Henrietta Sees it Through by Joyce Dennys

I read Henrietta’s War a few months ago and absolutely loved it, despite wishing it was a little more realistic about the difficulties of life on the Home Front. So when I was offered the chance to pick some books from Bloomsbury’s catalogue, Henrietta Sees it Through was the main title I knew I would definitely want to read from their selection.  As I expected, I was not disappointed; I actually thought it was better than Henrietta’s War, largely because it is much more candid about the hardships of living in a world at war. Though it hasn’t lost the jovial and witty tone of its prequel, Henrietta Sees it Through is tinged with a melancholic note of weariness and worry that made it feel much more heartfelt and genuine to me.

This volume of letters from Henrietta, a middle aged provincial doctor’s wife and mother of two grown up children, to her childhood friend Robert, a soldier at the front, chronicles the last three years of the war, from late 1942 to 1945. For the inhabitants of Henrietta’s Devonshire village, life is becoming increasingly frustrating as shortages continue, loved ones are killed, terrifying air raids occur with more frequency, and the war drags interminably on. Henrietta, Charles and their neighbours; the kindly, good natured elderly widow Lady B, the curt Mrs Savernack, the Colonel and his wife, the Admiral and his wife, the flirtatious Faith and the smitten Conductor, are carrying on as best they can, and Henrietta captures their characters and the often hilarious every day events of life with her usual dry humour. However, the underlying tension of life lived in a period of such uncertainty frequently makes itself known in the form of bad tempers and snappy comments, often in one of the queues at the shops, and sometimes coming to blows. I particularly loved it when a horrified Henrietta is told by no nonsense Mrs Savernack that she must donate some of her books to the Red Cross bank – Henrietta’s inability to give up any of her beloved books, before giving in, only to be told that they will be pulped – made me both laugh and rejoice in the fact that Joyce Dennys was clearly a kindred spirit when it comes to loving books like they are children. I also enjoyed the lamentations of poor Lady B, who was turned away from the V.A.Ds for being too old, and whose only contribution to the war effort can be knitting jumpers, which she finds highly unexciting.

There are some interesting asides about women’s roles during the war; many of the female characters desperately want to do something useful to help the war effort, but for those over a certain age, all they can do is knitting, bandage rolling or committee attending, and Henrietta and her friends find this incredibly frustrating and also guilt inducing. It reminded me of Laura in One Fine Day’s comment that during wars ‘men fight, women sew’.  Though younger women could be nurses and ambulance drivers and all sorts of things in the various women’s auxiliary forces, women with children or those past forty were not allowed to do anything much but keep the home fires burning. Their sense of frustration at being stuck at home, making the best out of their meagre rations and waiting for news while their sons and husbands were out fighting for their lives must have been difficult to cope with. The belief that the women must stay at home and wait passively for the men to decide their fate on the battlefields is still very prevalent today, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. From what I understand, the British army still bans women from frontline combat. While this is very gallant it still upholds the notion that women are the weaker sex, and need to be protected. I don’t have a problem with being protected or cared for by a man; I’m not against gentlemanly behaviour by any means, but I know that if I didn’t entirely disagree with wars and were the type to join the army, I’d be more than peeved to be denied the active role I was equally qualified for just because people can’t cope with the idea of women being killed in combat. I’d be interested to hear other people’s views on this.

Anyway, I found this underlying sense of frustration and guilt among the villagers quite moving; despite the sacrifices they have made and the private griefs they have suffered, they feel they have had an easy time of it compared to their city dwelling friends and so aren’t really in a position to complain, even though they frequently have just cause to. This leads them to constantly hide their fears and troubles from one another, putting on a mask of good cheer, and the effort of doing so adds to the sense of general weariness they already feel. No matter how cheery Henrietta is to Robert, and how amusing the events she describes, she can’t hide how fed up  everyone is at having their lives on hold and potential doom ever waiting around the corner. This realism is what takes Henrietta Sees it Through to another level, and when there is a sad loss to two of the characters, you really will feel it along with them. In these letters, the flippancy I found a little insensitive in Henrietta’s War has well and truly disappeared, replaced with a still very funny, cosy and excellently characterised novel, but one that is unafraid to show just how difficult living through a war was. As such I think it is really an unmissable and wonderful read for anyone who has an interest in life on the Home Front but also enjoys a critical eye that can lampoon the often difficult circumstances of a country at war; I know I’ll return to it time and time again. Plus, the illustrations add an extra layer of delightfulness to the text, and I particularly loved the drawings of the well endowed Lady B!

Just as an aside, is there anyone else who has noticed a lot of novels written in the 1930s have young female characters called Linnet, like the bird? I first noticed it in Illyrian Spring, then I saw it’s an Agatha Christie character’s name, and it’s in Henrietta’s War (Henrietta’s daughter), and another book from the 1930’s that I can’t remember but know I’ve read it in. I have never met anyone called Linnet or seen the name in use anywhere outside of mid century novels, but I’d be interested to know whether it was a name particularly en vogue during the period, or simply a coincidence! If anyone can enlighten me, I’d be most grateful!

Carol by Patricia Highsmith

Well, this is a departure from the usual genre of books I read, but as I am embracing change of late, I thought why not read a thrilling Patricia Highsmith novel rather than yet another cosy mid century domestic saga? I requested Carol from Alice at Bloomsbury (after she asked me if I would like some books) as not only was I keen to try a Patricia Highsmith, but I was also intrigued by the rather sinister sounding premise, and by the fact that it is set in New York, which, as you know, is of quite some interest to me at this present moment in time! It looks very smart and sophisticated from the front cover, and that’s exactly what it is; a slick, elegant, excellently written tale that manages to be both profoundly unsettling and yet somehow wonderfully romantic, all at the same time.

Therese Belivet is a nineteen year old with no family, a boyfriend she’s not really interested in, and a depressing job on the toy counter in a New York department store. She’s young, intelligent, attractive, and utterly bored with her life. Therese is at her counter dealing with the Christmas rush of frantic parents one afternoon when she sees a woman come out of the lift opposite. Blonde, wealthy, elegant, and beautiful, Carol Aird is a thirtysomething divorcee, and without any warning, in the instant they lock eyes, Therese loses her heart to her. Therese sells her a doll, and as Carol wants it sent, she leaves her address. Her heart filled with an indescribable, totally unexpected happiness at knowing that she has fallen head over heels in love, Therese decides to send Carol a Christmas card. She doesn’t expect a response, but she gets one; Carol phones the store, and delighted at the absurdity of the situation, invites Therese for a Christmas drink.

From this drink blossoms an unlikely romance tinged friendship. Therese becomes obsessed with Carol; every moment of the day that’s not spent with her is filled with boredom and dreariness. She can’t bear to be with her over amorous boyfriend Richard any more, whose constant declarations of love she finds suffocating. However, though it’s obvious Therese is smitten, Carol’s feelings are never made quite clear. Newly divorced from her husband Herge, wrangling over custody for their young daughter Rindy, and deeply involved with her best friend and former lover Abby, Carol’s life, emotions and loyalties are far more complex than Therese’s. Not ever quite sure where she stands, Therese finally admits she loves her on a cross America  trip they take together, and Carol declares that she feels the same. However, pursued and threatened by the people they have left behind, their idyllic holiday soon turns into a nightmare, and the realities of being female lovers begin to seem insurmountable. Does Carol really love Therese enough to give up her comfortable life, and will Abby and Herge let her? Does Therese love Carol enough to leave everything she knows behind, and take a risk on what everyone else tells her is nothing but a youthful, impermanent crush? As the book nears its close, the tension and uncertainty reach fever pitch, and the ever present possibility of danger in the form of the women’s jealous and angry former lovers hovers like a suffocating cloud. The ending is a shock; unexpected, unnerving, and perhaps not quite what you thought you wanted; perfect, therefore, for the unsettling story it completes.

Carol was nothing like I expected; my only experience of Patricia Highsmith before reading this was watching the excellent The Talented Mr Ripley, and I kept wondering when the murders were going to start. Initially I felt a bit let down at this lack of a traditional ‘thriller’ plot; however, when I finished, I realised how tense I had been throughout, how nervous, how afraid, that something terrible was going to happen. Carol; beautiful, pale, statuesque, is unreadable, unknowable; what she wants, what she is capable of, is never quite made available to the reader. Therese; passionate, headstrong, and totally under Carol’s spell, appears to be the perfect victim, just waiting to be destroyed by the woman she loves. Then there are the jealous, potentially malicious thwarted former partners, Abby and Richard, both waiting in the wings as potential sources of danger and damage. Nothing in Carol and Therese’s world is safe or secure; it felt like the entire novel was sitting on a fault line, waiting for the world Highsmith had created to be shaken apart at any moment. When the ending comes, it is shocking and unexpected; but not in the way you might think. I thought it was superb.

In the introduction to the novel, the crime writer Val McDermid claims that this is the first ‘lesbian’ novel, but I would disagree with that classification. Highsmith doesn’t set out to write a novel about homosexuality; this element of the story comes across as rather incidental to the plot, and she doesn’t sensationalise the two womens’ sexual preferences. Carol is, first and foremost, simply a thriller that plays on the tension between two people who have fallen in love and yet barely know each other, and the potential that something awful could happen as a result; it is not about the choice Carol and Therese have made to love a member of their own sex. Highsmith’s blase treatment of the pair’s ‘deviant’ sexuality was refreshing, and I had to keep reminding myself that this was written in the 1940s. Due to the subject matter, Highsmith found it very difficult to get it published, and until 1991, it wasn’t published under her own name. At the time of publication, it was incredibly popular, and I can see why; it’s about an unsuitable and to most people, an incomprehensible love affair, between a nineteen year old girl and a thirty something woman, who manage to inexplicably fall in love at first sight. It doesn’t matter that they are both women, and it doesn’t matter that they seem wildly mismatched; they love each other anyway, and they court potential danger, and make many sacrifices in order to be together. It’s a bit scary, but also rather romantic, and this portrayal of reckless love could well be the reason why it flew off the shelves when it first came out. So, part thriller, part romantic fantasy, part film noir plot, all rolled elegantly into one; Carol was a welcome and intriguing departure from my usual reads, and I’d highly recommend it. My only slight disappointment was that it didn’t really feature New York in it as much as I’d hoped, but then I’ll be there myself in three weeks, so it wasn’t the end of the world.

The Rhythm of Selby by Marti Healy

I’m usually reluctant to accept unsolicited review copies; I like my blog to be as neutral and as reflective of my tastes as possible, and not a commercial concern. However, the lure of free books is sometimes difficult to resist, and when The Rhythm of Selby was offered to me, I clicked over to amazon, read the first few pages through the handy ‘look inside’ tool (isn’t that fantastic?) and decided I definitely wanted to read it. One thing you may not know about me is that I have a secret dream of being a Southern Belle and living in a dilapidated former Plantation house, surrounded by reminders of my former glory. I would be Scarlett O’Hara blended with Miss Havisham, dressed in faded silk, sitting on my porch from sunrise to sunset in a wicker rocking chair, shouting southern drawl edged abuse at passing schoolchildren while drinking bourbon from a hip flask. A girl can dream, right? So, when I saw that The Rhythm of Selby was all about celebrating the past, and the present, of the beautiful South Carolina town of Selby (a thinly veiled Aiken, where the author lives), I went weak at the knees. And I was not disappointed! Why am I moving to New York when I could live in Selby?!

Marti Healy has written a gloriously affectionate account of the delights of living in a small town with a rich history and a tight knit community. Ready for a fresh start in later life, Macy (Marti) leaves Illinois for Selby, and soon finds herself wrapped up in the warm arms of Selby’s inhabitants, whose uniquely Southern hospitality and pride in their hometown draws Macy into the heart of her new home. During her conversations with her new friends as they show her around the town and demonstrate the best the local area can provide, Macy discovers the history of the town’s former inhabitants and some surprising skeletons in closets. Intrigued by the stories of the Victorian founders of Selby, and the tragic death of one of their descendants in a recent train accident, Macy sets out to explore the links between the past and the present, and finds herself falling increasingly in love with Selby.

The Rhythm of Selby is a series of gently, warmly, and graciously written vignettes of daily life in a town that is small enough to ensure you’ll always bump into friends but big enough to always have a beautiful new place to explore and delight in. The people who live in Selby are wonderfully welcoming, and throw their lives and homes open to Macy, who is enthusiastically embraced from the moment she moves in. Selby is the kind of town where lifelong friendships are formed over the garden fence, where there is always somebody willing to help a neighbour, and the whole community comes together to celebrate the holidays as one big family. I loved reading about the traditions of life in the Southern states, about the interwoven lives of the present and past residents of Selby, and about the kind hearted locals who love to socialise and share their lives with each other. I also loved the attitude of Macy; she rejoices in each day in her new town, takes every opportunity to meet new people and explore new places, and appreciates and savours every new experience of Selby with all of her heart. Her enthusiasm is truly something to be admired.

Interspersed with the text are beautiful photographs showing views of Selby/Aiken that took my breath away; mist rising across woodland in the early morning, beautiful wrought iron gates belonging to impressive Victorian mansions, horses galloping across open fields. It’s a wonderful, generous book that celebrates the old fashioned values of hospitality, neighbourliness, friendship, community, and civic pride. It warmed my heart, and reminded me that there are still plenty of places in the world where love and kindness reign supreme, where people, places and things are treasured and treated with respect, and where people have time for each other. It also brought up many happy memories of my own home town, which isn’t nearly as romantic or beautiful or small as Selby, but is dear to me nonetheless.

I think if we all valued the places we lived in and the people we live amongst as much as Macy and her neighbours do in Selby, then the world would truly be a better place. Life today has become increasingly isolated, with many people never speaking to their neighbours and rarely bothering to shop in local stores or take part in community activities. In cities this is a particular problem, and this eradication of civic pride and community living really saddens me. I grew up in a busy and over populated London suburb; there are streets and streets jam packed with houses, roads far too busy for children to play out on, and a high street that struggles to compete with out of town shopping malls and the bright lights of the West End. However, I truly feel a part of that community. I don’t live there any more, but by virtue of attending church there and having many friends in the town, it’s still a big part of my life. Every street corner holds a precious memory, and many faces I see, even now, are familiar. Walking past my childhood home, the flood of memories come rushing back; long hot summers spent playing in the sports fields behind our garden with the neighbourhood children, getting stuck in one of the big trees in the park that I climbed and having to send a stranger to find my dad to come and rescue me, going cycling with my best friend and getting lost for hours amongst the back streets, rescuing a family of ducks from a weir in the river, running full speed down the main road in pursuit of our dog who managed to free himself from his lead, gossiping my way to school with friends, heedless of the time, as we heard the school bell sound in the distance…then I pass my school, just ten minutes from my house; what wonderful memories I have of those days! The wonderful smell of floor polish and pencil sharpenings, the hours of side splitting laughter with friends, the joy of discovering favourite topics that fed my imagination, the ingenious excuses to escape sports lessons, the triumph of receiving end of year awards…then there are the memories of cinema trips, lazy days in the park, parties at friends’ houses, my first real job in the local library, the terror of learning to drive, the day my housemates and I dressed up in a giant bee costume and ran up and down our road to the delight of passers by, the week where it snowed so much the whole street came out and had a snow fight…these experiences are so linked with the places they took part in that I can never remember them without thinking about where they happened. As such, every street has taken on a glow of joy that I still delight in whenever I visit. We can take for granted the often dreary streets where we live, but The Rhythm of Selby has inspired me to see the beauty in the memory infused pavements I have walked all of my life.

A little piece of my heart will always belong in my home town, and I love that whenever I go back, I can’t walk down the street without having to smile and wave at someone I know. I’m proud to have grown up there. So I understood Marti Healy’s feelings about Aiken, and that rush of warmth and nostalgia that always comes over me whenever I think about my home town came flowing out of the pages of The Rhythm of Selby. I loved it, and I know you’ll love it too. It’s perfect to curl up with on a long afternoon, with a cup of tea and a quilt; such a cosy and heart warming read that will inspire you to appreciate where you live a little more, and also make you long to be a Southern Belle, drinking iced tea (or bourbon) on the porch!

The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson

Oh, how I should have enjoyed this. Social history is one of my greatest interests and I find it endlessly fascinating to learn how life was in previous centuries from the point of view of ordinary people. I was so pleased to find The Great Silence in a local charity shop because my reading of Testament of Youth had made me aware of how little I knew about the early 20th century and the aftermath of WW1. It seemed almost serendipitous that I should find it, and so cheaply too, just as I had developed an interest in the period, and I was looking forward to understanding more about what it was like for British civilians and demobbed soldiers after the guns fell silent.

There are some absolutely fascinating snippets of information in the book. For example, I had no idea that when the Armistice was signed, the soldiers weren’t instantly sent home. Many were held for several months in demobilisation camps, as the government wanted to stagger their return to make it easier to get them all back into employment. Some were forced to stay on as Peacekeeping troops; others were made to go and join the White Army fighting against the Bolsheviks in Russia. American soldiers had to continue fighting in some areas, as news hadn’t yet reached them that the Armistice had been signed. I was also enthralled by the description of the marvellous facial surgeon Harold Gillies and his hospital built especially for soldiers who had suffered terrible facial injuries in combat. Embarassingly, this hospital, Queen Mary’s, was my local hospital for the first 21 years of my life, and I had no idea of its previous incarnation. In 1919, Sidcup, which is now a busy London suburb, was a rural village and the gateway from London to Kent. It was here that soldiers came to be kept away from the averted eyes of the public and be given new hope of a normal life. The government’s compensation scheme for lost limbs did not extend to anything above the neck; they didn’t acknowledge the paralysing emotional affects of facial disfigurement and the often devastating consequences it had for those whose appearance now produced a mixture of horror and revulsion in those who saw them. Some men had lost the ability to speak, swallow, see, or even breathe normally through the injuries they had suffered to their faces. Many men had needlessly been wounded because in the early years of the war, leather hats rather than metal helmets had been standard equipment, and offered little protection for those whose heads were the first to peer over the trenches and be ravaged by shells or machine gun fire.

Harold Gillies, incensed by the government’s treatment of these men and powerfully moved by their plight, worked tirelessly to repair these shattered faces and give the soldiers a chance of a fulfilling life. His skill was second to none, and his methods were pioneering in the field of facial reconstruction surgery. A compassionate and dedicated man, his patients adored him, and many reported that his work was so successful that other people had no idea they had suffered such terrible facial injuries. Even more fascinating was the treatment of soldiers who didn’t have access to Gillies; American in Paris sculptor Anna Ladd was also moved by the plight of those whose facial injuries prevented them from living a normal life and had even caused them to consider suicide. She made painstakingly accurate tin masks to cover these men’s faces, so exquisitely painted that even in broad daylight it was difficult to tell that the masks were not real flesh and blood. The only give away was the lack of expression on the faces, but they gave the men who wore them a new found confidence and an ability to walk around freely without being stared at. Many chose to eventually be buried in these masks, so humiliated by what was underneath that they allowed no living person to ever see their mutilated features.

Other interesting stories were about the public’s desire to express their mutual grief; the first ever national silence was held on the first anniversary of the Armistice, and the entire country came to a complete standstill to remember its dead. The imposing Cenotaph, still standing on The Mall in London, was designed by Lutyens to represent a coffin, in which every grieving Briton could come to mourn their dead. The book closes with the burial of the ‘Unknown Soldier’ in Westminster Abbey in 1920; a random unidentified British soldier was brought back from the muddy killing fields in France to be buried as a representative of all those men who had died leaving relatives with no bodies to bury and no place to mourn. The crowds that turned out to watch this young man go to his final resting place were overwhelming, and not even the stolid Queen Mary was able to suppress her grief as he was lowered into a tomb packed with mud from France. Afterwards, the Cenotaph was literally buried in flowers from the amassed crowds, all of whom had lost someone they loved in the war. I choked up a little at this quote from a little boy, who reportedly said to his mother as he looked at the flowers around the Cenotaph: ‘Oh, what a lovely garden Daddy has got.’

These were the good bits. But I wanted to know more. What were the consequences of having significant injuries? How did soldiers adjust to life back home? What was it like for women, used to running their own homes, to have their husbands back? What were the political and social effects of losing the majority of the next generation of the ruling classes? How did people’s ambitions and beliefs change as a result of four years of worldwide carnage? What was done to provide jobs and homes for widows? I didn’t get any of this. Sadly, Juliet Nicolson has written a book filled with random anecdotes, mainly from the lives of aristocrats, used to illustrate her sweeping and frequently obvious generalisations about life after the war. Much of these anecdotes are poorly researched and have nothing really profound or relevant to add. Lady So and So took morphine to lessen her depression after the war (but she’d also taken it before the war, so how is this relevant?); therefore this shows everyone was depressed after the war. Poor old Duke of Devonshire had to sell off a few houses because they’d gone to rack and ruin and his finances were in a mess; this demonstrates how badly England had suffered and how poor the economy was. There are pages of faff about Tom Mitford, who was 10 during the war; what did his experiences of getting to eat nice food at school while his sisters had to make do with rationing at home have to do with anything? There are also reams of pages describing the disintegration of the Duke of Devonshire’s estates and the affairs of society hostess Ottoline Morell; all lazily used as metaphors for the general depression of spirits and financial difficulties faced by Britons in the years after the war. I’m sorry, but a multi millionaire having to sell one of his many estates has absolutely no points of comparison with how ordinary people suffered. There was just no coherence, and no discernable point, to much of the information included. It read like Juliet Nicolson had just shoved everything that happened to a bunch of random people in 1918, 1919 and 1920 in a book and expected it to somehow form a logical and informative impression of post WW1 Britain. It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid.

By the end I was just really annoyed with it. Juliet Nicolson, granddaughter of Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicolson, is not a historian, and I’m sure she only got this published because of her family connections. This book consists of nothing but a series of disconnected and largely irrelevant vignettes of random people, mainly aristocratic friends of her grandparents whose papers I presume she had easy access to, using them to make clumsy generalised statements about how everyone suffered from a sense of grief and depression after the war. You know what, I could have guessed that most people were feeling pretty down after the war, actually. I don’t need to buy a book to tell me that. What I wanted was more factual knowledge, like the stuff about Harold Gillies and Anna Ladd, about the demobilisation programme, about the reassimilation to normal life. These interesting tidbits are too few and far between and not developed enough to redeem the rest of the irrelevant and frankly boring anecdotes of poor aristocrats having less champagne to drink. So, I’m sorry to say that I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. It’s no better than an average undergraduate history essay. It’s a shame really, and rather disappointing; a better editor and a bit more actual history would have made this a much more fascinating and rewarding read.

A bit of positive news, though – I’ve finished my Reading America reading list! It has a special page all of its own and you can access it by clicking here or on the tab at the top of the page. Thank you so much to everyone who made such wonderful suggestions. I tried to include them all, along with books I had picked up from my own research, but it came to so many books that inevitably some didn’t make it to my final shortlist. I’ve gone way over the 50 books I said I wanted as it is; there were just too many amazing books for me to narrow it down to 50! I’ve chosen books that either define America or have defined Americans; many books suggested were written by Americans but not set in America, and most of these I cut out. I want to read about Americans in America and I want to explore the landscape of the different regions. That was my decision making process, and I hope you will agree that I’ve got some fantastic reading ahead of me! You may notice that I haven’t included any slave narratives or much literature by African Americans; this is because I studied these topics at university in an American Literature course and rather than going over what I have already read, I am keen to read books that are new to me. Some on the list are rereads, but I read them so long ago I have forgotten them, and they are so important to the history of American Literature (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby), that I don’t want this year to go by without having revisited them.

It would be lovely to have some people read along with me over the year; I don’t want to make it into a formal ‘challenge’ as such, but if you want to include some of these books in your own reading, it would be fantastic to get some discussions going.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

I want to write about this book and give it the praise and justice it deserves, but I don’t know if I can. Elizabeth Taylor is a magnificent writer whose prowess is drastically underappreciated. Her prose is not showy or complicated, but she has that rare skill of being able to find just the right words to perfectly encapsulate an emotion, a feeling, a place, a fleeting moment, and make it profound. Her characters are just ordinary people, who, in their superbly, succintly realised ordinariness, are heartbreaking, because their lives and their experiences and their feelings could just as easily be mine or yours. Their fears are my fears; their tears my tears. I love/hate reading Elizabeth Taylor, because as much as I love marvelling at being drawn into a world so exquisitely alive, I hate being forced to confront the often disturbing and profoundly upsetting realities of life she reveals in all their ugliness on the page.  Ageing is one of those upsetting realities that I try my best to avoid thinking about; having watched my grandparents disintegrate into shadows of the people they once were, I am terrified at the thought of being trapped in a body that is racked with pain, imprisoned in a life that grows smaller by the day. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont portrays both of these things unflinchingly, and at times I was so overcome with sadness that I could hardly bear to go on. I love life and believe that every stage we pass on our journey through it has its own unique beauty, but old age can be so terribly isolating and painful and frustrating that it’s hard to find the beauty in this often bleak season. I certainly couldn’t in Elizabeth Taylor’s portrayal, and though it was a fine and thought provoking and brilliantly executed novel, I didn’t, and couldn’t, enjoy it one bit because of that.

There is an all pervading melancholy about old age; the faded sepia photographs of people who have become nothing but wispy memories, the sadly struck out names in old address books, the growing number of pill bottles on the counter, the reduced mobility offered by ever stiffening, weakening limbs, the gradual shrinking of the parameters of life. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont perfectly captures that melancholia, in its depiction of a group of elderly women and men who are no longer able to manage a home of their own, and so are forced to live in a hotel. The Claremont is a reasonably smart establishment on the Cromwell Road in South Kensington; coincidentally where I happen to work, though the Claremont appears to be situated at the rather seedy Gloucester Road end rather than the Brompton Road end where I sit and while away my 9-5 days. Nowadays the hotels that cluster around Gloucester Road, up past the Natural History Museum and the Lycee Francaise, are dingy looking affairs whose clientele tends to be more foreign exchange student than elderly person in reduced circumstances, but for Mrs Palfrey and her fellow residents, The Claremont is a good compromise in a lively location. From the velvet curtained lounge they can hear the rush of the traffic and the clip clop of high heels, and feel that they are still part of life, and that there are a myriad of places they could go to, if they so chose.

However, the sadness of their lives is that none of them do choose to go anywhere, and their days become long vestiges of boredom, ordered around the routines of meal times and television programmes aired in the lounge. All of them are desperately lonely; Mr Osborne, the only male in the establishment, irritates the waiter every night at dinner by detaining him to tell pointless stories that there is no one else to listen to;  the women speak wistfully of grandchildren and siblings and nieces and nephews who only emerge once or twice a year to bother to take them out. All are longing for spouses lost, homes much missed, full and happy lives ebbed away into nothing but memories by the tides of time. Now and again a dashing elderly visitor will arrive and stay a few weeks, busy with their own social lives, an enviable reminder of what their lives used to be. With little money and no one to take an interest in them, the residents of The Claremont are trapped in a tedious routine that takes them no further than the shops around the corner of the hotel.

One day, on one of her walks to the local shops, Mrs Palfrey has a sudden fall in the rain. Ludo, a dashing young bohemian writer, emerges from his basement flat to help her. As a thank you, Mrs Palfrey invites him back to The Claremont for dinner, but, embarrassed by the fact her grandson, of whom she often boasts, has never turned up to visit, Mrs Palfrey concocts a plan with Ludo to make him pretend to be her grandson to save face. Ludo agrees, and an unlikely friendship springs up between the two of them. Ludo becomes a bright spark in the darkness of Mrs Palfrey’s life; she was used to having a husband to rely on, and now she relishes having Ludo. But he is young, and has a life of his own, and their friendship cannot go on forever. The old, Mrs Palfrey soon discovers, are easily forgotten, and they increasingly become passive agents in their own lives. All of the residents are at the mercy of others, rendered as vulnerable and dependant as children as they gradually become pushed to the side of their own lives.

I told you this was sad. I cried when I finished it. I thought of all the times I haven’t been to visit my own grandparents when I knew I ought to. I’ve already lost two; the others live close by but I only go and see them once a month at most. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont made me realise how limited life can become when you’re old; that the energy and mobility and health I take for granted can reduce your life to four walls and a television set out of necessity and not choice. I often feel frustrated that my surviving grandparents have allowed themselves to become practically housebound, but now I think I understand a little more about why they do live like that. The outside world can be a scary place when you’re 80 and surrounded by technology you don’t understand, fast moving people and vehicles and an exhausting array of noises and experiences and shops and people talking and general hustle and bustle. It’s easy for the young to take their youth for granted; to dismiss the old, to ignore them, avoid them, disrespect them. But they were us once, and we will be them, in our turn. Even though this book depressed and saddened me, it also gave me the determination to treat the elderly with more respect and tenderness, and to visit my grandparents more. The elderly have an important place in society; they are vessels of history, and of wisdom. They link us to our pasts and remind us of our futures. They have much to share, if only we would take time to listen. I want to do that. I don’t want to run away from ageing. I don’t think ageing in itself is frightening; Mrs Palfrey and her friends seem to accept their bodies’ natural process of slowly shutting down with quiet resignation; it’s the loneliness and isolation that was the most terrifying and demeaning thing for these characters, and most probably in real life too. Unlike illness and pain, loneliness is easily avoided, if only those the elderly love were more mindful of their isolation. Taking the time to pop in for a cup of tea, to give a helping hand with the shopping, or just to watch a film; all simple acts, but to Mrs Palfrey and her friends, they would have meant the world.

So, in summary, this is not an easy read, not by any means; but a necessary and thought provoking one nonetheless. Elizabeth Taylor isn’t afraid to look reality in the eye, and I think perhaps those with a romantic rose tinted view of life, like me, need to be unafraid to sometimes as well. Even if it means our reading experience is not as pleasant as we would like.

On a lighter note, what a joy it has been to read all of the replies to my Reading America post – such excellent suggestions, thank you all so much! I am slowly going through the list and looking up the recommended titles – it’s so exciting putting together a reading list! I’m going to hopefully have it finished by the weekend and then I’ll post the master list for all of you to see.