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When I reviewed Dorothy Evelyn Smith’s brilliant, brilliant novel O, The Brave Music – which is being reprinted by the British Library in the autumn, hurrah! – Sarah wrote in the comments that I should try her 1947 novel Proud Citadel. I was very much looking out for my next D.E.S, so I ordered a copy – and it came with this lovely, atmospheric dustjacket.

Like O, The Brave Music, the novel starts with a young girl – but we follow her for about 25 years, rather than to the edge of adulthood. Jess has just lost her mother and is moving to a distant relative in Yorkshire.

Out of the turmoil and hardships and deep devotion of her eleven years had emerged three salient precepts: you must never lie or break a promise, you must never get into debt, and you must never love anybody too much.

Jess has been through an awful lot for her age, and takes this journey anxiously and uncertainly. At every stop, she asks the train guard if they have yet reached Sunday Halt – until he gets exasperated and three young boys start teasing her. One is clearly the ringleader whom the others follow – and Jess wonders at his unkindness but also his charm and magnetism.

She gets out at Sunday Halt and is given unclear directions through the town, out to the moor, and to the cottage where Mary is waiting for her. She is guided by that dominant, cruelly charming boy, whom she learns is Randy – to Jess, he shows kindness. And as she is crossing the moor and catches her first sight of the sea, we get one of the many wonderful passages in the novel that describe the landscape and its effect on the observer:

Jess stood and stared in silent astonishment. In all her wildest dreams of the sea that Mother had talked about she had never imagined such a fierce and turbulent loveliness as met her sight. The lines of white she had glimpsed from the train now revealed themselves as the edges of deep, curling, grey-green waves that rose in incredible majesty and stood poised for a breath-taking instant before hurling themselves with a shout on the sharp black teeth of rock that thrust out from the sandy foot of the cliffs. And then what a boiling and a surging of brownish, foam-flecked water! What a flat, shining floor of sand as the waves retreated, gathering audible breath for the next attack! What a sharp thrill of expectancy as each wave swung slowly up and up and over…

I’m not usually one for landscape descriptions in books, my eye just glides over them unintentionally – but Smith wrote so wonderfully about the moor in O, The Brave Music and writes equally wonderfully about moor AND sea in Proud Citadel. It’s always stunning while also being descriptive – nothing fanciful, but prose from someone who knows and loves the sea and the moor and is able to convey why.

When Jess arrives with Mary, she finds her first loving home. Mary is a delight – wise, kind, mildly witchy, and able to encourage good sense and adventure in Jess. As she grows older, her life becomes tangled with so many members of the community – and especially the three boys from the train and, from them, even more especially Randy.

It took me a while to finish Proud Citadel, which no doubt partly because of coronavirus anxiety. But it was also because of the one major flaw in the novel, in my eyes – there are so many characters, and we spend scenes with so many of them. You eventually realise that all of them are pretty much necessary to Jess’s central story, even though it often doesn’t seem like it at the time, but I found it hard to juggle so many households in my mind and in my sympathies. There are about five characters I’d have cut from being the major focus of scenes – they could still be there, but without interrupting Jess’s story so much.

Because Jess is a fascinating character. She is adventurous and can be as wild as the sea, but she has a deep core of morality – and, having been let down so often in her youth, cannot bear people who break a promise. The novel is in the third person, but I felt like I was let into Jess’s world entirely.

And, while I flagged at times in reading it, I still raced through the final third of the novel and felt bereft once I’d finished it. There’s nobody like Smith for making you fall in love with a community, a landscape, and feel adrift once you are no longer with them. I’m sure I’ll re-read this one, as I have already re-read O, The Brave Music, and perhaps next time it will feel like coming home to the village – and the large cast of characters will be familiar faces to whom I am returning.

I don’t do a huge amount of re-reading, and I almost never read the same book twice within a year. Hopefully that’s a mark of how I loved O, The Brave Music (1943) by Dorothy Evelyn Smith. I read it back in March, and didn’t write about it for ages because I wanted to do it justice – and I re-read it recently to see if it was as good as I’d remembered. Oh, and it was.

I first heard of Dorothy Evelyn Smith when I was lent a copy of Miss Plum and Miss Penny, which was quite good. For some reason that I can’t quite remember, it didn’t live up to its promise (though Scott had nicer things to say). But I thought I still might as well buy O, The Brave Music when I came across it in a wonderful little bookshop in St. David’s. I was a little put off by the stupid title, which is one of those quotations-as-titles that only make sense if you know the context – and, even then, doesn’t make much sense in this case.

This is a coming of age novel in the mould of I Capture the Castle and Guard Your Daughters. Though published in the 1940s, the childhood being looked back upon takes place in the late nineteenth century (exact date rather vague). Ruan is the seven-year-old daughter a non-Conformist minister. Her sister is widely considered more beautiful and well-behaved than she, and her bold imagination and love for the moors that surround them are not thought advantages by the society her family moves in. But that family is far from a unified front. We see them through the seven-year-old eyes and the older-and-wiser eyes of the adult Ruan simultaneously. The child can only half understand how poorly matched her parents are – her conservative, absent-minded father and her beautiful, unhappily tamed mother – and can’t really comprehend the dislike her mother feels towards her. Ruan is not daunted by her surroundings. She is confident, thoughtful, determined. She feels much older than her seven years.

Ruan has another sibling – two-year-old Clem. Here’s a passage about him that is indicative of the way Smith writes:

At the back of our house was a long, narrow strip of garden, very much overgrown with weeds, because Father did not care for gardening and had no money for professional help. But it was a garden, at least, and, the weather turning very hot and dry, I was allowed to wheel Clem up and down the weedy path, or sit on the rank lawn and play with him. I had always loved my baby brother dearly, and in those long, quiet June days my love became more articulate and, alas, more sharp of vision. I began to watch Clem more closely; to think and worry and make comparisons; but it was Annie Briggs who finally tore the scales from my eyes, and gave me my first, salt knowledge of the sorrowful thing love can be…

Those final words are so beautifully pitched. In these years, Ruan gains plenty of that ‘salt knowledge’ – but this is far from an unhappy book. She is equally keenly aware of the things that bring her joy. That includes nature, freedom – and David.

David is the son of the local factory owner – a rich man who came from a working-class background. He is five years older than Ruan but sees a kindred spirit in her, calling her Tinribs and treating her without any of the awkward deference she experiences from almost everyone else. In him she sees a new sort of family, and loves him.

The novel covers about eight years, during which Ruan has to go to school – and then later to an enormous, mostly closed-up house, Cobbetts, belonging to a relative. Wherever she is, Smith is brilliant at giving the feeling of the place – whether that’s the dirty claustrophobia of the school or the cold, reassuring Cobbetts – and how it affects Ruan and her personality.

Like all the best coming-of-age novels, the strength of O, The Brave Music is in the empathetic central character and how deeply immersed the reader feels in her life. As Ruan sees and experiences and understands new things, adding them to the catalogue of her impressions of the world, we half feel that we are seeing them for the first time too – and half want to protect this child against the bad and good and overwhelming that life will bring. But whenever it has become too overwhelming – there are the moors, or there is Cobbetts, or there is David – and joy is back.

David is kind, stubborn, generous, and believable – becoming a little more strained as he grows older and goes to school, and they meet less frequently, but warming up and still being the David that Ruan needs him to be. Being children, this is not a romance – but my only criticism of the novel is that the five-year age gap does get rather unsettling when he becomes an adult and she is still a child, and still devoted to him. Considering how she always seems older than she is, I don’t know why Smith didn’t make it only one or two years between them. But I can reassure you now that nothing untoward or icky happens!

I was confident early in O, The Brave Music that is was something special – and a re-read confirms it. It’s going to be my favourite novel of the year, I feel sure – and one I’ll be revisiting often.