Ruth Adam (1)Critiques

During the Blitz, when friends were bombed out they moved into the narrator's house, already home to herself, her husband, and three children. In the evenings the crowd of friends, most of whom were connected with the BBC, would fantasize about moving to the country where they would have plenty of space and fresh food, so when they read a newspaper advertisement for a thirty-three room manor in Kent, they all moved in together. At first, living in the country was idyllic but eventually things fell apart. This pleasant, often humorous book is the story of the narrator's eight years in the country manor.½

It was a plain hardback book without a dust jacket, sitting on a shelf waiting to catch somebody’s eye. Many people would have passed it by but I recognised the name of an author who has been published by both Virago and Persephone. It had a title that I was sure I had read about, and that suggested the book might well be my kind of book.

It was.

Whether it is fact or fiction isn’t entirely clear, but the author’s words and my reading makes me think that it is fiction lightly fictionalised, to smooth rough edges and make it work as a story.

‘This is a cautionary tale, and true.

Never fall in love with a house. The one we fell in love with wasn’t even ours. If she had been, she would have ruined us just the same. We found out some things about her afterwards, among them what she did to that poor old parson, back in the eighteen-seventies. If we had found them out earlier… ? It wouldn’t have made any difference. We were in that maudlin state when reasonable argument is quite useless.’

It began during the war as a group of Londoners, family and friends, spun stories of the home they would love to have when peace finally came.

‘It must be one of those houses that’s been built, bit by bit. over hundred of years.’

‘It must have great windows that let all the sunlight in’

‘It ought to have a river running through the garden.’

‘There’ll be three or four kitchens, with red-flagged floors and hams hanging from the ceiling and we shan’t have to live in any of them.’

‘It must stand alone. Not another house within half a mile, at the very least. There must be miles and miles of green fields, washing right up to its garden walls.’

They hadn’t thought that it would ever be a reality, but not long after the war one of them saw an advertisement in the personal column of The Times that sounded just like their house.

When they thought about it, they realised that if they pooled their resources the dream could become a reality; and when they went down to see the house they agreed that it must.

‘They say that when a stranger’s face seems familiar, it is because it is like a forgotten face of your childhood. I don’t know if that is true about people. But I know it is about houses. When I stood for the first time in the hall of the manor, it was not strange to me. It was the house I had promised to have, so that my mother could come and stay in it.’

The house was everything they had hoped it would be, but of course there were practicalities and problems that they hadn’t considered. In the post-war world the house had come relatively cheaply because many people had realised that there were more comfortable ways to live. War-time regulations still on place put limits on the refurbishment of the property, and the age where people either were or had household staff was over.

There were wonderful tales told as maids came and went. One girl arrived with a suitor in the forces, went out in clothes she took from the wardrobe of one of the household and left expecting a baby; another had a husband who pilfered money from the box by the telephone; and another seemed perfect until she went for the cook with a knife. Finally they found two girls who worked happily and effectively together, and later they employed a married couple who were hardworking but possibly a little too down-to-earth ….

Luckily the group was blessed with a gardener cum handyman who loved the house and knew how everything worked and how to keep the wheels running smoothly.

The house itself was a joy

‘Every bedroom had a dressing-room. We all became remarkably tidy. You wouldn’t have known our bedrooms as belonging to the same people who had once had coats flung on the bed and overflowing suitcases on all the chairs. The house imposed order upon us, whether we liked it or not. When you have thirty-three rooms, you feel obliged to keep something in each one, and the possessions which had filled the little suburban house to bursting-point now vanished quietly into the depths of the manor.’

Most of the management of the household fell onto the shoulders of the author, because she was the only one who didn’t go out to work and because she and her husband – who worked for the BBC – were the only ones who had brought children. She coped wonderfully, with the people, with the kitchens, and with everything else that came with running a manor house and grounds.

She loved it, but she saw it clear-sightedly.

‘She was an aristocratic lady on our hands. All ideas for making her work for a living were wrecked on the fact that she was born to be served and not to serve.’

Her tone and her storytelling were wonderful. She caught the changing times perfectly, and she wove in some astute social commentary.

‘The gracious life in the front wing, after all, depended entirely upon service in the back wing, and it didn’t seem a justifiable way of living.’

The story is very focused on the house and the experience. I couldn’t tell you much at all about her children, the other members of the household, or what happened before or after. That served the book well, and the account of life in the house – the stories that could be told and the small details that could be recalled – were so engaging and so well drawn that I only thought about that when I put the book down.

Inevitably, over a period of time, the household changed. One man grew tired of commuting, and of living with other people’s children. One woman, who had been romantically involved with some-one else in the household, married someone who definitely didn’t one to move in. Another man was sent to work overseas.

That meant that the household finances were terribly stretched. Sub-letting part of the property was an unhappy experience, but providing lodgings for holiday-makers was much more successful and provided some lovely stories.

‘She loved to hear someone tell a long, painstakingly funny story brought back from the village pub. She never could follow the story. It was the reception she waited for.

“So the English really do laugh out loud when friends are together,” she would say contentedly.

We supplied her with ‘The Edwardians’ to read in the evenings, explaining the phrases to her when she got stuck. Then we sent her off, with a packet of sandwiches to spend the day at Knole, telling her it was Chevron House, in which the book was set. We awaited her return with sympathetic interest. She came in and looked at us speechlessly.

“It’s too much,” she said at last. “It was too beautiful, and too large. I’m going straight to bed.” ‘

The author continued to love the house – her bond deepened when her fourth child was born there – but in the end she had to acknowledge that the workload was too great and the finances could not be managed.

She was philosophical.

‘In April when we bought daffodils off a street- barrow and say to each other when we go home, ” I suppose the magnolia must be out,” we always add, “Thank goodness someone else has got to sweep up the fallen petals.” ‘

I am so pleased that I found this book, and it would be lovely if it could be reissued; because I can think of many other people who would love it too.

Set in a Depression era Nottinghamshire school, this is a bleak narrative of working class school life. We only get to know a few children by name- diligent monitor Moira, the criminally-inclined Hunts - as narrator Madge Brigson - a cynical but driven teacher - focusses largely on the adults around her and the world they must navigate.

Petty crime; left-wing riots; the constant scorn of society on 'old maid schoolmarms' - but, too,on the one glamorous, 'fast' member of the teachers. And the unhappiness of some reaching out for the 'joy' of marriage.
It's an enjoyable, realistic account of a time and a place, which very much tells it as it is.½

Disappointing

I’m Not Complaining is a somewhat ironically-titled novel about a schoolteacher living in a working-class town in the 1930s. Madge Brigson is thirty, yet she calls herself and the other teachers she works with spinsters (ha! What does that make me?). The novel deals with the life of the school, the teachers, pupils, and the bleak, desperately poor town the school serves.

It’s definitely not an uplifting novel, made more depressing by Madge’s bleak outlook on her own situation. Madge is sensible and smart and devoted to her job, but she does have her flaws-cynicism being among them. There’s no sugar-coating any aspect of her life, and she has zero tolerance for foolishness. Madge is the type of character who complains about her lot in life while not trying to change it. It’s as though she enjoys complaining for the sake of complaining!

I did enjoy the author’s descriptions of the other teachers at the school. Jenny is the youngest, beautiful and also rather promiscuous (there’s a scene at the beginning that deals quite candidly with an affair she has that must have been more shocking for a reader when the book was published); Freda the communist; and Miss Jones, a spinster who sweetly dreams about the day when she can be reunited with her “friend” who’s in the Navy. Ruth Adam’s novel is extremely realistic in it’s depiction of a depression-era town, where people are losing their jobs. The author does a fantastic job of balancing the stories of the women who teach at Bronton school with the people of Bronton itself. I thought that the ending of the book happened a little too quickly and came from literally nowhere, but Madge’s decision is pretty true to her character.

A Woman’s Place: 1910-1975 is a fascinating look at women’s social history between that time period. As the Persephone catalogue says, this book complements many of the other books that they (and Virago) publish because it deals in nonfiction form what the novels deal with fictionally. Organized chronologically, this book explores women’s lives at every level of British society, from the VADs (like Vera Brittain) in WWI up through the women’s lib movement.

There are some absolutely fascinating tidbits in this book, stuff I never knew. Because the book was originally published in the 1970s, it tends to be a bit feminist at times, but I thought for the most part that this was a very smart book, not preachy or pedantic. Sometimes her tone is sarcastic and dry, but never bitter. I enjoyed what Ruth Adam had to say about “superfluous women,” spinsters like me and widows who really didn’t have much of a place in early 20th century England. It’s interesting to see how things have changed, or not, in the hundred years since!

I loved how Ruth Adam managed to incorporate the writings of various female authors into her text to illustrate her points; most of them are Persephone or Virago authors such as: Vera Brittain, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Edith Hull, Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, Rosamund Lehmann, Radclyffe Hall, and EM Delafield, just to name a few. Some of the subject matter Adam mentions was current topics even at the time she wrote this, so this whole book was very topical. And it still is, in a way. Of note, Ruth Adam mentions the 1968 Dagenham car plant strike, where the female workers went on strike for sexual discrimination; a film was recently made about the strike, so I guess interest in these things are cyclical!½

At the end of that week the winter began in deadly earnest, as though the cold days before had been merely a temporary substitute for the real thing. I had a persistent sensation, as we plunged deeper into those short, icy days, with their lowering fogs, that the town was plunging down with us. It was frightening. We all seemed to be one -- the huge husks of the great factory buildings whose heart-beats had stopped -- the grey, stained houses round them, the tragic men who stood for ever at street-corners, and the children who came to school in fewer and fewer warm clothes, because as the weather got colder they were pawned for food. I would like to have been detached from it -- a visitor, coming down to work and then going away. But I could not get the feeling of detachment. I was part of it, bound irrevocably to their miseries because my work was their children. (p. 154)

Madge Brigson is in her 30s, single by choice, and committed to the teaching profession. By day she manages a room full of primary school children; on certain evenings she also conducts classes for unemployed young women. The Nottinghamshire town of Bronton has been hit hard by the Great Depression; factories have closed and unemployment is high. Most of the students come from families who were already poor, and are now suffering even more. Despite the gloomy setting, there's a great deal of humor in this book. Adam provides amusing portrayals of parents, children, and townspeople, and takes shots at the government and the educational hierarchy:
We were all at loggerheads that day because the Scripture had been inspected. It seemed silly, because the Scripture is the one inspection that does not matter at all from the point of view of one's career. It is the merest matter of form. ... if you care to teach the children that Jesus Christ lived in the Ark with Noah, the only thing that will happen to you is that some old parson, wihtout any power at the Office at all, will gently remonstrate with you, and the next inspection will be by a member of some religious sect who probably believes something equally odd about Bible history himself. So I did not worry. (p. 43)

Madge's co-workers are a varied lot: Miss Harford is the no-nonsense head teacher. Other teachers include an older woman, Miss Jones; middle-aged Miss Thornby; Freda Simpson, a firebrand with communist leanings; and the beautiful and somewhat promiscuous Jenny Lambert. In those days, teachers had to leave their jobs when they married. Madge and her colleagues have resisted societal pressures, but found that it's not always easy to be an independent woman. Through a year in the life of these strong women, Ruth Adam serves up excellent social commentary on the role of women in society. Each woman has a life-changing experience -- some more so than others. There are moments of deep emotion; Madge herself has to cope with sudden tragedy, and the reader is right there, sharing her grief. Madge is also faced with some significant decisions that will set her course for some time to come. I was pleased with the way Adam handled these issues, ensuring Madge could serve as a role model for others in her day.

In I'm Not Complaining, the narrator is the type who tells it like it is with no interfering idealism or sentimentality. She's a teacher in a school for poor children in an industrial town in Northern England and if you're looking for "if I can reach just one child"-style idealism a la "Up the Down Staircase" you won't find it here. Madge Brigson has no illusions about her students or how most of them will turn out, and sometimes the modern reader will find her a bit harsh in her judgments but she is certainly not without compassion or genuine feeling. I think it's her utter lack of hypocrisy that makes the narrator, and thus this novel, so appealing.