29. Jocelyn Playfair — A House in the Country

AMY: Hi everybody, and welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great works of literature by forgotten women authors. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. The book we’re discussing today was published more than 75 years ago, but in some ways, it couldn’t possibly be more suited for a reader living through the turmoil of the world today.

AMY: I totally agree with you, Kim. You originally lent me this little book by Jocelyn Playfair and I looked at the title (which is A House in the Country) and I thought, “Oh, lovely! This sounds like the perfect idyllic escape from all of the world’s cray-cray right now, you know? Let’s have a charming romp through the country!” And though the book is set in a very pastoral location, at least partly, the circumstances of the story are anything but idyllic. So I was a bit misled by that title -- (actually the introduction of the Persephone version of this book calls the title “misleadingly cozy,” which I think is accurate) -- but I’m definitely glad that I read it. 

KIM: Yes, it’s very thought-provoking.

AMY: I felt like this was one of those books that kind of fell in my lap right when I most needed it, you know? It sheds light on how to make some sense of chaos and uncertainty, which is something that we’ve been living through a lot lately. It’s really a lovely elegy on the human experience and how to find meaning in strange, dark times, and in that sense, I found it comforting.

KIM: You said it perfectly, and I can’t wait to talk about that — and A House in the Country, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music begins]

AMY: So I have this habit when the world gets scary (which it has sort of felt that way for the past four years for me, anyway) … I reach for certain types of books to try to make myself feel better. Usually it’s nonfiction, but I have turned to history and I read about times that were worse than anything that I’m experiencing. So, for instance, I might read about the Salem Witch Trials, or World War I, things like that, and it helps me be able to put things in perspective and be able to say, “Alright, you know what? Those were bad times, but we got through them and so we’ll get through these bad times.” Or at the very least I can think, “Boy, I don’t have it as bad as THAT.”

KIM: I know exactly what you mean. I teeter-totter between stuff like that and lighter fare like Bridgerton-- and maybe that’s weird or maybe that’s completely normal… anyway,  when it comes to this week’s lost lady, Jocelyn Playfair, I almost have to wonder if writing is the thing she turned to for that sort of reassurance. She started writing books in England on the cusp of WWII, and then by 1952, she’d written the last of her 10 books, never to publish again. And with A House in the Country, which came out smack in the middle of that time period, it really felt like she was using the book to sort out all of the doubts and fears and worries she was likely experiencing along with every other British citizen at the time.

AMY: And I think it’s easy for us to forget (especially we Americans) that an Allied victory was far from a certainty. Before the U.S. entered the war, in particular, England was the world’s only hope, and it felt like a David vs. Goliath match-up. It’s scary enough looking back in hindsight, but to imagine living through that time period, you know, the constant stress and terror people must have been under really must have overwhelmed them.

KIM: Yeah, and then you couple that with a sort of eerie normalcy in the midst of all that panic. And that’s what Jocelyn Playfair depicts so well in this novel. This sort of calm dread that was experienced by everyone in England, even people far removed from London. Even the residents of a lovely house in the country. The Times Literary Supplement called the mood of the novel “battered but sincere optimism.” And that famous motto “Keep Calm and Carry On” is what the protagonist of this novel, Cressida Chance, is trying to do.

AMY: She is the Lady of the House at Brede Manor, a fine Georgian house shut up behind these decorative iron gates. But she has opened the gates to allow lodgers into the grand home… Everyone has to help with the war effort, so this is one way that Cressida can really pitch in. The house is filled with a random mix of guests who have been displaced due to the war. The combination of the war and changing times means there is a shortage of servants, and so the beautiful Cressida (who’s in her late 30s — I was picturing Cate Blanchett)...

KIM: Oh, I can totally see that!

AMY: She basically rolls up her sleeves and gets to work, running what’s essentially become a hostel. So there’s breakfast to get on the table and linen to be washed and there are these rows of cabbages that she can see through her kitchen window. They’re in a village that, by day, is peaceful and quiet. And one of the lodgers remarks to Cressida:

“Sometimes I feel the war’s just something one’s read about and — had nightmares over.”

And Cressida’s response is: “And yet you look out of the windows and there are the cabbages.”

So the story is unfolding right after one of the worst disasters of the war at that point in time (The Fall of Tobruk in the Middle Eastern Theater, in which 30,000 British soldiers were taken prisoner). This was seen by everybody as a just devastating turn of events. And there’s this juxtaposition between news from the front (and even the blitz that’s happening in London) and then the more ordinary days that are being spent back at Brede. 

KIM: Right, and that’s what we see playing out with Cressida. She’s trying to keep that intrinsically British “stiff upper lip,” but she can’t manage to shake thoughts of a man she loves who is part of the war effort (note that we say “a” man she loves, not “the” man she loves). Playfair actually bounces back and forth between the life at Brede Manor and the experiences of this man, Charles, who is floating alone and wounded in a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic after the ship he was on is torpedoed and sunk.

AMY: And sidenote: I was really struck by the similarities between the set up of this book and that of Monica Dickens’ Mariana from our very first episode of this podcast, because both books are centered around this news of a sunken ship in WWII, and we, as the reader, are wondering what’s going to become of a certain man who was on that ship.

KIM: Yeah, and it’s really interesting that she actually takes us into the experience of that man in the torpedoed ship in a way that Mariana didn’t, which, it actually goes to a pretty dark place, and it’s very interesting. And it makes me think about how it was unfortunately an all too common event, probably, to be hearing news of this sort. Also, I just wanted to mention what a fantastic heroine Cressida makes. She’s truly the center of the novel and what holds it together, just like she holds together Brede Manor. She’s kind and sympathetic but also really strong and sensible at the same time. 

AMY: Yeah, she’s just very lovely, even-keeled… a lot of the men who are lodging at her house have small crushes (small or not so small crushes) on her. So as I mentioned before, this book felt really applicable to the times we’re living in now. This idea that a colossal horror is unfolding all around us, while we, meanwhile, are somehow removed and holed up in our homes, but still collectively part of it. I couldn’t help but think about the pandemic we’re living through. (And I think we could toss in the political shitstorm we’ve basically been living through in America as well, because I was reading this book the same week that Trump rallied his supporters to go storm the U.S. Capitol and we were all glued to the television.) It’s all so crazy. And yet that quote that I read earlier, about the cabbages, sums it up so perfectly. Here I am reading about this ongoing nightmare and watching it all unfolding in our country and then, I’m still playing in the backyard with my kids, you know? I’m still making dinner. I’m still doing the laundry. Life goes on. And it’s a really weird dichotomy, don’t you think?

KIM: I couldn’t agree with you more, and I always actually wondered how people who lived through the world wars were able to go on somewhat as though things were normal. And now, after living through the last 11 months, I have a better idea. The book also touches on the sacrifices ordinary citizens were forced to make during this time period. Yeah, things seem normal by day, but at night, there’s the blackout, and Cressida has to stay awake on certain nights to watch for fires in the villages should an Air Raid occur (and one does happen in the course of the book, and it’s a very vivid account of this.) And then there’s a character, Miss Ambleside, Cressida’s pampered aunt, who pays a visit. She clearly represents the privileged class who don’t feel as if THEY are to be included among those making sacrifices for the war. 

AMY: Miss Ambleside is this older woman who feels indignant when she’s at the railway station when she finds herself confronted by a poster that reads, “IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY?” (and her journey in the book was so not necessary by the way). Playfair writes about the people who are still taking hot baths up to their necks and hoarding biscuits and using their central heating… the ones who refuse to let troops quarter in their country houses for fear their boots will ruin the carpet. You’re reminded of the people who refuse to wear masks in this day and age … the people who think the rules don’t apply to them. And of the rich Miss Ambleside, Playfair writes: “She suffered from emotional disturbance of the very rich who suddenly find themselves in a dilemma from which money has no power to deliver them.” And that reminded me of today, too, you know, when there was a run on toilet paper last year, it didn’t matter how rich you were… we were all reduced to that same feeling of panic at the empty grocery store shelves, right?

KIM: Yeah, exactly. And there’s this real sense in the book that their world has changed so drastically… that they are living in this strange new normal, which is what we’re undergoing right now. And all things considered, WWII was far worse, far more terrifying than anything we’re experiencing right now, but Playfair’s insights are really prescient. Cressida is musing about the war at one point and thinks to herself: “Funny how often lately it had occurred to her that there was something to be said for the war. It was frightening to consider how enormous personal worries and tragedies would look without the infinitely more immense background of the war to dwarf them into insignificance.”

AMY: Yeah, so that idea of just putting everything into perspective in your life is so true.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Kim, do you remember last spring, we had that amazing good news professionally, something we’d been working on for a long time that had been finally greenlit last spring and it looked like it was going to happen, and then the pandemic brought the whole thing crashing down, which is something that, yes, it was a bummer, but we would have been so much more upset normally, however with everything going on it just felt so trivial to dwell on something like that. 

KIM: Yes, absolutely. It gives you complete perspective on what’s happening in your life versus what’s happening out in the world. She also, in the book, contemplates the hostility between the two sides fighting the war, and it’s pretty easy to transfer those passages to the current political divide right now in our own country. This idea of “what are we even fighting over?” One of the lodgers staying at Brede is a man named Tori, a former concentration camp prisoner, who ends up having a lot of very deep conversations with Cressida about what it all means. At one point he says, “Cressida, there is war now in all the world, not only internationally and with guns and bombs, but in men’s hearts and minds with weapons more dangerous still. In each human being is their own war taking place, a war of thought, of feeling. ….Perhaps for so long the kindness in human hearts has been defeated by greed, selfishness, personal desires, for comfort, power, money, what you like, that can make a man forget so simple a thing as love towards his neighbors.” 

Could that possibly be any more on the mark with regard to the division happening right now in our country?

AMY No, it honestly sounds like something that could have been written today in an op/ed or something like that. The conversations among the characters in this book, meanwhile, with each other and with themselves, really runs the gamut… whether they’re discussing war or romantic love, it all gets quite philosophical, don’t you think?

KIM: Yes, and that’s what ends up making it so much more than just “a house in the country,” which is perfect. Even when Tori says, “It is not enough to be not unkind” — oh my gosh, I think we could liken that to the conversations we’re having today about systemic racism. 

AMY: Yeah, exactly, and Cressida says at one point that she wonders if everything that’s happening, all these tragedies, are the prices they’re “made to pay for being allowed to — to see, instead of merely looking.” And, you know, I feel that way a lot too about the times we’re living in. It’s a strange wake up call. It’s forcing us to appreciate and really see what’s important. To find happiness in simpler things, you know? When you can’t go out, you can’t be with your friends… you have to find things that bring you joy in a different way, right?

KIM: Yeah, this idea of being grateful for every moment. Several of the characters in the book say that explicitly. So we won’t give too much away about the book’s conclusion, other than to say that, like the rest of the book, it definitely also makes you think.

AMY: Yeah, I’m not sure I was in full agreement with decisions made by certain characters, but I think that’s kind of the point of a great crisis. It changes people permanently… and life can never be what it was before. So, anyway, what do we know about Jocelyn Playfair in terms of the war years? What was her experience there?

KIM: Well, we know that her husband, who was an engineer, was abroad for most of the war years. He was serving in Southeast Asia. And her two sons were away at boarding school, so she, like Cressida, was sort of fending for herself a bit during this time period. She was kind of a loner with just a few close friends, so she didn’t have any real social life to keep her busy… she basically just dove into her writing. Her first two books were crime novels. Apparently the second book she wrote in 1940 (it was called Eastern Weekend) had the exact same plot as Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, coincidentally. Like Cressida, she did take in paying guests during the war, too, and she did away with having servants as well.

AMY: And then politically, it seems as though she was very left-wing, bordering on socialist almost, which was probably a bit out of step with the country set she was living amongst, you know? She ended up moving to London after the war, and left off with her writing. She was just done with it — took up other hobbies, basically — and interestingly though, she became much more right-wing in her old age. She apparently said once, “What the world needs is another war.” (And I found that so shocking given the tone of this book.) 

KIM: That’s so interesting. On the right-wing side, part of me wondered if maybe there was some dementia or something making her go right-wing, but the idea of “what the world needs is another war…” On some weird level you can almost see thinking, wow, that was a time that made a huge difference in my life and it made me grateful for things, and maybe people need an experience like that (even though obviously we don’t wish that on people). Maybe somehow she felt that people needed the experience that they had had. So on some level, I guess I can maybe understand where she was coming from with that quote, though I don’t agree we need another war.

AMY: But no, I get that. It’s like a wake-up call. We’ve said that about the pandemic in a weird way. You find the silver linings… you have to find the silver lining, right? I mean, how do you get through it otherwise?

KIM: Yeah, there’s no way that you could go through a year of being at home pretty much all the time without looking inward on some level, I would think.

AMY: And yeah, this idea of privilege. We’re really seeing that play out with the pandemic in terms of there is a serious divide in how this virus is impacting people.

KIM: Yep, on so many levels, from the virus itself to, like you said, jobs and everything. It really is a wake-up call in a lot of ways to many, many ills in our society that are sort of hidden when, or you can choose to not see them when you’re just going about your regular, day-to-day life, which we haven’t done in quite a long time!

AMY: We should mention that Cressida does have a child, a young boy, and he doesn’t factor into the story very much, but it did make me think of my own kids and the fact that you know, you’re going through these hard times and you really have to put on a show in some ways and not let them see how it’s affecting you; not let them see that you’re nervous or worried about anything. They have to just know that they’re safe. It definitely does not give you time to wallow, and everybody’s got their own journey through it all, just like the characters in this book. 

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: So I actually have an interesting anecdote to share about those “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters made famous during WWII in England. People still sell things with that motto on it, like all kinds of novelty items. But despite what we think about that poster now, it actually wasn’t even a thing really in England at the time, because they had made two and a half million of the posters, but that particular poster was a set of three different mottos. And they were saving, “Keep Calm and Carry On” because they knew they wanted that to be the one that they started putting up when things were starting to get really bad. So when the bombing was starting to get bad, they were holding off and were like, “We’re going to use this one when it’s push comes to shove and we really have to motivate everyone.” So they put out the other two mottos first. I don’t, off the top of my head, remember what they were, but they were not anywhere near as memorable as “Keep Calm and Carry On.” They got a lot of negative feedback about these posters because people’s response was sort of what we talked about earlier, just this idea of the common man has to make the sacrifice when the privileged don’t really have to. That was sort of how people were reading it: DO YOUR PART! And people were like, “Well, I have been doing my part. What about the rich folk?” So they got a bit of blowback on the first two motto posters that they had put out and they wound up eventually just being like, “We’re not doing the third one.” They destroyed most of them.

KIM: Are you kidding me?!

AMY: It’s like an urban legend that that was this, like, rallying cry. Most people did not ever see those posters.

KIM: That’s fascinating. So when… Do you know when “Keep Calm and Carry On” became sort of the pop culture phenomenon that it became?

AMY: We can link in our show notes to a few of the articles I found about the origin of that poster, but what I do know is that they really thought there were none left. I think there was some sort of Antiques Roadshow kind of show where somebody came and they had a batch of, like, 15 of them, and that was a big find, because they were like, “We haven’t seen these…” There’s just so few that survive today because they actually destroyed the allotment of them.

KIM: I feel like we could do a whole episode on this, because I feel like it really distills the idea that people have of the British — the “stiff upper lip” and all that. But I wonder what British people (English people) think about that phrase, and whether they feel like it pigeon-holes them… whether they feel good about it?

AMY: I feel like it’s something to be proud of. To be able to maintain that decorum in the face of calamity is…

KIM: I agree. 

AMY: While it might not have been this sort of unifying rally cry for the English during WWII, I think it’s still pretty sage wisdom. I like it.

KIM: So as we said, if you’re looking for something to read that will sort of help you take stock of your emotions in the midst of our current “crazy,” we highly recommend checking out A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair. 

KIM: That’s all for today’s episode. Consider giving us a rating and review if you enjoyed it, and check out LostLadiesofLit.com for further reading material.

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit was produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.