More O Douglas/Anna Buchan: Day and Jane

The Day of Small Things 

published1930

Jane’s Parlour 

published 1937

- both by O Douglas

[excerpt] Nicole took stock of the girl as she made tea and her mother made conversation, and was amused to find that she was almost exactly as she had pictured her. Very tall, as so many girls are now, she had long slim legs, a small pointed face with very dark blue eyes; a golden-brown curl on each cheek, a string of pearls, ear-rings, a good deal of make-up. She spoke in a quick, almost breathless, way, and her voice was pleasant. She had taken off her tweed coat, and sat in a fawn jumper suit, in a chintz chair with ‘lugs,’ her legs stretched out before her, answering Lady Jane’s questions.

 

comments: So here I am powering through the entire works of O Douglas/ Anna Buchan – see earlier entry for how I embarked on this (h/t Shay, again).

All the books have some crossover of characters. But The Day of Small Things is a real sequel to The Proper Place – the continuing story of the Rutherfurds, Lady Jane and her daughter Nicole who have had to move from the Big House  to a laughably smaller place, with many fewer servants.

Nicole helps set the scene with this in chapter 2

 

Nicole sank into a low chair opposite her mother, remarking, ‘…Don’t you think, Mums, slaves must have been a great comfort? Slaves can’t tell you that they are wanted at home—like Beenie, or that their “lawd” has now got a house and can marry—like Christina. You could really settle down comfortably with slaves! Has Effie forgotten milk after all? Just give me the merest dab of cream.’

[not the only such reference in the oeuvre – Elizabeth in The Setons aims to shock her dinner partner with something similar]

Nicole and her mother are going to take in Althea, a young woman who has been getting into wild ways in London: it’s hoped that a stay with the insufferable Rutherfurds will reform her. She is indeed wild, and wears tight revealing clothes and a lot of make-up.

She was looking amazingly pretty in a rose-red dress. Very little dress, Esmé noted, and a great deal of Althea.

 

But exposure to the wilds of the border country will change her completely (hope that’s not a SPOILER)

Nicole has her moments too

‘Talking about the queenly touch,’ said Alison, ‘I thought Nicole looked like a ballad queen the other night. That long parchment-coloured frock opening over gold lace, and the crystals binding her hair and coming down on her forehead—fire and dew. She always had moments of great beauty.

She has her moments in other ways too:

Nicole often said that she hated to stay with people for she was always either cold, or bored, or both…

The book is predictable but readable.

Then there is Jane’s Parlour, 1937, which definitely was weaker, Douglas was running out of steam, yet somehow I find I have a lot to say.

 

Alison Lockhart looked round the Eliotstoun luncheon-table with a satisfied smile as she said, "After all there is no place like home."

"Be it ever so humble," added her host. "Does that mean that for the moment you've had enough of 'pleasures and palaces'? You've been yachting with a millionaire, haven't you?"

This was an excellent foreshadowing of the seminal power ballad by Charlene, Never Been to Me:

Been to Nice and the isle of Greece
When I've sipped champagne on a yacht
I've been to paradise
Never been to me

Heroine Car Eliot (short for Caroline) is at drama school, and the mundane details of her time there are interesting from a sociological point of view. She also bears out my contention that Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph gets in everywhere:

"You remember Tessa in The Constant Nymph complained of her school that they expected you to do something every minute, and no allowance was made for transit! It's rather like that at the College.”

This is in a genteel boarding house in London – an unusual setting for Douglas, but one readers always enjoy, and we are set on collecting some examples for a future theme post. I did like the cook with the unsatisfactory husband:

“I still have Archer in a manner of speakin'. All the same, if he were laid away in Kensal Green and I could go every Sunday and lay flowers on his grave, and have a nice enlarged photo of him in my room I'm not sure that I wouldn't feel him more mine than he is now, 'aving to share him with all manner of people. But these things aren't in our hands....”

Lady Jackson – one of my favourite Douglas characters, much featured here – pops up in this book. One young man says this:

“ To my way of thinking Lady Jackson is merely a fat vulgar woman."

And he is firmly, severely and correctly squashed by his mother:

 "Because, my dear, you haven't lived long enough in this world to recognize, when you see it, true kindliness and honest worth."

One thing about O Douglas is that she never forgets the First World War and the devastating effect it had between the bereaved and those who survived but suffered long-term effects  - I have mentioned this before in posts on Penny Plain and The Setons.

In her 1945 memoir, Unforgettable, Unforgotten, Douglas/Buchan tells this real-life and very affecting story from the time around Armistice Day:  “I went down to my district to see a woman who had lost a second son only the week before. She told me, "I was at the back beatin' ma rug when I heard the noise. 'What is't?' I asked. They tell't me, 'It's Peace.' I came in and shut the doors and the windows so that I wouldna hear the bells mocking me."

Pictures from the NYPL.