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| Virago Modern Classics UK, 2013 |
The doctor gave a few hints and words of advice, and said I was to visit him in about a month. Then he had gone and we were left alone, but we were not alone any more. Charles said, 'Oh dear, what will the family say? How I dislike the idea of being a Daddy and pushing a pram!' So I said, 'I don't want to be a beastly Mummy either; I shall run away.' Then I remembered if I ran away the baby would come with me wherever I went. It was a most suffocating feeling and I started to cry.
Charles kissed me then and said it was no use crying about something that was not going to happen for seven months, I might have a miscarriage before then. I was almost more scared of having a miscarriage than having a baby, so I went on crying.
The Novel: Impulsiveness is generally portrayed as being an attractive quality in the modern world, one frequently associated with spontaneity and a certain youthful insouciance. To be impulsive, we're told, is to be unfettered and adventurous, living in and for the moment instead of settling down to plan ahead for a dull but steady future. It's a quality particularly associated with artists, whose creative powers allegedly thrive on instability and the rejection of repressive bourgeois values. Artists are entitled to be arrogant, petulant and selfish, we're often reminded, because their talent makes them a breed apart to whom the standard rules of human conduct must not be applied.
But a life lived by impulse also has its drawbacks –– a fact made distressingly clear by Barbara Comyns in Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, her brief second novel published in 1950. Comyns makes her point by juxtaposing childlike innocence with an unflinching adherence to the truth of what it meant to be young, poor, female and pregnant in the Depression ravaged London of the 1930s. What begins as something picaresque and charming gradually becomes disturbing and, on occasion, horrifying as we're shown the price paid by Sophia Fairclough for indulging her whims with little to no regard for what doing so will cost her financially, socially, sexually or psychologically.
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| Virago Modern Classics UK, 1983 |
Sophia, a pretty if rather ditzy commercial artist, meets a self-centred painter named Charles on a train one day and, against the wishes of their respective families, marries him when they both turn twenty-one. They move into a small London flat 'with use of bath and lav,' which they decorate themselves and furnish with pieces which conform to their quirky bohemian standards of beauty, then settle down with a cat and Sophia's pet newt to a poor but happy life financed by the £2 she earns each week at her 'unartistic' advertising job. Although they sometimes argue about money, these arguments typically end with Charles cashing one of the cheques his father gave them as a wedding present and taking his bride to an art gallery or a movie and then to an Italian restaurant for a cheap but filling supper. Sophia, however, secretly frets about their finances while Charles, after a few halfhearted attempts to find paid work of his own, spends every minute of his time feverishly drawing and painting, becoming concerned about their financial situation only when he can't scrape together the few shillings required to purchase a new pack of cigarettes.
Unable to pay the milkman or afford the fuel needed to heat their flat in winter, Sophia soon makes matters worse by committing the ultimate bohemian sin of falling pregnant. Like her similarly clueless husband, she is horrified by the prospect of parenthood, admitting at one point that she '…had a kind of idea if you controlled your mind and said "I won't have any babies" very hard, they most likely wouldn't come." I thought that was what was meant by birth-control, but by this time I knew that idea was quite wrong.' Nor is the situation helped by Charles's insistence that he doesn't want children because their presence is certain to interfere with his work, unremunerative though it remains despite the few small commissions he has recently obtained. He hopes Sophia will have a miscarriage and even suggests keeping the baby in a cupboard if she does insist on giving birth to it to spare them the bother and expense of shifting to a larger flat.
Too poor to enter a nursing home to deliver her baby after being fired from her job, and with Charles's unsympathetic harridan of a mother unwilling to help them financially, Sophia enters a charity hospital as an indigent patient, sharing a ward with similarly deprived mothers, the majority of whom hail from the insalubrious East End. Scared and alone –– Charles having been packed off by the nurses after bringing her to the hospital –– Sophia has a very nasty time of it in what passes for the Maternity Ward, bullied by staff who dose her with castor oil and treat her like an ignorant slut. 'They kept me on the move all the time,' we are informed in her frank if naïve way, 'and the only thing I wanted was to be left alone in privacy… I had begun to think it was a disgraceful wicked thing to do –– to have a baby.' After a long and difficult labour she gives birth to a son who, despite her misgivings, turns out to be perfectly healthy if slightly under weight. But this happy news comes with a sting in its tail. 'I couldn't help crying when I heard it was a boy, because I knew there wasn't much chance of Charles liking it, now it was a boy –– he particularly disliked little boys.' This proves to be the case when Sophia takes the boy, named Sandro by her husband in honour of his favourite Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli, home to their new flat which, thanks to Charles's total lack of housekeeping skills, she finds in a state of near decay. 'Charles still disliked him,' she later reveals, 'but in spite of this made some drawings of us together, so I hoped eventually he would get used to him. At the moment I felt I had most unreasonably brought some awful animal home, and that I was in disgrace for not taking it back to the shop where it came from.'
The arrival of Sandro complicates matters, placing further financial pressure on them which is temporarily alleviated by Sophia, now recovered from her ordeal in the hospital, finding semi-regular employment as an artist's model. Becoming a mother also results in an invitation from her brother to visit him in the country –– a gesture that, while very beneficial to the health of Sandro and herself, is soon regretted by their host who, in the end, cannot wait to be rid of them. Sophia returns to Charles and their former, hand-to-mouth existence in the city, modelling when she can and even finding Sandro a job posing for a baby food advertisement. But life, while happy enough after Charles grudgingly accepts the fact that he's a father and there's nothing he can do about it, remains a precarious proposition for all three of them, never more so than during the colder months of the year when money must be found each day for coal and other necessities. By the time Sandro turns one, Sophia has come to the long postponed realisation that their situation has to change. 'I disliked the flat and the depressing road we lived in. I felt we were getting like it. We had lost most of our friends now and we never went to a theatre, film or party… Charles had got in such a rut he hardly knew he was alive. He never sold any paintings, because no one ever saw them… All this seemed to have no beginning or end.' The only solution is to move, which entails more expense but at least allows them to socialise again while Sophia, her own artistic aspirations rekindled by their stimulating new environment, takes up sculpting.
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| New York Review Books US edition, 2015 |
One of their new friends is a painter turned art critic named Peregrine Narrow who, sympathetic to Sophia's plight thanks to his own failed marriage and ruined romantic expectations, becomes her employer and eventually her closest confidante. Sophia soon comes to rely on Peregrine and his kindness, particularly after learning that she's fallen pregnant again. Charles's response to this announcement is unequivocal –– he runs out of the house and, when he returns several hours later, tells her she must rid herself of the unwanted child at once. By borrowing from friends and family they manage to scrape together £25 to pay for an illegal back alley abortion –– an operation it takes Sophia several weeks to recover from, further diminishing her earning power –– Sandro being packed off back to the country in the meantime to stay with Charles's aunt. Although Sophia misses her son terribly, his absence allows her to once again become the family breadwinner by taking another 'unartistic' clerical job in another commercial art studio. This, however, provokes a bitter argument with Charles, who fails to keep his promise to bring her some money so she can buy herself lunch on her first day at work. Arriving home to find him sitting cosily by the fire, she hits him with a chair, wishing after she does that they had never met or, better still, that she had died while giving birth to Sandro.
This incident, shocking and entirely unprecedented in their topsy-turvy marriage, paves the way for Sophia to have an affair with the kindhearted and sympathetic Peregrine –– a decision that leads to the guiltless realisation that she has never really loved Charles, only been fond of him in a casual companionate fashion. But her new relationship with Peregrine comes with its own set of problems. A sad, defeated man for whom fame and contentment will always remain elusive, Sophia soon grows weary of his company and longs to end their romance, eventually doing so only to learn soon afterward that she has fallen pregnant for a third time, this time by him. 'Why should all these babies pick on me,' she asks herself once the evidence of her latest pregnancy becomes too conclusive to ignore, 'and why at the most inconvenient times? Charles and I had been so happy lately, and now it was all ruined.' Peregrine suggests she tell her husband the new child is his, adding the cowardly caveat that she should let him know after this has been done if there is anything he can ever do to help her.
Sick with worry, Sophia hopes again to have a miscarriage, only to revile herself for thinking such a monstrously selfish thought. When Charles returns with Sandro, finally home from his prolonged sojourn in the country, she takes Peregrine's advice and tells him the new baby is his, only to have Charles confound her expectations by saying that he hopes the child will be a girl this time.
The new child is a girl and they name her Fanny. Her birth, while physically difficult, does not prove to be half the ordeal for Sophia that the birth of Sandro was thanks to some money she and her sister have recently inherited from a deceased, distantly related aunt. Charles even seems to grow fond of the child after she's born, paying a charwoman to come and clean their new, slightly larger flat before Sophia brings her home and then happily sketching the new arrival at every opportunity. Even the spineless Peregrine finds the courage to visit his daughter, occasionally borrowing a car from a friend so he can take her and Sophia driving in the country. But the last £5 of Sophia's limited inheritance is soon spent, leaving her stuck back where she started, this time with two children to feed and no support other than Charles to rely on because Peregrine has lost his job as an art critic and been compelled to move in with relatives.
Faced with a whole new set of financial burdens, Sophia and Charles quickly find themselves drifting apart as a couple. While she's stuck at home with Fanny all day and night –– Sandro having been conveniently packed off to the country again –– Charles goes out carousing with his friends, staying out so late that he seldom bothers returning home. With the gas cut off and winter fast approaching, an increasingly desperate Sophia finds herself resuming her affair with Peregrine, only to be informed by Charles shortly after making this mistake that he no longer loves her and wants a divorce. Life is too short, he explains, for him to be hamstrung by so many unwanted responsibilities. After likening him to Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, Sophia says she intends to move out and will be gone from the flat by the time he comes back –– a promise she keeps despite being sick with fever and having no money to pay the bus fare to Chelsea, the suburb in which the simpering Peregrine now resides.
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| Publisher and year unspecified |
Sophia finally arrives in Chelsea, walking most of the way in the rain with Fanny cradled in her arms, only to be greeted by an imperious woman who refuses to let her see her former lover. This woman turns out to be the draconian Mrs Narrow and she soon orders the frightened Peregrine to send Sophia away, which he dutifully and very caddishly does. But Sophia does not get far after being turned away from her former lover's doorstep. The following morning she is discovered by a policeman in the doorway of a nearby shop, delirious and suffering from what turns out to be a bout of scarlet fever. The constable takes her to hospital where her primary concern is that Fanny be fed. Still delirious, she is soon visited by Charles, who shows her the child for what proves to be the final time before going on his not-so-merry way again.
Sick and emotionally devastated by the loss of Fanny, Sophia is sent to stay with her brother and his wife who, unwilling to have her live with them permanently, find her a job as a cook-housekeeper for a widowed farmer named Mr Redhead and his two adult daughters. Sophia discovers after a time that country life suits her even though the work itself is tedious and her opportunities for enjoyment prove to be few and far between. Farm life also suits Sandro who, thanks to Mr Redhead's generosity, becomes a pupil at the local village day school –– a predicament he adapts to as easily as he has adapted to every other destabilizing predicament that being the child of Charles and Sophia has exposed him to. Gradually, Sophia's formerly penurious life in London becomes little more than a distant bittersweet memory, her three year stay with the Redheads seeing her receive only one letter from Charles in which he begs her again to divorce him. It is not her husband she misses, but the city of London –– its sights, smells, sounds and the joy of being surrounded by what she calls her 'treasures.'
Thankfully, life is not all bleakness and privation for Sophia. Her employer is kind to her, even allowing Sandro to keep a fox cub they have found and made a secret pet of despite his well-known aversion to the species. And then fate, as it will, intervenes in a most unexpected way. While she and Sandro are taking Foxy for a walk one day the animal becomes entangled in the legs of a young, grey-haired man named Rollo who turns out –– who could have guessed it? –– to be an artist. The stranger invites Sophia to pose for him and she does, beginning an unforeseen chapter of her life as surprising as it is, in most ways, atypical of her previous experiences of men and relationships.
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths is not really a cautionary tale despite the seemingly endless opportunities it appears to offer for self-righteous moralising at the expense of the likable if incredibly gullible Sophia. What saves it from becoming a cliché-driven potboiler is Comyns's clever decision to have her protagonist tell her own story in her own distinctive words –– words that, while ingenuous and sometimes infuriating, are also notable for their forthrightness, particularly when it comes to describing what were the horrors of childbirth for poor women prior to the establishment of a nationalized British healthcare system in the late 1940s. Sophia is uncommonly quick to admit that she has no idea know why she makes the decisions that she does and it is this sense of candour, combined with her ignorance and innocence, that makes her an endearing character despite her lack of foresight and, at times, even the most fundamental form of common sense.
Surprisingly, she never judges Charles or Peregrine for failing her and her children as spectacularly and, in the case of poor Fanny, as fatally as they do. She accepts their weaknesses, and their humanity, as she accepts her own failings and foibles –– not with rancour but with an understanding forged of harsh experience. As Emily Gould states in her introduction to this fascinating novel, it is 'easy for the reader to feel frustrated with Sophia, whose scraps of pride prevent her from being honest with anyone who might help her escape her poverty (and Charles)… But it's also possible that the subtle shifts in circumstance, from bohemian to broke, are more perceptible in retrospect, and it's believable that a young and under-informed woman without other experience of marriage would have no idea what the reality of having a child with a wastrel might entail.' The fact that these things are believable and that Sophia remains a sympathetic character only confirms what a fine and subtle writer Barbara Comyns was and what an unsung gift she had for constructing credible first person narratives out of what, on paper, must have seemed like very unpromising source material.
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| BARBARA COMYNS, c 1930s |
The Writer: Barbara Comyns Carr (née Barbara Irene Veronica Bayley) was born in Bidford-on-Avon, a small village in the English county of Warwickshire, in 1907. Her father was a successful brewer whose fondness for the product he manufactured eventually saw him lose his business, confining him, his deranged wife and their six children to his crumbling riverside estate. It was here that Comyns grew up, largely unsupervised and educated only piecemeal by a series of governesses who were no doubt put off by the many eccentricities displayed by her appallingly behaved family. Her unconventional childhood would later form the basis of her first novel, Sisters By A River, published by the English firm of Eyre and Spottiswood in 1947.
The death of Comyns's tyrannical father allowed her to attend art school in Stratford-on-Avon –– she had been writing stories and illustrating them herself since the age of ten –– after which she relocated to London where she became a pupil at the Heatherley School of Fine Art. (It was here, rumour has it, that she was introduced to printed books for the first time, allegedly never having owned or presumably even seen any as a child.) London was also where she met her first husband, the Warwickshire painter John Pemberton, whom she married in 1931. Extremely poor, they still managed to buy the materials required to draw and paint and exhibited their work in 1934 as members of the London Group of artists, a loose association of like-minded bohemians presided over by Pemberton's eccentric uncle Rupert Lee. Soon pregnant, Comyns was forced to give birth to the first of their two children (a daughter named Caroline would soon follow her son Julian into the world) in circumstances identical to those she recreated with such devastating accuracy in Our Spoons Came From Woolworths –– a point made all too plain in the sentence 'The only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters 10, 11 and 12 and the poverty' she added to the novel's title page.
Her marriage to Pemberton ended in 1935, after which she took up with a petty criminal named Arthur Price, living a peripatetic life with him and her children in London while taking a series of jobs –– which included, at various times, commercial artist, model, poodle breeder, interior decorator, antique dealer and seller of classic cars –– in order to support them. In 1939, with World War Two newly begun and her economic situation more dire than ever, she separated from Price and took a job as a cook/housekeeper in a country house in Herefordshire. (Another experience that found its way into Our Spoons Came From Woolworths despite her claim that its plot was largely the product of invention.) It was here that she began to write again, inventing macabre stories to entertain her children and working on the literary sketches, based on her own childhood, that would in time be expanded to become her first novel.
Comyns married her second husband, a civil servant named Richard Comyns Carr who was employed by the British Foreign Office, in 1945. It was on their honeymoon in a Welsh cottage (owned by Cambridge don turned Soviet spy Kim Philby) that she conceived the plot of what would become her most acclaimed novel The Vet's Daughter (1959). This book, set in Edwardian times and praised by Graham Greene (who described hers as 'a strange offbeat talent'), would later provide the plot for an unsuccessful 1978 musical The Clapham Wonder. Comyns started working on the book as soon as she returned to London, but put it aside to write Our Spoons Came From Woolworths and another novel set in Spain –– where she and her husband moved in 1950 to save money after he lost his Civil Service job –– titled Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954).
Spain remained home to the couple until 1973, Comyns's literary reputation having been consolidated in her absence from England by the publication of her novels The Skin Chairs (1962), Birds in Tiny Cages (1964), A Touch of Mistletoe (1967) and a memoir titled Out of the Red Into the Blue (1960) which primarily described their lives as perpetually cash-strapped economic exiles. Comyns's next novel, The Juniper Tree, did not appear until 1985 and was followed in 1987 by Mr Fox, a novel based on her life with Arthur Price, and what proved to be her final published work of fiction, the poorly received The House of Dolls (1989).
Barbara Comyns survived her husband and died in 1992 at the age of eighty-four. She is buried in St Andrews Churchyard in the village of Stanton-upon-Hine Heath, her final home in the English county of Shropshire.
Use the link below to read an article about BARBARA COMYNS posted on the blog of independent publisher Emily Books (co-owned by EMILY GOULD) in August 2016:
Some novels by BARBARA COMYNS, including Our Spoons Came From Woolworths (1950), Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) and The Vet's Daughter (1959), may still be available to borrow or purchase from your local library, bookstore or preferred online provider.
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