I’ve always been intrigued when I saw mid-century novels by authors I’ve not heard of, and that’s particularly true since I’ve been scouting for titles for the British Library Women Writers series – and so I’ve started looking through my shelves for novels that are out of print and a little lesser known. Recently, I read The Unnatural Behaviour of Mrs Hooker by Eileen Marsh, from 1947.
Mrs Hooker lives in a small village where everybody knows each other’s business and usually makes it their business too. In the opening pages we are introduced to the community – vicar and wife, policeman, teacher, local aristocrats. The expected crowd of a village scene, though confusingly the women include Moya, May, Mary, and Maggy, which doesn’t make it particularly easy to remember which is which. Marsh has a light touch and quickly lets us know which characters will amuse and which will frustrate us. Though Mrs Hooker isn’t among this initial crowd.
She lives with her son Jim, who has just become an adult. During the war, they – like most people in the village – took in an evacuee. A young girl called Sylvia. The village – and seemingly the author – have some prejudice against London girls and their forward ways; their swaying hips and eyes that are asking for it, etc. Suffice to say, this sort of description would not be welcome in a novel now, and thank goodness.
Sylvia goes back to London for a bit, where Mrs Hooker visits, looking on her as a surrogate daughter despite the village’s distrust of her. She is rather upset by the indifference shown by Sylvia’s parents, not to mention the poverty she lives in. So when Sylvia unexpectedly returns to the village, she is welcomed by Mrs H. And she comes bearing news: she is pregnant, and Jim is the father. She is also only fifteen years old.
Jim denies that he ever slept with her, and says it must be some London dalliance. [Or – call it what it is, which the novel does not – statutory rape.] The village is divided in whom they believe of the pair. But the one person you’d expect to be on Jim’s side, and who isn’t, is Mrs Hooker herself:
“I don’t know why I should doubt the poor child’s word. I reckon she’s speakin’ the truth, poor lamb. No, it was Jim, an’ he’s got to stand the racket. I’d give my right hand for it not to be him – the disgrace of it – well, you know what folks are! But it is him, an’ she’ll make him a nice little wife an’ I’ll look after the baby for ’em an’ she can go out to work.”
This is the unnatural behaviour of the title: that she refuses to believe her son, and will not be swayed.
It’s an interesting premise for a novel, and a spin on the evacuee situation that I haven’t read before but must have been relatively common. The reason the novel didn’t quite work for me is that, after this set up, it’s incredibly repetitive. It’s less than two hundred pages long, but it keeps going in circles. Jim insists he isn’t the father. Sylvia insists he is. Various local people repeatedly refer to Jim as a ‘good, clean boy’. Mrs Hooker maintains that she is going to be a grandmother. I shan’t say what the truth is, but the reader does know it pretty early on – so we aren’t reading to find out the solution to a mystery. It all just got a bit samey – not to mention rather unpleasant to read, when people blame the fifteen-year-old Sylvia for being a hussy etc.
So, an interesting writer and a good village set up – but the theme of the novel hasn’t dated well, and the structure of the plot is severely lacking. But I’d still read something else by her, hoping for the best.