Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns

This book does not seem to be growing very large although I have got to Chapter Nine. I think this is partly because there isn't any conversation. I could just fill pages like this:

'I am sure it is true,' said Phyllida.

'I cannot agree with you,' answered Norman.

'Oh, but I know I am right," she replied.

'I beg to differ,' said Norman sternly. That is the kind of stuff that appears in real people's books. I know this will never be a real book that business men in trains will read, the kind of business men that wear stiff hats with curly brims and little breathing holes let in the side. I wish I knew more about words. Also I wish so much I had learnt my lessons at school. I never did, and have found this such a disadvantage ever since. All the same, I am going on writing this book even if business men scorn it.

Sophia Fairclough, the narrator of Barbara Comyns' Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, seems entirely guileless. She begins her marriage to a commercial artist, at 21 with no guidance or model; Charles' family seems to hate her, in fact. She has a childlike innocence that seems rather foreboding for a woman embarking on an adult marriage: she keeps newts, for example, in her pockets. Her husband, Charles, is equally unprepared for marriage, but he has a malicious streak that allows the burden of their poverty and ignorance to fall entirely on Sophia.

Sophia's narration has such a light touch that the Faircloughs' poverty seems, at first, rather picturesque, even comic. The spoons may come from Woolworths, but the second-hand furniture is all painted sea-green, a symbol, maybe, of need transformed into domestic coziness. But the light touch is a feint; Our Spoons Came From Woolworths actually has a razor-sharp idea of what poverty does. Never is that clearer than, a third of the way through the novel, Sophia delivers her first child, in a public hospital, described in sinister and bewildering detail. Charles' family blames her for having the child, and even as Sophia grows older, she never seems able to eradicate this internalized guilt, even as future pregnancies unfold in even more grotesque permutations, including an abortion that the penniless Charles pressures her into having. "I knew men hate women when they are unhappy," Sophia writes, excusing Charles' cruelty. If this seems like the final intersection of poverty and misogyny, just wait until the moment where Sophia, cast out of her home, spends the night in a cold alley with her infant in her arms.

One thing I teach my fiction writing students is that tone and mood ought to contrast, or be different. Our Spoons Came From Woolworths is the perfect illustration of that rule: though its depiction of poverty is horrifying, it never loses the whimsical and slightly befuddled tone of Sophia's worldview. She comes off as a sort of holy fool, an ingenue who has been profoundly tricked and mistreated. The reader's expectation that someone will see and reward her earnestness and honesty is answered by Comyns, who contrives at the end for Sophia and her son to end up with the kind of husband that she has deserved; anything else would have seemed far too cruel for such a sympathetic heroine. I like the passage at the top of this review because it suggests that, at last, Sophia has found a way to tell her own story without the mediation of a husband figure at all: she's going to share it no matter whether the "business men" like it or not.