Growing Up by Angela Thirkell begins in 1942 in the fantastically named Winter Overcoates. Sir Harry and Lady Waring have given over most of their drafty, uncomfortable home to a military convalescent hospital and are living quite cozily in the servants’ quarters. As with most of Thirkell’s long married couples, Lady Waring is quietly competent, ably making up for her husband’s good-natured disinterest in most matters. They are both charming but I am particularly fond of Sir Harry who may not be able to pay attention for the length of a dull conversation but always has a surplus of good will, leading to some no doubt confusing exchanges with visitors:
‘Things going all right?’ said Sir Harry, who had already forgotten exactly who Mr Hamps was and why he was in the room, but wanted to show good feeling.
When the call comes, grudgingly, they agree to lodge a military intelligence officer and his wife. To everyone’s delight, the couple turns out to be Noel and Lydia Merton. They may be strangers but at least they are Barsetshire strangers – quite a different thing from your run of the mill outsider. The Warings take to them immediately, especially Lydia (how could you not?):
As for the Warings, they had both taken to their guest at sight. Lady Waring, amusedly observing a certain gallantry in Sir Harry’s manner to Mrs Merton which suited him very well, hoped that this young woman would be a pleasant companion for her husband, who throve on, and indeed pined without, a little old-fashioned flirtation. Anything that made Sir Harry feel a little young and dashing was approved of by his wife, who feared fro him, about all things, the stagnation of a war-restricted life at home, with no fresh faces or conversation. And she was delighted to see that Mrs Merton and Leslie were getting on so well, for she was anxious about her niece, who obviously needed to be taken out of herself, poor child. So that, as usual, Lydia was cast for the role of general utility.
The Waring’s niece Leslie also comes down to stay, needing rest to recover from a recent breakdown brought on by overwork and a traumatizing experience when her ship was torpedoed while sailing back from a trip to America. Also posted nearby is Philip Winters, the former hot-tempered schoolmaster whose disastrous engagement to Rose Birkett provided much amusement in Summer Half. The two fall in love, quite quickly and rather boringly. I do like Philip this time around – he’s very talkative and on friendly terms with the Mertons – but Leslie is a bit sullen, obsessed with her brother’s welfare, and very dull. The romantic entanglements of Lady Waring’s middle-aged maid Selena, who cries beautifully and copiously over everything, were far more engaging.
In classic Thirkell style, Selena is the daughter of the Waring family’s nanny. Thirkell always has much to say about nannies, those despots of any well-run home, and I think exceeds herself with this description of Nannie’s career-long complaints:
…she had moved on to other families, always giving complete satisfaction but never obtaining it herself for two reasons: the first that babies will have parents who are apt to imagine that they can bring up their own children, the second that babies are so blind to their own advantage as to grow up.
It is no secret that Lydia (Keith) Merton is my favourite of Thirkell’s characters and I think part of the reason I loved this book so much was because everyone in it seems to share my adoration of her. While I was reading, I wanted to mark down every description, every word of praise (and there were many) directed at Lydia. Lydia is much changed since her last appearance in Cheerfulness Breaks In, but for the better. She is still stunningly useful and good-natured, universally admired, but she feels – to us if not to herself – grown up. Her youthful enthusiastic gaucheness has been tamed under Noel’s influence into something no less appealing but certainly more polite and dignified. She worships Noel (who is rather absent as a meaningful character here) and has made these changes in herself to please him but she is still very much herself:
Lydia Merton, whom we have not seen since the black days of Dunkirk, when her husband was one of the last to get back, was still the Lydia who had helped Geraldine Birkett to tear the frock she didn’t like and spent a hot Sunday with Tony Morland and his friends clearing out the pond. But during the last two years, married to her own blissful content, willing to please Noel Merton in all outward things in her deep security of pleasing his heart, she had so schooled her old wildness and conformed to his excellent taste in matters of dress and appearance that we might be forgiven if we did not recognize her for a moment. The well-groomed hair, the well-cut tweeds, the well-made shoes, even the well-kept hands, were what Lydia Keith would have characterized as a lot of rot, but to Lydia Merton they were as comfortable and normal as an old pair of gloves. In her carriage the old Lydia appeared, with brusque though not ungraceful movements, and Noel Merton said he would know her under any disguise if only he saw her as she vanished at the corner of a street, or got off a bus; and her speech was still apt to startle new friends by its downright quality.
Much is (silently) made by other characters ofLydia’s childlessness. Indeed, we first encounter her again while she is visiting her sister Kate’s young family. As Kate watches Lydia play the doting aunt in the nursery, it is clear that the true happy ending for this book would not be engagements for any number of love-sick couples (happy though those may be) but the promise of motherhood forLydia. Even though everyone was very tactful about it, I love Lydia so much that it hurt me to have so many people wondering and hinting at it all the time. It is a very normal thing to do when a young married woman doesn’t have a baby after a few years of marriage, but also unwitting cruel.
Since the Warings are sharing their residence with a military convalescence home, there are ample opportunities for prominent citizens of Barsetshire to drop by, either to visit or give little talks to the men. The most delightful speaker is surely Mrs Morland, who is shocked to discover how many soldiers read her novels. Young Tony is also about, now in uniform, which seems bizarre and terribly wrong. In fact, all four of Mrs Morland’s sons are in dangerous positions all over the globe, but she can take comfort in knowing that the War Office will at least be prompt if the worst news comes:
‘…whenever I don’t hear from them I know they are all right, because if the War Office or the Admiralty can annoy you by sending a telegram to say everyone is dead or missing they will most certainly do so…I have great confidence in the War Office telling me anything horrid at once, which is such a comfort.’
This is one of my favourites Thirkells of the dozen or so I’ve now read. It manages to balance all the plots and characters so gracefully that none feel either neglected or dominant. The war is certainly a guiding force but the blatant patriotic tone of her early war novels (Cheerfulness Breaks In, though I love it, is full of sickeningly clichéd ‘stiff upper lip’ moments that are jarringly out of place in Thirkell’s usually sharp tongued Barsetshire) has been toned down to focus more on the characters and their domestic concerns. And, of course, Lydia is front and centre, her every appearance making me a deliriously happy reader.
Every time I read one of your excellent Thirkell posts, I want to go straight to the shelves and take that book down. I think this is my favorite of the “war” novels, between the Warings and of course Lydia. It must have been so frustrating for the original readers, to wait two years to find out Noel’s fate, from the end of Cheerfulness Breaks In – or do we learn that in Northbridge Rectory? I can’t remember – darn, I might need to read that one again.
When I finished Cheerfulness Breaks In, I went directly to my computer to check on Noel’s fate (since I didn’t have any of the following novels in the series available to me at that time). Having to wait one or two years to find out, as the original readers did, would have been agony!
Writing these reviews a few months after reading the books for the first time is already make me want to reread them too. I’ve already reread Cheerfulness Breaks In (and hope to give it a proper review here too) and I’m sure this winter will see me rereading others while I try to track down copies of the ones I haven’t read and haven’t been able to find so far.
Growing Up is my favorite Thirkell book. I love trains and model railroading — almost time to put up the Christmas train and village at my house…I’m so excited — and the beginning of Growing Up is sublime:
“To the youth of England, except to that small and misguided section who prefer model airplanes to model railways, the station at Winter Overcotes, as all students of Barsetshire know, represents History and Romance in their highest form, for here is one of the few remaining survivals of the main or high level line crossing the low level or local line. Every right-minded little boy who has traveled by this route has wished to spend the rest of his life at the station…”
I also love her place names: Shearing Junction,Fleece, Eiderdown, Winter Underclose, Worsted, Lambton, and Skeynes.
The talk of trains at the beginning is perfect. I liked trains as a child but never really loved them…but then I grew up to work for the railroad so I am now quite the train geek! I am rather intrigued by the thought of your Christmas train and village; I’m certain it makes yours the most popular house for local children (of all ages)!