I somehow managed to miss the announcement of Simon and Kaggsy's 1944 Club - I've actually ordered a book but I suspect it won't arrive in time for a review this week. However I found something in the archives - a book I'd enjoyed tremendously - so here's my review, first published eight years ago.
I'm guessing that L P Hartley is not exactly a name to conjure with these days. If you've been around long enough you might have seen the 1970 film of his most famous novel, The Go-Between ("The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there"), or indeed read the novel itself. Beautiful, romantic, and ultimately tragic, that novel is celebrated for its portrayal of childhood innocence betrayed by a pair of socially ill-matched lovers.
Here we have another take on early 20th-century childhood, though written in the early 1940s.The protagonist, from whose perspective the story is told, is Eustace, aged just nine when the novel begins. Gentle, sensitive, imaginative, Eustace lives much of his life in a dream world, from which he often has to be dragged unwillingly by his older sister Hilda. Their mother having died a few years earlier, Hilda has taken it upon herself to bring Eustace up according to her own strict and puritanical standards. Generally speaking Eustace is willing to comply -- his occasional inner rebellion against her educational policies is usually tempered by his own sense of guilt and unworthiness. In fact the only time he does really rebel, going off on a long cross-country run with lively, pretty Nancy Steptoe, ends in disaster as he has a weak heart and becomes seriously ill as a result. In retribution he has to obey Hilda's demand that he go and have tea with an old lady, Miss Fothergill, of whom he is terrified on account of her appearance and her inability to walk. Once he does overcome his fear, though, he takes great pleasure in his visits to her house, and after her death he gets a legacy which changes his entire future.
This is a beautifully written novel, fascinating in its depiction of these two children. We see Hilda only through the eyes of Eustace, who adores and fears her, but her motives are clearer to the reader. This is particularly true of her unwillingness to accept the frequent invitations she gets from wealthy, privileged Dick Staveley, who has noticed her beauty and tries to persuade her to go to tea or to go riding with him. Eustace thinks Hilda dislikes Dick and hates horses, but in fact the opposite seems to be true, and her refusal is probably owing to her puritanism and to an instinctive feeling that any relationship with Dick will turn out badly for her.
But it is Eustace whose inner life is most clearly seen and this is most wonderfully and perceptively done. I was a little bit reminded at times of William Maxwell's great novel, They Came Like Swallows, another book about a sensitive small boy. Hartley went on to write two more novels about these two, ending up with a trilogy which now often appears as one book under the title Eustace and Hilda.
