First Grounded, now House-Bound. I promise it’s a coincidence. Anyway over the past eighteen months, I’ve been very drawn to both fiction and non-fiction about the UK during and immediately after WWII. I think this is because it’s therapeutic to read about a huge global emergency that’s definitely over. Anyway, House-Bound by Winifred Peck falls very much within that category. Upper-middle class Rose Fairlaw, who lives in the most genteel bit of “Castleburgh” (a thinly disguised Edinburgh), has just come back from her attempts to get a maid. During this excursion, she found that – due to a) the war effort and b) Glasgow being a hotbed of feckless socialism* – she can no longer be “suited”. Being very slightly pluckier than the limp and pathetic women around her, she decides to keep her house herself, without help. Are you clutching your pearls in shock yet?
Initially, it takes effort to swallow the central premise of the story. Perhaps people who grew up with a cleaner or an au pair would have slightly more sympathy for Rose Fairlaw and her ilk. For my part, in the early chapters, I found myself rolling my eyes at her so hard that it almost hurt. At this point in history, most women were either doing the hard work of keeping their own homes and families together while the men were away, or doing demanding physical labour in munitions factories/hospitals/the services etc, or both. It is difficult to believe that what Rose is actually proposing is so remarkable. And all the hand-wringing from her many friends and relations when she announces her intention to keep her own home! Her (adult) son protests that he wants his “Mummie” to have hands like a lady’s and always look lovely. I mean, if anyone ever needed a talking to. Even in these unsympathetic early chapters, though, we get a glimpse of what’s really going on under the surface, which is that Rose is desperately worried about her two sons serving in the war, and thinks that real hard work will be the best distraction. (She does not seem worried about her daughter, who drives an ambulance in London and is probably more likely to be killed than her officer class sons). And to do Rose credit, she is fairly clear-eyed about how useless she and her fellow ladies of leisure are, even if the others can’t see it.
“Linda, we’ve got to do something about it, and when you come to think of it were there ever a more utterly useless and helpless and – unproductive sort of woman in the world than people like you or me?
[…]
“Darling Rose, you have gone Bolshie and no mistake. Think how we’ve been rocks and props to our husbands, and entertained their friends, and made Home with a capital H.”
“Given lunch parties or dinners to people we like one day in the week, and gone out on the others- that’s all that comes to, my dear hypocrite.”
This is a book that I did not much like, but am very glad I read. I have been thinking about it a lot since I finished it. For all I struggled with Rose’s incompetence (what sort of able-bodied fifty-year-old can’t make vegetable soup?), she is a very real, very human character. If my fascination with books from this time is because I’m looking for some sort of solidarity about trying to carry on with life during a prolonged crisis, this book has it in spades. The banality of Rose’s life is threaded through with grief at what her children and other young adults are losing. Her life becomes a series of endless days, one much like another, broken up only by days when everything suddenly seems much harder for some reason. This is certainly how I have felt for long stretches of the pandemic, especially during the first and third lockdowns (much better when I am allowed to see even one friend), and I doubt I am alone there. Even some of the exact experiences that Rose has are familiar:
She only discovered how far she had wandered into these dark mists of despair when she listened on the wireless, as she did every year, to the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols in King’s College Chapel. Never before had the words of the bidding prayers, the simple stories in the different voices, and the exquisite melodies of the carols failed to bring joy to her heart. […] But this year all those songs and carols and the very story itself seemed only part of the world’s beautiful past, which could have nothing to do with the real world or the future.
As was the case for many people, Christmas 2020 was the first one I’ve ever spent on my own – I’ve been unable to get back to my mum’s in the past, but was able to get to church and have lunch with friends. Although I did a video call with my mum and brother (both also alone) and we had a good time, it’s not what you want from Christmas Day, is it? The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is part of my annual Christmas celebrations, just like Rose’s. It’s normally on in the kitchen while Mum and I prepare the veg for the next day; the solitary chorister singing Once in Royal David’s City is inextricably linked with the start of Christmas for me. When I tried to listen to it last year, I had to turn it off approximately 0.7 seconds in. Thankfully I didn’t experience the bleak despair Rose does, but still. Coming across this precise thing in a book nearly eighty years old reminded me of Karissa’s insightful comment on my Anthropocene Reviewed post – that some of our loneliest experiences are actually the most universal. And then the corresponding encouragement that comes with reading it in hindsight: first, that many of the people having a really terrible Christmas in 1941 subsequently had better ones; but more importantly, that Christmas as a whole was not ruined forever by one bad year, or even the many bad years during and after the war.
The other very apparent parallel to the present time is in the absolute self-righteousness of people who feel that they are better at being at war than everyone else. One of the things I’m most looking forward to about the pandemic being over is the end of people bragging about how good they are at plague. There is a certain type of person who just loves to talk about how they are more locked down than everyone else and wear their masks better and have eschewed all humans outside their own home for eighteen months and are shocked that people are socialising again. As far as I am concerned, these people can take a running jump. I felt much the same when Rose’s Cousin Mary comes into the house and castigates her because she’s reading poetry and snatching a moment of joy in amidst all the horror, rather than doing her duty and reading the news. In fact, I put the book down for a bit at that point, because it was just too reminiscent of what’s been going on this past eighteen months. It’s easy to think that the world has changed drastically since 1941 – which of course it has in many ways – but evidently humans are the same in fundamentals.
It’s certainly interesting to see a contemporaneous view of WWII – this was published in 1942. As Brits, we like to tell ourselves now that previous generations fought because the of the atrocities being perpetrated by the Nazis, and while there is a little of that in the novel (one extremely vague reference to bad things happening in Poland), there is much more focus on keeping the British Empire together. There are also references to hoping the Germans and the Russians will eliminate each other because both sides are foreigners. One of the characters comments that it is Britain’s duty to “exterminate” the Germans – which Rose objects to, but it does give the lie to the idea that everyone was full of noble ideas about equality and democracy. Now, this is primarily in the mouths of characters who have a strong selfish interest in preserving or resuming the status quo. There were certainly people whose motivation for participating in the war was a desire to stop fascism in its tracks – this is apparent in Tolkien’s letters to his sons while they were away fighting, for instance – but it’s a useful check to our national myth-making about the war.
The last third of the book is tied up with some very peculiar and outdated ideas about psychology and psychiatry – things that have subsequently been either disproven or have been shown to actively cause harm. Although I try not to hold books written decades ago to current standards of scientific and medical knowledge, there’s no denying that the plot gets weird in an attempt to justify all these theories. I mean, this is somehow the strangest book I’ve read this year, despite that list including stories about brain surgery that turns people into empaths and a sentient spaceship that makes mind-altering tea for a living. It’s all tied up with Rose’s daughter, Flora, who has been given a bit less attention than her brother Mickie – he was very sick as a child and commanded most of his parents’ attention accordingly. She has developed a truly astonishing level of resentment and entitlement as a result. This didn’t ring true to me. Because of my job, I’ve come into contact with a higher than average number of healthy children with a disabled or unwell sibling, and although there is almost inevitably some jealousy, I’ve never encountered a child (let alone a grown adult) with the level of seething bitterness about it that Flora is shown to have. The plot with Flora is building for most of the novel, and I have to say I think it would be better off without it. It doesn’t seem to tie with with the underlying themes, except in a very clumsy way.
Do I recommend House-Bound? Well, it’s hard to say. It’s definitely a compelling, if alarming, look at British attitudes during WWII in a certain segment of society. It acts as a reminder of how far we’ve come in terms of social mobility (even if we still have some way to go), and the role that things like washing machines have played in that. In fact, when I was talking about this book with my mum, I found out that at least one of her aunts went into service at a big house – but that by the time her own mum (who was the youngest) was an adult, that was already much less common. Although it doesn’t date very well, especially with its attitudes about class, I think it’s the more interesting for that. It captures the time when these changes were happening at such pace. The sections where Rose is allowed to just be a person worrying about her sons, trying to work out where she went wrong with her daughter, or contemplating what it means to have faith during such a difficult time are genuinely engaging. It’s just all so mixed up with long descriptions of sweeping a carpet or using a gas ring – things that almost everyone does these days without wanting a prize for it. A fascinating look at a very specific time and place, but not one I will be reading again.
*I do not know whether Glasgow was actually a hotbed of socialism in 1941, or, if so, whether that socialism was of a particularly feckless variety. There is a lot of anti-Glaswegian sentiment in the first part of this book, but it’s all in the mouths of upper-middle class Edinburgers, so I don’t know that it actually reflects the views of the author.
louloureads 
Haha, well, we were certainly a hotbed of socialism – children of the Red Clydesiders – but I take a bit of umbrage at the “feckless”! These Edinburghers always though they were better than us Glaswegians, but they were aw fur coat an’ nae knickers* – a Glaswegian wifey wouldn’t have made so much fuss about a bit of housework… 😉
*The traditional Glaswegian description of snobby Edinburgh “ladies”.
That is a beautifully evocative phrase! And really, the book absolutely justifies the socialism of the Glaswegian housemaid at the start – given that she takes off for better paid work in the Wrens or the WAAF and her mistress does indeed prove to be completely incompetent without her!
I hadn’t heard of Red Clydesiders at all and just spent a very interesting half an hour falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, so thank you for that. We got the equivalent English history at school but I had no idea what was going on in Scotland at the time.
I’m often struck reading older British fiction how prevalent servants were in middle class households right up to WWII. It was always difficult to visualize in the 1960s and 70s because wages had compressed so much – I think today’s much greater wage inequality is more likely the norm rather than the exception.
What you say about British attitudes reinforces why I much prefer reading books of the time rather than historical fiction. Particularly with war, we tend to glamorize our reasons for participating after the event.
Yes, I think there was a time when almost everyone either was a servant or had servants, and very few just making do in the middle. I think my Nan is about fifteen years younger than her older siblings, so the changes happened very rapidly during and after the war.
I like both, because I think (if done well) historical fiction can act as a type of analysis that you would never get at the time. It’s part of why I like Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day – it is much more clear-eyed about the end of the British Empire than I think anything written at the time would be. But I really can’t stand the type of historical fiction where the Good people have typical liberal 21st century values, and the Bad people are all caricatures of 21st century conservatives.
I laughed at your line about clutching our pearls because all I could was how hard I worked those 9 days at the bakery. Granted, we clean our apartment every Sunday and do dishes and some laundry throughout the week. However, I know in some homes the point of having a maid is to have their home cleaned daily. So, I laughed because instead of thinking, “Oh, poor wifey has to clean her own house,” I was thinking, “LOL, her back is gonna hurt.” Cleaning well and doing it often, or daily, is HARD. I’m hoping she gained some appreciation for what her domestic would have done had she found one “suited” for her. I think about how there are places in the U.S. where most likely, the person cleaning Hispanic and how we (Americans) take advantage of certain populations while screaming that they don’t belong here.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it – she suddenly realises what high standards she’s had for her staff over the years. Housework is genuinely hard work!
Here it’s not as much an issue of race as of class – I mean, my great-aunties in service would have been white, and the Katy the Socialist Glaswegian in this story would very likely have been as well, so there’s no “they don’t belong here” – but lots of people in the story think that the domestic help crisis is a natural result of universal primary education giving people ideas above their station. So not “they don’t belong here” but “having basic human rights just confuses those commoners”.
I forget the U.K. still has a pronounced class system. Not that the U.S. doesn’t, but it’s not as structured nor does it have the same long history (by the way, I saw a news story about some building being constructed in the 1960s — wow! — and laughed because I thought of our conversation when we read du Maurier about “historical” changing depending on your country).
I don’t know that I’ll read this one but it does sound like an interesting glimpse into a very specific class and time. I generally think of women in WWII as very “roll up their sleeves and fill in the gap and get things done” so this sounds very different from that perception.
Yes, I still think that’s what the majority of women were doing, and there are even some women in the book in that category, but I think it was mostly working- and lower-middle class women (with the occasional aristocrat running a hospital out of her manor house). I suspect I am betraying my class sympathies here but I am very glad Rose & co’s lifestyle has all but died out in the UK today!
I guess it was a dying lifestyle at that point. It is hard to sympathize with them, especially in the middle of a war.
I was recently visiting home and my dad was shocked that many Americans today don’t think we should have intervened in WWII to save persecuted Jews from Germany. I had to remind him that we didn’t join WWII for that reason; even though was knew what was happening, it took an attack on the US to bring us into the war!