Poor Dear Charlotte - rounding up Anabel Donald's books

 Poor Dear Charlotte by Anabel Donald

published 1985

 

 

I very much enjoyed recently re-reading Anabel Donald’s Notting Hill mysteries: I had also read a couple of her straight novels in the past, but not this one. So I gave it a go.

And what a strange book it is, and not one you would associate with the private eye stories of Alex Tanner.

It is a book of two halves, each equally unlikely-seeming.

When we first meet Charlotte she is a teacher in a private girls’ boarding school in the Cotswolds. It sounds more like a place from the 1950s to be honest. She goes on a schooltrip to the Baltic states and the Soviet Union (as it then was) with some tourist details shoehorned-in from time to time: ‘the docks were clean, tidy, unused; several Swedish ships with yellow markings were moored in front of a half-ruined castle’ – for no reason and completely irrelevant. Meanwhile we learn of Charlotte’s horrible childhood: abandoned to an awful father by her mother and brother, and living in Norham Gardens, where all Oxford fictional children live in my extensive reading. She has a phobia about men, but now, on this trip, is trying not to fall in love with the new headmaster of the school.

Then they all go back to school, and term meanders on for a bit. And then Charlotte is caught in a compromising position in a stationery cupboard with the headmaster, in a bizarre story (as a reader of many a crime story featuring cupboards, I read this over to try to work out how they were caught, but it was just ridiculous). She resigns before she can get sacked, and heads off to London.

Here she finds a flat, gets in touch with her lost relations, gets a job with her brother’s company creating popstars, and starts trying to navigate a lovelife and get over her phobia.

You can imagine it all as a 1960s film starring Julie Christie being breathy and swinging her hair around - sexy in her boring teacher clothes at first, then moving on to miniskirts. But it just didn’t seem very 1980s.

But then – almost my favourite thing about all this was reading an Amazon review of the book which says ‘a terrific novel. I know the original of the heroine’. So much for me and my judgements.

And anyway, I am guessing it is meant to be somewhat unreal – contrast? And rather Alice in Wonderland-ish: and in that trope of innocent girl in the big city learning how to enjoy life.

But as someone who lived through the 1980s, and read an awful lot of books then, I found it most strangely completely unattached to the real world, and very little of it rang true – though I did like the ‘coma girl being sung to by a popstar’ – very much a feature of the era. Splendidly, the cameraman recording the moment complains that the hospital room is “bloody useless… Everything’s white. White walls, white sheets.”

And there’s a teenage aspiring singer whom Charlotte goes to for advice:

‘it’s about a man.’

‘It always is. If he never takes you out he’s married. If he only takes you out he’s bent. He won’t get you an audition or a recording contract. If he says he’s had a vastectomy, check the scars…. Nerves are great passion-killers. Relax.’

I thought that was excellent - funny and relatable. But then there were sentences like this:

The flat… had something of the naively meliorist quality of a colour supplement, as if an AB consumer, his Guardian-reading wife and 2.4 computer-using children would pop up from a Human Body book and disport themselves.

It was Anabel Donald’s first novel, and it is hard to imagine an agent-publisher pulling it from the slush pile and saying ‘Yes this one!’

But it was very readable, I dashed through it.

I want blogfriend Lucy R Fisher to read it too – her perceptions on the era and books like this are always valuable.

And Donald's later books were very good, though SO different from this one.

Hannah at 35 is subtitled ‘how to survive divorce’ which about sums it up – it is similar to many other books but nicely done.

In 2002 she wrote Be Nice, an updated version of Lord of the Flies, featuring young girls.

Top picture is from a knitting pattern by the Queen of 1980s sweaters, Patricia Roberts.

Other pictures from a 1985 fashion magazine – 2 for Charlotte, one for the aspiring popstars. I have left the prices in so you can see how much things cost. These were probably quite good quality items, but you could certainly match those prices in modern-day Primark.

Click on the tag below for other Donald books.