A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and spoke to me when I was thinking of something else. Together we walked down a street that was lined with privet hedges. He told me his wife belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and I said I was sorry because that is what he seemed to need me to say and I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn kneecaps. We came to a great red railway arch that crossed the road like a heavy rainbow; and near this arch there was a vet’s house with a lamp outside. I said, “You must excuse me,” and left this poor man among the privet hedges.
So begins Barbara Comyns wonderful, strange, remarkable novel. This man plays no part in the plot, though he reappears for a second at the very end. The story is told by Alice Rowlands, aged about sixteen when the novel begins. She lives with her sad, sickly mother and her violent, bullying father in Clapham, south London. The time is the early twentieth century. Alice's home life is dreary, closed and oppressed. She feeds the sad, neglected animals, many of them destined for the vivisectionist. Her only friend is Lucy, who is deaf and dumb, and the two girls go for walks in Battersea Park, conversing on their hands. Her mother dies, and her father brings home Rosa, a barmaid, who he describes as his housekeeper. Alice acquires an admirer, her father's dull but kindly locum, who she calls Blinkers. Rosa tricks her into a frightening encounter with a man who says he is a head waiter but turns out to be a hotel porter. She goes to the country to be a companion to Blinkers' strange, suicidal mother. She falls in love with a handsome sailor. And she discovers that she possesses strange powers which confuse her and which finally bring about the novel's extraordinary ending.
As I tell you all this I am conscious that it will give you no idea of why this is such a great novel. Barbara Comyns writes like no one else I have ever read. Here as in her other novels it is the narrative voice that is so remarkable. Graham Greene wrote about her "strange offbeat talent", her "innocent eye which observes with childlike simplicity the most fantastic or the most ominous occurrences", and that perfectly encapsulates what makes her writing so exceptional. Strange, sad, frightening things happen to Alice. She is often
afraid and lonely, but she is also capable of great joy, in a stream of sunlight, picnics with little iced cakes, a ride in a car, the lovely houses and shops on the other side of the river, where "Children walked sedately beside elderly nannies who were pushing enormous prams. The prams had white canopies with fringes, and arranged on a frilly pillow would be a baby's flowering face". But whatever Alice sees or experiences is described in the same open, innocent way.
This novel manages to be both funny and sad, painful and uplifting. If you have never read Barbara Comyns then you absolutely must. And this would be a good place to start.
