Tom Tiddler’s Ground Read online

  Ursula Orange

  Tom Tiddler’s Ground

  “Is Florence looking after the house all right? I thought it was rather touching of her to say she would like to stay and be bombed with you. Mind you put her underneath when you’re lying down flat in an air-raid.”

  Caroline Cameron is charming and witty, no doubt—but also superficial, and a bit immoral. When we first meet her, at the beginning of Ursula Orange’s delightful novel of the early days of World War II, married Caroline is contemplating an affair with an actor. But then war intervenes, and Caroline and her young daughter evacuate to the quiet village of Chesterford to stay with school-friend Constance Smith.

  The two women couldn’t be more different. Warm-hearted, generous Constance surprises the local billeting officer with her delight at welcoming evacuees into her home. But she has also made a catastrophic marriage to salesman Alfred. As they weather the storm of blackouts, shelters, and village drama, it’s ultimately the women’s differences that allow them to bring out the best in each other and let peace (of a sort) reign again.

  Tom Tiddler’s Ground is a rollicking, irresistible tale of troubles on the Home Front. This new edition features an introduction by Stacy Marking.

  “Miss Orange’s very considerable gifts have all been requisitioned to make this a book not only of first-rate entertainment, but of literary excellence in its special light comedy genre.” New York Times

  “The whole story is a sparkling piece of fun.” Daily Telegraph

  FM10

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Stacy Marking

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  About the Author

  Titles by Ursula Orange

  Furrowed Middlebrow Titles

  Begin Again – Title Page

  Begin Again – Chapter One

  Copyright

  Introduction

  On the first page of a notebook filled with carefully pasted press cuttings, Ursula Orange has inscribed, in touchingly school girlish handwriting: Begin Again, Published February 13th 1936. Later she adds: American Publication Aug 7th 1936, and then a pencilled note: Total sales 1221.

  She was 26, a young married woman, and this was her first novel. There are plentiful reviews from major publications in Britain, Australia and America. Begin Again by Ursula Orange is included in the Washington Herald’s Bestsellers’ list for August 1936, where it comes higher than Whither France? by Leon Trotsky. The Daily Telegraph praises her insight into “the strange ways of the New Young, their loves, their standards, their shibboleths, and their manners … An unusually good first novel, in a decade of good first novels.”

  To be greeted as the voice of the new generation must have been thrilling for a young writer, and a year later her second novel was published. To Sea in a Sieve opens with the heroine Sandra being sent down from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, the college which Ursula herself had so recently left. Rebellious and in pursuit of freedom, Sandra rejects convention, marries an ‘advanced’ and penniless lover, and the novel lightheartedly recounts the consequences of her contrariness.

  But despite her light tone, Ursula Orange takes on serious themes in all her work. She explores the conflicts between generations, between classes, between men and women. Her characters embrace new and modern attitudes to morality, sex and marriage, and take adultery and divorce with surprising frivolity. She understands young women’s yearning for independence, their need to express themselves and to escape the limitations of domesticity – though she often mocks the results.

  In 1938 she had her first child, Gillian, and by 1941 when her third and most successful novel, Tom Tiddler’s Ground, was published, the chaos of war had overshadowed the brittle ‘modern’ world of her generation. With her husband now away in the army, Ursula and her small daughter left London to take refuge in the country, where she could observe firsthand the impact of evacuation on a small English village (just as her heroine Caroline does in the novel).

  Tom Tiddler’s Ground is set in 1939-40, the months later known as the “phoney war.” The evacuation of London is under way, but the horrors of the Blitz have not yet begun. The clash between rustic villagers and London evacuees, the misunderstandings between upper and lower classes, differing approaches to love and children, the strains of war and separation on relationships and marriage: all these indirect effects of war provide great material for the novel. The Sunday Times describes it as “taking a delectably unusual course of its own, and for all the gas-masks hiding in the background, [it] is the gayest of comedies.” It’s a delightful read to this day, and includes an astonishing number of elements, ingeniously interwoven – bigamy, adultery, seduction, fraud, theft, embezzlement, the agonies of a childless marriage and the guilt of a frivolously undertaken love affair.

  The book reveals a real talent for dialogue and structure. As Caroline arrives for the first time at her new home in a Kentish village, the scene, the plots and sub-plots, the major characters and the themes are all established on a single page, almost entirely in dialogue.

  “Red car,” said Marguerite ecstatically as Lavinia’s Hulton sports model, with Alfred in the driving seat, drew up alongside.

  “Excuse me,” said Caroline, leaning out, “but can you tell me where a house called The Larches is?”

  “The Larches!” Alfred was out of his seat in a minute, and advancing with outstretched hand: “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mrs. Cameron?”

  “Good God!” said Caroline, taken aback. “So you’re – are you Constance’s husband by any chance, or what?” (It might be. About forty. Not bad-looking, I will say that for Constance. That slick, smart, take-me-for-an-ex-public-schoolboy type. Eyes a bit close together.)

  “Yes, I’m Captain Smith.” (Caroline found her hand firmly taken and shaken.) “And Constance and I are very very pleased to welcome you to Chesterford.”

  “But that isn’t Constance,” said Caroline, feebly indicating Lavinia. Alfred gave an easy laugh.

  “Oh no! Constance is home waiting for you.” (Or I hope she is and not hanging round after that slum-mother and her brat, curse them.) “This is Miss Lavinia Conway,” he said, taking her in a proprietary way by the elbow to help her out of the car.

  “How do you do?” said Caroline, recovering herself. (.... Who is this girl? Good God even I didn’t put it on quite so thick at her age. Can’t be Alfred’s little bit, surely?)

  Part of the entertainment throughout the novel is the contrast between the perfect politeness of everything expressed aloud, and the bracketed thoughts that are left unsaid. Ursula Orange uses the device not to convey complex interior monologue, in the way of Virginia Woolf or Joyce, but as a comic, sometimes cynical, commentary on her characters’ evasions and self-deception.

  The notices and sales for Tom Tiddler’s Ground were good, but Ursula must have been disconcerted to receive a personal letter from her new publisher, Michael Joseph himself. He had been away at the wars, he explains, and has been reading the novel in hospital. He writes that he was “immensely entertained” and predicts “that it is only a question of time – and the always necessary slice of good luck – before you become a really big seller …” But then he adds: “The only criticism that I venture to offer is that Caroline’s unorthodox behaviour … may have prevented the book from having a bigger sale. I think it is still true, even in these days, that the public likes its heroines pure.”

  Whether influenced by Michael Joseph’s strictures or no, in her next novel, Have Your Cake, the clashes of moral values, of hidden motives, of snobbery and class distinction, are not taken so lightly. Published in August 1942, it features an ex-Communist writer who (in the words of The Times) “is one of those devastating people who go through life pursuing laudable ends but breaking hearts and ruining lives at almost every turn.” But lives and hearts are not ultimately broken: the notices are good; sales figures top 2500 – evidently “the Boots Family Public”, and her publisher, were pleased.

  By 1944 when Company In the Evening was published, Ursula Orange’s crisp dialogue-driven style has altered. Told in the first person, with greater awareness and self-analysis, it is the story of Vicky, a divorcee whose marriage had been abandoned almost carelessly (and somehow without her ex-husband discovering that she’s having their child). Vicky finds herself coping single handedly in a household of disparate and incompatible characters thrown together by war. Less engaging than Ursula Orange’s earlier heroines, Vicky seems particularly hard on her very young and widowed sister-in-law, who is “just so hopelessly not my sort of person”, in other words what her mother would have called common.

  The novel is full of the taken-for-granted snobbery of the era – hard for the modern reader to stomach. In fact Vicky raises the issue, though somewhat equivocally, herself.

  “When I was about 19 and suffering from a terrific anti-snob complex (one had to make some protest against the extraordinary smugness and arrogance of the wealthy re
tired inhabitants … ) I practically forbade Mother to use the word ‘common’ … “Don’t you see, Mother, it isn’t a question of phraseology, it’s your whole attitude I object to.”

  But just as one starts to feel sympathetic, she adds:

  “Goodness, what mothers of semi-intellectual daughters of nineteen have to put up with!”

  As the novel progresses, Vicky’s faults are acknowledged, her mistakes rectified, her marriage repaired. She returns contentedly “to ordinary married life in the middle of the worst war ever known to history.”

  Perhaps this context is the point. The New York Times praises Ursula for her admirably stiff upper lip: “Ursula Orange, calmly ignoring as negligible all that Hitler has done, … has written a novel that is a wet towel slapped nonchalantly across the face of the aggressor. ” Her light and entertaining novels were indeed helping the nation to carry on.

  At last in 1945 war came to an end. English life returned to a difficult peace of deprivation and scarcity. Tim Tindall, Ursula’s husband, had been almost entirely absent for 5 years, a total stranger to their young daughter. He had had – in that odd English phrase – a ‘good war’, seeing action in North Africa, Salerno and France. After his return, the family opted for country life; Tim picked up the reins of the family’s publishing firm, commuting daily to London and an independent existence, while Ursula passed her time in Sussex with Gillian and her new baby son. That year she published one more novel, Portrait of Adrian, which escapes to an earlier period and the happier existence of young girls sharing a flat together in London.

  Ursula’s horizons seem gradually to narrow. She had been the smart, modern voice of a young and careless generation that no longer existed, and she did not find a new place in the post-war world. Severe depression set in, leading to suicide attempts and hospital treatments. Her literary life had virtually come to an end. She undertook two projects but these were never realized, perhaps because they were well before their time: an illustrated anthology of poetry for teenagers, a category as yet unnamed; and a play about Shelley’s as yet unheralded wives.

  In Footprints in Paris, (2009) their daughter, the writer Gillian Tindall, describes her mother’s decline as she becomes “someone who has failed at the enterprise of living…. London now began to figure on her mental map as the place she might find again her true self.” But the hope of finding a fresh life when the family moved to a new house in Hampstead, proved illusory. “Six days later, having by the move severed further the ties that had held her to life … she made another suicide attempt which, this time, was fatal. She was not found for two days.”

  But we cannot let this sad ending define the whole of Ursula Orange. It should not detract from our enjoyment of her work, which at its entertaining best, gives us a picture of a sparkling generation, of intelligent and audacious women surviving against the odds, with wit as well as stoicism, with courage in the face of deprivation and loss.

  Stacy Marking

  I

  “I am in a strange room,” thought Caroline in the moment of waking. She was right. The room was strange, and yet the things she saw on opening her eyes in the early morning light were all objects that had been familiar to her for all the eight years of her marriage. There stood the streamlined steel and glass dressing-table she had insisted on choosing as a wedding-present from her mother eight years ago. (“My dear, I am giving my daughter a surgeon’s trolley. It appears that that is what she really wants,” Mrs. Carruthers had told the family at the time, and Caroline of course had been faintly irritated as one was constantly being irritated at that age by the laughing indulgence of the elderly.) As a matter of fact Caroline now agreed with her mother and, if Mrs. Carruthers had still been alive, would not have minded telling her so. The girl who had married John Cameron eight years ago seemed to herself a totally different personage from the Caroline of July, 1939. She was quite ready to repudiate her past taste in furniture, together with most of her past opinions and ambitions. That perverted lamp-stand over there, for instance. That had been another horrible error of taste, and even John, who was not observant over such things, had said “My God!” when first it had risen from its wrappings in all its tormented, writhing, chromium ingenuity. (“Don’t you like it?” Caroline had cried, instantly on the defensive. Things like that—tiny things—had mattered so much in those days, perhaps because there was nothing big to worry about. Just as every one must have something to love, so every one needs something to make a fuss about.) However, tomorrow she would put the lamp-stand in the attic; and oh, what heaven to have an attic to put things in at last. Yesterday’s move had been exhausting, but how well worth while! Eight years in a modern flat, and now at last she and John were in a house with a glorious, a recklessly glorious, absence of all those amenities that had so intrigued her at first. No more central heating with those horrible radiators lurking under the window-sills, pretending invisibility while they dried up and cracked the shoddy woodwork. No more of those “off-white” (sometimes very off-white) net curtains over all the windows because their flat had looked across a well (or courtyard as the agents preferred to describe it) straight into the utterly similar rooms of her neighbours in the opposite wing. No more tiresome feuds with the porter, no more vindictive notes hastily scribbled and pinned on the front door (“Selfridges N.B. Please don’t leave sherry in hatch as somebody steals it. I am out, but Mrs. Clark in No. 10 is in and will take it in for me”); no more electric bars in the wall masquerading as fires, no more, in short, of that ridiculous attention to detail (inset soap-dishes, inferior refrigerators, let-down flap ironing-tables, chromium door-handles and the like) and that utter disregard of the real needs of two adults in a home—room to sprawl, room to be untidy, room to cook without catching your elbow on the table with every joggle of the frying-pan, room to keep a dog (yes, a barking dog if need be), room to keep a baby (yes, almost certainly a crying baby). Not that Marguerite (exasperating little devil, darling pet, rising two, the clever poppet) often cried now. Caroline cocked an ear for a moment, but heard, in the maternal phrase, “nothing”—meaning that she heard only a car changing gear in the road, an early train in the distance, three hoots from a taxi and a raucous barking from a sea-lion in the Zoo in Regent’s Park. (John had said that the Zoo might be rather noisy at night.) But perhaps in this house she wouldn’t hear Marguerite if she did cry. Blissful thought! Caroline looked at her watch—half-past five only—and snuggled down again. Nanny would be asleep, Marguerite would be asleep, Nanny’s sleep quite ordinary, Marguerite’s somehow slightly clever, touching and pathetic. Funny little thing, smugly asleep in her Viyella nightdress, so passionately individual, so supremely convinced of her own importance, and yet so hopelessly, utterly reliant on the world of grown-ups for absolutely all the necessities of life. Taking all the care and trouble lavished on her so completely for granted, taught to say “thank you” and yet blissfully devoid of the slightest inkling of the meaning of gratitude. Screaming defiance at one moment (“Don’t worry, Mrs. Cameron,” said Nanny, “they all go through this phase”), holding up her arms for comfort and reassurance the next, a minute later remote and withdrawn, all her being intensely concentrated on the task of trying to fit a red brick into a cup so obviously far too small. (“The child’s a half-wit, Caroline.” “Of course she isn’t, John. She’s just trying, that’s all.”) Every day exploring life, every day experimenting, mentally and physically—what would happen if I screamed and refused to have my shoes on? What would happen if I walked off the sofa? Watching, Caroline sometimes trembled aghast at the inexorable compulsion of life. Move on, move on, all the time like a policeman. Develop or die, no half-measures. Exhausting process! Fancy any one choosing to be a children’s nurse, Caroline would think, rushing to the sherry cupboard when Marguerite was at last safely in bed after Nanny’s day off. (That absurd, that awful battle in the park. Anything for the sake of peace, but you can’t let them take strange children’s golliwogs home with them.) Caroline turned over again in bed, chuckling at the memory of the golliwog battle.