My pursuit of Barbara Comyns continues unabated. You may be getting sick of hearing about her but I have got into this mode which sometimes overtakes me where I have to just keep going, reading everything I can lay my hands on by and about the author I'm obsessed with. Very good when you're doing a PhD or writing a book but I am not doing either of those things. Anyway --
Like Out of the Red, into the Blue, which I wrote about a few days ago, this is actually an autobiography, though you can read it as a novel, if that makes sense. Either way, it tells a most bizarre story, and tells it in a bizarre fashion. Comyns apparently wrote it to amuse and entertain her children, and it is, of course, about her own childhood. The middle child of a family of six -- five girls, and a boy who is never mentioned in this book ("because I know they would hate to appear in it") -- Barbara was born in 1909 in Bradford-on-Avon, more or less in the centre of England, into a terrifyingly dysfunctional family. Her father, almost always furious and increasingly drunk, sinks further and further into despair as his business fails and his bills mount up, while her mother, struck with deafness after the birth of her last child, hates her children and retreats into an alcohol-infused fantasy world of phantom lovers. Granny lives in a smelly bedroom, shouts a lot, and treats the servants like slaves. Governesses come and go, the maids tell dreadful stories, the house runs to rack and ruin and the children run wild. Sounds appalling, doesn't it. But this a really funny and delightful book, or so it seemed to me. Here's an episode to give you an idea of what it's like. This happened when Barbara was four and had been put to sleep, for some reason, in Granny's bed (spelling and punctuation Barbara's own):
I woke up and found she wasn't in bed but walking up and down the room with her jaw all sticking out muttering to herself, she kept saying "I won't have it, I won't have it" I sat up in bed and said "what won't you have a jam tart" in my imagination I could see a criss cross raspberry one, but she said "Don't be so impertanant" so I didn't like to say anything else, but she kept marching up and down in her long white nighty and it got rather boring, I was almost asleep again, when there was a most frightful din in the room, Daddy, Mammy and Granny were all shouting and moping and mowing, then Mammy and Daddy started to push the poor old thing out of the window, Mammy got a bit frit and started to scream, but it was dreadful to see Daddy pushing and heaving away and Granny getting more and more out of the window, there were awful ghaspings and groanings going on from Granny and her flapping white nighty was all up at the back which seemed to make it worse somehow, Mammy looked quite sad, I guess she felt sorry for her when she was half in and half out like that, then she got stuck, it really was a mercy her hips were so wide and the window rather narrow...Granny did not appear till lunchtime, and everything seemed the same as usual then, her eyes were rather red maybe and she didn't talk quite as much as usual but she eat masses of chicken and it was only boiled, when Daddy said "Have a little more Nance" she handed up her plate quite happily.
I could honestly go on endlessly about this book. There are so many wonderfully horrific stories: the dreadful relations ("We had an aunt who went mad, Aunt Minnie was her name, she was Daddie's youngest sister. She had a square face and thought everyone was dirty, and wouldn't touch anything anyone else had touched..."); the children's appalling mistreatment of animals (hanging caterpillers, trying to ride on rabbits with predictably disastrous results); being made to wear awful clothes; Daddy and Mammy's dreadful rows, often culminating in Daddy throwing Mammy's clothes out of the window and Mammy threatening to throw herself in the river, Daddy throwing a beehive over Mammy, and much much more. It's a miracle really that any of the children managed to survive with any degree of sanity. But through it all, though they were not always exactly harmonious, the sisters seem to have managed to support each other. And Barbara herself is sustained, I think, by her ability to snatch moments of intense happiness, rowing alone down the river at dawn, cherishing her much loved dogs, even seeing God in the billiard room ("I knew it was God although he looked like an enormous parchment coloured bag drawn up by the neck with cord, I had been expecting to see Him for a long time but I couldn't help being rather overcome and fainted").
The saddest part of the story is the end, when Daddy dies and the debts are found to be so enormous that the house has to be sold, Mammy is left with hardly any money to live on, and Barbara, aged just sixteen, goes off to be a kennel maid in Cornwall. Astonishing, really, to reflect on the way her life would develop later. Amazing, wonderful stuff.