Nina Bawden
RUFFIAN ON THE STAIR
232pp. £6.99. 1 84408 380 2
CIRCLES OF DECEIT
216pp. £7.99. 1 84408 370 5
FAMILY MONEY
280pp. £7.99. 1 84408 318 7
Virago Modern Classics
Ruffian on the Stair, first published in 2001, is the most recent of the more than forty novels and children’s books with which Nina Bawden has delighted a wide readership since 1953. The novel’s hero, Silas, about to celebrate his hundredth birthday, “feels” (the author’s italics) his past life as “a vast, echoing tunnel, or underground cave”. The image of the tunnel or cave could also be used to describe Bawden’s fiction. Her narratives are packed with characters and incidents, and it is impossible to guess at any stage what may have happened previously, or what is likely to happen next. There may be an element of chance, but the plot twists are not haphazard. Events arise from the traits inherent in the characters she creates, as she reveals the consequences of nature, upbringing and actions.
Ruffian on the Stair, Circles of Deceit (1987), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Family Money (1991) have been chosen by Virago to complete their list of “best-loved writers of the twentieth century”, where Bawden joins ten women writers from Edith Wharton and Willa Cather to Elizabeth Taylor and Angela Carter. Bawden received a similar accolade in 1980, for her second novel The Odd Flamingo, which Julian Symons included in the Collins Crime Club “Fifty Golden Years of Crime 1930–1980”. Something of the thriller lurks in most of her books. In Ruffian on the Stair, there is a brutal attack by an attractive stranger met in a hospital; the events in Fanny Pye’s life, in Family Money, stem from her witnessing an incident of road rage which turns into murder; and in Circles of Deceit, clues are dropped about the illness of Tim, the narrator’s son, but it is not until nearly three-quarters of the way through the book that we are told that he suffers from schizophrenia.
Families are at the centre of Bawden’s work. They are portrayed, in all their diversity and complexity, as both nurturing and destructive. In Ruffian on the Stair, Silas, a hale and obstinate centenarian, can see that his elderly children, adult stepchildren and grandchildren behave with the characteristics they had as children; they are all still affected by what they experienced then. His daughters’ lives, like his own, are shadowed by the memory of their lovely, faithless mother. The older daughter, Hannah, is retreating into neurosis in spite of her patient husband, Julian, who is sympathetically and amusingly sketched. Formerly an Oxford don, a refugee from the Nazis, he has followed her whim to live in Yorkshire rearing sheep. Alice is a famous scientist, researching “the minor transplantation antigen genes in mice”, which she explains with the same kind of boring detail that Silas employed when recounting the history of tool-making, and that Henry, Silas’s wastrel father, used to interpret the political happenings of his day. The links Bawden makes and the parallels she draws between events and generations are intricate and nearly always informative. Silas’s son, Will, is delicate and different. Silas feels closest and most protective towards him. The reader gradually senses and finally learns the subtle reasons for this affection.
Another consistent theme in Bawden’s work is the power of money to liberate and to destroy. The two sisters in Circles of Deceit have different lives because the younger has been privately educated, thanks to the intervention of the schoolteachers she lived with as an evacuee during the Second World War. She goes to Oxford, becomes a well-known biographer and drives a Porsche. Her older sister works in a munitions factory, marries young and ends where she began, in the East End of London. It is arguable whether Maud or Maisie is happier. The question of who will inherit from Silas bothers even the nicest people in Ruffian on the Stair. As a result of the rise in house prices – Bawden charts the economic background of the period in which she places her stories – Fanny’s children in Family Money want their widowed mother to move and distribute some of the profit on her house, and they resent her altruistic impulses to give what they see as “family money” to worthy causes.
At the end of her memoir In My Own Time: Almost an autobiography (1994), Bawden wrote: “A writer’s work may be a coded autobiography, but only a very close friend could decipher it”. It is obvious that certain settings and situations in her books correspond with those in her life. The gentrified area with rising property prices in Family Money is Islington, where Bawden lives. Like Maud in Circles of Deceit and the heroine of Carrie’s War, her most successful children’s book, she was evacuated in the war. Influential aunts, like those in her own family, abound in her novels. She owned a house in Greece, as does Silas’s second wife, and Greece is the setting for A Nice Change (1997). She was a magistrate, and a slightly bored magistrate is the heroine of Afternoon of a Good Woman (1976). Her strength, however, is in transmuting her experience. Her characters go through lives of their own, and her books are rewarding to read because of their insight into relations between the people she has created. Silas realizes he is fascinated not so much by how little he knows about his own children but by how little anyone knows about those close to them. It is Nina Bawden’s achievement to illuminate human interaction by tunnelling deep into the backgrounds and motivation of her characters.
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Sarah Curtis edited the three volumes of Woodrow Wyatt's Journals, 1998–2000.
