The Skin Chairs – Barbara Comyns (1962) 200 pages

I really enjoy Barbara Comyns. Her voice is so distinct, uniquely hers. She can present traumatic events – in The Skin Chairs, parental death, bullying and poverty – with an equanimity of tone which offers an idiosyncratic resilience.

The Skin Chairs is narrated by ten-year-old Frances. It opens with her going to stay with horrible relatives to give her mother a break from her six children; four girls and two boys. Frances’ Aunt Lawrence is a bully and her daughter Ruby is completely cowed by her, while her daughter Grace is her favourite and as such, completely unbearable.

“It was no wonder that the Lawrence family were so spiteful; it was dreadfully catching and gave one such a feeling of power.”

Frances’ stay with her relatives is extended as while she is away, her father dies. Ultimately her mother and her siblings move into a new house nearby called The Hollies. This gives the Lawrences a distressing amount of power over Frances’ mother, who struggles to adapt to her straitened circumstances.

“She never went shopping, although she ordered meat when the butcher called at the house (the fishmonger soon stopped calling because he said it wasn’t worth it when we always ordered herrings), and I think she would have considered it the final degradation to have been seen carrying a shopping basket.”

Her mother does learn to cook, but even that isn’t quite right:

“Mrs Hand prepared vegetables and we washed up, so she had none of the drudgery. Delicious iced cakes appeared on the table at teatime, vol-au-vent, lobster croquettes and chicken soufflés at midday and savoury supper in the evening. The little ones became bilious and, when Polly discovered that we had spent nearly a month’s supply of money in a week, we went back to stews and rice puddings, fish pie and baked apples.”

There isn’t much plot, except as Frances takes us through her days. Dramas are generally short-lived. The family struggle for money, and Frances struggles with her schoolwork.

We get to know others on the village. There is an appalling ongoing thread with a mother neglecting her child so she can have an affair with a Major. There is also the utterly eccentric Mrs Alexander who bombs around in a bright yellow car, wears gold shoes polished daily by her chauffeur, and keeps a menagerie of animals in cages:

“She had once kept a bear, but people had complained because it used to break into church during the services, and it had to be given to a zoo. ‘I sometimes wonder why I ever returned to England, so many unpleasant things happen here’.”

As with all the Comyns I’ve read there is cruelty present. Not least with the chairs, belonging to a General and said to be made from human skin. The cruelty is never dismissed although no-one is demonised, and Frances’ child’s view doesn’t obfuscate. It is presented without sensation.

Thankfully there is kindness too. Mr Blackwell arrives in the village, incredibly rich and kind to Frances during a time of acute distress. He doesn’t meet the Lawrences’ standards however:

“Then Aunt Lawrence told us the man was not a ‘gent’ at all, but a retired brass-founder. He was rolling in money, he owned an appalling Birmingham accent and would be quite impossible to know. I imagined him rolling in brassy coins all alone and felt sorry for him planning to live in a village where no one would know him.”

The horrible central image of The Skin Chairs suits Comyns well. She is so clever at presenting the domestic, but making it unnerving and almost Gothic. Yet The Skin Chairs is also gentle, and the characters – even the dreadful ones – treated with compassion. I’ve a few other Comyns’ languishing in the TBR and this made me keen to get them!