181. Angela Milne — One Year’s Time with Simon David Thomas
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AMY: Hi, everyone, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes here with my co-host, Kim Askew.
KIM: The novel we're discussing today is a story of a romance that starts off as a one- night stand. Liza, our heroine, meets a dashing gent, Walter, at a party and ends up, as Liza says, "with me in bed with nothing on and him kneeling there with only socks." Bowm-Chick-a-Bow-Wow!
AMY: Yeah, racy. Oh my god. Although there's nothing really that sexy about a man standing there in his socks only. But no, he's charming. He's charming. So the novel takes place over the course of one year, beginning on New Year's Day. But the year in question might actually surprise you. The action, in more ways than one, is set sometime in the late 1930s, just before World War II. So not necessarily an era known for its frank portrayals of sex and the single girl.
KIM: Right. And published in 1942, it was actually the only novel written by Angela Milne, The niece of famed Winnie the Pooh author, A.A. Milne.
AMY: I love a lost lady with a famous literary connection. It takes me back to our very first episode of this podcast on Monica Dickens, the great granddaughter of Charles Dickens. This book though is such a pleasure to read, and I am excited to learn a lot more about Angela Milne. We've got a returning guest, in fact, Simon
Thomas, to tell us all about her.
KIM: Yay, Simon. So let's raid the stacks and get started.
[intro music plays]
Simon Thomas is a consultant for the British Library Women Writer Series, which curates works by forgotten female writers. It's their 2023 edition of One Year's Time, for which Simon wrote the afterward, that we read in preparation for this episode. He started the blog Stuck in a Book in 2007, and co-hosts the popular podcast, Tea or Books? Simon has a PhD from Oxford University in interwar literature.
AMY: And Simon joined us on the show several years ago for... god, has it been several years?
KIM: I don't, yeah.
AMY: That seems more recent than that. Um, yeah, that was for episode No. 83 when we discussed Dorothy Evelyn Smith's O the Brave Music, which we loved. And I got to hang out with Simon on my trip to England last summer, which was wonderful. Welcome back, Simon. So good to see you.
SIMON: Thanks so much. It's lovely to be here. Yeah, it was lovely to meet you in person. Um, it was lovely to be called charming in your podcast about it. I put that in my little, you know, praise book. You, of course, are charming too. And yeah, I'm delighted to be back here for Angela Milne.
AMY: And in my like hazy recollection as time passes, I know I've changed it a bit, but now you have gallantly saved me from a throng of killer bees. Remember all those bees?
SIMON: I mean, I didn't sort of fling myself in front of them. I was like, “Shall we just go back inside?”
KIM: That's the Mr. Darcy, style, right? You're just gonna calmly…
AMY: Understated save.
SIMON: That's true. True.
KIM: So let's begin our discussion by learning a little bit more about Angela Milne. What do we know about her early life, if anything, Simon? What can you tell us?
SIMON: Yeah, we're not gonna learn huge amounts, I'm afraid, 'cause it has been hard to find very much. But, um, the bits I have found, as you have mentioned, she's the niece of A.A. Milne who is, um, now very famous for Winnie the Pooh. And during his life he was famous for that book, but famous for a world of other literature as well. Um, she grew up in Croydon, which is a part of London. And she was apparently best friends with Peggy Ashcroft at school, the noted actress, uh, she would later become. She went to quite a posh school, Godolphin school, in Salisbury. Um, and that's basically all we know about her quite elusive childhood.
KIM: It's crazy how little you can know about someone in the 20th century and then, you know, you can dig up more sometimes on someone from the much more distant past.
SIMON: Yeah. Yeah.
KIM: Especially considering you know, her relations and everything.
AMY: And for American listeners who might not be as familiar with Peggy Ashcroft, she was like a famous stage actress with like the Royal Shakespeare Company?
SIMON: Yeah, that's right.Um, she, and I think she was later Dame Peggy Ashcroft, but um, yeah, she was of that generation of extremely well respected classical actors.
AMY: Right. I did see she was in A Passage to India, so that was a one thing where I was like, “Oh, yes.”
SIMON: Ah.
KIM: Oh, yeah, yeah.
AMY: Okay. So Angela Milne began her working career as a secretary, which will play into our discussion of this book. But after deciding she was, quote, 'the world's worst at it," she quit. So what happened next, Simon?
SIMON: So her uncle, A.A. Milne, gave her 50 pounds, a lot of money in those days, and said, “Go and try and be a writer if that's what you want to do.” Which actually is a lovely hearkening back to his own young days when he had wanted to become a writer and his father said, “You've got a year to go and try and do it. If you can break even in that year, then fine. I won't make you be a school teacher” or whatever you wanted him to be. Um, so yeah, it's just sort of continuing the generational shift of, it is hard to set out to be a writer with no money. So here's a little bit of money. See what you can do. If you're good enough, you'll make it.
KIM: Yeah, which is not a lot of money really to start yourself off, even then. But I like the traditional aspect of it.
SIMON: Yeah. I guess, yes, you're right. It would not have paid rent for a year..
KIM: Yeah, it was like, “okay, I believe in you enough to think that you can do this.”
SIMON: Yeah.
KIM: So she was also a land girl during the war. Simon, could you tell our listeners a little bit about what that actually entailed?
SIMON: Sure. So, yeah, during the war, obviously, uh, we had conscription in the UK where most men went off to fight at the front if they were of that age, and that left lots of jobs that needed doing, that women stepped up. For farmers actually weren't conscripted, but there was still must have been a lot of shortage of labor, and so it was just a way to, you know, “Dig for Victory” was the slogan on the posters, to go and, uh, make sure that there were enough crops in the UK for people to survive on, all that sort of thing. Basically just like after, you know, generations and generations of women not really being allowed to have hands on work, particularly if they were middle class and above that they were suddenly called to do it. And, um, and she went to do that. I don't know how good she was, but she described it as “living in quiet desperation, eating turnips and freezing in bed,” which is quite a good description of rural English life now. I don't have central heating in my flat. It's freezing.
AMY: Oh my gosh.
KIM: Yeah. Yeah. You canimagine it, yeah, it wouldn't necessarily be the most fun thing to be doing at that age. But still, an adventure.
SIMON: Yeah, something to build character.
KIM: Yes. Yeah, exactly.
AMY: So, uh, her uncle A.A. Milne, he wrote humorous sketches for Punch Magazine. And Angela would go on to do so as well. She was also notably the first woman invited to the Punch table, and there's actually a great anecdote about that in the forward to the British Library Edition. We were hoping you could share that anecdote, Simon.
SIMON: Sure. Yeah. So for those who don't know, the Punch table was something that only certain members of the writing staff and editors were invited to. So it wasn't like every writer got to be there, it was sort of very much the inner circle. Uh, and she was there just once and apparently while she was there, there was a heated discussion about Walt Disney's adaptation of Winnie the Pooh, which from what I know of Punch at the time Iimagine was not very favorable,
AMY: Oh yeah, for sure. I'm thinking of that animated movie right now and just cringing a little and thinking about what they would've been saying. That's hilarious.
KIM: Yeah. I kind of imagine it like an early, uh, woman on SNL or something and being in behind the scenes, practicing for SNL sketch
SIMON: Yeah. Um, and one of the interesting things about Punch is that everybody wrote under a pseudonym, which is usually just initials. so A.A. Milne was always just A.M. Women tended to write under a full name. Well not full name, but a name rather than initial. So she was there under, I think it must be pronounced Andy, but a A-N-D-E, and you know, Rachel Ferguson was there as Rachel. So I don't know if they had to, like, we we're not gonna tell you who they are, but we have to code that it's a woman for some reason, rather than just letting them write under initials..
KIM: Oh wow. Okay. So her first and only novel is One Year's Time, and it was published in 1942, and she's clearly in it, she's drawing on both this experience of being a secretary and also her sense of humor. Let's talk about the book. Simon, do you want to share the basic premise with listeners?
SIMON: Yeah. And it is one of those books that has a very basic premise because in some ways, there isn't really that much that happens. It's a year in the life of a woman called Liza. She has a job. She works as a secretary, which, you know, is quite unusual to see that day-to-Day working life in novels of this period. She also very early on meets this young man called Walter and gets to know him quite quickly as we'll talk about. It's basically just a year in the life of her career, of her romantic life, of her friendship life. Uh, we don't see that much of a wider family, but she's very much that sort of single woman who, who's distanced herself from what family she has a bit. And there's, you know, there's a few trips and a few fights, but broadly there isn't really a plot to speak of. It's more just,
um,
the day-to-day
life. Yeah.
KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And it still totally works. Um, AMY, do you want to do the honors of reading a little bit from the book to give our listeners a feel for how it reads?
AMY: Yeah, sure. So this is a passage towards the beginning of the book, right before Liza and Walter sleep together for the first time. She's just met him at, is it a New Year's Eve party?
SIMON: I
think
so,
AMY: it new? Yeah, yeah,
KIM: Yeah.
AMY: She's brought him back to her apartment and is hanging out with him on the sofa. Milne writes, "she thought of the party she had met him at, at the house of some strangers and how she had nearly not gone there, and she decided that there was something in Fate after all. She said suddenly,
What do you like best in the world? Well said, Walter, I'm not absolutely sure what plane we're on. I mean, I should like to say sex. It's sprang to my mind. It's true, of course. I mean, who doesn't? But then it would be just as true to say Shakespeare or the Brandenburg Concertos or curried chicken or the moon on the sea.
Or Groucho Marx. You see what I mean? Oh, I do, said Liza. I suppose it depends on who asks you. And then she nearly blushed and turned round and moved the telephone an inch from where it was before. So then Walter asks Liza, well, tell me some of the things that you hate. And so she rattles off a list of things that she doesn't like.
And Walter says, You hate all my hates. I think you can summarize them as stupidity and vulgarity, don't you? I think so, said Liza. She was thinking he has a quick, alive face to match his voice and his hair isn't quite dark. It's dark brown and his eyes are gray. So then Walter goes on to ask her what would happen if I took my tie off?
And Milne has Liza answer. Everything. I mean, how good
is that?
And then Milne writes, Now she did blush. She hadn't meant it to mean what it sounded like or to mean anything. It was just something to say.
She saw that Walter was rather embarrassed too and was a little surprised. He said, I don't think it need. And then modern life's awfully trammeling, isn't it? Yes. I should hate to wear a tie. I didn't mean that. O? What did you mean? She wondered why she had said it.
If you insist, said Walter undoing the top button of his shirt. I meant that there aren't any rules of conduct. Now, there probably weren't any ever, but people always say there were, so I suppose there were, Liza stood up and put her glass back on the tray. I think rules are rather silly.
No, I don't really, Walter stood up too. Nor do I, really. And so, uh, things progress from there as you can probably, uh, intimate with him starting to undress. There's a few things I love about
this. First of all, she's so good at the banter, right?
But, um, I love at the end where she says, I think rules are rather silly. And then she says, No, I don't really, because that's something that kind of comes up throughout, is she's not able, with Walter, to state what she really feels all the time. And we'll get into that
later.
Um,
KIM: Yeah, she says things she doesn't mean, which we all do, and she actually expresses like, okay, Why did I say that?
AMY: And that little bit about moving the telephone an inch, I mean, that's such a perfect description of when you're sort of blushing and you can't look at him. Just fiddling
with something to do.
SIMON: And I think that whole dialogue could be lifted
to a film made today, set today, and it would still feel absolutely right for like a man and
a woman meeting for
the first time. And, you know, flirting. It feels timeless.
KIM: Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like it could be made right now into a film so easily. So I wanted to talk a little bit about when Walter first calls her the first time, and she is in the middle of painting her floor this glossy black color. She's trying to make her bachelor flat look more chic. She's on a tight budget, obviously, and I thought that was really fun getting to see like,
there's a certain sense of pride she has, but also it's, you know, not always great.
AMY: And that DIY thing, if anyone could look back at my apartment when I was in my twenties and I have this brilliant idea that
I'm gonna paint an armoire, you know, and then I have no idea what I'm doing.
And, and the fact that she's painting the floor black, but she can't figure out how to paint under the rug and
she's spilling the paint everywhere. It's hilarious. it's so,
it's so my life when I was in my twenties. Yeah.
I was always so proud of like my stupid painted, dumb
thing that I did.
KIM: Yeah. I could choose what color I wanted for a room. This was in San Francisco, and I had it painted like this deep red, which I loved for about a month. And then it started to drive me crazy 'cause it was so dark red.
AMY: Like bordello.
KIM: Exactly. It was like, Okay.
I went a little too far. Anyway, part of the thing she is like working through is she doesn't wanna be seen as this certain kind of bachelor girl, right, Simon? Talk a little bit about the bachelor girl term and kind of why it was bothering her
so much. Yeah, I think the term bachelor girl is so fascinating because in this period, I guess starting maybe in the 1920s, there was this real attempt to stop using the words old maid, to stop using the word spinster. There were a lot more women than men in the UK, there were 1.75 million more women than men because so many men had died in the First World War. So there were all these young women facing the fact that they may well not get married ever, and if they were going to, they might have this extended period of singleness, but they wanted to rebrand. So bachelor girl originally came in as a cool alternative to spinster. But you know, misogyny being what it is, it very quickly, um, doubled back on it and there's a little quote I'll read, one of the mentions of it, which is when Liza's talking about finances and in her relationship with water, she says, I can't help feeling like that about money,
SIMON: said Liza, as they walked up the lane to the car. You would, if you'd always had to earn your own living. I mean all of it till a year and a half ago. She thought That sounds like getting at Walter for not really earning his, and it makes me a bachelor girl. That's awful." So there, she's thinking a bachelor girl as an independent woman, but what comes with being an independent woman, in her mind at least, is having to think about finances and having to penny pinch or, you know, having to do these things that don't make her seem womanly and flirtatious and all these things she's trying to be in that moment. So, yeah, she obviously wants to be independent. She likes having her own place. She likes having a job, but she's terrified that she'll be judged for those things. And she's also judging other people. She sees those women in a hotel and she decides just 'cause they're wearing slightly boxy clothing, that they must be, you know, beyond the pale and have never had a moment's joy.
So there's this internalized misogyny she's experiencing and projecting onto others. We don't really know how much other people are genuinely judging her for being a bachelor girl, but probably they were. There's a reason that she's afraid of this.
AMY: Well, Walter does have some derogatory statements about being a bachelor girl. He says like, they have fat calves or
something like that, right?
KIM: Yeah,
SIMON: He again, he sometimes just like immediately backtracks
from it, essentially saying, Oh, I didn't mean it. But does he mean it? I guess he's in a position where he's
not really had to think about whether he means it or not,
whereas to Liza
it's very
important.
KIM: Walter has this annoying habit of flicking her on the neck, which I found really weird and annoying
about him.
What did you, what did you both think?
AMY: Okay, my older brother did this to me all the time, even in adulthood. That flicking, like
flicking behind my ear, flicking my neck.
KIM: How did you feel about that?
AMY: It's so annoying, but he's trying to annoy me, right?
Like that's what brothers do. But for like a love interest to do it, it was triggering for me, 'cause I kept thinking back to all the times I got flicked by my
older brother.
KIM: Yeah. There's something so
aggressive about it.
SIMON: Yeah, I think it's another example in this relationship where he just is doing whatever comes to his mind. It might be flicking her, it might be cutting her off. He is not thinking, How would this affect the future of our relationship?
How does this affect how she sees me? 'cause he just does whatever he likes. Whereas she's constantly thinking, How will this make me seem to him? Will doing this small action
jeopardize a potential future
with him?
KIM: Been there. Been there personally,
AMY: Oh my God. Yeah.
KIM: that?
Yep. I know. It was almost a little disturbing to
AMY: read
this because it was so familiar.
KIM: Totally.
SIMON: We should say it's also a funny and
fun
book. It's not
just
traumatic.
KIM: Completely funny and fun,
but very realistic.
AMY: A lot of their, conversation is humorous and it revolves around inside jokes, and I think that is very hard to write about, because inside jokes are annoying
to everybody that's not
part of the inside joke, right? She does a really good job of making you feel like you're a third party in that joke, and so
you get the humor of it. And, um, yeah. I love the banter.
SIMON: Yeah, it made me think of Noel Coward plays when I was reading
it. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a slight staginess to it, but in a fun way and yeah, like something like
Private Lives or something where it is that, you
know, everyone's
saying the perfect thing to
each other.
KIM: Yes.
She is trying to do that to a certain extent. She's trying to be entertaining and fun, you
know, whatever he throws at her, she can handle it and she's not gonna be too attached or whatever.
AMY: So, yeah, Walter makes it pretty clear that what he expects from this relationship is kind of just no strings attached. As much as he disses the bachelor girl, he also talks down upon the little woman, and so when he does that, Liza has no choice but to be like, Oh yeah, I would never wanna be the little woman. No, no, that's
not me at all. But privately inside, she's like,
When's he gonna propose? Um, and Liza pretends it's what she wants, but it's not an equal relationship,
right Simon?
SIMON: Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, in the ways we've talked about already about, you know, her constantly reevaluating how she's presenting herself, which he clearly isn't, there's other much more tangible things that make it less free. Like if she gets pregnant, that's going to affect her life a lot more than it's gonna affect his life. So there is this sense that they're flying in the face of custom, but also very aware of certain customs.
One way that comes out, somewhere in the middle of the book, they go away for a weekend together. And, Liza is the one who's putting on an inverted commas "fake" wedding ring and practicing how to write her adopted surname in the hotel
guest book.
KIM: Yeah, let's talk about this ring. ' You wrote about it in the afterword to the book as a sign of her middle classness. Can you tell us a little bit more about that, 'cause I think it's pretty interesting.
KIM: I. Yeah, I think what made it seem really middle class to me is that she refers to it as a fake ring. And it's a wedding ring from Woolworths, the High Street chain. It's only fake to her because she expects when she actually gets married, she'll wear gold, she'll wear something actually valuable. This ring's probably made of bakelite, which at the time was a relatively new invention that made these things accessible. I did mention in the afterword to it a popular song from the 1920s, so a little earlier, called A Woolworth Wedding by R.P Weston and Bert Lee. I'll just read the
chorus. Sadly, I don't know the tune otherwise, of course I would, um,
sing it to you, but
KIM: Oh, come.
SIMON: You'll just have to imagine it. Um, We'll have a Woolworth wedding, Sweetheart, you and I, everything except the grand piano down at Woolworth where you can buy, we'll buy the wedding ring there. It won't be gold, it's true, but our love is 18 karats, so any kind of ring will do. Um, so, so for Liza, it's something that, you know, you see this in quite a lot of the novels of the period.
You go and buy it and you pretend. For a maid or a girl in a factory, or you know anyone in that class that is their wedding ring and that is what they're excited about. There's nothing fake about it.
AMY: Right. They're
not gonna get anything nicer than that one. Awww.
KIM: Yeah,
AMY: Uh,
KIM: happy to just be nominated.
AMY: Yeah. Um, I looked up that song online and I could find the tune, Simon, but I couldn't find an audio clip of the tune with the words. So between you and I, we could put on a little show.
SIMON: We could piece it together. Okay.
AMY: Yes,
exactly.
AMY: So, as we mentioned, Liza thinks she could never be herself until she got married, and she thinks she's gonna have security once she's married. Not only financial security, but it's also security from rejection. She's just sick of dating, and she's sick of having to deal with the games.
Um, she's jealous of Walter's interaction with other women, and so she thinks, Well, if we were married, I wouldn't have to feel that way because I would have him at
that point, right?
KIM: A done deal kind of thing.
SIMON: Yeah. And, um, in fact, I, I'll just read the quote that we've sort of been hinting at between us, if that's all right. It's a bit of a long quote, but it's a good one. She could never be herself till she was married. When they were married, she could be nasty to Walter when it was necessary because she wouldn't be afraid of losing him. She could tell him he was lazy. She could make him a proper barrister and bully him to write his book. And all she did now was stop him working, not by saying anything, by saying nothing. He was afraid because at the heart of their relationship, instead of the courage to take each other for life was a blank, a fear on her side. On his. She sat down again and thought, trying to put herself in Walter's place. Yes, he was being perfectly reasonable. He had always told her what he wanted. She had always said she wanted it, too, because she was afraid. Which I think is actually a really moving moment in what is quite a funny book because he isn't being deceitful.
He's probably just blissfully unaware that she's thinking all these things and he thinks that they're both being honest, but she's not really allowed to be. Um, and to an extent she would be safe if they got married, both from the jealousy, from all these other things. be very unlikely that they would get divorced once they were married.
The divorce rates were very low. Because it was set in a sort of uncertain period in the 1930s, I'm not sure whether it's before or after divorce legislation came in in the UK, I think it was 1936 or 37 around then, which expanded the um, grounds for divorce quite significantly. Before then there's quite a tricky list of things like incest or insanity or something. Whereas, yeah, there were more options, but depending on when this was actually set within the 1930s, that might not have been on the table. But again, even with those options, you were pretty safely
married. Maybe not happily married, but, but,
you were
KIM: safe.
Yeah, because you're safe to bully and like
SIMON: yeah.
KIM: Totally. It's like
her turn to like, get him under her thumb and get him to do all the
SIMON: Yeah.
KIM: wants. I love that her fantasy is about that.
AMY: It's about
nasty to
KIM: Exactly.
SIMON: I think her fantasy is also just
like not having to think about
what she's saying. It's just like if
I'm thinking something, I can say it.
and that's
it.
KIM: Exactly. Yeah.
AMY: But would she? Would she be able to do those things with Walter? Because she, like myself, does not like confrontation.
KIM: Oh yeah, me too.
AMY: So even to the extent, not even with Walter, but she sublets her apartment
when she goes off for the summer with him and the people subletting are not paying the rent and she just cannot confront them and be like, No, I really need my money. She keeps going back and forth like, uh, I'm still
SIMON: Yeah.
Yeah.
AMY: them.
And it's like, just tell them.
KIM: Yeah.
AMY: cause she hates confrontation.
KIM: Yeah,
there.
SIMON: That's me as
well. Yeah. Yeah.
KIM: The other thing, um, I felt, so she describes her mood swings a lot, so she can go from like euphoric to mildly depressed, depending on how things are going with her relationship with Walter, for example, she could be just in the depths of despair and then he does one little nice thing, and then she's euphoric again.
And I felt like that is very true to like someone in their twenties and sort of how you feel about things in the moment. Um, and I want to read from a scene where they go to the movies ' because it's filled with Liza's random thoughts and emotions as she's experiencing watching this movie. "Walter and Lizza sat in the middle of the middle row of their cinema. In front of them sat a loving couple, sloping a little to the left and behind them, someone who clicked her tongue. Whenever anything happened in the film, Lizza sat with her hand in Walters. They always held hands in a cinema. It was a film they hadn't seen before, but as Walter said, only just soon it would pass from her mind.
And all she would remember was that tonight Walter had said he was in love with her, and tonight they had some Turkish cigarettes and she wore a new elastic roll on belt, which squeezed her together and would leave a pattern. But the funny bits of the film were exquisitely funny. The sad bits made her cry worse than ever before.
And she always cried at films. Now. When the girl in the film told the man that she loved him, whatever happened, she would always love him because he was a part of her and she wouldn't be alive if she didn't love him. The tears drowned Liza's eyes and the man hadn't said he loved her.
Oh, you poor girl. But he will, when they jacked the car up off the man, and the girl took his head on her knee and he said he guessed he loved her. The tears ran right down Liza's face. Oh, he couldn't die. He couldn't. The man was in bed in a very shiny hospital. The woman behind them clicked her tongue and said, look at his temperature.
But the doctor told the girl he was going to be all right. Liza thought, it's only a film I'm just watching. It has nothing to do with me. I'm not even interested. So she wasn't crying when the girl put her head down on the pillow by the mans and the music grew suddenly louder and the screen said the end. She took her hand from Walters and they stood up while the gramophone played. God saved the king. Liza saw with great pleasure and great. Embarrassment that Walter's eyes were almost pink, but that might just be from looking at the screen or the smoke in the air. But she'd never seen his eyes pink before.
No, it would be the smoke. When other people looked as you felt, it didn't mean they felt the same. Other people. That was wrong. Liza and Walter held hands as they made their way through the crowd and in the King's Road.
He took her arm and linked her little finger with his, they walked slowly along. Well said. Walter, what did you think of that? Well, what did you, same again. Wouldn't it have been heavenly if the Jack had slipped and bust his neck? Heavenly said, Liza. Some films are films, aren't they? But darling, I cried dreadfully.
I hope you didn't see me. No ducky. I was too busy, not crying. Aren't we awful? He squeezed her hand. Liza thought we are in love. I did know before that I was more than he was. Now it will be different.
AMY: I think that scene, that whole movie scene and, and their reaction afterward
sums up the
entirety of their relationship, right?
KIM: Right. Yeah.
AMY: She's bawling her eyes out because the man in the film says, I guess
I
love you. And
KIM: enough.
AMY: her to just
break out in
tears.
And he's, Walter is pretty much
unmoved by the
KIM: yeah.
ahead.
SIMON: when he says he is busy not
crying, that's him saying that he was
crying though.
KIM: Yeah. And she loves
that. Yeah,
she
totally loves
that. It's
like he gives her just a little enough, she takes it and she's like, euphoric. And then he turns it
and it's like, Oh,
actually I'm gonna move
to the neighborhood, you know, but I'm not moving in with you 'cause we're
SIMON: Yeah.
KIM: be married, so,
AMY: That's what's great about Walter though, is he is so charming. You know he's behaving badly with her, but he is really charming and so you understand. Like in my head, he was the spitting image of Carrie Grant. He's got that vibe to him, and you can forgive him anything because he's just adorable.
Everything he says
is so funny and cute and
charming,
right?
KIM: What do you think, Simon, of Walter? I'm curious.
SIMON: Yeah, I think I'm with you. Like if people listen to this episode, haven't read the novel, they might think, Oh, he just seems awful and selfish and caddish, but I defy anyone not to fall in love with him. He is so fun and light and fresh and it's, maybe that's where the frustration also comes because he is not committing, he is not being clear, but he's that person you meet at a party and you're just like, I want to hear what he's saying next.'cause he just makes it more fun to be around him.
KIM: Yeah, totally. I mean, even like going away for the summer, that's exciting for her. They're gonna go away. She quits her job, which she was kind of bored with anyway, to go have this kind of playing “pretend marriage” time, you know, it's like he's, he is very fun.
SIMON: Yeah, you mentioned the job there actually, we haven't talked that much about the office job, but there's a little quote I wanted to read just from the office, because I think it'll give you a picture of how she brings across the camaraderie and fun and silliness of an office. Um. The office was rather exciting today. First, Miss Derry had a new jumper last week. She had dyed the navy on turquoise, or rather, as she had said, she had dyed the blasted stripes turquoise. You couldn't do anything with the navy part. It had made no difference that anyone could see, and today, Miss Derry had been saying when Liza came in, so I gave it to mom for polishing brass. What do you think of this one? It was magenta open work with very short puff sleeves. Pretty hot. Miss Nedley had said gloomily. think it's that.
Like I love that. It's great. That's what
you talk about when you go into work, isn't it? You talk about, you know, the new outfit, you or you know,
the unsuccessful haircut you've had. Something like that. I know. It's, it's, yeah. And I think that way gloomily at the end is so good. ', You immediately know what the atmosphere of that exchange is.
AMY: And also it sums up another thing I loved about Liza throughout the book is all of her inner
kind of catty thoughts about people. She's kind of, she can be a mean girl about people. She doesn't like confrontation, but her inner world is judging people for
KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It could have been a dot-com digital advertising agency (said from experience.)
AMY: Yeah.
Yeah. And even that scene at the beginning with, um, Walter and Liza, basically any scene they're in together, if they had been like, “Hold on, I wanna post this on Instagram,” it would've worked because it seems so modern. It seems like it's present day. I mean, there are elements that you're like, Yes, we're not in the modern world, but...
SIMON: And that was actually a discussion we had republishing it. The editor who I recommended it to said, I'm just worried this doesn't feel like a 1940s novel set in 1930s, because it feels so modern. I was like, Yeah, it does, but I think that's, you know, it was published in the 1940s, so let's go for
it.
It's not the period
piece that
people might expect when they're
KIM: Right. Totally. You completely surprised me, Simon picking this and I don't read the forward or the afterward until after I read the books. I don't wanna know anything about it. I was just so excited at how relevant it was to my life and how modern it felt like it.
It was a complete surprise.
SIMON: I'm so glad. Yeah.
KIM: Yeah.
AMY: Okay. So, we've been talking here about Liza's personal life a lot. Let's get into Angela's personal life. We know she was married in 1947 when she was 38, which would've been
kind of a ripe old
age.
KIM: I guess that's something with not
not enough men maybe. Yeah. Not enough men around, as you said.
SIMON: Yeah.
AMY: Yeah.
Do we know anything else about her own dating life? Married life?
SIMON: We do not, um, afraid. I mean, I'm sure the second World War would've had an effect on, you know, when she would've met, uh, her eventual husband. But yeah, I don't know if she, I dunno if she had any broken engagements or maybe she met a Walter who wouldn't commit, who knows?
AMY: I think we've all met a Walter. We've all met a Walter.
What was the response to One Year's Time when it came out? Were people scandalized at all by this casual sex?
SIMON: I haven't been able to find many reviews. I don't think it sold very well, particularly, or there were that many printed. The people who did review it, I was quite surprised, didn't sort of call out that too much. I mean, they acknowledged that it was a very sort of free and easy relationship, but not in a scandalized way,
more just sort of saying it's a bit different from other things you might read. Um, so yeah, maybe the reason the publishers didn't do a huge print run, or it didn't so well, maybe it's
connected to that,
but, um,
I don't
know. It's,
KIM: our perceptions are just off about
that time because
we don't
SIMON: I,
KIM: Maybe it was more
SIMON: yeah, I mean, people were obviously doing things that people weren't writing about, so, um, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it was also, of course,
published during the Second World War, so there were paper shortages, all these sorts of things meant that, um, yeah, it would've, I mean it isn't that likely it could have had a huge print anyway. But yeah, we often think people in the
past were like the books about them,
which, you know,
KIM: Yes.
SIMON: were, but to an extent they weren't.
KIM: Yeah.
AMY: Yeah.
And we're so lucky that this book has been republished. But uh, I hear that it was a bit of a challenge to track down the rights to it.
SIMON: Yeah, my goodness. Um, it does feel like a miracle. So I read it for the first time, oh, I don't know, maybe 2008, 2009. I read it in the Bodleian library in Oxford, which has all the books published in the UK, because I just couldn't find a copy of it anywhere. I'd heard about it because of her connection to A.A. Milne, and whom I love. Um, but I thought that I'm never gonna be able own a copy. I. That's it. so when they were asking me at the British Library for suggestions, I wanted to read this one again. It'd been a long time. I wanted to see if it was as good as I remember. Uh, and they said, Yep, fine. We'll do it. I was like, Well, this'll be easy because A.A. Milne's super famous. His estate must be well known, and it was in a catalog to come out a few years back and we had to, in the end, just pull it because they could not find the family. Angela Milne was still in copyright,uh, so we had to get a family to it, and I was, I was so sad. They've got brilliant people at the British Library tracking down the states and things, and they couldn't find any connection. And Angela Milne's married name was Killey, K-I-L-L-E-Y, which is pretty unusual. I thought there were so many reasons why it should be easy to find and it wasn't possible. So we were like, Fine, we'll put it on the back burner. If we ever find out about the estate, great. Technically, as you probably know, publishers can just publish, if they've done their level best to find the estate. You can actually pay. I think that's something the government set up. Uh, you can sort of set up a fund in case the estate ever does turn up, but it's quite expensive. And the British Library, I think, you know, because they're such an esteemed publishing wing of a very esteemed institution, they don't want to, you know, do anything too risky. So they just put it on hold and I thought, absolute last ditch, can't hurt on my blog I thought I'll just put a note saying I've mentioned this is coming out. It's not coming out. If anyone's got any connection, please let me know. Then a blogger called Claire, who blogs at The Captive Reader, a wonderful blog, emailed me saying, I don't know if this helps, but years ago I was reviewing a book by A.A. Milne and his nephew commented on it. He was not Angela's brother, he was her cousin. A different sibling of A.A. Milne. So she emailed him saying they're trying to find the family. Do you have any connections?He emailed me saying, Yes, I know her children, Nigel and Julia, I can put you in touch. And we went from there. It was amazing. I got to email both Nigel and Julia. And yeah, they were thrilled. They said yes straight away and I just couldn't believe it because I, you know, I never thought it would happen. It's one of the few books in the series that I'd never been able to have a copy of, so I'm thrilled it's reprinted, just so I can have a copy on my shelves apart from anything else. Um, yeah, that was a very exciting day, and I just love that it was just a, a humble book, blog exchange that managed to do what all these, you know, people who do it professionally somehow couldn't manage.
AMY: Totally. Yay. Internet.
KIM: So back to Milne's writing life, she continued to write for Punch. And her writing for Punch, Jam and Genius, was published in 1947. She was a regular book reviewer for The Observer and also an ad copywriter. She died on Christmas Eve, 1990, and One Year's Time, it basically seems almost effortlessly good. So I'm wondering why she didn't write another novel. Do we know anything about that? I guess we don't know much, so maybe not.
SIMON: Yeah, it's another one of those answers where I'm just afraid I have to say I don't know. Uh, but you, you see it time and again for women of this period writing, don't you, particularly if the first book hasn't been this huge success. Maybe she just didn't have time. Maybe she didn't have the inclination. I don't know. I think it's really sad that she didn't, because, I mean, Jam and Genius also really fun. That's easier to find second hand copies of if people want to track that down. And she was just one of these really fun, light, enjoyable, relatable voices that just burned once and then died, which does make me think maybe, uh, maybe is more autobiographical than we know.
KIM: Oh, good point. Yeah.
SIMON: People have that one story,
KIM: Yeah, they gotta get it out. yeah.
AMY: She's one of the few lost ladies that I wasn't able to immediately find a photograph of online either. Have you seen any photographs of her, Simon?
SIMON: I think I've seen photo of her as a child, I think is maybe in Ann Thwaite’s biography of A.A. MIlne. But nothing as an adult.
AMY: Okay.
KIM: That’s gonna be interesting. Yeah. Usually wehave something we can use. Um, yeah.
AMY: We'll just have to use the book cover. Yeah. So anyway, Simon, this has been a blast.
SIMON: It's so fun to be back. Thank you. Yeah.
KIM: Thank you for introducing us to this marvelous book that everyone should immediately go out and read 'cause it's a blast.
SIMON: Oh, thank you for spreading the word, and thanks as always for your wonderful podcast and all the great names that you're bringing to a wider audience.
KIM: Thanks, Simon. That's all for today's episode. We'll be posting a bonus episode on our Patreon site next week. That will be about Lost Ladies of Lit at the Oscars, just a little quick follow-up to the Academy Awards.
AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by AmY Helmes and Kim Askew and supported by listeners like you, including Jan, McKenna Roe, JJ Wilson, and Marianna Fowler. Thanks so much for your support.