"He knew Miss Hampton was in because Bill had just taken the usual over, six gin, two French, two Italian, two whiskey and a half-dozen syphons that was, as regular as clockwork once a week, besides what Miss Hampton bought extra and what she drank when she came in. . ."
This introduction to one of the minor characters in the novel Cheerfulness Breaks In could not be more typical of the now-neglected work of Angela Thirkell. The brilliance of the sentence lies in the throwaway detail - "regular as clockwork once a week" - which reveals Miss Hampton (incidentally, a brusque but good-hearted lesbian) as a respected drinker in Southbridge, the fictional setting of the book.
Cheerfulness Breaks In contains many minor characters of piercing practicality: Eileen in the pub, for example, discusses her sister's batch of evacuees (for this is 1940): "Greta, Gary and Gable their names are, not triplets as you might think but hardly ten months between them and their mother, she's at the Vicarage, expecting again poor thing, but always look on the sunny side I said to her and now your husband's at sea brighter days may be in store." There are Mr and Mrs Bissell, the childless guardians of a London boys' school sent to the country for safety whose happy custom it is to refer to one another as Daddy and Mother. There are the Octavias and Delias and Geraldines, disappointed that so far their V.A.D. service at the hospital involves nothing more than measles, not even of the German variety. There are Mr and Mrs Birkett, stunned with gratitude at the sudden wedding of their beautiful daughter Rose, who is whisked off to South America; Rose has for years reduced the entire county to despair through her genius for falling in love.
"All in God's hands"
There's Mrs Brandon. The Vicar reminds his audience that the times are troubled "` but we must remember that we are all in God's hands."
`I know we are' said Mrs. Brandon earnestly, laying her hand on the Vicar's sleeve, `and that is just what is so perfectly dreadful." And, still in 1940, there are the Palmers and Simnets and Nurses, butlers and housemaids and chauffeurs who enable (and are enabled by) this upper layer of village society to live lives of unremarkable public respectability and private if variable decency. Angela Thirkell, in fact, worked on the Austen principle and with something of the Austen irony. Elizabeth Bowen, in one of the few literary references to her work, called her admiringly "the last and most memorable of the Edwardians", but this suggests a wider canvas and a more florid style. Born in 1890, the beautiful grand-daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones, Thirkell's time was that of West and Woolf, Lehmann and Bowen and Macaulay, her fashion more that of Margaret Kennedy or, in contemporary terms, Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Skill concealed
Described in the Dictionary of National Biography as having a magnetic if acid personality, she wrote with a dispatch which conceals skill. Her characters are not drawn in great depth but that there are depths is made plain: as the weary Lydia prepares to feed the evacuee children, "the well-known smell of children and stew filled the air and Lydia wished for a moment everyone were dead."
It is a sentence which sums up the suppressed anxieties with which Lydia is living, but its sense includes the common but unspoken apprehension of the horrors then approaching Britain. It is only one indication of that gift for "crystal melancholy" which Elizabeth Bowen also noted as a characteristic of Thirkell's work. It is, perhaps, most noticeable in what must be the later novels: there are at least 32 of these but to find them I must apply to places such as MacNaughten's Bookshop in Edinburgh and endless inter-library loans.
The Brandons, Lydia (whose handshake reminds a young man of that time he broke his wrist) and Rose, Lords Stoke and Pomfret with their wives and offspring, Eileen at the pub and Mrs Morland with her demented hair and typewriter, Mr Miller in his vicarage or Noel Merton in his chambers are figures who reappear in many of the Thirkell novels. There is always a consistency in their presence. Time has moved forward with them as well as with the reader, and even if they are only backstage or in the wings for the main action of a book, they are summoned to provide whatever it was they originally had to offer, only more so.
Essentially a comedy, Cheerfulness Breaks In's slightly fractured personality is indicated early by a gathering at which various friends remark that they are making preparations in case "anything should happen" (the men call this "a scrap"), although of course, they remind one another immediately, nothing will. Towards the end the Dean's wife acknowledges the approach of a time in which the young would inherit a world whose most enchanting pleasures they had not known and would not miss: "Whatever happened it would mean eating other people's mental bread and treading strange stairs." Yet the only real plot in the novel, apart from a decorous romance, is whether or not the loathsome Warburys are Nazi spies. We know they are loathsome because the bounders ask for gin at the Admiral's (retd.) sherry party.
Thirkell, well-born and welloff (her father was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, her mother numbered Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling among her cousins) deals with social issues via ingenious asides on popular themes of the times: the success of banned books and the psychological provenance of neophallic thought as well as the heated arguments about The 39 Articles and whether, if the National Anthem is to be sung in church, it should be sung kneeling or standing: " `The Bishop of Barchester, while feeling that everyone should act according to his conscience, prefers it to be sung kneeling,' said the Dean. `In the Cathedral we stand,' he added in an unimportant voice."
Borrowing from Trollope
Often borrowing her geography and some of her names from Trollope, Thirkell thus adroitly summarises the entire plots of two of Trollope's greatest novels, Barchester Towers and The Last Chronicle of Barset with that side-swipe, in an unimportant voice, at the Bishop.
Searching for references to Angela Thirkell, I came across Henry James's comment that "Women are delicate and patient observers; they hold their noses close, as it were, to the texture of life. They feel and perceive with a kind of personal tact." James was describing something of Trollope's affinity with Jane Austen and in these terms at least I believe Thirkell shares that affinity. But she also has a uniquely poignant astringency. Of a mildly flirtatious couple she writes : "They were excellent friends and voyaged about the Pays du Tendre in great comfort, with return tickets." What could be more tactful than that?