Peck

The three women of the McWatt family, Honesty, Mary and their niece, Bridie, sat around the interior grate of their little flat in Napier Crescent, Castleburgh, on a cold December evening in 1945, their eyes on the black marble clock on the mantelshelf, tense with anxiety and anticipation.

The opening paragraph of Winifred Peck’s A Clear Dawn made me feel pretty sure I’d picked up something I’d enjoy. We’re in a domestic setting with a group of women and something is happening to shake things up – already I am squarely in the middle of my comfort zone. And, as I read most of A Clear Dawn on a very long train journey to Edinburgh, I quickly realised that ‘Castleburgh’ is a stand-in for that city. It felt apt. And all the more coincidental, given that I’ve had A Clear Dawn on my shelves for more than 20 years.

As that opening tells us, three women live together in a small flat. Two sisters in their 40s – though, as often in novels of this period, they feel rather older – and a niece in her 20s. Honesty is intelligent and sharp – perhaps living up to her name a little too closely at times. Mary is kind and deeply committed to her Christian faith. Bridie is loyal to her aunts but also aware that her youth and vitality deserve a wider canvas than their restricted world.

What has brought ‘anxiety and anticipation’ to the trio? It’s the return of Walter – their brother and uncle, respectively. Not only is he coming back to Scotland after years in the Middle East, he is returning with a fiancé, Lily. The women don’t know anything about her, but are prepared to make her welcome in their lives – well, ‘prepared’ to differing degrees. But the flat truly belongs to Walter, and they plot how best to shift living arrangements and furniture so that the newlyweds will be able to move in with them, once they are, indeed, newly wed. Until then, Lily can stay with a nearby aunt and Walter can stay with them.

During the initial meeting, it quickly becomes clear that this arrangement will not succeed. Whatever the opposite of a ‘meeting of minds’ is, that’s what happens almost as soon as Lily steps over the threshold. As the reader soon learns, she is marrying Walter largely because she is at an age when there are unlikely to be many further options, and because of a misplaced idea that he is wealthy. This modest flat, and the proposed living arrangements, are a horror to her.

“Oh, Wattie darling, such a funny mistake!” The falsity of Lily’s high, sweet voice with its cutting edge was obvious even to gentle Mary. “Your kind, kind sisters thought we were coming to crowd out this dear little flat when we married. I’ve been telling Honesty that of couse, of course, we mean to have a little home of our own!”

I think Winifred Peck is masterful at dialogue. Can’t you just hear her? And what made A Clear Dawn so enjoyable to me is that Lily isn’t some sort of spoiled ogre. You feel almost as much sympathy for her as for the sisters she may end up displacing. This is, after all, not the life she thought she was getting. And that sympathy is indicative of something that runs like a seam through the novel: Peck’s lack of cynicism. Characters are complex, but when they do good, noble things, it is celebrated. There are lines like this, which you’d struggle to find in a novel written today: ‘Perhaps it was true, yes, she supposed it was certainly true, that love and forgiveness must be put in the scales against truth and honour, and weigh them down in the end.’ In this cynical era, such simple, hard-won truth feels refreshing and powerful.

The only note in A Clear Dawn that felt less successful to me was the introduction of Ian. He is the estranged son of the absent-minded couple for whom Honesty is housekeeper. We learn that he was, as a child, possibly responsible for the death of his younger sister – and his parents lament that he has turned out bad. He is, in fact, sociopathic. When he arrives on the scene, causing chaos for various characters – particularly Lily – he doesn’t quite live up to this description. He is selfish, weak, immoral – but I think Peck’s pen drew back from creating anybody as evil as he is initially described. Even so, he is a curious addition to a novel filled with ordinary, flawed, lovable people. For even Lily is lovable, even if it is a love that comes with impatience – and Walter, similarly, you want to shake. But Honesty and Mary are two of the most engaging, enjoyable characters I’ve come across for a long time. I wonder why Peck decided to throw something so dark into the world of striking pastels that she had created.

And the title? It comes from Milton, and is quoted by one of the characters late in the novel: “By this time, like one who had set out on his way through life by night and travelled through a region of smooth and idle dreams, we now arrive on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes.” If I’m honest, I don’t truly understand what that means – except perhaps a new start, with the reality of things clarified for us?

There are certainly characters who embark on new starts at the end of this novel, and some who must mourn the ending of what they hoped for. There is a surprising amount of incident in the book. But it is really a novel about character, as all the best novels are, and succeeds brilliantly on that count. Honesty and Mary are particularly wonderful characters, and the family dynamic between the core characters – especially the dissatisfying meeting of new and old women – is done exceptionally well. I loved reading A Clear Dawn and it reminded me why I love domestic, middlebrow novels of this period so much.

It’s good to have that reminder. Quite often, because I am on the hunt for future British Library Women Writers titles, I read novels like this by authors I’ve never heard of. They’re picked from the dusty corners of bookshops, in the hope that I’ll stumble across something brilliant. It has led to some wonderful discoveries in the series – Winifed Boggs, Dorothy Evelyn Smith, Theodora Benson – but, of course, the majority are mediocre. And perhaps it dinted my impression of how much I loved this variety of novel. Thank you, Winifred Peck, for reminding me why it is my favourite thing. Kicking off the 1949 Club with a definite success (and I’m sorry that it is so hard to get of, friends).

Goodness knows when I bought Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck, but it was probably the best part of 15 years ago. Thank goodness for these reading clubs for making me pay attention to the books waiting on my shelves, as I really enjoyed this novel – subtitled ‘a week in the life of a clergyman’s wife’.

Parts of it were published ‘in rather a different form’ (whatever that means) in the Guardian before being collected into a book – which must have happened rather quickly, as it is set in the spring of 1940 and published before the end of that year. Of course, the Second World War moves quickly – and the period it is set in is before Blitzkrieg. It was while war might still feel far off, though still affecting everyday lives in numerous ways, of course. As Peck writes in a little author’s note at the beginning, ‘perhaps the thinks she [the diarist] cares for are coming to seem more, and not less, precious’.

The things she cares for are the lives and squabbles of a community of churchgoers. It all feels very like provincial village life, and indeed Provincial Lady-esque, except she mentions in passing that the population of Stampfield is about 60,000 – more than 200 times the number of people living in my village. But somehow, even in a fairly significantly sized town, everybody seems to know one another and be keenly involved in the details of each other’s lives.

Camilla is the vicar’s wife keeping the diary over the course of the week. It’s not really in diary form, except for aping the popularity of the Provincial Lady technique – and we have a similar range of characters. She has done better than the PL in the husband department – Arthur is kind, gentle, and a little incapable. Much of Camilla’s life seems to be spent in stopping him giving away all their money or shielding him from the criticism of locals. They have an adult son, Dick, who is a soldier but not yet deployed. Their maid is Not What Maids Were Before The War, and Camilla seems to do much of the housework themselves, but they consider her part of the family and tolerate her constantly going to see her boyfriend (who dangles the threat that he might be sent to the front at any moment).

One of the chief interests in reading books from 1940 is seeing a particular moment in wartime. There are little details, like ‘”the pink form” (which has, Dick tells me, a far less polite adjective in the Army)’ – which Peck’s original audience would have understood, I suppose, and seems to have been something connected with income replacement for the wives of soldiers? (I’ve only been able to find this post which mentions the pink form in WW1, which is something rather different.) As Camilla writes:

Like everyone else in Europe, we have lived for these last two years as people who know a thunderstorm is coming, and now the storm is raging all the time, though the lightning has not struck Dick nor ruined our cities yet, and the only thing to do is to turn away from the windows at odd moments and try to forget, as best you may, if you wish to keep your reason.

Despite war being a constant, Camilla notes that people aren’t truly interested in each other’s experiences of it: ‘”What news have you of Dick?” (Everyone asks this, and no-one ever waits for an answer, I notice. Soldiers aren’t news in this war.)’ They are rather more preoccupied with their own local issues – and one of the chief of these in Bewildering Cares is the curate Mr Strang, and a sermon he has recently given in favour of pacifism. People are furious, and Arthur and Camilla find themselves called upon to disown the curate or remonstrate with him in some way. Camilla, in particular, has no wish to do anything so drastic, and spends a lot of the book ingeniously disengaging from conversations with irate parishioners.

It is very quaint to imagine a time when a sermon could become the talk of a town. I certainly enjoyed the theme of faith in Bewildering Cares, and the ways that Camilla writes genuinely and undramatically about her prayer life and relationship with God, as well as the behaviour of other people in the church community. It’s so rare to find Christian faith written about sensitively or sincerely – or even unsneeringly – in recent fiction that I really appreciated how Peck incorporates it into the novel as a fundamental and stable part of Camilla’s life. Peck also writes so well about the mixed feuding and kindness of church communities that I have to assume she was part of one. I even expected that her husband had been a vicar, but apparently he was a schools inspector and later Education Minister in Scotland.

Another lovely feature of Bewildering Cares is seeing mention of other middlebrow authors. Camilla, like so many literary heroines whom we are expected to have some affinity with, is a keen reader and mentions Angela Thirkell, Dorothy Whipple, and Charlotte M. Yonge among others. These sorts of things might feel a bit forced in a historical novel, but much more natural from someone at the time.

Overall, Peck doesn’t have quite the charm and humour of the Provincial Lady, but then who does. I still loved reading Bewildering Cares, learning a bit more about the home front in 1940, and spending time in the company of a heroine whom it was easy to consider a friend.