I wish I'd paid more attention to the lino when I was growing up.
It was the standard floor covering in our house, with rugs and coverings various, until the arrival of Marley Floor, but seeing the endpapers to the Persephone edition of Greengates by R.C.Sherriff was all it took to remind me of the patterns and the unique smell. Then of course cue a massive diversion as I look up linoleum, the word a composite of the constituents 'linum' - flax and 'oleum' oil and a mid-Victorian invention.
R.C.Sherriff sets his scene as well and as visually as ever as the novel begins with the retirement of Mr Baldwin, a clerk in the city,and the usual presentation of a clock at a time in a person's life when they can actually stop watching it.
It is page forty-four before Mr Baldwin becomes Tom and with it a sense that he is shaking off the formality and routine of his working life in order to drive his long-suffering wife Edith to distraction. Suddenly thrown together the couples' lives are destined for disaster until, on a country outing, Tom and Edie suddenly realise that there could be more to this retirement thing than sitting around and getting on each other's nerves.
'Fancy forgetting the countryside was only half an hour away...' says Tom to Edie from their front seats on the bus, and with that excursion their new adventure begins; a new house and grand letting go of the past. The trauma of auctioning off a previous life is balanced with the excitement of establishing a new one as they move to a new housing estate and furnish their house accordingly.
There will be moments of doubt and terror but Tom is soon deeply involved in the community, finally achieving the status he had failed to achieve at work when he becomes the chairman of the newly-established social club.
Mind you, haven't we all met people like it...
Into the voluntary organisation with time on their hands, assume responsibility, refuse to delegate or trust others and then, as a conseqeunce, 'have' to do everything for themselves. Tom Baldwin, having let go of paid employment, soon finds himself working full-time for no payment, but he loves it and so does Edie, who hardly sees him, busy as she is with her garden and the Ladies Committee.
It's all a far cry from that immediate post-retirement ennui that had Tom sweeping leaves off the lawn on a daily basis...
'Against the lower wall lay the stack of leaves he had made in the autumn of the previous year: a little heap of embalmed sadness : a little monument to a futile groping for a happiness that has side-stepped him and slipped away.'
Roland Wales in his excellent biography of R.C.Sherriff From Journey's End to the Dambusters, suggests that with the extension of the tube line into the countryside came 'an explosion of house-building around the fringes of London,' likening it to John Betjeman's Metroland and in particular to the Surrey area that R.C.Sherriff knew well and to which my family also moved in the 1950s. He lived barely eight miles from us now that I think about it.
Cue a curious excursion onto Google street view as I go and have a wander up and down Russell Road in Mitcham fifty five years (approx) after I roller skated these very pavements...
That's it, the cream house, number 36 and there's my little bedroom window (youngest child always gets the box room). On this side lived the Vickers and on the other side the Nuns which we always thought was hilarious. Gone are the privet hedges, bane of my Dad's life with his hand shears, and long-gone the lino, but I'll bet there were a few Tom Baldwins around back in the day keeping us all organised and involved.
Greengates received positive reviews on publication in 1936...
'Brilliantly composed and splendidly persuasive...'
'A magnificent work...'
'A most engaging novel...'
And I feel a slight twinge of sadness at having read the last of R.C. Sherriff's three re-published novels, The Hopkins Manuscript, The Fortnight in September and now Greengates, what a joy they have all been, a perfect trilogy of great reading.
Your thoughts on R.C.Sherriff gratefully received..
And I'm thinking too about other male writers from this era and suddenly Nevil Shute has come to mind. Born three years later and a very different writer, but I haven't read any of his in ages...have his books stood the test of time and if so which would you recommend...
Postscript:: I am reading a new book entitled Outskirts - Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt by John Grindrod and am delighted to find that Greengates gets a good mention. More about it soon, but meanwhile head for library reservations, it's fascinating.
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