Westwood (2 page)

Or, as Gibbons the narrator more drily explains, ‘Like most seekers for an ideal woman, [Challis] did not really like women, believing that they disappointed and failed him on purpose.’

Gibbons punishes the humourless misogynist Challis brilliantly: by making him fall in love with Margaret’s down-to-earth (but very attractive) old school friend Hilda. He is thus placed in an infatuation quite as miserable and hopeless as Margaret’s – but much, much funnier. ‘You look like a painting by Signorelli, in that cap,’ he tells her, ardently. ‘There we go again,’ harrumphs Hilda. Of the three main characters in the book, it is Hilda that is
Westwood
’s greatest creation. A girl who takes nothing seriously and keeps her service boys ‘ever so cheery,’ Hilda is a life force; every line that drops from her mouth is worth its weight in gold. When Challis tells her that a ‘friend of his’ has written a play, she can’t imagine what for. When he tells her what the play is about (serial Austrian suicide), she flatly refuses to see it. Even the sublime work of Leonardo da Vinci doesn’t impress her. ‘I don’t know how you can bear to have that fat pan looking at you when you wake up in the morning,’ she says, indicating the tasteful
Mona Lisa
poster Margaret has proudly hung on her bedroom wall. ‘It would brown me off for the day.’

What a modern young woman might find hard to swallow in
Westwood
is the rather pitiless, matter-of-fact way Margaret’s lack of sex appeal is dealt with. But Stella Gibbons was a doctor’s daughter and she never believed in sugaring the pill. Margaret is described as having ‘tiny ears, fine dark eyebrows, and good ankles – all minor beauties and not in themselves enough to make a woman attractive.’ Naturally it hurts Margaret to be aware of her shortcomings (and to be
reminded of them quite so often by her unhappily married mother). But facts are facts: Margaret’s plainness ultimately rules out the possibility of
Westwood
being the twentieth-century
Persuasion
, after all. Stella Gibbons is just too honest about the realities of life to provide a happy romantic ending. Men are drawn to attractive women, and they don’t select partners according to any other measure of their worth. In the real world, Captain Wentworth does not reclaim the plain and ageing Anne Elliot; he marries someone else. But that doesn’t mean Gibbons is unsympathetic. Not at all. In fact, re-reading
Westwood
, I suddenly remembered one of Gibbons’s best-known poems, ‘Lullaby for a Baby Toad’, in which the little, ugly creature is lovingly told that, because it carries a precious gem in its forehead, its looks are actually its protection:

For if, my toadling
,

Your face were fair

As the precious jewel

That glimmers there
,

Man, the jealous
,

Man, the cruel
,

Would look at you

And suspect the jewel
.

So dry the tears

From your horned eyes
,

And eat your supper

Of dew and flies
;

Curl in the shade

Of the nettles deep
,

Think of your jewel

And go to sleep
.

I am so pleased
Westwood
is finally coming back into print. I’m quite sure that if it hadn’t been written by the author of
Cold Comfort Farm
, it would have fared a great deal better in the world. Stella Gibbons’s nephew Reggie Oliver, who wrote an excellent biography of his aunt, told me he was sure she felt more proud of
Westwood
than of any of her other books. This is a rich, mature novel, romantic and wistful, full of rounded characters and terrific dialogue, with a pair of pleasingly intertwining plots, and great comic scenes. It is beautifully written by an author whose precision with idiom was unerring. It deals with heartbreak and hope, longing and disappointment; and is underlined by a genuine poetic love for natural beauty. And it teaches us that integrity does not always have to be forged on the anvil of suffering, whatever the Gerard Challises of this world might think. Sometimes integrity is the cause of suffering, rather than the result of it.

Lynne Truss, 2011

London was beautiful that summer. In the poor streets the people made an open-air life for themselves under the blue sky as if they were living in a warmer climate. Old men sat on the fallen masonry and smoked their pipes and talked about the War, while the women stood patiently in the shops or round the stalls selling large fresh vegetables, ceaselessly talking.

The ruins of the small shapely houses in the older parts of the city were yellow, like the sunlit houses of Genoa; all shades of yellow; deep, and pale, or glowing with a strange transparency in the light. The fire-fighting people had made deep pools with walls round them in many of the streets, and here, in the heart of London, ducks came to live on these lakes that reflected the tall yellow ruins and the blue sky. Pink willow-herb grew over the white uneven ground where houses had stood, and there were acres of ground covered with deserted, shattered houses whose windows were filled with torn black paper. On the outskirts of the city, out towards Edmonton and Tottenham in the north and Sydenham in the south, there was a strange feeling in the air, heavy and sombre and thrilling, as if History were working visibly, before one’s eyes. And the country was beginning to run back to London; back into those grimy villages linked by featureless roads from which it had never quite vanished, and which make up the largest city in the world. Weeds grew in the City itself; a hawk was seen hovering over the ruins of the Temple, and foxes raided the chicken roosts in the gardens of houses near Hampstead Heath. The shabby quietness of an old, decaying village hung in the streets, and it was a wonderful, awe-inspiring thing to see and to feel. While the summer lasted, the beauty was stronger than the sadness, because the sun blessed everything – the ruins, the tired faces of the people, the tall wild flowers and the dark stagnant water – and, during those months of calm, London in ruin was beautiful as a city in a dream.

Then the autumn came with mists. They began early in September, and the beauty lingered while the leaves came slowly down through the still air. On Hampstead Heath the young willow trees growing on either side of a long hilly road did not turn until late October, and they were still in their long full leaf one evening at sunset, when a young woman was the only person in the road, which she was crossing on her way to the open Heath.

She glanced up the road’s length, and gasped as she saw the willows; the scene about her was all gorgeous in deep colours softened by the mist, but each willow tree looked like a streaked fountain of yellow and green and fire-colour hanging down in a blue haze, while, under some large, motionless, yellow and dark-green trees on her left, there spread away a broad lustrous lake of golden water, glowing not on its surface but in its depths. The dim blue sky was streaked with grey and scarlet mist, and the damp grass was blue in the shade.

The air smelled of fog. There were other people hurrying home in the distance, but they were only dark figures against the general gorgeousness and glow.

She looked at her watch. It was nearly five o’clock, and she set off quickly across the Heath in the direction of Highgate, whose church spire looked out at the spire of Hampstead’s church across the intervening small valleys and hills. Her shoes quickly became soaked in the long grass and the masses of black and yellow leaves, and the air grew cold, but she was so absorbed in the beauty of the scene, richly coloured as some dream of a Brazilian garden, that she noticed nothing else. She was a thin young woman of medium height in her early twenties, with a strong dark face, and untidy dark curls hanging about her shoulders. Her mouth was too full, and her brown eyes had an eager look.

Presently she came out on the path below Kenwood that leads directly down to Highgate. There were allotments here with giant cabbages of a rich blue-green colour; the mist, and the dim blue of the sky, and the green of the grass caught up the colour and repeated it again and again almost
as far as she could see, and the leaves were huge and beaded with water, for rain had fallen that afternoon. She hurried on with her hands in her pockets, still looking about her, but the colours were quickly fading now, and the greyness of evening was creeping over the fields.

As she was leaving the Heath, between two wide lakes reflecting the last colours in the sky and the clumps of dark roseate osiers, she saw two tall men coming towards her through the mist. The elder wore a closely fitting dark coat and a black diplomatic hat, and carried a leather brief-case, and had eyes of so deep a blue that it was noticeable even in the gathering dusk. The younger wore looser clothes, and a black sweater with a turtle neck, and had no hat.

‘But Henry Moore isn’t –’ the younger was saying as the two passed her, and then he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and the rest of the sentence was lost. Both were walking fast, and in a few moments they had passed out of her hearing.

But she turned once to look after them, attracted by their distinguished appearance and unusual height, and, as she did so, she noticed something lighter than the path lying a few yards away; a small, square, cream-coloured object. She approached it, and on stooping to pick it up saw that it was a ration book.

‘Oh dear,’ she said aloud, looking first at it and then after the two gentlemen, who were by now almost out of sight across the misty fields. Her voice was deep, with a decisive note.

It was no use running after them, she thought; besides, she was late now. She looked down at the name on the book. It was such an odd one that for the moment she thought it was foreign:

Hebe Niland,

Lamb Cottage,

Romney Square,

Hampstead, N.W. 3.

Oh well, I can drop it in the post to-morrow, she thought, and put the book in her pocket and hurried on.

It was almost dark by the time she reached Highgate Village. A figure in a mackintosh and beret rushed out from the shade of a shop door, crying reproachfully:

‘Well, you’re a nice one! I’ve been here for ages! What on earth happened to you? I’m frozen and now we won’t be able to go; Mother doesn’t like me out in the blackout, you know that as well as I do. You are the limit!’

‘I’m awfully sorry, Hilda. I walked over the Heath and it was so gorgeous, I didn’t notice the time. But we
must
go; come on; if we hurry we’ll just be there before blackout,’ and she put her arm through Hilda’s, and strode away across the road towards Southwood Lane.

‘Oh well, p’raps we’ll just make it, and I don’t expect Mother’ll mind, as there’s two of us. Have you got the keys?’ said Hilda, pacified.

The dark girl nodded and jingled them in her pocket.

‘What’ve you been doing all the afternoon?’ Hilda went on.

‘I went to the concert at the National Gallery, and then I walked about.’

‘Walked about? You are dopey. I say, Margaret, have you thought – there’ll be no blackout, so we shan’t be able to shine a torch.’

‘We shall be able to see all I want to see – if there’s a proper place for coals and all that sort of thing.’

‘Of course there’ll be a proper place for coals! Those houses have only been up about ten years. You’re very lucky to get the chance of one.’

‘I know we are, and I don’t think it’s right,’ said Margaret, grimly.

‘Why ever not?’

‘Millions of people all over the world have lost their homes. Why should
we
have a new house?’

‘I don’t see that! It wouldn’t make it any better for them if you didn’t have one.’

‘People in England haven’t suffered enough.’

‘If you’re going to start about Russia I’m going straight home!’ cried Hilda, standing still in the middle of the road.

‘I wasn’t going to say anything about Russia
particularly
.’

‘That’s a wonder. Here, is this it?’ and she darted forward and shone her torch on the gate of a house which was one of a row. ‘Yes, number seventeen. Well, it’s still got a gate. That’s something.’

She pushed the gate open and walked up the narrow crazy-paving path. The dim light of the torch shone on the tall weeds, fluffy with withered seedlings, that brushed against her skirt. Margaret followed, and the gate slammed after them.

‘Are all these house blitzed, I wonder?’ went on Hilda. ‘No, there’s a chink in your next-door neighbour’s blackout. Phew! Doesn’t it smell of bombs! Got the key?’

Margaret was already shining her own torch over the narrow front door, which badly needed painting, and fitting the key into the lock. It was nearly dark. Something so enormous, round and red that for a moment it was hard to realize what it was, was rising slowly between the black houses. Hilda glanced over her shoulder and exclaimed: