling of being watched and followed by someone no longer meant anything. It slipped away and seemed ridiculous. The hard tangle of events was smoothed away, too, with his fear.

The decision is made that the crew will try to escape but Franklin will have to stay until his wound has healed. These weeks of summer when Franklin's love for Françoise grows & the knowledge that, if he survives, he will have to leave her, are beautifully portrayed. Françoise is a resourceful young woman, fishing to supplement her family's poor diet, chatting to the German sentry on the bridge over the stream, all the time planning Franklin's escape. Franklin & Françoise make the most of their time together as the German patrols increase & the danger they are all in becomes palpable. As summer ends, Franklin finds himself longing for home,

The rain woke in him, as nothing else had woken in him, all his feeling for England. It was a longing deeper, at that moment, than his feelings for the girl; deeper than the mere desire for escape; deeper than the war, the things the war had done, and the desire for the war to be over. As he stood there all the memory of rain in England washed down through his blood and steadily increased the ache of homesickness until he was suddenly and utterly tired of the mill, the house, the river, and the flat French plain, tired of the smell of France, of speaking and thinking another language and, above all, of the complications. He felt all the Englishness of himself washed bare to the surface, clean and clear and simple as the rain.

This is a very understated novel.The terror of living under Occupation, the arbitrary nature of justice when 100 people can be taken hostage & 50 of them shot because a labour gang killed a German overseer. The fear that every visitor to the mill could be a spy. All this is conveyed very simply & unsensationally yet the atmosphere of long, hot summer days is always undercut with tension. The change of pace when Franklin & Françoise start on their journey is startling. I read the last half of the book in one sitting, I couldn't put it down. I loved this book & I'd recommend it to anyone who has read other novels & memoirs of the period.

There's a copy of Fair Stood the Wind For France available for purchase at Anglophile Books. I love the dustjacket on that copy, it's just beautiful

Villette - Charlotte Brontё

What is it about Charlotte Brontё’s voice that is so beguiling? I’ve just spent the last week in Charlotte’s company, reading Villette for the 5th or 6th time. After reading Margaret Oliphant’s views on the Brontё sisters & a recent issue of Brontё Studies (the journal of the Brontё Society) I knew it was time to revisit Villette & meet Lucy Snowe, M Paul, Madame Beck, John Graham Bretton, Ginevra Fanshawe & the spectral Nun again. I know that it’s not considered proper in critical circles to consider fiction as a form of veiled autobiography but in Charlotte Brontё’s case, I think I can claim an exception to the rule. Villette is full of Charlotte’s personal experiences. The evidence is there in her letters & the facts of her life as recounted by Elizabeth Gaskell in her biography of Charlotte.

Villette is the story of Lucy Snowe. We meet Lucy as a young girl, staying with her godmother, Mrs Bretton. Lucy’s life seems quite bleak. She seems to be shuttled from one relation to another & her visits to her godmother & her son, Graham, are an oasis of warmth & kindness. On this visit, a relation of Mrs Bretton, Mr Home, visits, bringing with him his small daughter, Polly, who will stay with the Brettons while he travels. Polly takes a fancy to Graham, who tolerates her fancies & allows himself to be adored. Mr Home returns, takes Polly away &, soon after, Lucy also retuns home & subsequently loses touch with the Brettons. Some years pass. Lucy is working as a companion to Miss Marchmont, an invalid who tells her the story of her own young life & lost love. When Miss Marchmont dies, Lucy is once more alone & friendless.

After hearing about schools in Villette on the Continent where English teachers are prized she decides to go there & look for work. On her journey, she meets Ginevra Fanshawe, a spoilt, pretty young woman, who is returning to school in Villette. She recommends Lucy try her luck with Madame Beck, the owner of the Pensionnat she attends. On arrival, Lucy gets lost but fortuitously finds her way to Madame Beck’s school & asks for work. She is engaged as nursemaid to Madame’s children but, after the English master incurs Madame’s displeasure, she becomes the English teacher. Lucy’s life at the Pensionnat is not unhappy. She has a healthy respect for Madame Beck even though she discovers that she runs the whole concern on a system of surveillance & spying, even going through Lucy’s belongings. She finds her feet as a teacher & has a friendship with Ginevra that amuses & irritates her in equal measure.

Lucy’s essential solitude begins to affect her health, especially when she is left alone in the school during the long vacation. She falls ill in body & spirit & is driven by her need for some human contact, to confess to a Catholic priest in the cathedral. This is a radical act for such a confirmed Protestant & she immediately regrets it. On her way back to the Pensionnat, she collapses & when she wakes, finds herself in a strange room that is also familiar. She has been rescued by the young English doctor, known to all as Dr John, & brought to his mother’s house. Lucy has already guessed that this young man is the Graham Bretton she knew in childhood although he doesn’t recognize her (& the reader has had no clue). Her godmother is pleased to be reunited with Lucy & her life begins to open up & become more social as she visits concerts, art galleries & theatres with the Brettons. She is also a witness to Graham’s infatuation with Ginevra & Ginevra’s flirting with both Graham & another foppish young man, Alfred de Hamal. As Lucy’s feelings for Graham become more intense, she finds herself relying on the letters he has promised to write to her when she returns to the Pensionnat.

Madame Beck’s cousin is also a teacher at the Pensionnat. M Paul Emanuel is an irascible, fiery man, vain, dictatorial but essentially kind-hearted. Gradually he becomes a friend & sometime antagonist to Lucy, bullying her into taking part in a school play & disapproving of her relationship with Graham. Lucy comes to realise that Graham’s feelings for her are no more than friendship & she symbolically buries her heart along with his letters beneath the pear tree in the garden where she likes to sit in the evenings. Lucy’s feelings for M Paul also change, becoming deeper & more serious. However, Madame Beck does not approve of their growing closeness & will do all she can to keep them apart.

Describing the plot of Villette doesn’t convey the flavour of the book. To me, all the interest & charm lies in the narrative voice & the knowledge of Charlotte’s life that informs the fiction. There is so much that mirrors Charlotte Brontё’s own experiences, there are echoes of her letters everywhere. Villette is based on Brussels where Charlotte & her sister, Emily, spent time teaching in a Pensionnat run by M & Mme Heger. Charlotte returned to Brussels for a further year without Emily & she found herself falling in love with M Heger. It’s impossible to say that M Heger is M Paul or that Mme Heger is Mme Beck but the characters were certainly based on Charlotte’s feelings about the Hegers – her love for Monsieur & hatred of Madame.

Graham & Mrs Bretton were similarly based on her publisher, George Smith, & his mother. George Smith acknowledged this, saying that Mrs Bretton was an exact picture of his mother, down to some of her favourite sayings & expressions. Charlotte’s feelings for George Smith have been a subject of much speculation. She certainly admired him & may have hoped to marry him. Her portrait of Graham Bretton is very honest about his faults & superficial nature & must have been uncomfortable for Smith to read. Charlotte’s journey to Brussels mirrors Lucy’s journey on the packet boat. Her mental torment, leading to the confession in the cathedral was based on Charlotte’s own experience which she wrote about in a letter to Emily. Charlotte also went to the theatre & was amazed & horrified by the performance of a great dramatic actress, just as Lucy is.

The plot of Villette shocked many reviewers at the time. Lucy falls in love with one man & then falls in love with another. This is not the conventional plot of a three volume Victorian novel. The heroine is not supposed to change her mind about her lovers in quite such an independent way. Harriet Martineau famously wrote, in a review that upset Charlotte so much that she broke off their friendship,

... so incessant is the writer’s tendency to describe the need of being loved, that the heroine, who tells her own story, leaves the reader at last under the uncomfortable impression of her having either entertained a double love, or allowed one to supersede another without notification of the transition. It is not thus in real life.

Well, I don't know about real life, but it certainly wasn't meant to be that way in fiction! Actually, the moment when Lucy falls out of love with Graham is very clear. He is trying to convince Lucy to intercede for him with a young woman, to remind her of their former acquaintance.

‘Could I manage to make you ever grateful?’ said I. ‘NO, I could not .’ And I felt my fingers work and my hands interlock: I felt, too, an inward courage, warm and resistant. In this matter I was not disposed to gratify Dr John: not at all. With a now welcome force, I realized his entire misapprehension of my character and nature. He wanted always to give me a rôle not mine. Nature and I opposed him. He did not at all guess what I felt: he did not read my eyes, or face, or gestures; though, I doubt not, all spoke.

In those few sentences, Lucy sees Graham’s self-centredness, his self-satisfaction, his belief in his own charm, very clearly & she realises that she doesn’t love him.

Lucy does keep vital information from the reader, she’s a very secretive narrator, she certainly doesn't take the reader into her confidence. We don’t know anything about her family. Why is she alone at the beginning of the book? Why does she lose touch with her godmother? Why doesn’t she tell us when she recognizes Graham Bretton in the Dr John of Villette (there’s a hint but I’m not sure now if I recognized it when I first read the book). Lucy is crabby, secretive, sometimes ridiculous, self-sabotaging & stubborn. Yet, I feel she’s closer to Charlotte Brontё than even Jane Eyre. Her voice is entirely original & entirely her own. The sense of crushing loneliness & despair in Lucy always reminds me of Charlotte alone with  her father in the Parsonage after all her siblings were dead, walking around the dining room table alone where once she had walked with her sisters as they discussed their work. The ending of the book is famously ambiguous. Apparently Patrick Brontё begged his daughter to leave the reader with some hope of Lucy's happiness. Charlotte obeyed her father but only the most optimistic reader could take much hope from the end of the novel.

Charlotte said that she wanted a cold name for her heroine & she was called Lucy Frost for a great part of the writing of the novel. As always in Charlotte Brontё’s work though, frost is mixed with fire & passion. No wonder the critics were astounded & bemused by the Brontё sisters & their books & weren’t at all sure about the sex of the author. Imagine reading Jane Eyre, Villette, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall or Wuthering Heights for the first time in an age when there were very definite rules as to how a heroine behaved & what she said & thought. Jane, Lucy, Helen Huntingdon & Catherine Earnshaw were created from the imaginations of three extraordinary women. I read their books over & over again & never feel I’ve got to the end of their fascination.

The Royal Wedding

On the day of the wedding of Prince William & Kate Middleton, here are a few of my favourite pictures from royal weddings of the past. Queen Victoria famously proposed to Prince Albert (photo above from ann-lauren.blogspot.com) and her dress set the fashion for white wedding dresses when they married in 1840.

Victoria & Albert's eldest son, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales married Alexandra of Denmark in 1863 (photo from goodhousekeeping.com). A beautiful bride & another wedding that stopped the nation.

Queen Victoria's granddaughter, Alix of Hesse married Tsar Nicholas II in 1894 (photo from ann-lauren.blogspot.com). A marriage that began & ended in tragedy but Nicholas & Alexandra were a devoted couple, very much in love until their deaths during the Russian Revolution.

I'll be sitting up tonight to watch the whole thing. Luckily, it all begins at about 7.30pm Melbourne time so I won't have to prop my eyes open to stay awake. Abby & I will settle down with a pot of tea & enjoy all the pageantry. Fingers crossed that it doesn't rain.