The Happy Ending by Leo Walmsley – #ABookADayInMay Day 2

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.