‘Mr and Mrs Berry always fixed the time for every thing. They arranged life in timetables. Perhaps because nothing of importance happened to them, they liked to make unimportant things important. By fixing a walk, say, for three-thirty, the walk and the hour were made significant. One could look forward to three-thirty, refer frequently to three-thirty, get ready for three-thirty, announce that it was just three-thirty and with satisfaction set off. A walk, taken like that, was much more of an event than a mere exit from the garden gate as soon as a wish to walk occurred.”
That is from After Tea, a short story by a long-forgotten English lady writer, Dorothy Whipple. I can’t remember how I stumbled across her. It is quite possible that I googled something like “long forgotten English lady writers who might appeal to elderly readers who like books about nothing very much”.
I have long had a liking for books by long-forgotten English lady writers who write about nothing very much. My life is so unexciting that to discover Dorothy Whipple makes for an excitement. Even her name is so quintessentially English and of her time that you think, how exciting. Nothing much could happen in a book by somebody called Dorothy Whipple. “Mrs Berry did not care to go into town; it was too fatiguing. She did not care for people, either, and there were, unfortunately, so many of them.”
This elderly lady who resides in a small provincial town knows just what she means. In a taxi, the week we moved to Masterton, we ran into what passes for a traffic jam. There were three cars negotiating a roundabout. “Town’s chaos,” growled the driver.
Dorothy Whipple is, writes the author Harriet Evans in the preface to my copy of Because of the Lockwoods, a name that is “slightly drab, slightly silly”. In other words, deeply unfashionable. She has a sharper eye than that might imply, particularly on small, drab and slightly silly English towns and their inhabitants. She is good at social snobberies.
As the novelist Hugh Walpole noted, “To put it plainly, in Dorothy Whipple’s picture of a quite ordinary family before and after the war there is some of the best creation of living men and women that we have had for a number of years in the English novel. She is a novelist of true importance.” And so long forgotten and hard to find. If you have a Whipple or two on your shelves I am willing to pay good money for them. (Just not the 60 bucks of good money plus shipping it costs to get a copy from overseas bookshops.)
Mrs Whipple has led me back to other, also mostly forgotten, English lady writers. My Auckland friend Linda, a former books editor at a rag we both worked for where nothing much exciting ever happened, sent me her collection of Barbara Pym novels.
Like Whipple, Pym has a keen eye for small-town life. From The New York Times: “However remote her themes may seem – a churn of parish politics and petty romances – beneath the gentle surfaces of her novels is a slow-building comedy, salt wit in a saline drip.”
I might re-read my own copies of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazelet Chronicles trilogy. For maybe the fifth time. They are deceptively cosy, comforting stories of Britain’s post-war upper-middle class, where cats smell of biscuits and where afternoon teas and good manners disguise seething suppressed sexuality and unsaid resentments. I came across it while browsing, for some unknowable reason, in the romantic fiction aisle in the shabby second-hand book shop near where I then lived in Auckland. It was love at first read. I named the lamb I hand-raised Elizabeth Jane after her.
Cosy-cottage novels by forgotten English lady writers are not all roses and foxgloves. Roses have thorns. Foxgloves are poisonous. We used to joke, when we were addicted to the ludicrous Midsomer Murders, that sooner or later somebody would be murdered with a dahlia. Death by Dahlia would be an excellent title for a murder mystery set in a cosy English village.
