WW2 Home Front: The Bachelor by Stella Gibbons

The Bachelor by Stella Gibbons

published 1944

 

 

 

This evening she had on a black suit from Simpson’s with a black jersey turban adorned by a yellow jewel and people on the platform in London had been staring at her shoes and stockings, and none of those clothes, with the exception of the jewel, were older than three weeks. In the factory she was one of the very few women who always wore the regulation cap, and she looked like one of those photographs printed by Vogue to show the rest of us the Smart Munition Worker, in clothes as stylized and correct and becoming as those for hunting.

 

The Bachelor is a delight for those of us who enjoy a WW2 Home Front novel. It’s vague and rambling and unstructured, but somehow Stella Gibbons makes it work – and it is full of wonderful details about life early in the war. For example, the characters are listening for ‘Raiders Passed’ siren after a bombing raid, where we would expect ‘All Clear’.

The setting is a comfortable household in the English countryside, with a varied collection of residents: a middle-aged brother and sister and their cousin – all unmarried. A widow they know well, and her grown-up son. A cook from the village, and then – the catalyst we all need in a novel like this one – an absolutely wonderful refugee from an imaginary Eastern European country. She is called Vartouhi, and she is maybe 22, and she is the agent of change. She is a servant/maid/mother’s help – her status not entirely clear, and in some ways living in the family (who invited her in to avoid having evacuees as well as to get some cheap labour) and in some ways a servant. She seems very much over-worked and underpaid, but she is so hilarious and unconcerned and self-absorbed that you feel she is probably OK. When Gibbons manages not to judge her characters too hard, or make them blatantly good or bad, she produces great varied plots. In this one your sympathies move around the various characters as they struggle with their various life problems.

As the book goes on, more people arrive and depart. There is the return of a black sheep father, the Night Club King (weirdly reminiscent of a plot element in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited – a blog favourite book, and one I wrote about for the Guardian) and then there is an enigmatic foreign philosopher academic.

Miss Fielding runs the house, bosses everyone around and is undoubtedly the least sympathetic character. Miss F is not at all sure about Vartouhi, who is (sometimes deliberately and sometimes unwittingly) leading the resistance to her reign.

Everyone behaves quite badly, there is a lot of falling in love and proposals of marriage. It is all wholly unbelievable and tremendous fun. I am a huge fan of Agatha Christie, always, but I was never sure about the portrayal of Mitzi, the Displaced Person in A Murder is Announced. Vartouhi is the anti-Mitzi: she is very refreshing, while at the same time wholly impossible.

There are some good clothes moments. Interesting piece at the top – I found it impossible to find a picture of a munitions worker in an official cap, it seems that everyone wore turbans. The woman above is getting ready for her shift.

And look at this gorgeous picture from the Imperial War Museum collection – it’s a 1944 painting of a munitions factory, by Frederick William Elwell. There are a few women in caps if you look closely, but far outnumbered by the turbans.

 

 

WOMEN WORKING IN INDUSTRY IN BRITAIN DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR | Imperial War Museums (iwm.org.uk)

 

Here is Alicia, a War Worker (neighbour to the main household), relaxing after her shift:

What a bore, thought Alicia as she carried her brandy into the drawing-room. She lay down on a couch and put up her feet, in lovely little brocade sandals, on the cushions among the pages of the Evening Standard which her father always brought down with him from the City, while the voluminous skirts of her green house-coat, most graceful of contemporary garments, fell in folds to the floor.

(The picture is by George Hendrik Breitner, and can be found on Wikimedia Commons.)

Here she is again, thinking about her men friends. ‘The little dears are always intrigued by someone who isn’t in a mess, she thought, and they aren’t satisfied until they’ve made you into one. And then they aren’t satisfied.’

There is a lovely sideplot (which turns out to be very important) concerning some leftover craft supplies. Miss Burton  has a problem:

At the bottom of her chest of drawers was about fifteen pounds’ worth of Scotch Four-ply, Paton and Baldwin’s Fingering, Angora, Peri-lusta, Fairydown and all the rest of them, with patterns for vests and jumpers and gloves, and scores of knitting needles, all tangled together in an inextricable and Laocoön-like embrace from which only Miss Burton’s demise or a direct hit could release them. And further down still in this woolly Record of the Rocks were half-finished stool-covers and chair-backs and firescreens in gros-point with their accompanying twelve skeins of wool to each piece and their needles and frames. Miss Burton bought a new design or pattern for a jumper every time she went up to London but she always got in a muddle or bored with them and not one, except a muffler for Kenneth ten years ago, had ever been finished.

 

But this impossible situation is resolved by Vartouhi – a metaphor surely for her effect on the whole household. She takes the mixed up wools and works on them. This is what she makes:

It was a bedspread, truly, but what a bedspread! It blazed with brilliant yellow, blue, crimson, green, black, and white; it was stiff with massy open flowers and pink silky buds coiling away among their brown leaves in a deep border round its edge. Queer little stiff soldiers in purple turbans marched across its middle towards a rose-like blossom that made the centre; a white-and-yellow flower with elongated thorns of scarlet silk. On the other side of the great blossom was another army of fair-haired warriors in white tunics who carried black spears. And all about the rose were green trees heavy with glowing pink and yellow peaches and apricots, swelling and fruiting upon the white background where every available space was filled by a tiny red or blue flower.

- the description made me think of the wonderful works of designer Kaffe Fassett (previously featured for his 1980s sweaters): these are pictures of his work.

 

--- and so we know Vartouhi really was a power for good in the house.

 

A most enjoyable read for those of us who like this sort of thing… we know who we are.

Stella Gibbons' Westwood, another Home Front novel, is also on the blog, along with a number of her other books - apart from the obvious Cold Comfort Farm. The tags below will take you there....