Forgotten Books: Peridot Flight

 

Peridot Flight by Doris Leslie

published 1956

 

 

If I read all the books suggested by blog commenters over the past two months I would use up all my brainspace for the next year. The contributions from readers on forgotten charity shop books, and names of characters, were wonderful: I loved reading and enjoying the comments. There were some books mentioned several times, and there were some books I’d never heard of before.

This was a typical exchange, though I’m sorry the commenter was anonymous so can’t thank her (I feel it is ‘her’):

I've loved reading all the comments - so many books which I remember my mum having when I was a child - mostly Book Club editions. I never read the Jalna ones, but I do remember enjoying Peridot Flight by Doris Leslie.

I replied: I've loved it too! Isn't it amazing how a book you have not thought about in 20 years is suddenly fully in your mind, cover and all? I looked up Doris Leslie, and found there was a 10-part BBC TV series of the book you mention, in 1960. She wrote a lot of historical novels... I might try to find Peridot.

I know the name Doris Leslie, but don’t think I have read her: she wrote mostly historical fiction – novelized versions of the lives of royal women, and she wrote a shedload of them. This one was slightly different, and I liked the unusual name, so managed to track it down at the Internet Archive Library.

There is very little about Doris Leslie or her books online – it’s always a mystery why one author survives and another doesn’t. Even quite obscure writers often have a website, or a fan club, or they are reprinted by one of those wonderful publishers who help us out so much.

But not Doris – a set of her historical books are available on Kindle, which is something, but no-one seems to have taken her up in a big way yet.

This book was turned into a BBC TV series in 1960, in 10 parts, but apparently has not been preserved. You can see why it was chosen – it must have made a splendid serial with lovely costumes.

Anyway, off I went. First of all – a very intriguing title. Peridot Flight is in fact the heroine’s name, which surprised me. And to be clear, it is presented as memoirs, but is fiction. It’s an interesting structure. The ‘author’ is reading and reproducing part of Peridot’s memoirs, and commenting on them at the same time.

The book opens around the 1880s, and takes the story up to 1914 in some detail, then fills you in up to the date of writing, ie 1955.

Peridot’s mother was a nursery governess who ‘became pregnant’. A local chemist married her and raised the child: the mother died, and a horrible stepmother turned up. Peridot eventually gets away from this fake family, and goes as companion to a rich but medically-challenged young woman of her own age.

I have said before how much I like Becky Sharp heroines: Peridot is not quite so much on-the-make, but she can see how to look out for herself, and is a clever but kind woman.

I found her story entrancing and compelling, I really enjoyed it: I had no idea where it was going, and the twists and turns were splendid.

And I think there are few books explaining the economics of life for a poor young woman as this. (in England anyway – Emil Zola is equally forthright in Au Bonheur des Dames, on the blog here).

Peridot’s friend Florrie spells out the facts of life to her naïve junior:

“what’s a kid like you goin’ to do with its life? Where will you end? D’you think you can live on ten bob a week on the straight? Never in this world! Look at that scrag of a Hubbard, always moaning, selling gloves—and where will she end? Selling matches. How can you or me or any one of us put by for our old age? Oh, yes, find a chap and marry him and what then? Half a dozen kids and starvation wages. Twenty-five bob a week at most—skilled labour. I could’a married on that. Not me! I let him go.” She swallowed painfully. “What hope is there for us, slaving our guts out in order to live, and no one to care if we die? Why shouldn’t we take what we can get and chance it—while the going’s good? We’ll be old and crabbed and sour soon enough and then—the workhouse. But I’m putting by, I am. I’m thirty now and when I’ve saved a coupla hundred quid I’m going to ’op it, see? It’ll take me another ten years, but I can live for the rest of me life on that—if this sort o’ life don’t kill me.”

Florrie is openly earning money on the side with some amateur prostitution, though it takes Peridot several pages to realize this.

Of course this is a novel, and a cheerful one, and Peridot is not going to end up as Florrie fears…

The book shows a sharp wit.

When Peridot’s adoptive father dies, she ‘hopefully enquires’ of the doctor whether her stepmother will die too. (Peridot is described as being ‘A much superior type to the widow’.) She likes to read, and at one point is busy with a novel translated from the French ‘of startling obscenity’

This is her landlady early on:

Mrs. P. sighed. “I’ve had my cross to bear. We used to let to gentlemen—commercials and that— but when my poor hubby was took I felt it wouldn’t do for a lady on her own to have men about the place, so I put an advert in the local paper for ladies only and had dozens of replies. …and since then I’ve never had a man inside the house. One,” said Mrs. P., “with all respect to the dead, was quite enough for me if not too many.”

When Peridot is employed by a strange and mysterious family as a companion to Geraldine, after meeting them all thinks

‘If this poor girl was right in the head, her uncle certainly wasn’t’.

On she goes, always smart, ultimately good-hearted, but aware that someone like her has to look after her own interests. Life is not simple, but she enjoys herself and is always full of plans to make things better. Peridot Flight is a great heroine.

Two fashion pictures from the NYPL of 1890s styles.

The other image is from a great favourite resource: the Library of Congress collection of illos by Arthur Keller, who most certainly had a way with facial expressions and dramatic moments. This picture is probably 1920-ish, a bit later than most of the action of the book, but I felt could represent many scenes from it.