coming of age

“Relationships of people are never established, are ever mutable, wavering like seaweed on a tide.” (Emma Smith, The Far Cry)

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After a slight disappointment previously with Death of Jezebel, I wanted a sure-fire winner to continue my 1949 Club reading. hosted by Kaggsy and Simon, and where better than a Persephone Book? Number 33 is The Far Cry by Emma Smith,  which I really enjoyed.

Teresa is a young teenager living with her unbending Aunt May. They constantly lock horns, while her father is an intermittent presence, and her mother… “Lilian was his second wife who, for 10 years, had pleased everyone by living in America.”

One day, Teresa and May are in usual domestic conflict, when everything changes:

“As this was plainly a lie, the fright increased. Teresa’s face appeared to go even thinner and Aunt May’s face to grow fatter, in the same way as the qualities of light and shade alter immediately before a thunderstorm. However, no storm broke as at that moment Teresa’s father arrived.”

Randall Digby, her father, has decided to take Teresa to India, where her half-sister Ruth is living in Assam with her tea-planter husband. Mr Digby is doing this to spite his ex-wife, who he believes is returning to England to take Teresa back. Teresa isn’t asked her preference regarding her living arrangements.

Smith isn’t afraid to make her characters unlikable: May is inflexible, Teresa is volatile and spiky, and Mr Digby is vain and self-indulgent. Yet the author shows compassion towards her characters:

“The tender gesture she needed from her father he was unable to give, having for too long expected tender gestures from others, and for too long been disappointed. It was difficult to imagine anyone loving Mr Digby: he was not lovable. Nor was Teresa.”

The two of them set sail from Southampton. Smith was part of a documentary team for the BBC who had gone to India a few years previously to take footage for the Tea Board (scripted by Laurie Lee!) She kept a diary which directly informed The Far Cry and there are many wonderful descriptions of the journey:

“On either side of the boat stretched miles and miles of sun coloured land, drier than raisins, not steaming, as green and earthy places steam, but nervously shimmering, as though the whole wide territory was on the move and might at any moment take off into space as easily as its sand, having no weight, shifts and sorts and piles itself when the desert winds blow. Now and then, growing close to the water, were date palms and tamarisk trees.”

Teresa and her father don’t become particularly close onboard the ship or subsequent train journey. Mr Digby finds Mr Littleton, a friend who will indulge his stories of his hard-done-by life, his unrecognised writerly genius. Again, Smith is more forgiving of her characters than I am and even I found the following passage truly affecting, despite my dislike of Mr Digby:

“Mr Digby was at heart an honest man, but his moments of lucid honesty were few and far between, and as he grew older he had contrived to space the more and more widely. They were, when they came, so devastating, they showed him such terrifying sights, such abysmal depths, such snows and glaciers ahead, such scorched earth behind, that he lost courage to face another day, and, but for his fear of dying, would have liked to cease upon that very midnight with as little pain as possible.”

When Teresa falls ill, she is cared for by Miss Spooner, a truly wonderful creation. Elderly and a spinster, Miss Spooner refuses to compromise to social niceties beyond politeness, but is always open to new experiences. Mr Digby dislikes her of course, because she doesn’t soothe his immense fragile ego. Although he tells himself his dislike is because:

“Miss Spooner had never justified her womanly organs by being the comforter and support of a man, or the maker and preserver of little children (little boys whom he hated, little girls who bored him—but it was the principle that counted).”

Ha! There are moments of humour like this in the novel, but although some critics, including Elizabeth Bowen, describe The Far Cry as a comedy, for me it wasn’t comedic. There is an awful lot of sadness, yet Teresa’s adolescent awkwardness and indignation stop it from being depressing.

When they arrive at their destination, the perspective shifts somewhat, from Teresa to her deeply unhappy sister and husband. I thought this description of beautiful, vacuous Ruth was blistering:

“Ruth revolved in a world of mirrors, for every person she met was her looking glass in front of which she arranged herself, blind to everything but her own image reflected in faces that were, on their own account, of no interest to her whatsoever.”

Her husband Edwin is loving but cannot make her happy:

“He looked about him and liked almost everything he saw. He was curious, as a child is curious, about everything, only unlike a child he seldom asked why. He drew no conclusions and made no pronouncements.”

And so in the latter part of the novel we follow this fractious and fractured family as they adjust to life together and Teresa falls in love with her new home. She adores India, feeling more strongly for it than she does for any of her relations. Smith gives her more insight into the people she lives with than anyone else has, but she is also too young to make any meaningful gestures towards intimacy.

While a 1949 portrait of India by a white British woman has undoubtedly dated, particularly in one character portrait, one surprising element of the novel for me was that I expected more racism. Mr Digby is racist, but this is portrayed as one of his myriad character-failings, there is no authorial endorsement. Edwin holds a strange mix of racist views and progressive attitudes around cultural appropriation. I was genuinely surprised, and if similar concerns were causing you to hesitate about picking this novel up, I hope this helps!

The Far Cry is a coming-of-age novel in the gentlest sense, although major life events happen for Teresa. We see her gradually grow and change, deepening her understanding of people and the world, but without huge epiphanies. She has to deal with tragedy along the way, and this is portrayed without sensation.

“There was no one to teach to them what they had to know to be peaceful: that they were their own experience. That they were equally everything and nothing. That they could only be everything when they were content to be nothing. That they carried this balance like air and water wherever they went, whatever they saw, whoever spoke to them, whatever happened.”

I tried to find the BBC footage that Emma Smith and her team may have shot, as BBC Archive has uploaded so many incredible old stories to YouTube. I couldn’t locate it but I did find this wonderful report from the Club year; the footage of ‘Blitzed acres’ around St Paul’s four years after the war is particularly striking:

“Waiting for something to happen in the deathly, unhappy silence.” (Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls)

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This is the first of what I hope will be a few posts for Cathy’s annual Reading Ireland Month aka The Begorrathon.

I really enjoyed August is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien when I read it a few years ago, and resolved to read The Country Girls trilogy. Admittedly it’s taken me a while but I have finally picked up the first in the trilogy, and O’Brien’s debut novel, The Country Girls (1960). Cathy and Kim are also hosting A Year with Edna O’Brien throughout 2025 so I’m joining in with that too 🙂

The girls of the title are Cait and Baba, growing up in 1950s rural Ireland, and the tale is told by Cait. Once again, I found O’Brien so intensely readable. She is great at small details that illuminate so much, without overwriting:

“Slowly I slid onto the floor and the linoleum was cold on the soles of my feet. My toes curled up instinctively. I owned slippers but Mama made me save them for when I was visiting my aunts and cousins; and we had rugs but they were rolled up and kept in drawers until visitors came in the summer-time from Dublin.”

Cait lives with her parents and man-of-all-work Hickey, on their farm which is hanging on by a thread, not helped by her father going on frequent alcohol benders. Her mother is loving but they all live in fear of her father’s return and the violence he brings.

“Her right shoulder sloped more than her left from carrying buckets. She was dragged down from heavy work, working to keep the place going, and at night-time making lampshades and fire-screens to make the house prettier.”

Baba’s family is better off financially, but they have their own sadnesses including her mother also self-medicating with alcohol. Baba can be a spiteful bully, but Cait experiences a growing awareness of how much Baba needs her too.

“Coy, pretty, malicious Baba was my friend and the person whom I feared most after my father.”

Village life is not idyllic in O’Brien’s world. There is a lot of poverty, there is violence, deep unhappiness and gossip. The girls are subject to the sexual attentions of much older men, even as they are at school.

Cait is academic and wins a scholarship to a convent school. Baba’s family pay for her to have a place too, and so the girls leave their village for the first time.

Baba despises the school with her whole being:

“Jesus, tis hell. I won’t stick it for a week. I’ll drink Lysol or any damn thing to get out of here. I’d rather be a Protestant.”

O’Brien brilliantly creates the cold, the disgusting food, the boredom and the oppressive rules laid down by the nuns.

“The whole dormitory was crying. You could hear the sobbing and choking under the covers. Smothered crying.

The head of my bed backed onto the head of another girl’s bed; and in the dark a hand came through the rungs and put a bun on my pillow.”

Eventually Baba engineers a way for her and Cait to leave, which to my twenty-first century eyes was very funny, but perhaps contributed to the banning of the book in Ireland and the burning of it by a priest when it was first published.

So in disgrace, the girls make their way to Dublin and all the seductions of city life, which Baba in particular is keen to embrace.

“Forever more I would be restless for crowds and lights and noise.”

The scandal The Country Girls created in 1960 seems very dated now. The only part I found concerning was a relationship that Cait begins with Mr Gentleman, a married man much older than she is, when she is still at school. This continues throughout the novel; it remains unconsummated but is wholly inappropriate and what we would now call grooming.

Apparently O’Brien wrote this in three weeks which is just extraordinary. Her evocations of environment and people, her ear for dialogue and her fluidity of style are all so well observed.

The novel ends on an anti-climax which initially I found an odd decision, but reflecting on it I think it is one of its strengths. It emphasises O’Brien’s choice to write about the realities of life for young women at that time, the life she knew. It insists on its truth, more than overly dramatic scenes, to engage the reader.

I’m looking forward to catching up with Cait and Baba in The Lonely Girl – hopefully it won’t take me another two years!

“I was not sorry to be leaving the old village. It was dead and tired and old and crumbling and falling down. The shops needed paint and there seemed to be fewer geraniums in the upstairs windows than there had been when I was a child.”

To end, a great interview with the author from the time of her memoir being published. She discusses The Country Girls around 11 minutes in:

Colette Week: Day 1 – Claudine at School (1900)

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Last year I undertook to blog on a Novella a Day in May, which I really enjoyed. I’m hoping to do it again this year, but I fear I may end up delaying it until 2020. To tide me over I’m going to do a mini-version with a favourite writer who wrote short novels: Colette each day for a week, starting today as it’s her birthday.

I’ll begin obviously, with Colette’s first novel, Claudine a l’ecole which I read in English translation, Claudine at School (trans. Antonia White 1956). Claudine is fifteen and in her final year at school. She lives in Burgundy with her father, who is distant but loving, interested mainly in slugs. As a result, Claudine is left to her own devices; her voice is strong and distinctive but she can also be something of a bitch, manipulating people and freely giving out slaps and other violence to her classmates.

“My name is Claudine, I live in Montigny; I was born there in 1884; I shall probably not die there.”

There are some lovely descriptions of the countryside which Colette clearly had great feeling for:

“The charm, the delight of this countryside composed of hills and valleys so narrow that some are ravines, lies in the woods – the deep, encroaching woods that ripple and wave away into the distance as far as you can see….Green meadows make rifts in them here and there, so do little plots of cultivation.”

A new teacher arrives at the school, Aimee Lanthenay, and Claudine is immediately entranced:

“My English mistress seemed adorable to me that night under the library lamp. Her cat’s eyes shone like pure gold, at once malicious and caressing, and I admired them, not without reminding myself that they were neither kind nor frank nor trustworthy. But they sparkled so brilliantly in her fresh face and she seemed so utterly at ease in this warm, softly-lit room that I already felt ready to love her so much, so very much, with all my irrational heart. Yes, I’ve known perfectly well, for a long time, that I have an irrational heart. But knowing it doesn’t stop me in the least.”

Claudine is aware of her own attractions and confident in them, including her appeal to the school’s District Superintendent Dutertre, who she sees clear-sightedly as something of a lech. Ultimately however, she loses Aimee to her Headmistress:

“The class was well-trained now. All the girls even down to those in the Third Division knew that, during recreation, they must never enter a classroom in which the mistresses had shut themselves up… we found them so tenderly entwined, or so absorbed in their whisperings, or else Madame Sergent holding her little Aimee on her lap with such a total lack of reserve that even the stupidest were nonplussed”

The treatment of sexual attraction between women is dealt with frankly in the novel. It is never apologised for, explained away as schoolgirl crushes, or treated as anything extraordinary. Claudine is at once inexperienced but wise and somewhat cynical beyond her years:

“In a week she will possess another fiancée who will leave her at the end of three months; she is not cunning enough to hold the boys and not practical enough to get herself married. And, as she obstinately insists on remaining virtuous, this may go on for a long time.”

The plot is minimal, the novel is Claudine’s diary of her final school year and all that entails. Yet Claudine’s distinctive voice propelled me along as I wanted to see what the precocious teenager would do next.

“Papa was sending me to Paris to a rich childless aunt… How should I do without the country; with this hunger for green, growing things that never left me?”

The answer to that question tomorrow 😊