Bewildering Cares
Page 21
It was only Kate who cried when Dick and Ida drove away a few minutes later. She was so disappointed not to feed them, and only consoled herself by waiting upon us hand and foot, and I can’t say I was sorry, for emotion is exhausting when you are over fifty, and I was thankful that Mrs. Weekes had sent a message to say they would look in to-morrow morning, for I don’t believe I could even have telephoned that evening. Arthur and I were glad to sit and talk each other into composure, and what mother in the world has any right to complain over a good-bye to her son when she is to see him again in three weeks, and knows that he is to get his heart’s desire?
“And yet, perhaps,” I said, when at length I got up to go to bed, “perhaps I’m only taking it all so happily and calmly because I still happen to be in love with you, Arthur. It does make a difference!”
“Isn’t it,” said Arthur, looking over the top of his spectacles, “one of the justifications of our profession and of the unselfishness and humility which we try to practise in our lives, that most clergymen do love and are loved by their wives?”
By a strange accident my errant engagement-book was lying by the arm-chair in the dining-room when I went in to say my prayers. I took the pencil and wrote down (though was I likely to forget it?)—“Mr. and Mrs. Weekes to call on Monday.” Thank goodness, I thought, the Magdalen Committee is not till twelve o’clock! And then I turned over the leaves, with all their jottings of X.Y.Z. Union, N.V. Council, G.F.S. Com., Y.W.C.A. Club—all the humdrum yet somehow inspiring work of the parish I hate and love so well, till on Monday three weeks I wrote down proudly, “Dick and Ida’s Wedding Day”.
THE END
About The Author
WINIFRED PECK (1882-1962) was born Winifred Frances Knox in Oxford, the daughter of the future Bishop of Manchester. Her mother Ellen was the daughter of the Bishop of Lahore.
A few years after her mother’s death, Winifred Peck became one of the first pupils at Wycombe Abbey School, and later studied at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Returning to Manchester, and under the influence of Christian Socialism, she acted as a social worker in her father’s diocese, as well as starting out as a professional writer.
After writing a biography of Louis IX, she turned to fiction in her thirties, writing over twenty novels, including two detective mysteries. She married James Peck in 1911, and they had two sons together. James was knighted in 1938, and it was as Lady Peck that his wife was known to many contemporary reviewers.
Bewildering Cares, a novel about the perplexing and richly comic life of a parish priest’s wife in the early months of World War Two, is now available as a Furrowed Middlebrow book.
Titles by Winifred Peck
FICTION
Twelve Birthdays (1918)
The Closing Gates (1922)
A Patchwork Tale (1925)
The King of Melido (1927)
A Change of Master (1928)
The Warrielaw Jewel (1933)
The Skirts of Time (1935)
The Skies Are Falling (1936)
Coming Out (1938)
Let Me Go Back (1939)
Bewildering Cares: A Week in the Life of a Clergyman’s Wife (1940)
A Garden Enclosed (1941)
House-Bound (1942)
Tranquillity (1944)
There Is a Fortress (1945)
Through Eastern Windows (1947)
Veiled Destinies (1948)
A Clear Dawn (1949)
Arrest the Bishop? (1949)
Facing South (1950)
Winding Ways (1951)
Unseen Array (1951)
MEMOIR
A Little Learning: A Victorian Childhood (1952)
Home for the Holidays (1955)
HISTORY
The Court of a Saint: Louis IX, King of France, 1226-70 (1909)
They Come, They Go: The Story of an English Rectory (1937)
FURROWED MIDDLEBROW
FM1. A Footman for the Peacock (1940) ... RACHEL FERGUSON
FM2. Evenfield (1942) ... RACHEL FERGUSON
FM3. A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936) ... RACHEL FERGUSON
FM4. A Chelsea Concerto (1959) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM5. The Dancing Bear (1954) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM6. A House on the Rhine (1955) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM7. Thalia (1957) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM8. The Fledgeling (1958) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM9. Bewildering Cares (1940) ... WINIFRED PECK
Rachel Ferguson
Evenfield
This book was written for those who don’t despise children’s parties, Edwardian actresses, dancing classes and the scent of lilac over sun-warmed fences.
Barbara Morant spent a crucial part of her childhood in the unremarkable suburban house which lends this novel its name. For her siblings, it’s merely a place to live; for her mother, it’s a symbol of the provincial drudgery of suburban living. But for Barbara, the house and the routines of those years are invested with a halo of happiness, and she yearns for them long after the family’s return to London.
Her obsessive nostalgia, the pursuit of her childhood joys, lead her to attempt a recreation of the past. She leases the house, undoes the changes made in the intervening years, and moves in, only to find the past irretrievably changed and changed by her later knowledge and experiences.
Lushly packed with domestic detail and references to popular culture, household products, advertisements, songs, décor, and pastimes, Evenfield provides us with a hilarious but surprisingly profound exploration of childhood and the way it’s remembered (and misremembered) by adults, and of the vanity of searching for lost time. Rachel Ferguson – known for earlier classics The Brontës Went to Woolworth’s, Alas, Poor Lady, and A Footman for the Peacock – gives us here her own utterly unique variation on Proust. This new edition includes an introduction by social historian Elizabeth Crawford.
‘It is only (now) that I realise how much … my work owes to the delicacy and variety of Rachel Ferguson’s exploration of the real and the dreamed of, or the made up, or desired.’ A.S. BYATT
FM2
Evenfield – CHAPTER I
1
OF all of us Morants I was to be the one who fell in love with our house: lived with it, was separated from it, re-united to it and finally parted from it by mutual consent. There was no legal separation, let alone a public divorce; we just discovered mutual incompatibility and it was, I see now, my fault from beginning to end. Certainly the house as my senior by over fifty years should have had sense for the two of us; on the other hand I, as the woman in the case, was the mental senior by probably as many years more as women so persistently are where wisdom is in question, and my affair with Evenfield was a boy-and-girl one, a childhood affection that should have turned out well since we knew the best and the worst of each other by the time that matters reached their climax.
My grievance against Evenfield was that it failed, at the last, to give me what I expected of it; its grievance against me was that I was too clinging, too romantic-idealist (which I knew already and spend my life fighting against in vain) and too fond of the sentimental scene for its own sake, when all that Evenfield probably wanted was to get on to the next change, to take things and families as they came and not to be confused with a castle in Spain when it made no pretensions to anything but mid-Victorian brick and slates and a reasonable amount of comfort.
Mother, in a burst of sub-acid facetiousness, once exclaimed to Mrs. Stortford, ‘“Evenfield”! I call it an uncommonly hard row to hoe!’; Marcus, my brother, apostrophized it as a ‘dog-hole’ when fresh from a wigging from father, while the servants complained that it was haunted and that their ankles were gripped when they filed up to the top floor to bed.
We made use of the house, and were robust with it, and it was left to me to enmesh it later in a net of nostalgic aspiration, pestering it with my solicitude and reminiscence which led in time to disillusion and discords and the end. I must have been aggravating to a decent
house which only asked to settle at leisure on its foundations.
We shall, I think, never forget each other, but I feel at last, instead of merely considering, that we are better apart.
2
If Doctor James, who knows his bogeys so well, had written this book he would have called it A Warning To Nostalgics, and if it should prove a deterrent to even one human being’s making the mistake that I did it will probably be a good thing, except that where that twilit condition of the mind, nostalgia, is concerned people won’t be ‘said’ and prefer to die of it in their own way than to be cured by common sense. There ought to be a Nostalgics Club. The condition of entry would be a capacity for retrospective hankering, for your true nostalgic (fated wretch!) can be steeped in melancholia at a moment’s notice for the price of a spray of lilac. Does not hot asphalt conjure up the whole of Ramsgate? And there is a turret staircase in Carisbrooke Castle smelling roughly of soapsuds, pipeclay and cold stone, yet climbing it I am back at one blow at school; once more I am twelve years old and drilling to battered operatic airs jingled out by a mistress at the piano.
If it comes to that, I was to discover, on first becoming a Londoner, that a box-room at Evenfield smelt of the Albert Hall, with the result that when I returned, grown-up, to the box-room I was irresistibly impelled to hum airs from The Messiah all the time I remained in it, while at the Albert Hall I missed whole tracts of the Oratorio through a sharp sensation of old trunks, and mentally tallying up their contents.
And nostalgia doesn’t even stop there, for the person who suffers from it in its acutest forms can with the greatest ease be homesick for places he has never seen, suffer awareness of reigns he has never lived through, their pace and flavour, their slowness, colour and tediums, and know to his undoing the feel of life as it was lived in more spacious, gracious days in certain of London’s streets and squares.
There is in Lowndes Square at least one mansion whose daily life, if I may put it so, I can imaginatively remember, both, oddly enough, as mistress and servant. I have certainly sensed some service in Bruton Street, and driven home down Arlington Street to a house which is now a club, while I cannot walk along Wilton Street without being instantly afflicted by a sensation of children’s Christmas parties, knowing to the last detail that lapping warmth and safety which was the Victorian epoch – did not those very trees, chained and glittering with goodness and the lavish, emanate from the sentiment of the lonely Royal widow?
And for every party I have known and never seen, for every great house in which I have been ageing grande dame and cook (I hope I satisfied here!) one pays: pays for goods one has never handled nor owned, suffers vicarious longings for the unpossessed and unpossessable, and comes close to tears that are dismayingly of the present century.
And I am pretty sure all this is not re-incarnation, or second sight, but nothing more complicated than some mental affinity, a facet of universal memory, perhaps, of which we, of the company so sadly, delightfully doomed, are heirs.
But it is futile to continue. Those who know will eternally know and those who don’t will continue not to understand. Their minds are like a pavement under a noonday sun, heedless of the shadow that is past and the shadow that is to come.
3
I have usually found that to get a thing down on paper robs it of its force at once, and all my life I have made a list of present worries or pleasures to come and crossed them off as they settled themselves, as one does the card or calendar people on one’s Christmas list. When system comes in at the door depression flies out of the window, or so I have found. Sometimes I come across an old overlooked worry-list. The items on one ran:
1 Row with A.
2 No letter from C.
3 Tooth.
4 Look for green overall again.
5 No ideas for magazine story.
6 What D said last week (Wed: 7th).
7 People I ought to be dining.
And I am harassed this time by occasional total failure to remember who the ‘C’ of the missing letter was or what the deuce ‘D’ had ‘said’, which only shows that if you sit tight long enough nothing matters at all, while I know that this particular brand of philosophy is no good and never will be to people like myself. One must live. And worrying is probably a part of the business and a sign that one is still in the swim! It is rather the same thing with old letters that you re-read. Like a rude, whispering couple who exclude you from the conversation, they indulge in allusions you can’t trace, hint at emotions you can’t recall, and make infuriating plans of the outcome of which your mind is a complete blank. ‘Who is this stranger hissing in a corner?’ one despairingly thinks, and it is oneself, as little as five years ago. And as for the letters dating further back, you get well-nigh to the stage of begging the correspondence to let you in on the conversation, to give you at that moment a little of the love expressed for you in the letter of which you are dimly jealous! You almost whimper, ‘It’s Barbara asking my best friend, in those days’, and it’s no good at all. The Barbara of the note excludes the Barbara who holds it in her hand (though you feel she would be miserably remorseful, eagerly, tenderly explanatory, if you did meet again). Meanwhile, you are left hiding a secret from yourself, and a most extraordinary and forlorn sensation it is.
Published by Dean Street Press 2016
Copyright © 1940 Winifred Peck
Introduction copyright © 2016 Elizabeth Chadwick
All Rights Reserved
The right of Winifred Peck to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 1940 by Faber & Faber
Cover by DSP
Cover illustration detail from Village Street (1936) by Eric Ravilious
ISBN 978 1 911413 88 2
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk