One Fine Day

Summary (from the publisher): It's a summer's day in 1946. The English village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rustling coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated. Together again after years of separation, Laura and Stephen Marshall and their daughter Victoria are forced to manage without "those anonymous caps and aprons who lived out of sight and pulled the strings." Their rambling garden refuses to be tamed, the house seems perceptibly to crumble. But alone on a hillside, as evening falls, Laura comes to see what it would have meant if the war had been lost, and looks to the future with a new hope and optimism. First published in 1947, this subtle, finely wrought novel presents a memorable portrait of the aftermath of war, its effect upon a marriage, and the gradual but significant change in the nature of English middle-class life.

 

Review: It's an ordinary summer day in 1946 in the small English village of Wealding, which is no longer threatened by war. Laura and Stephen Marshall and their daughter Victoria are limping along in their too large home, which is slowly being taken over by dust and neglect while the garden slowly succumbs to weeds. Their world and the social order they are accustomed to has been irrevocably altered by the war. Yet on this seemingly ordinary day a year after the end of World War II, Laura realizes both what it means to have won the war and looks towards the future with hope.

 

The world the Marshalls inhabit is one undoubtedly still recovering from the aftermath of war: "Coils of barbed wire still rusting among the sorrel were a reminder. Sandbags pouring out sodden guts from the old strong-point among the bracken, the frizzy lily spikes pushing up in the deserted garden of the bombed cottages" (8). In the aftermath of war, Laura and Stephen are still attempting to put their lives back together and also to adjust to the return to a very altered world, one where hired help is no longer there to cater to their needs and their once comfortable home threatens to overwhelm Laura with its demands. The echoes of the maids still rattle through their home: "Laura sat alone, the silence settled with the dust on the empty rooms, and the caps and aprons rustled their way - whither? Into factories, people said" (19). Her family's repeated mental image of Laura sighing, sweating, and laboring over the cantankerous oven with only limited success, is symbolic of her endless toil to carry on despite any obstacle and to fight to maintain the lifestyle her family expects. Yet other families are realizing the futility of their efforts, such as one of Laura's neighbors whose house is to be sold and used "partly as a holiday hostel, partly as an agricultural training centre for boys" (109).

 

Yet despite the rundown and recovering element to the Marshalls' world, there is a sense of the indomitable spirit they possess, symbolic of England itself; "I am England. I will remain" (9). For "The long nightmare was over, the land sang its peaceful song" (148).  Laura and her family seem to recognize that to survive is to adapt and that they can both preserve their history and their altered future now that the war is over. "The past, which in the Herriots's house was pressed like a dry butterfly between the glass of Edwardian photograph frames, could be seen here as something living which did not stop abruptly, but went on, stretching out to the present, on into the future" (110).

 

This is a beautiful book and celebration for the return to peace that also mourns the loss of what was, told in restrained yet moving language. As the introduction argues, "it is almost a hymn of praise to the English, and particularly to the ordinary Englishwoman who did not fight in the war but lived through it as acutely as any soldier - a theme usually ignored in literature, where the experience is often seen as a male prerogative" (xiii). This is a novel of survival and triumph over adversity "yet with a pervading strain of melancholy tinging the optimism like autumn leaves in an Indian summer" (xvi).

 

Stars: 4