A Gypsy's Joy!

Mollie Panter-Downes would have been a great novelist if she had written more novels. Instead she has left us with a single masterpiece - One Fine Day  - which captures, and with exquisite taste, the first few months of Clement Attlee’s peace.

_________________

Order has gone. It once belonged to this house, which like a ruined castle prostrate before the barbarians, can no longer fight against the dust and dirt; then are the weeds, nature’s nomads, restless and indefatigable. The servants having left, it is a struggle to manage the house and its estate; Laura, a poor amateur, a hopeless housewife, and a pitiful cook who tortures the family’s palate. There is an assistant, but Mrs Prout is too old and too committed elsewhere - so many ladies need her now - to do much in a house that anyway requires more than two cleaners; it disturbs Stephen, who often finds dust under the bed and on the bookshelves. He’s no better. In his designated sphere, with only old Mr Voller to help, Stephen is also losing control; the garden is growing wild, the whole estate breaking the bounds of domestic civility. It upsets him.

The previous order is collapsing. The free-living flowers, that press their faces against the windows, and the riotous pans, that boil over when Laura turns her back, belong to the forces that are transforming English society. The nouveau-riche - Mr Rudge and Mr Bellamy (the war was good for him) are two of its representatives - having scampered up the hierarchical ladder, knock off those who have been reclining insouciantly at its top; the Cranmers clattering out of their ancestral mansion; the Marshalls badly bruised and just about hanging on, though now no longer the cynosure of the local set, those wealthy young things of the 1930s. This upsets Laura. New wealth is not the only problem. Old money is no longer attracting the working classes. There are no servants anymore, causing the house to suffer, as the aristocrats are transformed into manual workers. It is a shocking experience; domestic service scrubbing away at Laura’s beauty, she is mortified at George’s reaction to her visit (she wants him to be their gardener): he looks at me as if I were a “sofa”, she says. The upper classes have lost their magic. They are not rich enough to compete with the new industries; even George is leaving to work in the city. The old folk, with their fond memories - there is Miss Fowler, Mrs Brunt and the ubiquitous Mrs Prout - are but the detritus left on the beach when the tide goes out; rotting posts and rusting barbwire all that remains of the defences of pre-war privilege. For sure, these oldies - Miss Fowler, Mrs Brunt, the omnipresent Mrs Prout - do miss the old ways, although we suspect they were always criticising their employers; unhappiness their eternal lot; The Moan a pleasure, adaptable to all periods and climates. They never had any influence anyway.

A settled order gave Stephen and Laura Marshall their liberty. Stephen yearns for this lost world; and goes crazy when the merest whiff of this glorious past whaffs his way; bumping into an old friend he intoxicates himself on talk of the Thirties; its parties, tennis, the lush acres of delight and entertainment. He is alive, for the first time since we met. Enjoying himself Stephen wants the evening to continue; but…oh no…that now familiar…that ever persistent…ring ring, ring ring…work calls. And worse: Nigel is reluctant to meet up again: is he telling lies about his life, or - and this, we think, the more likely - has he seen failure peering out of Stephen’s face? Few hang about a tottering wall.

Laura also thinks back to the old days with nostalgia; although her history trip is dense with thought, dreams, fantasies, lines of literature and snatches of song, that cascading into the memories of more recent events creates a vast delta of impressions and images, through which her mind luxuriously meanders. She is happier than Stephen. Lost inside her private river complex she embraces the disorder that surrounds her, smothers herself in the atmosphere it emanates. Only when she thinks of her husband’s reaction does she regret her unavailing efforts to maintain the house’s old standards. It makes her sad. Life was better during the war, when she didn't have to worry about the household arrangements; for with Stephen posted away, Laura and Victoria and all her women friends could joyfully live in domestic disarray. What a glorious mess! Stephen cannot accept such anarchy; it is an attack on this very being; thus his obsession with the overgrown garden, his shriek of dismay when he sees his daughter’s brace on the bathroom shelf, his distaste at her gym knickers strewn across the floor; signs of disorder are signs of decline, and they make him uneasy, causing him to be querulous. Stephen needs order (a safe haven from war’s chaos or is the army still encamped inside his head?)1 his equanimity dependent upon the home kept clean and tidy. His wishes are wearing Laura out.2

Life would be easier if he would just leave things be. Victoria cannot understand why her father complains about the garden - she thinks it perfect - while she too looks fondly back to the war, when they could all live freely in squalor. They could do anything they liked. They could eat their meals anywhere the fancy took them; no forced march, in those days, to the dining room table.3 

These are two females unable to adjust to the banal diktats of peace.

This postwar period is hard for the elite. Expecting to resume their old ways, they have discovered that they no longer have the wealth to employ those who could support their previous lifestyle; better a distant factory than service in the locality, is the general feeling in the area. Old Money is losing its charismatic hold; for power requires privilege, while so much of their authority is buttressed by a tradition that itself suffering from subsidence; a future Jerusalem not an ancient Arcadia exciting the imagination now. Respect has gone; although an impressive aristocrat like Mrs Cranmer can still dazzle the parvenu Mr Rudge. It is mere patina, and will soon fade.4 These country families are struggling against an historical tide that the dykes and ditches of their estates cannot contain: current affairs and contemporary politics washing away every defence. The Cranmers have sold the house to the National Trust, to leave only the grand old dame, who is to live above the stables. How resonant!5 This elite is downsizing. And are to fall into oblivion: Mrs Cranmer’s son has no heir. Nevertheless, Edward is happy with his wife Helen, who seems to complement him perfectly; sensibility not genealogy now the governing value; the academically inclined Edward prepared to extinguish the family name and surrender local rule, for it is the professions, not nobility, that calls him to service, are this age’s heraldic call. A long history is ending; one kind of England dying out. Only an old maid remains. Britain’s last dodo.

At the door Laura glanced back at Miss Cranmer, who had been left sitting in the corner of the velvet sofa. She did not seem to notice their departure. She was staring into space, her hands folded in her lap, her head twitching now and then like a dog who dreams. Her small figure looked lost in the great glowing room, swimming in the light of the summer afternoon. The group over the fireplace gazed down at her with well-fed, amiable arrogance, declaring that they were English ladies and gentlemen who would for ever inherit the earth.Thus should life be, they said, the green garden and the trout rising in the river, the white hand curled against the sea-green silk, the dead wild duck dangling, the jolly little slave crouching beside the cage of the huge flaunting crimson and yellow bird. Thus will life always be, stated their healthy confident faces. But in a minute there was nobody in the room but Aunt Sophia.

The power fading away, yet the Cranmers are enjoying themselves; Edward, living inside his own cerebral world, is content with the easy companionship of his wife, who understands him. They are suited to each other, and this, Laura reflects, is all that matters; contentment more important than the worship of the noble line, its persistence into the future. The family is not a church! Care only for the present, and its fleeting ways, has become the ruling belief, here in the 1940s. The war, and Laura’s peculiar relationship to it, has affected her attitudes far more than Stephen’s; she enjoyed a freedom that has exaggerated her vague and dreamy character which having fused with the disorder of the house produces a pleasing melancholy, replete with longing and unrest; it could, yes, it could…it could be…be…perfect! Talking to a local gypsy Laura spins off into a long revelry that revolves around her jealousy at this man’s freewheeling ways - with few possessions and a railway carriage for a home he can leave any time he likes, she thinks. He has become her symbol. Not anchored to a domestic history the gypsy enjoys a pure liberty, making him sensitive, attuning him to his own whims and needs. And he can go! at any moment. How she envies this character! The happiest person she knows.

He laughed out loud, as though the idea amused him. She had to smile too, for the sound was so curiously, unusually - yes, that was the only word for it - so curiously merry. Children laughed like that, but grown ups hardly ever. Mrs. Prout’s huge bosom shook, Mr. Vyner boomed and brayed, Mavis Porter’s giggles floated out of the twilight at the end of the lane, irritating as the soul-less shakes and whistles of Mrs. Bunt’s canaries. The gypsy, however, laughed merrily, merrily, under the greenwood tree. He laughed richly, contently, as a fat man laughs, as though there were layers of jolly fat on his spiritual bones. For actually he was thin, his old trousers were too big for him, and they were tied round his waist with a bit of string.

Laura refuses his request to climb to the top of Barrow Down: I must be home in time for my daughter, she says. Goodbye goodbye; to return to the country lane, where she stops, and looks back to where it winds around and disappears into the hill. She changes her mind. I will go up to Barrow Down after all! Where she enjoys a few hours of liberation; when, during an idyllic late afternoon, she enjoys a grand vision of England, crafted out of the beautiful hills, the clear summer air, and the sea peeking over the cliffs. A moving rectangle of light, alien to this majestic pastoral scene, introduces an uncanny feel. It is a car window! she suddenly realises. Stephen is sitting behind it. To Laura this banal object looks odd and unreal; an augury of strange, of great, events, this car becomes part of her own imaginary nation, a place of dreams and visions, and of memories, all suffused with tones and textures akin to music. The afternoon is lovely. The view glorious. And Laura… She forgets herself, falling asleep to wake hours later, long after Victoria has gone to bed and Stephen is about to call the police, worried she may have had an accident - she will insist on riding that battered bike.

Before she fell asleep, under that sun’s somatic seduction, Laura mused upon a new sort of existence for her daughter; albeit, and this is typical of her character, this concrete idea is quickly lost amongst the complex cross-currents of ambiguous feeling and quick-silvered thought: is she, in the following passage, referring to the weather, to the Germans or to Stephen himself when she talks of being left alone? Is that rectangle of light an unwelcome presence, a disquieting omen…

It must last for Victoria, the beautiful weather. And again the earth beneath her seemed to give its delicious half-sway. I want a good deal for Victoria, she thought drowsily, but not the same things that my mother wanted for me. Nothing better than this. A quiet evening, a house and a child in the valley, time to climb a hill by herself. But it is only possible, she thought confusedly, if we are left alone, if the good weather lasts. How the bowl hummed with all its voices, sleepy crickets in the grass! Be not afeared, Mrs. Cranmer had said long, long ago, the isle is full of noises. How it hummed, her dear isle. And suddenly the hum was music, Mrs. Vyner’s music, swelling, dying away, seeming about to state something which Laura would never forget in the split second before her eyelids drooped, her eyelids sealed. Mrs. Vyner’s music swelled out of the air, but enormously stronger, fortified by a million strings. She could see through her flickering lashes the wing-like movement of all the arms beating up and down, drawing the bows up and down across the glittering air—or were they really some large white birds, pigeons, seagulls, flapping slowly across the blue? But the music went on, the whole world was playing it now, she struggled to keep awake and hear it, the answer. “If only the weather doesn’t break,” she said to Stephen, who was sitting listening beside her. The earth rocked once, twice, Mrs. Vyner’s piano reared up and yawned, the crickets played a piercingly sweet passage close to her ear.

She slept.

When she wakes, the dream has faded away.

She sprang to her feet, or tried to spring to her feet, but she was awfully stiff. She staggered and stood for a moment, her head spinning stupidly. I am glad I got to the top, she thought, looking dizzily down into the great misty bowl. But now she wanted to be down in it, to be part of it, to be home. She wanted to run in, calling their names, to find Stephen and say to him—what?  Something that had come into her mind just before she fell asleep, though it did not really matter.  She was feeling so extremely happy.

Though the joy it evoked remains. It has been one fine day! Although a novelist of this quality will never be satisfied by simple fact. Of course Mollie Panter-Downes is going to use symbols; this day a synecdoche for that period - a few short months - between the last days of the war and the beginning of Austerity, when dreams were thought common sense.6 The war was a social revolution, producing a brief interlude of freedom, fun and exquisite pleasure, out of which a vision of the good life arose, Britain’s New Jerusalem. It couldn't last. This vision quickly vanished. But then something strange happens: Laura's ecstatic happiness. The dream of liberty never so wonderful as on the day it dies.

_________________

 1.Compare with the hero in Jocelyn Brooke’s The Image of a Drawn Sword (in my Come Back Sweet Time).

2.  We wonder if there is a metaphorical code operating here: to read the novels of Elizabeth Bowen, Penelope Lively and Anthony Powell is to recognise both the ubiquity of wartime promiscuity and its melancholy aftermath: the longing for that sexual liberty in Laura; regret and shame in Stephen, who suspects more than he knows.

3.  Compare the sensibility displayed here to that in Barbara Comyns’ Sisters by the River, where the family’s decay freed up the children, who enjoyed happy times in a large house with extensive gardens. A wealthy family’s decline, by introducing nature into a highly civilised state, encourages liberty… And is the best of times for those tuned into freedom’s frequencies.

4.  In Isobel Colegate’s A Man of Power the dazzle is shown to be tinsel: the glamour hardly lasted a decade.

5.  Lord Clandon is an interesting comparison in Lance Comfort’s Silent Dust (see my He Can’t See It).

6. For two other micro-periods in the 1940s see my pieces on Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. Silent Dust is more upbeat on the period discussed here; see my He Can’t See It and Period Fashions.