Nightingale Wood
I loved this book. It is so much sheer, mischievous, witty, whimsical, retro—copyright 1938—fun.
Most of you have read Cold Comfort Farm, yes? Classic. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you do so immediately—or at least read the first chapter standing up in the library/bookshop to find out that it is utterly not your sort of thing. It’s a free country* and 1930s English social comedy, however scintillating, is not everyone’s cup of first flush flowery orange pekoe.** Same author: Stella Gibbons. I can’t now remember who forced Cold Comfort Farm on me, many many years ago; my recollection is that I was in my Raymond Chandler phase at that point and I received Cold Comfort somewhat disdainfully. The disdain didn’t last long.
But I took away with me the impression that Gibbons was a one-book author. She isn’t. Even when I found out she wasn’t, I allowed myself carelessly to assume that there was a reason only one of her books remained even remotely in circulation—and thirty years ago in America she was almost a cult: you had to be someone’s friend, you had to manifest the right stuff, before anyone would mention Stella Gibbons to you,*** and finding out someone had already read Cold Comfort Farm would pretty well turn a casual acquaintance into an instant friend. I’m exaggerating. Slightly. For one thing, Gibbons was out of print, and all the library copies had been stolen by maddened fans, so someone was going to have to loan you their hallowed copy. They were going to have to like you a whole lot first.
I have no excuse for never getting round to looking up any of Gibbons’ other books. Life happens. And there’s always too much to read. But Nightingale Wood showed up in a catalogue† I get and I thought, oh! Stella Gibbons!, and ordered it. Virago Modern Classics has reissued it with an introduction by Sophie Dahl.†† It’s been rolling around on the other side of the bed with the urban fantasy, homeopathy and music books for some weeks and . . . I started it last weekend. When I urgently needed something bright and clever and cheerful and distracting. I read it in the green-draped cubicle at A&E Sunday night. And I read it sitting at a hospital bedside this week, when I wasn’t falling asleep or watching the ward floor show.
I finished it this afternoon. Siiiigh. It’s Cinderella—yes, someone was retelling fairy tales before Stephen Sondheim. Or me.†† But like all the best retellings it also knocks hell out of the original.†††
Viola Thompson is a shop girl with no prospects and, having no prospects, somewhat reluctantly accepts the proposal of a dull young man named Theodore Wither, because she is not likely to have any others. Theodore, however, is so convenient, or inconvenient, as to die after a year of marriage; and Viola goes to live with her in-laws: the appalling Mr Wither, the watery Mrs Wither, the jolly-hockey-sticks Madge and the neurotic Tina in a dire, frigid, over-furnished house marooned in a bit of Essex countryside. Viola is soon lonelier and more miserable than she can comprehend; and with nothing to look forward to, and nothing to think about except the one other large house in the area, where an extremely wealthy and rather handsome young man named Victor Spring lives with his mother and his cousin, gives flashy and dashing house parties, and is the romantic fantasy of every shop girl in Sible Pelden and Chesterbourne. This is not exclusively Viola’s story; Tina, although she has ‘kept her brain exercised by reading heavyish books, which might not always be truly wise but at least were not those meringues of the intellect . . . novels’, is in love with the chauffeur, who is twelve years younger than she is and has a drunken washerwoman for a mother, but is very good-looking: ‘. . . They saw him walk past the window on his afternoon off, wearing a grey suit in which he looked as beautiful as he did in his dark uniform (differing therein from many chauffeurs, whose appearance when in mufti suggests that of escaped convicts).’ And Victor Spring’s cousin, a young woman named Hetty, hates her comfortable, enforced high-bourgeois existence, and can’t wait for her twenty-first birthday, when she is going to run off to London and live in a garret.
Viola is an orphan; she was raised by her father after her mother’s death. He was a passionate amateur actor, and named her Viola after his favourite heroine: ‘She liked to watch her father as he read, and to listen to the smoothly rolling tones; she felt no curiosity about what the words meant. It was only Shakespeare, and she was used to him. . . . But Viola’s father was knocked down by a young man driving a car, and died in an hour.
‘The young man was fined, and had some severe remarks made about him, and drove away from the court faster than ever because he was so cross . . .’ which is to say this is Cinderella with an edge. As Mrs Theodore Wither Viola ‘was not very happy, because after he was married to her, Teddy discovered that she was not so poetic and marvellous as he had supposed, and naturally this made him less fond of her’. Of the exciting house on the far side of the nightingale wood: ‘The telephone rang every half-hour or so. Vans from Harrods, from Fortnum and Mason and Cartier, came up to the house . . . These were for Mrs Spring, whose hobby was shopping.’
This being Cinderella, there has to be a ball, and Viola has to go to it, and meet, and dance with, Prince Charming; and there is and she does. But then the ball is over, and she has to go back to the dire frigid house where there is nothing to do—one of the things Gibbons gets bang right to my eye is the mad, frenzied, hopeless boredom of being a nice bourgeois girl of that era. Viola thinks: ‘I wish I was dead. Well, not exactly dead, but I wish I was a nun or something, or something simply marvellous would happen tomorrow.’
Being a nice girl, she cannot ring up Mr Charming and suggest they go to a film together; besides, he is already engaged to be married, to an extremely well-turned-out scion of the smart set. But—finally—and with only a tiny acceptable amount of violent manipulation, she has an excuse to write him a letter: ‘She posted her letters, keeping Victor’s until the end and pushing it slowly through the letter-box, letting it fall at last into the darkness. She heard the little sound as it landed on the other letters below. She stood for a minute, staring at the box, then turned and walked slowly home.’ And that letter arrives at a crucial juncture, and . . . ‡‡
Well, it’s Cinderella, okay? And both Tina and Hetty also have lives to be worked out, as does Phyllis, the scion, and the icky Madge; and possibly the best thing of all about the book—no, the second-best, the first best is Gibbons’ skill with the language and marvellously, persuasively ridiculous plotting—is the way everyone in it is both good and bad, likeable and a twerp, admirable and repellent—with the possible exception of Phyl, who is pretty comprehensively a—er—virago, in the wrong sense of the term. I was even half-fond of the odious Mr Wither by the end—he is such an easy mark for comedy. And Viola and Victor are rather funny as a fairy-tale heroine and hero; Viola is a wet, and Victor is more than a little a cad. But you like them anyway, or I did. And the nightingale in the wood is beautifully, off handedly, almost invisibly done.
According to Waterstones’ site, Nightingale Wood is still Gibbons’ only book, aside from Cold Comfort Farm, in print. If you all rush out and buy a copy, or two copies, one to give away, maybe Virago will bring out a few more. . . .
* * *
* Or countries
** Although I feel sorry for anyone who can’t slide into this particular suit of literary clothes, as I feel sorry for people whom LOTR brings out in a rash. But then I won’t wear . . . ahem. Let me just say that there is a plethora of opportunity to feel sorry for me on these terms, even if you don’t know the specifics.
*** I shudder in hypothetical dread of a scene in which someone is so privileged as to be invited to cross the Stella Gibbons threshold to the inner sanctum and . . . discovers Gibbons chafes like sackcloth and Harris tweed.
† The Old Children’s Bookshelf, Edinburgh. They don’t have a web site. Fancy.
†† http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/may/24/sophie-dahl-cookbook-interview
Why she is writing introductions for Virago for eighty-year-old comedies of manners I have no idea.
††† Or Rossini.^ Or Eleanor Farjeon. You’ve all read Little Glass Slipper, haven’t you?
^ http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?id=36
‡ I never liked Cinderella, of course: another of these awful little wets. Not as bad as Sleeping Beauty, but still wet.
‡‡ One warning, which I offer a little hesitantly. Dahl makes rather heavy weather of it in the introduction, and she’s thirty years younger than I am, so maybe she’s right and I’m wrong. Part of Nightingale Wood being of its time is that it is not PC as we understand PC: I tend to feel that taking Gibbons up on this is like taking Dickens up for sentimentality; yes, Florence Dombey or Dora Spenlow or Little Nell, among many others, is revolting, but it would be a pity to let them spoil your pleasure in Dickens. My own sense of Gibbons’ view of such things is that Indians are ‘black’ because Madge—who is not, after all, hugely more appealing than Phyllis—is close-mindedly and repulsively a snob; and Gibbons’ Jews, while peripheral and identified as Jews, have a very Gibbonsish view of their part of the story. I am a little disappointed that Gibbons seems to think it’s reasonable to dislike being thought to be homosexual; but the particular circumstance would also imply that the character was committing adultery, so I prefer to leave it there.
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