The Village by Marghanita Laski

Here we are in the middle of Persephone Reading Weekend, hosted by Claire of The Paperback Reader and Verity of Cardigan Girl Verity. I have just spent a delightful evening & morning with The Village by Marghanita Laski. I haven’t seen it mentioned in the PRW round-ups so far, but I hope more readers will pick it up, because I think it is both a heartwarming love story and an insightful social commentary. Plus, it has charming endpapers:

So, the story. The novel opens just as WWII ends, with victory celebrations in the village of Priory Dean. In the opening scene, Mrs Wendy Trevor and Mrs Edith Wilson go to do their ‘duty’ at the Red Cross Post, as they have during the war, but they both inwardly know this will be the last time they work together like this and that their post-war life will revert to being how it is pre-war; namely, Wendy and Edith will have very little to do with each other, because Wendy is the wife of a gentleman and Edith used to be her char. Never mind that Wendy’s family is poor and struggling to make ends meet, and Edith’s is doing quite well for themselves. In the words of Ralph Wetherall, as he explains the English middle-class to his American wife:

Their standard of living is lower than the poorest paid workers’ and nothing keeps them in the middle-class except their own absolute refusal to be recognised as anything else.

Then we meet Wendy’s daughter Margaret, a plain, dull girl who gives her mother grief because she isn’t quite bright enough to pursue a respectable career, but the Trevors don’t have enough money to really marry her off well. Margaret is also a very sweet girl and quite self-confident, as we see throughout the story. The scene at the beginning of the book where Wendy drags Margaret along to a dance cemented my affection for Margaret and my extreme dislike of her mother. Wendy tries to force Margaret to be something she isn’t – she can’t see her daughter for who she is, and makes Margaret very unhappy as a result. Margaret enjoys herself at the dance until

“[s]he perceived now, not, indeed that all her parents’ friends had set out to see that she was all right, but that none of the partners who had thronged round her earlier in the evening had been moved by the impulses that should drive a man to seek a girl a partner. … There was something wrong with herself that made Roger Gregory, the only young man of her own sort in the village, dance with her only as a duty and escape as quickly as he could.”

Enter Roy Wilson – son of Edith Wilson – who asks Margaret to dance. Roy and Margaret played together when they were children (when Roy broke his arm, and Wendy allowed Edith to bring the injured boy with her to work), and the memory of their shared enjoyment in the past leads to shared enjoyment of each other’s company now. After the dance, Margaret doesn’t see Roy again until a series of circumstances results in their chance meeting and an impromptu date. One thing leads to another, and they become secretly engaged.

I don’t want to spoil the book by telling you what happens after they become engaged – it is worth reading for yourself! I also don’t want to get into all the other characters from the village (for one thing, there are far too many of them – there is a four-page list of characters at the beginning of the book!). But there is a point in the story when we get to hear what all of the village residents think about Roy & Margaret’s engagement. This is where I think Laski has been particularly insightful, for the people of the village do not all respond to the engagement the way I expected them to based on their place in the village’s class structure:

‘Why not?’ said Miss Evadne curtly. ‘Here’s a poor girl without any chances in life, and a respectable young man willing to give her a good home. What’s against it?’

In this way, Laski shows us that post-war England is going to be different, because people are already starting to look at things they way they want to, not the way they should based on their place in society.

And, just as I was starting to feel smug about my life in Canada and the lack of class structure here, just like Ralph Wetherall’s American wife Martha feels about her country, Ralph takes us both to task by pointing out the chasm between white and black Americans (although Ralph says “negro,” in keeping with the times, I suppose). Canada hasn’t had the same race struggles as our southern neighbour, but neither are we immune to differences among various strata of society. Rural vs urban Canada, working-class vs university graduates, immigrants, First Nations… I could go on.

So this is where I think Laski has been particularly insightful. The transition faced by this English village has been mirrored by many other social changes in the sixty-odd years since WWII. Parents still force their expectations on their children, the way that Margaret’s parents forced her to take a respectable job that bored her rather than letting her become a cook. We still need to be reminded to look at other people for who they are as people rather than who they are in society.