I have just finished reading House-Bound, a novel by Winifred Peck. It was chosen by Sara Maitland for a recent edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme, A Good Read.
Written in 1942 it tells the story of Rose Fairlaw, a woman born to privilege who suddenly finds herself, in middle age, having to manage without servants, her last two live-in maids having gone off to work for better pay & conditions in a munitions factory.
Not a very enticing description, as Michael Morpurgo, the other guest on that edition of A Good Read who thereby found himself duty-bound to read it, freely admitted.
But what a revelation when you do read it. We have sympathy for Rose when, in response to an incredulous But didn’t your mother even make sure you could cook? reflected that her mid-Victorian mother would simply never have been able to imagine that her daughter’s household would not contain, among others, a vegetable maid, a scullery maid & a kitchen maid. So Rose, when needs must, finds herself surreptitiously having to watch out of the corner of her eye to see ‘whether you used hot or cold water for the ablution of potatoes & ‘veg’ & if you did or didn’t use soap.’
Rose & Stuart, her husband, had each been married before – Rose to a dashing young officer who died in WWI leaving her with a baby daughter. Her best friend, mother to a new-born son, died of pneumonia, so Rose had thrown herself (with plenty of help from servants) into caring for the two babies. When the widowed Stuart returned from his war service &, in due course proposed, she accepted this most suitable arrangement for two half-orphaned children & their remaining grief-stricken parents.
One of the more interesting aspects of this novel – written by a sixty year old woman & published twenty years before the Lady Chatterley judgement – is the way that it deals with sex, of which there is quite a lot in the book. So we read that, having assumed that she was entering a marriage of convenience between two people each mourning the loss of the great love of their life, Rose was ‘surprised that Stuart suggested a honeymoon at all, & still more surprised at the honeymoon itself.’ and that since Stuart’s ‘simple masculine attitudes about graves & beds were entirely different from her own … she accepted them dutifully.’
Would explicit description of the exact details of her surprise add anything worth reading to this?
The book is in turn funny, tender, tragic. Although obviously not another Middlemarch, I quite often found myself thinking of Dorothea in this tale of courage in all its guises & circumstance. It also makes for an interesting comparison with the last volume of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles, which too deals with women of the privileged middle classes coming to terms with doing their own housework & fending for themselves in a very different world after WWII had ended.
The novel also struck me as very Priestley-esque, with the bumptious, plain spoken American taking the part of the picaresque hero.
Well worth a read indeed - & currently being reprinted according to the publisher’s website.
