Sisters by a River : A Virago Modern Classic (9781405522328) Read online

  VIRAGO

  MODERN CLASSICS

  164

  Barbara Comyns

  Born in 1909 at Bidford-on-Avon, Barbara Comyns was educated mainly by governesses until she went to art schools in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. She started writing fiction at the age of ten and her first novel, Sisters by a River, was published in 1947. She also worked in an advertising agency, a typewriting bureau, dealt in old cars and antique furniture, bred poodles, converted and let flats, and exhibited pictures in The London Group. She was married first in 1931, to an artist, and for the second time in 1945. With her second husband she lived in Spain for eighteen years. She died in 1992.

  Books by Barbara Comyns

  Sisters by a River

  Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

  Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

  The Vet’s Daughter

  Out of the Red and into the Blue

  The Skin Chairs

  Birds in Tiny Cages

  A Touch of Mistletoe

  The Juniper Tree

  Mr Fox

  The House of Dolls

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  978-1-4055-2232-8

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © The Estate of Barbara Comyns 1947

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Introduction copyright © Barbara Trapido 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  HACHETTE DIGITAL

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Sisters By a River

  Table of Contents

  VIRAGO

  MODERN CLASSICS

  164

  Books by Barbara Comyns

  COPYRIGHT

  Introduction

  Being Born

  Mary – the eldist

  Early days of a Batchlor Girl

  Babies Arriving

  As if she had No Ears at all

  Granny

  The Aunt with the Square Face

  The Rolly Polly Field

  God in the Billard Room

  Rooted to the Ground

  Rooms

  It Wasn’t Nice in the Dressing Room

  Maids Lav

  Walks

  Some Sad things to Do with Animals

  Education

  Black Monday

  The River that ran past our door

  Courious Habits of Bats, Moths and Earwigs

  Dinner Parties

  Punishments

  Boats and Fishing

  The Other Side of the River

  The Trippers

  Dish face

  Click

  Dolls and Games of Distruction

  Mice and Owls

  Engin Room

  Blackeye

  Dancing Class

  Perfectly Beastly Frock

  Shooting

  Good Luck Numbers

  Potting Shed and Hen Pens

  Aunts Arriving

  Food

  Bother-em-Dick

  Maids in the Kitchen

  Bees

  Wicked Foxes and Engines

  Gather your hats while you may

  Mr Ellismore! How is your window looking?

  New Year

  Two Friends

  Cut her hair long

  Funerals

  Banishing smell and ghosts

  Dampness and Illness

  About Trees

  The Field that was stiff with skeletons

  About Trees

  Spring Cleaning

  ‘It’

  London visits and dieing babies

  Sisters by the Sea

  Doom and Depression

  Change

  INTRODUCTION

  Anyone with a gothic streak will be gripped by this vivid autobiographical novel about five sisters struggling to bring themselves up – with a high degree of ingenuity – as they dodge the fall-out created by their ill-matched and violent parents. In its entertaining portrayal of family life among the early twentieth-century servant-owning classes, the book is reminiscent of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, though darker and edgier. For all its flair and its understated, childlike tone, for all its energy and fun and layered richness, the effect on the reader is unsettling. Adults, whether they be visiting aunts, grandmothers, governesses or parents, are as arbitrary and dangerous as tigers. Domestic servants are on the whole benign, but are dismissed (because their ‘feet smelt’) or end up in the workhouse.

  Malevolence and the unexpected lurk around every corner in a story in which the house itself is an unpredictable character. Shellford Court is large and damp. An ancient pile dating from the 1500s, it is dominated by the river and smells of ‘walnuts and church’. Despite its numerous rooms – boot room, engine room, billiards room, morning-room, drawing-room, along with its pantries, ante-rooms and cellars – it appears to afford our child narrator no fixed bedroom until, at fifteen, she and her older sister Beatrix are grudgingly permitted to inherit the room in which Granny has recently, grotesquely, died. The child, throughout her earlier years, will variously find herself evicted in the night from a dressing room by her screeching parents who are making fisticuffs, or accidentally bedded down beside a visiting male accountant, or waking up in Granny’s bed to witness the old woman being rough-handled out of the window by her daughter and son-in-law. Wailing for her life, her nightdress bunched up to expose her crêpey old legs, Granny is saved from serious injury by the excessive width of her hips.

  A younger sister is hurled downstairs as a baby because Daddy is fed up with her crying, and later misses her footing while sleepwalking and crashes down the same staircase. The house is prone to flooding, and the children have permanent coughs. They walk the garden on stilts. Bats threaten their uncombed hair. Rats emerge from the porridge. And the river, running past the door, inviting frequent escape, is itself pregnant with menace: a ‘very dead boy’ is discovered bumping about under Daddy’s rowing boat; drowned pigs, bloated and rotting, are a common sight – a useful food source for the villagers, who whack the cadavers with sticks to cause an exodus of squirming edible eels.

  But the major hazard for the novel’s young narrator is other people, who, though violent, self-centred and bizarre, are depicted with a stoic, childlike acceptance and not a whiff of self-pity or exhibitionism. Comyns never had publication in mind and wrote the book as a private recollection: as solace for herself in difficult times and as a memoir for her children. Only when a friend came upon the manuscript in a suitcase was she persuaded to offer it for publication. And then, since it didn’t quite fit the soothing picture of childhood favoured in post-war stories, it was repeatedly rejected until it was serialised in Lilliput magazine under the provoking title, ‘The Novel Nobody Will Publish’. In 1947, the publishing house Eyre & Spottiswoode took a chance on it – six years after she wrote it – by which time Comyns had completed the better-known Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. She went on to produce a total of ten brave, alluring and highly origina
l novels during the course of an eventful life in which she married twice, exhibited her paintings, bred poodles, managed a garage, renovated apartments and sold antique furniture. A reader would expect no less from a person who had survived the baptism of fire depicted within the pages of Sisters by a River.

  Daddy proposes to Mammy when she is still a child. He will marry her, he says, on condition that she learns how to cook, and this she certainly does. All the enjoyable family interludes in this story of eye-boggling neglect and abuse have to do with food: Christmas is a marvellous extravaganza, as are the picnics, the dinner parties, the tennis parties. Mammy starts childbearing at eighteen, and stops only when her sixth confinement renders her both infertile and stone deaf. By turns hostile and indifferent to her children, and given to lines such as, ‘How I wish I’d never had you… I hate you all,’ she is an unstable, self-indulgent and spiteful woman, whose rare attempts at maternal closeness are both alarming and weird. She talks out loud to imaginary lovers and uses her children as go-betweens in her ongoing war with Daddy.

  Daddy, rumoured among the servants to have a ‘touch of the Tarbrish’, is a petulant rage machine. Brooding upon his debts, and seeking solace in too much whisky, he is constantly infuriated by the presence of his wife, his mother-in-law and his children – though he is always at one with Palmer, the gardener, an odious and cruel tyrant who severs the heads of newborn kittens. Daddy, on one occasion, knocks Mammy about so brutally that she’s obliged to lurk indoors, a white-faced ghost in hiding from her own garden party, and he horsewhips his daughter into near-unconsciousness in reprimand for a minor mishap with a breakfast egg. He blasts his ancient cat into a gory splatter of dispersed body parts, and stalks the passages, revolver in hand, ready for bailiffs and tax inspectors. But he and Mammy come together in vanity, being much occupied by their social position. Daddy requires the entire household to witness the finesse of his once-a-month departures on business to Birmingham: getting ready takes him three hours. He adores his boot collection and has ‘a room lined with shelves all filled with beautiful shiny shoes’; for his buttonhole he favours an out of season bloom, which causes ‘a great comb out of the greenhouses’. ‘Although we live in the country, we are cultured,’ Mammy declares to her ill-educated, badly dressed daughters, with their rotting teeth. ‘Not many girls have your opportunities.’ Meanwhile, Granny, a one-time femme fatale, has metamorphosed over the years into a hideous bad fairy, a blown-up compulsive eater who terrorises the maids and repels her granddaughters, bawling commands from her bedroom, which is sticky with mint humbugs, old hair and ‘rotting sealskin jackets’.

  Added to the adult menace is the monstrous rule of Mary, the eldest of the girls, who is left unchecked to oppress and bully her siblings. None is permitted to read a book that Mary likes, which rules out The Wind in the Willows along with a range of childhood favourites. None is permitted to wear a garment in any colour but brown because Mary has the monopoly on brightness and style; the sisters endure hours of shame as dowdy outcasts, spurned and humiliated at dances and hunting parties. Beyond the immediate family, there is a cavalcade of demented and mean-minded relations, from the aunt with ‘seal flapper’ feet, who washes the meat in disinfectant, to Daddy’s youngest sister, the intermittently incarcerated ‘aunt with the square face’, who can’t touch anything once it’s been touched by somebody else. And then there are the villagers, who are variously macabre, exotic, malformed, retarded or merely wretched.

  In spite of the minefield of lunacy and violence that they are forced to negotiate, the sisters exhibit an imaginative richness, being mostly left alone to invent games and rituals, to dismiss their own governess, to inhabit orchards and verdant secret spaces, to eat honey from the comb, to navigate the river with its abundance of fish. Unsurprisingly, they also exhibit signs of disturbance and stress: nightmares and chattering teeth, sleepwalking and nervous tics. Theirs is a world that is tinged with the surreal and the macabre: Beatrix and Barbara levitate, riding on a magic branch that carries them over the rooftops (that’s until Mary deliberately breaks the branch); they observe an enchanting rain of hats that fills the sky, just as if they were inside a Magritte painting; Barbara meets God in the billiards room; Chloe burns all her things and rips the heads off dolls. In addition, the girls visit horrible cruelties on animals: they hang caterpillars from miniature gallows and ‘resurrect’ moths over candle flames.

  And then, one day, it’s all gone: the furniture gone under the hammer; Mammy despatched to a grim, ill-appointed cottage; the children dispersed. All is swept away. Yet it’s all here, on the page, thanks to the flair and recall of its talented chronicler; something for which every reader will be grateful.

  Barbara Trapido, 2013

  Being Born

  It was in the middle of a snowstorm I was born, Palmer’s brother’s wedding night, Palmer went to the wedding and got snowbound, and when he arrived very late in the morning he had to bury my packing under the wallnut tree, he always had to do this when we were born – six times in all, and none of us died, Mary said Granny used to give us manna to eat and that’s why we didn’t, but manna is stuff in the bible, perhaps they have it in places like Fortnham & Mason, but I’ve never seen it, or maybe Jews shops.

  Mammy rather liked having babies, it was one of the few times she was important and had a fuss made of her, but Granny used to interfeer a lot, and an old woman called Mrs Basher who lived in a round cottage used to come too, but she didn’t when I was born because of the snow.

  Daddy got dreadfully annoyed about all these babies coming all the time, he said it was a conspiricy to ruin him. He got quite fond of us as we grew older, at least he sometimes was, and used to take us mushrooming on our bycicles early in the mornings and we would stop at Heath’s farm to drink new warm milk, he gave us each a garden and taught us to row, so he must have liked us.

  The first thing I can remember is being in a white pram by a lot of ivy and it started to rain but not on me, the rain ended in a straight line which gradualy came nearer, just as it reached me someone in blue came running out of the house and took me in.

  The next thing I can remember was Kathleen being born and I wasn’t the baby any more, I was not allowed in the pram and how my legs used to ache on the long walks the maids used to take us. We didn’t have proper nurses with vails, like the Crawfords, except once when we had a beautiful one who wore pink and had a wide stiff belt, but Granny made her go away because she washed the nappies with sticks. Our nursery was very dark with fir trees pushing in at the windows, but we were seldom in it. There was a wonderful picture on the wall of a girl in a wood stiff with bluebells and white rabbits and ducks, but when I saw the picture again some years later, they were all rabbits and no ducks atall, I think I was about two before I could see what picturs were meant to be, sometimes I don’t know even now.

  There are lots of vague memories floating around my mind of when I was very young, some are comfortable like driving in a closed carrage with Auntie Eva and Granny all dressed in black and nodding plums in their hats, a tiny dog called Fido, we stopped at a cottage to get him a drink, I saw him lapping out of a saucer with a gold rim, I went to sleep and when I awoke there was an old woman with a basket full of bananas at the carrage door, they gave me one and it was nice, I eat it and went to sleep again, it was very warm. But there are other memories that make me think I would hate to be a small child again, being left strapped in an awful little chair with a pot in it, being left for simply hours and being left in the bath till the water had gone quite cold, and being frightened in the night, and falling down stairs, we were always doing that, and of course being smacked, though we weren’t smacked much before we were three. After three everything seems clearer, almost clearer than things had happened yesterday.

  Mary – the eldist

  Mary was the eldist of the family, Mammy was only eighteen when she had her, and she was awfully frit of her, but Daddy thought she was lovely and called her his little
Microbe, I don’t know why, maybe microbes were just coming into fashion then like we have germs now. When Daddy came home in the evening Mary had to be woken up and taken down stairs, and almost every day she had a new toy, and she was always being taken to the photographer. But by the time she was three or four there were such a lot of babies no one bothered about her any more. Mammy said the first words she ever said were ‘I’m so miserable’ and I expect she was. Mary was the plainest in the family, but she made up for it by being so bossy. I have often noticed the eldist in a family isnt so pretty as the others, usually the youngest is the best, it is so in fairy stories too, it must be because the parents havn’t had enough practice at making babies.