Roofs Off! by Richmal Crompton

Ten years ago, I wrote a blog post about my changing relationship with Richmal Crompton. She’d gone from being a favourite author I raced through in my late teens to being an author I felt a little less sure about – though a lot of that was probably connected with having read her best work so early. And yet I keep returning to her every few years, making my way through the collection of her adult novels that was compiled because I managed to get in there in the sweet spot – when secondhand booksellers online made her novels accessible, but before they became prohibitively expensive.

I’ve recently finished Roofs Off! (1928), which I bought back in 2010 and which seems now more or less impossible to source online. Which might make it annoying to say that it’s one of the best Cromptons I’ve read in a while – or, perhaps, simply that I was in the right mood for it. Because her writing is seldom nuanced or deep – but, at the right moment, it is compulsive and wonderful in a slightly soapy way.

That’s perhaps a bit unfair. Her characters are often interestingly constructed – she just reuses the same types over and over again. There are always posh people who aren’t happy; poor, honest folk with hearts of gold; stiff, loveless marriages; children who don’t understand the machinations of the adults around them – and, most specifically and most frequently, a pair of retired women in a toxic friendship with hidden lesbian undertones.

All are present in Roofs Off! but it takes a while to get to them. For a long stretch at the opening of the novel, we remain with one character: Martin Evesham. He is in his early 50s and recently widowed – mourning his wife, but also free for the first time in many years. Mary was clearly strict about rules, behaviour, and social climbing. Martin had to set aside his artistic ambitions for a respectable and lucrative career in business. I’m not sure Crompton ever convinces us that Mary had her up-sides (though she often tries to) – but she does convince us, on the other hand, that Martin is better off without her.

I always love house hunting scenes, and Martin starts looking at homes on a newish housing estate – not with any intention of buying, but swept along by an estate agent (who evidently knows Martin’s mind better than he does).

“Is this all the Estate?” he said; “Chestnut Drive and Woodlands Avenue?”

“There’s Fairview,” said the agent with a slightly pained expression. “Bungalows and cheapish houses. Quite distinct. No, you couldn’t do better than Woodlands Avenue. It’s between. It’s neither the one thing nor the other. It’s safe. It hasn’t the expenses of Chestnut Drive and it hasn’t the – I won’t say commonness – but you know what I mean – of Fairview.”

The British class system is thus rigorously delineated! Though when Martin moves to Woodlands Avenue – because of course he does – there is a wider range of class than you might expect from the estate agent’s description. At its pinnacle is a young woman engaged for years to a young man who will receive a title – but who strikes up a friendship with the working-class, shy man who lives next door. There are children who are dear friends but know they must hide it from their parents, because of their class difference. And Martin discovers (in a rather unrealistic coincidence) that the woman who lives at the manor, whose estate has been sold off for land to build these houses, is the woman whom he loved before he got married. Class runs like a seam through almost every dynamic in the novel.

When I was 17, I took Crompton’s enormous casts in my stride. Nowadays, I do struggle when we are suddenly introduced to 20+ people over a handful of pages. To be honest, I was quite enjoying the focus on Martin. And yet, in Roofs Off!, I did manage to work them all out and keep them in the correct places in my mind. The budding friendship/romance between the engaged woman and the working-class man was particularly lovely, and done better than such things often are.

The title is explained quite late in the novel, when Martin and other characters are discussing a child’s game with some cardboard dolls’ houses – where the roofs had to be remoed on the signal of ‘Roofs Off!’ to reveal the hidden and interesting lives of the dolls therein.

“I wonder,” said Martin dreamily, “which would be the most interesting life in Woodlands Avenue if someone said, ‘Roofs Off!'”

Mrs Glendower shot him her quick smile.

“They’d all be indescribably dull,” she said.

“I doubt it,” challenged the doctor. “I believe that there isn’t such a thing in the whole world and never has been such a thing as a dull life. What you see of it may be dull, but you only see a part of the pattern or a back side of the pattern. If you could see the whole you’d be amazed. You’d be thrilled. A life may be sad or even uneventful, but it can never be dull.”

Crompton’s characters are not dull – and nor are they especially memorable, particularly in the early- to mid-career. Her best novels do seem to have come in a run at the end of her writing. I think what makes many of her novels enjoyable romps rather than particularly nuanced works is that no characters ever act ‘out of character’. Once they are established as a type, you know they will behave precisely in that manner on every single page. I think the best writers of character are those who can make somebody act inconsistently, and make it both believable and significant.

I’ve also realised what marks out my least favourite Crompton novels: overuse of ellipses. So many of her earlier novels put ‘…’ at the end of almost every sentence, I suppose with the intention of adding airy poignancy. It quickly becomes too much. In Roofs Off!, she uses it sparingly – and that alone is enough to elevate it.

The cast of Roofs Off! has no real external reality to the novel, but sometimes that’s fine. Crompton is clearly very interested in her characters, even when they are strikingly similar to people in many of her other novels. There is enough entertaining stuff about houses and housing estates to mark this one out for me, and certainly plenty of plot to race through. In the right mood, in the right place, I think Roofs Off! can head up towards the upper half of Crompton’s prolific output – and it might even be one I return to when and if I finally get to the end of her many novels. But if you can’t find it for sale, you’ll find very similar things in almost any of her novels – and have a lovely, inconsequential time doing so.