Molly Clavering
Love Comes Home
“Love romps home and sets the whole place by the ears, gets her own way in everything, and father and mother don’t even notice they’re being crossed!”
Jane Cranstoun is having a lovely time with friends in England (and has just been proposed to by the charming John Marsh) when she is summoned home to Scotland to welcome her young sister Love, newly returned from being ‘finished’ in Paris. Keeping her engagement a secret, and drawn back into an ‘endless round of good works and dull county functions’, Jane promptly gets off on the wrong foot with Peregrine Gilbert, a local politician and naturalist, and soon falls prey to Love’s inveterate (and incompetent) matchmaking. Supported by a lively and vividly-portrayed cast of family and friends, Jane must steer carefully to avoid the pitfalls of misunderstandings, gossip, and misguided romance.
Molly Clavering was for many years the neighbour and friend of bestselling author D.E. Stevenson, and they may well have influenced one another’s writing. First published in 1938 (under the pseudonym B. Mollett) and out of print for more than 80 years, Love Comes Home is one of her funniest and happiest tales.
FM67
To
J.A. H.-W.
“COUSIN JEAN”
In affectionate remembrance of
8th July, 1937
Contents
Cover
Title Page/About the Book
Dedication
Contents
Introduction by Elizabeth Crawford
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
About the Author
Titles by Molly Clavering
Furrowed Middlebrow
Copyright
Introduction
Describing Love Comes Home as ‘full of local colour and genuine humour’, the Montrose Standard (18 November 1938) commented, ‘It is a pleasure to welcome a writer who can give us glimpses of heathery moors and rippling burns and makes her characters as natural and healthy as their surroundings’, this remark predicated on the reviewer’s opinion that ‘so much of our fiction is unhealthy and “sexy”’. In this, her sixth novel and the third published under the pseudonym of ‘B. Mollett’, Molly Clavering created a love tangle around two sisters, Jane and Love Cranstoun, combining robust humour with romance and ensuring that anything the Montrose Standard might consider ‘unhealthy’ was performed off-stage by minor characters.
Born in Glasgow on 23 October 1900, Molly Clavering was the eldest child of John Mollett Clavering (1858-1936) and his wife, Esther (1874-1943). Named ‘Mary’ for her paternal grandmother, she was always known by the diminutive, ‘Molly’. Her brother, Alan, was born in 1903 and her sister, Esther, in 1907. Although John Clavering, as his father before him, worked from an office in central Glasgow, brokering both iron and grain, by 1911 the family had moved to the Stirlingshire countryside eleven miles north of the city, to Alreoch House outside the village of Blanefield. In an autobiographical article Molly Clavering later commented, ‘I was brought up in the country, and until I went to school ran wild more or less’. She was taught by her father to be a close observer of nature and ‘to know the birds and flowers, the weather and the hills round our house’. From this knowledge, learned so early, were to spring the descriptions of the countryside that give readers of her novels such pleasure.
By the age of seven Molly was sufficiently confident in her literary attainment to consider herself a ‘poetess’, a view with which her father enthusiastically concurred. In these early years Molly was probably educated at home, remembering that she read ‘everything I could lay hands on (we were never restricted in our reading)’ and having little ‘time for orthodox lessons, though I liked history and Latin’. She was later sent away to boarding school, to Mortimer House in Clifton, Bristol, the choice perhaps dictated by the reputation of its founder and principal, Mrs Meyrick Heath, whom Molly later described as ‘a woman of wide culture and great character [who] influenced all the girls who went there’. However, despite a congenial environment, life at Mortimer House was so different from the freedom she enjoyed at home that Molly ‘found the society of girls and the regular hours very difficult at first’. Although she later admitted that she preferred devoting time and effort to her own writing rather than school-work, she did sufficiently well academically to be offered a place at Oxford. Her parents, however, ruled against this, perhaps for reasons of finance. It is noticeable that in her novels Molly makes little mention of the education of her heroines, although they do demonstrate a close and loving knowledge of Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope.
After leaving school Molly returned home to Arleoch House and, with no need to take paid employment, was able to concentrate on her writing, publishing her first novel in 1927, a year after the tragically early death of her sister, Esther. They had both taken an active interest in the local Girl Guides, although Molly was sufficiently aware that a character such as Jane, the elder of the Cranstoun sisters in Love Comes Home, might regard such involvement as more a matter of duty than pleasure. It was, however, as a means of fund-raising for the Guides that Molly, by writing scenarios for two ambitious Scottish history pageants, found another outlet for her literary talent. The first, in which she took the pivotal part of ‘Fate’, was staged in 1929, with a cast of 500, in Stirlingshire. However, for the second in 1930 she moved south and wrote the ‘Border Historical Pageant’ in aid of the Roxburgh Girl Guides. Performed at Minto House, Roxburghshire, in the presence of royalty, this pageant featured a large choir and a cast of 700, with Molly in the leading part as ‘The Spirit of Borderland Legend’. For Molly was already devoted to the Border country, often visiting the area to stay with relations, and using it as a setting for many of her novels.
Love Comes Home, however, is unusual in being located further north, close to her family home. Like Blanefield, ‘Milton Riggend’, the Cranstouns’ local village, lay a few miles north of Glasgow, and had once relied for its prosperity on a ‘tiny Turkey-red dye-works which had given work to the community’. That had now closed and ‘there was a good deal of hardship and unemployment in the place.’ This, together with the fact that one of those involved in the love tangle is the prospective Unionist [Conservative] parliamentary candidate, prompts considerably more political discussion than occurs in other of Molly’s novels. But, although both Hitler and the Spanish Civil War lurk in the background, centre stage is village life, the countryside around the Cranstouns’ home, and, described in considerable and fascinating detail, a Court Presentation at Holyrood Palace that took place to mark the Coronation of King George VI. Here fact and fiction collide, for Molly Clavering was herself presented at this Court, three regulation ostrich feathers on her head, dressed, like Jane Cranstoun, in silver lamé, her train lined with green satin. In her hand was an ostrich-feather fan, now held in the collection of Moffat Museum. The printed dedication to Love Comes Home reads, ‘J.A. H.-W. “Cousin Jean” In affectionate remembrance of 8th July 1937’, the initials referring to Mrs Hay-Wilson, who acted as Molly’s sponsor on that great day.
Molly Clavering published one further novel as ‘B. Mollett’ before, on the outbreak of the Second World War, joining the Women’s Royal Naval Service, based for the duration at Greenock, then an important and frenetic naval station. Serving in the Signals Cypher Branch, she eventually achieved the rank of second officer. Although there was no obvious family connection to the Navy, it is noticeab
le that even in such pre-war novels as Love Comes Home many of the leading male characters are associated with the Senior Service.
After she was demobbed Molly moved to the Borders, setting up home in Moffat, the Dumfriesshire town in which her great-grandfather had been a doctor. She shared ‘Clover Cottage’ with a series of black standard poodles, one of them a present from D.E. Stevenson, another of the town’s novelists, whom she had known since the 1930s. The latter’s granddaughter, Penny Kent, remembers how ‘Molly used to breeze and bluster into North Park (my Grandmother’s house) a rush of fresh air, gaberdine flapping, grey hair flying with her large, bouncy black poodles, Ham and Pam (and later Bramble), shaking, dripping and muddy from some wild walk through Tank Wood or over Gallow Hill’. Molly’s love of the area was made evident in her only non-fiction book, From the Border Hills (1953).
During these post-war years Molly Clavering continued her work with the Girl Guides, serving for nine years as County Commissioner, was president of the local Scottish Country Dance Association, and active in the Women’s Rural Institute. She was a member of Moffat town council, 1951-60, and for three years from 1957 was the town’s first and only woman magistrate. She continued writing, publishing seven further novels, as well as a steady stream of the stories that she referred to as her ‘bread and butter’, issued, under a variety of pseudonyms, by that very popular women’s magazine, the People’s Friend.
Molly Clavering’s long and fruitful life finally ended on 12 February 1995. Describing in her the very characteristics to be found in the novels, Wendy Simpson, another of D.E. Stevenson’s granddaughters, remembered Molly as ‘A convivial and warm human being who enjoyed the company of friends, especially young people, with her entertaining wit and a sense of fun allied to a robustness to stand up for what she believed in.’.
Elizabeth Crawford
Chapter One
FAREWELL PARTY
Jane Cranstoun, abruptly roused from sleep by the banging of her door, had to remind herself, as always on first waking, that she was not in her own room at Craigrois. This was a mere slip of a place, so small that she could open her dressing-table drawers from bed and, by using her umbrella, which she kept in a corner beside it, could push the door shut, or work the light switch, without the bother of getting up. So different was it from the large, old-fashioned bedroom in her own home, with its faded roses rambling up and down the wall-paper, and the thin rugs scattered here and there on the polished boards, and the solid, shining mahogany furniture, that each morning she wondered afresh how she could have made such an absurd mistake, even in sleep. To-day she had some reason for thinking herself back at Craigrois, because she would soon be there again. In less than a week, now, she would open her eyes to see, through the window which looked north, a glimpse of the Greenriggs, those frowning, scar-faced hills, glowering in at her.
A cup of tea stood steaming on the combined dressing-table and chest-of-drawers, and the breeze which entered on a beam of early sunlight blew the thin pink curtains into it and blew them out again, like the whiskers on Michael Finnegan’s chin, leaving a wet trail across her brushes and mirror. Sleepily supposing that George’s had been the kind hand which had set it just where the end of the curtain could not avoid it, she sat up, stretched out a bare arm and rescued it.
“Dear George: how sweet of him!” she murmured, as she drank with a wry face, for it was cold, and stewed, and tasted strongly of curtain. It must, of course, have been George himself who had crashed into the room a few minutes earlier, wakening her by the simple expedient of banging the door as he went out again. Jane’s lips curved into a smile as she thought of what her mother’s comment on such a procedure would have been. Lady Cranstoun, as she said herself, was seldom shocked, but she had a strong sense of what was fitting. She would most certainly not have approved of Lieutenant-Commander Mariner’s calling his guest and bringing her an early cup of tea.
“Oh, lor!” muttered Jane vulgarly, with a grimace. “How I don’t want to go back to the endless round of good works and dull county functions!”
She groped for her mother’s last letter, which the breeze had swept lightheartedly on to the floor, unfolded the crackling sheets and read again:
Your father and I feel that you have paid a very prolonged visit to the Mariners and think it is time that you came home. Milly Graham tells me that she met a Mrs. Longdale out at luncheon the other day who has recently been staying at Admiralty House with the Hortons, and she—Mrs. Longdale—said that the reason for your being at the Mariners’ so long was quite a topic for amused conjecture among the Admiralty House circle. I don’t like this, Jane. Besides, as you know, Love comes home next week and is sure to be disappointed if you are not here. I have said that you and she will help Milly Graham at her flower-stall for the Unionist Fête at Blanchlands, and the Guides are having a district church parade next month which you really ought not to miss.
Jane groaned and crammed the letter back into its envelope. ‘If only mother didn’t have to be so disgustingly energetic, on my behalf, at least.’ When all I ask is to be left alone. I’m so much more at home here with Kitty and George and their friends,’ she thought resentfully. ‘As for Mrs. Longdale—her name ought to be Longtongue! I suppose she was the female who tried so hard to pump me at Mrs. Horton’s charity bridge the other afternoon, and I did think I’d put her off the scent by telling her I lived near Glasgow. It didn’t sound a bit like Craigrois, but evidently I wasn’t clever enough. A pox on all inquisitive hags! They always turn out to be friends of friends of mothers.’
A new and almost equally disturbing thought suddenly struck her. ‘Heavens! If George is up he may have bagged the bath while I’m sitting here!’
She jumped out of bed, flung her dressing-gown about her and made a dash for the bathroom. By right of being cook to the establishment she had first claim on the bath in the morning, but this did not prevent George, if in a freakish mood, or merely feeling energetic, from sometimes sneaking in before her and upsetting the entire domestic routine of the bungalow.
All was well, however. The steady hum of Kitty’s voice, reading and commenting on the naval appointments in the morning paper to her husband, came from behind the closed door to reassure Jane, who knew that she always read them in bed. Presently she was brushing her teeth to the usual terrifying rumblings of the geyser, as it reluctantly decanted a thin flow of boiling water into the bath; and in a remarkably short space of time she was dressed and preparing breakfast on the gas-stove.
The kitchen was in many ways the most pleasant room in the house, for it was so arranged that, while cooking, you could look out of the window at a narrow strip of lawn, with a flower-border full of young green things up each side, and beyond it, through a rickety gate, was a small orchard, now a wonder of pink and white apple-blossom. Jane, dreamily poking sausages about in a frying-pan, could see between the branches a wide field of rough grass, with a little wood standing against the pearly sky on its far side. A rash of small bungalows was springing up and gradually encroaching on this green space; the wood, as if it knew its doom, wore a forlorn air. Kitty Mariner declared that the ugly little houses grew in the night like mushrooms and that there was a new one every morning but, with the philosophy of a true naval wife, consoled herself by remembering that George’s time at the Barracks here would be up before their field—for to her and Jane it was peculiarly their own—was entirely swallowed in dwellings with names like ‘Corbière’ or ‘Dunromin’ or ‘Chatsworth.’
This furnished bungalow in which the Mariners had set up their household goods nine months before, was called ‘Harrietville.’ Kitty and George had made a valiant effort to ignore it and during their tenancy at least to have it known as Number 42 Gibson Avenue, and nothing else. But their more facetious friends considered the name a glorious joke and sent them letters addressed to ‘Kittyville’ in honour of its temporary châtelaine, and even, on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, ‘Egroeg,’ which, after much pa
ssionate argument, had been triumphantly translated by Jane as ‘George backwards.’ That settled it. They gave up the attempt to return to a mere number, and, except for official purposes, ‘George backwards’ the house remained, to the great confusion of new acquaintances who did not know the origin of this very unusual name.
The sizzling of the sausages grew louder as they turned brown. From the dining-room came the clatter of plates and cutlery as Kitty set the table; from the bathroom a dolorous, tuneless rendering of Spanish Ladies, broken by many pauses, sure sign that George had reached the shaving stage of his slow toilet. Jane cut several slices from a crusty loaf and pushed them under the grill to toast, sniffed appreciatively at the coffee and stuck her head right out of the window to listen to a blackbird perched on the swaying tip of a branch.
“Good morning, my pet,” said Kitty’s voice behind her. “The table’s all set; George has finished shaving and is dressing himself absent-mindedly in pages of the Daily Mail, and—the toast’s burning!”
“Oh, Lord! So it is.” Jane ruefully pulled out a charred and smoking piece, broke it up and threw it out into the garden for the birds. “I never seem able to escape without burning one bit, do I?”
“It’s part of your breakfast drill by this time. I’ll probably do the same myself from force of habit after you’ve gone,” said Kitty. She flung her arms around Jane and hugged her warmly. “Oh, Jenny darling, do you really have to go?”
“Well, you saw mother’s letter. She who must be obeyed has spoken,” said Jane with a sigh. “Yes, I’ll have to go, if only to be waiting on the doorstep with the rest of the family to receive Love.”
“‘Love’,” repeated Kitty thoughtfully. “It must be an awfully difficult name to live up to. What made them call her that? There was a girl at school with me called Charity, but that’s not quite the same, is it?”
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