The past couple of weeks I’ve spent reading the new books by Dorothy Lambert that Dean Street Press are republishing under their Furrowed Middlebrow imprint. Those books come out today! Among them are gentle, funny stories, full of endearing characters, and beautiful descriptions of nature. It’s been a thrill to get to read these books ahead of their publication and review them. Many thanks to the publisher for making this possible! (You can find my reviews of All I Desire (1936), Scotch Mist (1936), and Staying Put (1941) here.) Sometimes I will enjoy a book, but not want to write one of these longer reviews for it. It takes work. An embarrassing amount of work, if we are being honest. But these books of Dorothy Lambert’s are worth the effort on my part. One of the joys of reviewing a book is getting to share my excitement with you! I want as many readers as possible to find these books and fall in love with them, like I have. The other lovely thing is that it enables me to spend a little more time in the world of that book. And Dorothy Lambert’s books are the kind I want to crawl into, roll around, and get comfortable in. So, without further ado, let’s get comfortable in the world of Harvest Home (1950).
Sir Giles’s chief concern is a lack of sufficient help for getting his harvest in. The labour he had during the war has dried up, and the local population is not large enough to produce emergency workers during haymaking and harvesting weeks. His daughter, Lucinda, has been begrudgingly allowed to go to London for a few days to visit her sister, Angela, who is celebrating her birthday. Angela is studying art and shares a flat with Priscilla, who works in a psychoanalyst’s office. Angela and Priscilla have a party and Lucinda, who is not used to drinking, winds up falling down drunk in the hallway, where a man Simon Kingsford finds her. (In her defence, it was also too hot and stuffy in the flat with too many people, many of them smoking, and her borrowed dress was too tight. An unbearable combination!) Quickly assessing the situation he whisks Lucinda up and deposits her in his apartment, then visits next door to explain what has happened. Everyone becomes fast friends. Priscilla comes up with the idea of having a Harvest Camp, inviting another friend of hers, Aylwin Vines, a poet who needs bucking up, to join them. Lucinda goes home the next day, and later the rest descend on Sir Giles and Lady Bradsole at the Place. What follows is a mad tale of romance, flirtation, psychoanalysis, making do, coincidence, misunderstandings, misdirections, and ghosts. Oh, and a bit of farming, too, though we aren’t privy to too much of that.
The Place was a large red-brick house of Queen Anne date that obviously resented the rows of chicken-runs on the erstwhile croquet lawn, to say nothing of the battered tin buckets containing chicken food standing by the fine flight of steps that led to the handsome front door. Visitors felt it was a pity. “Such a fine place but no attempt to keep it up these days. No cash, of course, but chickens on the lawn— well! But then, Lady Bradsole always was a little odd.” (3)
But a decay in finances and domestic staff, meant a number of adjustments for the couple. “Sir Giles was an enthusiastic farmer and all his time and energy were spent on his cattle and crops.” While Lady Bradsole “never had to do anything but accept her housekeeper’s suggestions”. That is until the day her housekeeper left her. Now, she has part-time help from the gardener’s wife, and she does her own cooking and dusts only when necessary.
As she told people, the first five years were the worst. After that, nothing seemed to matter. Things just went on—or they didn’t. Anyway, the Place survived and no one was actually poisoned. (3)
It’s a companionably chaotic household, complete with Kenneth the cat who seems to be the best fed member of the family. If anything is left out for a moment, Kenneth is at it. And remember, this book was published in 1950, and food in the UK was rationed until 1954. The cat eating the butter means there is only margarine to offer guests when they drop in. Which in a mad book like this, people are dropping in in need of feeding at all hours.
On one such occasion, Sybil Hargreaves, a bossy, know-it-all neighbour who makes a full-time job of dishing out advice and judgement, in equal portion, drops in at teatime. Etiquette says Lady Bradsole must offer Sybil the cake she has just made. We are privy to both Sybil’s surprise that the cake is not at all bad, and Lady Bradsole’s dismay as Sybil helps herself to yet another slice of the cake that was intended to be served at dinner. Of course, neither breathes a word of these thoughts to each other. When offered cake, Sybil reminds Lady Bradsole of a recent cake of hers that failed and Lady Bradsole silently accepts her neighbours reproof. All I can say is that Lady Bradsole is a saint, and Sybil gets a telling off at the end, but not nearly to the extent in which she deserves.
I’ve gotten off base, like I knew I would. There are so many characters in this book and side plots that I wasn’t sure what the primary plot of the story was until I was almost finished the book. But I don’t feel I could do justice to all of the characters or plots and keep this review to a manageable length.
What I feel I must address are the ghosts. I had reached about 55 percent of the way through this book when it momentarily lost me. In many novels, something happens at around the halfway mark to turn the story on its head. Usually it is something that concerns the main character. If things have been going their way up until that point then something comes along and knocks them for six. Likewise, if the main character has been facing setback after setback, then they finally have a win. Often all this happens at a big event where a good number of characters come crashing into each other and disrupting the main character’s life. But here’s the thing. Not every story follows this structure. Also, at 55% I still had no idea which character was the focus of the story. At the start I thought it was Lucinda, because she’s the character we travel with to London. For a moment, I thought it might be her sister, Angela, who she encourages to come home to help with the harvest. Then at 55 percent Aylwin seems to be the focus. Remember, Aylwin? He’s the poet friend of Priscilla’s who she is trying to help buck up through psychoanalysis, or what she calls psychoanalysis.
Aylwin visits one of the neighbours, an old woman with hermit-like tendencies, Miss Kingsford, who just happens to have the same last name as Richard. (He’s the one who rescued Lucinda when she was drunk at Angela’s birthday party.) Aylwin and Miss Kingsford have struck up a friendship, and Aylwin tells her all about himself. Her house is next to the crumbling walls of an ancient Priory, and oldest part of the house had once been part of the original Priory. Aylwin feels “a chilly eeriness in the atmosphere”, but dismisses it as he gets more comfortable with its owner. She tells him the place is haunted by her ancestors, and that she is proud of their ghosts (81). It’s not just Aylwin that feels a strange presence there, many others do as well, including Sir Giles, Priscilla, and a police inspector.
It’s at the halfway point in the book when there is a dramatic occurrence with a “grey mist” that seems to “obscure the room” (105). Someone shows up at the woman’s house, and there is a struggle. At this point, “[t]he mist appeared to Aylwin to grow dense and ‘They’ seemed to press closely round” (106).
At this point I was thinking, what kind of book is this?! I was pretty sure the ghosts were real, but the ghosts felt out of place within the context of the rest of the story. Without revealing anything, I will just say, stick to it. I won’t say it all makes sense in the end, but it makes more sense. Look, I love a spooky book as much as the next person, but the ghosts threw me off. It distracted me from what this scene is doing within the context of the rest of the novel. And it’s actually brilliant. Lambert adds layer upon layer of misdirections, misunderstandings, confusion, creating a general state of chaos where no one knows if they are coming or going. My advice is to just go with it and enjoy the ride.
I’ve only just realised I didn’t touch on the romances. And not all of them went as I had expected! There is lots of flirtation, some happily ever afters, and the suggestion of more in the future for these characters. Like I said, too many things happen in this book to cover all of them in one review. But I hope I’ve teased enough of them to encourage you to pick it up your own copy of Harvest Home.
Like Sir Giles and Lady Bradsole home, the Place, this book is companionably chaotic, full of charmingly batty characters, and coincidence. I loved every minute in this world, even the ghosts, once I got used to them.
Thank you to Dean Street Press for kindly sending me a copy of Harvest Home for review. As always, all opinions on the book are my own.
All I Desire, Scotch Mist, Staying Put, and Harvest Home come out today with Dean Street Press’s Furrowed Middlebrow imprint.
*All page numbers are from the ebook and may not correspond to the paperback edition.
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