Our Spoons Came from Woolworths Read online

  BARBARA COMYNS (1909–1992) was born in Bidford-on-Avon, in the English county of Warwickshire, one of six children of an increasingly unsuccessful Birmingham brewer. Living on the run-down but romantic family estate and receiving her education from governesses, she began to write and illustrate stories at the age of ten. After her father’s death, she attended art school in London and married a painter, with whom she had two children she supported by trading antiques and classic cars, modeling, breeding poodles, and renovating apartments. A second marriage, to Richard Comyns Carr, who worked in the Foreign Office, took place during World War II. Comyns wrote her first book, Sisters by a River (1947), a series of sketches based on her childhood, while living in the country to escape the Blitz, which is also when she made an initial sketch for The Vet’s Daughter (available as an NYRB Classic). This, however, she put aside to complete Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950) and Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954). The Vet’s Daughter was published in 1959. Among Comyns’s other books are the novels The Skin Chairs (1962) and The Juniper Tree (1985; forthcoming from NYRB Classics), and Out of the Red into the Blue (1960), a work of nonfiction about Spain, where she lived for eighteen years.

  EMILY GOULD is the author of the essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever and the novel Friendship. She is the co-owner of Emily Books and lives in Brooklyn.

  OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS

  BARBARA COMYNS

  Introduction by

  EMILY GOULD

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  The only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters 10, 11 and 12 and the poverty.

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1950 by the Estate of Barbara Comyns

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Emily Gould

  All rights reserved

  Cover image: John Bratby, Kitchen II, 1966; © The Estate of John Bratby / Julian Hartnoll / Bridgeman Images; photograph courtesy the Portsmouth Museum

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Comyns, Barbara, 1909–1992.

  Our spoons came from Woolworths / Barbara Comyns; introduction by Emily Gould

  1 online resource. — (New York Review Books Classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-897-3 (ebook) — ISBN 978-1-59017-896-6 (print)

  1. Marital conflict—Fiction. 2. Artists—England—London—Fiction. 3. London (England)—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PR6053.O452

  823'.914—dc23

  2015016924

  ISBN 978-1-59017-897-3

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, please visit

  www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York NY 10014

  Contents

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  The Last Chapter

  INTRODUCTION

  Some books need no introduction because they’re better if you don’t know what to expect, and as I sit down to write this introduction it occurs to me that Our Spoons Came from Woolworths might be one of those books. Certainly I wasn’t prepared for it the first time I read it, and I don’t think I noticed the first time its tone abruptly shifted from lighthearted and twee to something more like horror. But then it happened again, and I started to pay closer attention. The book revealed itself to be darker and more complex than its premise—young artists secretly marry and begin to feather a bohemian nest in 1930s London, with pet newts and layaway-plan furniture and inexpensive cutlery—seems to promise. A clue to its nature is in a note on the copyright page: “The only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters 10, 11 and 12 and the poverty.”

  Our Spoons was Barbara Comyns’s second published novel. Her first, Sisters by a River, also drew on her remarkable early life experiences, describing a largely unsupervised childhood taking place in the second decade of the twentieth century in a crumbling estate on the River Avon. The eccentric, often appalling family she described, with its alcoholic father and damaged, batty mother, was by all accounts very similar to her own. Published in 1947 and 1950, respectively, these books seem to have been valued at the time for what some critics called their “childlike” qualities; her first publisher not only preserved her misspellings but added additional mistakes to enhance the impression of naïve charm. This condescending attitude offended Comyns. Her writing style was certainly untutored—she had almost no formal education except her years in art school, and by some accounts did not encounter published books until moving to London in her late teens, at which point she destroyed all her own early stories and drawings. But she was far from unsophisticated; the destabilizing inconsistency of tone that she cultivates to devastating effect in Our Spoons, for example, is entirely deliberate. Comyns wants to catch her readers off guard, and so charming daffiness runs right alongside frank and understated evocations of what it was like to be young, female, and crushingly poor. Most strikingly, she captures the shock, in the three “true” chapters, of what labor and delivery in a public hospital were like at that moment in the history of medicalized childbirth.

  The narrator of Our Spoons, Sophia Fairclough, is taken by surprise when she becomes pregnant almost immediately after her wedding. “I had a kind of idea if you controlled your mind and said ‘I won’t have any babies’ very hard, they most likely wouldn’t come.” Her husband, Charles, who has a similarly fantastical idea about the definition of “birth control,” nevertheless blames and resents Sophia. “Oh dear, what will the family say? How I dislike the idea of being a Daddy and pushing a pram!” He then reassures her by telling her that she might miscarry. Charles’s wealthy family offers the couple nothing but disapproving and useless advice. His painting rarely brings in any money so Sophia supports them by working at a commercial studio until she is fired for being pregnant. She then works as a model, but her meager wages don’t begin to cover the expense of food or heat, and even after moving to cheaper lodgings with a shared bathroom, they fall behind on rent. Charles can’t be bothered to care. “As soon as Charles started to paint he forgot about the cold and money worries. That is how artists should be, but I was only a commercial artist, so I went on worrying. In any case . . . there was all the work of the flat, and shopping and cooking to do when I returned home in the evening.”

  Up until this point in the novel the Faircloughs’ poverty has seemed almost picturesque, but there is nothing romantic about being pregnant and starving. It’s easy for the reader to feel frustrated with Sophia, whose scraps of pride prevent her from being honest with anyone who might help her es
cape her poverty (and Charles), as on her last day of work at the commercial studio, when she lies that Charles has lots of commissions coming and that she’s looking forward to a rest. But it’s also possible that the subtle shifts in circumstance, from bohemian to broke, are more perceptible in retrospect, and it’s believable that a young and under-informed woman without other experience of marriage would have no idea what the reality of having a child with a wastrel might entail. So, soon we find ourselves at the book’s first horrific peak: those “true” chapters that take place on the maternity ward.

  Childbirth, in literature, almost always takes place “offstage,” outside a book’s main action. Even contemporary novels, unless they are specifically about motherhood, birth babies in a sentence or two. What was Comyns up to, then, in devoting three chapters of this short book to Sophia’s labor and delivery? One possibility: the description of Sophia’s labor makes the class and sex limbo that threatens her life inescapably clear. She is too middle-class to give birth at home, as most poor people did in 1930, but she is too poor to give birth as richer women did, attended by competent doctors in a private hospital.

  Instead, she is treated brutally at the public hospital where a thoughtful friend of a friend has managed to get her admitted as a charity case. The fate that awaits her there is horrifying in part because its horror is so commonplace; millions of women shared it, and worse, still do. Even today birth is pathologized and shrouded in mystery in most of the developed world. Comyns, with her knack for defamiliarization that reveals the strangeness of the most familiar, was a perfect observer of the absurdity of the situation in which her narrator—and in which she—found herself. “Besides being very uncomfortable it made me feel dreadfully shamed and exposed. People would not dream of doing such a thing to an animal. I think the ideal way to have a baby would be in a dark, quiet room, all alone and not hurried.”

  With these frank and detailed chapters, Comyns elevates what might have been a commonplace melodrama about a girl led astray into a much more unusual sort of novel—especially for its time. The particulars of Sophia’s delivery are outdated, but the feelings she describes—of shame, helplessness, and terror, wonder at her baby countered by fear for his life—are still far too common in life, and far too rare in literature.

  —EMILY GOULD

  OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS

  1

  I told Helen my story and she went home and cried. In the evening her husband came to see me and brought some strawberries; he mended my bicycle, too, and was kind, but he needn’t have been, because it all happened eight years ago, and I’m not unhappy now. I hardly dare admit it, even touching wood, but I’m so happy that when I wake in the morning I can’t believe it’s true. I seldom think of the time when I was called Sophia Fairclough; I try to keep it pushed right at the back of my mind. I can’t quite forget it because of Sandro, and often I find myself regretting lovely little Fanny. I wish I hadn’t told Helen so much; it’s brought everything back in a vivid flash. I can see Charles’s white pointed face, and hear his husky nervous voice. I keep remembering things all the time.

  We met for the first time on a railway journey. We were both carrying portfolios; that is what started us talking to each other. The next day Charles ’phoned me at the studio where I worked, and we met every day after that. The sun seemed to shine perpetually that summer, the days were all shimmering and beautiful. It never rained, yet everything remained fresh and green, even in London. The summers used to be like that when I was a child, and in the winters there was always deep snow or hard frost. The weather has grown all half-hearted now; soon we won’t be able to tell the change in the seasons except by the fall of the leaf, like it says in the Holy Bible, and that will be the end of the world; at least I think it says that.

  Charles and I were both twenty when we met, and as soon as we were twenty-one we decided to get married secretly. There was a church next door to the house where I had a bed-sitting-room, so we went there to ask the priest to put the banns up. We dared not ring the bell at first, we felt too shy. Charles said they would ask us in and give us a glass of sherry and some funeral biscuits. We stood on the doorstep rehearsing what to say and the priest must have heard us, because he suddenly opened the door although we hadn’t rung the bell. He took one look at us with his deepset eyes and said ‘Banns’ in a shouting kind of voice. He asked us some questions and wrote down the answers in a black notebook, and said if we had an organ it would cost extra, and confetti cost extra, too, because of all the mess it made, so we said we could do without both those things, and he shut the door again. We went back to my bed-sitting-room and planned how we would spend the ten pounds Charles had just received for painting a screen with Victorian women creeping about. He painted it for one of his Aunt Emma’s friends, and he was offended afterwards because it was put in the maid’s bedroom, but we were glad of the ten pounds because that was all we had to spend on our entire home.

  A few days after we had arranged about the banns we had dinner with a spiritualist friend of ours, and after we had drunk a little wine confided our marriage plans to her. She was highly delighted to be involved in a secret wedding, and when we told her we only had ten pounds to furnish our home she gave us a cheque for another ten pounds to go with it; she also said she knew someone who had a flat to let on Haverstock Hill. Not satisfied with all this help, she offered to give us a little reception at her flat after the wedding.

  The next free afternoon we had, we went to the address in Haverstock Hill she had given us. A woman with very fuzzy black hair came to the door. She had a huge silver belt round her waist, and arty, messy clothes. She kept saying ‘GER-G E R’ after every few words, rather like a giant cat purring. She showed us the flat, which consisted of a large basement room with an old-fashioned dresser, and a small kitchen and use of bath and lav. When we had seen it she said we had better meet her sister ‘GER-G E R’ so we went upstairs and met the sister, who had even more fuzzy hair, but it was fair, and her eyes were round and blue and her face like a melting strawberry ice cream, rather a cheap one, and I expect her body was like that, too, only it was mostly covered in mauve velvet. She spoke to us a little and said we were little love-birds looking for a nest. She made us feel all awful inside. Then she suddenly went into a trance. We thought she was dying, but her sister explained she was a medium and governed by a Chinese spirit called Mr Hi Wu. Then Mr Hi Wu spoke to us in very broken English and told us we were so lucky to be offered such a beautiful flat for only twenty-five shillings a week; it was worth at least thirty-five. So when she had recovered we said we would have the flat, and left the first week’s rent as deposit.

  After this we had a frantic time shopping; we did most of it in Chalk Farm Road, N.W. We bought a massive oval table for seven-and-six, and chairs for one-and-six. A carpenter made us some little stools because I like sitting on stools better than anything else. We painted all our furniture duck-egg green with a dash of sea green; we had the paint specially mixed for us. We found the rugs rather expensive; we had to have two and they were a pound each. The sheets and blankets were a great worry, too. We had to get the divan on hire purchase and for months after were having trouble over it; we nearly lost it several times, but after two years it really belonged to us, and they sent us a large and legal paper to say it did.

  We redecorated the flat ourselves. Because the room was rather dark we painted the walls a kind of stippled yellow; lots of black hairs from the brush got mixed with the paint, but they looked as if they were meant to be there almost.

  We had white walls in the kitchen, and Charles painted a chef by the gas cooker. The thing we were most pleased about was the dresser; there were drawers for our clothes and shelves for the china. We had a proper tea-set from Waring and Gillow, and a lot of blue plates from Woolworths; our cooking things came from there, too. I had hoped they would give us a set of real silver teaspoons when we bought the wedding-ring, but the jeweller we went to wouldn’t, so our spo
ons came from Woolworths, too.

  2

  Every evening there was Charles waiting outside the studio where I worked. I could see him from my window, always standing with his back to the railings, looking at the trees in the square garden. The evening before we were married he was there as usual, and as soon as I came out he drew some telegrams out of his pockets and handed them to me. I thought someone must have discovered about our marriage and they were congratulations, but when I read them I felt as frit as Charles looked. One was from my brother saying, ‘Do nothing until you hear from me.’ I did not worry about this much. As a matter of fact, it was over a month until I did hear from him again, but the other two telegrams were for Charles, one from his father and the other from his mother. They were very angry ones.

  Charles had an aunt living quite near, so we decided the best thing would be to go to her flat and ask her advice. It was Emma that I mentioned in the last chapter, and she was the only relation of Charles that liked me. We both admired her immensely. She was a very tall woman with red hair and she wore a cloak and three-cornered hat. She wrote, and was altogether very intellectual and interested in women’s rights, but she disliked children, babies in particular, but perhaps that was because she had never had any and couldn’t very well now Simeon, her husband, had run away. People always talked about her tragic marriage in hushed voices when she left the room; you were never allowed to mention the name Simeon in front of her. I thought it a wonderful thing that she approved of me and tried not to talk too much in case she discovered how stupid and ignorant I was. She even liked my newts, and sometimes when we went to dinner there I took Great Warty in my pocket; he didn’t mind being carried about, and while I had dinner I gave him a swim in the water jug. On this visit I had no newts in my pocket and had the feeling I was going to be most unpopular, but when we arrived at the flat and Charles told her all about the plans for our secret marriage that had somehow gone astray, she was most sympathetic and helpful. We talked for some time. Then she had the bright idea of putting a trunk call through to Charles’s father. Charles did this, and said his father didn’t sound too dreadful on the ’phone, but had arranged to come to London by train, an early one, and we were to meet him at the station, but we were to do nothing until he came; this didn’t sound too frightful to me, although Charles was still very worried. I had a feeling the father would agree to our marriage eventually, partly because Charles’s mother disliked me so much. They did not live together, Charles’s parents, they simply hated each other; there seemed to be a lot of unhappy marriages in that family, perhaps it was kind of catching.