Tag Archives: 1940s fiction

The Happy Prisoner by Monica Dickens

Posted on by
2

The Happy Prisoner by Monica Dickens was first published in 1946.

Oliver North has been badly wounded in World War 2. He has had a leg amputated and his stump wasn’t healing well, the explosion has also damaged his heart, but he’s back at home now, although stuck in bed as he isn’t well enough to cope with the exercises required for his rehabilitation. It’s a frustrating situation for a previously healthy and active young man, but his bedroom becomes a bit of a hub for his family and he has an attractive  nurse, Elizabeth who attends to him.

It’s a farming community and Oliver hopes to eventually be able to take over the running of the family farm, but meanwhile all of his relatives are in and out of his room telling him of their problems, and he tries to advise them, not always successfully.

His sister Heather’s marriage is in trouble and the return of her husband who had been a prisoner in Japan has not gone well, and his tomboyish sister Violet looks like she’ll be making a disaster of a marriage too.

So it’s a time of upheaval for almost everyone in the family. The war has come to an end at last and people have to adjust to their new life, but there’s also a lot of comedy in this book and the author’s description of a beautiful moth on the first page had me hooked from the start.

I had first  read and enjoyed a few books by Monica Dickens (great-granddaughter of Charles) back in the 1970s, then a couple more over the last decade or so, so it was about time I got around to reading more.

Apparently she volunteered for the Samaritans and when she married an American and moved to the US she set up the first American branch of the Samaritans in Boston, Massachusets.

 

One Year’s Time by Angela Milne – 20 Books of Summer 2023

Posted on by
3

One Year’s Time by Angela Milne was first published in 1942, but it has just been reprinted by British Library. I must say that as soon as I started to read this book I turned back to the publishing details to check them out as I could hardly believe what I was reading. The setting is the late 1930s and it begins in London.

Liza had been at a New Year’s party the previous evening and had met Walter there for the first time. She is just about to start painting the floor in her living room when the telephone rings. It’s Walter, he has looked her number up in the phone book and he would like to come round to her place. Liza is keen for him to visit her. To be fair so would I be, anything to postpone having to paint a floor would be a welcome.  But by page 7 they’re in bed!

Liza is a secretary, in a very staid company, and Walter is training to be a barrister, something he’d like to avoid. Very quickly Liza is besotted with him and she’s suppressing all her own wishes, matching her actions to what he wants in life because she’s afraid that she’ll lose him if he realises what she really wants. She knows that he has had lots of affairs in the past, sometimes with married women. Clinging to him would put him right off her.

When Walter announces that he wants to go away to the country and write a book Liza gives up her job to be with him. She pretends she’s his wife and keeps house for him and they strike up a friendship with Kate and Maurice, a married  couple who live nearby. Of course Walter doesn’t even try to write a book, he’s just lazing and reading. It’s an idyllic time for Liza anyway,  despite the fact that she realises that she’s more or less walking on eggshells. She really has to be true to herself if she’s going to find happiness, but spinsterhood is beckoning to her and she’d rather avoid that.

Kate has guessed that they aren’t married, but Liza doesn’t see Kate as being a danger. Walter has given up calling Liza darling and has moved on to calling her ‘ducky’. For me this is a dead giveaway, I’m never keen on people calling their other half ‘darling’ instead of using their name, it smacks of being afraid of calling them by the wrong name, but ducky is definitely a demotion!

This all makes it sound quite grim, but it isn’t. There’s quite a lot of humour in it. Angela Milne was A.A. Milne’s niece and she wrote for Punch.

From a social history point of view this book was a real eye-opener for me as we’ve always been told that the introduction of the Pill in the late 1960s had led to the permissive society, but it seems that there was always a lot more ‘illicit’ sex going on than I would have thought, we can’t blame wartime because the war hadn’t quite started yet.

Thank you to British Library who sent me a copy of the book for review. I really enjoyed it and it’s just a shame that the author never wrote any more books. There could have been a sequel about Walter dodging the war in some way and marrying someone who definitely didn’t race him into bed within 24 hours of meeting him.

As ever with this series there are interesting snippets of information about the decade it was first published and a thoughtful and informative Afterword by Simon Thomas.

Flowers in the Grass by Monica Dickens

Posted on by
2
Flowers in the Grass cover

Flowers in the Grass by Monica Dickens was published in 1949. This book is well written but it reads more like a collection of short stories rather than a novel. It’s the story of Daniel who I found to be very annoying which might colour my thoughts.

Daniel is stubborn, thrawn as we say in Scotland and isn’t what could be called normal, now I suspect he would be described as being quite high on the autism spectrum, or maybe it’s just that he’s one of those people who think that the rules just don’t apply to them – only to other people. Daniel also has the knack of finding women who are keen to look after and mother him. I wouldn’t have been one of them.

The book begins with a chapter titled Jane, surprisingly Daniel marries Jane who happens to be his first cousin (eugh) and it looks like this is going to be a book about a young couple with Jane improving Daniel and settling down in a lovely home, but disaster strikes.

Daniel’s existence in people’s lives never seems to be a plus for them but at the end he sort of makes up for it all, expiation through another young couple.

For me anyway this wasn’t one of her best, but other readers seem to have been quite keen on it.

At Mrs Lippincote’s by Elizabeth Taylor

Posted on by
6
At Mrs Lippincote's cover

At Mrs Lippincote’s by Elizabeth Taylor was first published in 1945 but my copy is a Virago reprint. This was her first novel, I’ve read almost all of her other novels and I think that this one is obviously not quite as polished as some of her later books. To begin with I wasn’t really too enthralled with this one because I didn’t really like any of the characters but I ended up really enjoying it.

The setting is World War 2 and Julia’s husband Roddy is in the RAF. He has been posted away from London and Julia and their son Oliver have gone with him. They’ve rented an old house and Roddy’s unmarried cousin Eleanor is also part of the household, she’s teaching in a local school.

To begin with Julia is portrayed as a rather annoying and quite rude woman. Eleanor has always been in love with Roddy, so she thinks that Julia is off-hand with her husband, and to be honest she isn’t going to win any ‘best wife’ contest. Worse than that though is Julia’s attitude to seven year old Oliver who hasn’t even started school yet, Julia’s terribly over-protective of him, and it does him no good.

By the time the reader gets towards the end of the book though everything falls into place, and what had seemed like peculiar behaviour on the part of some of the characters becomes completely understandable.

There’s a painful conversation between Julia and her husband who basically thinks that education is wasted on females – and you just know that this is something that Elizabeth Taylor had witnessed herself, indeed I even witnessed that attitude within my own family in the 1960s. How times have changed for the better!

The Virago copy of this book has an interesting article by Elizabeth Taylor which had first been published in the New York Herald Tribune in 1953. It’s a two and a half page snapshot of her life – from her birth in 1912. At the end of it she says: “I think I have no hobbies. In my spare time I like to look at pictures, to write letters to my friends, or just to reflect on the English climate – a subject which is endlessly fascinating and elusive, of which one is unconscious. I do not know where English literature – or the lovely English landscape – would be without this weather.”

Now I just have three of her novels still to read – The Wedding Group, Blaming and The Sleeping Beauty.

No Highway by Nevil Shute

Posted on by
2
No Highway cover

No Highway by Nevil Shute was first published in 1948. Shute was of course an aeronautical engineer and pilot and he worked in that industry at the same time as he was writing his earlier books. In No Highway Shute has plundered his experiences of working within the aviation industry.

The tale is told by Dr Scott, the head of the Structural Department at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. Theo Honey is one of the employees he is in charge of, Honey is a strange character as far as everyone else is concerned, he has weird ideas about religion and being able to gain information through using a planchette. Honey’s wife was killed when their home was bombed during the war and he has been left to bring up their young daughter on his own.

Honey is completely obsessed by his research on stress and metal fatigue in aircraft and he thinks he has discovered that the newest trans-Atlantic Reindeer aircraft is likely to suffer catastrophic damage involving the tail falling off after they have flown around 1400 hours.

Nobody wants to believe his research outcomes and his weird interests are used against him, to paint him as someone not to be taken seriously. One Reindeer aircraft has already crashed into a mountain but as usual the crash has been blamed on pilot error. Honey and Scott believe that if they don’t stop the other Reindeers from flying then more people will die in crashes. Honey is sent off to Canada to look for evidence of metal fatigue on the crashed aircraft, and ends up taking desperate action to stop the plane he is on from flying on when it stops to refuel.

This is a good read, at times quite gripping and also involves quite a lot of romance as Honey is one of those men who are obviously in need of the love and care of a good woman to nurture and protect him. He brings out their mothering instincts, much to the amazement of the more worldly men around him. .

Murder Among Friends by Elizabeth Ferrars

Posted on by
4

Murder Among Friends by Elizabeth Ferrars was published in April 1946 and it’s sometimes titled Cheat the Hangman. It begins at a party which is being given by Cecily Lightwood, the setting is London in wartime and the guests at the party are mainly literary types. They’re all waiting for Aubrey Ritter to turn up, it seems like without him the party is never going to get going. He doesn’t have far to come, in fact he’s living in a flat just upstairs.

Another visitor to the block of flats alerts them to the fact that a murder has been committed. It seems like a very simple case to crack and the culprit is caught and convicted very quickly. But is the verdict correct?

I enjoyed this one which has a good wartime/blackout atmosphere, when it was an advantage to have a heavy drinker with you who could tell you how many steps up every pub had from the pavement, when you went out on a pub crawl.

There’s an interesting cast of characters and clothes are important in the book, with lots of descriptions of what the women in particular were wearing, such as:

Her coat was of a grey Indian lamb, worn over a scarlet woollen dress which was held in round her far from slender waist by a belt of gilded leather. She had a heavy gilt necklace round her throat and chunks of gilt screwed on to the lobes of her ears. With her fair hair done up in a gaudily striped turban, showing on her forehead in a cluster of dishevelled curls, with her fresh, fair skin, blue eyes and soft full lips, gaudily daubed with a few haphazard strokes of lipstick, she was like some magnificent doll, come to exuberant life.

In fact clothes play quite an important part in this book.

This one qualifies for the Read Scotland 2015 challenge as Elizabeth Ferrars was of Scottish descent despite being born in India and she lived in Edinburgh for 20 years.

The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin

Posted on by
4

I should really have enjoyed this book as it has all the elements which I usually like, 1940s setting, a railway journey and also it involves a theatre company of actors who are rehearsing for their opening night, a scenario which I’ve enjoyed in the past, but unfortunately there were no likeable characters, in fact most of them I wouldn’t have wanted to spend any time with at all, so it was harsh to be stuck in a book with them.

It’s a Gervase Fen mystery, first published in 1944, so it’s the first in a series of nine books featuring him, I can only surmise that the books got better further into the series, this is the first one which I’ve read. Fen is an Oxford professor who also writes mysteries, this is also a scenario which I’ve enjoyed in the past. In fact Crispin copied this from Michael Innes, even nicking one of his characters names. Going on the evidence of this one Michael Innes is a much better writer, and would also qualify for Read Scotland 2014 as he was a Scot.

In the 1930s and 40s there seemed to have been an awful lot of snobbery amongst some crime writers. It’s understandable I suppose, especially if the writer was working as an academic too. They obviously wanted their colleagues to think that they weren’t engaged in writing dross and this led to them dropping in screeds of Latin and in this case German too. I did both those languages at school so it isn’t a problem for me but it must be a frustration to people who aren’t able to translate for themselves. I know that much as I love Dorothy Sayers – it did so annoy me when she went as far as writing in Greek – I mean really! Even when I was at school the only boys who did Greek were the couple who wanted to become ministers – and yes of course in that dim distant past they were all boys.

Anyway, back to the book, there was some humour, always a plus as far as I’m concerned but there was also a lot of nastiness, especially about the women, it was all quite mysoginistic, even by 1940s standards. I wasn’t even impressed with the mystery part of it, I could only give it 2 stars on Goodreads.

I believe that the last book in this series is his best one – The Moving Toyshop. I wonder if I could just skip the other seven and go straight to that one!

Keep the Home Guard Turning by Compton Mackenzie

Posted on by
2

This book is like Dad’s Army (I love that programme) but instead of the south of England setting we find ourselves on the Scottish islands of Great Todday and Little Todday. The islanders are fierce rivals and even have different religious affiliations with Great Todday being staunchly Protestant and Little Todday Catholic. In earlier days they spent their time stealing each other’s sheep.

World War 2 has broken out and the islanders are living in fear of a German invasion, although some of them think that if Hitler invades then they will be able to improve him with their hospitality in the shape of whisky, which everyone seems to quaff at an amazing rate, ‘just a sensation’ is the usual offer, but a sensation is a very big dram indeed!

This is an amusing read and for me it came to an end too abruptly. I couldn’t find anything about a sequel to this one which was first published in 1943. But amazingly I was browsing in a local bookshop (Burntisland) when I came across Rockets Galore which was first published in 1957 it has the same setting and I now realise that his famous book Whisky Galore was published in 1947 and as that is set on the islands too I should be reading that one next. Whisky Galore was of course made into a very popular film and the TV series Monarch of the Glen was based on one of Compton Mackenzie’s books too.

This is the first book by Meckenzie which I have read but some of his earlier books are available free from Project Gutenberg.

The House That Is Our Own by O. Douglas

Posted on by
4

As usual this is another book about houses and homes. O. Douglas seems to have been writing her dreams. As a spinster I suppose she spent most of her life living in her parent’s homes and longing to have a place of her own, so until she could do that she fulfilled her wishes by building fictional homes.

Kitty and Isobel are living in an hotel, as people sometimes did especially during World War 2 – this book was first published in 1940. But they are both hankering after something more permanent.

Surprisingly they don’t pool their resources and buy a home together, Kitty decides to take a service flat in London, but Isobel falls for a ramshackle old historic house in the Scottish Borders which she finds when she is on holiday there.

The House that is Our Own is full of wit and wisdom, such as:- you’re much too easily pleased with everything. The world will simply make a footstool of you if you ask so little from it. I wish I had realised that many moons ago!

Kitty and Isobel look at lots of flats in London. Are there really people who would live in a basement, always in artificial light, and be willing to pay £150 a year for the privilege?
How shocked they would have been if they were told how much it would cost to rent a flat in central London in 2013!

This was another enjoyable comfort read from O. Douglas which I chose deliberately when we were having our house put in order prior to putting it on the market, it was a shock to us because we had been under the impression that the house was perfect and ‘ready to go’. So I could have done without the fictional workmen which turned up in the book at a time when we were dealing with actual workmen unexpectedly. Such is life.

House-Bound by Winifred Peck

Posted on by
8

House-Bound was first published in 1942 but it has been reprinted by Persephone.

It’s that World War 2 setting again, but this one is also set in Edinburgh which Winifred Peck decided to rename Castleburgh for some reason. It begins at a registry office for servants, but there are no servants to be found as they’ve all given up domestic drudgery in favour of earning more money, independence and ‘doing their bit’ for the war effort, and who could blame them!

The middle class ladies of Edinburgh blame them, that’s for sure, but when Mrs Fairlaw (Rose) is told that millions of women do their own housework she decides that that is just what she will do. Rose has been born into quite a grand family and married Stuart Fairlaw who had inherited the family pile, Laws House, originally an ancient tower house but much enlarged over the years and very inconvenient and difficult to keep clean.

Rose is completely clueless about housework and cooking and even wonders if you have to use soap to clean the potatoes! Stuart can see that his wife is exhausted by all her domestic duties but as a man it never occurs to him to lend a hand, and Rose doesn’t expect him to. Their children are grown up and off in various military services.

This book is funny in parts but also sad too as the war takes a toll on family members. Rose is a strange mother/step mother with obvious favouritism towards one child and this has had an unfortunate effect on the rest of the family.

Eventually a Mrs Childe comes to help Rose with the housework a few hours each day and she attempts to teach Rose the mysteries of domesticity, there’s so much of it going on that I felt quite exhausted. Did you know that you are supposed to clean your cornicing regularly, I didn’t – and don’t!

It’s an enjoyable read and Rose is a really likeable character, there’s also some input from the US army in the shape of Major Hosmer, who tries to help Rose with her problems. One thing which did amuse me was the constant references to Rose and her friend Linda as being old and basically past it, so it’s a bit of a shock to realise that they’re only in their early 50s.

I do believe myself that the 50s is the new 30s!!