Huffley Fair by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

Ever since discovering the miraculously good O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith, I’ve been steadily making my way through her other novels – wondering if anything will be equal to it. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by her, though that extraordinary spark seems to have only struck once. The other novels are very good but not classics. So, what of Huffley Fair (1944), the most recent I’ve read?

The novel covers quite a long time period and several generations of a family, and we are back in a similar setting to several of Smith’s other novels – the moors and the surrounding villages. Here is the opening paragraph, with Smith’s ability to capture place beautifully and invite you in.

Up on the hill-tops the day was broad awake; warm with sun, bright with gorse and hawthorn and star-eyed daisies, loud with bird-song and the hum of bees, washed with dew and wind. But deep in the valley, where the Huff was a dark-and-silver thread between two towering hills, the day still slept, waiting for the sun.

Into this scene comes a group of travellers – of gypsies, in the language of the novel. I say ‘family’. There are quite a few tangential relationships between these people, but they are bonded together by their work and their lifestyle as itinerant fair-workers – rather disdained by all the communities they go to, and perhaps disdaining them in return, but accepted for their brief period of their work. The fair offers entertainment to the children and to the townfolk doing long hours at tedious jobs. Among them is Lou, a pretty, unsociable young woman who will come to the centre of the novel.

One family unlikely to be found at the fair is Abel’s. He is a serious-minded craftsman, opening the novel finishing off a chair. Unorthodoxly, he intends to use it to propose to Hilda, a neighbour for whom he feels no love and little affection, but who seems the inevitable choice as a wife. She, in turn, considers him her last hope (more on her in a minute). But while Abel gets his living from building furniture and the like, his passion is as a preacher at the Mission. He preaches fury and fire, the love of God swept up more forcefully in the wrath of God. It is the passion that draws people: his church is exhilirating, and far more people come than to the tamer churches nearby.

The kindest, loveliest characters in the novel are Abel’s parents – Alfred, who also preaches, and Eliza, who bakes and cares and worries. The evilest character in the novel is Hilda’s father – who brings out the sharpness of Smith’s pen:

Years ago, Samuel Berridge had come to Huffam to die. That he was still living was a matter of some regret to a number of people, not least of whom was his daughter Hilda.

Fat, timid, a good hosuekeeper and willing slave, and foolishly fond by nature, Hilda had been marked down from birth as her father’s lawful prey. Her mother departed this life at the earliest possible moment, thankful in the knowledge that in heaven there is no marrying or giving in marriage. Her brothers bolted from home as soon as they knew how to turn a penny, honest or otherwise. Her sisters leapt into the arms of the first young men who looked at them, safely entrenching themselves in homes of their own. On Hilda’s shoulders fell the task of caring for her father’s declining years, and it was a task no one wished to wrest from her.

Samuel is such a dark character in the novel, and some of the abuse was really difficult to read.

The moment that changes the trajectory of the novel – and Hilda’s future among others’ – is Abel stumbling across Lou on the moors, who has sprained her ankle. He tends to her, somewhat unwillingly, and somehow they go swimming together. Smith gives us three ellipses for what happens next – but when we see Abel come to the Mission (late for preaching), she gives an extraordinary scene of his preaching. We feel whipped up in the furore his congregation experience, and it’s clear he is driven by some new force. It’s hard to convey sermons (I remember two others in fiction, very different – Lease of Life by Frank Baker and Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck) but Smith does it with brio.

What has made him so animated? If we hadn’t guessed, we can piece it together a little while later – when Lou reveals to her fellow fair-goers that she is pregnant. They reason that she can get some money from the father and so, reluctantly, she allows herself to be taken to demand it. What they don’t expect is Alfred insisting that his son marry the woman he has made pregnant. And so a marriage takes place that nobody truly wishes, least of all Lou. And there goes, it seems, Hilda’s chance of security.

The next section of the novel shows Abel and Lou living together in Huffley, Abel having refused to stay with the family – and, indeed, he cuts himself off completely. They live a few miles away but may as well be at the other end of the universe. Absurdly, Abel blames Lou for all of this – for tempting him to sin, and ruining his life. Smith doesn’t overly editorialise, but any reader will be deeply frustrated by him: he makes everything worse for everyone through his stubbornness, unkindness and selfishness. Lou believes that she has wronged him and, in a subdued, sad way determines to ‘make it up to him’ through her lifelong obedience. Huffley Fair keeps going into the next generation too, and beyond, with their child and her future. But I shan’t reveal any more of the plot because we’ve gone far enough.

So, what was Huffley Fair like to read? Smith writes beautifully, and her characters are so well-realised and believable. It’s that believability which makes them so painful to read at times. As elsewhere, she captures the landscape in a memorable and evocative way and, as the novel takes place over several decades, we see the shifts that come with modernisation and the approach of war.

There is brightness in the novel – chiefly Eliza, and perhaps her other son, Walter, whom I haven’t mentioned. I thought Huffley Fair was very well-written and I did like reading it but, gosh, what a heaviness to it all. I often say how surprising it is that O, The Brave Music is such an uplifting novel when so many sad things happen to the characters. The opposite is true for Huffley Fair: it is such a melancholy novel. The aftermath of one man’s stupid, cruel choices is drawn out through years and years, and it is bitterly sad. Maybe that’s the difference between the triumph of hope over unavoidable tragedies in O, The Brave Music versus the very, very avoidable tragedies in Huffley Fair where hope is deliberately trampled under pride.

It’s still very good, but goodness me it won’t cheer you up. I’m not sure I’ll reread, certainly not as often as I know I’ll return to O, The Brave Music throughout my life, but I’m glad to continue expanding my relationship with Smith.