Westwood (Vintage Classics) Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Stella Gibbons

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter The Last

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Set in wartime London, Westwood tells the story of Margaret Steggles, a plain bookish girl whose mother has told her that she is ‘not the type that attracts men’. Her schoolfriend Hilda has a sunny temperament and keeps her service boys ‘ever so cheery’. When Margaret finds a ration book on Hampstead Heath the pompous writer Gerard Challis enters both their lives. Margaret slavishly adores Challis and his artistic circle; Challis idolises Hilda for her hair and her eyes and Hilda finds Gerard’s romantic overtures a bit of a bind. This is a delightfully comic and wistful tale of love and longing.

  About the Author

  Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She worked for various newspapers including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short-stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems The Mountain Beast (1930) and her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) won the Femina Vie Heuruse Prize for 1933. Amongst her works are Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

  ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS

  Cold Comfort Farm

  Bassett

  Enbury Heath

  Nightingale Wood

  My American

  Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm

  The Rich House

  Ticky

  The Bachelor

  The Matchmaker

  Conference at Cold Comfort Farm

  Here Be Dragons

  White Sand and Grey Sand

  The Charmers

  Starlight

  To

  Peggy Butcher

  Philippians iv. 8

  STELLA GIBBONS

  Westwood

  or The Gentle Powers

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

  Lynne Truss

  Introduction

  This is what everyone knows about Stella Gibbons: she wrote only one book, but it was a very, very good one. Cold Comfort Farm, published in 1932 when its obscure female author was thirty years old, was a brilliant, perfect comic novel, satirising the ‘loam and love-child’ genre of English fiction. It was a huge success on publication and is rightly regarded as a classic eighty years later. But what about its author? What did Stella Gibbons go on to do? Did she ever write anything else? Did she perhaps renounce the literary life and devote herself to bee-keeping? Was ‘Stella Gibbons’ perhaps not even a real person in the first place? After all, how can someone write a huge debut book like Cold Comfort Farm and then not become a literary celebrity?

  In fact, Stella Gibbons went on to write more than twenty more novels, one of which was the 1946 novel Westwood you are currently holding in your hand. Like all the others, it has been overshadowed by the success of Cold Comfort Farm (rather than helped by it) which just goes to show the rotten unfairness of things sometimes. I first read Westwood about ten years ago, when I was in the habit of suggesting nifty ideas to BBC radio, and had come up with an intriguing literary hypothesis on which I proposed to build an ambitious season of programmes and adaptations. Was it true, I wondered, that funny women writers are generally allowed only one success in their careers? Wouldn’t it be interesting to examine this rather clever insight in relation to (say) Anita Loos, Stella Gibbons and Betty MacDonald – and then dramatise one (each) of their less well-known books or novels? A quick look through the reference materials told me that Stella Gibbons had published over two dozen books between 1930 and her death in 1989, including a couple of collections of poetry. Just as I had suspected, none of these books, apart from Cold Comfort Farm, was even in print.

  So I thought I should probably read some of these neglected books of hers – for one thing, I needed to check they weren’t rubbish. I picked up Westwood under guidance from my frighteningly widely-read friend Deirdre, and it occurs to me as I write this that I still haven’t properly thanked her for the recommendation, because Westwood is a book I loved deeply on first reading and have loved deeply ever since. It is a wise and truthful novel which makes me laugh, and also makes me weep. If Cold Comfort Farm is Stella Gibbons’s Pride and Prejudice, then Westwood is her Persuasion. Sadly, the BBC rejected my idea about the female one-hit-wonders. However, they did let me rescue one element from the wreckage. They allowed me to dramatise Westwood as a two-part ‘Classic Serial’, and it remains one of the most pleasurable things I’ve done.

  Westwood makes an interesting companion to Cold Comfort Farm, being concerned just as much with the eternal struggle between romantic illusion and common sense; however, it expresses that struggle much more sympathetically. Set in wartime north London (specifically the Hampstead Heath and Highgate beloved of its author), it concerns the 23-year-old Margaret Steggles, an emotionally earnest, plain, loveless young English teacher who reveres, above all things, poetry, art and drama. ‘I’ve got such frighteningly strong feelings,’ she tells her old school friend Hilda in the first chapter. ‘I think you imagine a lot of it,’ is the matter-of-fact reply. Through the bathetic agency of a dropped ration book recovered on Hampstead Heath, Margaret gains entry into an exciting world of north London intellectuals – the fashionable painter Alexander Niland, his spoiled wife Hebe, and above all, his eminent father-in-law Gerard Challis, a deeply unfrivolous playwright of high renown. Margaret is overwhelmed by this opportunity to share a more intellectually elevated way of life – ignoring the obvious fact that these people are ghastly. Not only do they quite openly mock her sincerity (and high-handedly foist their small children onto her), but they disappointingly sit about discussing mundane things such as the scarcity of matches, just like anyone else. How confusing this all is for an intelligent girl like Margaret. She wants to worship Gerard Challis; she can quote his preposterous plays; she dreams of his beautiful blue eyes. And yet she can’t help it: she still instinctively quibbles with every lordly generalisation he deigns to confer on her.

  Margaret’s nervousness was as keen as her delight as they walked together across the faded carpet to the door. As [Challis] opened it, he turned to her once more with his grave searching look, and she experienced a delicious tremor …

  ‘There is a helpless quality, don’t you agree, about a room that is prepared for a party,’ he observed. ‘The silence and flowers are like victims, awaiting the noise of conversation and the cigarette smoke and dissonant jar of conflicting personalities tha
t shall presently destroy them.’

  Margaret had been thinking that the hall looked perfectly lovely and wishing with all her heart that she was going to the party too, but she hastily readjusted her point of view, and answered solemnly, ‘Yes, I know just what you mean.’

  Challis is a terrific character. Pompous, vain, self-satisfied, humourless, he speaks as if from a mountaintop, and refuses to compromise with real life, even in a time of war. By way of everyday conversation, his high-minded characters say things like, ‘Suffering is the anvil upon which the crystal sword of integrity is hammered’ – which fits in with the way they quite often step outside and kill themselves on the flimsiest pretext as well. In his play Kattë (written and premiered in the course of the novel), the Viennese heroine’s lover shoots himself offstage; then her father shoots her mother for having borne him such a daughter; he then jumps into the Danube. And in the end, of course, Kattë shoots herself for bringing so much misery on everyone else by her sheer cursed attractiveness.

  ‘He knew that his plays were good; each one better than its predecessor. Mountain Air, the one about six women botanists and a male guide isolated in a snowstorm in a hut on the Andes, had been surer in its approach and handling than his first one, The Hidden Well, which concerned the seven men and one female nurse on the tsetse-fly research station … while Kattë dealt with an Austrian woman who was bandied about by the officers of a crack regiment in Vienna, and was, he felt convinced, his masterpiece.

  He was for ever thinking up new permutations and combinations.’

  Challis was rather transparently modelled on the writer Charles Morgan (1894-1958), whose play The Flashing Stream had been a big hit before the war. Morgan had annoyed Stella Gibbons in two significant ways: first, by arguing that a sense of humour was overrated in writers (the great Shakespeare had managed without one, he claimed); and second, for writing exasperatingly dreadful female characters along the lines of Kattë. In Westwood (Chapter 20), Challis’s cut-glass wife Seraphina is devastatingly frank about his lack of realism in this important area:

  ‘I don’t mean to butt in or be rude, and I do know everyone says you’re such a marvellous psychologist and I’m not highbrow or anything, but honestly you don’t know much about women. The women in your plays are such hags, darling; absolute witches and hags, if you don’t mind my saying so. I don’t know any women like them and I’ve known hordes of women.’

  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

  1

  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.