Six Degrees of Separation: April 2022

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Our chain begins this month with Julia Armfield’s OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA. I think it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever read this book, and it took me some time to find anything to connect to it (my husband suggested Vigil, which is sadly not a book….)  So in the end I have gone off at a complete tangent, and chosen THE LIGHTHOUSEKEEPER’S LUNCH by Ronda and David Armitage. The link is indeed the sea, but there’s another one too, in that the lighthousekeeper’s wife, Mrs Grinling, plays a pivotal part in this wonderful story of the battle to get Mr Grinling’s gourmet lunches to him without the daily intervention of a group of scavenging seagulls. 

Mrs Grinling sends her culinary masterpieces - seafood salad, lighthouse sandwiches, iced sea biscuits - to her husband via a zip wire from their cottage to the rocks. After a failed plan to send Hamish the cat across the wire with the lunch (he’s too seasick to do anything about the winged raiders), the clever way in which Mrs Grinling finally defeats ‘those varmints’ is pure genius. This beautifully illustrated book has rightly become a children’s classic.  

From lighthousekeepers to lighthouse builders; Robert Stevenson was a Scottish engineer who, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, became such a celebrated designer of lighthouses that he was commissioned to build the famous Bell Rock Light, one that still stands today. Stevenson’s grandson was Robert Loius Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and plenty more. Robert’s cousin David was also a lighthouse engineer, but more importantly for my purposes, David was the father of one Dorothy Emily Stevenson, or DE Stevenson, author of numerous novels, which included, between 1934 and 1952, the Mrs Tim series. 

Mrs Tim is an army officer’s wife, and the books tell the story of her life with the regiment (or as Stevenson puts it ‘following the drum’), which means being left alone to manage her home, family and friends for long periods while her husband is away. Stevenson’s husband, James Reid Peploe, was a captain in the 6th Gurkha Rifles, and the first book, MRS TIM OF THE REGIMENT, was based on her own diaries. 

Some very different military wives form the cast of Laurie Graham’s excellent THE FUTURE HOMEMAKERS OF AMERICA. It is the 1960; the Cold War is at its height. An American Air Force unit is based in a remote part of the Norfolk Fens, effectively marooning a disparate group of women. On one of their rare expeditions off-base (only one of them has a car) they come across Kate Pharaoh, a local woman living a hard life with her strange eel-catching brother. The friendship that develops between them and the resilient Kate forms the backbone of the plot, one that eventually extends over forty years. I wrote about it in a blog post here. 

Staying in the Fens, but reaching back even further to the 1930s, Dorothy Sayers’ THE NINE TAILORS finds Lord Peter Wimsey and his manservant Bunter snowbound in the village of Fenchurch St Paul on New Year’s Eve. When the vicar, Reverend Theodore Venables, discovers that Lord Peter is (of course!) a dab hand at campanology, he soon persuades him to take the place of Will Thoday, a bell ringer who has - like half the village - been struck down by influenza. On New Year’s Day Lord Peter hears that local aristocrat Lady Thorpe, has died, and that since the theft of an emerald necklace twenty years previously, the family had been blighted. 

By Easter, Lady Thorpe’s husband Sir Henry has also died, and when the family grave is opened up to bury him, the sexton finds the corpse not of Lady T but of an unknown man, mutilated beyond recognition. Wimsey and Bunter are soon on the case, the solution to which is uncannily related to the famous bells. 

I used Barbara Pym’s A GLASS OF BLESSINGS last month, but it fits so well for me here that I am going to mention it again. In the opening scene of the novel Wilmet is attending lunchtime mass at her newly adopted church of St Luke’s. She is surprised to hear a bell ring in the middle of the service - for this is not the bell of the altar but of the telephone in the vestry;

I suppose it must have been the shock of hearing the telephone ring, apparently in the church, that made me turn my head and see Piers Longridge in one of the side aisles behind me. 

Wilmet’s reacquaintance with Piers, dissolute brother of her friend Rowena, leads to one of the novel’s main plot threads - one of several that allow us to see how often smart, sophisticated Wilmet misinterprets what is happening right in front of her. 

Last month I compared A Glass of Blessings to Jane Austen’s Emma, but this time it leads me to a novel I have just re-read for Reading Ireland Month 2022 - Molly Keane’s GOOD BEHAVIOUR. Aroon St Charles is the now 57 year old unmarried daughter of  (minor) Anglo-Irish aristocracy. As the book begins she is living with her aged invalid mother and one remaining servant, Rose. It is clear that the family’s circumstances are much reduced.  A dramatic event in the opening scene inspires Aroon to look back over her life to see what went wrong. It gradually becomes apparent to the reader that Aroon’s version of the fall of the St Charleses is one that is totally blinkered and naive - like Wilmet she fails to see what is going on, but whereas Wilmet is a fundamentally sensible and happy person, Aroon’s story is full of cruelty, bitterness, deceit and tragedy as the family strives to retain its iron grip of its obsolete idea of ‘good behaviour.’ Nevertheless Good Behaviour is often wickedly funny; it reminded me a little of Elspeth’s Barker’s O Caledonia (review here), a criminally under-appreciated book in my opinion, My full review of Good Behaviour is here. 

I really struggled with the layout this month as I am away from home and doing my best with very poor wifi and an ipad that has seen better days, so apologies for the muddle. 

Next month’s 6 Degrees (7 May) will start with Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang.