by E. H. Young
Chatterton Square
E.H. Young
First published in 1947
This edition published in 2020 by
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London nw1 2db
Preface copyright © 2020 Lucy Evans
Afterword copyright © 2020 Simon Thomas
Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7123 5322 9
e-ISBN 978 0 7123 6761 5
Text design and typesetting by JCS Publishing Services Ltd
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK), Croydon, cr0 4yy
Contents
The 1940s
E.H. Young
Preface
Chatterton Square
Afterword
The 1940s
The National Marriage Guidance Council was founded in 1938 by Rev. Herbert Gray, concerned that the divorce rate was increasing.
There are 6,250 divorces in England and Wales in 1938. This rises steadily to c.30,000 divorces in 1946, before jumping to 60,254 in 1947. The divorce rate falls in 1948 and throughout the next 10 years or so, before beginning a significant increase in the 1960s and 70s.
1941 (December): Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces, the United States officially enters the Second World War.
1942 (November): The publication of the Beveridge Report, by economist Sir William Beveridge, sets the blueprint for the modern British welfare state.
1944 (August): The Education Act, also known as the Butler Act, abolishes fees for state secondary schools. By the end of the decade, there are 2 million pupils at secondary school.
1944 (June): The Normandy landings, also known as D-Day, is the largest seaborne invasion in history.
1945 (May): Victory in Europe Day, or VE Day, sees the end of the war with Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender. Victory in Japan Day, or VJ Day, follows in August.
1946 (July): The Denning Committee reduces time between decree nisi and decree absolute from six months to six weeks.
1947: Chatterton Square is published.
1949 (July): The Legal Aid and Advice Act extends the welfare state to those unable to pay for a solicitor, making many court cases, including divorce cases, much more accessible.
E.H. Young (1880–1949)
Emily Hilda Young was born in Northumberland in 1880 to Frances Jane Young and William Michael Young, a shipowner. When Emily was 22, she married a solicitor called J.A.H. (Arthur) Daniell and moved to Bristol. Clifton – an area of Bristol noted for its grand Georgian architecture – is given the pseudonym Upper Radstowe as the setting of many of her novels, including Chatterton Square. Bristol is changed to Radstowe.
Young’s first novel, A Corn of Wheat, was published in 1910. A second, Yonder, followed two years later. During the First World War she worked in a stables as a groom and later in a munitions factory. Her husband was killed at Ypres in 1917, and shortly afterwards she moved to London to be with her lover Ralph Henderson, who was married. He had been a close friend (and schoolfriend) of her husband, and was headmaster of the public school Alleyn’s in Dulwich. Young not only conducted the affair with Henderson, but lived with him and his wife (who appears to have accepted the situation), occupying a separate flat in the house. Her 1925 novel William is about the consequences on an extended family when one of the daughters commits adultery. It was also one of the first 10 novels chosen by Allen Lane when he launched Penguin Books in 1935.
Young continued to publish a novel every few years throughout the 1920s and 30s, and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1930 with Miss Mole, a largely comic novel about an unmarried housekeeper. Her novels often looked at social mores and unconventional households, though none were quite as unconventional as her own. She never married Henderson, even after his wife died; he and Young moved to Bradford on Avon, where they lived until she died from lung cancer in 1949. Chatterton Square was her final novel, published in 1947.
Preface
Chatterton Square is the final novel written by E.H. Young. Young’s novels were popular in her time but fell out of favour in later years. Through this addition to the British Library Women Writers series, a new generation of readers can explore Young’s last novel, and one of her most accomplished works. Young lived an unconventional life characterised by her work during both the world wars, her unusual romantic and domestic relationships, her support for the women’s suffrage movement and her love of mountaineering. All are themes which are explored to some extent in Chatterton Square.
Two unusual families are at the heart of Chatterton Square, and like many novels of this time we follow their lives in detail against the backdrop of major world events, in this case the lead up to the Second World War and the impact this might have on both of the families. At first glance, familiar female tropes are present: the attractive widow, the passive wife and the waspish spinster. As we discover the rich inner lives of Mrs Fraser, Mrs Blackett and Miss Spanner, we learn the secrets held within their marriages and the developing connections between the families. The story of Miss Spanner, in particular, is a detailed and sympathetic account of the place that unmarried women had within society.
One of the great strengths of Chatterton Square is the creeping sense of tension that is felt by the residents as they edge closer to the declaration of war. We come to see how the after-effects of the Great War and the possibility of another conflict form the lens through which each of our characters sees the world, their relationships and their hopes for the future. Young wrote Chatterton Square in 1947, so would have been well aware of what awaited her characters.
It is rare to read a novel which ends with such uncertainty but still allows the reader room for hope.
Lucy Evans
Curator, Printed Heritage Collections
British Library
Chatterton square
Chapter I
Chatterton Square belied its name. It was really an oblong and, at that, it was unfinished, for one of its longer sides was open to the road which, rising a little, led southwards to the Green, and northwards, dipping a little, to the short curving hill on to the Downs. What gardens the houses possessed were at the back; in compensation, the inhabitants of the Square were free to use a railed oval of grass fringed with evergreens. It made a pleasant patch of greenness but, as the gates were locked and the householders were apt to mislay the keys and the spiked railings were high enough to thwart stray urchins, there was seldom anyone inside the enclosure and there was very little traffic in the Square. It had seen better days. That was evident in the delicate tracery of the fanlights over the doors and the wrought iron balconies breaking the plain fronts here and there, but now most of the houses were in need of paint and, though there were no printed cards in the windows advertising lodgings to be let, the shabby young clerks who blossomed out into bright sports clothes at the week-ends and the old ladies with over-trimmed hats who took their slow daily walks were certainly not householders. Fashion and prosperity had deserted this corner of Upper Radstowe where all the houses had basement kitchens and anyone walking round the Square at cooking times would have seen these caverns lighted as though for some underground festivity.
It was the balconies, although his own house was n
ot favoured with one, the fanlights, the atmosphere of an earlier and, as he thought, a more gracious day which, in spite of his wife’s gentle objection to the basement, had induced Mr. Blackett to rent a house in the left hand corner of the Square. It was in good repair and had an added though, he had to admit, an incongruous attraction in an extra, flat-roofed room filling the space there had once been between his house and the one, at right angles to it, on the long side of the Square. He needed that extra room for his books. He had been collecting them all his life and at last, on his promotion to be manager of the Radstowe branch of the business with which he had always been connected, he had found harbourage for them and solitude, when he needed it, for himself. This excrescence was ugly but its oddity was rather pleasing. It had the effect of being swung between the two houses for it was on a level with the pavement while they had their basements some feet below it and their first-floor rooms a few feet above it. Thus, to reach it from his dining-room or the passage, it was necessary to descend three shallow steps and he always enjoyed descending them for in this house of his choice there was that difference from other houses which matched the difference from other people he felt so strongly in himself. And he did not regret the absence of a balcony. The one decorating the Frasers’ house next door, though he admired its beauty from a distance, was used too often and rather vulgarly, he thought, by Mrs. Fraser. It was just wide enough to accommodate a chair and long enough to accommodate several and there, on fine days, she would sit, reading or sewing, and no doubt missing none of the few happenings in the Square. He would not have cared to see any member of his family in so conspicuous a position and one so conducive to idling and gossip. His wife’s drawing-room was at the back of the house with a little staircase leading into the garden, and she loved a garden. She was, or ought to be, as well content with her room as he was with his and she was the least curious of women. It would have given her no satisfaction to sit on a balcony and watch the comings and goings of the neighbours. She lived in a little world of her own with a home and a husband and three children to care for, and a peaceful, well-ordered world it was, good to come back to after a tiring day and these were troublous times. Mr. Blackett refused to liken his home to an oasis in a desert; that was too obvious a simile for his literary taste, but he gratefully took the refreshment he found there, only disturbed, half pleasurably, by the bigger Fraser encampment next door, with no apparent male chieftain at the head of it.
“I suppose,” he said to his wife, soon after their arrival in the Square, “that Mrs. Fraser must be a widow.”
“I suppose so,” Mrs. Blackett replied.
“Ah, poor thing!” he said. He pitied widows but he distrusted them. They knew too much. As free as unmarried women, they were fully armed; this was an unfair advantage, and when it was combined with beauty, an air of well-being, a gaiety which, in a woman over forty had an unsuitable hint of mischief in it, he felt that in this easy conquest over, or incapacity for grief, all manhood was insulted, while all manhood, including his own, was probably viewed by that woman as a likely prey. But he knew how to protect himself. He had made that clear on her first friendly approaches and, though he hoped he was a humane man, he had a little spiteful pleasure in detecting her vulnerable spots. He doubted whether she was aware of them herself, but he saw them in her two tall sons. He was thankful his own three children were girls. If war came, and as he privately admitted in his more candid moments it threatened, distantly, it might involve them in suffering but it could hardly involve him in their loss. There, certainly, he had the advantage over Mrs. Fraser but it was not until he had been living in Upper Radstowe for a year that the conviction was forced upon him. At the time, he merely said, “I don’t think she is the kind of woman you would care for, Bertha.”
“No?” she said half questioningly. She was very rarely unwilling to accept his judgment and her beautifully chiselled lips, now as always, were set in the serene lines of her contentment, and then, unexpectedly, she asked, “Why do you say that?”
Mr. Blackett smiled. He laid a hand on her shoulder. Its firm pressure emphasized what it was unnecessary to explain. She must trust his wider experience. She had had a sheltered girlhood in her father’s vicarage; she had been sheltered as a wife and it would have been beneath his dignity and hers to have told her of the little attacks he had had to parry, easily enough, from women secretaries and clerks and typists. No doubt this sort of thing occurred in most offices where the sexes, unfortunately, mingled. Perhaps his share of it had been unusually large, but he if could not change his appearance for the easing of these troubled young women! It was not his fault that he looked like an elegant poet with his pointed, little black beard, his slim figure in well-cut clothes and his hat just a fraction of an inch broader in the brim than the hats of other men. And he was neither the hearty business man who was jolly with the girls nor the suave man of affairs who treated them like machines. They knew he was different. He was a man in uncongenial surroundings who had made himself master of them and they found him interesting. Circumstances had forced him into trade and his humorous consolation for missing a literary career was his concern with the manufacture of paper for the making of books someone else would write.
“Conceited ass,” said Rosamund Fraser as, from her balcony, she watched him opening his front door.
“You say that,” Miss Spanner said, “because he snubbed you.”
“No, he snubbed me because he’s a conceited ass. I knew he would.”
“Then I wonder you gave him the chance.”
“Just to tease him,” Rosamund said lightly. “He never knows whether I’m going to speak to him or not. He hopes I will and then hates me because I do and he thinks it’s very common to call to him from the balcony.”
“Asking him for the news, too, when you’d just been listening to it on the wireless! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“I am, a little. But I’m only forty-three, like you, Agnes. We’re mere girls. We must have a little fun sometimes.”
“You’re putting on weight though,” said Miss Spanner.
“Just the suitable amount for the mother of a family.”
“And I’m as slim as ever I was.”
“You’re not slim, Agnes. You’re skinny. Exactly the same back and front. If you hadn’t a face I shouldn’t know which was which. You’ve never eaten enough and of course you were half starved as a child.”
“Don’t talk such rubbish,” said Miss Spanner. “No child could have been better cared for.”
“I’ve had meals in your house, haven’t I? Plenty of them, but never plenty at them. Why, I used to come home and raid the larder! But you’re benefiting from all that parsimony now. You’ve got the money you might have eaten and worn and laughed with. They were a mean old pair, your parents, weren’t they, now honestly, Agnes?”
Miss Spanner gave her slightly crooked nose a knock. “It little becomes you to say so and I wonder at myself for bearing with you. My father gave Felix his articles, didn’t he?”
“Yes. Conscience money,” Rosamund said.
“And what d’you mean by that?”
“Nothing criminal, but he took most of the firm’s profits and my father did nearly all the work.”
“He was the junior partner.”
“While yours sat on chapel committees and hopped into a pulpit whenever he had the chance. Oh, I’m sure he got some business out of it. One eye was fixed on Heaven, booking seats for himself and your mother there, but the other was concentrated on Mammon. And how I wish I had his belief in the hereafter! It would do me good to imagine their dismay when they found the good seats had not been kept for them and to see their sweet smiles turning sour. And God was very good to you, Agnes, when he took them to his bosom within a few days of each other.”
“It was a great blow to me,” Miss Spanner said piously, but the slight cast in her right eye became accentuate
d into a squint, a sign with which Rosamund was well familiar. But for that squint, she and Agnes would never have become the friends they were. Even in the old-fashioned, odd-looking little girl, an only child born to her parents in their middle age, that squint commented on the sentiments she quoted from them, on the restrictions they set to her liberty, on her pretence of willing obedience to them. Agnes, in those days, Rosamund soon divined, was very far from being what she seemed. Sometimes she would give a sudden hoot of laughter, startling in its derision and painful in its young bitterness. Yet only in one matter, and then secretly, had she actually rebelled, for the old Spanners were people of character and together they were formidable. There was a steel-like quality under their smiling sweetness and though, in their own way, they adored and even cosseted her, they were determined to have the kind of daughter they wanted, one who would minister to them in their old age. She had arrived as an almost immodest inconvenience; she must survive as a comfort. They were too much for one lonely little girl to combat. She bore patiently with the pinafores she was made to wear; she went, without demur, to a little private school while Rosamund had a full and exciting life at a big one, but books she had to have and she soon exhausted the parental library. In this matter Rosamund and her father conspired with her and she spent many a happy hour in the very house where she was living now. She was asked there to tea, and her parents could hardly refuse an invitation from Mr. Spanner’s useful partner, but she was left to herself with the books while Rosamund rushed round the roads on her bicycle or scamped her homework in another room.
“The direct intervention of Providence,” Rosamund said, “like the walls of Jericho and that Red Sea business.”
“I’m very grateful,” said Miss Spanner, “and I wish he’d be up to some of those useful tricks again, for more important matters than me, but he seems to have given up that sort of thing. Now a thoroughly catastrophic earthquake or a completely devastating plague on the continent would come in very handy.”