AFTERWORD
In the autumn of 1946, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, then at the peak of her literary career, was commissioned to write fiction reviews for The Listener. Her judgments were perceptive: she gave high praise, for instance, to Albert Camus’s The Outsider, which was not then recognised by other critics as the modern classic it has become. I came across these reviews while researching for my forthcoming book on Lehmann’s own literary reception, and was intrigued by her warm commendation of a novel which I discovered to have been long out of print, and whose author, named as Barbara Bower, was unknown to me. Miss Ranskill Comes Home, Lehmann said, ‘is a work of great originality, and delightfully readable, a blend of fantasy, satire and romantic comedy’. I was able to find a copy in the British Library, and having read and enjoyed it, I contacted Persephone, and this republication is the result.
Rosamond Lehmann was not alone in her appreciation of the novel, as I was to find out. J D Beresford, in the Manchester Guardian, congratulated Miss Bower on ‘a witty first novel which besides being continuously entertaining displays a fine appreciation of life’s values’. The book also received an enthusiastic reception in America, despite transatlantic readers’ lack of experience of the wartime shortages, black-out and other restrictions, which are an integral feature of the plot. Sara Henderson Hay in the Saturday Review of Literature said that the novel was ‘somber, satiric, often bitter, a mixture of realism and romanticism’, and that it ‘approaches a modern morality play; it is an idea, an allegory in a way in which fantasy is blended with fact for the purpose of the whole’. Anne Richards in the New York Times also praised the blend of ‘reality and fantasy, irony and pity’.
The novel received an unprecedented accolade from one of America’s most influential popular journals, the Saturday Evening Post. At that time that magazine’s fiction section consisted of short stories, serialised (and almost always abridged) novels, and condensed novels, contained within one issue, and labelled ‘Novelettes’ but evidently not with any pejorative meaning. For instance, one such novelette was H E Bates’s acclaimed The Cruise of the Breadwinner, rightly described by the Post as ‘a distinguished war story’. In the case of Miss Ranskill Comes Home, however, they announced that, since they felt it to be ‘one of the finest stories we have read in a long time’, they would publish it neither in instalments nor as a Novelette, but in full ‘in three long parts, each about three times the length of a typical Post serial installment’.
So who, I wondered, was Barbara Bower, and why, despite her book having been so well received, did she only seem to have written one novel? The answer partly lay in the fact that Bower was the author’s married surname; her full maiden name was Barbara Euphan Todd, the name under which for some twenty years previously she had enjoyed considerable success as a children’s writer, most famously as the creator of the talking scarecrow of Scatterbrook Farm, Worzel Gummidge, and his friends.
The only child of a country parson, Barbara Euphan Todd was educated, as she later put it, ‘very slightly’ by daily governesses until she was sent to boarding school at the age of 14. She appears to have been somewhat coy about her date of birth; reference books cite the year as being ‘1890 (?)’. During the First World War, she worked on the land, and as a VAD nurse. After the war, she returned to her parents’ home, and began to write, first collaborating with various others on collections of fairy stories, and then writing her own realist adventure novels appealing to slightly older children. Her first attempt to combine the worlds of fantasy and real life adventure in the shape of Worzel Gummidge was however rejected by several publishers, and the manuscript was put away in a drawer for a number of years.
Later Barbara had poems and short fiction for adults published in Cornhill Magazine, and regularly reviewed books for Punch, which, even at the modest rate of £2. 12s. 6d. per contribution, provided a steady income. By strange coincidence, in 1936, she was among the critics who disliked Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets. The heroine, Olivia, irritated her, and so, she continued, ‘does her creator, who seems to show an almost old-fashioned determination to shock’. While admitting that the book was clever and interesting, she nonetheless wished that Lehmann, ‘who can write so beautifully about beautiful things, would not bother to write so badly about ugly ones’. It should not be thought, however, that in praising Miss Ranskill, Lehmann was being remarkably forgiving ten years later: she was unlikely to have known the name of the reviewer, Punch reviews then being unsigned.
It is tempting to identify the Barbara Euphan Todd of the years before her somewhat late marriage with the middle-aged heroine of her first story published in Cornhill. Miss Blessop has unexpectedly inherited a large fortune, and sets out to relive her childhood as it might have been, had it not been blighted by the severe, unloving aunt, who had brought her up. Despite an empathy with childish desires, the narrator tells us, Miss Blessop ‘was not a sentimentalist’:
She had no desire for little fingers to clutch at her heart-strings, for the sound of little feet to patter up and down her new corridors in Kensington. Never once since the days of her anæmic girlhood had she sighed for a family fireside and the love of a good man – the former would worry, and the latter embarrass her.
But at the age of 42 Barbara Euphan Todd did find a man to marry, who was unlikely to have embarrassed her. John Graham Bower was a family friend, formerly married, with two young children, a retired naval commander awarded the DSO in the First World War, who listed his recreations in Who’s Who as ‘shooting, hunting, and boxing’. A devout Christian all her life, it might have seemed uncharacteristic that Barbara should marry a divorcé, but throughout her writing there is an unconventional streak, and a dislike of authoritarianism in any form. This attitude is made clear in ‘Sign-posts’, the poem signed B E T, which is the foreword to The Very Good Walkers (1925), her first published novel for children, written in collaboration with Marjory Royce. The sign-posts ‘along the hot and dusty roads where grown-up people go’ are ‘policemen tall and straight’, declaring: ‘„There really isn’t time to play.“’ But children and other free spirits, the poem continues, should follow the swallows who ‘flash and flicker past’:
John Bower, the younger son of a baronet, had himself published adventure and travel books for adults, using the pseudonym, ‘Klaxon’. His novel Heather Mixture (1922) seems to have autobiographical elements, his hero being a much-decorated Lieutenant-Commander, ‘Dicky to intimates, Fawcett to others, and Lofty to the Lower Deck’, who finds in 1918, in common with many of his fellow-officers, that the welcome home offered by the Admiralty amounts to relegation to six months’ unemployed pay. Bower nevertheless stayed in the Royal Navy until the year before his marriage to Barbara. The couple pooled their interests, and collaborated, as ‘Euphan’ and ‘Klaxon’, on several educational but entertaining children’s books. They lived in Blewbury, a picturesque village in Oxfordshire, inhabited by a number of writers and artists, with whom they became friends, including the painter William Nicholson and the novelist Marguerite Steen to whom Barbara later dedicated Miss Ranskill Comes Home.