I decided not to depend on Santa to bring me a copy of Minnie's Room: The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, which was my hope after I finished reading the Wartime Stories. Santa can be pretty generous, but that doesn't always include ordering books from the UK. The next best thing is borrowing a library copy. This is yet another marvelous collection of more slice of life stories, where Panter-Downes turns a keen and perceptive eye once again towards British middle-class life, which was irrevocably changed in the aftermath of World War II. I've read a smattering now of Mollie Panter-Downes's fiction, which is very revealing. She's so adept at portraying her characters honestly, blemishes and all, whilst still making them believable and sympathetic. Granted she writes about that class of people she knows best, but she does it so well you can't fault her. It's put very nicely in the introduction.
"The stories in Minnie's Room have a subtle, very English depth of observation: they are revealing of their time but also suggestive and funny, beautifully written explorations of the response to change, and of loneliness, loss and self-deception."
A few facts I've learned which are good to keep in mind: these ten stories were written for the New Yorker between 1947 and 1965. She wrote (I believe) exclusively for the New Yorker--literally hundreds of columns, short stories and poems over the course of her life. The stories of Minnie's Room came after her beautifully rendered novel, One Fine Day, which subtly evokes an England amidst great change. It's a natural progression that these stories continue to tell that story. The period after the war was known as "The Age of Austerity". The war may have been over but rationing was still in place. "The Labour Government was seeking to build its 'New Jerusalem': in a few short months it laid the foundation for the Welfare State, set up the National Health Service and brought coal, electricity, gas, and railways into public ownership." The middle class bore the cost of most of these changes. Their taxes were at about the same rate as during wartime. Life as they knew it was changing for better or worse, and it is this Britain Panter-Downes writes about.
It's impossible to discuss the stories in any great detail in one short post, but I'd like to mention a few of my favorites. The titular story, "Minnie's Room" is about an "ugly Londoner" who had worked as a cook for one family for over 25 years. If by her 45th birthday she hadn't married, she planned to quit and get a room of her own and enjoy her remaining years independently. Of course the family, consisting of parents and a spinster daughter, can't understand why she would leave such a lovely home.
'Damn it! exploded Mr Sothern. 'We ought to be life enough for her! She oughtn't to need anything else.'
Who could they possibly find to take her very capable place? She fills her small room overlooking a "green cloud of a lime tree" with inexpensive seconds and cast offs and thinks of the lovely smell that will fill her room from the tree. What's most poignant is the spinster daughter has feelings of envy upon visiting her, well knowing this is an independence she's not likely to see in her situation, so you wonder who's benefiting and who's losing out in the end.
In "I'll Blow Your House Down" a young widow must prepare her house for sale after the unexpected death of her husband. Taking her little daughters to live with her own parents she faces a life she hadn't planned. The prospective buyers of her home see only an empty house that they can reshape and mold into something that will be unrecognizable to her.
"I shall go back and corner Mr Wolfe, she thought, and say that I have changed my mind. I cannot sell to those people. The trees, the grass, the white house at her back, all seemed to make their separate thin cries of of protest at being abandoned to the Dentons."
It's the Denton's sweet little old dog who sits happily with her in the yard that she imagined taking over her house--"grey, shadowy , fitting quietly into the picture without disturbing a single line." In the end she makes the only choice she has open to her as someone who needs the money now that she's alone.
Although there's a sad air of finality that hangs over so many of these stories, my favorite is one that's quite wistful. Is there such a thing as a coming of age short story? Perhaps one where knowledge is gained through the simplest of actions. In "What the Wild Waves are Saying?" two young cousins spend their annual summer holidays taking in the famous country air along the coast. Every year the hotel is filled with the same faithful visitors. This year promises excitement however, with the addition of newlyweds.
"We knew that love was the unique experience of the brave and the fair, and, brooding over our own youth and physical shortcomings, we could only trust blindly in the miracle-working properties of time (again our reading provided comforting examples) to turn clumsy goslings into graceful swans. Now, we thought, we would see the romantic fulfillment at close quarters."
But their first sight of the lovers is appallingly disappointing as the pair were as unromantic as they come. The bridegroom in a badly fitting suit with the look about him of a clerk and the bride a spectacled, plain girl sporting a tailored costume of a hideous shade of puce. And they seemed the most ordinary of couples sitting together reading detective stories. But when the narrator catches the pair in an unstudied and private moment she'll learn what love and romance really mean and that it's not just superficially pretty people who experience it. This is one of her most beautiful stories and probably my favorite of the entire lot that I've read by her. It's a pity the book will have to go back and this story with it.
My library has her London War Notes, 1939-1945, which I believe are her columns from the New Yorker, which I guess will be what I turn to next. I'll soon be running out of reading material by Mollie Panter-Downes and will have to try interlibrary loan once again to look for her other out of print novels. If you've not read her, she's well worth searching out!