The school year has just finished in a flurry of exams and parties and extraordinarily hot weather, and to get myself through it I’ve been mainly reading light and cheery novels (plus something I’ve reviewed for Shiny New Books, I’ll let you know when it’s up). A social comedy from the 1930s, High Rising was exactly the ticket.
The novel, Thirkell’s first, was recently reissued by Virago and has been quite widely and very well reviewed by other bloggers including Jacqui, Claire and Hayley. I agree with all that they have written and I enjoyed reading the book enormously and indeed am on the look-out for Wild Strawberries. However, I did feel quite strongly that a defence should be mounted of Miss Grey.
Miss Grey is the secretary hired by George Knox, widower and writer, to type up his manuscripts and help out with a little light research. She stays in his manor house in Low Rising with him, his twenty-year-old daughter Sybil and an unspecified number of dogs. Over in High Rising is Laura Morland’s ‘cottage’ (complete with drive and at least four bedrooms) where Laura, our heroine, spends part of the year. Laura is also a writer, of ‘good bad novels’, and a widow with four sons. Three are grown up but the fourth, Tony, is all too present in the school holidays. Anyone who has ever conversed with a child will love Tony.
‘Mr Coates,’ said Tony, ‘did you know one of the hounds got run over? I’m going to bring him to see your car got out of the ditch this afternoon. It would be such a treat for him. It was a marvellous engine that ran over him, the very latest type.’
‘That must have been a comfort for the dog.’
‘He rolled all down the embankment, poor thing, and yelped like anything, and his leg was broken. I wish you had seen the train, Mr Coates. It had eight coaches and a post-office sorting van, and the engine was a four-six-nought like the Titley Court. Mother, could I have my railway in the garden next summer? I could make a splendid embankment. The trains would look marvellous dashing round the garden, wouldn’t they? I’m going to get a small goods-engine with that pound you gave me, sir, a small tank-engine to haul trucks. It really costs twenty-one shillings, but it will be your present all the same.’
‘Would another shilling be any help?’ asked Adrian, feeling in his pocket.
‘Oh, sir, thank you.’ Tony went bright pink. ‘I shall call the new engine the Adrian Coates, after you, sir.’
Anyway. Laura and her friends take against Miss Grey. Laura dislikes her from the moment they first meet:
I’m ashamed of myself, thought Laura, for nearly being rude at sight. But I won’t be patronised by a chit in George’s house. And why should she ask if Sibyl has been talking about her? Why should she think that anyone wants to talk about her? Impertinence.
(Of course Sibyl, Laura, they have all been talking about her.) Miss Grey’s crimes: not knowing her place and being Irish. (Although Anne Todd may have an ulterior motive for wanting rid of Miss Grey, as it transpires.) Laura even mimicks her Irish ‘brogue’ to her face:
Miss Grey actually blushed, though whether at Laura’s slight assumption of a brogue, or for some other reason, Laura couldn’t be sure.
All right, Miss Grey has a bit of a temper and a tendency to Have Designs on Older and Sometimes Married Men, and perhaps also she pens a poison pen letter and fibs about her lack of family, but really what gets Laura’s back up is her ‘impertinence’ and perhaps her challenge to Laura as queen of local society.
Laura and her friends fear that, despite being a proper adult, George Knox will accidentally marry Miss Grey and then a blight will descend on the Risings’ merry social life. Quite why they should feel this when George is mostly such a crashing bore I know not. Miss Grey might actually have improved him; she’d certainly have spiced up the neighbourhood with intrigues and back-stabbings and perhaps even poetry readings. But what they are objecting to is her outsider status – she isn’t one of them and she is looking above her station in hoping to marry George. And ambition and cleverness can never really be attractive traits in a woman, eh?
Of course, Miss Grey is run out of town, let us hope to greater success with one of the young men in Miss Hocking’s establishment. I am pretty sure that in the hands of Charlotte Brontë, Miss Grey’s hidden talents would have been more favourably displayed. George marries someone less threatening and life continues undisturbed in Barsetshire...