Evenfield Read online

  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, A Footman for the Peacock and Alas, Poor Lady – gives us here her own 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

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Elizabeth Chadwick

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  About the Author

  Titles by Rachel Ferguson

  Furrowed Middlebrow Titles

  A Harp in Lowndes Square – Title Page

  A Harp in Lowndes Square – Chapter I

  Copyright

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  A FAMILY – a House – and – Time. These are the ingredients whipped by Rachel Ferguson (1892-1957) into three confections – A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936), A Footman for a Peacock (1940), and Evenfield (1942) – now all republished as Furrowed Middlebrow books. Her casts of individuals, many outrageous, and families, some wildly dysfunctional, dance the reader through the pages, revealing worlds now vanished and ones that even in their own time were the product of a very particular imagination. Equally important in each novel is the character of the House – the oppressive family home of Lady Vallant in A Harp in Lowndes Square, comfortable, suburban Evenfield, and Delaye, the seat of the Roundelays, a stately home but ‘not officially a show place’ (A Footman for a Peacock). Rachel Ferguson then mixes in Time – past, present, and future – to deliver three socially observant, nostalgic, mordant, yet deliciously amusing novels.

  In an aside, the Punch reviewer (1 April 1936) of A Harp in Lowndes Square remarked that ‘Miss Ferguson has evidently read her Dunne’, an assumption confirmed by the author in a throwaway line in We Were Amused (1958), her posthumously-published autobiography. J.W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time (1927) helped shape the imaginative climate in the inter-war years, influencing Rachel Ferguson no less than J.B. Priestley (An Inspector Calls), John Buchan (The Gap in the Curtain), C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. In A Harp in Lowndes Square the heroine’s mother (‘half-educated herself by quarter-educated and impoverished gentlewomen’) explains the theory to her children: ‘… all time is one, past, present and future. It’s simultaneous … There’s a star I’ve heard of whose light takes so many thousands of years to reach our earth that it’s still only got as far along history as shining over the Legions of Julius Caesar. Yet that star which is seeing chariot races is outside our window now. You say Caesar is dead. The star says No, because the star’s seen him. It’s your word against his! Which of you is right? Both of you. It’s only a question of how long you take to see things.’ The concept of ‘simultaneous time’ explains why the young first-person narrator, Vere Buchan, and her twin brother James, possessing as they do ‘the sight’, are able to feel the evil that haunts their grandmother’s Lowndes Square house and uncover the full enormity of her wickedness. In A Footman for a Peacock a reincarnation, one of Time’s tricks, permits a story of past cruelty to be told (and expiated), while Evenfield’s heroine, Barbara Morant, grieving for her mother, takes matters into her own hands and moves back to the home of her childhood, the only place, she feels, ’where she [her mother] was likely to be recovered.’

  For 21st-century readers another layer of Time is superimposed on the text of the novels, now that nearly 80 years separates us from the words as they flowed from the author’s pen. However, thanks to We Were Amused, we know far more about Rachel Ferguson, her family, and her preoccupations than did her readers in the 1930s and early 1940s and can recognise that what seem whimsical drolleries in the novels are in fact real-life characters, places, and incidents transformed by the author’s eye for the comic or satirical.

  Like Barbara Morant, Rachel Ferguson was the youngest of three children. Her mother, Rose Cumberbatch (probably a distant relation to ‘Benedict’, the name ‘Carlton’ appearing in both families as a middle name) was 20 years old when she married Robert Ferguson, considerably older and a civil servant. She was warm, rather theatrical, and frivolous; he was not. They had a son, Ronald Torquil [Tor] and a daughter, Roma, and then, in 1892, after a gap of seven years, were surprised by Rachel’s arrival. When she was born the family was living in Hampton Wick but soon moved to 10 Cromwell Road, Teddington, a house renamed by Mrs Ferguson ‘Westover’. There they remained until Rose Ferguson was released from the suburban life she disliked by the sudden death of her husband, who was felled by a stroke or heart attack on Strawberry Hill golf course. Fathers in Rachel Ferguson’s novels are dispensable; it is mothers who are the centres of the universe. Rose Ferguson and her daughters escaped first to Italy and on their return settled in Kensington where Rachel spent the rest of her life.

  Of this trio of books, Evenfield, although the last published, is the novel that recreates Rachel Ferguson’s earliest years. Written as the Blitz rained down on London (although set in the inter-war years) the novel plays with the idea of an escape back into the security of childhood, For, after the death of her parents, Barbara, the first-person narrator, hopes that by returning to the Thameside suburb of ‘Addison’ and the house of her childhood, long since given up, she can regain this land of lost content. The main section of the novel describes the Victorian childhood she had enjoyed while living in ‘Even
field’, the idiosyncrasies of family and neighbours lovingly recalled. Incidentally, Barbara is able to finance this rather self-indulgent move because she has made a small fortune from writing lyrics for successful musical comedies, a very Rachel Ferguson touch. What might not have been clear to the novelist’s contemporaries but is to us, is that ‘Addison’ is Rachel Ferguson’s Teddington and that ‘Evenfield’, the Morant family home, is the Fergusons’ ‘Westover’. In We Were Amused Rachel Ferguson commented that since leaving Teddington ‘homesickness has nagged me with nostalgia ever since. I’ve even had wild thoughts of leasing or buying Westover until time showed me what a hideous mistake it would prove’. In writing Evenfield Rachel Ferguson laid that ghost to rest.

  But what of the ghost in A Harp in Lowndes Square? Vere senses the chill on the stairs. What is the family mystery? Once again Rachel Ferguson takes a fragment of her family story and spins from it what the reviewer in Punch referred to as ‘an intellectual ghost story’. The opening scene, in which a young girl up in the nursery hears happy voices downstairs, is rendered pathetically vivid by the description of her frock, cut down from one of her mother’s. ‘On her small chest, the overtrimming of jetted beads clashed …’. This humiliation, endured not because the family lacked funds, but because the child’s mother cared nothing for her, was, Rachel Ferguson casually mentions in We Were Amused, the very one that her own grandmother, Annie Cumberbatch, inflicted on her daughter Rose. ‘The picture which my Mother drew for me over my most impressionable years of her wretched youth is indelible and will smoulder in me till I die.’ Rachel Ferguson raised the bar by allotting Sarah Vallant a wickedness far greater than anything for which her grandmother was responsible, but it is clear that she drew her inspiration from stories heard at her own mother’s knee and that many of the fictional old lady’s petty nastinesses – and her peculiarly disturbing plangent tones – were ones that Rachel Ferguson had herself experienced when visiting 53 Cadogan Square.

  The Punch reviewer noted that in A Harp in Lowndes Square Rachel Ferguson demonstrated her ‘exceptional ability to interpret the humour of families and to make vivid the little intimate reactions of near relations. Children, old people, the personalities of houses, and the past glories of London, particularly of theatrical London, fascinate her.’ Rachel Ferguson’s delight in theatrical London is very much a feature of A Harp in Lowndes Square, in the course of which Vere Buchan finds solace in a chaste love for an elderly actor (and his wife) which proves an antidote to the wickedness lurking in Lowndes Square. As the reviewer mentioned, old people, too, were among Rachel Ferguson’s specialities, especially such impecunious gentlewomen as the Roundelay great-aunts in A Footman for a Peacock, who, as marriage, their only hope of escape, has passed them by have become marooned in the family home. Each wrapped in her own treasured foible, they live at Delaye, the house inherited by their nephew, Sir Edmund Roundelay. The family has standing, but little money. Now, in the early days of the Second World War, the old order is under attack. Housemaids are thinking of leaving to work in the factories and the Evacuation Officer is making demands. ‘You are down for fifteen children accompanied by two teachers, or ten mothers with babies, or twenty boys or girls.’ This is not a world for which the Roundelays are prepared. Moreover other forces are at work. Angela, the sensitive daughter of the family, watches as, on the night of a full moon, Delaye’s solitary peacock puts on a full display, tail feathers aglow, and has an overpowering feeling he is signalling to the German planes. What is the reason for the peacock’s malevolence? What is the meaning of the inscription written on the window of one of the rooms at the top of the house: ‘Heryn I dye, Thomas Picocke?’ In We Were Amused Rachel Ferguson revealed that while staying with friends at Bell Hall outside York ‘on the adjoining estate there really was a peacock that came over constantly and spent the day. He wasn’t an endearing creature and … sometimes had to be taken home under the arm of a footman, and to me the combination was irresistible.’ That was enough: out of this she conjured the Roundelays, a family whom the Punch reviewer (28 August 1940) assures us ‘are people to live with and laugh at and love’ and whom Margery Allingham, in a rather po-faced review (24 August 1940) in Time and Tide (an altogether more serious journal than Punch), describes as ‘singularly unattractive’. Well, of course, they are; that is the point.

  Incidentally Margery Allingham identified Delaye ‘in my mind with the Victoria and Albert’, whereas the 21st-century reader can look on the internet and see that Bell Hall is a neat 18th-century doll’s house, perhaps little changed since Rachel Ferguson stayed there. Teddington, however, is a different matter. The changes in Cromwell Road have been dramatic. But Time, while altering the landscape, has its benefits; thanks to Street View, we can follow Rachel Ferguson as, like Barbara Morant, she pays one of her nostalgic visits to ‘Evenfield’/’Westover’. It takes only a click of a mouse and a little imagination to see her coming down the steps of the bridge over the railway line and walking along Cromwell Road, wondering if changes will have been made since her previous visit and remembering when, as a child returning from the London pantomime, she followed this path. As Rachel Ferguson wrote in We Are Amused, ’I often wonder what houses think of the chances and changes inflicted on them, since there is life, in some degree, in everything. Does the country-quiet road from the station, with its one lamp-post, still contain [my mother’s] hurrying figure as she returned in the dark from London? … Oh yes, we’re all there. I’m certain of it. Nothing is lost.’

  Elizabeth Crawford

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IF the reader’s taste lies in the direction of battle, murder, horrors and Hitler, or alternatively of cocktails, bedrooms and The Eternal Triangle, this is not the book for him, and I can only trust it may prove as much of a release to those who long for normal life to return and who despise not the day of small things as it has been to me to write.

  It may well be objected that a family which, like the Morants, existed from the nineteen-hundreds to the nineteen-forties could not have evaded the Great War, especially with a son of military age. That evasion is deliberate. Too many of us are so sick of war in fiction that violent measures have to be taken to overcome what to all writers of chronicle stories is and will remain a very real dilemma.

  R. F.

  PART ONE

  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.