: Barbara Comyns
: A Touch of Mistletoe
: Daunt Books
: 9781911547877
: 1
: CHF 8.50
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 352
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'The morning I left home Mother was recovering from being poorly and she'd been sick in the vegetable basket.' Sisters Victoria and Blanche grow up in their grandfather's house in Warwickshire. It's a secluded existence: their mother is a war widow with a thirst for port and sherry and their last governess leaves never to be replaced. When their grandfather dies, their mother replaces drink with housework and the girls plan their escape. Blanche heads off to train as a model at a dubious institution in London. Vicky wants to study art but answers an ad leading her to Holland, where she tends a pack of miserable bull terriers. This is just the beginning of the sisters' adventures, which take them from the poverty of cooking eggs over a candle in their Mornington Crescent bedsit, to a wider bohemian world, as they encounter love and the fluctuating fortunes that come when you're open to the strange twists life can take. First published in 1967, A Touch of Mistletoe is a unique coming-of-age story that shows Barbara Comyns's

Barbara Comyns was born in England in 1909. She and her siblings were brought up by governesses, and allowed to run wild. She wrote eleven books including Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead,Sisters by a River, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and The Vet's Daughter. To support her family, she worked a variety of jobs over the course of her life, including dealing in antiques and vintage cars, renovating apartments, and breeding poodles. She was an accomplished painter, and exhibited with The London Group. She died in 1992.

I discovered Barbara Comyns a few years back, the result of a chance encounter with an old English teacher of mine. It was Comyns’s 1947 debutSisters by a River I landed on first and I was drawn in by its sheer oddness. Where I had expected pastoral frolics of limited consequence, I found the shapes of such familiar scenes burdened unexpectedly by menace and decay. While I was beguiled, and found much to admire, I was also jarred by its misspellings and grammatical errors. They were included, I assumed, as a stylistic flourish by Comyns to capture a child’s eye view. ‘Mary was the eldist of the family, Mammy was only eighteen when she had her, and was awful frit of her,’ goes an introduction to one of the book’s five sisters. Such a gimmick seemed to me at odds with the originality and intelligence of the writing as a whole.

I was interested, then, to learn that some of these mistakes were originally genuine errors, omissions of knowledge which resulted from sporadic education in Comyns’s formative life. The mistakes were not only allowed to remain by the book’s publisher but heightened and multiplied, the better to create a sense of unvarnished ingenuity.Sisters by a River was also serialised inLilliput magazine before its eventual publication, under the titleThe Novel Nobody Will Publish. The combination of these two facts came together to impress something on me about the manner in which Comyns’s work had been received. There was appreciation, certainly, for what was undeniably compelling and singular fiction, but there existed an inclination to appreciate it through the prism of an assumed innocence, or even ignorance, on Comyns’s part. Even the most unimpeachably literary praise she has won – Graham Greene was a fan and supporter, and Alan Hollinghurst blurbs a 1985 reprint ofThe Vet’s Daughter – concentrates on her innocence and childlike naivety.

This book,A Touch of Mistletoe, is for me the great rejoinder to any idea that the freshness and simplicity of style which characterises Comyns’s work can be attributed to a mere unknowing ingénue. In fact, here is something sophisticated and rare – the ability to contain many moods in a single, matter-of-fact tone. This tone is not glib, nor purely comic and wry in a way which flattens emotion (though there are many very funny moments). It is instead simply accepting of the vagaries of fortune, as our narrator Victoria Green is also.

 

A Touch of Mistletoe follows Victoria from the age of almost-eighteen (an important distinction from seventeen) in the 1930s through to the 1960s, taking in a life made up of marriages, poverty, addiction, mental illness, a love of art, children, and war. We meet her sitting with sister Blanche on a June evening after