Sunday, June 13, 2010

Storm in the village - Miss Read




Miss Read is one of my favourite authors & one of my favourite comfort reads. Her stories of village life in the middle of the 20th century give me a warm glow whenever I think of them & an even warmer glow when I’m reading one of her books about the villages of Fairacre or Thrush Green. Miss Read (we never know her first name, like the second Mrs De Winter) is the schoolmistress of Fairacre School. She mostly tells her stories in the first person & we’re obviously meant to think of Miss Read the author & Miss Read the character being one & the same. Although Miss Read is the pseudonym of Dora Saint, I think we’re pretty safe in assuming that the books are based on Mrs Saint’s career as a teacher.

Miss Read is a very contented spinster, a bit slapdash in her housekeeping, but kind, responsible, a little old-fashioned in her teaching methods, but always doing the best she can for her pupils & her friends in the village. She’s also not above a sharp retort when someone tries to take advantage of her good nature, but she thinks a lot more of these than she actually says. She’s a great lover of nature & this is one of the joys of the books. In Storm in the Village, it’s the first day of summer holidays,

Nothing can beat a village, I thought, for living in! A small village, a remote village, a village basking, as smug & snug as a cat, in morning sunlight! I continued my lover’s progress, besotted with my village’s charms. Just look at that weeping willow, plumed like a fountain, that lime tree murmerous with bees, that scarlet pimpernel blazing in a dusty verge, the curve of that hooded porch, that jasmine – in fact, look at every petal, twig, brick, beam, thatch, wall, pond, man, woman & child that make up this enchanting place! My blessing showered upon it all.

Of course, trouble comes to idyllic villages as often as it comes to any other setting. There are plans to build a new village between Fairacre & Beech Green to accommodate workers from the atomic energy plant nearby. The chosen site is the Hundred Acre Field, owned & farmed by the Miller family for over a hundred years. The villagers are divided about the plan. There are those who abhor any change at all, those who foresee trouble when hundreds of town people settle in the countryside, those who are appalled at the desecration of good farmland & those who object because the famous local artist, Dan Crockford, used to paint there. Then there are those in favour of the plan. Water & sewage would be laid on for the nearby villages as well as the new estate, more public transport would be convenient, the newcomers would provide extra business for the village shopkeepers & the nearby town of Caxley. There would be more opportunities of employment for school leavers & the older children would have the opportunity of going to a bigger, more modern school on the estate. Miss Read is worried by the prospect of her village school closing or being turned into an infant’s school.

As well as the upheaval over the new estate, Miss Read has to deal with her young assistant teacher falling in love with a very unsuitable man, & with the declining health of her dear friend, Dolly Clare, who had taught at Fairacre School for over 30 years until her retirement. There’s also a lot of humour in the Fairacre books. Mrs Pringle, the school cleaner, is a prophet of doom who mangles her words &, although too superior to gossip, always knows the latest news on any scandal. She bullies Miss Read unmercifully about her slovenly housekeeping but any retort from Miss Read only leads to Mrs Pringle dragging her bad leg, a sure sign of trouble to come.

The books manage to be nostalgic without sentimentality, in the best tradition of writing about the English countryside. Although the books were written from the 1950s to the 1990s, they seem to be set mostly at that point of change where the centuries old traditions of country life were being challenged by the social & economic changes of the post WWII period. Miss Read is only too aware of the troubled homes of some of her pupils with drunken fathers or feckless mothers to overcome & the children in the books are realistically naughty, not many little angels here.

I’ve read quite a few of the Fairacre books but I’ve only just started on the Thrush Green series so I have lots of enjoyably nostalgic, comforting reading ahead of me. I especially like the lovely US paperbacks published by Houghton Mifflin. Fortunately they kept the original illustrations by J S Goodall which add so much to the charm of these gorgeous books.

Anglophilebooks.com There's a copy of Storm in the Village, and many other books by Miss Read, available at Anglophile Books.

12 comments:

  1. I LOVE Miss Read. YOu have quite different editions from the two sorts that I own (the most recent pastel coloured versions and the orange spined penguins)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I too like Miss Read. Don't know if you have seen, but she had a brand new book published in 2009, the first in ten years. "Christmas at Thrush Green" written with the help of a lady called Jenny Dereham. Have yet to read it, but it but a copy sits on my bookshelf and waits patiently for me to pick it up. Too many books, too little time.

    JB

    ReplyDelete
  3. JB, I'd warn you against the "new" Miss Read. From what I've read, I don't think she had much to do with it! I picked it up at work last year & started it but wasn't very impressed. Still, I haven't read many of the Thrush Green books so maybe if you're a fan, you'll think differently.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks Lyn, I shall certainly bear that in mind when I finally get round to reading it. I don't think there are many Miss Read books which I haven't read about Fairacre and Thrush Green and hoped this would be as good as all the others, even though I knew Miss Read was a co-author so to speak.

    JB

    ReplyDelete
  5. I must read some Miss Read! I bought a few a year or so ago, nice and short, but somehow... it'll be comfort reading one day soon.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is quite a timely post for me because Miss Read has been on my mind for a while. I have a few of these but don't want to start reading them until I have the first few in the series as I don't like reading things out of order.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I also love Miss Read, and in my life have read everything she has written. There is such a quiet calm, yet it is the real world, as any teacher will tell you. Thankyou for reminding us what a joy she is as an authoress.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Ann, I agree with you about Miss Read, one of my favourite authors & I stilll have most of the Thrush Green books to read. What a treat! Simon & Bookish space, Miss Read is wonderful, I hope you get to her soon.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I agree with Lyn..the last book Christmas at Thrush Green certainly does not have the Miss Read touch and was rather a disappointment. Some of the narrative just did not sit right with me. I have read every single Miss Read book, have been reading both series religiously each year since 1994! I particularly enjoy reading them in the depths of winter...they are so comforting. Rather sad, some may say, but I ended up moving to a Cotswolds village as the Thrush Green books made such an impression on me. Wood Green, where the books are set, is about 20 minutes from where I live...

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous, I've only just started reading the Thrush Green books. I've just finished listening to At home in TG on audio & I loved it. How lovely to live in a Cotswold village & not far from the original setting too. What I particularly like about both series is that although they are comforting they're never sentimental. There are villains & naughty children as well as the helpful hardworking characters we love.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I LOVE Miss Read so much. As far as I know, the author is still living and will be 98 this year. If you are interested, I wrote about this book on the blog:

    http://lettersfromahillfarm.blogspot.com/2009/02/storm-in-village-by-miss-read.html

    I have begun to read all the books again. I had read them years ago as library copies.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Nan, thanks for the link to your review. Interesting that we both quoted the same passage! Miss Read's books are some of my favourite comfort reads. I like to read them in winter on a Sunday afternoon with a cup of tea.

    ReplyDelete