Mary Bell (2)

Well this book was a complete surprise, a gem of a book that I had had for quite a long time. I picked up Summer’s Day by Mary Bell after reading Love, Anger Madness needing a certain kind of book – something of a palate cleanser. Re-issued by Greyladies in 2008 Summer’s Day was first published in 1951 – set in a girls’ boarding school a few years after the Second World War. I think I must have picked this up second hand somewhere, and it has languished overlooked on my shelves ever since.

I underestimated this novel – and that it tuned out to be a much better novel than I had expected was a nice surprise.

There is a wonderful cast of characters, who are fully fleshed out, portrayed by Bell with warm affection and humour. Teachers, girls, their families, maids at the school and the gardener are all given compelling stories of their own. There are stories familiar to all of us who remember school days. Stories of unrequited love, seduction and loss in a novel with themes of love, loss and freedom. Mary Bell weaves these stories together to absolute perfection.

“The school. Empty and expectant, waited within sound of the sea. During term the sea could never be heard through its hygienically opened windows, nor when, as now, Alice opened one of them would the blown newspaper in the empty corridor sound loudly, or the water in the pipes of the heating arrangements pass with a cracking sound. The small echoes in the empty building seemed to Alice far more significant than the comfortable murmur with which it was filled all the term.”

As the novel opens, sixteen-year old Jasmine and Sophie are returning to school for the summer term. After that term, they will have just one year left – and then – freedom! Margery will be beginning at the other end of the school – moving from the junior house to the big school (though why she does this at the start of the summer term and not in September remained a mystery to me). Margery is leaving her father and her beloved Nannie at home – but she does manage to squeeze her teddy bear Augustus into her trunk against Nannie’s instructions. Jasmine, who longs so for freedom, is bright but quite lazy – she writes the essays and Sophie does the algebra. Jasmine has been brought up by her Aunt May. May Tern is married to a desperately dull clergyman – and she and Jasmine have a wonderful relationship – colluding against Uncle Arthur. May’s friend from school; Lady Berwick is Sophie’s mother, and it is at their house at half term Jasmine meets Sophie’s cousin Tom, off to Africa for a year, they agree to write.

Headmistress Miss Bishop – a former pupil of the school, has been forced to ask the retired classics mistress Miss Meadows to come back for a term or two. We see sixty-five-year-old Miss Meadows, leave her comfortable, quiet little cottage with its temperamental stove and willow pattern china, to return to the school she left ten years earlier.

“She had been faithful all her life to her first love but the service of the classics had been hard. It had not been remunerative either and the holidays she would like to have taken had remained for the most part in her dreams.”

Art master, Mr Walker, finds himself smitten from afar by Jasmine’s extraordinary beauty – though he is rather dismayed at what she produces in art class. Sophie’s love meanwhile is bestowed on Geoffrey, the gardener, Albert’s baby son. Sophie spends every moment she can at the cottage helping Mrs Munnings bathe him, Albert is completely nonplussed by Sophie’s adoration.

Albert is the local Adonis, having served his country during the war, when he married young – he now finds himself working at a girls school – stifled by marriage and fatherhood. Albert has a wandering eye, flirts regularly with the bar maid at his local pub, always on the look out for another conquest. As an appreciator of beauty, Mr Walker pays Albert to pose for a painting, the extra money getting spent in the pub. Mr Walker – a studio in the garden shed – lives with his mother – a nasty old woman, desperate to prevent her son from marrying.

Honor, an unhappy vicar’s daughter is assistant matron, a job she loathes. Matron hates her, and Honor feels that she is neither fish nor foul within the school community. Lonely and homesick she is easily seduced by Albert and made miserable thereafter.

I was fascinated by the way Albert and his wife are portrayed. We see Albert as a young, handsome man, selfish and carefree – his wife is always referred to as Mrs Munnings – we never know her first name. This makes her seem drab and matronly – the perfect contrast to Albert’s golden aura. Albert reflects on his time in Algiers, a time of exotic surroundings, when home seemed such a perfect place.

“The seeds of adventure which lay he supposed, in everyone, had been fostered for five years to a green growth and did not wither because he had come home. The easy routine, the soft spoken employer, the bells on Sunday, the tea in the kitchen, the wife to sew buttons, the pub from which one did not rush for fear of a sergeant major, the shops in which no one bargained – how sweet they had been in retrospect, how dull when he had settled down! A girls’ school! he thought, turning his back upon it, and spat over the fence.”

Mrs Prior runs the kitchens – she tells tales and displays the postcards from her son Jim, who is with the services, due home on leave soon to much excitement. Jim is a real hero, and everyone can’t wait to meet him. Shirley; second housemaid, misses dearly her large, warm family, and wants nothing more than a little family of her own. Poor Shirley is destined for some sadness, poignantly and touchingly told by Bell – she’s a wonderful character – and Miss Meadows who so kindly tries to help is adorable.

There is a lot more I could probably say about this lovely novel, suffice to say it was a complete joy.… (plus d'informations)