Decorating the Church for Christmas, again

 

Christmas scenes in books: I did one last week which featured decorating the church and doing the flowers for the festive season. It proved so popular, and brought on so many comments that I expanded this entry to feature more of this topic....

 

Jenny Wren  & The Curate’s Wife  both by EH Young

published 1932 & 1934

 

There’ll Always be an England by Victoria Mather and Sue McCartney-Snape

published 2010

 

[excerpt] At dusk on Christmas Eve Dahlia went into the church and slipped into one of the back pews She had done her share of decorating earlier in the day, and now all the parcels had been delivered, all the calls on the sick had been made, she could think of nothing she had left undone and she was very tired…

It was almost dark where she sat, but there were lights at the other end of the long church and she could see figures moving near the pulpit and the chancel rails. They were far enough away to seem like figures thrown on to a screen and there was an unreality, a sort of futility, in their movements.

 

comments: These two books are almost one: the story of two sisters who move into Bristol with their widowed mother and keep a lodging-house.

(Discussion of both will definitely SPOILER the first – though, honestly, the title of the second already does that)

It is very Austen-esque – the two sisters looking for life and love: and the connection is made overt in a funny moment near the end where one girl mentions Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and is thought to be boasting of posh relations.

Because class is a key element here: the girls’ now-dead father married ‘beneath himself’, and their mother is the subject of gossip. Plus – they keep a boarding-house and do housework. Hard to place for some of those around them.

I liked the books, but thought them long-winded (they could have been edited down to one good novel). I did occasionally became impatient with the agonies of class, morality and religion. Dahlia pursues the church really as a way of meeting people, and ends up (this is the

 

SPOILER)

 

 marrying the curate. Jenny is involved with various young men, and it is not clear who she will end up with. The time-frame is short: the two books together cover less than a year in their lives.

One thing while reading it was that I had to keep reminding myself that it is clearly taking place at the time it was written, early 1930s: the life and behaviour of everyone seemed much more to belong to pre-WW1 days. I had to keep re-imagining their appearances.

EH Young was a stalwart of the early days of the Virago Press, who did such a good job, starting in the 1980s, of reprinting women’s fiction. Young’s book The Misses Malletts gave us a New Year entry a few years ago.

She lived an unconventional life herself, though not too openly: widowed in the First World War, she took her dead husband’s best friend as her lover, and moved in with him and his wife. As you might expect, she has a kind and non-judgemental attitude to those of her characters with ‘moral failings’. In general she is very good at looking at everyone’s views, seeing both sides of the question. It is a very nuanced look at various marriages and relationships, and she doesn’t always take the direction you expect. So it makes for an interesting and occasionally surprising read.

One item I would take her up on: she often doesn’t show, or give the dialogue, of important scenes. She tells you about them later, or summarises them. And also – a great, if rather niche, Clothes in Books failing – she trails both an upcoming dance (and a new dress), and the performance of a play by the Church young people’s group. Neither of these excellent opportunities happens during the novel – a disappointment.

But still plenty to enjoy.

Picture by Mike Pennington via Wikimedia Commons, described thus:

“Watchnight service, Christmas Eve, Old Rattray. Fog wreathes the church; inside the watchnight service has begun. Listen carefully - you may be able to hear the sleigh bells above the chorus of Silent Night.”

The two young women are from much earlier (1920) and wearing very expensive clothes (Worth) but I liked it as a picture of the two sisters, who are keen on flowers – there is much discussion. NYPL.

The drawing of ‘decorating the church’ comes from a collection of The Daily Telegraph’s Social Stereotypes (There’ll Always be an England, 2010)  - this was a weekly feature in the paper, of great truth, eloquence, and absolute hilarity. Each item consisted of a drawing like this one, and words to match. Those decorating the church here are obviously 80 years later than those in the novel, but some things don’t change.

I was just going to use and mention briefly the Social Stereotype picture, but when I did that previous post on decorating the church – Trollope, here – there was a great deal of interest in the trope of church ladies arguing over the decoration. So it seemed only right to include the text as well, and I hope you can read it. The authors get it all off to a tee.

Sue McCartney Snape draws the Social Stereotype pictures, and Victoria Mather wrote the words. There are half a dozen collections of the columns, and I treasure them all (despite not being a Daily Telegraph reader at all).