Starlight by Stella Gibbons was first published in 1967. She is of course best known for writing Cold Comfort Farm which is a witty take off of popular romances which had a rural setting, more precisely those written by Mary Webb.

I’ve read the Cold Comfort books and a few others but I must admit that I had no idea that she had written so many others, and so far the ones I’ve read have each been quite different, although dogs have featured in the books I’ve read. She did write over quite a long period of time though so it’s unsurprising the settings would be different. I love her quirky characters, and this one has London as the setting, a very dilapidated street where some of the houses have been ear-marked for demolition, the area was damaged by bombs and you can still see the cracks.

Gladys and Annie Barnes are sisters in their 70s and they live in a two room flat in a house which has been split up, housing various different tenants on each floor. Life is grim and the sisters are poverty stricken but not quite as much as the old man living in the attic above them.

The tenants are in despair when they hear that the owner of the house has sold it to a ‘rackman’ a slum landlord, they expect him to put up their rents and eventually make them homeless. Gladys in particular is at her wits end, her invalid sister is more sanguine, and against the odds the change in ownership turns out to be a good thing.

I really enjoyed this book, Gibbons evoked a great feeling of post-war London and some of its inhabitants. A time when 8/6 (eight shillings and sixpence) or in decimal money 42 and half pence was the weekly cost of a slum attic room’s rent.

It’s a piece of social history as well as a good read. The setting must be the late 1950s rather than the 60s. Gladys is still talking about drawing the black-outs rather than the curtains, and it’s sad to note that although there was a time when life got a lot more pleasant for working class people living in London, the glory days of the 1960s and 70s, we’re back at the stage of having people living in disgusting slums again, although this time they’re paying exorbitant rents for damp ridden flats.

In some ways this book reminds me of a working class version of Barbara Pym’s or even Jane Austen’s books. There’s witty dialogue, vicars and curates, snobbery, a young female in need of nurturing and a reasonably happy ending. I warn you though that by the time I finished the book I felt absolutely awash with tea and half suffocated by cigarette smoke! There is one character in it who is distinctly odd, especially towards the end of the book, strange totally unlikely things happen to her, but I’m still giving Starlight a 4 on Goodreads though.

In case you were wondering how we climbed the steep slope up to better living conditions and then plummeted down the other side again, look no further than Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative party who sold off all the council houses dirt cheap and allowed the owners to sell them on at huge profits to – buy for let landlords, modern day ‘rackmen’. Life for many people is even worse than it was in the slums of post war London, but that’s another bee I have in my bonnet.

PS. Jack says rackman should possibly be “Rachman” after an infamous 1950s and 1960s slum landlord but it was spelled rackman in the book.