The House on the Cliff - D E Stevenson

The House on the Cliff (cover picture from here) is the story of a young girl who is left with nothing when her mother dies but finds herself & a future in an old house at the seaside.

Elfrida Ware is trying to make a living as an actress. She's not a very good actress but her father, Frederick Thistlewood, was on the stage & her mother, Marjory, worked behind the scenes & there doesn't seem to be very much else that she can do. Frederick has long since left his family & Elfrida & her mother have been living precariously in a boarding house run by the flamboyant Miss Martineau. Marjory has just died & Elfrida's latest part is in a not very good play. She's only staying because of her infatuation with the leading man, Glen Siddons.

Miss Martineau sees an advertisement in the paper from a lawyer looking for Marjory Thistlewood &, knowing Elfrida's story, encourages her to go along & find out what it's all about. Elfrida reluctantly goes to see Mr Robert Sandford & discovers that she has inherited Mountain Cross, her mother's family home. Marjory's parents had disowned her when she eloped with Frederick Thistlewood & her father never forgave her. After his death, her mother desperately wanted to get in touch but all Mr Sandford's enquiries were fruitless. Now, old Mrs Ware is dead & Elfrida has inherited Mountain Cross. Mr Sandford advises Elfrida to sell the house as there's very little money or land. Her grandfather had lost money on bad investments & sold off most of the land. Without the farmland, there's no way to make the house self-supporting.

Elfrida decides to go down to Devonshire & see the house. She's missing her mother, unhappy at the theatre & Miss Martineau has advised her to forget about Glen. Leaving London seems to be the best plan so, Mr Sandford's nephew & junior partner, Ronnie, drives Elfrida down to see Mountain Cross. Elfrida immediately loves the house & is warmly welcomed by all the locals. The housekeeper, Emma Chowne & her husband, Ernie, are very welcoming & seem keen for her to stay on. Even when Elfrida confesses that she has no money, the Chownes offer to stay on for the use of their flat in the house & the chance for Ernie to raise pigs. Ernie was traumatised by his wartime experiences & doesn't speak. He feels uncomfortable anywhere but at Mountain Cross & Emma, who talks constantly, is happy to have them both settled in a familiar place.

Elfrida soon settles in to life at Mountain Cross. She knows she will have very little income when her grandmother's estate is settled but she begins to make a few improvements, knowing in her heart that she will never be able to leave. Everyone in the village wants to make life easy for her. A local man offers to tidy up the overgrown copse & be paid in timber. She's welcomed by the local gentry who had been a little apprehensive about an actress coming among them. Of course, as soon as Elfrida puts on tweeds & a pearl necklace, she's one of them, even though she has grown up living a very different kind of life. This is a D E Stevenson novel, after all. Nothing truly awful ever happens (if you don't count Elfrida almost drowning, not once, but twice).

Elfrida soon has several suitors. Ronnie Leighton is obviously smitten but conscious of the fact that he's very much a junior partner, has no money & is living with his widowed mother who expects him to marry a childhood friend called Anthea. Lucius Bebbington is a neighbour who is kind & helpful with gardening & then Glen Siddons arrives with his neglected young son, Patrick, in tow & settles down for a visit. She even has a visit from her cousin, Walter Whitgreave, who has lived in Canada most of his life & was once considered to be old Mr Ware's heir. Elfrida's lack of money is always there in the background but there's a fairytale ending that puts everything right.

The House on the Cliff  is a gentle story with all the elements that I enjoy in D E Stevenson's books. I especially loved the house. Books with houses in them always interest me & even though Elfrida doesn't transform the house, the house, the countryside, the sea & the people she meets transform her from a lonely, tired waif into a young woman with a future, a home & a family. The Chownes are also wonderful characters. Old family retainers who know all the family secrets & are fiercely loyal to Elfrida from the moment she arrives. The House on the Cliff  was published in 1966 but the atmosphere is very 1930s. This seems to be true of all the Stevensons I've read so far. Unless they're set very specifically during the war, they all seem to be set in the 30s.

I read The House on the Cliff thanks to Open Library. I've only just discovered Open Library thanks to a mention in this review of Stevenson's The English Air at Fleur's blog. When I investigated, I found many ebooks available for loan, including several Stevensons that I haven't read & that are out of print. It's free to sign up & you can read the EPub or PDF ebooks on an ereader that uses Adobe Digital Editions or, if you search on an iPad or tablet, you can read the ebooks in iBooks or Overdrive (thanks to a YouTube video for helping me with this! What did we ever do without YouTube?) I now have yet another wishlist in Open Library with titles by Stevenson, R F Delderfield, Ruth Adam, Angela Thirkell, Catherine Gaskin & Elizabeth Goudge (including her autobiography, The Joy of the Snow, recently read by Cornflower). The books have been scanned from library copies so there are a few glitches (y came out as v) but The House on the Cliff was perfectly readable & I'm so glad to have had a chance to read it.