I've added a new author to my list of favorites, Mollie Panter-Downes. I've just finished reading One Fine Day, which is a gorgeously written book about an ordinary midlands family. Mollie Panter-Downes considered herself more of a journalist than a novelist. She wrote a "Letter from London" column for the New Yorker from 1939-1984. Apparently she was almost better known to American audiences than British, though she had also written several novels and works of nonfiction.
One Fine Day is a slender novel. It's quite thoughtful. There's not much dialogue, but there's lots of reminiscences and observations. Much of the novel is made up of these beautifully descriptive passages. The story begins:
"The day promised to be hot."
"The village was no great distance from the sea. Hikers who went toiling up the chalk track among the foxgloves and the cooked thorns to the top of Barrow Down could see it, like a grey-blue rim to a green saucer, but the green, snug in its leafiness which the circle of low hills protected. Here, the presence of the sea could be felt only as a sort of salty vibration in the air, like a watch ticking in the pocket reminding the landlubber of his island's destiny."
The story takes place over the course of one fine summer's day in 1946, in a victorious Britain still suffering from the effects of WWII. The war is over, and really it's far from the action of the story, but it does linger a bit in the small details. As a matter of fact there really isn't a lot of action at all in the story. Although only one day passes, we're given a compelling view of what Britain (or one small corner of it anyway) must have felt like in 1946. Much of the novel is made up of observations of the Marshall family, Laura primarily, but also Stephen and their daughter Victoria. I really liked Laura. In some small way I could identify with her. She's 38 and feeling slightly shabby. Her hair's turning grey and she likens herself to an old sofa. She sees herself through the eyes of a handsome young villager, whom she asks to come work in her garden.
"He looked at her amiably, as though she were a nice sofa. That must be the penalty of the grey hairs, the tired shadows under the eyes, that must be the beginning of getting old. She had noticed it. Young men looked at you as though you were a nice sofa, an article of furniture which they would never be desirous of acquiring. The signal flags were hauled down, the lights went out, all commerce between the sexes to cease forthwith."
The family lives in Wealding, close enough to London so Stephen can travel in daily, but they're still in the countryside. Their once grand house is slowly crumbling. In a small way the novel is a portrait of a vanished England, though perhaps it is more correct to say a changing England. Laura's parents sound like typical Edwardian types, somewhat aristocratic and used to living a certain way. A way that by the end of WWII has all but disappeared. While they hold on to the last vestiges of pre-war Britain, Laura and Stephen come to the realization that they must move forward with the times. I love this passage where Stephen is thinking about their house:
"And it suddenly struck him as preposterous how dependent he and his class had been on the anonymous caps and aprons who lived out of sight and worked the strings. All his life he had expected to find doors opened if he rang, to wake up to the soft rattle of curtain rings being drawn back, to find the fires bright and the coffee smoking hot every morning as though household spirits had been working while he slept. And now the strings had been dropped, they all lay helpless as abandoned marionettes with nobody to twitch them."
Victoria is young enough that she has little concept of what life was like prior to the war and has already learned to live in a different sort of society. The younger people, like the handsome young villager who can't be convinced to come work in their garden, are all leaving Wealding.
Over the course of the day Stephen will take the train into a hot and uncomfortable London. Victoria is off to school, and Laura takes care of the necessary household duties and errands. She does the shopping, though the choice is limited and some foods are scarce. When something as exotic as oranges make an appearance, word goes out and Laura thinks only of Victoria.
"As for Victoria, she lived for food. At school the little girls boasted and bragged, chinking the small change of the extra orange, the rare iced cake, which life would harden later into the currency of the better motor-car, the more satisfactory husband."
Laura must go off looking for their runaway dog and meets with neighbors and friends. She's tied to the household, but nothing is like before the war and everything seems to take twice as long to accomplish. This is such an evocative book and I could go on and on about it. It's left quite an impression with me--such an interesting slice of post-war British life. It fits in so well with other books I've read this year.
I'm happy to see that One Fine Day is still in print (thanks Virago), and I highly recommend it! I'll be looking for anything else I can find by her, including two books of short stories published by Persephone Books, Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes and Minnie's Room (the only other books I've found still in print!). I've also requested a copy of her first novel The Shoreless Sea, which has been compared to Rosamund Lehmann's, Dusty Answer (though the Lehmann was written four years later) through ILL. And my library has a copy of her London War Notes, which I've already grabbed from the shelves. That should keep me busy for a while. Perhaps it's time to move on to Rosamund Lehmann's work next, as I believe she writes about this era as well.