My turn-of-the-year Big Shelf Sort saw me revisiting H.E.Bates corner and a little nest of books that I hadn't picked up for quite a while.
I was looking for some short reads and there was Dulcima, my 1971 / 20p copy. Even then, in 1971, we were thinking back to how cheap things had been before the war, now I'm looking back and thinking a book now costs a week's wages in 1970s money, and the cost of a house wouldn't buy a car these days. It's an age thing I'm sure, but I love these old books for the reminders and the memories they hold; every time I have a book cull there is no question of ever throwing these out, I get the Pang of the Past and they stay because most of this vintage were bought during nurse training and packed and unpacked in every home I lived in around London.
Rosslyn Lodge in Lyndhurst Road Hampstead...
Guilford Street Nurses Home ...almost and depressingly until a friend and I saw an advert for a room in another nurses home..
Rutland House in Bedford Place just off Russell Square. Eventually it was time for the rite of passage, our student nurse flat share...
Eade Road just along from the old Haringey Dog Stadium before being packed off to do our SRN year at the London...
Cavell Home in East Mount Street, Whitechapel..
...and finally back to the alma mater of GOS and a room in 28 Bernard Street, and thence to every home since.
I only have to look at this pile of books and I am stashing them on a shelf somewhere.
Dulcima, first published in 1953 and originally part of a collection of short stories by H.E.Bates entitled The Nature of Love, seems to have made it into a stand-alone book in 1971 on the strength of the film adaptation featured on the cover of my edition, and starring Carol White and John Mills. I haven't seen the film but H.E.Bates makes it very easy to imagine the opening sequence...
'She was a short girl, thick in the back, with stout legs covered by brownish cotton stockings and flat feet by big sloppy shoes. Her hands were large and coarse and her straight dark hair hung down over her solid cheekbones in uncombed strands...
Every afternoon she pushed an old hoodless pram with a baby in it, up the hillside...'
Dulcima is the eldest daughter of a large and impoverished rural family and, on her return journey down the hillside, the baby in the pram will be submerged in a heap of 'new-blown' branches, 'under a crooked roof of boughs.' First impressions are of poverty and deprivation...
Dulcima's mother...
'...a hollow-faced whining woman with meagre breasts that were like empty purses except when they filled briefly and fed another child. Her face was yellow, with a haunted look...'
Her father...
'...a man with cheeks fissured dark by long hours in brick kilns...work at the kilns seemed to have burnt the juices out of him, so that he was dry of kindliness...'
Everyone seems dessicated, living a depleted papery tissue-thin existence, bland and parched. Tis is a life that seems to take everything and guve nothing and very quickly I am reminded of the supreme storytelling and scene-setting powers of H.E.Bates.
The children's names hark to some sort of wishful social aspiration on the part of Dulcima's mother... Rowena, Chalice. Spenser, Clarissa, Angel, Cassandra and Abigail along with the two who had died, Magnolia and Sharon. Who can know the disappointments and the destroyed dreams of her life and clearly Dulcima, in her sloppy-shod feet is destined to follow the same path.
It is little wonder that Dulcima sees a possible escape route in the home of the family's farming neighbour, the ageing Parker, and when she assumes the unofficial role of his housekeeper and discovers a horde of money in his attic, it is only a matter of time before her head will be turned at the thought of what this money could buy.
And when Dulcima meets a young and alluring gamekeeper in the woods it's only a matter of time before...
and...
and then...
Dulcima made for surprisingly breathless reading; you know that feeling of time well-spent with a book, this a tale that really did stand the test of time for me.
I have since turned to the much newer edition of H.E.Bates's short stories Day's End published by Bloomsbury who are reissuing all 300 of them according to 'A Note From the Family' written by Tim Bates about his grandfather, and flagging up the H.E.Bates Companion a really superb website. In a Foreword to this edition writer Lesley Pearse suggests of H.E.Bates..
'He managed to create a little world for you to enter into, and that soft focus would stay with you long after you'd finished the story.'
As a starter for ten Bloomsbury are offering a free download of Castle in the Air for Kindle and, delving a little deeper, I now see that Dulcima is also available as one of three stories included in The Nature of Love for just 99p.
Has anyone seen the film of Dulcima because I'm wondering how it matches up to the book...
Do you think he has stood the test of time...
And what about your favourite H.E.Bates titles...
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