Dreams of the Good Life by Richard Mabey

Author:Richard Mabey [Mabey, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141932217
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

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Sometime during 1919, aware that she was no longer producing marketable material, Flora responded to an advertisement in the Daily News, which was offering postal writing courses from the Practical Correspondence College in London. There is no record of how long she signed up for, or what kind of material she submitted. But it earned her fulsome praise from one of the tutors, A. Brodie Frazer, a staff writer on the Daily News. She kept his response as a memento amongst her papers: ‘This is really good. You have handled the situation with the mastery of genius. Please send to one of the magazines on the list. I am proud of this story; it does you the highest credit.’

One of the magazines he may have recommended was The Catholic Fireside, as Flora almost immediately submitted to its editor a slightly reworked version of her story ‘The Leper’, which had already appeared in the Literary Monthly seven years previously. The magazine published it in January 1920, and Flora sold six more stories to them that year. They are still sentimental in tone and predictable in plot, but have a distinctly post-war edge and reveal a growing political awareness on Flora’s part. Her stock characters are still there, but they are moving in a changing social landscape, in which there is now a ‘new poor’ as well as a new class of arrivistes, many of whom had amassed their fortunes during the war. ‘The Hermit’s Yew’ explores the collision between traditional values and what Flora calls ‘profiteering’, via the felling of an ancient village yew by an entrepreneurial incomer. ‘The Profiteers’ is set in a smart country hotel, where the old aristocracy and the new lower middle classes glare daggers at each other over the perfectly laid dining tables. Into their midst strides a classic Thompson hero, a young doctor with ‘the eyes of a poet and dreamer’. Allan Neal is also a class migrant, having devoted his life to treating the poor, and he cuts through the stand-off by falling for the daughter of a philanthropic industrialist (he made his money from wartime condensed milk), who is also staying at the hotel. There are doctors and journalists in most of these post-war stories. There are also determined autodidacts, whose talents overcome their educational and social shortcomings. The hero of ‘The Uphill Way’, Dr Carstairs, is all of these things and eventually finds fulfilment when his enthusiasm for amateur astronomy lands him a column called ‘The Sidereal Heavens’. ‘Our Contemporary’ features a woman editor of a family provincial newspaper, which is driven into near-collapse by the arrival of a new mass-circulation title, owned by a wealthy, Oxford-educated outsider. Flora and 1920s magazines being what they were, the clash is averted by a comprehensive merger, the combination of both titles into ‘one really first-class paper’. ‘But this was only the prelude,’ runs the story’s closing sentence, ‘the real romance came later!’

Flora’s late stories are somewhat redeemed because they feature clashes of social manners as well as values, and this was her strength.

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