The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden
Well, I fell off the wagon last month with the Virago Group monthly read, and unfortunately didn’t manage to make it to a Margaret Laurence book; time just ran out and much as I wanted to, it wasn’t possible. However, this month’s author is Rumer Godden and I’ve been a little more successful with her….!
Initially I thought I didn’t have any Godden books in the stacks, so I thought I would give this one a miss too. However, something nagged in the back of my mind, and I had a dig about in a box of book club volumes I knew I had – and indeed, there was a lovely copy of “The Greengage Summer” I’d picked up at some point in the past and stashed away. Since the polyreading with “War and Peace” seems to be working, I decided it squeeze this one in before the end of the month, and I’m very glad I did.
Published in 1958, “The Greengage Summer” apparently draws on events in Godden’s life. Set in the 1920s, it tells the story of a summer in the life of the Grey children and their holiday in France that goes horribly wrong. The family is a dysfunctional one: the father is absent most of the time, a botanist travelling the world and seemingly with little time for his wife and children. Their mother copes as well as she can, with the help of her brother, Uncle William, but it is clear that as the children grow they are often more than she can manage. There are five of them: 16-year-old Joss, 13-year-old Cecil (who narrates), Hester, and then the ‘Littles’, Vicky and Willmouse. The family lives in genteel poverty in Southstone, a rather dull seaside town, helped out by Uncle William when needed. At the end of her tether one day, mother announces she will take them to France for a tour of the battlefields, which will be an education for them, and some legacy money is splashed out on this, despite Uncle William’s misgivings.
However, things go wrong almost straight away. Mother is bitten by a horsefly as the leave, and develops septicemia. By the time they reach the hotel at Les Oeillets, she is seriously ill and one of the hotel owners, Madame Corbet, wants to turn the family away. They are rescued by the arrival of Eliot, a young and glamorous Englishman, in the company of Madame Zizi, the hotel’s other owner. He whisks mother off to hospital and takes the children under his wing. But is this young man entirely what he seems?
So the children muddle through the summer, pretty much left to their own devices and finding their own kind of entertainment and enjoyment. Vicky attaches herself to M. Armand, the cook; Willmouse makes his own space and plans his future as a famous couturier; while Hester and Cecil pair off, spending far too much time with Paul, the general help, smoking and drinking at an alarmingly young age. Paul is an interesting character, damaged and with a problem background, and the girls are being exposed to things they shouldn’t be. Unfortunately, on their arrival, Joss was also taken ill almost immediately, and spends much of the initial holiday in bed so the influence of the eldest child is missing. When she emerges, like a butterfly from its cocoon, she has blossomed into a beautiful young woman, and this beauty disrupts the fragile peace that has reigned over the group.
I wasn’t sure initially if I was going to like “Greengage”, as Godden simply drops you into the narrative and things are often explained a little later on. However, as the story and characters developed I became completely gripped and ended up reading too late into the night to finish the book! It is clear from the very start that Something Dreadful happened over the summer; the way Godden flags this up, with later comments from Uncle William and others scattered throughout the narrative, is clever, although perhaps became a little laboured towards the end.
But where Godden excels is in capturing mood and atmosphere. The uncertainty of adolescence, the confusion of young people who aren’t told what is going on and don’t really understand the implications of things and the shock of provincial English children being exposed to a richer, French life is brilliantly portrayed. The children suddenly experience a more open way of living, away from morals and parental intervention (which is not necessarily a good thing, as becomes clear!) And the long hot days, the sense of time stretching on forever, the feeling of being away from the rest of the world, comes across vividly.
Godden also draws her characters well: Joss and Cecil were particularly vivid; Willmouse wonderfully realised; but Vicky and Hester perhaps a little more shadowy. However, despite it being an engrossing read, I didn’t find “The Greengage Summer” completely without flaws, and that’s perhaps hard to discuss without spoilers. But I did agree very much with a comment made by one of the other members of the Virago group in that the book is an odd mixture of coming-of-age tale and thriller and that doesn’t always quite work for me. The plot of encountering an adult world with the emotional complexities and jealousies would have worked well enough on its own, but the thriller element of the story almost deflected attention from that.
Nevertheless, this *was* a wonderfully evocative read; the writing is lovely and the lost world it evokes is quite beautifully portrayed. And I’m quite curious now to find out about the real events in Godden’s life that inspired the book so I may have to search out her autobiography! 🙂
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