I’ve read Leo Walmsley’s wonderful autobiographical trilogy, all of which centre around his domestic life in a different home that needs to be developed – starting with a boathouse and ending with a mansion – but I hadn’t ever read any of this fiction. If we set aside that his autobiographies have heavy doses of fiction in them, that is.
Anyway, I was recently in Cornwall for a few days and grabbed Foreigners (1935) that I’ve had since 2011. I knew Walmsley set some of his novels by the Cornish coast, and thought that would make for pleasantly apposite reading. As it happens… this is one of his novels set in Yorkshire, but it is at least coastal Yorkshire.
The novel is about a young boy called Sonny. He is a ‘foreigner’ to the close-knit seaside town – because his family have come from elsewhere. In this community, you’re a foreigner until you’ve been there for at least three generations, and that’s something that hasn’t changed massively in some parts of the South West. It’s not just that they are geographic outsiders – his father’s job is very different from the traditional sailors and fishermen of the town.
I felt very miserable. I wished that I wasn’t a foreigner in Bramblewick: that my father, instead of painting pictures, was a fisherman, or better still a ship’s captain like Grab’s: that he talked like Bramblewick men talked, and swore, and drank beer, and joined in the fights outside the Mariner’s, or the Fiserhman’s Arms on Saturday nights. I wished I could wear a blue fisherman’s guernsey and corduroy breeches like the other village boys instead of velvet trousers, and a norfolk jacket, and a tarched collar and a bow.
Because of his status, Sonny is not popular at school. He is sort of friends with a couple of other ‘foreigners’, though it’s clear that this is only a case of convenience and any of them would ditch the others if they had any chance of something better. The exception is a boy whom Sonny calls Chicken – they all have nicknames, and I don’t remember his real name – who is slavishly devoted to him. Chicken lives in poverty with a violent, alcoholic father and an oppressed mother, and Sonny finds him irritating – though is often struck with guilt for his lack of affection, and tries to make up for it with hamfisted gifts.
As the novel opens, Sonny is preparing to be fought by the boy he knows as ‘Grab’. It is a long-running feud, and Sonny has recently beaten up Grab’s brother – so he knows that retribution is coming, though he also knows it is likely to be disproportionate. With few boys on his side, he is likely to be set upon by a whole group of Grab’s posse. (Incidentally, there are presumably girls in this town too, but we see almost nothing of them – they do not really register on Sonny’s wavelength.)
You wouldn’t think these very childish concerns would necessarily make for a good novel, but Walmsley swept me in straight away. And he is such a good storyteller. I think he ranks with R.C. Sherriff for his brilliance in keeping a straightforward story about ordinary people absolutely captivating. His pacing is so steady. He has absolute confidence in his characters and his narrative, and unfolds them to us gradually, without any time jumps or tricks or anything.
And what happens? There are some significant plot moments – a boy falls from a cliff; a fraud is committed; a new friend opening up a different world – but the emotional heart of the novel is what sustains it. Sonny faces frequent moral quandaries that are seemingly on a small scale but, like any of us, that small scale is his whole world. When he lies to his mother, he is wracked with guilt. He launches enthusiastically into temperance, thinking he will be celebrated for discarding a barrel of beer he finds in the street – only to find it was treacle. (This sounds like it could be a comic moment, but it isn’t: as with his autobiographies, Walmsley has no interest in writing with humour. This moment of mistake is heartrending and confusing for Sonny.)
I am seldom interested in stories entirely about children, particularly if they are told from the child’s point of view. They so often feel inauthentic. But Walmsley has authenticity through to his bones. Sonny was a complete and fascinating, and very real, character. His world is small but, within it, every emotion is felt keenly and every fear or joy is writ large. He doesn’t make the mistake of giving Sonny too much worldly wisdom, and yet sometimes there are moments of beautiful writing that break into his perspective – such as this, when another boy has fallen from a cliff and is feared dead:
Everybody, even the sergeant and the other men, looked frightened, too. They didn’t talk much. The way they looked at each other, as they started to launch the boat, was like the way the bearers at a funeral looked when they were carrying a coffin out of a house. And suddenly I noticed Mrs Brewster herself standing with another woman who was holding her arm. She wasn’t crying. She was just staring at the boat, and breathing hard, and her face was white.
Walmsley is so restrained in his writing, never showy, never showing an emotion that he hasn’t earned. Foreigners is primarily a novel, about character and about how one place and community totally dominates your understanding of the world when you are young. I knew I loved his non-fiction, but I hadn’t expected to relish his fiction so much. Why has Walmsley fallen through the cracks of literary history so much? Take my advice – help recitfy that the next chance you get.