Faith, Hope and Decency

Rosamunde Pilcher had already enjoyed several decades of consistent if modest success as a novelist when, in 1987, her family saga The Shell Seekers propelled her on to the bestseller lists. By then in her early sixties, she followed it three years later with September. A sequel of sorts, it proved to be a worthy companion to the book that had made its author a household name.

My own introduction to Pilcher, and to September in particular, came a little later, when I was in my early teens. Left alone as my mother drove my sister to her weekly riding lesson, I would filch her copy from her bedside table, gulping it down in greedy, if guilty, instalments before rushing to replace it as her car crunched back up the drive. Since then, furtiveness has given way to frankness as the realization has dawned that countless others, from barristers to museum directors, have found similar pleasure in a novel I choose to reread at that point in the year when August slips away, off the calendar, and I can stop pretending that it’s summer. The plot of September is reasonably straightforward. In the opening chapter, the well-to-do Verena Steynton decides to give a dance at her home in the fictitious Scottish county of Relkirkshire, about an hour north of Edinburgh. A guest list is drawn up and the invitations sent out. Thereafter, Verena takes a back seat as Pilcher turns her attention to those planning to attend. There is the high-flying businessman Edmund Aird and his second wife, Virginia, who are at loggerheads over his decision to send their small son, Henry, away to school. There is Edmund’s widowed mother Violet, and his daughter by his first marriage, Alexa, who lives in London, where she is shyly embarking on a relationship with the urbane Noel Keeling. There is Archie Balmerino, a local landowner in straitened circumstances, and his hard-working spouse, Isobel. And there is Archie’s dazzling sister, Pandora, who fled the scene some years earlier, and whose sudden return from a self-imposed European exile precipitates a drama, the significance of which is disclosed by degrees. Orbiting these protagonists are friends, neighbours and retainers who together populate a novel as fully realized, richly textured and deftly handled as any by Anthony Trollope.

By the end of July, the last of the family holidaymakers had, by and large, left; tents were packed up and caravans towed away as the tourists headed for home. In their stead, August brought the vanguard of a secondary invasion from the south, regular visitors who returned each year to Scotland for the sport and the parties. Shooting lodges that had stood forlornly empty for most of the year were opened up and their owners, driving north up the motorway in Range Rovers loaded to the gunwales with rods, guns, small children, teenagers, friends, relations and dogs, took happy and grateful repossession.

Set, with characteristic precision, between the spring and autumn of 1988, September is unmistakably a product of its era. It proclaims its vintage through both its incidental details (puffball skirts, wine bars, Wogan, ‘Poison’ by Christian Dior) and the backdrop against which its narrative unfolds. Secure in its hierarchies and class assumptions, Pilcher’s milieu is one in which a 30-something advertising executive can afford to live alone in a flat in Kensington, while a stockbroker, ‘having made his pile’, can retire comfortably from the City when barely into middle age. No doubt the reassuring familiarity of this terrain accounts for Pilcher’s enduring popularity with successive generations of former boarding-school girls (though her appeal transcends age and gender as well as social background). I know of two married sisters who, despite living miles apart, share a tatty but treasured library of her books, passing them back and forth to tide them over periods of pregnancy, illness or low spirits. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Pilcher – as some critics have done – as a middlebrow novelist who wrote about women for women. She is neither snobbish nor meretricious and while the world of September is, admittedly, well-insulated, it is neither smug nor complacent. Pilcher was well-attuned to the harsh realities of life in Thatcher’s Britain. The Eastern Bloc and the AIDS crisis are referred to in passing, while for much of the novel, Archie, having lost a leg on active service in Northern Ireland, is afflicted with what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. His harrowing account of his experiences during the Troubles is as vivid as any of Pilcher’s descriptions of landscapes or interiors. As he explains:

‘I don’t feel bitter and I don’t feel angry, just desperately sad for the people of Northern Ireland, the ordinary decent people who are trying to make a life for themselves and bring up their children under this terrible, perpetual shadow, of blood and revenge and fear. And I feel sad for the whole human race, because if such senseless cruelty is accepted as the norm, then I can see no future for us all. It is frightening. And I am frightened for myself because, like a child, I still get nightmares that terrify me and leave me screaming.’

In September, glamour, be it ever so seductive, is of secondary importance to strength of character. Whereas Virginia, Pandora and Noel are blessed with great good looks and uncommon charisma, Violet, Isobel and Alexa lack any semblance of vanity or pretension. Calm, capable and utterly dependable, they are women whose natural habitats are their kitchens and gardens. Far from patronizing them for their unapologetic embrace of domesticity, Pilcher celebrates them for their enterprise and undemonstrative courage. The elderly Violet camps in a caravan as she renovates a derelict house, Isobel drives a minibus and hosts groups of American tourists to shore up the faltering family finances, and Alexa, in spite of a sizeable inheritance from a rich grandmother, establishes a thriving catering business. While beauty and sex appeal provide the necessary tension, the reader is left in little doubt as to the qualities Pilcher, who had served as a Wren during the Second World War, rated more highly. Decency is, in fact, the bedrock of September. Implicit throughout is Pilcher’s conviction that the world would be a much better place if only we were kind to each other. That’s not to say that she is priggish. None of her characters are held to impossible standards, and she is clear-eyed and unsparing in her delineation of their flaws. Edmund is overbearing, Noel is materialistic, and Pandora’s wayward passions cause her and those around her considerable anguish. Crucially, however, nobody is shown to be incapable of contrition and reform. By the same token, Pilcher is disinclined to attribute duplicity or dis honour to even the supporting members of her cast. It’s revealing that Conrad Tucker, who is a latecomer to the story, and who, in the hands of a lesser writer, might have become a predatory shark, is a man of tact and sensitivity, providing the haunted Archie with the opportunity to offload his burden of misplaced remorse. Besides knowing her world and its inhabitants, Pilcher saw it clearly, too. It’s in her acute powers of observation that the real strength of her writing lies. Far from bogging the narrative down, the descriptive passages in September – of stylish new clothes, of rooms cosy or grand, and of mouth-watering meals (Pilcher excels at food) – only serve to elevate it. Even the simplest and most spontaneous of suppers, prepared by Alexa for a jet-lagged Noel, acquires significance as the starting point for their romance: ‘The chops were tender, the salad crisp; warm bread to mop up juices and dressings, and all washed down by fine wine. After a bit, his stomach stopped groaning and he felt infinitely better.’ The novel is peppered with regional dialect: the local postman, Tom Drystone, is ‘kenspeckle’ (conspicuous), and a fish is ‘guddled’ (caught with the hands rather than with a rod). Elsewhere, the imagery is intensely evocative. Hydrangeas are the colour of ‘pink blotting paper’, while distant hills are ‘as bloomy and purple as ripe plums’. And who could fail to feel the promise in phrasing as gorgeous as ‘the lark-song emptiness of a summer morning’? Pilcher’s prose truly takes wing when it comes to her native Scotland, where she died, aged 94, in early 2019. Her account of the shifting seasons instils September with a rare and unforgettable lyricism. On the very first page, spring comes at last to the Highlands:

The wind veered around to the south, bringing with it the balmy breezes and the soft weather that the rest of the country had been enjoying for weeks, along with the scent of damp earth and growing things. The countryside turned a sweet and verdant green, the wild white cherry trees recovered from their battering, took heart, and spread their branches in a mist of snowflake petals.

For me, as for so many who love it as I do, September is, above all, a comforting book. I wallow in it, just as I would wallow in a warm bath or well-sprung bed on a chilly autumn evening. To discover or rediscover Pilcher through one of the finest of her many fine novels is to be taken by a firm but friendly hand and guided on the most leisurely of journeys. Along the way, there are pangs of pain and flashes of beauty. I suspect that few readers would consider the destination, which provides the characters with hope, bliss or redemption – according to their just desserts – to be anything other than wholly satisfactory.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Martin Williams 2025