Backlisted - The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

Episode Date: May 30, 2016

Writer, academic and contributing editor of Bookanista Lucy Scholes joins Andy, John and Mathew on the pod to talk 'The Vet's Daughter', the extraordinary novel of an extraordinary girl in late Victorian South London. Also, how some books just shouldn't be turned into musicals, and the best name for a dog ever. Timings: (may differ due to adverts)6'19 - First Signs by Barry Hinds13'40 - The North Water by Ian Maguire21'09 - The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Worst wife ever. They wasted money. They are like comics book guy from the Simpsons. It's not meant to be where it is, Andy. Hop, hop, hop, hop. We're going to have to walk down the street. A leading city, a city on the south coast.

Well, I am obviously ignoring my wife's advice because I'm going to be taking her in every Saturday. Winning, like, favourite dad award every single time. I'm going to take a stroll through the redacted with my redacted to go shopping for. Right, shall we kick off? Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. As usual, we're gathered around a table in the offices of Unbound, the publishers who bring authors and readers together.

But guess what? It's not the usual table. It's a new table in a new canal-side office. Anyway, that's the reason it sounds different, if it in fact sounds different. I'm John Mitchinson, publisher at Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reign Dangerously. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reign Dangerously. And joining us today, as usual, is the author and comics fan, Matthew Clayton. Hello, Matthew. Hello, everyone. And also the writer, critic, and lecturer, Lucy Scoles. Hello, Lucy.

Hi, everyone. Thanks very much for coming in. You are here for a very specific reason, which John will now reveal. Very well read. Yeah. Off the script. You're joining us today for a specific reason, which is to discuss the book, The Vex Daughter, by Barbara Cummings. Yes, have we got that right?

Yes. It's spelt Cummings, but it's pronounced Cummings. I think that was how I was told to pronounce it, unless I'm doing it wrong, by Barbara's granddaughter. So I think we should take that as fact. And we should say the specific reason, or one excellent reason why Lucy is here, is that you are, it is fair to say, and factually accurate to say,

that you are a Barbara Cummings expert. In as far as Warden can be an expert on an author about whom not much much is known but i guess so yes not much is known but in a way i feel well we'll come on to it later i think you i feel i know more than i know about a lot of people we feel we i feel as i say at the top straight away that lucy has written an absolutely brilliant essay which is probably the longest biographical thing available about barbara cummings called the writer lost in time and that's on the emily books website is that

right yeah that's right i think it is the longest piece out there definitely because so little is um sort of in the public realm about her have you got any rivals as the barbara cummings i think there was somebody else doing some research I was told that a while ago but as far as I'm aware they didn't publish anything or do anything with it so I'm perhaps not the first person to look into it but the first one who's written about her

and definitely the best well, you know, if that's what you want to say before we get to Barbara Cummings and her extraordinary oeuvre, it is the usual form on these podcasts that I say to you, Andy, what have you been reading? Well, John, thanks for asking. I have been... There's two things I'm going to talk about this time.

I've been finishing off the book I mentioned on the last podcast, Eternal Troubadour, The Improbable Life of Tiny Tim, by Justin Martell with Alana Ray McDonald. The most brilliant and miserable book I have ever read about what it is like to be in show business. And I have talked about this. And you've read some miserable show business. Oh, I've read more, of course.

I've written A Little Goes a Long Way by Sid Little. Crikey. I've got a signed copy of it, which cost me one P. Was it you that sent that remarkable picture of the topless Sid Little and Large that was doing the rounds on Twitter? It wasn't me, but it's almost a meme. It's, yeah, a proto-meme.

So I've talked about this book quite a lot. I just wanted to read that just very near the end of this book there is one tiny story which made me laugh out loud. Anyone who has ever been a member of a band will recognise this as the decision-making process of any band or artistic endeavour. We were all very happy with the way it turned out burnett concluded we wanted to help tiny make something that would stand as a real album at first the album was to be called

back to normality after after a line taken from tiny's ad-libbed monologue during Sly Cigarette. However, the title Back to Normality was scrapped after a debate over whether or not normality was a word. That seems to me to be such a wonderful book. I cannot recommend that highly enough. So I finished that book. The other book that I've been reading, I mentioned on the last podcast that thanks to the magic of an interlibrary loan, I was able to read Haldor Laxness's novel Salka Valka, which has been out of print in this country for the last 50 years. I also ordered another couple of books at the same time. One of those was Sheila Delaney's only book of short stories. Sheila Delaney, who wrote A Taste of Honey, called Sweetly Sings the Donkey,

and that's terrific. Quite hard to buy a copy of that, but I got a copy from the reserve stock at Swiss Cottage Library, thank you. But the other book that I read was called First Signs by the late Barry Hines. Now, we talked about Barry Hines after he died earlier this year. We talked about him on the podcast. And I was asking why it was that his book, A Kestrel for a Knave, later filmed as Kez, was still so widely read and so popular. And yet how few of his other books seem to be widely read or popular because when he died I did the thing that people do and I do

which is go online and say I'd like to read something by Barry Hines. Almost nothing is available except A Kestrel for a Name. So I did a bit of research and I found that he'd... A Kestrel for a Name I think is published in 67 or 68. It's filmed in 1970. It's a bestseller. And his next novel is this book, First Signs. I could not find a copy of First Signs. So I ordered it from the library. A secondhand copy would cost you about £100. I never made it into paperback. So I was thinking well why would that that seems really strange that a novel by a

best-selling author which is published amongst softy southern uh critics that that might be one explanation so I ordered this book for the library I've just read Selka Valka by Haldor Laxness incredible book I've just read Sweetly Sings the Donkey by Sheila Delaay. Incredible, sort of poignant, and sort of Sheila never really had the full writing career she could have had. But that was great too. And then I'm coming into First Signs by Barry Hines. Here I go.

It is terrible. Now, I'm not saying that Barry Hines is a terrible author. He clearly isn't. He's clearly a brilliant author. He had a brilliant career, a fantastic track record. This is not me saying, this is not me having a pop at the legacy of Barry Hines. I am fascinated to understand why this particular novel

was published in this form and then never published again. And I'm going to, well, you can't see this published again. And I'm going to... You can't see this, everybody, but I'm going to hold up the cover now and show it to the table. Audible gasps. Oh, my word. OK, that's... Is that pubic hair on the cover?

It is. It's a full frontal painting of a naked lady, but instead of a head, she's got... A pit. A pit head. Yeah. That kind of looks like some kind of weird Magritte pastiche. Yeah.

And the plant plot just in front of her. Aspergistra, maybe? It's such a... Well, it's a book of two halves, so this painting is an accurate representation. The mining and the naked ladies. Yes, the first half of the book is about naked ladies, and the second half of the book is about pit village. of two halves so this painting is an accurate representation yes the first half of the book

is about naked ladies and the second half of the book is about pit village really? but really it's such a strange book and so I read

some more about Barry Hines and Barry Hines is the author sorry I'm not the best author we'll put the

author picture up as well he there's no blurb on this book it put the author picture up as well. There's no blurb on this. It says the author of Kez, but that seems a little... I mean, the book was actually called a Kestrel for a Nave. No, be fair. He has written two previous novels,

The Blinder and A Kestrel for a Nave, which were successfully filled with Kez. But it says on the front, Kez, doesn't it? Oh, yeah, it does say author of Kez. So Barry Hines, it says on the back, the son of a miner is a schoolmaster in Yorkshire, and this is about the son of a miner who goes to Spain. Published by Michael Joseph.

Has romantic adventures with a lot of naked ladies. Amazing. And comes back to his pit village. Now, I was reading about Barry Hines. Barry Hines was very left-wing. And initially, I was reading the book, and I was thinking, well, this book is... What's wrong with this book is it's no good.

It's really poorly structured. Technical. Yeah. Technical kind of... Yeah, it's poorly structured. The prose isn't very good is it's no good. It's really poorly structured. Technical kind of... It's poorly structured. The prose isn't very good. There's no plot. Nothing happens. There's no emotional development.

There's no intellectual development. But then I realised that Barry Hines had worked with Ken Loach a lot. And I thought, maybe this book isn't no good. Maybe it's very left-wing. Maybe. Because if you're very left-wing... It's a Brechtian alienation thing. Yes, exactly.

It makes you feel that it... Plot is bourgeois. Yeah. Therefore, plot must be rejected. Identifying with characters, bourgeois. Yes. Don't like any of that. Yes, yes, yes, but that's exactly the problem with the book.

The fiction itself is the ultimate bourgeois form. So this is like a minus finger being jabbed in your eye repeatedly. It is exactly like that. Reminding you of the realities of life. It's like a long straight line which stops after 200 pages. I was thinking this in regard to... I wrote about The Ragged Trouser Philanthropist by Robert Tressel. Which is a good novel.

Which similarly, though, rejects many of the bourgeois tropes of the novel by being deliberately repetitive and massively overlong. The theory being that it recreates the grind of capitalist employment and it does not give you any... In the life of the reader. Yeah, and it does not give you any sort of compromised romantic way out. So I would genuinely like, if you have read, in the unlikely event that you've read First Science by Barry Hines,

or that you know anything about it, or why it never made it into paperback, please email me or tweet me. I would be fascinated to discover what... It sounds to me it didn't make it into paperback because it wasn't very good. Yeah, but you know what? You know what, John? There's a serious point that it's a mucky book by a successful writer

coming off the back of a successful film. It seems bizarre, even if it's not very good, that it wouldn't make it into paperback. That is odd. I mean, the only one I can think of that we've thought about recently was the Bradby book. I don't think that made it into paperback. That is odd. I mean, the only one I can think of that we've thought about recently was the Bratby book. I don't think that made it into paperback. It did.

Oh, it did. Breakdown did make it into paperback. It just didn't stay in print. David Miller gave me the example of... The agent and writer David Miller gave me the example of Something Happened by Joseph Heller, which was the follow-up to Catch-22, was a disaster at the time.

Maybe they just made the publishers, as in this case, having had Kestrel for a name, they suddenly decided to bury it because it was going to do his career more harm than good. Well, someone said to me, perhaps Barry Hines didn't think it was any good. Perhaps he had to write it out, get it out, and then... Because there are other novels of his. The Gamekeeper.

The Gamekeeper. Yes. The Gamekeeper, which I think is a very good one. Yeah. He has a very successful career. As I say, what's still slightly mystifying is that there's only one book of his in print, and that's a Kestrel for a name. You don't think he wrote that first and then tried to publish it based on the success of Kest?

You know what? That is a very good theory. It does have a bit of a juvenile autobiographical feel. It's very autobiographical. Yeah, because if you say that and also it's just not actually that great. The mystery deepens. Didn't Alan Sillito move to Majorca, didn't he,

after his first success? Did he? I met him once, actually, at a party and I said, why did you move to Mallorca? And he was like, well... If you see where I live. He wanted to go out of Nottingham. I was like, I moved to Mallorca

and I'll write about Nottingham from there. I was like, that's very sensible. Just like Joyce. Nice to meet you. Anyway, John. Okay, what have I been reading? John, what have you been reading? Well, I've been reading a novel by Ian McGuire called The North Water.

And why have I been reading it? Two reasons. I was struck, as anyone on the QI series will tell you, I am the whale guy. I'm mildly obsessed with cetaceans. And I like the whole, not just the actual animals themselves, although they're interesting enough, but the whole 19th century whaling just one of these most i mean unthinkable kind of brutal difficult uh businesses and i'm and the whole idea that we ran factories and you know lit our homes with the oil all extracted from these extraordinary animals so i'm already i'm already in the in the zone it struck me also

that i was there was a book published last year called rusho which i didn't read which was about yeah whaling but i looked at this and also on the cover there was a quote from hillary mantel and a quote from martin amos yes very very rarely get martin amos giving a book a quote so i read it in reasonably high hopes i really did think it was a it was an extraordinary book. And it's had very good reviews. It had a great review from Colm Tobin, which I might just read a little line from,

because this seems to me to get it exactly right. The North Water feels like the result of an encounter between Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy in some run-down port, as they offer each other a long sour nod of recognition i mean this is this book is dark grimy it starts with it starts with a very unsavory character a harpoon called henry drax who within the first 10 pages has has basically raped and murdered a a young a young boy um you know 10 year old 12 year old, 12-year-old boy. It oozes

every single, I mean, it's cold. They go on, Drax is a harpooner on a ship. They leave Hull. They sail for the North Water. You assume they're going to kill whales. In fact, it's an elaborate insurance fraud. The other main character in the book is Patrick Sumner, who's an Irish surgeon

who has, we discover, been disgracefully kind of um excluded from the army so he's running away taking opium in order to forget you know the shame of his past life they the classics set up they all find themselves on this boat the boat ends up kind of sinking they then find themselves on the ice there are polar bears they you know there are disgraceful scenes of of you know eating sea but that's the squishing of a seal's eyeball in your mouth when you're eating it's it's cold it's dark it's full of blood semen um every all this all the fluids in fact fecal seepage is a word is a phrase that's used in the everything smells bad it's

everything turns the martin amos hillary mantel and a quote from what you've just said is a phrase that's used in the... Everything smells bad. Everything turns bad. The Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, and a quote from what you've just said is going on the paperback. And the thing is, what I love about it, I mean, I've a few quibbles. The use of what seems to me to be 20th century sort of slang, you know, using the F word a lot.

Yeah. Just slightly kind of you know but in general what you don't get which is there's not lots of long descriptions of you know he's not trying to write a historical novel to impress you in that charles palace away about how fully he i mean he obviously knows there's lots of fabulously gruesome scenes of what they have to do to the whales flensing and and there's this wonderful thing there's stuff that they throw in the water it's called krang i mean a lot of this stuff you know you if you unless you're really interested in whaling you can take or leave but it what i like about it is that the two main characters you've you can you can sense that there

isn't there i mean there is an extraordinary and terrible resolution to the book but he doesn't it's sort of like a meditation on how might you write about which i think is why hillary mentel likes it so how do you write about the past without making it seem like you know that kind of bbc adaptation and oh didn't they didn't they get the dresses right i mean it's a really strong it callormac McCarthy's probably the closest. Have you read H-H-H-H or Ash, Ash, Ash, Ash by Laurent Binet? No. Not even heard of it. It's about the Heydrich assassination plot in Prague.

Have I got that right? And it's sort of Robert Ludlam for TLS readers. I mean, it's sort of a gripping account of the capture of the men who assassinated Heydrich and also amusing on how you put it into fiction without at some level betraying the memory of the actual bravery of the men who performed that act. You know, it's funny when you said you were reading this book

because the publisher sent me a copy maybe six months ago. That's Scribner, isn't it? Yeah, and I saw exactly like you, I read the Martin Amis quotes and Hilary Mantel quotes and thought, hmm, someone knows someone. But they wouldn't give those unless they... Ian McGuire teaches at Manchester, so I'm figuring that's... But also, they wouldn't give those unless they teaches at manchester so i'm figuring that but also they wouldn't give the quotes unless the book was good yeah so and you got colin to be in hillary mantel and martin amos then you're already cut your interest is peaked

but i've seen people talking about it it feels to me this feels like this is going to be a big book i see people talking about it already and, when you told me you were reading it, I picked it up and I read the first four or five pages and put it down and thought, yeah, this is going to be massive. I think the thing about it is that it could be all kinds of... It could be Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth, but it kind of isn't. It's very, very taut. He's not trying to make big geopolitical kind of isn't yeah it's very very taught he's not making trying to make big geopolitical kind of parallels he's taking a group of characters putting them in and i mean you

ever want to know what it feels like to spend a night inside the carcass of a polar bear that you've just killed and i mean it's just it is blood soaked yeah without being kind of without being in in any kind of it will come on to gothic but i mean it's not really a gothic novel it has elements of that but it's too good for that and his characters i think the two he in real there are no there are no easy morals from it i i was i have to say i was i was i was gripped and i i think like you it will probably do when you know gongs are handed out later in the year i I'd be surprised if it wasn't that way. I really want to read it, I must say.

Just based on those three or four pages, I thought I must find the time to read this. I mean, the prose is, I mean, we've got to talk about other things, but the prose is faultless. I mean, it's really, and some of the passages are just, there's somewhere he talks about a newish saw that he's got in his bag. And some of the reviews said it's it's the it's the word newish that really newish bone saw. He said it's the word newish that's really upsetting, which actually you never know that you're going to do these things. But that kind of precision of the unheimlich detail, you know, the very odd detail, is very Barbara Cummings.

What is that book and author called again, please? It's called The North Water, Ian McGuire. Yeah, so given the choice, everyone, between The North Water by Ian McGuire and First Signs by Barry Hunter, you won't be able to get hold of a copy of First Signs, as luck would have it. So we recommend The North Water. We'll pick this up again after some mar marvelously witty and interesting adverts. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout.

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Lucy. Yes. Barbara Cummings. I first read a Barbara Cummings book at the start of this year and I really liked it it's her second novel it's called Our Spoons Came From Woolworths

and I then I really liked it it seems a bit popular but then I read this book The Vet's Daughter and I was completely blown away by it. And I've read a couple more Barbara Cummings since then.

And I think Barbara Cummings is amongst my new favourite authors. Where did you first encounter her and when? I think I read Spoons first as well. And I think it was quite a long time ago. It was about 10, maybe 15 years ago now when I was um reading a lot of mid century kind of right women writers uh I think I probably found a copy in university library or something and I read it and I really liked it but I didn't really think I didn't connect it with a kind of larger body of work or anything like that and I think because spoons is probably

one of the novels that has remained more well known and potentially kind of more in print on a regular basis and then i think it was maybe two or three years ago virago in this country republished spoons vet's daughter and sisters by a river her first novel um and i got sent three for review and i read them all and i just loved them and spoons was incredibly different to how i'd remembered it first time round, which was sort of weird and sort of shocked me and made me sort of distrust my own recollection of what I had read before. But then also you then read The Vet's Daughter and even Sisters by River

and she's doing something really different as well. And I think that most people know, if anyone knows about her, they tend to know Spoons and actually The Vet's Daughter, I think, is a far more interesting novel, as I think we all have. I mean, it's completely, I think, captivating novel. And so strange and so original. It's very short, but it feels, it's so much detail packed into it. There's so many remarkable lines in it. And so the psychology, it's first person.

And the voice seems to me to have that kind of come from the first paragraph, that authority of a David Copperfield or a Pip or anyone or a Holden Caulfield. I mean, it's a very original voice, but also so weirdly childlike. I mean, it's, I mean, yeah, like you, I'm blown away and also added to the pile of really, really remarkable writers who I had not even heard of before we started doing this podcast. One of the things I found with reading Our Spoons came from Woolworths is that I couldn't shake off the sense when I was reading it

that I was reading something, I've seen this term applied to Barbara Cummings, I found very interesting, I couldn't shake the sense that it was in some way outsider art, that I couldn't tell how much craft there was in it. It seemed like someone with a very distinctive voice, which might be accidental, right? But then, when I read The Vet's Daughter,

in fact, one of the reasons I read it so quickly is I felt i needed to read another one to get more of a sense of the artistry of it and the vets the control in the vet's daughter is absolutely remarkable i think in terms of the steeliness with which the narrative is laid out uh leading to a an ending which um i was saying before we started recording i think is my fate we're not going to say what it is everybody don't worry but i think it's my favorite ending of any book that we've read so far for backlisting i'd go for that it's high praise well you know it's just it is it is an amazing ending and i think it packs such a huge punch and one that you're not you're not expecting at all. I mean, you know, the novel prepares you in certain ways

for things that are going to happen, but when you first read that, I mean, I was taken aback as well by it. It's really, really... The punch is not pulled. Yeah. But I feel the punch is not pulled anywhere through the book. I mean, she doesn't let Alice off the hook at any point. You realise that's quite rare in fiction,

that there are brief moments when she's lying, she ends up, I guess it must be the Isle of Purbeck or somewhere, that she's... I think it's Hailing Island. Hailing Island, is it? Because she can see the Isle of Wight at one point. Yeah, I'm just trying to work out where it was. But she gets to lie in the

caravan and sort of, for the first time I'm sorry, I think we've got a canal boat going past and it's airplane I thought you were spoiler alert it's only lying in the caravan but did anyone take that line again?

lying in the caravan I was just lying in the caravan and and amusing and eating eating such stolen apples i mean that no book i've read recently do small pleasures small tiny let's be honest tiny pleasures count for more i mean the the bleakness of the life the cabbage smelling house the mother the brutal father the father it just gets worse and worse and worse but she's indomitable isn't she

she's got this kind of incredibly this incredible sort of resistance that she just won't that she won't give in literally floats above it I just want to give people, I think we should tell people, normally what we do on Backlisted, as you know,

is we read the blurb on the back of the book. The current edition of The Best Daughter has no blurb on it. It has three quotes from Sarah Waters, Alan Hollinghurst and Graham Greene. Pretty good. Graham Greene, who loved this book. Yeah, he did.

And we're going to come on to that. He says, The strange offbeat talent of Miss Cummings and that innocent eye which observes with childlike simplicity the most fantastic or the most ominous occurrence. These have never, I think, been more impressively exercised than in The Vet's Daughter. But I did find another blurb, and here it is.

It's from a review in The Guardian in 2013. The vet's daughter, a masterly example of suburban gothic meets magical realism, set in the Clapham-Battersea borders at the turn of the century, the novel tells the strange, sad story of Alice Rowlands and her vicious father. He puts down his cancer-ridden wife like an animal while selling the creatures brought to him for the same reason to the vivisectionist. There's a neurotic parrot locked in the lavatory

and a, quote, partly cooked, unquote, cat. After a particularly traumatic episode in her young life, Alice discovers she can levitate, a fact that once discovered by her father leads to a ghoulish, violent denouement on Clapham Common. That is an excellent blurb. It is. Written by our guest.

I thought I recognised it when you started reading. I mean, the magical realism element is what's remarkable, the way she manages that. Who knew that this who knew that there was a magical realist writer she's writing so much earlier than Angela Carter, because I think people

Angela Carter is the one she's a bit like Angela Carter, but she was writing so much earlier than that, and the way that she uses the magical realism is incredibly advanced for the time that she was writing I think, so I find it really strange that she's not so well known. I mean, it's the other book that it reminded me a lot of and one we've done on the podcast was Lolly Willows,

where there was a similar kind of, you know, it suddenly starts as one kind of realist narrative and turns into something else. We've talked about this before, but certainly with Barbara Cummings and the books of hers that I've now read, she has a unique combination of the quaint and the nightmarish. The things seem to be pootling along in quite a safe and reasonable way

and will suddenly veer horribly, with horrible realism, into some terrible scenario of um violence this all suppressed violence in it all the time as well or not so suppressed but just terrible thing about the mother being the mother having to take the father i mean that relationship the fact that he kind of basically buys her for for a hundred pounds from from from all the parents pay pay £100 so he marries her and then he treats her brutally from the beginning and she has to take his boots off every evening and

one night he flies into a rage and kicks her so hard in her mouth he breaks her teeth and there are times in the book where she comes back and she's obsessed with broken teeth and when she goes through I suppose we can are we allowed to say we can say that she gets raped in the in the the most most extraordinary

description uh accurate but awful description of rape i've ever read does she actually get raped i don't know i think i think she's she thinks she's not well because you remember when afterwards the um the friendly woman who helps around the house says that you're still a good girl, don't worry, and things. So I think that it's just for short of rape. But she says that they're entwined. No, she says...

What she says is we were linked. He dragged me to the floor and we were linked together. Yeah. Which is ambiguous. It is ambiguous. And unpleasant. And she does also say that she felt

she'd never be clean again. Yeah, that's true. I think you read it as a rape, and then you think, then I always think afterwards, I'm not sure. Yeah, and it's after the rape that she has her first. Well, that's the thing. It's the first traumatic event that leads to... Lucy, could you read,

I know you were going to read something from the start of the novel. Could you just read us that little bit you were going to read, just to give people... At the beginning. Yeah, the flavour of her voice, of Barbara Cummings' voice? Okay, so this is the beginning of the first chapter. A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and spoke to me when I was thinking of something else. Together we walked down a street that was lined with privet hedges. He told me that his wife belonged to the Plymouth Brethren and I said I was sorry

because that is what he seemed to need me to say and I saw he was a poor, broken down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would most likely have worn kneecaps. We came to a great red railway arch that crossed the road like a heavy rainbow and near the arch there was a vet's house with a lamp outside.

I said you must excuse me and left this poor man among the privet hedges. I entered the house. It was my home and it smelled of animals, although there was lino on the floor. In the brown hall, my mother was standing and she looked at me with her sad eyes half covered by their heavy lids,

but did not speak. She just stood there. Her bones were small and her shoulders sloped. Her teeth were not straight either. So if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her. Oh, God. I said, Mother, I smell cabbage. It must be lunchtime.

One of the great, really terrible lines in all literature. The smell of cabbage pervades, doesn't it? It's brilliant. Yeah, the whole house is there. And then they have their lunch. That's the clacking plates. The clacking plates. And there is a...

The dining room was dark because a dirty holly tree came close to the window. You could not have told it was summer except that the fire grate was filled with pleated paper with soot on it. Before the fireplace was a rug made of skinned Great Dane dog. before the fireplace was a rug made of skinned great dane dog and on the carved mantelpiece there was a monkey's skull with a double set of teeth which seemed to chatter when you looked at them after lunch i helped mother in the kitchen through the window i could see the sun shining on houses so i asked mother if i could walk in the park with my friend lucy as usual she told me to ask father so i went to the surgery the door was propped open by a horse's hoof without a horse joined to it he was sewing in a peak's eye he used chloroform but i went away because i

couldn't bear to see him sewing a dog like that the smell of chloroform seemed to go with me even when i met my friend oh now see i That's so brilliant and so spare. I know, but the point is, it's the details that appear to be sort of slight, almost like non sequiturs, you know, where you're not sure where she's taking the story. I think it's brilliant. But also all those weird disassociated images of, you know, the horse's foot without the horse attached to it and the peak side. It's this kind of weird sort of

frankenstein like house of horrors is being set up yeah and the way that she sees it and that sort of slightly like you say it's all these kind of disassociated images that together make this kind of horrible horrible hole so should we say a bit about um who barbara cummings was then. She was born in 1907, one of six children, grew up on the banks of the Avon River in a house called Bell Court. That is the basis of her first novel, Sisters by a River. She went to art school, married the artist John Pemberton, both exhibited work with the London Group of Artists in 1934. They knew Dylan Thomas and Augustus John,

so they were connected. And the marriage broke down in 1935, and that is the basis for the novel of Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. And there is, I'm just going to... Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, described by Dr Matthew Sweet as such an authentic world of grim boho poverty.

I mean, I don't think it's quite as good a novel as The Vet's Daughter, but it's also very memorable. Although I really enjoyed reading it, and I think, yeah. And what, Lucy, there's a note, isn't there, at the beginning of Our Spoons Came From Woolworths? Yeah, yeah, it just says, so it's on the imprint page, and it says the only things that are true in this story are the wedding and chapters 10, 11 and 12 and the poverty which is basically the entire novel

infused with i mean poverty is at the heart of it um it's the reason that everything in their marriage breaks down it's the reason that they're unhappy it's kind of so it's it's such an odd note isn't it because it's it's both acknowledging it but also not acknowledging it it's kind of so it's it's such an odd note isn't it because it's it's both acknowledging it but also not acknowledging it it's also so interesting that this is that that is now her best known novel that it's the one that's been most recently serialized on the radio yeah um it gets chosen for book groups yeah quite regularly well. And it is a very good book, but that autobiographical element seems to be the thing that people glom onto. I think people like that. Well, also, I think, I mean, maybe it's worth mentioning chapters 10, 11 and 12

are the ones in the novel that feature the protagonist, Sophia, giving birth to her first child. And it is told in quite a level of detail, which is unexpected for today, let alone when she's writing it. And I think a lot of the more recent readers and people who've been championing Spoons have picked up on that and saying that it's revelatory in that sense that she was writing so honestly about childbirth. So there's something there as well. So in the late 1930s, Cummings begins a relationship with a black marketeer called arthur price and i'm quoting wikipedia here everybody cummings generated money by breeding poodles

renovating pianos dealing in antiques and classic cars the gondas i love that and drawing for commercial advertisements which she once again this is the pattern, all of which appears in the later novel, Mr. Fox. Mr. Fox is based on that period in that line. And then she remarries in 1945 to a she's still connected to a friend and colleague of Kim Philby. And so she has

this sort of second act in terms of she's out of poverty. But she she's writing but she's writing a isn't she no no she's not out tell me more well i mean just when she met um richard cummings car he was working in whitehall and that's where he knew philby from but he left his job in whitehall supposedly he was fired um due to his links with links with Philby so there's a bit of a story there that's not quite clear and then they moved after that they they were in a lot

of financial problems they moved to Spain and lived there for many years and one of the books she wrote while out in Spain is called Out of the Red Into the Blue which is probably the closest although lots of her novels are based on things that happened to it, it's actually much more of a memoir. And it begins, I think, on the very first page or the second page as a wonderful line where she says something like, you know, my husband, we've only got one peseta left, we don't know what to do.

I told my husband to write to the bank, maybe there's just no money in the account. And they lived in Spain on this terrible... They lived in Ibiza, didn't they? this terrible they lived in Ibiza didn't they? yeah they lived in Ibiza for a while, Barcelona and then some, I can't remember the other they sort of lived all around for a long time but they were

really poverty stricken out there I think the poverty did haunt her for most of her life and if you read her diaries from the later years which I've been lucky to have some access to again she's writing about money a lot or needing money and not being able to get money so she writes um her first novel Sisters by a River is published in 1947 and she publishes eight novels in the next 20 years she's publishing

regularly right so she Sisters by a River Our Spoons Came from Woolworths Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead in 1954, this novel, The Vets' Daughter in 1959, After the Red and Into the Blue, 60, The Skin Chairs, which we'll also say a little bit about in a minute, in 1960, I mean, The Skin Chairs, everyone, in 1962. Birds in Tiny Cages, is that a novel? That is a novel, but that's the one set in Spain.

Yeah, 64, and then Touch of Mistletoe in 1967. And then she doesn't publish anything for 20 years. I don't think it's quite 20 years. The next one is kind of in the 80s. 85, Juniper Tree in 85. So is she well-known at the time? She has the patronage of Graham Greene. I think Graham Greene liked The Vet's Daughter.

I mean, I think she did get some good reviews for some of the earlier stuff. The Vet's Daughter did get good reviews. Yeah, that got quite interesting reviews. But I think that she doesn't publish for a while, but something like The House of Dolls, for example, which is her final novel, not published until 1989, she was writing that as early as 67 or 69, something like that, because there's accounts in her diaries of her writing this.

So I don't know, I'm not entirely sure what meant that she wasn't publishing. Perhaps it was the fact she was out of the country, focusing on other things at that time. It might be one of those cases, as with Barbara Pym, that Barbara Pym, you know, can't get published from the early 1960s onwards and it's only in the mid-70s when she is named as one of the greatest living writers by both Philip Larkin and somebody else that that the publishers turn around and say have you got anything yeah she's and so she then publishes the late the novels in her later career are the books that she'd been writing while she couldn't get published. That's true, but I think also The House of Dolls is not a particularly accomplished novel

compared to the earlier ones, and neither is... I mean, Mr Fox is fun, it's a bit more like Spoons, I guess, but it doesn't do some of the more interesting things that Vets Daughter, Skin Chairs, even The Gene of a Tree, which comes before mr fox does so there's i don't know i feel with her there's this kind of two strands in her work one that is much more kind of straightforward autobiographical um weaving in these kind of you know things that happen to her and she did live a fascinating live a fascinating life so

that you know it's great to read about but then there's this other strand of this kind of weird magical realism sort of suburban gothic strange strange things that are happening and that kind of that mixture of comedy and tragedy and and sort of real horror as well almost stella gibbons like in places yeah which you just don't expect when you read her other stuff so i think that it's i don't know i haven't quite worked out how you reconcile those two sides of that. Going back to the vet's daughter, why is it levitation do you think she picks as being the particular characteristic that the main character develops?

I never even thought about that. But it is sort of, it kind of works, because it's just that thing, you feel it's like mesmerism, or the obvious of, you know, something appropriate to the era. Yeah, something weird weird Victorian isn't it I think it has that

got that sort of gothic-y Victorian feel to it the unhappiness is almost so kind of concentrated in her that she kind of almost the only thing she can do and it's like well without giving away the ending at all it is just remarkable and I

it becomes a sort of something that she it's one of the few things that she can take pride in but also there's something there because she goes into that sort of weird trance when she does it and i think there's something to be said there about disassociation which is why it also links in with um if you look at it quite carefully all the episodes of levitation before she manages to master it as a sort of skill she can do on demand they all occur after some kind of traumatic event in her life and so it's like a sort of disassociative

a sort of disassociative skill isn't it? So it's psychologically consistent Yeah I think so. In a way which in setting for this book is remarkable. That's the thing isn't it because no one's really theorising this when she's writing it. That's, I think, what's most intriguing, that actually

when you work it through, there's a really... You know, if this was being written today, you'd say, well, someone's read a bit of Freud, they know they can work it out. But, you know, not even Freud, obviously, but someone's read some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, there's a lot of theorising that goes on in the 80s or whatever. This is written so

much earlier, so it's quite... She also has also has this brilliant passage you just read has that lovely switch in and out of humor yeah i just want to read a bit from quite late in the book uh very short uh it became almost dark in the big room except for the glow from the fire and I longed to draw the curtains and make it light I thought I could see a tall brass lamp gleaming and on the mantelpiece there were candles waiting to be lit the vague sad voice went on and on quote my husband was still alive when the house was almost gutted by fire I'll never forget old floss howling but we couldn't reach her there we were trapped in this very room and smoke pouring under the door. Henry was safe in the next room, but poor old Floss died,

and the little maid we had then, I believe her name was Alice too. Her charred body was found crouching on the landing. I thought she'd be black like burnt paper. She was a dreadful reddish brown. Poor girl. I sometimes think the fire was the cause of my trouble. On and on she went.

I'd have been interested if I hadn't been so hungry and tired. I mean... I know. And the thing is, it's... I'm going to read a little bit in a moment as well, but it's that precision, isn't it? Yeah. If you're... Because you think, at this point in the book,

she's basically been rescued from the horror of her home life. Her father has brought in a kind of the strumpet from the trumpet, the local pub, to come and basically to be his housekeeper. And what does Mrs Churchill, the old housekeeper, be doing? She's a floozy. And there's brilliant scenes where they're eating, suddenly her father's eating all this fancy food

that you know because Rosa the floozy is bringing so it's an awful awful situation and then she's had this terrible

you know the guy from the waiter who turns out not to be the head waiter from the hotel but turns out

to be the porter who rapes her or almost rapes her so she escapes down to look after her dull what's his what's

his nickname to look after the mother who is this miss havisham like who's the describing i was just going to say this a little bit this is just what she can do in a parrot that no one can tell me that this isn't really really writing of the first order there's the old man and the chickens right and she just she just the man said they aren't good eaters coachings the fats in the wrong places look at that now and he pointed to a bloated hen's body hanging from the shed it was quite bare except for a few feathers on its head and between its relaxed beak there was one crystal bead of water. I looked at the pitiful and obscene sight and found myself thinking of Mrs Peebles hanging in the bath.

Mrs Peebles had attempted suicide. But at least she was thin and had clothes on her body. I turned away but said good morning to the man quite politely. After all, he was so used to hens bodies he didn't realize how depressing one could look so fat and pale and gently swinging in the wind oh god the thing is we're laughing but I don't think we're laughing because we think it's silly oh I think we're I find it so full of truth and it's It's so remarkable. And so I know, Matt, you had a thing. You thought it got a little bit ripping yarns in places,

that it was just, you know, there was just too much, you know. I mean, almost, you know, like Stella Gibbons, you know, shall I go and I'm going to go and kill, you know, there's hanging and it's the gothic elements. I didn't ever feel that she over... It was the parrot in the downstairs lavatory packing holes in the floor. Yeah.

Picking its own feathers. I mean, you know... A depressed parrot. I mean, everybody... Trapped animals. I mean, that's one of the things. There's the thing about the black... There's at one point when she says, you know,

she's going home for the summer. She has to... The thing is, this is what's so brutal about the book. She gets out to Hailing Island, and she has this brief moment where there's Nicholas, who is the kind of beautiful boy that she goes skating with, and then she goes and watches him working on boats, and he's on leave from the Navy.

So she has this sort of moment of, you know, for the first time she sort of knows what it's like to feel that attraction to somebody because Blinkers, she knows that Blinkers is a sweetheart, but he's really tall and has fat, hairy arms. He looks like he's made of bark. He looks like he's made of bark.

Not bark. I know. He's so proud to be out with her. The fear of her. That's one of the things i really loved about it was that relationship with blinkers in that so she's had this terrible relationship with her father and he arrives as her savior but she immediately doesn't look at him as her savior which is you know a very realistic portrayal exactly it's really real you can't force yourself to fancy someone can you i mean nothing nothing like i say she's she's you think she's escaped and then they she has to go

back to that house she has to go back into the house and she says there's no summer the only summer in the house would be the blackbird singing in the holly tree which is the blackbird her mother and i will think i will never look at holly trees again in the same way do you know that being at the start you read that bit with describes the dirty holly trees again in the same way. You know that at the start, you read that bit where it describes the dirty holly trees. And what about the extraordinary bit where her mother suddenly starts talking about her childhood in Wales, which is one of the most, I mean, really heart-renderingly poignant. Oh, that's amazing. About how she grew up in this beautiful place.

Well, I think the book was supposedly, when Cummings started writing it, the mother was a central character and it was set in wales and then as she wrote she realized that actually it was the story of the daughter instead which i think accounts for such a long sustained passage of the the kind of the mother's life basically because she came up with so i think she started writing um the vet's daughter when she was on her honeymoon um for her second marriage in Snowdonia, staying in Kim Philby's cottage. Wow. I mean, she could have made the rural little fun, but she puts the most disgusting couple, the Gowlings.

So she never gets away from being spied on. She's spied on all the way through the book. Well, I think, I don't know what you think, Lucy, that is one of the brilliant elements of the book in terms of the way it contextualises the levitation. That the levitation is her only escape from this relentless parade of awfulness. And even that is co-opted. Even the rising up and escaping is controlled by other people.

Nothing breaks her, though. Nothing breaks her. You can't imagine having a more dreary, worse sort of life than this. But somehow she has this ability to literally rise above it all. And you felt when you hear about her life, she was a remarkable survivor. So Matthew, have you got anything tenuous to add? Yeah, a factious detail. That's what we're hoping for. That's what we're hoping for, yeah.

Yes, I've got a very factious detail, which is, you know that thing where people say, you've never heard of, like you did it to me earlier about someone, you talk about something like, you've never heard of so-and-so, and particularly if you're interested in books, you get that all the time, you've never read that book. Well, in my house where I grew up, the book that my dad continually said, you've never read, and it was Neville Shoots on the Beach.

It's like, you've never read neville shoots on the beach which always he always found that very remarkable so the tenuous link this week is is for my dad it was it was a lovely dad he wasn't an abusive dad with a muster with a muster so my unabusive dad um who always said that to me and And Neville Shute lived on Hailing Island, where they moved to in this book. How tenuous is that? The author Jenny Colgan recently acquired a puppy for her family, and they've called that dog Neville Shute.

On the grounds that it will be spending a lot of time on the beach. Which is brilliant. That is quite funny. I've got a tenuous link this week. Wow. Excellent. My tenuous link this week. Wow. Excellent. My tenuous link is that The Vet's Daughter, the most successful of Ms Cummings' novels, I believe.

I think that's what I'm saying. So it was turned into a radio adaptation. Yes. And a musical. It was turned into a musical. It was a musical as well. It ran for a month. Listen, listen now.

It ran for a month. It written by sandy wilson sandy wilson who wrote the boyfriend it ran for a month at the marlow theater in canterbury near where i live in 1978 and here are a few of the musical numbers now matt doesn't let me um i love it when books are turned into musicals right but back on back, every time I try and get a song on, right, Matt refuses because he's prejudiced. No, no,

it's more or less that. So here are some of the... He is a musical bigger. He's a musical bigger.

He knows. He's nodding. He's nodding along. So the Vestor was made into a musical called The Clap and Wonder. Here it is.

You wrote about this as well, didn't you? Sorry, just before you... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You wrote about this and it was very tragic about her. It was so sad. She wanted to hear all the author from the audience. I know, she wanted it to be successful and it was sort of, you know,

and then there's a bit in her diary where she talks about how she's off to see the first night and she's so excited about it and she hopes that there'll be kind of screaming author, author for her. And then she gets there and it's this horrendous production that everyone is kind of obviously booing and then she has to leave before it finishes to get the last train home so she doesn't even see the ending of it and she has to drink like a champagne warm champagne out

of a paper cup on the train home knowing that the slowest train ever knowing that it's been a failure and then i think the final line for that diary entry is there's you know there's no hope nothing to look forward to now i'll never make any money and it's so yeah i think it's so sad to make light of her um well you'll never know i'm not going to i'm just saying because of matt because of matt you'll never get to hear My Little Tin Trunk and Me. You'll never get to hear Come For A Spin or The Strumpet From The Trumpet because of Matt's prejudice. Because of Matt's prejudice. I am sorry.

Is there an original cast recording? Sadly, there isn't. This is Sandy Wilson. It's the boyfriend. It should have been and could have been a hit I think they they had high hopes

and it just I mean it's a pretty dark story I wouldn't want the trouble of trying to dramatise this

into a musical this is the music this musical is the musical that Defying Gravity should have been written for is there a song that accompanies the father selling puppies

to the baby's next year? Yes. A lot more to life than that. That's brilliant. Also, I've got one other thing. It's very quick to say that we have received some mild criticism here on Backlisted for choosing selecting books that are out of print and are expensive

to get hold of. And so I want to draw attention to listeners. There is currently an offer available from our friends at the Book People, online at the Book People, where you can buy Sisters on a River, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, and The Vet's Daughter, all three of those books for £4.99 for all three.

Bargain. That is the best five that you've ever spent. And in return for that massive plug for the book people, I am going to read you the blurb from their website. Imagine, I want you listeners to imagine that you buy Barbara Cummings' novels on the basis of this blurb compared with what we've talked about today. Here we go. Barbara Cummings was a very talented author who lived an extraordinary life and wrote a number of unique and witty novels that will keep fans of murder mysteries hooked. mystery is hooked the books are set in victorian london literally math and are heaving and are heaving with quirky characters strange events love affairs and mysteries to solve and vivisection

mysteries to solve mysteries to solve yeah okay Just when you were reading that, it just reminded me of that. Do you remember those brilliant characters that French and Saunders used to do, the old ladies who would, like, they were very posh, and they'd lose a finger and they'd... Go to the dogs. Go to the dogs. I sort of suddenly thought, Barbara Cummings is one of those kind of... She must have been brilliant company, don't you think?

Yes. Just completely she'd been through everything. She reminded me of both Morwenna Banks' little girl character. Yes. And Morwenna Banks' do I scare you? Are you attracted to me?

Yes. A kind of weird combination. Just amazing. They don't make them like that anymore. That seems as good a point as any to start reading the script. That seems as good a point as any to call it to a halt.

Thanks, Lucy, for coming on. My pleasure entirely. It's been really nice to talk about her. Oh, I really hope so. Seriously, people, please, please, go to the book people or your library or wherever anywhere whichever i feel like you can't i mean i know we've done a good job well i think we have done a good job but you can't quite ask what she's like until you read her no absolutely right

yeah it will it will you'll it'll be something you always you'll remember forever i mean it's it's a gift thanks so thanks lucy, Lucy. Thanks, Matthew Clayton. Thank you. Thank you, producer Matt Hall. Thank you. Thanks once again to Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, at BacklistedPod,

on Facebook, which is BacklistedPod, and on the page on the Unbound site, which is unbound.co.uk forward slash backlisted. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then, it's goodnight from me. Thanks, everybody.

I'm going to break into song. Just for that now. Thanks. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted,

which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.