China Court (1961) by Rumer Godden

 

China Court – how can I describe this novel which has overtaken In This House of Brede as my favourite book by this author? This gem has languished on my shelves until the other day when I decided I need to be more serious about reading the books I already have. I joined in with Rose City Reader’s TBR 23 in ’23 Challenge at the beginning of the year in order to make some headway on my TBR but I’ve been derailed by the tug of more book finds. After I’d finished reading China Court I had a look through some of the other books I’ve had for a while and was inspired to be more focused on the challenge – I bought these books for good reasons, after all.  

In This House of Brede, surprised me as it wasn’t really quite what I was expecting. China Court had the same effect. Set in Cornwall, it is a novel about five generations of a family. The story weaves back and forth between generations in the telling, which could be confusing, but Rumer Godden shows her skill by ignoring some of the niceties of grammar while keeping continuity and suspense. I loved this book so much that when it finished I wanted to start it over again – not something I ever do, but I found it so hard to put the characters, and the house, aside. I re-read parts and lingered over her beautiful descriptions of people, place, and their histories, and wondered how I could do the book justice. I can’t, so I apologise that my ‘review’ isn’t what I would like it to be.

The story focuses on a number of different characters that have been involved with the Quin family of China Court from around 1840 to 1960. Framing the novel, and later playing an integral part in the outcome of the story, is a medieval Book of the Hours. The central character linking the house and the characters is Mrs Quin, originally an outsider, and her granddaughter, Tracy.

Old Mrs Quin died in her sleep in the early hours of an August morning.

The sound of the bell came into the house, but did not disturb it; it was quite used to death, and birth, and life.
‘Cause of death, stopped living,’ wrote Dr Taft on the certificate…’

I counted over thirty characters who play significant roles in this novel and it’s a measure of Godden’s skill that I find I can readily picture them all. From Eustace and Adza and their brood of nine – the bitter and tragic Eliza who questioned why she knew so little and was told it was her girls’ school education and followed the advice given her,

’In this country, at this time, there is only one way to educate a girl…Turn her loose with books, guide her, but let her read.’

The tragic, arrogant Lady Patrick and her faithless husband, Jared; beautiful Damaris who pined her short married life away in the city when her heart was in the Cornish moors; Minna, the young girl so homesick for her snow-covered Swiss homeland and Groundsel who loved her,

To Minna, washing up is a thing of beauty…Groundsel, who has seen the other maids throw everything higgledy-piggledy into the sink, is charmed.

Peter, the young man Mrs Quin came to love almost as a son, believed in and helped him by letting him use her land of Penbarrow for his farming…‘How could you die?…I was going to surprise you.’ He had harvested his real crop, built his first hayricks, and at long last started his herd. Tonight or tomorrow now – ‘’Please God not tonight,’’ said weary Peter – his first calf would be born: it would be the firstborn, first fruit, and, little heifer or bull, he had planned to give it to Mrs Quin…The knell that had rung for Mrs Quinn had run for them all: China Court, Penbarrow, Peter, ‘finished.’

Mrs Quin, or Ripsie, as she was in her youth, was a thin, neglected, shabby little girl who loved China Court and hovered around on the edges, was loved and brought into the family by one of its members, ’For him she always has the waif look that tears his heart, and he knows he is undone.’

Five children were born and then the granddaughter, Tracy, whom Mrs Quin loved. Circumstances forced her and Tracy apart when Tracy was twelve years of age and went to America with her mother. Mrs Quin gave Tracy a key to the house and told her she would come back. Tracy always longed for the home at China Court. The rest of the family thought the place should be sold. It needed too many repairs; there was no gas or electricity; looking after the house was domestic tyranny!

When Mrs Quin died, the family gathered together at China House to hear the reading of the will and to know the old lady’s wishes. It was said that both Tracy & Mrs Quin were enslaved by China Court and Tracy was determined to fight to keep the house if she could.

‘To keep’ had become for Tracy the most important verb in the English language…It means to watch over, take care of, maintain.

A stunning book! I took the photo of my copy of the book with my flowering azalea in full throttle in the background. I thought it was very in-keeping with Mrs Quin’s garden. 

 

An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden (1955)

 An Episode of Sparrows is another perceptive and sensitive novel by Rumer Godden. Godden’s writing is spare and unsentimental with a gritty realism, but also much beauty.

In the preface to this book she wrote:

'Finally the time came when I had to tell myself miserably, “You have squandered, muddled, and wasted everything, everything from opportunity to money. Wasted.”

There I was wrong. After the war years of hard work, poverty, and loneliness in Kashmir I needed that space of gaiety, companionship, even luxury, and I have come to believe that nothing is ever wasted; out of mistakes, or through mistakes, something quite worthwhile can come, in my case the seed of another novel.’

Living in the busy whirl of post-war London in a tiny little jewel of a house, she spent as much time as she could in the nearby park where she got to know the antics of the ‘London sparrows’- children from the poorer streets nearby. She picked her way through the bombed-out sections of London where weedy flowers pushed their way up through broken masonry and blossomed in the rubble.

Godden wrote that all her stories have themes underlying them, not actually stated, but there all the same. An Episode of Sparrows grew out of her stay in London but it wasn't until ten years later, in 1955, when she started to write it.

There are multiple characters in this story but the central figure, Lovejoy Mason, is a girl of about 11 years of age whose life held little love and no joy.

Lovejoy’s mother worked on the stage and had casually left her with Mrs Crombie and her husband, Vincent, a superb chef wasting away in an impoverished part of town with virtually no clientele, while she went off all over the place for work. From time to time the neglectful mother would return to her daughter who was devoted to her. Then there came a time when she didn’t come at all.

‘Mrs Crombie was kind, Vincent was very kind, but for Mrs Crombie there was really only Vincent and for Vincent there was only the restaurant. Lovejoy was a little extra tacked on.

She had never heard of a vortex but she knew there was a big hole, a pit, into which a child could be swept down, a darkness that sucked her down so that she ceased to be Lovejoy, or anyone at all, and was a speck in thousands of socks, ‘Millions,’ said Lovejoy, and then there was something called ‘no-one.’

The story revolves around a secret garden. Lovejoy who, with the help of some other London sparrows, steals some good soil from the rich neighbourhood gardens to start their own. Godden’s clever use of shifting perspectives brings in all the other supporting characters and gives us insight into their motivations, reactions and thoughts. 

Olivia and Angela are two unmarried sisters who live in the more prosperous area near Lovejoy. Olivia, the eldest, is dominated by her beautiful, high energy and opinionated younger sister. When Olivia finds a small footprint in the garden bed that points to the soil thieves, she says nothing and her heart is stirred to find out more about the Sparrows.

“It was not the absence of a man that Olivia regretted so much, though she could have wished that both she and Angela had married…that blank in her life was not the worst, but I wish children were not so unknown to me…Olivia divined something in children, not in her nieces and nephews…who were precocious and spoilt, but in the children who were let alone, real children…they seemed to her truer than grown-ups, unalloyed; watching them, she knew they were vital; if you were with them you would be alive, thought Olivia.”

As Lovejoy planted her garden in the bombed ruins of a churchyard, her soul grew along with her seedlings…

‘At night now, when she went to bed, she did not lie awake feeling the emptiness; she thought about the garden, the seeds, their promised colours. She had never before thought of colours…except in clothes, thought Lovejoy; now she saw colours everywhere, the strong yellow of daffodils…the deep colours of anemones; she was learning all their names; she saw how white flowers shone and showed their shape against the London drab and grey. She was filled with her own business. She had never had her own business before; directly after breakfast, on her way to school, she went to the garden and was thinking about it all day long.’

She spent most of her time waiting…for her mother to wake up in the mornings; waiting for her while she tried on clothes or went shopping; waiting outside pubs.

‘Why did people take it for granted that children had all that time to waste? I want to garden, not wait, she thought rebelliously.’

Rumer Godden’s writing is similar in some aspects to Elizabeth Goudge’s. They both were both masters of characterisation and understood human conflict. Godden’s style is terse, Goudge tends to be rambling and more philosophically inclined but both were adept at thematic undertones. I think Rumer Godden had a greater insight into children - The Greengage Summer is another example of her way of seeing from a child’s perspective.

Although both of the books just mentioned are focused on children, there are some themes that make them more suited to older readers. Greengage has some obvious mature content, An Episode of Sparrows only has one aspect that would make me hesitate to give it to a younger person - Lovejoy’s mother would entertain her male friends in her room while her daughter sat forlornly on the steps outside. It was a passing observation so it would probably go over a child’s head. However, I’d hold off until about age 14 because there is an underlying richness that may not be appreciated or understood by a younger child. From an adult point of view it is a story that has staying power and lingers in your mind and heart afterwards.

Both authors have been unjustly neglected but Elizabeth Goudge has made a comeback in more recent years and from what I’ve read this has been largely initiated by book bloggers. (Yay!) Rumer Godden’s works need a similar revival.

Biography | Rumer Godden