Begin again, p.1
Begin Again, page 1
Ursula Orange
Begin Again
Oxford, it appeared, if it did not seem to have fitted her for any precise occupation, had at least unfitted her for a great many things.
In her charming and incisive debut novel, Ursula Orange focuses her sharp eye on four young women only recently down from Oxford.
Jane and Florence live in London, working at office jobs, the latter channelling her excess energy into a dreadfully earnest novel of her own. Sylvia remains at home, shocking her family with theories of sexual and social liberation. And Leslie, as the novel opens, idealizes the other three, as she tries to convince her mother to let her use her small nest egg to attend art school in London.
As the four friends balance their youthful ideals with the realities of work and romance in 1930s England, Orange offers hilarious and thoughtful perspectives on the quandaries of educated, ambitious women in a world not yet ready for them. This new edition includes an introduction by Stacy Marking.
“a charming and deftly written book” Sunday Times
“The fresh quality and genuine youthfulness of this story are as charming in fiction as in life.” Times Literary Supplement
“an unusually good first novel, in a decade of unusually good first novels.” Daily Telegraph
FM11
Contents
Cover
Title Page/About the Book
Contents
Introduction by Stacy Marking
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
About the Author
Titles by Ursula Orange
Furrowed Middlebrow Titles
Company in the Evening – Title Page
Company in the Evening – Chapter I
Copyright
Introduction
On the first page of a notebook filled with carefully pasted press cuttings, Ursula Orange has inscribed, in touchingly school girlish handwriting: Begin Again, Published February 13th 1936. Later she adds: American Publication Aug 7th 1936, and then a pencilled note: Total sales 1221.
She was 26, a young married woman, and this was her first novel. There are plentiful reviews from major publications in Britain, Australia and America. Begin Again by Ursula Orange is included in the Washington Herald’s Bestsellers’ list for August 1936, where it comes higher than Whither France? by Leon Trotsky. The Daily Telegraph praises her insight into “the strange ways of the New Young, their loves, their standards, their shibboleths, and their manners … An unusually good first novel, in a decade of good first novels.”
To be greeted as the voice of the new generation must have been thrilling for a young writer, and a year later her second novel was published. To Sea in a Sieve opens with the heroine Sandra being sent down from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, the college which Ursula herself had so recently left. Rebellious and in pursuit of freedom, Sandra rejects convention, marries an ‘advanced’ and penniless lover, and the novel lightheartedly recounts the consequences of her contrariness.
But despite her light tone, Ursula Orange takes on serious themes in all her work. She explores the conflicts between generations, between classes, between men and women. Her characters embrace new and modern attitudes to morality, sex and marriage, and take adultery and divorce with surprising frivolity. She understands young women’s yearning for independence, their need to express themselves and to escape the limitations of domesticity – though she often mocks the results.
In 1938 she had her first child, Gillian, and by 1941 when her third and most successful novel, Tom Tiddler’s Ground, was published, the chaos of war had overshadowed the brittle ‘modern’ world of her generation. With her husband now away in the army, Ursula and her small daughter left London to take refuge in the country, where she could observe firsthand the impact of evacuation on a small English village (just as her heroine Caroline does in the novel).
Tom Tiddler’s Ground is set in 1939-40, the months later known as the “phoney war.” The evacuation of London is under way, but the horrors of the Blitz have not yet begun. The clash between rustic villagers and London evacuees, the misunderstandings between upper and lower classes, differing approaches to love and children, the strains of war and separation on relationships and marriage: all these indirect effects of war provide great material for the novel. The Sunday Times describes it as “taking a delectably unusual course of its own, and for all the gas-masks hiding in the background, [it] is the gayest of comedies.” It’s a delightful read to this day, and includes an astonishing number of elements, ingeniously interwoven – bigamy, adultery, seduction, fraud, theft, embezzlement, the agonies of a childless marriage and the guilt of a frivolously undertaken love affair.
The book reveals a real talent for dialogue and structure. As Caroline arrives for the first time at her new home in a Kentish village, the scene, the plots and sub-plots, the major characters and the themes are all established on a single page, almost entirely in dialogue.
“Red car,” said Marguerite ecstatically as Lavinia’s Hulton sports model, with Alfred in the driving seat, drew up alongside.
“Excuse me,” said Caroline, leaning out, “but can you tell me where a house called The Larches is?”
“The Larches!” Alfred was out of his seat in a minute, and advancing with outstretched hand: “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mrs. Cameron?”
“Good God!” said Caroline, taken aback. “So you’re – are you Constance’s husband by any chance, or what?” (It might be. About forty. Not bad-looking, I will say that for Constance. That slick, smart, take-me-for-an-ex-public-schoolboy type. Eyes a bit close together.)
“Yes, I’m Captain Smith.” (Caroline found her hand firmly taken and shaken.) “And Constance and I are very very pleased to welcome you to Chesterford.”
“But that isn’t Constance,” said Caroline, feebly indicating Lavinia. Alfred gave an easy laugh.
“Oh no! Constance is home waiting for you.” (Or I hope she is and not hanging round after that slum-mother and her brat, curse them.) “This is Miss Lavinia Conway,” he said, taking her in a proprietary way by the elbow to help her out of the car.
“How do you do?” said Caroline, recovering herself. (.... Who is this girl? Good God even I didn’t put it on quite so thick at her age. Can’t be Alfred’s little bit, surely?)
Part of the entertainment throughout the novel is the contrast between the perfect politeness of everything expressed aloud, and the bracketed thoughts that are left unsaid. Ursula Orange uses the device not to convey complex interior monologue, in the way of Virginia Woolf or Joyce, but as a comic, sometimes cynical, commentary on her characters’ evasions and self-deception.
The notices and sales for Tom Tiddler’s Ground were good, but Ursula must have been disconcerted to receive a personal letter from her new publisher, Michael Joseph himself. He had been away at the wars, he explains, and has been reading the novel in hospital. He writes that he was “immensely entertained” and predicts “that it is only a question of time – and the always necessary slice of good luck – before you become a really big seller …” But then he adds: “The only criticism that I venture to offer is that Caroline’s unorthodox behaviour … may have prevented the book from having a bigger sale. I think it is still true, even in these days, that the public likes its heroines pure.”
Whether influenced by Michael Joseph’s strictures or no, in her next novel, Have Your Cake, the clashes of moral values, of hidden motives, of snobbery and class distinction, are not taken so lightly. Published in August 1942, it features an ex-Communist writer who (in the words of The Times) “is one of those devastating people who go through life pursuing laudable ends but breaking hearts and ruining lives at almost every turn.” But lives and hearts are not ultimately broken: the notices are good; sales figures top 2500 – evidently “the Boots Family Public”, and her publisher, were pleased.
By 1944 when Company In the Evening was published, Ursula Orange’s crisp dialogue-driven style has altered. Told in the first person, with greater awareness and self-analysis, it is the story of Vicky, a divorcee whose marriage had been abandoned almost carelessly (and somehow without her ex-husband discovering that she’s having their child). Vicky finds herself coping single handedly in a household of disparate and incompatible characters thrown together by war. Less engaging than Ursula Orange’s earlier heroines, Vicky seems particularly hard on her very young and widowed sister-in-law, who is “just so hopelessly not my sort of person”, in other words what her mother would have called common.
The novel is full of the taken-for-granted snobbery of the era – hard for the modern reader to stomach. In fact Vicky raises the issue, though somewhat equivocally, herself.
“When I was about 19 and suffering from a terrific anti-snob complex (one had to make some protest against the extraordinary smugness and arrogance of the wealthy retired inhabitants … ) I practically forbade Mother to use the word ‘common’ … “Don’t you see, Mother, it isn’t a question of phraseology, it’s your whole attitude I object to.”
But just as one starts to feel sympathetic, she adds:
“Goodness, what mother s of semi-intellectual daughters of nineteen have to put up with!”
As the novel progresses, Vicky’s faults are acknowledged, her mistakes rectified, her marriage repaired. She returns contentedly “to ordinary married life in the middle of the worst war ever known to history.”
Perhaps this context is the point. The New York Times praises Ursula for her admirably stiff upper lip: “Ursula Orange, calmly ignoring as negligible all that Hitler has done, … has written a novel that is a wet towel slapped nonchalantly across the face of the aggressor. ” Her light and entertaining novels were indeed helping the nation to carry on.
At last in 1945 war came to an end. English life returned to a difficult peace of deprivation and scarcity. Tim Tindall, Ursula’s husband, had been almost entirely absent for 5 years, a total stranger to their young daughter. He had had – in that odd English phrase – a ‘good war’, seeing action in North Africa, Salerno and France. After his return, the family opted for country life; Tim picked up the reins of the family’s publishing firm, commuting daily to London and an independent existence, while Ursula passed her time in Sussex with Gillian and her new baby son. That year she published one more novel, Portrait of Adrian, which escapes to an earlier period and the happier existence of young girls sharing a flat together in London.
Ursula’s horizons seem gradually to narrow. She had been the smart, modern voice of a young and careless generation that no longer existed, and she did not find a new place in the post-war world. Severe depression set in, leading to suicide attempts and hospital treatments. Her literary life had virtually come to an end. She undertook two projects but these were never realized, perhaps because they were well before their time: an illustrated anthology of poetry for teenagers, a category as yet unnamed; and a play about Shelley’s as yet unheralded wives.
In Footprints in Paris, (2009) their daughter, the writer Gillian Tindall, describes her mother’s decline as she becomes “someone who has failed at the enterprise of living…. London now began to figure on her mental map as the place she might find again her true self.” But the hope of finding a fresh life when the family moved to a new house in Hampstead, proved illusory. “Six days later, having by the move severed further the ties that had held her to life … she made another suicide attempt which, this time, was fatal. She was not found for two days.”
But we cannot let this sad ending define the whole of Ursula Orange. It should not detract from our enjoyment of her work, which at its entertaining best, gives us a picture of a sparkling generation, of intelligent and audacious women surviving against the odds, with wit as well as stoicism, with courage in the face of deprivation and loss.
Stacy Marking
Prologue
“You are listening, aren’t you, mummy?” said Leslie Fisher anxiously.
“Yes, dear, of course.”
This was true. Mrs. Fisher always listened to what her only daughter had to say. It was only because it was ten o’clock on a Saturday morning with the breakfast not yet cleared away that a lurking consciousness of Cook to be interviewed and the grocer to be phoned showed occasionally through her interest.
“It’s not,” continued Leslie, patiently, “that it’s not a very nice life here. But you see I can’t help feeling that I’m not getting anywhere.”
Mrs. Fisher did not agree or disagree. To her daughter’s annoyance she simply reverted to the dull subject of money.
“I’m sure you would be sorry if you went and spent Grandfather’s hundred pounds straight off. Now I’m quite willing to let you have a year in London at an art-school if you think that’s what you’d really like.”
“I know that’s what I need now,” corrected Leslie, “if I’m ever to do anything with my painting.”
“I told you Miss Wilkinson was giving some local classes here this summer, didn’t I, Leslie? I thought you might be interested.”
Leslie sighed. She had been afraid her mother had not understood.
“That wouldn’t be the slightest use,” she said quickly, “Miss Wilkinson’s sort of classes would never lead on to anything. Besides, I’m not interested in landscape at the moment. I want to study fashion drawing and poster work.”
She paused expectantly, but her mother did not ask her to what this would lead. She merely reiterated:
“I really wouldn’t advise you to dash up to London and spend Grandfather’s hundred pounds on a studio straight away. Now why not try living with Aunt Sybil? You’d be very comfortable there—”
Comfortable! Leslie shuddered at the epithet. She had lived in comfort at home for nearly five years; she believed now that it was not a thing she valued in the least. She stared gloomily at the breakfast table, at the June sunlight dancing on the well-polished silver kettle and tea-pot, through the window at the border, now a blaze of tulips and lupins, much admired by her mother’s visitors; and reflected with a touch of regret that she did not care at all for silver tea-pots and tulips, a comfortable house, a large garden and all the placid leisurely routine of life in her Berkshire home. No. It was the precarious, the dangerous, the colourful that would really appeal to her. She would like to live in an attic with an enormous skylight and canvases stacked all round the walls; she would like to cook sausages and kippers over a gas-ring and share them with her artist friends. She would like to stay up all night and sleep all day. She would like to have a frying pan and a loaf of bread and an alarm clock of her own. She would like to wear trousers and a bright yellow sweater and paint her front door a vivid green. She would like to cut off her hair and sleep on a divan and live her own life.
She tried very hard to be patient with her mother.
“I think if I’m to get on,” she said, “it’s rather important to have the right atmosphere.”
“Yes? Of course, dear, I only want you to be happy. I’m quite willing to give you a year in town.”
Leslie sighed. She did not in the least want her mother only to want her to be happy; she did not want to be given a year in town on her mother’s money. She wanted it to be acknowledged that there might (indeed almost certainly would) be a future for her in the world of art. She wanted to make a gesture, to believe in herself, to sink her small capital and gamble on her own ability: and of course to find out that she had been right. From her mother she wanted nothing but comprehension. Not, no, most certainly not, indulgence.
“I wish I could make you understand, mummy.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite see what it is I’m to understand, Leslie.”
“Well, you see, mummy, it isn’t that I’m exactly asking you for anything. I really want just to tell you that I’ve decided to spend Grandfather’s money on just this thing.”
There was a moment’s silence and Leslie hoped, a little anxiously, that her mother was not offended.
Mrs. Fisher was not. The slight frown on her forehead was due to the strain of financial calculations. She said slowly:
“But, Leslie dear, I don’t see how your food can possibly cost you less than—”
At this point a diversion was created by Alice, the maid, who came in and said: “Please, madam, Robinson says did you know the new chicken-house has arrived and shall he put it up in the lower field with the others?”
“Tell him I’ll come and see him about it in ten minutes,” said Mrs. Fisher. “Leslie, I was just going to say—there is Robinson crossing the lawn. Is that one of the sides, I wonder? Good gracious, it doesn’t look to me at all like the one I ordered from the catalogue. I wanted the one with the little windows. Perhaps he’d better not unpack any more until I’ve made sure. . . .” Mrs. Fisher hurried out of the room.
And that, thought Leslie disgustedly, is the event of the day. The arrival of a new chicken-house!
When her mother returned, reassured (it was only the back wall that was windowless), Leslie had found material for a new argument against living at home.
“You see, mummy, I haven’t really any part in this sort of life, have I? I mean new chicken-houses and all that sort of thing are very nice, but—well, it isn’t even as if the chickens were mine, is it?”
