A House in the Country

Introduction

In times of crisis, dreams flourish to keep the spirits fired. So, during the years of World War II. In A House in the Country, four men and two women, tired of blackouts, powdered eggs and cramped air raid shelters, fantasise about moving out of London to a baronial manor house with acres and acres of gardens and its own river. This is a cautionary tale and true, writes Ruth Adam who based the novel, published in 1957, on her own post-war experience of living communally with several other families. Never fall in love with a house.

Together, Ruth and her glamorous co-residents including her unnamed husband, (Kenneth Adam who later became Director of the B.B.C.), their three children, Ruth’s brother, Bob, in the R.A.F., Diana, a West End actress, Lefty in the navy and Timmy, a golden-voiced broadcaster, conjure a rural refuge with red-flagged floors and hams hanging in the kitchen where they will be serenaded by bird song not air raid sirens and enjoy nature, privacy and space. War over, in the personal columns of The Times, they find their idyll.

The house is in Kent built in Tudor times by Flemish weavers with the curved gables of their homeland. It has 33 rooms, a resident bat, a temperamental insatiable geriatric boiler and five kitchens. It is home to lilacs and roses and swallows in the stable. Over the years, its powers of seduction ensnare not just the small band of Londoners but also a succession of domestic staff, weekend visitors, foreign paying guests and tenants. The whole is presided over by the magnificent figure of Howard, the head gardener.

Howard had served the previous owner, the Colonel, beginning as a page boy. He marries the kitchen maid and the pair rise through the ranks. As cook, she is renowned for her crab apple jelly and artichoke soup. After the Colonel’s death and on behalf of the trustees, Howard has tended the empty house through the long years of the war. He confides to Ruth, I fixed for you to have it but don’t you say nothing to nobody . . . Don’t you say nothing . . . is Howard’s favourite opener to every conversation with Ruth which usually concerns him fixing something: leaks, the boiler, the Colonel’s daughter seeking return of linoleum, fire extinguishers and the Cox’s apple trees (the latter without success).

Ruth decides Howard understands that her group has no ambition to masquerade as the squirearchy, instead, we longed for the good life of the English country . . . the pinnacle of domesticity. Domesticity up to a point, she discovers.

While the other residents earn a wage necessary to pay for the lease, Ruth slaves, clocking up 126 hours a week, on the land, in the house, in the dark pokey scullery with its back breaking sink where she imagines many a scullery maid must have spent her whole day washing up for her betters above stairs. The dream of rural life begins to splinter as Ruth fails to fulfil all her tasks, the rooms became thick with dust, baths sticky with tide marks.

Ruth Adam was an extraordinary woman. A former teacher, she was a feminist and a socialist. She wrote radio plays, several novels, most concerning social issues such as the plight of girls in care. She also wrote two long running strips in Girl comic, about young women who were brave, resourceful and clever. Her final work, A Woman’s Place, a history of women’s lives in the twentieth century was published in 1975. She died two years later.

A House in the Country is enchanting, wise and funny. It is set at a time when the country is in transition moving from the pre-war deferential, class conscious society of us and them to the birth of the N.H.S. and the welfare state and an exhilarating feeling that we were launched on a new world. The novel is a cameo of those times, full of snapshots of the social and political contradictions, as the past drags hard on the present.

Soon after the London group arrive, for instance, Howard takes Ruth for a private conversation to the greenhouse, illicitly kept warm through the war. What flowers would she like for the table this summer? Democratically, Ruth attempts to engage Howard in consultation. He is firm: The mistress always decides the flowers.

In another example, Howard despises the nearby village and all its occupants for unclear reasons – rural idylls always have their mysterious feuds and enmities. Undaunted, the Londoners visit the local pub, and meet with the bristling hostility proper towards newcomers in the country. However, the hostility persists. It emerges that it’s because Ruth’s daughter Jane has been sent to the local primary school and that is considered no place for a child of the manor.

Gradually, Ruth, metaphorically haunted by the ghost of the little scullery maid, comes to a realisation. I began to think our experiment did not deserve to succeed. . . . the gracious life in the front wing, after all, depended entirely upon service in the back wing, and it didn’t seem a justifiable way of living.

The spell, however, is hard to break. Colin, aged four, receives a countryman’s apprenticeship from Howard. Howard shows him how to wring a chicken’s neck . . . kill snakes in the long grass, use a bill hook on nettles and build a hen house from discarded wood. . . . Every boy should have a year at the heels of an old craftsman sometime in his life.

In addition, there are the unfolding seasons. Adam is striking in her imagery: narcissi were treading on the heels of the daffodils; primrose queueing for attention in the grass. Ruth’s domestic burden is eased when maids, Mollie and Noah arrive and expertly take over the running of the house. Labour minister, Barbara Castle (one of many exotic weekend guests) advises on their terms and conditions – a forty hour week, double pay for overtime. Adams writes, The ghost of the little scullery maid was laid at last.

Over the eight years, the group disbands, Ruth and her husband try alternative sources of income such as renting out half the manor and Howard retires, choosing as his successor Morris on the basis of the lashing tongue of Morris’s wife. The ideal situation for the gardens is a scold in the gardener’s cottage and an eternally pottering exile outside it.

Eventually, a decision has to be taken. New tenants are found. The Adams make a bonfire of the furniture and contents they are unable to sell or give away and the villagers assume they have set fire to the manor. Back in London and for months after, the couple struggle to pay off their debts. The manor stretched out her hand and kept us enslaved, Ruth Adam writes.

Her memories have turned sour but such is her skill, the manor’s rural spell for readers remains intact.

Yvonne Roberts

1

This is a cautionary tale, and true.

Never fall in love with a house. The one we fell in love with wasn’t even ours. If she had been, she would have ruined us just the same. We found out some things about her afterwards, among them what she did to that poor old parson, back in the eighteen-seventies. If we had found them out earlier . . . ? It wouldn’t have made any difference. We were in that maudlin state when reasonable argument is quite useless. Our old parents tried it. We wouldn’t listen. "If you could only see her," we said.

She first came into our lives through the Personal Column of The Times. I have the advertisement still. Sometimes I look at it bitterly, as if it were an old dance-programme, with some scrawled initials on it which I had since learned to hate.

Why did I have to read the Personal Column that particular morning? It isn’t any use, really, trying to blame the unkind gods. I was studying it every day, looking for this very house.

It was the end of the war, and we were very tired of squalor. We were tired of the black-out edging obscuring the daylight from the windows and of breakfasts of powdered egg eaten at noon because one had been fire-watching last night. We were so very tired of disorder—of living in one room to save fuel, of the smell of scraps boiling up for the backyard hens, of beds in the downstairs rooms and of a grubby air-raid shelter in the tiny neglected garden.

We had our dream of escape. It was the standard, classic dream of every English town-dweller. It was the dream of country life, in which everything is transformed. In the country, the sun would shine all the time and we would be wakened by birds instead of sirens. Country people were simple and gentle and golden-hearted. It is an everlasting dream, left over from some forgotten forefather before the Industrial Revolution. All around us, the Londoners are dreaming it still, though we have awakened.

The porter in our block of flats has been looking, these twenty years, for a country job. I asked him this morning just what he thought he was going to get out of it that was so wonderful. He said, To smell the grass. People on the city housing list admit shyly, "What we’d really like would be the country. Parents who make sacrifices for their children’s education rate the sacrifice of the dream above everything else. If we didn’t have to pay school-fees, we could have a weekend cottage in the country."

When the English get to heaven, they will make trouble if they find it, as advertised, a golden city. What they bargained for—Saint Peter must have seen it plenty of times on Christmas cards—was something with thatch and lavender and rambler roses, or something with a cobbled stableyard, an orchard and singing birds.

There was nothing unusual about our dream. It was just like everyone else’s, except that there were six of us—not counting the children—weaving the same one all at once. Also, we put in more than average time on our day-dreaming, because we talked of it always in the air-raid shelter, always on trains that were held up, always in queues, and any other time when everyday life was more sordid and boring than usual. Between us, our dream country house became so real that we began to think it must exist somewhere, in real bricks and mortar, with real grass and apple-trees and wistaria over the door.

We were one of those groups that grew up all over Britain in the days of evacuation and billeting and sleeping in the suburbs to avoid air-raid noises. Bob, who was my brother, turned up at our house after the fall of France, when we had given him up for dead, and went on turning up there again from Ireland and Portugal and Egypt and India until presently we forgot that there had been any interval between the nursery we used to share at home, and the nursery to which he was uncle. Lefty and he had shared a peace-time establishment, so Lefty moved his civilian kit in with Bob’s and presently it began to be an accepted fact of life that he lived with us when he was on leave. He was in the Navy and Bob in the Air Force. Timmy had been at college with my husband and was godfather to our eldest son. He was one of the golden-voiced hierarchy at the B.B.C. When he was bombed out, he moved himself and such possessions as survived into our spare bedroom. Diana had been doing walking-on parts at the local rep when we were first married and was godmother to another of the children. Now she got West-end parts, and moved in with us because of air-raids. We were not particularly congenial to each other, but we were used to being together by now. We had worn paper caps in the air-raid shelter, to distract the children and concocted ways of keeping warm, and shared secrets—such as the name of a shop where you could buy marzipan which gave you the illusion of eating sweets. We knew that we wanted to get away from the shaming petty disputes which blew up among us, about who had taken more than his share of butter, but it never crossed our minds that we should get away from each other. We had planned our dream of country living for so long that we seemed bound together, whether we liked it or not, because we were all involved. We should go on being together, but we should be orderly. We should breakfast at a fixed hour, all looking clean and tidy, with the windows open to let the fresh country dawn float in. Lefty used to dwell affectionately on this bit of the dream. He was in one of the Little Ships and hated breakfast, crammed in a tiny cabin with two other officers, none of them having bathed, worse than the night’s action which had preceded it.

Our rooms would be tidy, we wouldn’t borrow each other’s clothes and the day would be marked out in patches of routine that had gone on for so many generations that we should simply slip into the well-trodden path and follow it.

After dinner, in the evenings, said Diana. We shall all sit round in the old drawing-room, with the French windows open and night-scented stock in the flower-bed outside, and sip our coffee. Diana thought most about this, because she hated queueing for spam in a smoky restaurant after her play, and then going out through the black-out to catch a dawdling train home, worse than the flying bombs which invariably (she said) spoiled her best lines.

Log-fires in every room, said Timmy.

Cutting down trees for them at the week-end, said Bob.

My husband and I thought privately of our children having the kind of life which is the pinnacle of English childhood—a whole domain of gardens, shrubbery, stables, barn and secret lairs that no one else can ever find. We didn’t say it aloud, because the others might have thought we were only subscribing to the plan for the sake of what our children could get out of it at everyone else’s expense. They would, as a matter of fact, have been dead right.

It must be one of those houses that’s been built, bit by bit, for hundreds of years, said Timmy.

It must have great windows that let all the sunlight in.

It must have so much space that we never use half of it.

It must have acres and acres of garden.

Dozens of outhouses.

It ought to have a river running through the garden, said Lefty, whose fishing-rods and guns were stored away in his boyhood home in the smoky north.

It ought to have a ghost, said Timmy. But I wouldn’t agree to the ghost because of the children.

They’ll be fast asleep in the nursery wing, right out of hearing of the rest of the house, said Timmy wistfully. In our present crowded quarters he was sleeping next to the new baby. He was broadcasting to Occupied Europe, which kept him up late, and resented losing more sleep, though otherwise he was very public-spirited about the baby. Once he had come home in an air-raid, from a safe spot on the other side of London because he had remembered I should be alone and couldn’t carry three children to the shelter at once. Apart from this, our relations were poisoned by his believing that I let the Irish domestic help herself from his sugar ration when he wasn’t home.

There’ll be three or four kitchens, with red-flagged floors and hams hanging from the ceiling and we shan’t have to live in any of them, I contributed. We were all sitting huddled round the stove in our uncomfortable little suburban one, and could still smell everything that had been cooked in it that day, including the hens’ mash. Each bedroom will have a dressing-room so that there’s no more of this First Up, Best Dressed, Lefty added broodingly. It was true that Timmy, who shared his bedroom, did help himself to Lefty’s civilian clothes when he ran short, and also left them at the B.B.C. when he came home in a hurry.

Our next-door neighbours on the right launched on one of their party evenings, with screams of maniacal laughter. Our next-door neighbours on the left called in to ask if we knew that the children had dragged their black-out curtain right away from the window.

Above all, we decided, It must stand alone. Not another house within half a mile, at the very least. There must be miles and miles of green fields, washing right up to its garden walls.

We babbled of green fields.

It can’t be true, we said, reading the Personal Column. Either someone’s put it in for a joke, or else it’s really a code message, or else there’s some immense snag about the place.

We went down to Kent to view it, in turns, and came back looking as if we had been to Lyonesse.

We never had a moment’s doubt. It would have been strange if we had. We added our incomes together and found that we could afford it. We were angry with our lawyers for even wanting to discuss the lease. "They don’t realize," we said to each other privately. But when it was all finally settled for Ladyday, we were satisfied. That would be the beginning of Spring and the end of the long, long winter that had gone on since September 1939. Lefty and Bob were sure that Monty would get the peace signed in time for them to help with the moving in. Timmy said that while Occupied Europe was celebrating liberation, they wouldn’t want to hear his voice, which would leave him free to unload the vans and lay carpets. Diana, whose play had been running for a long time, grew gleeful as audiences began to fall off round about the new year.

I’ll be out of a job by March, she prophesied. Perhaps I’d better take over the housekeeping when we get to the manor, then you could spend all your time on the children. I know about managing staff from the stage-hands at the theatre.

One of our regular disputes was about whether we lived in such cheerless squalor because supplies were bad or because I was a bad housekeeper. I was sick and tired of war-time housekeeping, but only over my dead body would Diana have taken the reins. They all thought that I was so determined to keep the keys and ration-books myself only so that I could be sure the children got the best of everything. It was true, too. But once we got among the farms where the milk came from, and the hens were laying, and we had a gardener bringing in a basket full of fresh produce every morning, I meant to reform and dole out fair shares all round.

I suppose you’ll wash all the clothes at home when you’ve got that clothes-line on the river bank to dry them, said Timmy, when the laundry failed to return his shirt and he couldn’t take one of Lefty’s because Lefty was home on leave.

I said that when we were all living an orderly, disciplined life, with formal meals, I should require wage-slaves of some sort. They all looked amazed, because it had been patriotic now, for a long time, to be a downtrodden housewife, and the more downtrodden the more patriotic.

Besides, you just got Biddy over from Ireland, Timmy argued.

But you say you each want two private rooms and roses on the polished oak table and clean sheets every week smelling of lavender. Biddy and I can’t do all that and clean the thirty-three rooms as well.

In the end I was bought off by a promise to keep on the gardener’s boy as well as the old gardener who went with the lease. It wouldn’t have been any use standing out for more, because you couldn’t get domestic help. I had only got Biddy’s labour permit because of the new baby, and she was only staying because she had married a parachutist (which had been the real object of her crossing the Irish Channel) and thought she might as well stay where she was until he came home.

We began to count the months.

No smoky fogs in Kent, said Timmy, winding a