Behind the Privet Hedge

In 1936 my father designed the house in which I grew up in the Fifties. I would like to say that it was a textbook example of Thirties Modernism, like a small-scale model of an ocean liner in dry dock, with sinuous white curving walls punctuated by Crittall metal windows, and a flat roof – that signifier of all that was modern (or ‘moderne’ in house-speak). The inside white à la Syrie Maugham, with minimalist pale plywood furniture, maybe a Marion Dorn cubist-design rug on the herringbone parquet floor, smudgy John Piper textiles hung at the windows. A regular ‘machine for living’, form elegantly following function. Only it wasn’t.

The house my father built was the sort of house small children draw: a pitched tiled roof, a sturdy chimney at each corner, four symmetrical wood-framed windows, even a castellated brick wall with iron chains and a sunburst gate in the front, standard rose bushes erect alongside the crazy paving path. In short, it was the ubiquitous suburban vernacular of the Thirties – much more representative of that decade that anything the so-called ‘flat roofers’ built. Indeed, it was just like the house Thomas and Edith Baldwin buy in R. C. Sherriff ’s 1936 novel Greengates – and yes, our gates were green too, somewhere along the spectrum between emerald and British racing green. Our house wasn’t quite as grand as the Baldwins’: we didn’t have a maid’s room – not that we needed one because we didn’t have a maid, just someone who ‘did’ for my mother. And inside it owed little to the influence of the interior of the Queen Mary, embarking on her maiden voyage the year the house was built, and featured in all the ‘picture papers’. The furniture consisted of the usual hand-medowns, a few ‘good pieces’, the odd new purchase from Maples or Drage’s (rather than Heals or Dunns of Bromley, I suspect), my room furnished in whitewood furniture painted apple green gloss, with, I shudder now to recall, lustrous pink plastic handles. Not that the Baldwins’ home had always been a symphony in cream with acres of fawn carpet, a modern boxy Rexine sofa, twin beds with satin eiderdowns and wall lights, and such fancies as a nest of occasional tables in the lounge and a pull-down ironing board in the (partially) fitted modern kitchen. When Tom Baldwin retired from his job in insurance in the City of London at the age of 58, he came home to live out his days of well-earned leisure in Grasmere, an austere, dark Victorian villa off the Edgware Road. But he soon found the house enervating, the garden so exhausted that no matter how much ‘chemical fertilizer’ he dug into the soil, it seemed unable to revive, stuck in a sort of perpetual November in the gardening calendar. Tom’s retirement was not a success. Yet he’d had such plans: to revivify the garden, do all those jobs round the house that he’d never had time to do when he’d taken the 8.15 to the City every weekday. He had even decided to take up history, maybe discover some ancient, previously unknown language – Anglo-Saxon hieroglyphs, as it were, on the South Downs – or write a new history, making the dry-as-dust tomes he ploughed through compelling reading for ordinary people. But it had all come to nothing. Tom’s disappointment was beginning to sour his previously happy marriage. He and Edith found it a strain to be together all the time. They had nothing to talk about any more as they had had when they inhabited separate spheres of work and home. Edith had begun to resent the disruption of her previous routines, while feeling guilty that it was only because Tom had worked so hard all those years that she had such a pleasant life. The Baldwins’ salvation was a Shangri-La moment (James Hilton’s Lost Horizon had been published in 1933 – see SF no. 9). Reaching the top of a hill on a once-favourite country walk, the couple gazed down into the transformed valley below. No longer was there a small village nestling in the hollow: the valley was now full of activity and churned-up mud. A new housing estate was being built. Resentful at first of this defacement of what they had almost considered their own rural idyll, the Baldwins were sucked in within minutes. Invited into the show house, they suddenly saw the possibility of a new life opening up. The next day they wrote to reserve a plot, then threw a lifetime’s financial caution to the winds, cashing in Edith’s debentures, taking out a mortgage, putting Grasmere on the market, and selling off at auction every stick of furniture, including the clock on the mantelpiece (‘doleful at the best of times, it looked at its worst at twenty-five past six, when its hands gave it a dreary, drooping moustache’), and every pot and pan. Their elderly maid Ada, she of the arthritic knees in her basement kitchen domain, was pensioned off, to be replaced by ‘a young country girl – everything fresh and new’. Effectively the Baldwins would be reborn in Welden Close, Welden Valley. R. C. Sherriff was a miniaturist of genius, a poet of the ordinary and the banal. He captured a lower-middle-class family’s annual summer holiday to perfection in The Fortnight in September (1931). A George Grossmith for his time, in Greengates Sherriff paints an achingly authentic picture of the other side of the usual Thirties coin. While long-term, intractable unemployment, underemployment and poverty were the lot of those working in the old traditional industries – coal, iron, steel, ship-building, textiles – in the north, Scotland and the Welsh valleys, for those in the south or Midlands, it was a decade of growing prosperity which found its expression in the massive interwar housing boom. Three million new homes were built – two million of those by private landlords, most for owneroccupiers. It was a time of easy mortgages, low deposits, growing reliance on the ‘never never’ for couples whose parents’ iron mantra had been ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’. Moreover, most of the new building was on suburban estates – either huge local authority ones like Becontree in Essex, the St Helier estate in Surrey, and Wythenshawe outside Manchester, or private ones that sprawled out along the A3, wonderfully portrayed in the arts journalist Paul Vaughan’s memoir of his childhood in newly built New Malden, Something in Linoleum: A Thirties Education (1994). Or in Kent, Middlesex or Hertfordshire where my father, with his localauthority architect’s expertise (he designed the Chipperfield – or was it the Bovingdon? – cricket pavilion too) bought a plot but insisted on his own design rather than relying on that of the spec builder as the Baldwins did. Greengates touches on every aspect of the new suburbanization, and especially on the desire to emphasize rurality, to distance the suburban from the urban. There were no streets in suburbia, all were closes and crescents, drives and avenues, and every suburban house would have a name as well as a number. Ours was The Laurels in honour of the rather scrubby hedge that divided us from the neighbours, while the Baldwins scrapped amicably about whether their house should be Lavender Corner or Restnook (too feminine, thought Tom) or Firstcome or Clean Sweep (too ugly, dismissed Edith) until they settled on Greengates. Sherriff perceptively picks up on suburbia’s class nuances and insecurities, an example being Mr van Doon – just about ‘one of us’ despite his references to ‘the wife’ and the purple jelly he serves at a social gathering. Indeed, in Greengates Sherriff subtly recreates the whole fraught notion of what a community meant in these new, inorganic settlements, and how best that might be forged without disturbing the calibrations of class or intruding on the middle class’s reverence for privacy and privet hedges. This forensic yet kindly approach should come as no surprise. Sherriff was – is – best known for his harrowing play about the First World War, Journey’s End (he had been badly wounded at Ypres). After that triumph, the career of the bachelor who lived with his mother in Kingston upon Thames and died a few miles away in Esher was somewhat in the doldrums, until, sitting on the front at Bognor, he had the idea for a novel. Diffidently submitting the manuscript of The Fortnight in September to his publisher, Victor Gollancz, seemed, Sherriff said, ‘like offering a fruit drop to a lion’. Yet when it was published in 1931 the book was an instant success, described by reviewers as ‘enchanting’ and a ‘little masterpiece’. Greengates followed. Writing in the Listener, the recorder of the countryside Adrian Bell was equally enthusiastic, calling it ‘that rarity, a complete novel . . . one that is completely experienced, whose success is both local and cumulative . . . in which every detail tends towards the whole’. And he instanced as exquisite evidence of Sherriff ’s mastery his description of the eve of the auction of the old house’s effects, when ‘Mr Baldwin dropped his umbrella in Lot 1 and hung up his hat on Lot 2.’ The era of the silent film was all but over by the early Thirties, and movie studios, desperate to find writers who could produce convincing dialogue for the talkies, alighted on Sherriff. He was shipped to Hollywood (taking his mother along too) where he scripted the film of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, and later the film version of James Hilton’s sentimental novel of school life, Goodbye Mr Chips. But he soon came home to suburban Surrey, his natural habitat, to live out his days among the rows of Tudorbethan semis and faux Georgian houses that had provided him with his best material, and the mid-twentieth century with a poignant taste of its unique and complex flavour.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 28 © Juliet Gardiner 2010