Don't You Know There's a War On? , livre ebook
Description
Reviewers and blurbers– author already well reviewed by internationally recognised authors – Hilary Mantel, Emma Donoghue, Philippa Gregory, Salley Vickers, Sarah Dunant et al and by literary critics and journals (Times, Sunday Times, TLS, Library Journal, Entertainment Weekly)
Approaching Sarah Waters, Ali Smith, John Lanchester, Pat Barker, William Boyd, Claire Messud, Zoe Heller. Suggestions welcome.
Advance Reading copies available early for reviewers and stores (November 2019).
Bookstore co¬op available
Media—key reviewers, long-lead magazines, NPR, women’s writing. National media targets include literary fiction editors and reviewers in national dailies and magazines. National print campaign to include Guardian, New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, and to trade magazines Publishers Weekly, Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Booklist, and academic journals.
eBook Marketing: eBook available at the same time as print publication. Promoting e through usual channels social media, print media and through deals with national, international and independent accounts, using promotions newsletters, price promos etc. liaising with print.
Announcement e¬mails sent to independent bookstores, academic journals and conference lists, and book clubs, literary bloggers, and websites.
Twitter and Facebook campaign by publisher, author and PR agency, to include contests and giveaways.
• An ordinary woman’s life and dreams are blighted by the Second World War, post-war society, and a complex mother-daughter relationship
• A disquieting psychological fiction, with elements of black humour.
• Evocation of physical and emotional unravelling, original, courageous first quietly then dramatically shocking – breaks one of the last taboos in mother-daughter relationships
• Expert authorial tone – a woman who has no power and voice, in her later year, gains one through writing her diary; an innovative novel form – monologue from the suburban setting, combined with intricate details of 1940s and 1950s life. Domestic, claustrophobic atmosphere. Todd’s considerable talents give a remarkably sighted view into the bleak alleys of the female psyche.
• Protagonist Joan is the kind of woman whom society and writers tend to ignore – she is unlikable but ultimately sympathetic. Think of her akin to a Flannery O'Connor or Alice Munro character in a drab, small British post-war town. Todd uses a carefully constructed foundation to build to a shocking, multi-layered story. Skilfully grafts disparate elements: psychological suspense, obsession, capturing distortions and complicities that poison familial relationships and intimacies between women.
• Todd’s fine command of language and her character means that the reader is almost unaware that the circuitry of Joan’s mind overtakes her. Is she inhumane or merely unempowered? Unreliable narrator or justifiably jaded? Superbly told story of how inner turmoil and hidden past morph into outer destruction.
• Joan’s diary is bitter, wise, morbid, yet witty, searingly sharp. The writing is controlled yet fresh and ultimately thrilling. Todd creates a wonderful tension between wanting to slow down and bathe in the language and imagery, and the impulse to race to see what will happen, how the past has informed the present, and constricts the characters’ futures.
• Key themes for analysing the experiences of 20th century English and North American women – sexual assault, anorexia, depression, loneliness, jealousy, female coercive/emotional control, escape from background through work and education; the opportunities, and trauma caused by war
• For fans of Elizabeth Stout, Amy Bloom, Pat Barker, Jane Smiley, Alice Munro (esp. Lives of Girls and Women), Anne Tyler (esp. Amateur Marriage), Ann Patchett (esp. Patron Saint of Liars), Elizabeth Harrower, Otessa Moshfegh (Eileen), Claire Messud, Zoe Heller (Notes on a Scandal)
• Author inaugurated women’s writing and literature and life writing/memoir courses in US and UK – book will appeal to teachers of creative writing, fiction, memoir, literature of novels of 1940s, and 70s, illness.
• Author has successful sales track record with 40+ non-fiction trade and academic books, and her novels.
Comp titles:
Aphra Behn: A Secret Life Janet Todd 9781909572065 Fentum Press 2017 2000
The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen, Janet Todd 9781107494701, CUP 2017, 15,000
A Man of Genius, Janet Todd 9781908524591 Bitter Lemon 2016 2500
Banshee, Rachel de Woskin, 9781948340113, Dottir, 2018, 2000
Eileen, Otessa Moshfegh, 9780143128755, Penguin, 2018, 30,000
Warlight, Michael Ondaatje, 9780525562962, Vintage, 2019, 25,000
"Air jangled when bombs were falling and exploding. Dim lights reflected on walls as the Food Office shuddered; blackouts trembled against windows. Dust and plaster fell on ration books, our Rembrandt Utility frocks and coiled up hair, and we, the Food Office girls, giggled excitedly. Nervously too.
I danced inside.
It was smelly and crowded in the Anderson air-raid shelter where we hurried when the siren sounded from the Town Hall. But the eager, jostling bonhomie and crush of strangers clutching gas masks and family trinkets were exhilarating all the same. Above the whispering we could hear fighter planes revving, circling and shaking the earth.
After work I'd stumble home in fog or dark over sandbags and through bomb rubble to Mother’s house, hearing Italians singing way over in the internee camp. I’d catch in my lungs the thrill of searchlights and sudden fires.
One would have to be dead not to feel alive. You didn’t need a front seat at the Battle of Britain.
Olive and Rachel shared food parcels from America and Northern Rhodesia. I brought in Canadian tea from Uncle Harry (Mother said it tasted like stinging nettles and spat it out into a serviette).
We didn’t share nylons. Those without them could stain their legs with onion skins, then draw a line with eyebrow pencil down their calves (though bare legs made no swishing noise when crossed). We all did it in summer. Told to.
'Don’t you know there’s a war on?'
We did know. Of course we did. We were independent and smart, young and nice looking, even if patched and mended.
I remember the day I shared the Canadian tea because a bomb fell in a nearby field. I went to see it with other girls from the Food Office.
Parts of dead cows lay up the sides of the shallow hole it made. A worn shoe in the dirt and some furred wood still smoking. On the edge, boys from the evacuated public school pointed enthusiastically.
My spirits accelerated. I wanted to be away to London where more than just cows exploded. Where sugar flowed in gutters when the Tate and Lyle warehouse was struck: one could lick the pavements for bliss as the molten sugar hardened. Where a cathedral floated above the blitz in a magic sky. Where women in square shoulders were just as strong as men. Where rollicking transformations took place, and boys with a teeny bit of gumption were heroes, and pushy girls became ladies. (So I learnt later. How could I know then?)
I’d stay as long as I had to in the Midlands. Saving up to take a course in something, to make me something more. Then get away as soon as ever. In London I'd step out to hear Myra Hess play Mendelssohn at lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery. Aunty Gertie would have approved. Hold to independence, she’d said. Never work in an office.
'Ring out, wild London bells.'
I was vague on details in my single-pleated best skirt doing war-work, but I yearned for a smart flat in Kensington or Chelsea as fiercely as Hardy’s Jude for his snarling Christminster—or cousin Clare for county doctors and trunk-loads of admiration. Oh to come from somewhere else, to be going to a place far away. Somewhere where the air was crisp and the talk witty, brittle and allusive.
You don’t forgive a person for messing this up.
You don’t forgive your country for fooling you either…..
There’s thousands worse off than you, scream the walls. If you think Our Decision wrong, try the War Pensions’ Appeal Tribunal. All applications acknowledged. Try the Royal British Legion.
If you need more milk, keep a goat in the front garden. Goats aren’t rationed.
Mrs Patterson caught me outside a classy teashop when I gave her Charitable Organisation 6d for some wretched cause. Starving Koreans, I think. Or mince pies for Irish orphans.
My stomach churned when, after a little commonplace chitchat—I indulged in it then -- she invited me to a 'gathering'.
‘That would be delightful,’ I said. Why wouldn’t I? In brown waisted coat with a black astrakhan collar and tan suede shoes, I was dressed as one should be to say such words.
I went because I said I would: delight had nothing to do with it.
General talk, forced conviviality, nothing worth being in a room for. A niece called Madeleine was mentioned. ‘Something wrong with the poor girl,’ said a thin bristly woman. ‘She has nervous breakdowns, you know, moody.’
Nothing that some sock-pulling-up wouldn’t stop in its tracks, I thought.
‘She’s such a lovely girl with so many chances.’
A teaspoon clanged in a teacup.
‘They say now it’s to do with hormones,’ said a woman with a cream-bun face, thick jam piped in for mouth, bulging fish eyes.
‘They say that about fat people,’ said Mrs Patterson with more acidity than her matching garments and comfortable bulk led one to expect. ‘Nobody believes in self-control anymore.’
‘When I was young...,’ I began but was interrupted.
‘Were we ever?’ said some fuchsia lips in a laughter-shaking voice.
I glanced perhaps sharply, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t think our generation was ever young. We had the war.’
I said something. No idea what. Mrs Patterson gave me a look.
Oh, that war! Don’t you know...? Special bit of ham for you Mrs Carruthers, but not for you, Mrs Uh or is it Miss? O what a lovely war!
Yet it was not I who finished the talk by saying ‘Yes, there was some spirit then. You couldn’t afford to be depressed. No time.’
It was glass-coated Mrs Patterson.
'Girls are so unhealthily self-absorbed nowadays,' said painted lips, clicking teeth.
‘So true,’ said cream-bun face.
At the end, though I’d suggested inventive schemes for collecting money, Mrs Patterson and the others left together without me, their feathered hats a moving tepee out of the room. Talking as if I were sitting on the moon in a high chair, my feet in dead dust.
What had I done? Had I been a hard cheese grater rubbing everything I touched the wrong way? Had they seen a flaw? The wrong sort of face, an eye of suspicion, a judgmental wariness? My look and looking both amiss?
An obscene name-tag left showing?
I stacked the used tumblers and carried them from the table to the sink for the charlady to wash. As I descended the stairs, I saw a loose cord hanging from one of the badly hemmed curtains. Someone might slip on it. They might.
You throw out a shoot. Out stretch the world’s secateurs. Held in lobster hands.
Why this obsession—my writing proves no less--with bleached-faced Mrs Patterson, eyes and emotions as cold and rough as grouting between old bricks in winter?
Might as well be honest in a cheap lined notebook. Why write if not to humour what lives in one's head—the green imp, a sort of blindfold devil, churning up the detritus of scratchy moments with its long spiteful nose?
‘That’s a tremendous idea,’ I’d said to a proposal I'd made and someone else repeated in more self-assured tone.
And I answered with an imploring look, when I should have been aloof, disregarding the snakes behind the fried-egg eyes.
I excel in being humiliated, I might have said proudly. I take umbrage in my handbag wherever I go.
‘Why are you so ridiculously self-centred?’ cousin Clare used to laugh. ‘Do you think the world turns on you?’
Ah yes. How tedious! It turns on everyone.
1000 word excerpt
Air jangled when bombs were falling and exploding. Dim lights reflected on walls as the Food Office shuddered; blackouts trembled against windows. Dust and plaster fell on ration books, our Rembrandt Utility frocks and coiled up hair, and we, the Food Office girls, giggled excitedly. Nervously too.
I danced inside.
It was smelly and crowded in the Anderson air-raid shelter where we hurried when the siren sounded from the Town Hall. But the eager, jostling bonhomie and crush of strangers clutching gas masks and family trinkets were exhilarating. Above the whispering we could hear fighter planes revving, circling and shaking the earth.
After work I'd stumble home in fog or dark over sandbags and through bomb rubble to Mother’s house, hearing Italians singing way over in the internee camp. I’d catch in my lungs the thrill of searchlights and sudden fires.
One would have to be dead not to feel alive. You didn’t need a front seat at the Battle of Britain.
Olive and Rachel shared food parcels from America and Northern Rhodesia. I brought in Canadian tea from Uncle Harry.
We didn’t share nylons. Those without them could stain their legs with onion skins, then draw a line with eyebrow pencil down their calves (though bare legs made no swishing noise when crossed).
'Don’t you know there’s a war on?'
We did know. Of course we did. We were independent, smart, young and nice-looking, even if patched and mended. ….
A bomb fell in a nearby field. I went to see it with other girls from the Food Office.
My spirits accelerated. I wanted to be away to London where …. sugar flowed in gutters when the Tate and Lyle warehouse was struck: one could lick the pavements for bliss as the molten sugar hardened. Where a cathedral floated above the blitz in a magic sky. Where women in square shoulders were just as strong as men. Where rollicking transformations took place, and boys with a teeny bit of gumption were heroes, and pushy girls became ladies…
In London I'd step out to hear Myra Hess play Mendelssohn at lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery. Aunty Gertie would have approved. Hold to independence, she’d said. Never work in an office.
'Ring out, wild London bells.'
I was vague on details in my single-pleated best skirt doing war-work, but I yearned for a smart flat in Kensington or Chelsea as fiercely as Hardy’s Jude for his snarling Christminster—or cousin Clare for county doctors and trunk-loads of admiration. Oh to come from somewhere else, to be going to a place far away. Somewhere where the air was crisp and the talk witty, brittle and allusive.
You don’t forgive a person for messing this up.
You don’t forgive your country for fooling you either.
There’s thousands worse off than you, scream the walls. If you think Our Decision wrong, try the War Pensions’ Appeal Tribunal. Try the Royal British Legion.
My stomach churned when, after a little commonplace chitchat—I indulged in it then -- she invited me to a 'gathering'.
‘That would be delightful,’ I said. In brown waisted coat with a black astrakhan collar and tan suede shoes, I was dressed as one should be to say such words.
I went because I said I would: delight had nothing to do with it.
General talk, forced conviviality, nothing worth being in a room for. A niece was mentioned. ‘Something wrong with the poor girl,’ said a thin bristly woman. ‘She has nervous breakdowns; moody.’
Nothing that some sock-pulling-up wouldn’t stop in its tracks, I thought.
‘She’s such a lovely girl with so many chances.’
‘They say now it’s to do with hormones,’ said a woman with a cream-bun face, thick jam piped in for mouth, bulging fish eyes.
‘They say that about fat people,’ said Mrs Patterson with more acidity than her matching garments and comfortable bulk led one to expect. ‘Nobody believes in self-control anymore.’
‘When I was young...,’ I began but was interrupted.
‘Were we ever?’ said some fuchsia lips in a laughter-shaking voice. ‘I don’t think our generation was ever young. We had the war.’
Oh, that war! Don’t you know...? Special bit of ham for you Mrs Carruthers, but not for you, Mrs Uh or is it Miss? O what a lovely war!
Yet it was not I who finished the talk by saying ‘Yes, there was some spirit then. You couldn’t afford to be depressed. No time.’
'Girls are so unhealthily self-absorbed nowadays,' said painted lips, clicking teeth….
Though I’d suggested inventive schemes for collecting money, the others left together without me, their feathered hats a moving tepee out of the room. Talking as if I were sitting on the moon in a high chair, my feet in dead dust.
What had I done? Had I been a hard cheese grater rubbing everything I touched the wrong way? Had they seen a flaw? The wrong sort of face, an eye of suspicion, a judgmental wariness? My look and looking both amiss?
You throw out a shoot. Out stretch the world’s secateurs. Held in lobster hands.
Why this obsession—my writing proves no less--with bleached-faced Mrs Patterson, eyes and emotions as cold and rough as grouting between old bricks in winter?
Might as well be honest in a cheap lined notebook. Why write if not to humour what lives in one's head—the green imp, a sort of blindfold devil, churning up the detritus of scratchy moments with its long spiteful nose?
‘That’s a tremendous idea,’ I’d said to a proposal I'd made and someone else repeated in more self-assured tone.
I answered with an imploring look, when I should have been aloof, disregarding the snakes behind the fried-egg eyes.
I excel in being humiliated, I might have said proudly. I take umbrage in my handbag wherever I go.
‘Why are you so ridiculously self-centred?’ cousin Clare laughed. ‘Do you think the world turns on you?’
Ah yes. How tedious! It turns on everyone.
A teaspoon clanged in a teacup.
‘They say now it’s to do with hormones,’ said a woman with a cream-bun face, thick jam piped in for mouth, bulging fish eyes.
‘They say that about fat people,’ said Mrs Patterson with more acidity than her matching garments and comfortable bulk led one to expect. ‘Nobody believes in self-control anymore.’
‘When I was young...,’ I began but was interrupted.
‘Were we ever?’ said some fuchsia lips in a laughter-shaking voice.
I glanced perhaps sharply, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t think our generation was ever young. We had the war.’
I said something. No idea what. Mrs Patterson gave me a look.
Oh, that war! Don’t you know...? Special bit of ham for you Mrs Carruthers, but not for you, Mrs Uh or is it Miss? O what a lovely war!
Yet it was not I who finished the talk by saying ‘Yes, there was some spirit then. You couldn’t afford to be depressed. No time.’
It was glass-coated Mrs Patterson.
'Girls are so unhealthily self-absorbed nowadays,' said painted lips, clicking teeth.
‘So true,’ said cream-bun face.
At the end, though I’d suggested inventive schemes for collecting money, Mrs Patterson and the others left together without me, their feathered hats a moving tepee out of the room. Talking as if I were sitting on the moon in a high chair, my feet in dead dust.
What had I done? Had I been a hard cheese grater rubbing everything I touched the wrong way? Had they seen a flaw? The wrong sort of face, an eye of suspicion, a judgmental wariness? My look and looking both amiss?
An obscene name-tag left showing?
I stacked the used tumblers and carried them from the table to the sink for the charlady to wash. As I descended the stairs, I saw a loose cord hanging from one of the badly hemmed curtains. Someone might slip on it. They might.
You throw out a shoot. Out stretch the world’s secateurs. Held in lobster hands.
Why this obsession—my writing proves no less--with bleached-faced Mrs Patterson, eyes and emotions as cold and rough as grouting between old bricks in winter?
Might as well be honest in a cheap lined notebook. Why write if not to humour what lives in one's head—the green imp, a sort of blindfold devil, churning up the detritus of scratchy moments with its long spiteful nose?
‘That’s a tremendous idea,’ I’d said to a proposal I'd made and someone else repeated in more self-assured tone.
And I answered with an imploring look, when I should have been aloof, disregarding the snakes behind the fried-egg eyes.
I excel in being humiliated, I might have said proudly. I take umbrage in my handbag wherever I go.
‘Why are you so ridiculously self-centred?’ cousin Clare used to laugh. ‘Do you think the world turns on you?’
Ah yes. How tedious! It turns on everyone.
1000 word excerpt
Air jangled when bombs were falling and exploding. Dim lights reflected on walls as the Food Office shuddered; blackouts trembled against windows. Dust and plaster fell on ration books, our Rembrandt Utility frocks and coiled up hair, and we, the Food Office girls, giggled excitedly. Nervously too.
I danced inside.
It was smelly and crowded in the Anderson air-raid shelter where we hurried when the siren sounded from the Town Hall. But the eager, jostling bonhomie and crush of strangers clutching gas masks and family trinkets were exhilarating. Above the whispering we could hear fighter planes revving, circling and shaking the earth.
After work I'd stumble home in fog or dark over sandbags and through bomb rubble to Mother’s house, hearing Italians singing way over in the internee camp. I’d catch in my lungs the thrill of searchlights and sudden fires.
One would have to be dead not to feel alive. You didn’t need a front seat at the Battle of Britain.
Olive and Rachel shared food parcels from America and Northern Rhodesia. I brought in Canadian tea from Uncle Harry.
We didn’t share nylons. Those without them could stain their legs with onion skins, then draw a line with eyebrow pencil down their calves (though bare legs made no swishing noise when crossed).
'Don’t you know there’s a war on?'
We did know. Of course we did. We were independent, smart, young and nice-looking, even if patched and mended. ….
A bomb fell in a nearby field. I went to see it with other girls from the Food Office.
My spirits accelerated. I wanted to be away to London where …. sugar flowed in gutters when the Tate and Lyle warehouse was struck: one could lick the pavements for bliss as the molten sugar hardened. Where a cathedral floated above the blitz in a magic sky. Where women in square shoulders were just as strong as men. Where rollicking transformations took place, and boys with a teeny bit of gumption were heroes, and pushy girls became ladies…
In London I'd step out to hear Myra Hess play Mendelssohn at lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery. Aunty Gertie would have approved. Hold to independence, she’d said. Never work in an office.
'Ring out, wild London bells.'
I was vague on details in my single-pleated best skirt doing war-work, but I yearned for a smart flat in Kensington or Chelsea as fiercely as Hardy’s Jude for his snarling Christminster—or cousin Clare for county doctors and trunk-loads of admiration. Oh to come from somewhere else, to be going to a place far away. Somewhere where the air was crisp and the talk witty, brittle and allusive.
You don’t forgive a person for messing this up.
You don’t forgive your country for fooling you either.
There’s thousands worse off than you, scream the walls. If you think Our Decision wrong, try the War Pensions’ Appeal Tribunal. Try the Royal British Legion.
My stomach churned when, after a little commonplace chitchat—I indulged in it then -- she invited me to a 'gathering'.
‘That would be delightful,’ I said. In brown waisted coat with a black astrakhan collar and tan suede shoes, I was dressed as one should be to say such words.
I went because I said I would: delight had nothing to do with it.
General talk, forced conviviality, nothing worth being in a room for. A niece was mentioned. ‘Something wrong with the poor girl,’ said a thin bristly woman. ‘She has nervous breakdowns; moody.’
Nothing that some sock-pulling-up wouldn’t stop in its tracks, I thought.
‘She’s such a lovely girl with so many chances.’
‘They say now it’s to do with hormones,’ said a woman with a cream-bun face, thick jam piped in for mouth, bulging fish eyes.
‘They say that about fat people,’ said Mrs Patterson with more acidity than her matching garments and comfortable bulk led one to expect. ‘Nobody believes in self-control anymore.’
‘When I was young...,’ I began but was interrupted.
‘Were we ever?’ said some fuchsia lips in a laughter-shaking voice. ‘I don’t think our generation was ever young. We had the war.’
Oh, that war! Don’t you know...? Special bit of ham for you Mrs Carruthers, but not for you, Mrs Uh or is it Miss? O what a lovely war!
Yet it was not I who finished the talk by saying ‘Yes, there was some spirit then. You couldn’t afford to be depressed. No time.’
'Girls are so unhealthily self-absorbed nowadays,' said painted lips, clicking teeth….
Though I’d suggested inventive schemes for collecting money, the others left together without me, their feathered hats a moving tepee out of the room. Talking as if I were sitting on the moon in a high chair, my feet in dead dust.
What had I done? Had I been a hard cheese grater rubbing everything I touched the wrong way? Had they seen a flaw? The wrong sort of face, an eye of suspicion, a judgmental wariness? My look and looking both amiss?
You throw out a shoot. Out stretch the world’s secateurs. Held in lobster hands.
Why this obsession—my writing proves no less--with bleached-faced Mrs Patterson, eyes and emotions as cold and rough as grouting between old bricks in winter?
Might as well be honest in a cheap lined notebook. Why write if not to humour what lives in one's head—the green imp, a sort of blindfold devil, churning up the detritus of scratchy moments with its long spiteful nose?
‘That’s a tremendous idea,’ I’d said to a proposal I'd made and someone else repeated in more self-assured tone.
I answered with an imploring look, when I should have been aloof, disregarding the snakes behind the fried-egg eyes.
I excel in being humiliated, I might have said proudly. I take umbrage in my handbag wherever I go.
‘Why are you so ridiculously self-centred?’ cousin Clare laughed. ‘Do you think the world turns on you?’
Ah yes. How tedious! It turns on everyone."
Parts of dead cows lay up the sides of the shallow hole it made. A worn shoe in the dirt and some furred wood still smoking. On the edge, boys from the evacuated public school pointed enthusiastically.
My spirits accelerated. I wanted to be away to London where more than just cows exploded. Where sugar flowed in gutters when the Tate and Lyle warehouse was struck: one could lick the pavements for bliss as the molten sugar hardened. Where a cathedral floated above the blitz in a magic sky. Where women in square shoulders were just as strong as men. Where rollicking transformations took place, and boys with a teeny bit of gumption were heroes, and pushy girls became ladies. (So I learnt later. How could I know then?)
I’d stay as long as I had to in the Midlands. Saving up to take a course in something, to make me something more. Then get away as soon as ever. In London I'd step out to hear Myra Hess play Mendelssohn at lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery. Aunty Gertie would have approved. Hold to independence, she’d said. Never work in an office.
'Ring out, wild London bells.'
I was vague on details in my single-pleated best skirt doing war-work, but I yearned for a smart flat in Kensington or Chelsea as fiercely as Hardy’s Jude for his snarling Christminster—or cousin Clare for county doctors and trunk-loads of admiration. Oh to come from somewhere else, to be going to a place far away. Somewhere where the air was crisp and the talk witty, brittle and allusive.
You don’t forgive a person for messing this up.
You don’t forgive your country for fooling you either…..
There’s thousands worse off than you, scream the walls. If you think Our Decision wrong, try the War Pensions’ Appeal Tribunal. All applications acknowledged. Try the Royal British Legion.
If you need more milk, keep a goat in the front garden. Goats aren’t rationed.
Mrs Patterson caught me outside a classy teashop when I gave her Charitable Organisation 6d for some wretched cause. Starving Koreans, I think. Or mince pies for Irish orphans.
My stomach churned when, after a little commonplace chitchat—I indulged in it then -- she invited me to a 'gathering'.
‘That would be delightful,’ I said. Why wouldn’t I? In brown waisted coat with a black astrakhan collar and tan suede shoes, I was dressed as one should be to say such words.
I went because I said I would: delight had nothing to do with it.
General talk, forced conviviality, nothing worth being in a room for. A niece called Madeleine was mentioned. ‘Something wrong with the poor girl,’ said a thin bristly woman. ‘She has nervous breakdowns, you know, moody.’
Nothing that some sock-pulling-up wouldn’t stop in its tracks, I thought.
‘She’s such a lovely girl with so many chances.’
A teaspoon clanged in a teacup.
‘They say now it’s to do with hormones,’ said a woman with a cream-bun face, thick jam piped in for mouth, bulging fish eyes.
‘They say that about fat people,’ said Mrs Patterson with more acidity than her matching garments and comfortable bulk led one to expect. ‘Nobody believes in self-control anymore.’
‘When I was young...,’ I began but was interrupted.
‘Were we ever?’ said some fuchsia lips in a laughter-shaking voice.
I glanced perhaps sharply, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t think our generation was ever young. We had the war.’
I said something. No idea what. Mrs Patterson gave me a look.
Oh, that war! Don’t you know...? Special bit of ham for you Mrs Carruthers, but not for you, Mrs Uh or is it Miss? O what a lovely war!
Yet it was not I who finished the talk by saying ‘Yes, there was some spirit then. You couldn’t afford to be depressed. No time.’
It was glass-coated Mrs Patterson.
'Girls are so unhealthily self-absorbed nowadays,' said painted lips, clicking teeth.
‘So true,’ said cream-bun face.
At the end, though I’d suggested inventive schemes for collecting money, Mrs Patterson and the others left together without me, their feathered hats a moving tepee out of the room. Talking as if I were sitting on the moon in a high chair, my feet in dead dust.
What had I done? Had I been a hard cheese grater rubbing everything I touched the wrong way? Had they seen a flaw? The wrong sort of face, an eye of suspicion, a judgmental wariness? My look and looking both amiss?
An obscene name-tag left showing?
I stacked the used tumblers and carried them from the table to the sink for the charlady to wash. As I descended the stairs, I saw a loose cord hanging from one of the badly hemmed curtains. Someone might slip on it. They might.
You throw out a shoot. Out stretch the world’s secateurs. Held in lobster hands.
Why this obsession—my writing proves no less--with bleached-faced Mrs Patterson, eyes and emotions as cold and rough as grouting between old bricks in winter?
Might as well be honest in a cheap lined notebook. Why write if not to humour what lives in one's head—the green imp, a sort of blindfold devil, churning up the detritus of scratchy moments with its long spiteful nose?
‘That’s a tremendous idea,’ I’d said to a proposal I'd made and someone else repeated in more self-assured tone.
And I answered with an imploring look, when I should have been aloof, disregarding the snakes behind the fried-egg eyes.
I excel in being humiliated, I might have said proudly. I take umbrage in my handbag wherever I go.
‘Why are you so ridiculously self-centred?’ cousin Clare used to laugh. ‘Do you think the world turns on you?’
Ah yes. How tedious! It turns on everyone.
Approaching Sarah Waters, Ali Smith, John Lanchester, Pat Barker, William Boyd, Claire Messud, Zoe Heller. Suggestions welcome.
Advance Reading copies available early for reviewers and stores (November 2019).
Bookstore co¬op available
Media—key reviewers, long-lead magazines, NPR, women’s writing. National media targets include literary fiction editors and reviewers in national dailies and magazines. National print campaign to include Guardian, New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, and to trade magazines Publishers Weekly, Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Booklist, and academic journals.
eBook Marketing: eBook available at the same time as print publication. Promoting e through usual channels social media, print media and through deals with national, international and independent accounts, using promotions newsletters, price promos etc. liaising with print.
Announcement e¬mails sent to independent bookstores, academic journals and conference lists, and book clubs, literary bloggers, and websites.
Twitter and Facebook campaign by publisher, author and PR agency, to include contests and giveaways.
• An ordinary woman’s life and dreams are blighted by the Second World War, post-war society, and a complex mother-daughter relationship
• A disquieting psychological fiction, with elements of black humour.
• Evocation of physical and emotional unravelling, original, courageous first quietly then dramatically shocking – breaks one of the last taboos in mother-daughter relationships
• Expert authorial tone – a woman who has no power and voice, in her later year, gains one through writing her diary; an innovative novel form – monologue from the suburban setting, combined with intricate details of 1940s and 1950s life. Domestic, claustrophobic atmosphere. Todd’s considerable talents give a remarkably sighted view into the bleak alleys of the female psyche.
• Protagonist Joan is the kind of woman whom society and writers tend to ignore – she is unlikable but ultimately sympathetic. Think of her akin to a Flannery O'Connor or Alice Munro character in a drab, small British post-war town. Todd uses a carefully constructed foundation to build to a shocking, multi-layered story. Skilfully grafts disparate elements: psychological suspense, obsession, capturing distortions and complicities that poison familial relationships and intimacies between women.
• Todd’s fine command of language and her character means that the reader is almost unaware that the circuitry of Joan’s mind overtakes her. Is she inhumane or merely unempowered? Unreliable narrator or justifiably jaded? Superbly told story of how inner turmoil and hidden past morph into outer destruction.
• Joan’s diary is bitter, wise, morbid, yet witty, searingly sharp. The writing is controlled yet fresh and ultimately thrilling. Todd creates a wonderful tension between wanting to slow down and bathe in the language and imagery, and the impulse to race to see what will happen, how the past has informed the present, and constricts the characters’ futures.
• Key themes for analysing the experiences of 20th century English and North American women – sexual assault, anorexia, depression, loneliness, jealousy, female coercive/emotional control, escape from background through work and education; the opportunities, and trauma caused by war
• For fans of Elizabeth Stout, Amy Bloom, Pat Barker, Jane Smiley, Alice Munro (esp. Lives of Girls and Women), Anne Tyler (esp. Amateur Marriage), Ann Patchett (esp. Patron Saint of Liars), Elizabeth Harrower, Otessa Moshfegh (Eileen), Claire Messud, Zoe Heller (Notes on a Scandal)
• Author inaugurated women’s writing and literature and life writing/memoir courses in US and UK – book will appeal to teachers of creative writing, fiction, memoir, literature of novels of 1940s, and 70s, illness.
• Author has successful sales track record with 40+ non-fiction trade and academic books, and her novels.
Comp titles:
Aphra Behn: A Secret Life Janet Todd 9781909572065 Fentum Press 2017 2000
The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen, Janet Todd 9781107494701, CUP 2017, 15,000
A Man of Genius, Janet Todd 9781908524591 Bitter Lemon 2016 2500
Banshee, Rachel de Woskin, 9781948340113, Dottir, 2018, 2000
Eileen, Otessa Moshfegh, 9780143128755, Penguin, 2018, 30,000
Warlight, Michael Ondaatje, 9780525562962, Vintage, 2019, 25,000
"Air jangled when bombs were falling and exploding. Dim lights reflected on walls as the Food Office shuddered; blackouts trembled against windows. Dust and plaster fell on ration books, our Rembrandt Utility frocks and coiled up hair, and we, the Food Office girls, giggled excitedly. Nervously too.
I danced inside.
It was smelly and crowded in the Anderson air-raid shelter where we hurried when the siren sounded from the Town Hall. But the eager, jostling bonhomie and crush of strangers clutching gas masks and family trinkets were exhilarating all the same. Above the whispering we could hear fighter planes revving, circling and shaking the earth.
After work I'd stumble home in fog or dark over sandbags and through bomb rubble to Mother’s house, hearing Italians singing way over in the internee camp. I’d catch in my lungs the thrill of searchlights and sudden fires.
One would have to be dead not to feel alive. You didn’t need a front seat at the Battle of Britain.
Olive and Rachel shared food parcels from America and Northern Rhodesia. I brought in Canadian tea from Uncle Harry (Mother said it tasted like stinging nettles and spat it out into a serviette).
We didn’t share nylons. Those without them could stain their legs with onion skins, then draw a line with eyebrow pencil down their calves (though bare legs made no swishing noise when crossed). We all did it in summer. Told to.
'Don’t you know there’s a war on?'
We did know. Of course we did. We were independent and smart, young and nice looking, even if patched and mended.
I remember the day I shared the Canadian tea because a bomb fell in a nearby field. I went to see it with other girls from the Food Office.
Parts of dead cows lay up the sides of the shallow hole it made. A worn shoe in the dirt and some furred wood still smoking. On the edge, boys from the evacuated public school pointed enthusiastically.
My spirits accelerated. I wanted to be away to London where more than just cows exploded. Where sugar flowed in gutters when the Tate and Lyle warehouse was struck: one could lick the pavements for bliss as the molten sugar hardened. Where a cathedral floated above the blitz in a magic sky. Where women in square shoulders were just as strong as men. Where rollicking transformations took place, and boys with a teeny bit of gumption were heroes, and pushy girls became ladies. (So I learnt later. How could I know then?)
I’d stay as long as I had to in the Midlands. Saving up to take a course in something, to make me something more. Then get away as soon as ever. In London I'd step out to hear Myra Hess play Mendelssohn at lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery. Aunty Gertie would have approved. Hold to independence, she’d said. Never work in an office.
'Ring out, wild London bells.'
I was vague on details in my single-pleated best skirt doing war-work, but I yearned for a smart flat in Kensington or Chelsea as fiercely as Hardy’s Jude for his snarling Christminster—or cousin Clare for county doctors and trunk-loads of admiration. Oh to come from somewhere else, to be going to a place far away. Somewhere where the air was crisp and the talk witty, brittle and allusive.
You don’t forgive a person for messing this up.
You don’t forgive your country for fooling you either…..
There’s thousands worse off than you, scream the walls. If you think Our Decision wrong, try the War Pensions’ Appeal Tribunal. All applications acknowledged. Try the Royal British Legion.
If you need more milk, keep a goat in the front garden. Goats aren’t rationed.
Mrs Patterson caught me outside a classy teashop when I gave her Charitable Organisation 6d for some wretched cause. Starving Koreans, I think. Or mince pies for Irish orphans.
My stomach churned when, after a little commonplace chitchat—I indulged in it then -- she invited me to a 'gathering'.
‘That would be delightful,’ I said. Why wouldn’t I? In brown waisted coat with a black astrakhan collar and tan suede shoes, I was dressed as one should be to say such words.
I went because I said I would: delight had nothing to do with it.
General talk, forced conviviality, nothing worth being in a room for. A niece called Madeleine was mentioned. ‘Something wrong with the poor girl,’ said a thin bristly woman. ‘She has nervous breakdowns, you know, moody.’
Nothing that some sock-pulling-up wouldn’t stop in its tracks, I thought.
‘She’s such a lovely girl with so many chances.’
A teaspoon clanged in a teacup.
‘They say now it’s to do with hormones,’ said a woman with a cream-bun face, thick jam piped in for mouth, bulging fish eyes.
‘They say that about fat people,’ said Mrs Patterson with more acidity than her matching garments and comfortable bulk led one to expect. ‘Nobody believes in self-control anymore.’
‘When I was young...,’ I began but was interrupted.
‘Were we ever?’ said some fuchsia lips in a laughter-shaking voice.
I glanced perhaps sharply, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t think our generation was ever young. We had the war.’
I said something. No idea what. Mrs Patterson gave me a look.
Oh, that war! Don’t you know...? Special bit of ham for you Mrs Carruthers, but not for you, Mrs Uh or is it Miss? O what a lovely war!
Yet it was not I who finished the talk by saying ‘Yes, there was some spirit then. You couldn’t afford to be depressed. No time.’
It was glass-coated Mrs Patterson.
'Girls are so unhealthily self-absorbed nowadays,' said painted lips, clicking teeth.
‘So true,’ said cream-bun face.
At the end, though I’d suggested inventive schemes for collecting money, Mrs Patterson and the others left together without me, their feathered hats a moving tepee out of the room. Talking as if I were sitting on the moon in a high chair, my feet in dead dust.
What had I done? Had I been a hard cheese grater rubbing everything I touched the wrong way? Had they seen a flaw? The wrong sort of face, an eye of suspicion, a judgmental wariness? My look and looking both amiss?
An obscene name-tag left showing?
I stacked the used tumblers and carried them from the table to the sink for the charlady to wash. As I descended the stairs, I saw a loose cord hanging from one of the badly hemmed curtains. Someone might slip on it. They might.
You throw out a shoot. Out stretch the world’s secateurs. Held in lobster hands.
Why this obsession—my writing proves no less--with bleached-faced Mrs Patterson, eyes and emotions as cold and rough as grouting between old bricks in winter?
Might as well be honest in a cheap lined notebook. Why write if not to humour what lives in one's head—the green imp, a sort of blindfold devil, churning up the detritus of scratchy moments with its long spiteful nose?
‘That’s a tremendous idea,’ I’d said to a proposal I'd made and someone else repeated in more self-assured tone.
And I answered with an imploring look, when I should have been aloof, disregarding the snakes behind the fried-egg eyes.
I excel in being humiliated, I might have said proudly. I take umbrage in my handbag wherever I go.
‘Why are you so ridiculously self-centred?’ cousin Clare used to laugh. ‘Do you think the world turns on you?’
Ah yes. How tedious! It turns on everyone.
1000 word excerpt
Air jangled when bombs were falling and exploding. Dim lights reflected on walls as the Food Office shuddered; blackouts trembled against windows. Dust and plaster fell on ration books, our Rembrandt Utility frocks and coiled up hair, and we, the Food Office girls, giggled excitedly. Nervously too.
I danced inside.
It was smelly and crowded in the Anderson air-raid shelter where we hurried when the siren sounded from the Town Hall. But the eager, jostling bonhomie and crush of strangers clutching gas masks and family trinkets were exhilarating. Above the whispering we could hear fighter planes revving, circling and shaking the earth.
After work I'd stumble home in fog or dark over sandbags and through bomb rubble to Mother’s house, hearing Italians singing way over in the internee camp. I’d catch in my lungs the thrill of searchlights and sudden fires.
One would have to be dead not to feel alive. You didn’t need a front seat at the Battle of Britain.
Olive and Rachel shared food parcels from America and Northern Rhodesia. I brought in Canadian tea from Uncle Harry.
We didn’t share nylons. Those without them could stain their legs with onion skins, then draw a line with eyebrow pencil down their calves (though bare legs made no swishing noise when crossed).
'Don’t you know there’s a war on?'
We did know. Of course we did. We were independent, smart, young and nice-looking, even if patched and mended. ….
A bomb fell in a nearby field. I went to see it with other girls from the Food Office.
My spirits accelerated. I wanted to be away to London where …. sugar flowed in gutters when the Tate and Lyle warehouse was struck: one could lick the pavements for bliss as the molten sugar hardened. Where a cathedral floated above the blitz in a magic sky. Where women in square shoulders were just as strong as men. Where rollicking transformations took place, and boys with a teeny bit of gumption were heroes, and pushy girls became ladies…
In London I'd step out to hear Myra Hess play Mendelssohn at lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery. Aunty Gertie would have approved. Hold to independence, she’d said. Never work in an office.
'Ring out, wild London bells.'
I was vague on details in my single-pleated best skirt doing war-work, but I yearned for a smart flat in Kensington or Chelsea as fiercely as Hardy’s Jude for his snarling Christminster—or cousin Clare for county doctors and trunk-loads of admiration. Oh to come from somewhere else, to be going to a place far away. Somewhere where the air was crisp and the talk witty, brittle and allusive.
You don’t forgive a person for messing this up.
You don’t forgive your country for fooling you either.
There’s thousands worse off than you, scream the walls. If you think Our Decision wrong, try the War Pensions’ Appeal Tribunal. Try the Royal British Legion.
My stomach churned when, after a little commonplace chitchat—I indulged in it then -- she invited me to a 'gathering'.
‘That would be delightful,’ I said. In brown waisted coat with a black astrakhan collar and tan suede shoes, I was dressed as one should be to say such words.
I went because I said I would: delight had nothing to do with it.
General talk, forced conviviality, nothing worth being in a room for. A niece was mentioned. ‘Something wrong with the poor girl,’ said a thin bristly woman. ‘She has nervous breakdowns; moody.’
Nothing that some sock-pulling-up wouldn’t stop in its tracks, I thought.
‘She’s such a lovely girl with so many chances.’
‘They say now it’s to do with hormones,’ said a woman with a cream-bun face, thick jam piped in for mouth, bulging fish eyes.
‘They say that about fat people,’ said Mrs Patterson with more acidity than her matching garments and comfortable bulk led one to expect. ‘Nobody believes in self-control anymore.’
‘When I was young...,’ I began but was interrupted.
‘Were we ever?’ said some fuchsia lips in a laughter-shaking voice. ‘I don’t think our generation was ever young. We had the war.’
Oh, that war! Don’t you know...? Special bit of ham for you Mrs Carruthers, but not for you, Mrs Uh or is it Miss? O what a lovely war!
Yet it was not I who finished the talk by saying ‘Yes, there was some spirit then. You couldn’t afford to be depressed. No time.’
'Girls are so unhealthily self-absorbed nowadays,' said painted lips, clicking teeth….
Though I’d suggested inventive schemes for collecting money, the others left together without me, their feathered hats a moving tepee out of the room. Talking as if I were sitting on the moon in a high chair, my feet in dead dust.
What had I done? Had I been a hard cheese grater rubbing everything I touched the wrong way? Had they seen a flaw? The wrong sort of face, an eye of suspicion, a judgmental wariness? My look and looking both amiss?
You throw out a shoot. Out stretch the world’s secateurs. Held in lobster hands.
Why this obsession—my writing proves no less--with bleached-faced Mrs Patterson, eyes and emotions as cold and rough as grouting between old bricks in winter?
Might as well be honest in a cheap lined notebook. Why write if not to humour what lives in one's head—the green imp, a sort of blindfold devil, churning up the detritus of scratchy moments with its long spiteful nose?
‘That’s a tremendous idea,’ I’d said to a proposal I'd made and someone else repeated in more self-assured tone.
I answered with an imploring look, when I should have been aloof, disregarding the snakes behind the fried-egg eyes.
I excel in being humiliated, I might have said proudly. I take umbrage in my handbag wherever I go.
‘Why are you so ridiculously self-centred?’ cousin Clare laughed. ‘Do you think the world turns on you?’
Ah yes. How tedious! It turns on everyone.
A teaspoon clanged in a teacup.
‘They say now it’s to do with hormones,’ said a woman with a cream-bun face, thick jam piped in for mouth, bulging fish eyes.
‘They say that about fat people,’ said Mrs Patterson with more acidity than her matching garments and comfortable bulk led one to expect. ‘Nobody believes in self-control anymore.’
‘When I was young...,’ I began but was interrupted.
‘Were we ever?’ said some fuchsia lips in a laughter-shaking voice.
I glanced perhaps sharply, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t think our generation was ever young. We had the war.’
I said something. No idea what. Mrs Patterson gave me a look.
Oh, that war! Don’t you know...? Special bit of ham for you Mrs Carruthers, but not for you, Mrs Uh or is it Miss? O what a lovely war!
Yet it was not I who finished the talk by saying ‘Yes, there was some spirit then. You couldn’t afford to be depressed. No time.’
It was glass-coated Mrs Patterson.
'Girls are so unhealthily self-absorbed nowadays,' said painted lips, clicking teeth.
‘So true,’ said cream-bun face.
At the end, though I’d suggested inventive schemes for collecting money, Mrs Patterson and the others left together without me, their feathered hats a moving tepee out of the room. Talking as if I were sitting on the moon in a high chair, my feet in dead dust.
What had I done? Had I been a hard cheese grater rubbing everything I touched the wrong way? Had they seen a flaw? The wrong sort of face, an eye of suspicion, a judgmental wariness? My look and looking both amiss?
An obscene name-tag left showing?
I stacked the used tumblers and carried them from the table to the sink for the charlady to wash. As I descended the stairs, I saw a loose cord hanging from one of the badly hemmed curtains. Someone might slip on it. They might.
You throw out a shoot. Out stretch the world’s secateurs. Held in lobster hands.
Why this obsession—my writing proves no less--with bleached-faced Mrs Patterson, eyes and emotions as cold and rough as grouting between old bricks in winter?
Might as well be honest in a cheap lined notebook. Why write if not to humour what lives in one's head—the green imp, a sort of blindfold devil, churning up the detritus of scratchy moments with its long spiteful nose?
‘That’s a tremendous idea,’ I’d said to a proposal I'd made and someone else repeated in more self-assured tone.
And I answered with an imploring look, when I should have been aloof, disregarding the snakes behind the fried-egg eyes.
I excel in being humiliated, I might have said proudly. I take umbrage in my handbag wherever I go.
‘Why are you so ridiculously self-centred?’ cousin Clare used to laugh. ‘Do you think the world turns on you?’
Ah yes. How tedious! It turns on everyone.
1000 word excerpt
Air jangled when bombs were falling and exploding. Dim lights reflected on walls as the Food Office shuddered; blackouts trembled against windows. Dust and plaster fell on ration books, our Rembrandt Utility frocks and coiled up hair, and we, the Food Office girls, giggled excitedly. Nervously too.
I danced inside.
It was smelly and crowded in the Anderson air-raid shelter where we hurried when the siren sounded from the Town Hall. But the eager, jostling bonhomie and crush of strangers clutching gas masks and family trinkets were exhilarating. Above the whispering we could hear fighter planes revving, circling and shaking the earth.
After work I'd stumble home in fog or dark over sandbags and through bomb rubble to Mother’s house, hearing Italians singing way over in the internee camp. I’d catch in my lungs the thrill of searchlights and sudden fires.
One would have to be dead not to feel alive. You didn’t need a front seat at the Battle of Britain.
Olive and Rachel shared food parcels from America and Northern Rhodesia. I brought in Canadian tea from Uncle Harry.
We didn’t share nylons. Those without them could stain their legs with onion skins, then draw a line with eyebrow pencil down their calves (though bare legs made no swishing noise when crossed).
'Don’t you know there’s a war on?'
We did know. Of course we did. We were independent, smart, young and nice-looking, even if patched and mended. ….
A bomb fell in a nearby field. I went to see it with other girls from the Food Office.
My spirits accelerated. I wanted to be away to London where …. sugar flowed in gutters when the Tate and Lyle warehouse was struck: one could lick the pavements for bliss as the molten sugar hardened. Where a cathedral floated above the blitz in a magic sky. Where women in square shoulders were just as strong as men. Where rollicking transformations took place, and boys with a teeny bit of gumption were heroes, and pushy girls became ladies…
In London I'd step out to hear Myra Hess play Mendelssohn at lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery. Aunty Gertie would have approved. Hold to independence, she’d said. Never work in an office.
'Ring out, wild London bells.'
I was vague on details in my single-pleated best skirt doing war-work, but I yearned for a smart flat in Kensington or Chelsea as fiercely as Hardy’s Jude for his snarling Christminster—or cousin Clare for county doctors and trunk-loads of admiration. Oh to come from somewhere else, to be going to a place far away. Somewhere where the air was crisp and the talk witty, brittle and allusive.
You don’t forgive a person for messing this up.
You don’t forgive your country for fooling you either.
There’s thousands worse off than you, scream the walls. If you think Our Decision wrong, try the War Pensions’ Appeal Tribunal. Try the Royal British Legion.
My stomach churned when, after a little commonplace chitchat—I indulged in it then -- she invited me to a 'gathering'.
‘That would be delightful,’ I said. In brown waisted coat with a black astrakhan collar and tan suede shoes, I was dressed as one should be to say such words.
I went because I said I would: delight had nothing to do with it.
General talk, forced conviviality, nothing worth being in a room for. A niece was mentioned. ‘Something wrong with the poor girl,’ said a thin bristly woman. ‘She has nervous breakdowns; moody.’
Nothing that some sock-pulling-up wouldn’t stop in its tracks, I thought.
‘She’s such a lovely girl with so many chances.’
‘They say now it’s to do with hormones,’ said a woman with a cream-bun face, thick jam piped in for mouth, bulging fish eyes.
‘They say that about fat people,’ said Mrs Patterson with more acidity than her matching garments and comfortable bulk led one to expect. ‘Nobody believes in self-control anymore.’
‘When I was young...,’ I began but was interrupted.
‘Were we ever?’ said some fuchsia lips in a laughter-shaking voice. ‘I don’t think our generation was ever young. We had the war.’
Oh, that war! Don’t you know...? Special bit of ham for you Mrs Carruthers, but not for you, Mrs Uh or is it Miss? O what a lovely war!
Yet it was not I who finished the talk by saying ‘Yes, there was some spirit then. You couldn’t afford to be depressed. No time.’
'Girls are so unhealthily self-absorbed nowadays,' said painted lips, clicking teeth….
Though I’d suggested inventive schemes for collecting money, the others left together without me, their feathered hats a moving tepee out of the room. Talking as if I were sitting on the moon in a high chair, my feet in dead dust.
What had I done? Had I been a hard cheese grater rubbing everything I touched the wrong way? Had they seen a flaw? The wrong sort of face, an eye of suspicion, a judgmental wariness? My look and looking both amiss?
You throw out a shoot. Out stretch the world’s secateurs. Held in lobster hands.
Why this obsession—my writing proves no less--with bleached-faced Mrs Patterson, eyes and emotions as cold and rough as grouting between old bricks in winter?
Might as well be honest in a cheap lined notebook. Why write if not to humour what lives in one's head—the green imp, a sort of blindfold devil, churning up the detritus of scratchy moments with its long spiteful nose?
‘That’s a tremendous idea,’ I’d said to a proposal I'd made and someone else repeated in more self-assured tone.
I answered with an imploring look, when I should have been aloof, disregarding the snakes behind the fried-egg eyes.
I excel in being humiliated, I might have said proudly. I take umbrage in my handbag wherever I go.
‘Why are you so ridiculously self-centred?’ cousin Clare laughed. ‘Do you think the world turns on you?’
Ah yes. How tedious! It turns on everyone."
Parts of dead cows lay up the sides of the shallow hole it made. A worn shoe in the dirt and some furred wood still smoking. On the edge, boys from the evacuated public school pointed enthusiastically.
My spirits accelerated. I wanted to be away to London where more than just cows exploded. Where sugar flowed in gutters when the Tate and Lyle warehouse was struck: one could lick the pavements for bliss as the molten sugar hardened. Where a cathedral floated above the blitz in a magic sky. Where women in square shoulders were just as strong as men. Where rollicking transformations took place, and boys with a teeny bit of gumption were heroes, and pushy girls became ladies. (So I learnt later. How could I know then?)
I’d stay as long as I had to in the Midlands. Saving up to take a course in something, to make me something more. Then get away as soon as ever. In London I'd step out to hear Myra Hess play Mendelssohn at lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery. Aunty Gertie would have approved. Hold to independence, she’d said. Never work in an office.
'Ring out, wild London bells.'
I was vague on details in my single-pleated best skirt doing war-work, but I yearned for a smart flat in Kensington or Chelsea as fiercely as Hardy’s Jude for his snarling Christminster—or cousin Clare for county doctors and trunk-loads of admiration. Oh to come from somewhere else, to be going to a place far away. Somewhere where the air was crisp and the talk witty, brittle and allusive.
You don’t forgive a person for messing this up.
You don’t forgive your country for fooling you either…..
There’s thousands worse off than you, scream the walls. If you think Our Decision wrong, try the War Pensions’ Appeal Tribunal. All applications acknowledged. Try the Royal British Legion.
If you need more milk, keep a goat in the front garden. Goats aren’t rationed.
Mrs Patterson caught me outside a classy teashop when I gave her Charitable Organisation 6d for some wretched cause. Starving Koreans, I think. Or mince pies for Irish orphans.
My stomach churned when, after a little commonplace chitchat—I indulged in it then -- she invited me to a 'gathering'.
‘That would be delightful,’ I said. Why wouldn’t I? In brown waisted coat with a black astrakhan collar and tan suede shoes, I was dressed as one should be to say such words.
I went because I said I would: delight had nothing to do with it.
General talk, forced conviviality, nothing worth being in a room for. A niece called Madeleine was mentioned. ‘Something wrong with the poor girl,’ said a thin bristly woman. ‘She has nervous breakdowns, you know, moody.’
Nothing that some sock-pulling-up wouldn’t stop in its tracks, I thought.
‘She’s such a lovely girl with so many chances.’
A teaspoon clanged in a teacup.
‘They say now it’s to do with hormones,’ said a woman with a cream-bun face, thick jam piped in for mouth, bulging fish eyes.
‘They say that about fat people,’ said Mrs Patterson with more acidity than her matching garments and comfortable bulk led one to expect. ‘Nobody believes in self-control anymore.’
‘When I was young...,’ I began but was interrupted.
‘Were we ever?’ said some fuchsia lips in a laughter-shaking voice.
I glanced perhaps sharply, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t think our generation was ever young. We had the war.’
I said something. No idea what. Mrs Patterson gave me a look.
Oh, that war! Don’t you know...? Special bit of ham for you Mrs Carruthers, but not for you, Mrs Uh or is it Miss? O what a lovely war!
Yet it was not I who finished the talk by saying ‘Yes, there was some spirit then. You couldn’t afford to be depressed. No time.’
It was glass-coated Mrs Patterson.
'Girls are so unhealthily self-absorbed nowadays,' said painted lips, clicking teeth.
‘So true,’ said cream-bun face.
At the end, though I’d suggested inventive schemes for collecting money, Mrs Patterson and the others left together without me, their feathered hats a moving tepee out of the room. Talking as if I were sitting on the moon in a high chair, my feet in dead dust.
What had I done? Had I been a hard cheese grater rubbing everything I touched the wrong way? Had they seen a flaw? The wrong sort of face, an eye of suspicion, a judgmental wariness? My look and looking both amiss?
An obscene name-tag left showing?
I stacked the used tumblers and carried them from the table to the sink for the charlady to wash. As I descended the stairs, I saw a loose cord hanging from one of the badly hemmed curtains. Someone might slip on it. They might.
You throw out a shoot. Out stretch the world’s secateurs. Held in lobster hands.
Why this obsession—my writing proves no less--with bleached-faced Mrs Patterson, eyes and emotions as cold and rough as grouting between old bricks in winter?
Might as well be honest in a cheap lined notebook. Why write if not to humour what lives in one's head—the green imp, a sort of blindfold devil, churning up the detritus of scratchy moments with its long spiteful nose?
‘That’s a tremendous idea,’ I’d said to a proposal I'd made and someone else repeated in more self-assured tone.
And I answered with an imploring look, when I should have been aloof, disregarding the snakes behind the fried-egg eyes.
I excel in being humiliated, I might have said proudly. I take umbrage in my handbag wherever I go.
‘Why are you so ridiculously self-centred?’ cousin Clare used to laugh. ‘Do you think the world turns on you?’
Ah yes. How tedious! It turns on everyone.
Sujets
Informations
| Publié par | Global Book Sales |
| Date de parution | 09 mars 2020 |
| Nombre de lectures | 0 |
| EAN13 | 9781909572201 |
| Langue | English |
Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.
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