Bewildering Cares Read online

  Winifred Peck

  Bewildering Cares

  ‘It’s a storm in a tea-cup, of course, but then we happen to live in a tea-cup!’

  So begins Camilla Lacely’s charming, witty diary of life as a vicar’s wife in a mid-sized town outside of Manchester in the anxious, early days of World War II. The ‘everything and nothing’ that happens include a controversy swirling around the curate’s pacifist sermon (through which, alas, Camilla napped, making it difficult for her to discuss with outraged parishioners), servant problems, anxieties about Camilla’s son off training with his regiment, the day-to-day worries of friends, and a potential romance in the town … or are there two romances?

  Readers of Bewildering Cares might well be reminded of the likes of E.M. Delafield or Angela Thirkell, but Peck offers her own distinct take—sometimes hilarious, sometimes touching—on the ironies and heartbreaks (not to mention the storms in teacups) of domestic life, community, faith and life during wartime. This new edition includes an introduction by social historian Elizabeth Crawford.

  ‘(Winifred Peck) deserves our real gratitude for making us laugh in these troublous days’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘A romantic who was as sharp as a needle’ PENELOPE FITZGERALD

  FM9

  “These bewildering cares

  Which weigh us down who live and earn our bread”

  —WILLIAM MORRIS

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Epigraph

  Contents

  Introduction by Elizabeth Chadwich

  Preface

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About the Author

  Titles by Winifred Peck

  Evenfield – Title Page

  Evenfield – Chapter One

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘Small troubles are a great help in war-time … They fill the foreground of one’s mind and enable one to keep a sense of perspective.’ Thus observes Arthur, husband of Camilla Lacely, the narrator of Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck (1882-1962), now reissued as a Furrowed Middlebrow novel. Arthur is vicar of St Simon’s, a parish in ‘Stampfield’, a market town in ‘North Midlandshire’ to which London means little ‘though we have a slight respect for Manchester’. St Simon’s is one of the churches thrown up in manufacturing districts in the 19th century and was, as Camilla describes, ‘of the most dismal Victorian Gothic, with pitch pine pews and pulpit, and a dismal East Window.’ The ‘small troubles’, Camilla Lacely’s ‘bewildering cares’, are those that dominate her life and that of her parish during a week in Lent in 1940. The Second World War has been underway for barely six months, the main news is of Russia’s invasion of Finland, the blitz is yet to come, but Stampfield has already accustomed itself to life on the Home Front. The Lacelys’ only son, Dick, is with his regiment ‘somewhere in the Essex mud’ and Camilla has had to accustom herself to running her vicarage, ‘a gaunt, big house with a peeling stucco front, three stories high, with a cavernous basement kitchen’, with only one maid. Moreover, Camilla tells us that since the beginning of the war ‘I have tackled the cooking myself, to prevent waste’. Here, as in so many other ways, the author of Bewildering Cares is drawing on her own experience; it was only now that, for the first time in her life, Winifred Peck had had to cook for her household. Moreover, although not a vicar’s wife, she knew only too well what it was to live in a clerical household; the Scotsman’s reviewer (19 September 1940) particularly remarks that the author ‘shows herself a knowledgeable and sympathetic observer of the domestic life of the clergy’. The third of six children, Winifred was born in Oxford in 1882 at a time when her father, Edmund Knox, who had been ordained ten years earlier, was a fellow of Merton College. However, the family soon moved to Kibworth in Leicestershire where Knox was rector from 1884 until 1891 and where his two youngest sons were born. All four Knox brothers were to have interesting careers: the eldest, as ‘E.V. Knox’, was to be a renowned editor of Punch, and father of the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, the second, Dillwyn, was a classics scholar and cryptographer whose work in both world wars was essential to the Allied victory, Wilfred was an Anglo-Catholic theologian, and the youngest, Ronald, was ordained as an Anglican but quite soon converted, becoming a Catholic priest, theologian, and writer of detective novels. All the Knox children, except the eldest, Ethel, were demonstrably clever, with Winifred well able to match the intellectual and verbal gymnastics of her brothers. Edmund Knox had received a dour upbringing from an exacting clerical father but ensured that his children did not suffer a similar fate. Of him Winifred Peck wrote ‘My father seemed to me so far removed from the nursery and our schoolroom orbit, and so great, so omnipotent, yet infinitely kind when we were unhappy, that through him the conceptions of an Almighty God was easy to realise.’ Their mother, born Ellen French, was the daughter of the saintly bishop of Lahore. Yet, despite what was an overwhelmingly Evangelical clerical inheritance, Winifred reported that ‘we had no surfeit of church services or religious admonitions or holy talks.’ Life at Kibworth was a time to which all the Knox children looked back as a golden age. But it did not last. In 1891 Edmund Knox felt called to work in what Winifred described as ‘a huge slum parish’ and the family left their country rectory with its bounteous gardens for the grimmer surroundings of Aston, Birmingham. Very quickly their mother became ill and was taken away to a series of nursing homes. Her children never saw her again. She died in Brighton in August 1892 when she was 38 years old and Winifred was nine. After an interlude during which a ‘fragile and bewildered aunt’ attempted to manage the Knox household, the children were divided between various relatives. Winifred was sent with her sister and one of her brothers to board with a decidedly Evangelical great-aunt in Eastbourne. After this experience it was a great relief to return to Birmingham after their father’s remarriage in 1895. Winifred’s step-mother was also the daughter of a clergyman, but one who had inherited considerable wealth and appreciated the finer things of life. Edmund Knox was appointed suffragan bishop of Coventry and vicar of St Philip’s in central Birmingham, allowing the family to move from Aston into a rectory made tasteful and comfortable in a William Morris-ish way by the new Mrs Knox. After experiencing schools of varying quality in Birmingham and Eastbourne, Winifred Knox was among the first intake at Wycombe Abbey School and completed her education at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where in 1905 she gained a first-class honours in Modern History. She then returned to ‘Bishopscourt’, a large house set back from Bury New Road, Salford, which had become home since her father’s appointment to the bishopric of Manchester in 1903. She continued her research into French history and in 1909 published The Court of a Saint, a study of Louis IX of France. She later turned to writing fiction and by the time she wrote Bewildering Cares had already published at least nine adult novels as well as contributing many articles to The Manchester Guardian. While at Oxford Winifred Knox had been influenced by ‘Christian Socialist ideals’ which, ‘founded on class-love rather than class-hatred, seemed to offer the prospect of a golden future.’ Living at home in Manchester in the years between leaving Oxford and her marriage in December 1911 she tried to give these ideals a practical application and in doing so led a life not dissimilar to that of Camilla Lacely. ‘My own poor efforts at social work after I went down, those poor straws of factory girls’ clubs, district visiting and committees on which I floated on the vast torrent of human misery, seemed more tolerable because of tho
se dreams of a new Christian social order.’ By taking the title of Bewildering Cares, slightly misremembered, from the ‘Apology’ to William Morris’s Earthly Paradise – ‘The heavy trouble, the bewildering care/That weighs us down who live and earn our bread,/These idle verses have no power to bear’ – she demonstrated her affection for the work of that socialist revolutionary. Indeed Morris might well have approved of the sermon preached by Arthur Lacely’s curate, Herbert Strang, which was to be the most ‘bewildering care’ of Camilla’s week. For on Sunday Strang preached a message of pacifism, lambasting capitalism and even, it was thought, the Empire. Camilla was present but, alas, had slept through his oratory, so worn out was she with her domestic duties. The curate’s heresy becomes the talk of Stampfield, having ruffled the feathers of both the leading local businessman and parish committee ladies such as ‘Miss Cookes [who] has always suspected Mr Strang of having no interest in missionary work as compared with British social questions’. It took a bout of pneumonia to restore him to the grace of his parishioners. Camilla is well aware how absorbed she becomes in such ‘storms in our Stampfield tea-cup. But tea-cups are important when you live in them.’ However, there are plenty of other distractions. As the vicar’s wife she is called upon to attend a wide variety of committees, including Comforts for Converts (making ‘hundreds of bags of sphagnum moss for Finland’), Warmth for Warriors, the Factory Girls’ Club, the District Nursing Association, and a Missionary Society. She visits the dying, listens to various tales of woe, and spends a rather ludicrous ‘Quiet Day’ organised by the wife of the vicar of Stampfield Parish Church. In addition she is privy to two romances, one of which, involving her own son, prompts her to take out her wedding veil. It is made of Brussels lace, as was the one worn by Winifred Knox at her wedding in Manchester Cathedral. Throughout the novel Camilla’s observes her fellow parishioners with a slightly jaundiced eye, often allowing the ideas of her youthfully acerbic son to float into her mind where she herself might have felt obliged to be more charitable. Of the novel the Daily Mail critic wrote, ‘It is quite on the cards that before long Winifred Peck will qualify as a modern Anthony Trollope’ and indeed Camilla and Arthur are clearly well acquainted with the ‘Chronicles of Barsetshire’, casually referring in their conversation to Trollopeian characters. Camilla Lacely is also devoted to Charlotte Yonge, E.M. Delafield, Winifred Holtby, Dorothy Whipple, and Angela Thirkell, although for Lent she has been ‘trying to do without a library subscription’. However there is little time for reading, except during meals. Camilla is a slave to the work necessary to keep the vicarage and its household in order, even going so far as to unpack the overnight case of the visiting Archdeacon. When Winifred Peck was writing Bewildering Cares her husband held the important position of chief divisional food controller for Scotland. Rationing had been introduced in January 1940 and on the Wednesday of her week one of Camilla Lacely’s many tasks is to deal with ‘Food Control’ in order to get a replacement for a lost ration book for a ‘mother [who] drinks, and [whose] children are dirty and verminous’. One imagines that it amused the author to slip in a reference to ‘food control’, a subject that must have been much discussed at home. James Peck had been knighted in 1938 and it was as ‘Lady Peck’ that the author was referred to by some reviewers. The Times Literary Supplement (28 September 1940) commented ‘Lady Peck’s wit sparkles on every page. The book is a tonic and she deserves our real gratitude for making us laugh in these troublous [sic] days’. Noting that the book was written before the Blitz, the same reviewer summed up Camilla Lacely thus: ‘[She] has her hands full without bombs, but she would have stood up to them – probably is at this moment doing so – with the same mixture of courage, humour, slightly acid criticism and sincere faith in God as help her through all the bewildering cares of a poor parish.’ In The Observer (15 September 1940) L.P. Hartley commended the novel for showing ‘us a world in which a multitude of small duties, faithfully discharged, add up to something much greater than themselves’. For, as readers of Bewildering Cares will appreciate, Arthur Lacely’s observation that ‘small troubles enable one to keep a sense of perspective’, is as pertinent now as in 1940. Elizabeth Crawford

  Preface

  This diary was written before the Blitzkrieg began. Part of it appeared, in rather different form, in The Guardian; and in thanking the Editor for leave to make use of it, I find myself wondering whether my readers will thank me for taking them back to the spring of 1940. I can only plead that Camilla Lacely will continue to cope with her husband’s parish as long as he and she and the parish remain in being. Perhaps the things she cares for are coming to seem more, and not less, precious.

  I

  Monday

  My husband, Arthur Lacely, is the Vicar of Saint Simon’s, Stampfield, North Midlandshire. To the lay mind, the word Vicar conjures up at once, I know, either an image of a thin, fussy, short-sighted fanatic, with bicycle-clips confining his black trousers, or of a stout, bald spheroid in a surplice rising over the top of a pulpit. (Rectors, let me add, have a very different reputation: they may have white, curly hair, infinite charm, and die for their congregations in typhoid epidemics.) So I must insist at once that Arthur, though a Vicar, is tall, dark, as scrupulously clean-shaven as our defective hot-water system allows him to be, and has a delightful way of looking over his spectacles at any acquaintance as if he or she were the one person in the world worth talking to. While I can never admire enough his courage, good-humour and tolerance, I am not sure that he is the right man in the right place in this parish. He took a First in Greats before he served in the ranks, in the Great War, for some months before he got a commission, so that on the one side he is invariably incapable of regarding theological or party problems with anything but detached tolerance, and cannot begin to understand the pettiness or narrowness of the provincial middle-class mind. And on the other, he finds his work among the factory-hands and the out-of-works in the parish so enthralling that I have frequently to remind him that even women have souls to be saved, and that even elderly Church workers need a little attention.

  “What it really boils down to,” said Dick, our son, when I was making one of my protests, “is that old Mother Weekes happened to plant herself down on the chair where that nice chap, who dropped in on his way back from his factory last night, left a few fancy traces. Well, whose fault was that?”

  “You can’t expect your Ma or me to wash a chair-cover between ten one night and ten next morning!” put in Kate, unexpectedly, as she flung the potatoes on the table. Kate is our one maid, and I am never sure whether she is a Menace or a Paragon. She breaks china, talks for hours to the tradesmen, comes in late at night, never gets a message right, and is so tall and stout and jolly that Dick always refers to her at the Buccaneer. But she is devoted, usually cheerful, and stays with us; and in any crisis becomes a Treasure at once.

  “I admit”, said Arthur, “it was unfortunate about the chair, but—”

  “Go on, Daddy!” laughed Dick, “But it depends on what meaning you attach to the words ‘chair’ and ‘unfortunate’, you’re going to say!”

  “No, no, I was going to say that Hartly looked in late, at great personal inconvenience, to discuss a serious problem, and Mrs. Weekes interrupted my morning with nothing but some fantastic protest against Miss Boness for putting dahlias in the Church vases in Lent.”

  “Not dahlias at this time of year!” I had to protest. “And, darling, the point was that you don’t have vases in Lent—and a very good idea, too, and I always try to get my name down for March before anyone remembers! The real trouble was that Miss Boness hadn’t remembered it was Lent at all, because she didn’t often come to church then, and Mrs. Weekes wanted to rub it in!”

  “Sweet soul!” said Dick. “Oh, well, she got something else rubbed in all right!”

  “It is wholly incredible to me”, said Arthur, a little amused yet obviously bewildered, “how any human being in this twentieth century can conceivably attach any im
portance to such trifles.”

  I quote this story to show Arthur’s point of view. Some clergy wives have to run about making up differences because their husbands are too narrow-minded, but there is almost as much to do when your husband is not narrow-minded enough. I paid the cleaner’s bill for what Dick would call “The Tragedy of the Tail”, and had a tea-party for Miss Boness, and that was that.

  Dick is our only son. He has neither gone to the bad, like the clergy son of fiction, nor can I pretend to say that he has never given us a moment’s anxiety. He broke various limbs in his school-days, and criticized us and the Church fairly severely at the age of fifteen. He took to Communism and was rather extravagant at Oxford, and had a serious affair with a quite horrid little gold-digger. But he is charming, cheerful, adorable to us, and delightfully profane. Riddled though our home has doubtless been with inhibitions, neuroses and Oedipus complexes, we look back to every holiday with memories of happiness and gaiety, only too poignant now that he is with his regiment “somewhere in Essex mud”.

  As Arthur is a Vicar we naturally live in a Vicarage, and this, again, to the lay mind conjures up a picture either of a country house in embosoming trees, or a Victorian-Gothic villa and church set down in a pocket of asphalt among London streets. Saint Simon’s Vicarage is not quite true to any conventional type. It is a gaunt, big house with a peeling stucco front, three stories high, with a cavernous basement kitchen. If it ever had a garden it was sold years ago, and we have a row of little houses on either side, and a very busy brewery yard at the back. The front door opens upon a flight of stone steps, a strip of gravel behind a stucco balustrade and a gate, into a narrow—and much frequented—street. The porch, rails and gate have all subsided a little into the ground at different angles, so that, as Dick says, the old home looks as if it had been having “a bit of a night out”. It has seven bed., three sit., bath (h. & c., but not much h. without vast expenditure of coal) and the usual offices, all inconvenient. It can never be sold or exchanged, as country rectories so often are, as it belongs wholly to a past age of cheap coal and cheap domestic labour. Until the War, I managed it easily with two hereditary treasures. We had a little money of our own in industrial shares then, and those of course we can count on no more. So Kate and I manage together, and I know I am very lucky to have her.