Header overlay

Thames Valley Blues

Patrick Hamilton, now best known for his novel Hangover Square and the play Gaslight, was a troubled man who is often seen as the court poet of shabby alcoholics and wandering drunkards. He is, however, also the bard of a particular area west of London, that part of the Thames valley that extends from just beyond Slough to Reading, where his characters often go to seek refuge from the excesses of the city. This is a strange hinterland of pretty villages and small towns occupied largely by people who work in London, places that are eerily quiet during the week (apart from the air traffic from Heathrow, which of course Hamilton knew nothing about) and yet vitally attached to the metropolis. I know this area well because it’s where I grew up – a train ride away from London and yet irredeemably, parochially South Bucks.

Hamilton’s bitter-sweet wartime novel The Slaves of Solitude (1947) expresses the semi-detached insularity of these places better than any other book I know. The fictional town in which the book is set, Thames Lockdon – how close that word is to ‘lockdown’ – is based on Henley, the quintessential Thames valley river town. It is a measure of the slow pace of progress in such a place that Hamilton cites as the most glamorous local nightclub Skindles in Maidenhead, a real-life venue also beloved of Evelyn Waugh that was still open and alluring in the mid-1980s when I attended a twelfth birthday party there. Hamilton’s heroine Enid Roach, a 39-year-old spinster always known as Miss Roach, has moved to Thames Lockdon to avoid the Blitz, but she travels back to her publishing job in London every day. The opening passage of the book expresses beautifully and brutally the interdependence of city and suburb, and makes clear Miss Roach’s plight:

London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.

You would think that Thames Lockd

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

Patrick Hamilton, now best known for his novel Hangover Square and the play Gaslight, was a troubled man who is often seen as the court poet of shabby alcoholics and wandering drunkards. He is, however, also the bard of a particular area west of London, that part of the Thames valley that extends from just beyond Slough to Reading, where his characters often go to seek refuge from the excesses of the city. This is a strange hinterland of pretty villages and small towns occupied largely by people who work in London, places that are eerily quiet during the week (apart from the air traffic from Heathrow, which of course Hamilton knew nothing about) and yet vitally attached to the metropolis. I know this area well because it’s where I grew up – a train ride away from London and yet irredeemably, parochially South Bucks.

Hamilton’s bitter-sweet wartime novel The Slaves of Solitude (1947) expresses the semi-detached insularity of these places better than any other book I know. The fictional town in which the book is set, Thames Lockdon – how close that word is to ‘lockdown’ – is based on Henley, the quintessential Thames valley river town. It is a measure of the slow pace of progress in such a place that Hamilton cites as the most glamorous local nightclub Skindles in Maidenhead, a real-life venue also beloved of Evelyn Waugh that was still open and alluring in the mid-1980s when I attended a twelfth birthday party there. Hamilton’s heroine Enid Roach, a 39-year-old spinster always known as Miss Roach, has moved to Thames Lockdon to avoid the Blitz, but she travels back to her publishing job in London every day. The opening passage of the book expresses beautifully and brutally the interdependence of city and suburb, and makes clear Miss Roach’s plight:

London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.

You would think that Thames Lockdon would represent an escape, and Hamilton does present its prettiness, the beauty of its surrounding countryside and its friendliness as an antidote to the aggravations of the city. Yet, as anyone who has ever lived in a small town can attest, knowing everybody and their business brings pressures of its own. Miss Roach lodges at the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a community in miniature that is presided over by the tyrannical Mr Thwaites, a brilliant comic character who represents every parochial boor who ever wrote a mean-spirited semi-literate letter to the local paper. He speaks in an almost surreally pompous patois of jocularity, archaism and sly innuendo – for instance upon hearing Miss Roach is going to meet her German friend Vicki Kugelmann for coffee:

‘She goeth, perchance, unto the coffee house,’ said Mr Thwaites, ‘there to partake of the noxious brown fluid with her continental friends?’

The accusatory inference in the words ‘continental friends’ is unmistakable. This is, after all, wartime, and Vicki is therefore asuspicious character. However, as far as Mr Thwaites is concerned, all foreigners are suspicious. The Russians also count as Miss Roach’s ‘friends’, because she once pointed out how important they are as allies, and so she is simultaneously a Nazi sympathizer and a communist fellow traveller. Anything beyond the bounds of the Rosamund Tea Rooms is used as a stick to beat her with, even more so when the Americans come to town. Miss Roach finds herself in a half-baked relationship with the diffident Lieutenant Pike, an airman from a local base, and the exoticism of ‘our Democratic friends from across the Atlantic’ is almost too much for Mr Thwaites’s prurience to bear. Hamilton has rather wonderfully set up two opposing types of Britishness in Roach and Thwaites. The metropolitan Miss Roach prides herself on her liberalism and fair-mindedness, even though privately she finds Vicki irritatingly affected and the Lieutenant frustratingly inconsequential. Ranged against her is Mr Thwaites, whose personality is made up entirely of unprocessed imperialist attitudes and snobberies and yet who takes Vicki to his heart. So shallow are his opinions that when Vicki moves into the Rosamund Tea Rooms, he falls pathetically in love with her continental otherness. Together, they conspire to make life unbearable for Miss Roach. Vicki plays with the loyalties of the inconstant Lieutenant Pike by deliberately outshining the reserved Miss Roach, while Mr Thwaites casts aspersions on her totally innocent relationship with the 17-year-old son of a friend. Everything that Miss Roach values about her own kind of Britishness – her decency, kindness and moderation – is turned against her. It is in these circumstances that London becomes the place of escape, despite the ravages of war. Another inhabitant of the Rosamund Tea Rooms, Mr Prest, is a semi-retired comic actor who is deemed rather vulgar by his fellow guests. He finds himself work in the Wimbledon pantomime and invites Miss Roach to a performance. In the most joyous sequence in the book the transformation she sees in him also works magic upon her. All the drabness of Thames Lockdon is spirited away by his appearance as a comic uncle:

Here he was, with a whole house of children screaming at him . . . dancing, singing, falling, getting into difficulties with his trousers, exultantly triumphing! . . . Somehow his triumph seemed to be Miss Roach’s triumph as well, and her heart was lifted up with pleasure.

Whatever the dangers of the Blitz, London seems to be a place of vitality, excitement and anonymous refuge. Mr Prest finds joy in the guise of a pantomime uncle while Miss Roach discovers pleasure in the anonymity of the crowd. My own upbringing in the Thames valley was rather less dramatic than Miss Roach’s experience, but I recognize this vision of London as a kind of Shangri-La. Slough in the 1980s was no more exciting, and much less pretty, than the Thames Lockdon of Hamilton’s imagination. I moved to London as soon as I could after university to pursue the same kind of vibrant, cosmopolitan life that Miss Roach seeks. When, to her surprise, she inherits a fortune and moves to Claridge’s, I experience a sympathetic thrill of relief and pleasure. However, The Slaves of Solitude would not be a Patrick Hamilton novel if it did not contain a salutary message. No sooner has Miss Roach moved into Claridge’s than she is worrying whether it really suits her. The luxury intimidates her, because she is modest, unassuming, thrifty, ‘not the sort of person to go in for double rooms at places like Claridge’s’. The novel ends with her lying in one of the hotel’s wonderfully comfortable beds musing on having to find somewhere to live, going back to work and hoping for the best. In other words, she is looking forward to returning to her normal, quiet life, rather than escaping into a world of opulent dreams. It is all very well running to London from the suffocation of small-town life, but you bring with you the same basic desires that you had all along. There is no escape from your own personality, and that is why Miss Roach is always complaining about everything she has. She still hasn’t found her home. We don’t know where Enid Roach goes after this. The novel ends by giving her a fresh start, which you feel is the real reward for her decency and integrity, rather than the inheritance itself. The last line of the novel is a blessing upon every reader: ‘God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us’, as we are sent off with the hope of avoiding the bombs on the one hand and the barbs on the other. Above all, it is an injunction to live honestly and kindly. At the very beginning of the novel, Hamilton showed us that London is a monster, which was a pretty good clue that it would never be the answer to Miss Roach’s needs. After ten years of living in the disinterested jumble of London, I came to the same conclusion. I now live in a different small town, a place of friendship and common spirit. While I still commute to the capital most days, I no longer see London as the promised land. I have found my corner of Britain, and I hope Miss Roach has found hers.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 64 © Chris Saunders 2019


About the contributor

Chris Saunders is managing director of the antiquarian bookseller Henry Sotheran Ltd. He also writes and runs his own blog, SpeaksVolumes.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.