I only bought my copy of Ordinary Families by E. Arnot Robertson recently, but I added it to my Classics Club list as it’s a Virago. It was originally published in 1933.

Someone commented earlier that this was a bit of a love or hate book, but having a quick squint at the few reviews I’ve seen of it, it seems that most people really liked it. For me it was just okay-ish, in parts. I really quite disliked the first third of it. It reads very much like an Arthur Ransome book with all the sailing going on, minus the quirky characters. To be fair though this book was published before Ransome published We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, which I read recently, but there is a problem with a lost anchor and chain, exactly as described in the Ransome book, maybe it’s a common sailing problem.

Anyway, the setting is Pin Mill on the Suffolk Marshes and the characters are mainly made up of what is described as three middle class families, but their wealth or lack of it is very uneven with the widowed Mr Quest being very much the wealthiest (dishonestly gained). Lallie Rush is one of four children and lives in the shadow of her very pretty sister Margaret. Lallie is a bit of a tomboy and very young for her age. She’s keen on birdwatching, to begin with. The Cottrells are the other family and they’re rather artistic, or think they are, they seem to know lots of well-known people and tend to look down on the Rush family. There’s such a lot of class snobbery in this book, but what was even worse for me is the lack of likeable characters. Towards the end I sort of warmed to Lallie, at the same time as thinking she was a fool.

Mr Quest is new to the neighbourhood and he sets about building an enormous wall which totally blocks out the view of the river that his neighbours had had. Complaints have no effect, the rich Mr Quest has robbed the Rush family of their magnificent view of the Orwell river.

Mr Rush is a total bore who regales people with his previous adventures, but stays ominously quiet when someone who has actually been to the place he talks about most visits the area, which seems to me likely that he is a teller of tall tales, at the same time as being a builder of bad boats, difficult to sail because of their poor design. The wives are either dead or living for their children

It’s quite a depressing read really as when I thought about it it’s evident that there’s nobody in it who is really happy. All of the couples young and old have just ‘settled’ for various reasons and while I would be the first to admit that you can’t expect perfection all the time and there’s more to marriage and relationships than romance, I found Lallie’s situation at the end of the book to be tragic – and her husband just ghastly, before and after the marriage.

Having just written this I realise that I disliked it more than I thought. Oh well, onwards and upwards.

The Virago cover shows a detail from a painting called The Young Rower by Lancelot Glasson, which I’ve actually seen at an exhibition in Edinburgh, but it usually resides at Rochdale Art Gallery.