Xmas and the All-Night Chemists

The Millstone by Margaret Drabble

published 1965

[excerpt] It was the night before Christmas that I met George. The circumstances have an indelible beauty, like the beauty of fate itself. It did not seem so at the time, for confusion obscured their strange outlines, but now in retrospect I feel that I could reconsider forever the paths that I walked along, the bonds that bound me….

I spent the afternoon of December 24^th in the British Museum; I had no worries about the morrow, as Lydia had arranged to cook a turkey for me, and had invited dozens of her friends to come and eat it…

 

comments: The passage I am using here comes from near the end of this book. It is by no means a novel of surprises or mysteries, but still I am going to spoiler it pretty thoroughly, so consider yourself warned if you were thinking of reading it in the near future.

Rosamund Stacey is a young academic who has her first experience of sex with George: a radio announcer who may be gay or perhaps bisexual. She has no contact with him after their one-night stand, and when she finds she is pregnant she decides not to tell him, and goes ahead alone. She is fortunate in many of her circumstances: she is able to live rent-free in her parents’ flat, her friend Lydia stays with her and helps out, and she continues writing her dissertation on Elizabethan sonnet sequences. Her daughter Octavia has a health problem, but she hopes all will be well. However…. Just before her first Christmas, Octavia’s cough means Rosamund has to go out to get a prescription, and she meets George at the all-night chemists.

Now, during 2024 I commented on encountering a London all-night chemists (drugstore for US readers) as I had come across two mentions in my recent reading – you can read about it in this post, on Nigel Balchin’s Darkness Falls From the Air. I said then:

I feel this must turn up in other books – a bit like that coffee stall that 1930s poshos were always going to after a dance. Three is really the minimum mentions to justify a Clothes in Books [X]-watch (see eg bedjackets and furniture – specifically the items after which Credenza Davenport was named). So just one more to find before we can officially announce a Clothes in Books 24-hour Boots Watch (implying an urgency that, truly, won't exist). Please report to me if you spot a mensh.

I knew already from my reading that there were two such shops in central London – the Boots in the books above, and John Bell and Croyden, misleadingly not in CroydOn (a place on the outskirts of London) but very much in the centre of town. It has existed since 1798, and has been in Wigmore St since 1912.

And now it has turned up in this book:

As luck would have it, I lived within 10  minutes walk of one of the only all-night, every-night chemists in London, John Bell and Croyden on Wigmore St. The thought of their proximity had comforted me more than once, although the most I had ever purchased there had been a thermometer and a bottle of codeine.

So we change the name to 24-Hour Chemists Watch, and please tell me if you find a mention in any other books…

Now, back to Rosamund.

The book is startling, and no doubt authentic, in its picture of life. In 1965 people thought the world was changing but it was still brave and surprising for her to have a baby on her own. It feels as though it sits in a different era altogether. Rosamund comes from liberal well-meaning parents, and claims to have used state medicine, but is still shocked by the nature of the National Health Service and the treatment she gets there. I think the way medical staff reacted to mothers was very much of its time and not to do either with single motherhood or the NHS. (Drabble has said herself that she had similar experiences, but she was married). Things have changed dramatically: there really were issues with parents not being allowed to visit children in hospital. (At the age of 5 I was in hospital for 6 weeks, and could only have visitors 3x a week for half an hour. I am happy to say, unthinkable now.)

Abortion is a consideration: it is either legal and difficult to obtain, or illegal and thus dangerous – this would change dramatically in 1967 when it became lawful in the UK. The opening scenes of the book show Rosamund trying a hallowed folk method alleged (without much evidence) to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy: gin and a hot bath. But friends come round and drink the gin, and she hasn’t set the hot water boiler properly, so that’s the end of that. It must have been, I suspect, quite daring to make fun of this back in the day.

[Though of course in blog favourite Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love – 1945 – Fanny is asked how her mother avoided further pregnancies, and she reports what she has heard through eavesdropping:

 ‘Tremendous jumpings and hot baths….skiing, or hunting, or just jumping off the kitchen table.’

Naturally the response of the other children is their perpetual refrain: ‘You are so lucky, having wicked parents.’]

Rosamund is a strange and distancing heroine. She tells one of her friends she is pregnant. He says

‘Don’t tell me you want to have a baby.’

She says ‘I don’t mind.’

I found her affectless and annoying, and I wanted to know more about her siblings or her parents – she seemed to despise them but they sounded intriguing.  And her friend/flatmate, Lydia, was splendid. I liked her encouraging words for Rosamund:

Ordinary babies aren’t much of a status symbol, but illegitimate ones are just about the last word.

Lydia wears a ‘strange gold lurex’ outfit for a Christmas party – this picture seems nice for that.

Any of them seemed like better subjects for a novel, honestly.

When I first read The Millstone, it was by no means new, but I was around Rosamund’s age, so wanted to empathise. I thought that in the scene above, she was going to find out that George had a medical issue, that the baby had inherited it from him, but a friend told me firmly that would not have been a very Margaret Drabble plot turn. I was also astounded by her having a family flat to live in rent-free, and by the later plot turn in which her parents arrange to ‘stay abroad longer’ so she has somewhere to live. This, Rosamund realises, shows that they know she has had a baby and are helping her, but this will not be mentioned directly or spelled out. Every aspect of this puzzled me: families I knew did not have these facilities, nor did they behave like that.

Reading it now my main thought is that Rosamund dismisses George because he has no enormous interest in the baby: but this is wholly unfair for the obvious reason that he has no idea it is his. It’s hard to follow an ethical question that he has a right to know – but, I believe that research shows that broadly speaking men in general do not respond to random babies (as women may) but will respond deeply to their own child. George never gets the chance. Anyway. There were enough real and fictional men abandoning their partners and children very lightly, so cannot get too worked up about George’s rights here.

It must have read very differently in 1965: online I found some comments from people who had read it then and found it ground-breaking and helpful. Now it is a historical record of a different time.

The pictures are from the Vivat Tumbler, which features excellent pages from an Australian women’s magazine of the era. Not at all, I’m guessing, how Drabble saw her women, but I particularly liked the two flatmates, and tried not to invent jokes about keeping zippers closed.

Another early Margaret Drabble novel, A Summer Birdcage, is on the blog here – a scene that was notorious among my contemporaries, where a young woman gets married in a dirty bra… ‘Is that your something old?’

I featured Doris Leslie’s Peridot Flight, 1956, on the blog last year: in the book, posh doctors are ‘snobbishly inclined to favour… Messrs Croy and Belldon’, though not because of the opening hours.