On the window-sill, catching what light there was, stood several bowls of lilies of the valley just coming into flower. An enormous dresser took up one side of the room, and there was a sink, with taps and drying board, beneath the window. In it was a square table covered with a red serge cloth, a comfortable basket chair, and a big old-fashioned fireplace. The housekeeper’s room was the largest room in the basement except for the kitchen itself. “Mrs Hubbard stood watching them till they had disappeared round the house, then she went slowly back to the hall, through a green baize door, down a flight of stairs to the kitchen regions.
The only servant from the old days left in the house is Mrs Hubbard who shares Robert’s bittersweet nostalgia for former times. Every day the house is in their possession, it is costing them money. Robert is a realist, he knows only too well that running a large country house like Chedsy Place is prohibitively expensive – and that the only thing he can do is to arrange for the place to be sold as quickly as possible. Instead, he has found a peace and contentment running a farm and making a reasonable living. Now happily married to Celia, Robert had shrugged off his painful longing for the place he had been so happy growing up. When Robert Beaton unexpectedly inherits Chedsy Place, he feels deeply nostalgic for the world of his childhood. Some of these people may be about to break free, others will not, destined to remain in the state in which we first find them. Characters imprisoned in their own lives by the tyranny of those around them or the quirks in their own personality.
Chedsy Place has elements of both of those novels, as we find ourselves in the company of some rather unpleasant people – as well as those who are lovely.
In her novels The Old Man’s Birthday and Narcissa – particularly the latter – there are some wonderfully monstrous characters, complex relationships and family discord existing within a well ordered, conventional world. What I am finding with Richmal Crompton, who I am finding I very much enjoy – is that, beneath a veneer of cosy, middlebrow domesticity there lurks something rather less comfortable. Richmal Crompton of course famous for her Just William stories for children, wrote quite a number of novels for adults and this is the fifth of them that I have read.
Chedsy Place was a marvellously compelling little read, unfortunately the last of the Richmal Crompton novels I had tbr, and I mustn’t buy more just at the moment (I am making an effort to manage my book buying, and so I’m attempting to not buy during January – I am waiting on a couple I ordered at the end of December, and one I have had on pre-order for months). This was my final read of 2017, I never can manage to tidy things up satisfactorily.
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