Paradise Woes

Who really wants to live in paradise? Given the Garden of Eden, some dreamt of the tough ole days, when men were hard and heroes; the Fifties, a decade when the rebel was lauded, as the people chose comfort over independence. Barbara Comyns, Who was Changed and Who was Dead. For all of its technological miracles the 1950s seems glued to the past, ruled by oldsters who’d forgotten their retirement date.

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Some characters want to go out into the world, others like it at home. Yet home can be a trap, as Ebin Willoweed - great name - discovers; he is dependent on a tyrannical mother who dominates both her house and this novel. For a decade he has lived here with his two children; during all this time he has dreamed of escaping such harsh rule. A freak accident - the local baker, experimenting with rye bread, poisons the village with ergot - gives him his chance: a London newspaper, smitten with his coverage of the event, offers our man a permanent contract. A career in journalism has been resurrected from the dead. 

Doesn’t ergot kill not give life? Depends if you’ve eating rye bread. With the locals going mad and chopping themselves up - we are present at a grisly scene with a butcher going berserk on a bridge - it is handy to have an old hand as witness. Ebin has an inspiration and writes his first piece for years. He’s a natural, and soon there is demand for more. A decade of depression, with its feelings of failure and submission, is lifting, with this new life of creative activity. Awoken from a living death he is invigorated, strong and happy. He has to tell Grandmother Willoweed he is leaving…he does, and finds he enjoys it. Independence is intoxicating.

Grandmother Willoweed has made the mistake of thinking that the best way of adverting a lonely old age is to create a seraglio of relatives, buying their submission by vague promises of inheritance. Not the household bodyguard but the solicitor and his will, to keep these people in place. Dominate. Threaten. Be a thoroughly nasty person, and the family to stay, cudgelled into passivity by your overbearing personality. Yet she has only set down the conditions for their escape; for in a crisis no love or loyalty will bind them to her. Ebin tells his mother he is leaving. She breaks down, and dies in her sleep.

One of the biggest characters in Fifties fiction - figuratively not just literally: Grandmother Willoweed competes with the Chilterns for range and size - she has her best fights with the gardener, Mr Ives; each chiding the other on who will live longest. Both enjoy the battle, for strong people like a fight, their want their tyranny tested. Ebin - too weak to stand up to his mamma - has yet to learn this subtle truth; the family thus allowing the old woman to become a despot. Grandmother Willoweed has created her own kingdom, which she refuses to leave. A gigantic matriarch, lording it over her son and a few servants, in a quiet village in the lushest part of England, has turned her estate into an empire out of the mythical East. Yet this is the Home Counties not the Arabian Nights. Her rule more comic than exotic. She can only play the autocrat from within the safety of her own garden; it is why once upon a time she decided not to step off her property. But now someone dies, and her curiosity pricked, she wants to attend the funeral. How get to the church without leaving her own land….

At eleven thirty the sinister black group were still arguing by the river, while the sun beat down on their heads. Eventually it was decided by Grandmother Willoweed that the boat could be dragged through the mud to the water.

“But who will wade through all that mud?” wailed her son.

‘You, of course, my dear, with a little help from Ives.”

“Mother, my clothes!” he shouted.

“You are dressed like a fool already, so what does it matter?” the old woman snapped, swinging her ear trumpet around in a threatening manner.

Ives went off to the potting shed and returned with two enormous pairs of waders that were sometimes used for fishing by the weir. Dejectedly the men crawled into them.

‘Hurry, hurry!” their persecutor shouted, and her tongue protruded through her lips.

Without a word the men stepped into the mud and dragged and pushed the heavy boat towards the water. They struggled in the mud and heaved and pushed, and in the end they did manage to get the boat into quite deep water. Ives remaining holding it while Ebin returned to his mother. She almost leapt at him and twined her great legs round his body, and he reeled under her weight. Staggering and gasping, he managed to reach the funeral barge and push his awful mother into it. Relieved of her weight, he lent, doubled up, over the boat. Channels of sweat were pouring down his swollen, almost crimson face. Old Ives helped him gently into the boat; they were fellow sufferers.

When Ebin had sufficiently recovered, the men used punt poles and found the boat moved quite easily. Grandmother Willoweed sat in her draped armed-chair, a proud but rather muddy figure. She looked straight ahead, which was just as well or she would have seen Eunice’s laughing face looking at her between the trees and Hattie convulsed with laughter sitting on the hen-pen roof. Ives’s ducks watched the boat’s progress from the island where they were presenting themselves in the sun, and when the boat drew near most of them flew into the water with loud quakes of welcome.

“Send those foolish birds away!” complained the old woman; but Ives took no notice and they followed hopefully behind.

A tyrant’s rule is akin to madness. For with no resistance their life is turned into a series of obsessions and crazy whims; large characters able to convince others to live inside such fantasies. Everyone in this house submits to Grandmother Willoweed’s will and idées fixes; even the servants - Norah and Eunice - allow the old bitch to beat them up. Only when outside circumstances intervene - Norah to marry Fig; Eunice pregnant by Mr Lott - do they leave; Eunice to work for the sweet sisters of Roary Court. Despite the depredations of the ageing despot, these people have to be pushed out of the place; the meaning of the flood that brilliantly opens this novel, and of which the ergot poisoning is its human corollary. To break out from a closed world these characters need outside intervention - it is nature’s grace - or else habit and passivity, their will to servitude, prevails.

To the children this is normal life. Grandmother Willoweed part of the landscape around which they manoeuvre. No big deal. They are content in nature’s paradise, the massive garden that surrounds this large house next to the river. For much of the time they avoid the authoritarian’s shenanigans. Grandmother an eccentric character who occasionally frustrates their idyll - when she bullies their father into giving them lessons - but otherwise, as in this river scene, she is a figure of fun. They are too distant from the old woman to feel her baleful effects. Their father’s behaviour - he hides in his own room - they find odd, but convenient, his presence irksome and interfering. Dennis, a soft, fragile child, who is close to his sisters Hattie and Emma, is the only one to suffer; his father wanting him to act like a man, bullies him into acting tough and sporty. Like most weak men - he lacks the strength of sympathy, with its emotional rough and tumble - Ebin has no understanding of others.

The ergot changes everything. Bringing death to some it carries new life to others. Ebin we have mentioned. For Emma a young doctor comes to town - they fall in love. I could go on, but you note the theme, which is obvious. After the flood there is a new landscape. New lives to be built on it.

The will is read out. Ebin realises that he is a wealthy man. Suddenly the house seems very attractive - he sees himself as his custodian - while Hattie does not want to leave the place: she has become sentimental over its memories. Life hasn’t changed that much, the theme not so clear as first thought. Ebin breaks the contract with the newspaper, and lives happily ever after at home.

Not to test oneself in the world but to find contentment away from it, this is his deepest instinct.1 Grandmother Willoweed, we now recognise, was an excuse for Ebin’s lethargy not its cause. Deep down he prefers the freedom of submission; it is only when it gets too much - when strong rule becomes tyrannical - that he day-dreams of escape.

The big house - a trope not just of this writer but of the period - is once more to the fore, drawing its magnetic charm.2 Desuetude has its own attraction, especially for an author who prefers the liberty of poverty to the restraints of riches.3 Poor Grandmother Willoweed. If only she’d been nice! She would have lived forever with a family that would have looked after her. For some characters - Ebin - retirement is more compulsive than work. 

There are many kinds of freedom. Ebin, having suffered the one kind - he took too much licence and was sacked for libel - retreats to a second childhood, which the flood brings to an end. Despite his unhappiness and the depression of such childish servitude, it has been a tolerable existence, with its emancipation from decision-making and routine work. If it wasn't for the uncertain future - will Grandmother Willoweed leave him her money? - he might have resigned himself to it. Journalism offers a different sort of liberty, but one that will involve an engagement with the world, its discipline, its contingencies, its intrusion. So hard! Only an outside force to compel him to be so free. When it relaxes he is to enjoy yet another kind of freedom, as a member of the leisure class. This man wants live away from the footlights; though their pull - and their loss - resonates throughout the novel. The quiet life attracts but also enervates. 

This novel is not about the artist, for whom a job and society are unwelcome guests, taking his time, his ideas, his energy - they clutter up his studio - but about the gentleman, who prefers to doss rather than graft. Child, artist, lazybones, all so similar in Comyn’s fiction; which is obsessed by weakness and failure, which can give space to others, especially children.

Mass death has put new life into this community.

We suspect some sly social commentary; with four decades shoehorned into a novella. The memory of the swinging twenties; the Depression of the 1930s; the Austerity of the 1940s (Grandmother Willoweed); and the prosperous 1950s. Like so much of this author’s work, this is a novel about those misunderstood decades - the 1930s and 1940s. She is telling us that the bad times were not so bad after all. Despite all the complaints it is the childhood paradise - that big house with its wilderness where parents are rarely seen -  that calls, when we live without restriction or responsibility. It is adulthood that is the curse of adult life. It suggests characters who have never left Eden’s gates. Ebin is lucky. Having eaten the apple, God, in the shape of Grandmother Willoweed, has allowed him back into the Garden. Oh dear!

Most bourgeois are not so lucky, the reason they are so upset, angry, dissatisfied. Their childhood just too magical. Thus Ebin, rather than pitied, is envied…. Oh Miss Comyns, you are so very sly!

Review: Who was Changed and Who was Dead

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1.  Compare with Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle.

2.  Sisters By a River.

3.  Our Spoons Came From Woolworths.