I was struck, when reading about the life of novelist Josephine Tey, by the similarities in her life to that of Nan Shepherd of The Living Mountain. Both women born in Scotland just three years apart in the 1890s, both writers, both reticent about publicity and both committed to caring for elderly parents, perhaps sacrificing some of their own personal ambitions in the process. I wonder if they ever met.
Born in Inverness, Josephine Tey (the pen name of Elizabeth Mackintosh), like Nan Shepherd, would receive a solid education that enabled her to qualify as a physical training teacher and led to employment in schools in Liverpool, Oban, Eastbourne and Tunbridge Wells before finally having to return home in 1923 to care first for her dying mother and then to keep house for her father. Josephine would outlive her father by a mere two years, dying at the age of fifty-six, but in that time she wrote some splendid novels and several plays (under the pen name Gordon Daviot) and I can hardly believe that I have only just discovered them.
Sir John Gielgud, who would act in several of the plays, became a life-long friend of Josephine's saying this of her
'...an elusive character who shunned photographers and publicity of all kinds and who gave no interviews to the press, was deeply reserved, and was 'proud without being arrogant, and obstinate, though not conceited'...'
Many of you will be way ahead of me on this one so please do add your thoughts in comments, but having plumped for The Franchise Affair when faced with a shelf-full in Waterstones the other day, I quickly ordered another three once I had finished it.
When local solicitor Robert Blair is called in to represent a mother and daughter accused of the abduction and beating of a young girl, Betty Kane, in order to make her work as their maid, a deep sense of mystery and intrigue surrounds their house, Franchise, and the town of Milford. The Sharpes live on the outskirts of the town in their dilapidated and secretive house, inherited without the means to maintain it and, thanks to high walls and solid gates, visible only from the top deck of a bus. Yet Betty Kane, having apparently made her escape and with the bruises and a convincing account of her treatment, seems to know every detail of the house, the interior, the attic in which she has been imprisoned, its contents and more. The situation predictably runs out of control once the national press get their teeth into it and suddenly everyone has an opinion and becomes judge and jury.
Having eschewed contemporary fiction for a while for all its ticking of the PC boxes, it is serves me well to remember that fiction has done this since forever, maybe its purpose, amongst many others, is to immortalise the now for the future. Meanwhile The Franchise Affair, published in 1947, laments the single letter of five thousand written to Scotland Yard that might be worthy of police attention...
'Letter writing is the natural outlet of the "odds". The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties -...also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet... they can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it...But I do remind you that the ordinary intelligent citizen writes only one time in five thousand.'
Likewise the press come under equal scrutiny, and when the word 'FASCISTS' is painted in large capitals along Franchise's wall, and bricks are lobbed through the windows...well this could have been one of many moments in recent history.
The story cracks along apace as Robert Blair, beguiled by the younger Miss Sharpe steps well beyond his brief in support of the women, and in an effort to prove their innocence...or are they guilty. Josephine Tey cleverly kept me guessing. I really couldn't predict which rabbit was going to be pulled out of the hat, and without giving anything away it is an irony that the newspaper much maligned will feature large in this final courtroom conjuring trick.
The Franchise Affair felt like a book that has stood the test of time despite its occasional non-2019 attitudes leaving me keen to read the rest of Josephine Tey's novels, except I'm now stuck for choice as to which of these to pick up next. They seem to have had a very favourable make-over, with delectably subtle covers and floppy pages and binding which are my new best friend. All suggestions gratefully received and now over to the Josephine Tey fan club which I'm sure is out there amongst you and itching to confirm in comments.
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