Miss Mole Read online

  E.H. Young

  Miss Mole

  Who would suspect her of a sense of fun and irony, of a passionate love for beauty and the power to drag it from its hidden places? Who could imagine that Miss Mole had pictured herself, at different times, as an explorer in strange lands, as a lady wrapped in luxury and delicate garments, as the mother of adorably naughty children and the inspiringly elusive mistress of a poet?

  Hannah Mole is a forty-ish spinster, haunted by her past and drifting from post to post—now a governess, now a companion for elderly women. She rarely lingers long due to a slightly troubled relationship with the truth, a tendency to speak her mind, and a fundamental mistrust of others. But Hannah’s darker instincts are tempered by a stubborn self-respect and a surprising ability to find joy and inspiration in ordinary life. When she returns to her home town of Radstowe and takes an unpromising job in the home of the stuffy, widowed Reverend Corder and his daughters, she finds a situation in which her unique characteristics are not only appreciated but essential.

  In Miss Mole, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1930, E.H. Young created her most complex, unlikely, yet imminently lovable heroine in a tale packed with rich characters, brilliant humour, and quiet triumph.

  FM47

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Charlotte Moore

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  About the Author

  Titles by E.H. Young

  Furrowed Middlebrow Titles

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Hannah Mole is a shabby, long-nosed spinster approaching forty, scraping a slender living as a housekeeper or paid companion to a series of unsatisfactory employers, “dragging her skirts through other people’s dust”. She is also one of the most vibrant, amusing, loveable and memorable characters in twentieth-century British fiction. The all-seeing servant who is cleverer than the deluded master or mistress has been, of course, a staple fictional device for centuries, but E.H. Young was one of the first writers brave enough to make such a character the centre and sole raison d’être of the narrative.

  As her name suggests, Miss Mole is subversive. She burrows into the lives of those more materially fortunate than herself and unearths motives and secrets for the delighted scrutiny of the reader. She exposes outworn moral conventions, punctures hypocrisy with sharp wit, and regards truth as “a limiting and embarrassing convention.” Miss Mole is inventive with truth, using her imagination to expand the restricted sphere in which inter-war English society places women like her. She regards her “capacity to make drama out of humdrum things” as an art form, and when accused of lying, she makes the crucial distinction, “Not lying. Fiction.”

  Miss Mole’s fictions are not entirely for her own, and our, amusement. She has “a past”, and it’s important that it stays hidden, so she invents an alter ego called Cousin Hilda as a smokescreen. Without any overt political manifesto, E.H. Young uses her unlikely heroine to examine the long term emotional and economic consequences of the First World War for single women unprotected by money or family. I’m not going to disclose Hannah Mole’s secret, which forms the basis of the novel’s very slight plot; suffice it to say that the assumptions her employers make about her are false, and that the eventual revelation requires the reader to consider carefully the options available to such a woman at such a time.

  Such considerations bring Jane Austen to mind, and there are many points of comparison. Like Austen, Young’s geographical sphere is small; nearly all the action takes place in “Upper Radstowe”, easily identifiable as Clifton, the genteel Bristol suburb where Young spent her married life. The cast of characters is similarly limited, to about a dozen, with Hannah herself pre-eminent. Over the course of a few months we observe the public and private behaviour of these characters with ironic detachment, and well-heeled, influential Mrs Spenser-Smith’s Christmas party, longed for or dreaded according to individual circumstances, provides the turning point in their lives. Like Austen, Young revels in a well-turned phrase; when Miss Mole declares that an employer’s wig “needs as much care as a pedigree Pekinese”, or that travel agents are desirable because they provide “all the uncertainty of foreign travel without the expense”, we feel their kinship. A sisterly hand is stretched out, too, forward into the 21st century, to Elizabeth Strout’s great creation Olive Kitteridge, with her disconcerting habit of rattling the bars of cages.

  Emily Hilda Young was born in Northumberland in 1880. Educated at first close to home at Gateshead Grammar School, she went on to Rydal Penrhos College, a Methodist establishment in Colwyn Bay; when Miss Mole becomes housekeeper for the non-conformist minister Robert Corder, differences between church- and chapel-goers are observed with an insider’s eye. Aged 22, Emily married a Bristol solicitor, John Daniell, and lived with him in Clifton. She supported the campaign for women’s suffrage, studied philosophy, and embarked on her writing career, publishing three novels during her thirties. There were no children; in Miss Mole, Young writes feelingly of the pangs of childlessness.

  Emily Young was a very private person and left few traces, but any guess at what her marriage was like is coloured by the fact that she embarked on a lifelong affair with her husband’s friend Ralph Henderson, a married schoolmaster and fellow mountaineering enthusiast—her adolescence in North Wales had bred a passion for mountains. In August 1915 she led three men—Henderson, the literary critic I.A. Richards, and another friend—on a route up the Snowdonian Idwal Slabs hitherto believed impregnable. Ralph Henderson attributed the breakthrough to his beloved’s “remarkable qualities of balance, speed and leadership, and to her sound judgement of rock and route.”

  When the Great War broke out, Emily worked first as a groom, then in a munitions factory. Like Miss Mole, she was tough and resourceful. Her husband became a sergeant in the Royal Garrison Artillery and was killed in the run-up to Passchendaele. Her lover had become headmaster of Alleyn’s School in Dulwich; Emily joined him there, taking up a post as the school librarian and living in a flat in the headmaster’s house. Henderson’s wife seems to have accommodated the arrangement without protest. It is not surprising that the novels Emily produced over the next two decades often describe tensions between ostensible respectability and hidden transgression.

  The seven novels Emily set in the “Upper Radstowe” she had left for good were successful. William (1925) was reprinted twenty times, and Emily’s actress sister Gladys Young read an
adaptation of it for BBC radio. Miss Mole won the James Tait Black prize for fiction. Though Emily’s dislike of public attention made her less famous than she deserved to be, Ralph Henderson’s support and admiration gave her the space to produce a strong body of work, with short stories and two children’s books as well as the novels. It was, Henderson said, his “privilege—and fearful joy—to watch the growth of her works from the first word written to the last word printed”.

  “We must be ready to laugh on the most terrifying occasions” asserts Miss Mole. She is like the ship in a bottle she has treasured from childhood, “sailing all alone, never getting any further and never losing its gallantness”. But when events conspire to capsize her, the reader stares with her into the dark tunnel of her loneliness: “there was no one in the world who knew her well enough to detect the anxiety under her careless tones”; “Oh, what’s going to happen to me if I can’t laugh any more?”

  There is a comic resolution after all, and E.H. Young rewards her heroine—now proved truly heroic—with the nurturing sympathy she found in real life with Henderson. Young turns close and clever attention to so many things- rooftops, primroses, coal fires, troubled teenagers, the “stealthy” fall of a horse chestnut, the “wise helplessness” of God. Her sense of place is impeccable, her seasonal details exactly right. She knows for certain what her characters wore and ate, how they walked and talked. You won’t get anywhere with this novel if you don’t respond to Hannah—but who could fail to feel sympathetic interest in “a woman for whom repentance had no practical results”?

  Charlotte Moore

  Chapter 1

  The voice of her new friend, bidding her good night, followed Miss Hannah Mole as she went down the garden path, and the laurel bushes, as she brushed by them, repeated in a whisper, yet with a strange assurance, the persuasive invitation of Mrs. Gibson to come back soon.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’ll come!’ Hannah called out hurriedly, and she glanced over her shoulder as the golden patch on the path disappeared. Mrs. Gibson had shut the front door: she had returned to the problems which ought never to have arisen in her respectable house, and Hannah, freed from the necessity for action, for the expression of sympathy and the giving of advice, was able to admire the skill she had shown in these activities, but first, because she was grateful by nature as well as appreciative of herself, she offered up thanks for the timely justification of her faith in the interest of life. That faith had been persistent, though, latterly, it had demanded a dogged perseverance, and at the moment when she most needed encouragement it had been supplied. She would not ignore the creditable quickness with which she had grasped the opportunity offered; it was, indeed, only to those with seeing eyes and hearing ears that miracles were vouchsafed, and who but Hannah Mole, at her impact with Mrs. Gibson’s broad bosom, would have had the prescience to linger after her apology and give Mrs. Gibson time to recover her breath and explain why she stood outside her gate, bareheaded and in a flutter.

  On the same spot Hannah now stood, a little breathless herself, through excitement and the effort to reconcile her good fortune with the small deception she had practised on her employer. The effort was not successful and she renewed her conviction that the power which controlled her life was not hampered by man’s conventional morality, otherwise, she would surely have been punished and not rewarded for the lie which had induced Mrs. Widdows to send her companion shopping at the hour when she should have been mending Mrs. Widdows’ second-best black dress. Yes, Hannah should have been knocked down by a motorcar or, worse still, have been robbed of her purse, for hiding the reel of silk and pretending she could not find it.

  The crowded little sitting-room had been unbearably hot. A large fire blazed and crackled, the canary made sad, subdued movements in its cage, Mrs. Widdows’ corsets creaked regularly, her large knees almost touched Hannah’s own, for the two women sat near each other to share the lamplight, and Hannah, luckier than the canary, had found a means of escape. Too wise to suggest that she should go out and buy the necessary silk, she had merely remarked with regret that it would be impossible for Mrs. Widdows to wear the second-best dress on the morrow, and, at once, Mrs. Widdows had indignantly driven her forth with orders to return quickly. And nearly two hours had passed and the silk was still in the shop. Hannah was indifferent about the silk, for the reel she had removed from the work-basket was in the pocket of her coat, and she was twopence halfpenny and an adventure to the good, but the passage of time was a serious matter, so serious that another hour or two would make no difference. She glanced up the street, and then down, and while she seemed to hesitate between duty and desire, she had already made her choice. She would go down, towards the traffic and the shops. By the light of the street lamp, she looked at the old-fashioned flat watch she carried in her handbag. It was six o’clock. Most of the shops would be shut, but there would be light and movement; tram-cars full of passengers would be leaping in their advance, like strange beasts rejoicing in their strength; people on foot would be streaming homewards from the city of Radstowe, and Miss Hannah Mole, who had no home of her own, would look at these people with envy but with the cynical reflection that some of those homes might be comparable to that of Mrs. Widdows – stuffy and unkind, or to the one she had just left – holding tragedy maliciously streaked with humour. In nearly twenty years of earning her living, as companion, nursery governess or useful help, she had lost all illusions except those she created for herself, but these appeared at her command and, stirred by her late adventure, she was ready to find another in the approach of each person she met. In Prince’s Road, however, there were not many people and such as there were walked quietly, as though the influence of the old terraced houses on one side of the road were stronger than that of the later buildings on the other. It was the old houses that gave its character to the street and here, as elsewhere in Upper Radstowe, the gently persistent personality of the place remained, unmoved by any material or spiritual changes since the first red bricks were well and truly laid. It was like a masterpiece of portrait painting in which a person of another generation looks down on his descendants and dominates them through the union of the painter’s art and something permanent in himself. Even where the old houses had disappeared, their ghosts seemed to hover over the streets, and Hannah, too, walked quietly, careful not to disturb them. In no other place of her acquaintance did the trees cast such lovely shadows in the lamplight, and on this windless night the leaves were patterned with extraordinary, ethereal clearness on the pavement. Now and then she paused to look at them, puzzled that the reflected object should always seem more beautiful than the original, and eager to find some analogy to this experience in her mental processes.

  ‘Not the thing itself, but its shadow,’ she murmured, as she saw her own shadow going before her, and she nodded as though she had solved a problem. She judged herself by the shadow she chose to project for her own pleasure and it was her business in life – and one in which she usually failed – to make other people accept her creation. Yes, she failed, she failed! They would not look at the beautiful, the valuable Hannah Mole: they saw the substance and disapproved of it and she did not blame them: it was what she would have done herself and in the one case when she had concentrated on the fine shadow presented to her, she had been mistaken.

  She pushed past that thought with an increase of her pace and reached the wide thoroughfare where the tram-cars clanged and swayed. Here she paused and looked about her. This part of Radstowe was a new growth, it was not the one of her affections, but on this autumn evening it had its beauty. The broad space made by the meeting of several roads was roughly framed in trees, for in Radstowe trees grew everywhere, as church spires seemed to spring up at every corner, and the electric light from tall standards cast a theatrical glare on the greens and browns and yellows of their leaves.

  At Hannah’s left hand, in a shrubbery of its own, there stood a building, in a debased Greek style, whither the Muses occasionally drew the
people of Radstowe to a half-hearted worship. The darkness in which it was retired, suddenly illuminated by the head-lights of a passing car, dealt kindly with its faults, and there was mystery in its pale, pillared facade, a suggestion of sensitive aloofness in its withdrawal from the road. When Hannah passed this temple in the daytime, her long nose would twitch in derision at its false severity and the rusty-looking shrubs dedicated to its importance in the aesthetic life of Radstowe – had the gardener, she wondered, chosen laurels with any thought beyond their sturdiness? – but now it had an artificial charm for her: she could ignore the placards on the enclosing railings and see it as another example of the city’s facility for happily mixing the incongruous.

  She stood on the pavement, a thin, shabby figure, so insignificant in her old hat and coat, so forgetful of herself in her enjoyment of the scene, that she might have been wearing a cloak of invisibility, and while she watched the traffic and saw the moving tram-cars like magic-lantern slides, quick and coloured, no one who saw through that cloak would have suspected her power for transmuting what was common into what was rare and, in that occupation, keeping anxious thoughts at bay. To-night she could not keep them all at bay, for though she was pleased with her adventure and the speculations in which it permitted her to indulge, she was altruistically concerned for the other actors in it, and it would have obvious consequences for herself. Mrs. Widdows was not a lady to whom confidences could be made or who would accept excuses, and Hannah would presently find herself without a situation. It was a familiar experience but, in this case, her contempt would have to be assumed, and she made a rapid calculation of her savings, shrugged her shoulders and took a half-turn to the right. A cup of coffee and a bun would strengthen her for the encounter with her employer and, as she sipped and ate, she could pretend, once more, that her appearance belied her purse and that she was one of those odd, rich women who take a pleasure in looking poor. She was good at pretending and she thanked God sincerely that her self-esteem had enabled her to resist the effects of condescension, of the studied kindness which hurts proud spirits, the slyer variety she had encountered, in her youth, from men, when compliance and disdain were equally disastrous to her prosperity, the bullying of people uncertain of their authority, and the heartlessness of those who saw her as a machine set going at their order and unable to stop without another. Her independence had survived all this, and it was, as she knew but could not regret, her conviction of her dignity as a human being which, more than any of her faults, had been her misfortune, but it had its uses when she demanded a bun and a cup of coffee of young women who respected richer appetites, and she went on in this confidence, and with pleasure for though this street might have found itself at home in any city, she knew what lay beyond it and she treated herself as she would have treated a child who thinks it has been cheated of a promise: there was not much further to go, the surprise was close at hand, and when it came she rewarded herself with a long sigh of pleasure.