Betty's World on BBC!

Probably many of you have, by now, read Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth, or seen the BBC series based on the book and two follow-ups.  Those of you who have not have the most marvelous summer treat in store!

Worth (1935-2011) wrote her memoirs in her 60s, and the first volume was published in 2002.  The BBC series began airing in early 2012.

The story is autobiographical, with most names changed to protect the privacy of people Worth hadn't kept in touch with in the 50 years since the story's setting.  And that setting?  It's Worth's foray into midwifery in the tough slums of London's East End in the 1950s and early 60s!  Yes!  This is Betty's world, replete with caps and cloaks, Cockney accents and bicycles.

The first book contains a lot less romance (the author fled a doomed love affair, in her mid-teens, to learn nursing in a West End hospital, and doesn't care to discuss it) and a whole lot more gynecological detail than a Betty novel.  There are also heartbreaking stories of poor people abandoned to horror by a system without safety nets.  Worth doesn't shrink from the sorrow and horror, but keeps a stiff upper lip and soldiers on, calling in the chiropodist to deal with toenails untrimmed for decades, befriending a young prostitute and trusting a mother of 25(!) to deal with a premature baby successfully.  There's also a skinnydipping interlude in literal Brighton, but other than constant babies, no mention of metaphorical Brighton.

I've only seen two episodes of the show, one from the middle and one toward the end, but I get the impression romance figures more largely in the film version than the printed.  And oh, the costumes!  The hairdos!  The meals!

Must dash to library and attempt to wrestle volumes two and three (Shadows of the Workhouse and Farewell to the East End) from what is most likely a long list of requestees.  So maybe the bookstore...

Enjoy!

Betty by the Numbers: Touring the United Kingdom

 There really is no place like home, and when home is that green and pleasant land, that precious stone set in the silver sea, that land of brown heath, shaggy wood and rugged strand that we today call the United Kingdom, well, why not explore a bit?  Betty does!

A full 100% of the 135 Novels Neels are set, at least partially, in the U.K. – more specifically, in England or Scotland or both.  However, as in real life, while the heroines and heroes acknowledge the beauty and richness of their immediate environs, they’re sadly disinclined to tour like the guidebooks do.  Only 43, or 32%, do any serious tourist-type attention-paying to the country around them in England, and another eight, or 6%, give us insight into the riches of Caledonia.  (Two of those eight explore both countries, so it’s a total of 49, or 36%, of the books that offer England/Scotland tours.)  Compare this to the 60% who offer useful perspective into sightseeing in the Netherlands.

Unlike our experience of touring the Netherlands with Betty as our guide, touring England and Scotland involves vigorous shunning of the larger cities.  Only 1% of our heroines browse about London with any real conviction (they often live there, but take every opportunity to flee to the country).  Sadie Gillard of A Girl to Love (1982) and the young Misses Trentham thrill to the grisly history and gleaming jewels of the Tower of London, and Beth Partridge and a whole gaggle of kids take a few ganders about the big city in A Star Looks Down (1975).  The bodacious Josephine Dowling van Tacx has several days to explore the delights of York, population 198,000 today, while the small and nicely plump Amabel Parsons gets a few weeks to become familiar with its seamier side – though when Oliver Fforde shows up, they cover the higher-end bits together (Never the Time and the Place, 1985, and Always and Forever, 2001, respectively).

 


London and York – seriously, Bettys, how can you pass on these?

As an aside, I am distraught to imagine all these Londoners never taking a good look around that historic and charming city.  Although Amsterdam is the most-named location (after ‘other’) to tour in the Netherlands, the English capital is relegated (mainly) to a vague background for slightly down-at-heels family homes (hers), richly-appointed Regency townhouses (his), valiant bedsits, Victorian-era hospitals, swank hotels with Grill Rooms and staunch East-End clinics, with the occasional dog-walk in Green Park or Richmond and vaguely-worded visit to Harrod’s or an unnamed art gallery.  Pshaw!  One might almost surmise that Mrs. Neels was tired of London – and we all know what that means.  My own favorite thing to do in The World’s Most Interesting City^TM is to wander.  I’ll carry a map or cab fare, because one wants to get back eventually, and set out on foot, and then next thing you know, I’m watching the Queen’s Guards parade across some side street on their way to Buck House for the Changing of Themselves.  Or checking a street sign to read that I’m on Downing Street – and quickly noting that that house over there has a large number “10” on its door.  Or gazing delightedly at the Savoy Hotel, meandering under Nottingham Gate into an outdoor art show, or cantering down Rotten Row... (okay, the last one took a smidge of planning).

However, I am not Betty Neels, and I adore a good dose of difference-of-opinion.  So off we go to Betty’s favorite beauty spot:  ....no, I’m not telling.  Guess.

It’s the West Country.  For purposes of this dissertation, I’m defining the West Country as comprising the counties of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset.  Some scholars include Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, but then we start bumping into the Cotswolds, of which more later.

The hills are steeper than in the self-proclaimed “quintessentially English” Cotswolds, but the West Country nonetheless boasts greenness, pleasantness and the occasional thatched cottage.

So you may have noticed that a healthy portion of heroines, and some of our heroes, have or had homes in Devon or Dorset or Somerset, and one or two have aunts in Cornwall.  That is the topic of a future BbtN.  For now, let’s stick to the tourists:  14 heroines, 10% of all heroines and 27% of those who tour in the UK, make their ways to the West Country.  The first to do so is Tabitha Crawley, taking in the glories of Lyme Regis, Stoke Fleming, Churston Ferrers and Chittlehampton from the passenger side of Marius van Beek’s Bentley T convertible (Tabitha in Moonlight, 1972).  Beatrice Browning makes it farthest west, as she pokes her splendid nose into Polperro in Cornwall, a wonderful place for a Hilltop Tryst (1989) (though not Beatrice and Oliver’s designated trysting-top).  We know Emma Trent is The Right Kind of Girl (1995) in part because of her embrace of the simple glories of Dartmoor, Lustleigh and Torquay.  And we know the West Country is the right kind of place because in Betty’s swan song, Emma’s Wedding (2001), the two places Emma Dawson tours are Amsterdam (extensively) and Devon (a bit).  Incidentally, the photo that appends my comments in this blog is of me, leaning against a rent-a-Punto pulled over to take in a pastoral roadside scene in Devon.  Or maybe Dorset.

Polperro Harbor – plenty of hills for Beatrice’s trysting pleasure.

A close second on the list of visit-worthy locales in England & Scotland is ‘other,’ with 13 visits (10% of books; 26% of UK tourists).  And the category had some catching up to do, as after Mary Jane takes a peek ’round Cumbria in 1973 (Winter of Change/Surgeon in Charge), no ‘other’ visitors show up until Katrina Bennett enjoys visiting Edinburgh (pop. 482,000!) in When May Follows (1980).  Don’t be alarmed by that big Scottish city; the rest of the ‘others’ are towns and villages like Ightham in Kent, as described in Heaven Around the Corner (1981) and not much of anywhere else in the world (although The Rough Guide England (4^th ed., 2000) recommends a visit to Ightham Mote, an “idyllically situated medieval dwelling,” while noting that “Ightham is tricky to get to by bus, with only the infrequent #404 from Sevenoaks (not Sat or Sun) making the trip.”).

 Ightham, I presume?

Then there’s a sprinkling of Sussex and Suffolk and Hampshire with a heavy dose of not-quite-Cotswolds Wiltshire – specifically, Wilton, Salisbury, Castle Cary, Amesbury and the Longleat Estate near Warminster.  Only one of our young ladies is intrepid enough to explore Brighton within the pages of her romance; perhaps that’s part of what makes Venetia Forbes ter Laan-Luitinga The Convenient Wife (1990).  Although, if I recall correctly, she and Duert were not yet married when they browsed about the pier.  Shocking!

Now, if you’ll wave goodbye to Worthing’s delightful sea breezes, and Brockenhurst by the New Forest, we’re off again.  This time, to the Cotswolds, with nine heroines and heroes squashed in to the socking-not-great-enough Bentley.  (Betty Keira is forced to sit on a lap!  Sadly, it is Betty Debbie’s lap.)  Those nine comprise 7% of all Neels partnerships, and 18% of those who tour the UK.  The Cotswolds, for those who have always wondered, are a series of hills (“wolds”) full of sheep sheds (“cots”), and the region is an irregularly-shaped Area of Natural Beauty incorporating pieces of six counties in more-or-less the central part of southern England.  It’s a lot like the West Country, actually, though with more tourist-friendly quaintness (subjective opinion!), gentler hills and a wealthier population base.

Victoria Parsons is the first of Betty’s heroines to look about the mellow hills of limestone (Victory for Victoria, 1972), and then we stay busy elsewheres for a decade or so.  Six stories feature Cotswolds tours from 1982 to 1985, including two of our three visits to Bath (pop. 84,000), in A Girl to Love (1982) and All Else Confusion (1982).  Jemima Mason visits another major attraction of the area in A Dream Came True (1982), becoming the only heroine to pay homage to her creator’s literary progenitor with a whip-round his home town of Stratford on Avon.  Over the next few years, we swing through Warwick and Bristol, and take a peek at Elmley Castle, and then depart the area until 1990’s visit, with Venetia and Duert, to Moreton-in-Marsh and Woodstock.  Olivia Harding rolls back through, with a busload of schoolgirls, in 1994 (A Christmas Wish) for another visit to Bath (Shakespeare 1, Austen & Heyer, 3), and then we depart the magical land of quintessential Englishness, mellow golden stone and thatch forever.

Stow on the Wold (Cots-wold, that is), Glocs.

 The Romanesque-Georgian architecture of Bath serves up golden stone in verdant Somerset.

Okay, scorecards back out:  fourth most-toured in the UK?  The Scottish Highlands.  Six of the eight books that offer us a view into the scenic wonders of Scotland serve up the Highlands – and all eight of them if you’re willing to consider the island of Mull and the Isle of Eriska (a very, very small island owned by one family and featuring a snazzy resort hotel) as Highlands, which is up to you.  Those six constitute 4% of all books, and 12% of those that guide us through the UK.  Three are from the 70s, one from the 80s, and two from the 90s, which seems a fair distribution given how long the trip is from The One True Betty’s West Country home to the remoter bits of Scotland.  While the names of English villages are often great (Saffron Walden, Churston Ferrers, Buckland in the Moor), let us reflect a moment on Sappha Devenish’s itinerary in the Tangled Autumn of 1971:  Ullapool, Inverewe, Balmacara, Auchtertyre and Lochcarron.  Shove a half-dozen marbles into your mouth and say those names aloud, rolling the “r”s, to get the true local flavor.

 

Scottish Highlands, with not a Nissen hut in sight – note low-hanging clouds, please, and take appropriate precautions.

Stourhead, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Bath, is just outside the Cotswolds, so gets its own place on the rankings list:  five of Betty’s stories take us to that meticulously-landscaped Palladian mansion in Wiltshire, starting with 1985’s Never the Time and the Place (though Stourhead seems the perfect place for a declaration of love).  Then there’s one visit each in ’87 and ’88, and we skip ahead eleven years for one in ’99, then finish up with Julia and Gerard’s 2001 visit in An Independent Woman.  If we include the five edge-of-Cotswolds locations I’ve thrust into “other” with the Stourhead visits, “Wiltshire just outside the Cotswolds” has more Betty tourists than the Cotswolds proper.

I have got to get to Stourhead – bee-yoo-tee-ful!

There are three (2% of books; 6% of UK tourists) visits to Yorkshire, and the same for Bath, both touched on above.  Finally, we have two visitors (1% of books; 4% of UK tourists) each for Scottish islands, Guernsey, Essex (“the true Essex”), London as mentioned, Cumbria, Northumberland (Hadrian’s Wall!), the Lake District, Oxford (just outside the Cotswolds) and Cheddar Gorge (also just outside the Cotswolds).  Zero for the Midlands, the Peak District, Liverpool, the eastern Fen country, ‘Madchester,’ Durham’s coal-mining country, the storied St. Andrews or the gritty Glasgow.  But then, Betty didn’t go in for grit much, did she?

So, what’s your favorite part of the UK that Betty skipped?  They say Birmingham is awfully hip...

“Brum,” as some folks call the UK’s second-largest city:  old and new; classic and (horrors!) modern

The usual caveats:  1) Eliza Proudfoot spent half a book in Scotland without exploring any notable landmarks, so she doesn’t count; similar examples abound.  2) Sometimes I don’t count so good myself.  3) Sometimes I don’t count five words (“They drove through Middle Carnage”) as ‘proper’ touring, and sometimes I do.  This whimsy is part of what keeps me young at heart.  4) You can argue as much as you like about what’s in and what’s out of the Cots, the West C., the Highlands, etc.  You’re not wrong.  Neither am I.  Seriously, that’s an invitation to state your case.

Life After Betty: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

With my apologies for not having finished a Betty by the Numbers for this week (we're having a party tonight!), I hope you'll seek out and immensely enjoy this wonderful happy-cupcake of a novel.

-Betty van den Betsy

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, by Winifred Watson

This is a wonderful book!  I just discovered it a year or so ago, and have probably read it four times since.  There’s also a very good, though very different, movie version.  Big caveat: the stinkin’ book carries the 1930s English lit stain of anti-Semitism.  Gosh, I hate that.  But it’s in about two or three sentences, so I excise them mentally and carry on with the otherwise-most delightful Cinderella story ever.

Guinevere Pettigrew is an Araminta at forty-ish, complete with the mouse-colored hair, but without the advantages an RDD provides.  She’s struggling to navigate London in the 1930s, and finding the going difficult for a dowdy spinster who’s not very good at her putative profession of governess-ing.  (She finds children frightening.)  A curate’s daughter, she was reared to strict standards of morality, humility and gentility.  Add to that twenty years of living in other people’s homes, at the mercy of her employers’ moods, children and household rules, and she’s gone from timid to chronically terrified; from modest to apologetically subservient.  Our story opens with Miss Pettigrew in desperate need of a job that will save her from the workhouse.  In search of that job, she finds adventure, friends and happiness.

 

undated photo of residents of an English workhouse.  They seem frequently to have been stuffed with children, which would have made them especially upsetting for Miss Pettigrew

An employement agency sends Miss P. to the home of Miss Delysia LaFosse (née Sarah Grubb), an actress and nightclub singer of surpassing beauty in need of a governess, despite that “Miss.”  Miss LaFosse has a more immediate problem – too many gentlemen friends about to collide – and despite her parsonical upbringing and belief in her own incompetence, Miss P. makes great strides in sorting out the various callers to beneficial effect.  Miss P. quickly realizes that life’s exigencies have made her much more open-minded and affectionate, and less sternly moral, than her parents and culture molded her to be.

Early in the day (sometime between 11:35am and 12:52pm; the chapters are titled according to the minutes they encapsulate), Miss P. decides “she was going to accept now everything that came along,” including a dry sherry.  She is quickly swept into Miss LaFosse’s gay and frivolous life, teetering on the edge of debauchery, and experiencing all sorts of exciting things she’s never known before, including furs, taxis, a nightclub and kindness.  Her quick wit and courage help her new friends out of several fixes, and she wins a beau of her own and a much, much better job than any she’s held before.  Sometime around 4:00am, the novel closes with a delicious and well-earned sense of happy-ever-after-ness.

 

Miss Pettigrew and friends attend a cocktail party that may have been quite like this one shown in the TV show Upstairs, Downstairs

It’s not just the marvelous Cinderella story that makes Miss Pettigrew such fun.  Listening in on Miss P.’s thoughts as she transforms herself from cringing, unloved drudge to brilliant social strategist and fierce guardian of her friends’ best interests is great fun – funny and uplifting.  Early in the book, “Miss Pettigrew cast a sternly disapproving eye about her, but behind her disapproval stirred a strange sensation of excitement.”   Close to the end, she’s thrown her upbringing to the wind:  “If the small voice of conscience did pipe up, Miss Pettigrew turned a wickedly deaf ear. ... She was out to enjoy herself as she had never enjoyed herself before, and all the sermons in the world wouldn’t change her course. ... Now she lived.  She was inside of things.  Now she took part.”

I like the movie less well, but still recommend it.  It makes two significant changes from the book:  first, it feels truer to its time period – the late 30s – by bringing WW II’s imminence into the story.  That helps put the gaiety of the society butterflies and Miss Pettigrew’s very different experience into a more realistic perspective.  The second dramatic change is a lousy one:  rather than show the camaraderie between women that the book emphasizes, the writer imbues one of the nicest secondary characters in the book with a vicious jealousy of Miss Pettigrew, and shows the two as rivals rather than supportive friends.  Pfui.

Brighton:  Miss La Fosse luxuriates in all the most garish parts of that sinful city; other characters visit; our heroine’s beau has clearly been there; our heroine, at 40, has never kissed a man.  “’The culmination of all true romance,’ said Miss Pettigrew sternly, ‘is marriage.  Unless the thought of marriage enters both partners’ heads, you may be sure there will be no permanent happiness.’”

Clothes:  a five-year old coat of a nondescript, ugly brown, not thick enough for a cold, drizzly November day in London; a silk and lace négligé; real silk underclothes; home-made woolen underclothes; black velvet evening dress with jade earrings and necklace; a fur coat; a “magnificent black evening wrap with a white fox collar;” gentlemen in evening dress and more.

Food:  not really a focus, but grapefruit, ham, eggs, toast and marmalade; various cocktails, including Miss P’s own pour of soda water with just a dash of sherry for color (“Why men waste money getting drunk on [whiskey], when they can get a really cheap palatable drink like lemon squash...!”); a nice cup of tea; a delicious dinner with unspecified soup, fish, roast and sweet; a “marvelous concoction” of “cream and fruit and nuts and ice-cream and a wonderful syrup.”

Incidentally, the author’s story is fascinating.  She was a secretary with time on her hands, reading at work, when she remarked to her sister and brother-in-law that she could write a better book than the library’s latest offering.  Her BIL told her to get on with it, and she wrote six novels, in three or four quite different styles, before giving up writing to run a household that included her husband, children and mother-in-law.  “You can’t write if you are never alone,” Ms. Watson explained to an interviewer.  Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is very available at my local library, and I would love to know what others (like you) think of it.

Betty by the Numbers: Marriages

Harlequin author Catherine Spencer has a story on the Harlequin website of a modern-day marriage of convenience – her widowed dental hygienist, with two young daughters, married the widower of her best friend, who had two young sons.  They thought it would be best for the kids, so they created a happy family for several years and divorced after the kids were grown.  Sounds better than Consuelo Vanderbilt’s experience in being threatened and emotionally blackmailed into marrying the Duke of Marlborough to satisfy her mother’s social ambitions – that marriage ended after two sons and eleven years, though the divorce didn’t happen for another 15 years, and then they managed an annulment five years after that, apparently on grounds that the bride married against her will and the groom did it for the money.  It makes a love match sound rather appealing, doesn’t it?

 

The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, 1895 – the former Miss Vanderbilt needed the veil because, though famously beautiful, she is rumored to have cried throughout her wedding.

That said, any rich, Dutch doctor who needs a gracious hostess for his dinner parties and mousey Mama to his flighty late-wife’s children is welcome to call on me – assuming he doesn’t mind a little wear on the tires, if you will.  I am great at all that hostessing stuff, and Betty Beth has already volunteered to take the kiddies for a few hours a week, and I would be suitably appreciative – no gushing – of shopping sprees at Harrod’s and a devoted household staff.  (Drifts off into pleasant daydream....)

Actually, only one quarter of Betty’s marriages are convenient.  I tend to avoid the MOC stories, as the premise is so utterly and unbelievably unhappy to me.  “As I am now almost forty, and you are 26, we’re probably both willing to spend the rest of our lives without so much as speeding past the Brighton city limits.”  Oh, no, we are not, bucko.  We’ve never been there, and we understand that mutual affection, respect and a socking great allowance paid quarterly are important components of a successful union, but we’ve heard a few things about Brighton, and frankly it sounds worth exploring in the right company.  Anyway, it turns out I’ve been avoiding fewer books than I realized – and The Vicar’s Daughter (1996), which includes a MOC, was off the list anyway because I hate when the parents die in car crashes (sorry, Once for All Time).

My favorite marriage scenarios are the ones where he proposes near the end of the book, but not so near that we don’t get to see the wedding.  Cassandra by Chance (1973) is the first of seven – just 5% of the stories offer us an invitation to the wedding of two entirely happy, mutually loving people – but what a wedding: “on a cold blustery January day in the little village church on Mull... overflowing with flowers.”  The bride wears blue, to match her sapphire engagement ring.  (And seems to have her new mink coat on over the blue dress.  Am I misreading that?)  After a jolly reception at her sister’s, they change into sheepskin jackets and walk briskly up the hill to Ogre’s Relish, planning for a mixed half-dozen of baby ogres and ogresses.  Happily, there is no mention of awkward social moments with would-be suitor and minister Mr. Campbell conducting the service.

 

A sapphire-blue wedding dress – perhaps a skosh chilly for Mull in January.

 

This one will work well if he gives you an heirloom aquamarine.

If you haven’t read Philomena’s Miracle (1978) recently, do go back and tuck through those last few pages of wedding-prep and aisle-walk.  They really make a VHEA, although I do wish Betty didn’t harp so on our heroines’ looks, as if that were the primary and proper criterion for love.  If you’ve never read Philomena’s, you have a treat in store.  I’m less enamored of Eugenia and Gerard’s Heidelberg Wedding (1984).  Hands up who’d want to be proposed to, without warning, at the door of the chapel and swept in, handed a bouquet, and pointed toward the officiant.  We skip a lot of years after that, and then get four wedding scenes in ten books in 1997-2000.  Perhaps Harlequin/M&B was paying extra for satin and lace – and flowers.  Always flowers.

 The wedding chapel at Heidelberg Castle, pre-be-flowering.

With the usual caveats, I count 34 MOCs, or 25% of the 135 books.  Five of them take place early in the story, 23 happen about halfway through, and six occur toward the end – including that of the beautiful Sophie and her Rijk, who marry for convenience on page 137, and discover they really, truly do love each other on page 188, after rescuing a small child from drowning and freezing and straightening out all the confusion as to just what the curiously-likeable Irena means in Rijk’s life.

Given that seven marriages take place in the final paragraphs, that leaves 94, or 70%, to occur after the curtain falls upon our satisfyingly-snogging hero and heroine.  As the milkman in Last April Fair (1980) says “to no one in particular” after squeezing and wriggling past a blissfully-unnoticing Phylly and Pieter, “it’s a very good morning for some of us, and that’s a fact.”

While we have limited glimpses into their Afters, about 27 couples (MOC and non-MOC) show up in subsequent books, and 100% of them are blissfully happy together.  If I know anything about social sciences (and I don’t), that’s a statistically-significant sample.

Finally, let me quote from Kate Fox’s anthropological work Watching the English, recommended on this site by Betty Andrea, and many thanks to the said Betty for the tip.  Here’s Ms. Fox on weddings in England:  “We know that a wedding is supposed to be a joyous event, but in our usual Eeyorish fashion, we really see it as an ordeal, an occasion fraught with difficulties and dangers (or, as the ever-cheery Debrett’s puts it ‘a minefield for the socially insecure and a logistical nightmare for the organisers’ and, for good measure, ‘a source of inter-family tension’).  Something is bound to go drastically wrong, and someone is bound to be mortally offended – and because of our belief in the magical disinhibiting powers of alcohol, we know that the veneer of polite conviviality may crack, and the inevitable family tensions may erupt into unseemly tears and quarrels.  Even if stiff upper lips are maintained on the day, there will be grumbles and recriminations in the aftermath, and in any case, even at best, we expect the whole ritual to be rather embarrassing.”

According to Fox, the English practice “negative politeness,” which involves taking great care not to threaten the privacy of others.  This and other factors make them chronically uneasy on social occasions, like wedding receptions.  (“Positive politeness,” as practiced in the US and most western European cultures, involves seeking to include others in community – or invading their privacy.)

Life After Betty: Elinor Lipman

Life After Betty:  Elinor Lipman

Brighton alert!  Most of Elinor Lipman’s heroines and heroes are perfectly comfortable in Brighton, though it’s much more the mid-priced B&Bs in quiet side streets than the garish, flashy, big hotels by the boardwalk, and they don’t describe their visits.  You’re welcome to blame them if you like, but since they are largely college-educated New Englanders in the 80s, 90s and 00s in long-term relationships that may or do lead to marriage, their fictional behavior is much more plausible than not – in real life, those folks are highly likely to make the trip.

And realistic is something Lipman does extremely well.  Her secondary characters are often colorful – a radio personality, an accused murderer, a delusional, aging dancer – but her heroes and heroines are more like the folks you probably know:  a medical intern, a hotel manager, a police officer, a temp/aspiring writer.  When the colorful carom into the not-so-much, the results are humor, self-discovery and romance.

Elinor Lipman’s first novel takes an ordinary woman, an ordinary man, a flamboyant birth mother and an unusual situation and gets emotional growth and happy-ever-after from the mix.

Her first full-length novel was Then She Found Me, which got turned into a movie with Bette Midler and Helen Hunt with only the vaguest similarity to the novel.  The book features April, a 30-something teacher, and Dwight, the 30-something librarian she’s always found dorky.  April has adjusted to the deaths, a few years before, of her adoptive parents, when suddenly her birth mother appears in her life.  Bernice is a glamorous, self-aggrandizing liar and demi-celebrity on local TV, and she desperately wants April’s acknowledgement, affection and respect.  Deflecting Bernice’s emotional assaults leads April to Dwight, and she gradually revises her opinion of him, resulting in as H an EA as real lives offer – which is to say, quite happy.

JFK’s birthplace – read the book...

 Dwight and April’s relationship is a revealing sub-plot in a story more deeply concerned with the conflicted, complicated relationship developing between Bernice and April.  The mother-daughter relationship is strained by April’s surprise, her loyalty to and love for the parents who reared her, and Bernice’s egotism and persistent dishonesty.  She’s no one’s idea of a Weeping Despot, but she certainly tries to ride roughshod over April’s lower-key character, demanding rather than earning a connection.  Our heroine and her sidekick don’t give in – often – and together they manage the emergence of a new family with care and humor.  Bernice has moments of sensitivity, but for the most part I find her a singularly unsympathetic character.  I am sometimes frustrated by April’s tolerance of her birth mother’s worst moments, but that frustration forces me to stop and think a bit more about why April puts up with Bernice’s emotional greed and flamboyant pushiness.

April and Dwight work at Quincy High School, just outside Boston, Mass.

The love story is really lovely.  I empathize deeply with these two people’s attraction to each other, and absolutely believe in April’s slowly-dawning awareness of that attraction.  “He stood up slowly, threw his balled-up lunch bag neatly across the room into the open barrel.  The grace of his set shot surprised me.  He smiled down at me and said, ‘Liar.’  I watched him collect the rest of his trash and reassemble the thermos; he took my coffee cup and swallowed the rest like a belt of scotch.  The huge Adam’s apple dipped; below it, his blue pinstripe shirt was unbuttoned at the neck.  A few chest hairs poked through a small hole in his T-shirt.  I felt a sudden pull in my gut for no reason.”

Lipman is a wonderful writer.  Her heroes and heroines are hugely likeable, and her prose is restrained, clear and vivid.  She is a member of the New England academic/artistic community, and knows that environment cold and describes it accurately and affectionately, without sentimentalizing (mostly).  All of her books touch that world to some degree, and if you like Then She Found Me, you’ll almost certainly enjoy The Inn at Lake Devine, The Way Men Act, The Dearly Departed, and The Pursuit of Alice Thrift.  Secondary characters Isabel of Isabel’s Bed and the delusional dancer of My Latest Grievance are especially colorful, notably in their approaches to marriage and non-marriage, so if you’re Brighton-sensitive, approach cautiously.  Your library probably has many of these.

Caveats:  dialogue includes swearing, and the secondary characters have a much more cavalier attitude toward Brighton than heroes and heroines.  The book is set in the 80s (published in 1990), and Bernice smokes quite a bit – in restaurants, which on my 2012 re-read I found oddly disconcerting, though realistic.  Also, these characters eat a lot of Chinese food.

Salman Rushdie plays the ob/gyn in the movie version.  The novel does not have an ob/gyn character, since no one has need of one in the course of the story.  Further, the hero of the novel doesn’t appear in the film, and the unmarried heroine of the book is going through a divorce in the movie.  I haven’t seen the film, but it has both Bette Midler and Colin Firth.  Hmm.

Midsummer Star--1983

My copy of Midsummer Star is falling apart--the pages fluttering out like pieces of our heroine's ragged heart.

Celine Baylis, 22, is a gorgeous dark-haired beauty with years of theoretical education and 'finishing' behind her. She speaks French like a native, whips together food like a Cordon Bleu, looks awfully decorative and lives like Sleeping Beauty in a charming tumble-down Elizabethan Manor. But, as evidenced by her awful name (Celine just screams Neels villainess to me), her parents are not to be trusted.The Colonel (a dreamy type with a sporadic parade-ground manner) and his wife ('My, what a lot of flowers there are to arrange!') have dug themselves into a debt crisis. Their assets are these:

• The manor. Yes, this 10 bedroom house has damp patches and needs repairs but if you squint just right and fail to acquaint yourself with the furnace (ha! It doesn't have a furnace, silly.) it is charming.
• A couple of old retainers--cooking and butler/gardening. They're paying them no matter what.
• A well-stocked wine cellar that The Colonel mothers like a broody hen.
• An extensive kitchen garden--producing fresh delectables at little cost. The garden also has a good deal of flowers.
• One newly minted entrepreneurial daughter--passionately determined to make a go of running a Bed and Breakfast. ('If Mrs. Ham can, so can I.')

Act I: The Bed and Breakfast or Mother Can Do the Flowers or Celine the Magnificent

This is my favorite part. Once Celine (a name which is probably not too bad in real life but fits like a bad suit on a Neels heroine) understands the magnitude of her parents' financial straits, she throws off the young Swiss-finished lady and rolls up her sleeves. Celine pitches in...cleaning crud up in the kitchen

With an unflinching desire to live life as it is and not the way she wants it to be that had me cheering she tells the family solicitor, 'I've been doing nothing for a long time...I think I'll try something else for a change.'
In no time they've opened up the rooms, worked out menus and rates (Six pounds for a night, dinner will be three pounds fifty and extra for drinks) and had a few visitors.
And then one day, when she's strolling gently past the front drive she gets malaria. Okay. Not malaria. But some disease that transforms her personality and gives her a brain fever. Let's call it...I'm just spit-balling here...(snaps fingers)...The Nicky.
Celine instantly succumbs to The Nicky. He is with his parents on holiday and plans to stay a few days! Celine's joy has little to do with swelling the family bank account and more to do with being rushed off her feet by this magnificent malarial specimen.
Editorial Note:
I think of falling in love with Nicky as the Old Celine's last hurrah. She's not in love with the Malady, per se, but in love with this languid, cosseted life she used to live. And though she works like a Trojan, I think she's got some lingering longing for her former self. New Celine is rushed off her feet, running after guests and getting dinner. Nicky takes trays out of her hands and strolls with Old Celine in the garden. (Of course, New Celine takes a basket along with her to collect some peas while she's at it.)

And then his father has a stroke. (Maybe from hanging out with The Nicky?)

The Nicky is less than useless, leaving his father to be cared for by strangers, while he lolls about the scenery and makes passes at Celine. Papa Seymour (The Nicky's father), meanwhile, calls threadily for 'Oliver'.
Oliver Seymour, Nicky's cousin, is an up-right, up-tight, do-right bore according to The Nicky--he's a virtuous prig but they'll have to send for him.
Celine is up a ladder in filthy clothes painting a drainpipe that she's hauled into place (no lolling here!) when she meets the Odious Oliver. Deep in love (read: 'Deep in do-do') with the Malarial Nicky, she feels like she needs to adopt his attitudes and loyalties--hauling her opinions into line with his in much the same way as that wayward drainpipe. So she sees what Nicky sees: A smug and virtuous man bent on showing The Nicky up as the cheap imitation he is.
Oliver loves her at once.

Act II: Young Love's Dream Dashed
Oliver steps into the situation with an un-Nicky-like aplomb. Nicky is only able snatch moments with Celine--whispering about weekends and...marriage...of course he means marriage if weekends away are involved--before Oliver breaks things up. And then, when Nicky and his parents leave and all the bills are settled (by Oliver), Celine receives a crushing blow.
Oliver: I noticed you and Nicky were making googly-eyes at one another.
Celine: We mean to be married. What would an old bachelor like you know about a divine love like ours?
Oliver: Only that it would be illegal in all fifty Colonies.
Malarial Nicky is married.
It can't be true, thinks Celine as she spirals into a fevered delusion. But when The Nicky returns, she (after much equivocation) tells him what Oliver said. Well?
Oh. That. Divorce is easy these days...let's have a weekend...you're naive...let me grab your arm menacingly...
Oliver makes a sudden rescue and Celine takes off to cry her eyes out.
When Oliver does track her down he offers a shoulder to cry on and a job. She (stupidly!) wants to know if Nicky would really want to divorce his wife and find her again. (I almost can't forgive this much idiocy.) And then she calls Oliver avuncular because he must not be interested in women. He took this unflinchingly on the chin.

Act III: The Fetid Swamp of Bethnal Green or Celine Gets a Job and a Flatlet
Oliver arranges everything (even the installation of Mother Baylis' much younger sister as Celine's temporary replacement) and before you know it, Celine is living above a paediatric clinic in the rough part of London--Bethnal Green in the East End.
The point is that absence and activity will make her forget The Nicky but I keep getting annoyed at the subtle implication that she's not up to the job. She bravely started a semi-thriving Bed and Breakfast with limited resources and a willingness to work, people! Don't tell me that she's incapable of swabbing baby vomit or de-funking toddlers.
My one criticism of Oliver is that, just as The Nicky said, he is always right. This would be rather tiresome to live with and you find yourself wishing that Celine would be mugged and strangled on her way to church just to prove to him that establishing her in the middle of a slum might be a bad idea.
She does not get strangled.
Instead, on her day off, she meets The Nicky. And she has tea with him. And she listens as he pours his honeyed disease into her ears. But back in her flatlet she isn't quite so happy. Maybe dating a married man would be a bad idea!
Oliver, seeing the need to bolster Celine's resolve, makes some effort to fill up her free time and she spends a wonderful day with him in the country and then at his home. They go to Cats that evening and stumble across Daphne--Nicky's wife...and mother of his child! 'You knew--that they were going to be there. You did it deliberately...'
'Yes, I did it deliberately.'
Editorial Note:
Recently legendary screen actress Patricia Neal died and I've been going through a lot of her obits. She suffered a series of horrible strokes during one of her pregnancies and her rehabilitation was attributed to her husband, author Roald Dahl, being a horrible SOB (not a stretch for him, I hear) and making her button her own shirts if it took her an hour. This is exactly Oliver's approach. Nicky is a disease to be purged from her system and Celine won't get better by being coddled. But don't think that Oliver enjoys it.
Nicky isn't going to stop pestering her (though her fever has finally broken and she's so over him) so Oliver, tossing over his shoulder on the way to stabilize a diabetic child, says, 'A propos Nicky--we could get engaged.'
She agrees to talk about it (intending to ask if he's suffering under malarial delusions) and, coming upon him waiting for her to change--sitting on the bottom stair, reading a newspaper--she is blindingly certain that she's in love with Oliver.
So, now it's a foregone conclusion that she'll agree to an engagement of convenience. Delightfully we learn that her middle name is Petronella (please don't print that in the newspaper, she thinks) and his Christian names are Oliver Edmund Frederick. They dance in the line of duty and kiss in the line of duty and if his embraces are more warm than is strictly warranted than it must be attributed to his skills as an actor.
On one weekend they visit his aunt and uncle (Nicky's parents) and run into Daphne (quite bitter over her husband's continual philandering and in a mood to pour her heart out to Celine) and Nicky (who hisses at Celine, 'Am I supposed to believe that this is a fairytale romance?...You'll be telling me next that you love him.' Celine's quiet and heartfelt, 'I do' wipes the smug expression off his face).
So that's Nicky taken care of. But we still have thirty pages left and we have to fill them with something...Ah, a red herring! Just the thing. One of Oliver's friends tells Celine that she was sure Oliver was waiting to marry her daughter Hilary. This is just like your GPS telling you to take the I-405 North exit to get to the airport when you know that to take the I-405 South exit will get you there sooner. Detours ahead!

Act IV: Hie to Holland or The Little Italian Dress Takes a Trip
And then they go to Holland because he has a business trip and wants to have her meet more friends. She gets a chance to air her French and likes her hosts enormously. He catches her in the garden one afternoon, kisses her thoroughly and gently reminds her that they are engaged. But of course, that only makes her stiffen (instead of relent and reveal which was what he was hoping for) and, as he is a seismograph where she is concerned, he lets her go and the moment is lost.

Act V: A Spot of Snogging
Back in England, she plucks up her courage and corners the good doctor. She has heard that Hilary is a charming girl and, finding the selfless love of New Celine more satisfying (albeit, more painful) than the blind rapture of Old Celine, gives him back his ring and breaks the engagement.
Just by chance she meets Hilary in the street and sees that she's not a day over 14. Uh-oh. Or, if I may employ the more nuclear, Scooby-Doo-ism: Ruh-Roh.
Forces (by 'forces' I mean 'A very determined and angry Oliver') keep her from getting a minute alone with Oliver to explain and she finds herself being told by his butler that he's gone away for a few days. Tears!
And thank heaven for tears because Pym (the butler) calls Oliver to let him know he was making innocent young ladies burst into lamentations on his doorstep. That's why, when Celine is swinging gently in her Elizabethan garden under her Elizabethan tree, Oliver walks around the corner of the Elizabethan house. He's there to see what the fuss is about.
There's no fuss. Just kissing and disclosures and more kissing
The End




Rating: This was a darling little book. It's not one of my favorites (as it becomes mired in the swamp of Bethnal Green rather securely) but it mostly works and the two main characters have much to recommend them. Oliver is always right and serious and dependable. Celine (ugh, I hate her name) is fresh and plucky and hard working...and as dumb as a post. The only part I don't like much is when she's trying to justify seeing Nicky again even after finding out about his wife. I hated it, but then, I think I hated it because it was uncomfortable to read...not because it wasn't an understandable feeling for Celine to have. When she was behaving stupidly I would think to myself, 'She single-handedly rescued her family from ruin' and say it over and over in my head. She never does get the recognition she deserves for such an awesome thing. I give this a happy boeuf en croute.

Food: Cornflakes, kipper fillets, lamb chops, syllabub (twice!), egg and mushroom flan (ick.), fresh peas are pushed to the side of the plate (that's what I do with my peas too), Yorkshire pudding, roast beef, trifle, wild duck stuffed with apples, ice cream, strawberries coming out of your ears, Boeuf Stroganoff and lobster.

Fashion: Celine meets Oliver wearing paint-stained jeans and a cotton sweater. She could practically drive to Rome on the mileage she gets out of a 'little Italian dress'. She also wears a dim apricot silk and a faded cotton Liberty dress.