Walmsley

The Happy Ending (1957) is the third book in Leo Walmsley’s trilogy of autobiographical novels – starting with Love in the Sun and followed (rather later) by The Golden Waterwheel. Clicking on those links will take you to my enthusiastic reviews, and I’ve read the whole trilogy within four years, which feels like breakneck speed considering how often I leave sequels until I’ve long forgotten the original.

As with the previous two books, the focus of the plot is on the unnamed narrator and his wife Dain buying and renovating a property. In Cornwall, it was a seaside shack. In Yorkshire, it was a bigger house with ambitions for a huge waterwheel. In The Happy Ending, they are in Wales – having bought, sight unseen, a sizeable property (and farmland) called Castle Druid that is in total disrepair. The Second World War has started and their Yorkshire home has been requisitioned, so this is something of an emergency plunge into the dark.

In the first book, it was just the couple (then unmarried, which ruffled feathers locally) and a kitten. By now, they have a brood of children who get added to by large numbers of evacuees. We have lost the intimacy of the original, which truly felt like an us-against-the-world situation. Here, it is more about a community – the growing community of the home, but also connecting with the local Welsh people who are pleasingly welcoming to these outsiders.

I love reading about renovations and discovering new features of an old property. The gradual repair and extension of Castle Druid – the discovery of the cellar, the introduction of a waterwheel, even the digging of drainage ditches – is written with the same steady fascination of the previous books, and I always love Walmsley’s wonder at what can be created by diligent work, imagination, and hope. He isn’t brilliant at all the tasks he undertakes, and I think it’s the realism of the arduous labour and unexpected obstacles that stop this seeming self-congratulatory and smug (unlike this book, which has the most angry comments of any review I’ve ever written!) His self-deprecation helps make the simple idealism seem relatable – because I loved the way he and Dain enivsage an idyllic life. Here’s Dain:

“You’re making me homesick. Of course I remember. It was all so lovely. But so was Adder Howe, and so is this, really. If we haven’t got the sea, we’ve got the country, and if we make the lake, it will be almost as good as having the cove at our front door, especially if we have fish in it. And couldn’t we have some sort of a boat? We can swim in it in summer, and if there’s a shallow end with a sandy beach, the little children can have it for paddling. It will be perfect if we do get the waterwheel. I think that as well as using it for electricity, we ought to grind flour with it. If we grew just a little wheat, we could grind that, and actually make our own bread from start to finish. We could make oatmeal anyway, so that we wouldn’t have to buy it in the shops. It would all be helping with the war.”

Having said all of this, The Happy Ending has a relationship at its heart, and it isn’t between the narrator and Dain. The most dominant character is Clow. He is a local man who can turn his hand to everything, and instantly offers to work on the renovations for a modest wage for as long as it takes. He insists that Castle Druid would, by rights, belong to him and his sister – but seems to hold that against fate, rather than against the couple.

The narrator takes him on, and Clow is indeed invaluable – but he also has a pretty negative relationship with him. Clow takes charge of everything, giving unsolicited advice and taking credit for anything that goes well. If somebody else comes up with an idea, he says that he could have told them that, if he’d asked. The narrator is frustrated by how often Clow takes the most significant moments in the renovation to himself – and there is something quite childlike but touching about the way the narrator and Dain keep the possibility of the cellar secret until they can unearth it without his gaze.

I was fascinated by the dynamic. I’m not saying there was anything homoerotic about it, or anything like that, but there is an intensity to the way the narrator and Clow clash and depend on each other that drives much of the emotion of the novel. I wonder how much Clow was based on a real person, and if Walmsley ever truly worked out what they thought of each other.

Like the other books in the series, The Happy Ending is peculiar for its total humourlessness. That’s not a negative thing – it’s just that humour isn’t one of the tools in Walmsley’s arsenal. Nor is it earnest – it’s just presenting what happened in a steady, clear-eyed, almost loving way. To be self-deprecating without trying to be funny about it is very unusual, and quite disarming.

I think this is probably my least favourite of the trilogy, partly because it doesn’t have the intense insularity of the earlier books that made them so vivid – and partly because the narrator hardly does any fiction writing in this book, which was a central theme of the others. But that’s only by comparison. I still loved it, and love this special trilogy. If you’ve not read them, I urge you to start.

If you look at Jane’s 2010 review of Love in the Sun (1939) by Leo Walmsley, you’ll see a comment from me saying that I’d like to read it. And, indeed, I bought a copy in 2012, still remembering Jane’s enthusiasm and how wonderful the novel sounded. Recently for my book group, I read The Village News by Tom Fort – there’s a chapter that mentions Walmsley a lot, and so 2021 finally became the year when he got his moment in the sun(!) Now read Love in the Sun, I can report that it is just as wonderful as Jane says.

I’ve done a bit of background reading online now, and haven’t quite worked out how autobiographical Love in the Sun is, nor how it relates to Walmsley’s earlier novels – but all of that can be put to one side to enjoy what this is: the story of a couple who’ve fled a financial crisis in Yorkshire, arriving in Cornwall with almost no money.

St Jude is a seaport in South Cornwall. It lies near the mouth of a small river, the Pol, whose estuary, shut in on all sides by high land, affords a safe, deep-water anchorage to ships of considerable size. The town itself, while small, straggles along a mile and a half of waterfront, its main street widening out here and there into wharves and jetties. This street continues through the old town into a residential area of hotels, boarding-houses and modern villas, becomes a parade, and ends near the sea in public pleasure gardens, with a golf course extending along the coastline.

[…]

It was the afternoon of a Christmas day that I, a Yorkshireman and a stranger, arrived on foot in St Jude, and, from one of those quays that break its straggling main street, had my first view of its harbour. That view was not specifically attractive. It did not encourage the hope that I was near the end of my peculiar quest: least of all did it suggest the beginning of a great adventure.

And perhaps it isn’t a great adventure, in the literary sense of the word. The plot of the novel is steady and simple, and all the more immersive for that. The narrator and his partner (they are not married because he still has a wife, but this is an incidental strand of the novel) fend for themselves by setting up home in a cheaply-rented old hut. Rain pours through the roof on the first night, when a storm seems almost to remove any possibility of staying. But gradually, resourcefully they make the hut into a home – they start growing vegetables, they adopt a visiting cat. In their quiet cove, they have idyllic beauty in front of them – and anxiety alongside, since they don’t know how they will survive with almost no income.

The solution is for the narrator to write a book, and it was fascinating to follow this process – aggravating at first, because he seemed so certain of its success. And, indeed, he is ultimately published – but the feelings he goes through after his first emotionless rejection are feelings that I recognise 70 years later! The development of his manuscript is perhaps the closest this novel comes to adventure. Unless you count some cat drama, which (thinking about it) gave me more tension than most tales of humans in peril.

Love in the Sun is lovely because it is authentic and beautifully realised, in all its day-by-day details. Walmsley is also wonderful at depicting this corner of Cornwall, making me ache to visit it. But the novel certainly isn’t a sweet tale of escaping somewhere beautiful. Even if it weren’t for the financial difficulties, the community are pretty lukewarm to the new residents – partly because they are new, but also because they are unmarried and eccentric. The narrator and his wife don’t seem unduly concerned about their reception, and it isn’t a dark thread of the book – rather, this is a story of solitary struggles and progress, not a saccharine story. Having said that, there is an unlikely friendship along the way, which is rather touchingly done.

The narrator, whom I think is unnamed but could be misremembering, is certainly the dominant character – but I think Walmsley’s portrayal of the partner is good too. She does have a name – Dain. Dain shares the same vision, capable work ethic and determination of the narrator, with just enough differences to make them work well together – she has a touch more romance, a little more optimism, a bit more willingness to see the best in people. If it is autobiographical, it is an affectionate portrait that still feels honest and accurate.

This novel is relatively long, but it felt even longer – in a good way. Like when I read L.P. Hartley’s brilliant novel The Boat, it’s the slow and steady pace of the novel that helps make it a beautiful reading experience. One to luxuriate in, even if it took me more than a decade to get to it after reading Jane’s review. And, you know… there are two sequels…