‘If only people knew about Dorothy Whipple, I feel their lives would be so enriched,’ I remember the founder of Persephone Books remarking thoughtfully when I interviewed her for a profile of the firm for the very first issue of Slightly Foxed. And how right she was. It took me a long time – almost twenty years in fact – to catch up with Dorothy Whipple, and although I have enjoyed her fiction, which is compulsively readable, it is her childhood memoir, The Other Day (1936), that has touched and entertained me most.
Dorothy Whipple, born in 1893, grew up in Blackburn, Lancashire, the middle child in a cheerful, ever-expanding family, with an architect father who had an office in the town. Life was comfortable without being luxurious. Her mother, practical and down-to-earth, had grown up as the eldest of nine children in what Dorothy describes as ‘an old-fashioned sort of family’, self-sufficient in their big house and garden, with a cow for milk, and a pig. So it came naturally to her mother to do her own baking and run the household along generous lines, assisted by sharp-tongued Kate, the family’s prop and stay, not always easy to get on with but much loved and indispensable.
It’s in the kitchen on baking day that we first meet mother and daughter. The kitchen has been made ready by Kate, who has made herself scarce, and with palpable excitement little Dorothy waits for her mother to come and begin the baking.
The fire roared under the oven like a cheerful tiger, the board and the rolling pin waited on the table, the flour waited, warming, in the yellow bowl on the stool by the hearth. I waited too. My mother came, rolling up her sleeves and tying her apron strings behind. She cast a business-like glance about her to see that all was to hand. From her preoccupied face and her silence it was impressed upon me that it was an important thing to make bread for one’s family . . . From time to time my mother, her hands fast in the dough, bent her head to me and said: ‘Put my hair back, love.’ Carefully I put back the strand of hair, feeling that I was necessary to the bread-making in doing so . . .
As always with Dorothy Whipple, there’s a great deal conveyed in very few words: the safe and cosy atmosphere of the kitchen, the strong, capable character of her mother, the sense of purpose and responsibility which transmits itself to the child, and the tender gesture which speaks of the relationship between them, and makes her feel important and included.
The kitchen, where there was ‘always something going on’, was the centre of a small but sociable world. Dorothy’s adored maternal grandmother lived near enough for dropping in, there were friends to play with, and all around the mill town were woods and fields rolling uninterrupted to the sea, with Blackpool Tower visible on a clear day like a skeleton on the horizon. There were picnics, and expeditions to a primitive country cottage rented by Dorothy’s lively young unmarried uncles, and visits from her mother’s more fashionable sisters – famous for their laughter and high jinks when they all got together – who had left home to get married and returned from time to time to show off to those who had stayed behind.
On the face of it The Other Day looks like the account of an idyllic childhood: safe, predictable and largely undramatic. Yet Dorothy Whipple’s genius is not only to bring this small world and its characters completely alive, but to show us the gulf of understanding and perception that exists between children and the adults who look after them, however kindly. The Other Day truly is a child’s-eye view, and though calm on the surface, underneath it is full of drama, and often very ruefully funny. As Dorothy writes, ‘children bear a great deal that their elders know nothing of’.
One of the things Dorothy as a small child bore with resignation was being uprooted from her home and handed over to friends and relatives. There was the family of girls from down the hill, ‘all very much alike with strong black hair, big teeth and highly developed maternal instincts’, who would often come and ask to ‘borrow’ her, an idea with which her busy mother happily concurred. They would bear her away, squabbling over who should put on her bonnet, coat and shoes, and for the whole of the afternoon she would be carried about and handed from person to person like a doll. For Dorothy, uprooted from her play, it was misery: ‘I belonged to myself no more. I became a bone among dogs.’
There were other occasions too, notably a dreadful visit to the home of a family friend from Nottingham, ‘so-called Aunt Kitty’. Dorothy had just become the proud possessor of a new dolls’ tea-set and she wanted nothing more than to be left alone to play with it. So it was with horror that she heard the so-called aunt suggesting that Dorothy should accompany her back to Nottingham, where she could play with the aunt’s daughter ‘Baba’ – an invitation her mother was eagerly accepting.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ asked Aunt Kitty with incipient coldness. ‘Doesn’t she want to go?’
‘Of course she wants to go,’ said my mother. ‘She’s shy, that’s all.’
The visit was anguish. Dorothy was sick on the train and elegant Aunt Kitty’s disgust is vividly conveyed. Baba turned out to be an unpleasant, spoiled little girl, the maids in the big house behaved badly when the mistress was out and made fun of Dorothy, and the precious tea-set got broken. No doubt her family imagined she was enjoying herself, but she thought the visit would never end, until she was finally returned home by someone who happened to be travel- ling in that direction.
Like many young children Dorothy was heartbreakingly full of generous impulses and well-intentioned plans, many of which fell flat or were entirely misunderstood. She describes them in a chapter called ‘Things that Did Not Come Off’. There was her attempt to cheer up the inhabitants of the local almshouses by transplanting a large number of her father’s cherished plants into the flowerless alms- house garden – then the awful realization of what she had done as the cold reality of the ruined garden, the now dead plants, and her father’s angry and disbelieving face blanked out the original dream.
As Christmas drew near she had what seemed another brilliant idea, the ‘Silver Bough’, a magical present for her two brothers consisting of a fallen tree branch covered with silver paper collected from chocolates, and hung with marzipan fruits. Dorothy saved for and laboured over it for weeks, hugging the secret to herself, feeling a ‘sharp stab of joy’ every time she thought of it and of how delighted her brothers were going to be. Their reaction was sadly predictable:
‘What is it?’ asked one brother.
I stared at them. They didn’t seem at all excited . . . ‘Can’t you see?’ I asked them. ‘It’s a silver bough.’
‘She’s potty, as usual,’ said the other brother. ‘Fancy giving us a thing like that.’
And somehow [Dorothy writes] now that I looked at it again after they had spoken disparagingly of it, I saw that it was nothing wonderful after all. It was even silly. In the years that followed this kind of thing often happened to me, as it happens to us all. It was years before I recognized the formidable power of other people’s opinion to destroy one’s visions. An amused glance, a contemptuous word can bring them down.
The Other Day describes the gradual getting of that wisdom, years that included the death from pneumonia of a baby sister and the near loss of the brother who came after her, a little boy whom Dorothy adored and for whose recovery she prayed fervently all one terrible night – well, almost all night: ‘I never blamed the disciples for falling asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane after I had failed to keep vigil myself. They could not help it I felt.’ It was a recovery that secretly renewed her belief in God, dented by the tedium of Sunday church – especially the Litany, during which she ‘shuffled and sighed, ejaculating at the appointed intervals, but without hope: “Good Lord deliver us”’ – and the bewilderments of the years when she attended a convent where she was the only non-Catholic and, despite the kindness of the nuns, felt excluded and ‘couldn’t find her way about the doctrines’.
It is a memoir in which nothing much happens, yet everything happens. Dorothy Whipple has a brilliant ear for dialogue – how often is a book spoiled by the fact that you simply can’t believe in what the characters are saying – a confiding voice that invites you to listen, and a talent for description that makes her people jump off the page: Miss Bennett, her great-aunt’s grim companion, ‘who, when not reading the Bible, knitted socks; iron grey socks on murderous steel needles’; poor Miss Kate, one of the sisters who ran Dorothy’s first school, who could not keep order and would burst from the classroom in tears, ‘her face convulsed, her false teeth jerking in an amazing fashion’, while her sister Miss Sophy stood so close to Dorothy at the front of the class that she ‘could hear her stays creak, and when, like the Duchess, she rumbled abdominally, I listened with awe’.
The Other Day is the kind of book that has something you long to share with someone on almost every page. Though she had already written a number of successful novels, Dorothy Whipple’s literary agent thought it ‘the best thing she had done yet’, and it’s certainly one of the wisest, most entertaining and most endearing memoirs that I’ve come across.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Hazel Wood 2024
About the contributor
Hazel Wood is the co-editor of Slightly Foxed. She has lived in London for most of her life but still feels nostalgic for the Devon countryside where she grew up.