Behind the Net Curtains

The maxim ‘write what you know’ has been drummed into aspiring novelists on creative writing courses for years and it aptly sums up the varied career of R. F. Delderfield, whose writing life was divided into three distinct parts. He was encouraged early on by George Bernard Shaw and Graham Greene among others, and one of his several mentors advised him to ‘write what pleases you and you have a slim chance of pleasing others by accident’.

R. F. (Ron) Delderfield was 6 when in 1918 his family, shaken by the Great War’s air raids, moved, as so many Cockney families did, to the suburbs. Ashburton Avenue, Addiscombe was then on the Kent/Surrey border, close to Shirley, an outer London ‘ring’, near Croydon – very different from Bermondsey and a paradise for a small boy. Five years later, his father upped sticks to Devon, changed his job and became editor of a weekly local paper, the Exmouth Chronicle, where Delderfield worked after leaving boarding-school as a reporter and ‘virtual sub-editor’. He interviewed visiting celebrities, wrote memorial notices (an inappropriate source of hilarity), attended weddings and funerals, and was required to fold the papers prior to distribution. Though his father considered him fortunate to have a job in the late 1920s when unemployment was widespread, Delderfield felt his prospects were limited, and he determined to write a successful play. Returning to London, he worked his way through theWriters’ and Artists’ Yearbook and was on the cusp of success when war broke out again. Having been rejected for training as air-crew because of his extreme short-sightedness, he joined up as a clerk and did unpaid stage writing for the RAF (including a pantomime). He eventually joined the bomb disposal squad since he was considered insufficiently educated to be an officer. The armed forces would prove to be a rich source of copy. Discharged in 1945, he was delighted to discover that a play he had sent to several theatres years earlier and forgotten about had been picked up. Worm’s Eye View, described by its first producer as ‘on the face of it, a farcical comedy of low genre’, became a huge success, eventually transferring to the West End where it became a popular fixture. Delderfield’s father looked upon his son’s dramatic endeavours with a jaundiced eye, and only went to the play more than halfway through its five-year run after ‘the local pork butcher . . . assured him that it was well worth seeing’. In 1956, disillusioned with the theatre, Delderfield gave it up, began to write novels and ‘at once put on weight’. He found he was far happier with his characters ‘safely imprisoned between two hard covers and not in a position to dispute their exits and entrances’ – unlike the actors and actresses in his plays, who clearly drove him to distraction. He was also a reasonably successful screenwriter, but never made much of television, though after he died, aged 60 in 1972, many of his novels were adapted for the small screen and were avidly watched by huge audiences throughout the 1970s and early ’80s. Among these was the Avenue series, retitled People like Us. Published in 1958 and located, like Delderfield’s childhood home, near Croydon, in the lightly fictionalized ‘Manor Park Avenue’, the two Avenue novels tell of the daily life of a suburban community. They are a robust defence of suburban life, its values, its architecture and its residents, ‘who dream as extravagantly as anyone else’, impervious to the sneers and derision of those who despise suburbia and all it stands for, though Delderfield does skewer their weaknesses and occasional pretensions. The Avenue books were the first of his enormously successful ‘sagas’. The Dreaming Suburb covers the years 1919 to 1940, and its sequel, The Avenue Goes to War, 1940 to 1947. Five families are introduced, four on the ‘even’ side of the Avenue, one on the ‘odd’. The largest (seven in all) is that of the Carvers at No. 20, father Jim a widower, recently returned from the trenches. Next door at No. 22 live Esme Fraser and his mother Eunice, trailing her lovelorn solicitor and eventual spouse Harold Godbeer in her wake. It is Harold who personifies the suburban mindset – fussy, correct and resistant to change, at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Jim Carver. For Esme, as for Delderfield, the open countryside so close to the houses is a revelation. Local landmarks feature in the books, and Delderfield uses them to good effect – the cinema, the ‘rec’ where lovers’ trysts are made and broken, and the annual Fair on the Shirley Hills. Then there’s the Avenue itself, the houses (‘some . . . had names as well as numbers’) with stained-glass panels in the front doors, a porch bedroom window where goings-on are observed, and chainlink fences dividing the properties at the front. At No. 4 live the spinster Clegg sisters: Becky, the younger, has a ‘past’ and a mental age of 7, and they exist in genteel poverty until they find a lodger, Ted, who epitomizes the age with his passion for jazz and his extensive knowledge (like the author’s) of 1920s sheet music. Edith Clegg loves the cinema as fervently as her creator did, and much of her dialogue on the subject could have been his. A lovely description in the first book of ‘the summer evening orchestra of the suburbs, the low, pleasant whine of lawn-mowers, the chink of watering-can and spade . . . and the metallic snick-snack of hand-shears, hard at work on unruly privet’ evokes the continuity of suburban life, while within the houses passions seethe and some residents plot their escape. This parochial existence is lived against the background of historical events such as the General Strike (most of which leave the Avenue dwellers, with their ‘pitifully limited horizons of thought’, unaffected). Central London, only twelve miles away, might as well be another country. But the outbreak of war brings seismic changes, and people’s dreams go into cold storage for five years. Characters leave, most to join up, but their stories are followed, and their adventures always lead them back to the Avenue. In occupied France, Esme meets a man who once lived round the corner. In The Avenue Goes to War, which opens in mid-1940, Delderfield kills off a total of seventeen Avenue residents but is unable to bring himself to kill Bernard Carver who, with his twin brother Boxer, provide much of the comedy in the novels – first as naughty boys, then as fearless Commandos. Even the most conventional resident, Edith Clegg, breaks out in her own small way. The Avenue loses its pre-war trimness and many of its occupants lose their insularity. Ted the lodger, now married, quite literally experiences a sea-change after meeting a refugee from the concentration camps, and feels he must do his bit. Jim and Harold forge an unlikely friendship, both agreeing that they’ve ‘got to face up to things as a people again, the way we did last time’. The conflict creeps closer to home with bombing raids destroying the symmetry of the Avenue, while the quiet humdrum lives its residents once enjoyed disappear. Those who return find an Avenue irrevocably changed. It still has its values, and its residents still have their dreams, but they are different now. I won’t spoil the experience for anyone reading the books for the first time by going into more detail. Suffice to say that it is definitely a case of amor vincit omnia. At the end of The Avenue Goes to War we find Jim Carver, now 67, still disillusioned by politicians, yet grudgingly optimistic, having discovered that it is friends that matter most – ‘energetic, steadfast, large-hearted and brave as lions’. What is left of Manor Park Avenue’s ‘scimitar curve’ will soon be swallowed up in a tangle of new avenues, ‘no longer a salient, marking the furthest advance of south-eastern London . . . just another road’. In 1990, as a new (albeit ancient) bride, I left a wild single life in Camden, nw1, to join my husband in New Malden, Surrey – on the same latitude as Shirley and swiftly christened ‘The Gateway to the Suburbs’. After the commuters had departed, there were, at that time, only two trains an hour ‘up to London’. The High Street had no franchises at all, but it did have a department store which had stocked maid’s uniforms up until quite recently. The place had, as expected, an air of repressed gentility. Immune to New Malden’s charms until I joined the local Horticultural Society (President, Mr Pink; Secretary, Mr Broadoak), I then discovered a flair for jammaking and flower-arranging which has stood me in good stead, and an insatiable reading habit developed on those wretched off-peak trains which took forty-five minutes to reach The Smoke. Delderfield bade an affectionate farewell to his Avenue and went on to write numerous novels and other sagas based on the people and places he knew and loved. An inaccurate biography of him was published a few years ago, but, as always, it’s more rewarding to turn to the novels to understand the man. Of these, I have just eighteen to go.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 47 © Sarah Crowden 2015