{review} the greengage summer

I am rather tied up this week, so this review of Rumer Godden's The Greengage Summer comes from the archives (June 2010).

Rumer Godden's (1958) The Greengage Summer is a book to which I return every couple of years. Each re-reading offers further rewards and I suspect that I enjoy it more each time, appreciating the excellent writing that enables it to function on both a teen and an adult level. 

It is a coming-of-age story: the Grey family (mother, Joss 16, Cecil 13, Hester 10, 'Willmouse' 7 and Vicky 4 - "Three years separated each of us children - Father's expeditions usually lasted three years") go on holiday to Vieux-Moutiers in the French Marne region in the late 1950s. Things do not go to plan: their mother is hospitalised, the eldest sister Joss becomes ill, and the younger children roam unsupervised about the hotel and its environs. They are unwelcome guests at the hotel, confined to the worst rooms and the dreaded lavatory "à la turque", but their behind-the-scenes status lets them observe that things are not what they seem at the Hotel Les Oeillets. This sense of wrongness is, on one level, overt, as the hotel specialises in entertaining char-à-bancs of visitors on pilgrimage to the battlefields of northern France, for whom the staff put on lunch and a macabre show:

The bullet-holes were real, but when the staircase was painted they were not closed up but picked out again; the stain in the cupboard was made freshly every now and then by Paul with blood from the kitchen; and one day... he beckoned me out into the garden and showed me what he had in its hand, the skull. It was gruesome, with its eye-sockets and long cheekbones... He had to shut Rita and Rex in the kennel or they would have dug it up at once; he buried it under the urn in the middle of the flowerbed and with it put a piece of raw liver. 'Le pourboire,' he said and laughed again.

The story is narrated by the thirteen year old girl Cecil, and Godden's characterisation of her naïveté yet concomitant loss of innocence is astonishingly good. It really is a remarkably candid book, with its references to menstruation, sexual awakening, homosexuality, illegitimacy, rape and murder - all seen from the teenager's point of view. Consider the characterisation of the hotel-boy Paul ("found in the American camp when it was broken up"):

One day Paul said, "J'avais une p'tite soeur."

"A little sister?" By then Hester was beginning to understand.

"Une mulâtre," said Paul carelessly, and, seeing we did not understand that either, he said "Une négresse," and showed half on his finger.

"Negro? But you are not mulat... what you called it," we said, puzzled, and asked, "Where is she, your sister?"

Paul shrugged.

"Don't you know?"

He shook his head. "Elle a disparu."

...

"Morte?" I asked sympathetically.

"Perdue," said Paul, "Pssts," and he made as if to throw something away.

"But you don't lose sisters." Paul's silence said clearly that you did. We felt dizzy.

The children are attracted by a mysterious Englishman, Eliot, who lives in the hotel and Eliot's shady enterprises are increasingly endangered by his contact with the idealistic English children and, in particular, by his infatuation with the ripe (yes, just like the greengages) Joss:

She [Joss] would not undress with me any more, and I was glad because my pinkness was still distressingly straight up and down while she had a waist now, slim and so supple I could not help watching it, and curves that tapered to long slim legs, while her breasts had swelled. I knew how soft these were and that they were tender, for once, out of curiosity, I touched them and she had jumped and sworn at me... "Is Joss beautiful?" I asked with a pang. "Just now," said Mother, "just now".

Eliot's decides to use the motherless children's presence to make his own residence in the hotel seem more innocent. Cecil overhears him explaining to his mistress, Mademoiselle Zizi, the patronne of the hotel, who dislikes his interest in them:

...there was the sound of a kiss; but Eliot said something else, something odd and . . . not pleasant, I thought, "Those children can be useful."

"How useful?"

"Stop people talking."

"Let them talk," said Mademoiselle Zizi.

"Don't be silly, Zizi. This is a little town and you have to live in it. The children will give me a reason for being here. After all, now I'm their guardian. They can be camouflage."

The book is filled with fascinating cross-currents: the ageing Mlle Zizi burning with jealousy over Eliot's infatuation with the young Joss; Mlle Zizi's protectress Mme Corbet loathing Eliot's attentions to Mlle Zizi ("Parce qu'elle en tient pour Mademoiselle Zizi" - "A lady loves a lady?") and writing "the figures into our account as if the pen could poison the paper"; the absent botanist father versus the vibrant neo-father Eliot ("He had a carnation in his buttonhole, a dark-red one, and it seemed to symbolise Eliot for us... Father brought flowers into the house but they were dried, pressed brown, the life gone out of them; with Eliot the flower was alive"); or the only boy in the family, 'Willmouse', crafting couture doll's clothes: at the Gare de l'Est, "Willmouse disappeared. 'Il est parti voir les locos,' said the attendant, but there was a new Vogue on a kiosk and he had gone to look at that."

One of the best-drawn relationships - also the most significant - and one constantly reassessed throughout the novel, is that between the narrator Cecil and the hotel boy Paul who bond, after coming to blows, over a Gauloise and the lees of the day's wine bottles. Paul is a lost boy, old beyond his years, dirty, overworked, amoral and violent:

I did not know about Paul in those days, but even then, in my carelessness and ignorance, I was worried by his face. We had come to see the battlefields and, though we did not know it, this face was a part of them.

Paul provides Cecil with an education of a sort:

He could not know that when he told me small prickles seemed to be breaking out all over me and the back of my knees felt hot. I had to persist. "You mean . . . you made love? When you were fourteen?"

But it is an education which Cecil herself sees as "a stain spreading through my bones": "I had become as stretched and as sensitive as an Indian with his ear to the ground, or as an insect's feeler or the needle in a compass to these doings". But how different is it to the education that her mother has decided to give her "abominably selfish" children?

"I shall take you to the battle-fields of France... So that you can see what other people have given," said Mother, "given for your sakes; and what other people will do in sacrifice. Perhaps that will make you ashamed and make you think... You need to learn . . . what I cannot teach you," said Mother, her voice quivering.

Of course, everything falls steadily apart as the children try to figure out the puzzle that is Eliot and his shadowy ventures:

"Were you ever a sailor? Joss asked...

"Probably," said Eliot.

"Don't you know?" asked Hester incredulous.

"I know I was a soldier," said Eliot. "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, richman, poorman . . ."

Will Eliot ("I didn't ask to be a hero") redeem himself as the good Englishman?

Joss put her hand on Eliot's knee. "Eliot, what has made you so unhappy?"

He looked down at her hand and I shall always remember his answer. "What has made you so unhappy?" Joss asked, and he answered, "Being perfectly happy for two days."

For so many of the adult characters in this book it is too late for redemption or salvation. The narrative's growing 'feel' of wrongness moves relentlessly towards the brutal denouement that ends the children's stay in this lush Eden. As Joss says, "We never came back."

The awakening of the two older children from their childish selfishness and dependency to an acceptance of adult responsibility - and the realisation that the adults they admire do not necessarily share their uncompromising black-and-white moral outlook ("'Must you be so appallingly honest?' He said it so harshly that we stared.") - is deftly handled:

On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages. Joss and I felt guilty; we were still at the age when we thought being greedy was a childish fault, and this gave our guilt a tinge of hopelessness because, up to then, we had believed that as we grew older our faults would disappear, and none of them did.

Obviously, I highly recommend this book and I plan to read as many more of Godden's books as I can (especially since many are being reprinted by Pan Macmillan).

Rating: 10/10

If you liked this... try Mabel Esther Allan's It Happened in Arles (1964; sadly out of print {REVIEW}).

BTW, the image at the top is of the wonderful cover of my 1959 copy (London: The Reprint Society).

{review} kingfishers catch fire

Rumer Godden Kingfishers Catch Fire (1953)

This is my second Rumer Godden read, after the excellent The Greengage Summer {reviewed HERE}. I'm a bit baffled about what to make of Kingfishers Catch Fire. I suspect, (a) that it has aged quite badly and, (b) that quite a heavy lacquer of political correctness stands between its opinions of the native population of Kashmir and my full appreciation of Godden's excellent writing. The protagonist of KCF is Sophie Barrington-Ward, a thirty-five year old widow. Sophie is one of the most irritatingly selfish characters to grace a page. She drags her children Teresa and 'Moo' to a remote spot in troubled Kashmir where she believes that she can live cheaply. Everyone warns her against her romantic vision of a simple life in the desperately poor mountain-town:

'Sophie is nice to scold because she never answers back,'... Aunt Rose had once said, 'and nasty to scold because she never takes any notice.' Sophie took no notice now.
'It's too far,' Dr. Ruth Glenister, the head doctor at the Mission, told her.
'Your Mission ladies go further than that,' argued Sophie.
'They have the protection of the Mission,' said Dr. Glenister.
'We shall protect ourselves,' said Sophie confidently.
'The people won't know what to make of you,' said Sister Locke, the senior Mission sister.
'They soon will,' said Sophie.
It was not only the Europeans who advised against it. 'You may lose everything you have,' said her Kashmiri merchant friend, Profit David.
'We haven't anything,' said Sophie.
'But we have,' Teresa wanted to cry. They had some precious things, doubly precious to Teresa because through all the family changes these few had endured... Teresa could not bear the thought of losing any of them. 'Don't let's go there,' begged Teresa.
Even the Pundit Pramatha Kaul who owned Dilkhush was worried though he was anxious to let the house. 'Am I handing you over to the hounds and thieves?' he asked.
'If we were rich,' said Sophie, 'if we were like most Europeans and Americans who come to Kashmir, then there might be trouble.'
To the Pundit, Sophie was precisely like any other European or American, only more friendly; the friendliness alarmed him. 'These people are poor and simple . . .' he began, but Sophie interrupted him.
'We shall be poor and simple too,' she said with shining eyes.
'But, madam, the peasants are rapacious . . . '
To that Sophie would not listen. Like many people there were some words about which she was sentimental; one of these was 'peasant'.
...
'How picturesque they are!' said Sophie admiringly.
'And dirty,' said Teresa. It was true. They were very dirty.

Of course, it all goes spectacularly wrong. Sophie attempts to help the poor villagers (and, primarily, herself) but blunders into a village feud about which she remains almost totally in the dark. Her children have a far better grasp of the realities of their isolated position and suffer considerably at the hands of the junior members of the feuding families. 

'But they are children,' said Sophie, again and again. 'What could they do to you?'

Sophie fails to see how seriously her well-meaning projects are alienating her family from safety and bringing personal danger to herself. The word that she herself uses of her nature is 'insouciant':

'Careless and indifferent'. It was not that things did not go wrong. They did, very often, though she could never see why. 'But what did I do?' she would ask when they had. 'I didn't mean it to turn out like that,' and how bitter was her remorse, though, of course, if the remorse because too much to bear in one place she could always go somewhere else.

It is possible to be too free-spirited. Sophie's attitude to Teresa, too, is insouciant. Teresa is 'stolid' - and timid and 'tiresome' - while 'Moo' has 'feelings'. One cannot help but note that the boy Moo is the favoured child. 

A sense of menace permeates the narrative, made more so by Sophie's inability to see the dangers around her. Even when she suffers a dose of poisoning at the hands of her household staff she shrugs off the danger. And then Teresa goes missing... 

The growing feeling that doom is imminent is so well done in this book. The writing is excellent. Godden shakes up our expectations with her sympathetically drawn yet unsympathetic heroine and her poor household staff who, for the most part, do not possess the stereotypical hearts of gold of the faithful retainers of morally improving Raj fiction. Will Sophie redeem herself or has her selfishness, under the guise of free-spiritedness, destroyed her family beyond repair? 

Sophie found Teresa's hand under the blankets; the other, with the fingers broken, was strapped across her chest; the chill and limpness of the small hand she knew so, well, that she had often held so carelessly or shaken off, seemed to creep slowly over Sophie and into her heart.

'Is she much hurt?' she had asked...
'Yes.'

The setting of Kingfishers Catch Fire is based on Godden's "three years' living, thinking and perhaps dreaming in Kashmir." The descriptions of the landscape are quite beautiful, particularly those of the chenar trees - the 'chinar' or Planus orientalis (Oriental plane) - which features on the local handicrafts of Kashmir. There is no question that Godden's reinforcing of the the external romance of the locale heightens the emotional effect of the scenes of shocking poverty and filth of the village. This juxaposition of beauty and ugliness plays through the text: when Sophie is most attuned to the beauty of the evening, it is because she is suffering the effects of cannabis poisoning. I find that Godden keeps me in a constant state of shock - and perhaps that is both her strength and, unfortunately, why I remained so ambivalent about this book.

Rating: 6/10. That's for its appeal to me. It's a good book.

If you liked this... I've now got my hands on The Peacock Spring and An Episode of Sparrows, so I'm certainly not giving up on Rumer Godden.

{review} greengage summer

Rumer Godden's (1958) The Greengage Summer is a book to which I return every couple of years. Each re-reading offers further rewards and I suspect that I enjoy it more each time, appreciating the excellent writing that enables it to function on both a teen and an adult level. 

It is a coming-of-age story: the Grey family (mother, Joss 16, Cecil 13, Hester 10, 'Willmouse' 7 and Vicky 4 - "Three years separated each of us children - Father's expeditions usually lasted three years") go on holiday to Vieux-Moutiers in the French Marne region in the late 1950s. Things do not go to plan: their mother is hospitalised, the eldest sister Joss becomes ill, and the younger children roam unsupervised about the hotel and its environs. They are unwelcome guests at the hotel, confined to the worst rooms and the dreaded lavatory "à la turque", but their behind-the-scenes status lets them observe that things are not what they seem at the Hotel Les Oeillets. This sense of wrongness is, on one level, overt, as the hotel specialises in entertaining char-à-bancs of visitors on pilgrimage to the battlefields of northern France, for whom the staff put on lunch and a macabre show:

The bullet-holes were real, but when the staircase was painted they were not closed up but picked out again; the stain in the cupboard was made freshly every now and then by Paul with blood from the kitchen; and one day...he beckoned me out into the garden and showed me what he had in its hand, the skull. It was gruesome, with its eye-sockets and long cheekbones...He had to shut Rita and Rex in the kennel or they would have dug it up at once; he buried it under the urn in the middle of the flowerbed and with it put a piece of raw liver. 'Le pourboire,' he said and laughed again.

The story is narrated by the thirteen year old girl Cecil, and Godden's characterisation of her naïveté yet concomitant loss of innocence is astonishingly good. It really is a remarkably candid book, with its references to menstruation, sexual awakening, homosexuality, illegitimacy, rape and murder - all seen from the teenager's point of view. Consider the characterisation of the hotel-boy Paul ("found in the American camp when it was broken up"):

One day Paul said, "J'avais une p'tite soeur."

"A little sister?" By then Hester was beginning to understand.

"Une mulâtre," said Paul carelessly, and, seeing we did not understand that either, he said "Une négresse," and showed half on his finger.

"Negro? But you are not mulat... what you called it," we said, puzzled, and asked, "Where is she, your sister?"

Paul shrugged.

"Don't you know?"

He shook his head. "Elle a disparu."

...

"Morte?" I asked sympathetically.

"Perdue," said Paul, "Pssts," and he made as if to throw something away.

"But you don't lose sisters." Paul's silence said clearly that you did. We felt dizzy.

The children are attracted by a mysterious Englishman, Eliot, who lives in the hotel and Eliot's shady enterprises are increasingly endangered by his contact with the idealistic English children and, in particular, by his infatuation with the ripe (yes, just like the greengages) Joss:

She [Joss] would not undress with me any more, and I was glad because my pinkness was still distressingly straight up and down while she had a waist now, slim and so supple I could not help watching it, and curves that tapered to long slim legs, while her breasts had swelled. I knew how soft these were and that they were tender, for once, out of curiosity, I touched them and she had jumped and sworn at me... "Is Joss beautiful?" I asked with a pang. "Just now," said Mother, "just now".

Eliot's decides to use the motherless children's presence to make his own residence in the hotel seem more innocent. Cecil overhears him explaining to his mistress, Mademoiselle Zizi, the patronne of the hotel, who dislikes his interest in them:

...there was the sound of a kiss; but Eliot said something else, something odd and . . . not pleasant, I thought, "Those children can be useful."

"How useful?"

"Stop people talking."

"Let them talk," said Mademoiselle Zizi.

"Don't be silly, Zizi. This is a little town and you have to live in it. The children will give me a reason for being here. After all, now I'm their guardian. They can be camouflage."

The book is filled with fascinating cross-currents: the ageing Mlle Zizi burning with jealousy over Eliot's infatuation with the young Joss; Mlle Zizi's protectress Mme Corbet loathing Eliot's attentions to Mlle Zizi ("Parce qu'elle en tient pour Mademoiselle Zizi" - "A lady loves a lady?") and writing "the figures into our account as if the pen could poison the paper"; the absent botanist father versus the vibrant neo-father Eliot ("He had a carnation in his buttonhole, a dark-red one, and it seemed to symbolise Eliot for us... Father brought flowers into the house but they were dried, pressed brown, the life gone out of them; with Eliot the flower was alive"); or the only boy in the family, 'Willmouse', crafting couture doll's clothes: at the Gare de l'Est, "Willmouse disappeared. 'Il est parti voir les locos,' said the attendant, but there was a new Vogue on a kiosk and he had gone to look at that."

One of the best-drawn relationships - also the most significant - and one constantly reassessed throughout the novel, is that between the narrator Cecil and the hotel boy Paul who bond, after coming to blows, over a Gauloise and the lees of the day's wine bottles. Paul is a lost boy, old beyond his years, dirty, overworked, amoral and violent:

I did not know about Paul in those days, but even then, in my carelessness and ignorance, I was worried by his face. We had come to see the battlefields and, though we did not know it, this face was a part of them.

Paul provides Cecil with an education of a sort:

He could not know that when he told me small prickles seemed to be breaking out all over me and the back of my knees felt hot. I had to persist. "You mean . . . you made love? When you were fourteen?"

But it is an education which Cecil herself sees as "a stain spreading through my bones": "I had become as stretched and as sensitive as an Indian with his ear to the ground, or as an insect's feeler or the needle in a compass to these doings". But how different is it to the education that her mother has decided to give her "abominably selfish" children?

"I shall take you to the battle-fields of France... So that you can see what other people have given," said Mother, "given for your sakes; and what other people will do in sacrifice. Perhaps that will make you ashamed and make you think... You need to learn . . . what I cannot teach you," said Mother, her voice quivering.

Of course, everything falls steadily apart as the children try to figure out the puzzle that is Eliot and his shadowy ventures:

"Were you ever a sailor? Joss asked...

"Probably," said Eliot.

"Don't you know?" asked Hester incredulous.

"I know I was a soldier," said Eliot. "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, richman, poorman . . ."

Will Eliot ("I didn't ask to be a hero") redeem himself as the good Englishman?

Joss put her hand on Eliot's knee. "Eliot, what has made you so unhappy?"

He looked down at her hand and I shall always remember his answer. "What has made you so unhappy?" Joss asked, and he answered, "Being perfectly happy for two days."

For so many of the adult characters in this book it is too late for redemption or salvation. The narrative's growing 'feel' of wrongness moves relentlessly towards the brutal denouement that ends the children's stay in this lush Eden. As Joss says, "We never came back."

The awakening of the two older children from their childish selfishness and dependency to an acceptance of adult responsibility - and the realisation that the adults they admire do not necessarily share their uncompromising black-and-white moral outlook ("'Must you be so appallingly honest?' He said it so harshly that we stared.") - is deftly handled:

On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages. Joss and I felt guilty; we were still at the age when we thought being greedy was a childish fault, and this gave our guilt a tinge of hopelessness because, up to then, we had believed that as we grew older our faults would disappear, and none of them did.

Obviously, I highly recommend this book and I plan to read as many more of Godden's books as I can (especially since many are being reprinted by Pan Macmillan).

Rating: 10/10

If you liked this... try Mabel Esther Allan's It Happened in Arles (1964; sadly out of print).

BTW, the image at the top is of the wonderful cover of my 1959 copy (London: The Reprint Society).