A kind of minor Dickensian-rich London: warmth, humour, seediness and pathos 23rd December 1938 – 25th December 1940
The girls had most of them already exchanged Christmas cards, There was no obvious reason why they should have done so. They had spent the whole of the previous twelve months sharing the same office, and drinking tea together at eleven o’clock every morning and 3.30 every afternoon, and giving each other pieces of chocolate and aspirins. But for the past two or three days they had been behaving as though they had been parted for years. They had been distributing views of snow-bound coaches and lighted taverns and children tobogganing, and robins and boys bearing holly and old bellmen crying ‘Oyez’, as though Noel and the 18th century were the same thing, and life depended on celebrating both.
Norman Collins, was a writer, a sometime publisher with Gollancz, creator of the Left Book Club series of books, and was later in charge of BBC Radio’s Light Programme. Later still, he was controller of television, when we only had the BBC. A single television channel. And even later, he helped form the Independent Television Authority.
In other words, this was a rather busy man, who nevertheless wrote 16 novels and 2 plays.
This particular novel, published in 1945, and starting during the phony peace, but with the potential for war as an undercurrent, and ending during the Blitz, is a veritable house brick at well over 700 pages, and in fairly small print too. Though it fairly whirls absorbingly along, with a terrific mix of memorable, believable ‘characters’ – all pretty well ordinary working class Londoners. There is crime, – a central crime, and we know who did it, – there are romances, some of which are doomed to fail, others of which are more hopeful – there is seediness, there is deception, class-consciousness, socialism and fascism on the streets, penury, near-penury, greed, spiritualism, fake and possibly not quite – and oodles of affection for London itself, for ordinary people living ordinary lives, and displaying all the wonderful combination of nobility, generosity and mean-mindedness which we all do, all-mashed up together.
Collins takes a Kennington house, 10 Dulcimer Street, whose widowed owner lets out rooms. Under the one roof are the Jossers – a clerk on the verge of retirement, his wife and Doris, their office worker daughter. There is Connie, an ageing ex-‘actress’ now a cloakroom attendant at a seedy club, there is a devout widow Mrs Boon and her grown-up motor mechanic son, Percy, with impossible aspirational dreams. There is an overweight man, Mr Puddy, moving from unskilled job to unskilled job, with adenoids and an obsession with food. There is the money counting, terrified of poverty landlady, Mrs Vizzard, inhabiting the meanest room in the house so she can let the rest And there is also another room to let, waiting on a new tenant ………….
Out of this motley crew of characters and their own close friends and families, Collins weaves a satisfying, well crafted, most enjoyable tale.
Mrs Josser roused herself. She looked meaningly at Doris
‘It’s time that somebody got some tea’ she said
She didn’t really expect Doris to get tea…..But what she did want was to have her offer
As it turned out, however, it was Cynthia, silly fragile little Cynthia, who volunteered
‘Let me get it’ she said, with a giggle as she got up………….
But Mrs Josser had risen too. She had no intention whatever of allowing an ex-usherette to go chipping bits off her tea service………………..
‘Mind Baby’ she said warningly. ‘She’s going over to my work-box again.’…
Pins were exactly what Baby wanted, She was a substantial and determined sort of child. Taken over all, she had the appearance of a small but thick-set police-woman: if crossed, it seemed that she might start blowing a whistle or applying a half-Nelson. At this moment she was stretching both hands grimly towards the work-box and pushing out her nether lip to indicate her feelings in the matter.
I love the economical way all the undercurrents of family life, not to mention the little subterfuges, deep waters and thunderstorms of normal day to day human relationships are deftly and lightly sketched in by Collins. His humour is in no way…..there’s a joke coming..JOKE IS ON THE WAY, just rapid, incisive images, reflections, which are funny – but often, also full of a kind of pathos
The book was turned into a film directed by Sidney Gilliat, with Richard Attenborough playing Percy Boon, a young man who seems destined for a sticky end, a less knowingly vicious character but in some ways with some similarities to Pinkie in Brighton Rock. From this little snippet, it is clear that the film, called 10 Dulcimer Street, lays on Collins’ deft, subtler humour with a bit of a hefty trowel! Collins did not write the screenplay, and indeed, looking at the cast list on Wiki, there are a whole tranche of characters who do not exist in the book, not to mention characters missing.
This is my version of a cracking good read. Lots of wonderful humour, sharp observation – the reader rather knows from the off that there is a warmth and kindness, a wit and tenderness, – ‘a right rollicking good read’
I’ve come to this reasonably hot on the heels of reading or re-reading Patrick Hamilton, another writer with left sympathies who focuses on the small communities of ordinary London, as war approaches. Both Hamilton and Collins are celebrating the humanity of the small people.
This is another of the titles which Penguin re-released in their ‘Modern Classics’ within the last decade, many of them, like this, wonderfully well written ‘minor classics’ which sounds derogatory, but is kind of accurate. Collins is certainly not an Orwell, not a Graham Greene – but this is also miles away from disposable, forgettable, fiction
It’s interesting, there was certainly no consideration of this as ‘literary fiction’ by all accounts at its publication time, but this is a much more well-crafted page turner of good narrative, evocative of a place and time, than might have been thought of at the time, hence that ‘Modern Classics’ appellation, for its re-publication by Penguin. Sometimes it takes the distance of time, not to mention, the changing of tastes, to re-appreciate something. Sometimes, that ‘simple’ ability to tell a story, to tell it believably – indeed, to tell many stories within the one main narrative thrust – to create unique individuals who are nevertheless ‘ordinary’ enough to also be examples of a type, and to write all this with precision, without employing overworked cliches of style or language, seems incredibly rare!
London Belongs To Me Amazon UK
London Belongs To Me Amazon USA
Sounds amazing – straight on the wishlist! I love Hamilton and also Julian McLaren-Ross – have you read the latter?
Ooh – an author new to me – I shall investigate Julian McClaren-Ross of whom I have never heard. I assume he is another of those mid-century authors? Thanks Karen.
He is – he’s often bracketed with Hamilton. I reviewed his “Of Love and Hunger” here https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2014/08/07/recent-reads-of-love-and-hunger-by-julian-maclaren-ross/ and I’d highly recommend it!
A definitely hooking review. TBR achieved!
Excellent!
I have a copy of this somewhere, that I found in a second-hand bookshop not long after the Penguin reissue, and though I was very pleased to find it I haven’t read it yet. You’ve definitely inspired me to pluck it from a certain shelf, where it resides with old hardback copies of books by neglected 20th century men.
And you may notice I too gave been pushed to another author by kaggsy – we all keep each other reading. I’m nearing the end of a splendid NetGalley – us conductors, by Sean Michaels, which won Canada’s version of The Booker. Worth taking a look, I don’t think it’s published till August, so it should still be there. It’s beautiful and also distressing, as it’s partly set in the gulags and is about a real person.
I’m tempted, but I have a stack of unread review copies from Bloomsbury, so I’m going to resist. It feels like the kind of book best read as a substantial hardback, so I shall cross my fingers that the Cornish library service will order me a copy.
I love your review, especially the fact that you added a youtube video and some quotes. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for Norman Collins when I next hit a bookshop 🙂
Thank you. The video made me laugh a lot as it missed Collins’ light touch by miles with some very ripe character acting of the time. Good to see Richard Attenborough though
Love the quotes, especially the first one! So true…
Well I’m kind of hoping, despite the size of it, that it inches, or foots, itself onto your TBR.
PS, I paid a visit to the library, on your behalf (!) and got Grapes of Wrath to read /re-read. A wonderful quote on the cover of the edition. Steinbeck did what he set out to do with you, spectacularly :
“I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied “
Well, I admit I am tempted, but also overwhelmed. I shall compromise and put it on the wishlist, so that it can be promoted to the TBR sometime after I get past the horrendous tower of reading I’m supposed to do over the summer!
Oh, good! I wonder what you’ll think of it – I’m intrigued. I can see either a major gush, or a major throwing it at the wall tantrum – hmm. Hurry up and read it! Yes, it’s rare for a book to make me quite so angry – both at the subject and at the author…
I’ll have to wait a bit, having just finished a book which has rather wrung me out and blown me away, so I have to read something which demands far less attention, to let this one settle enough to write any kind of coherent review
Love the quotes you’ve pulled. Funny and insightful writing. Under normal circumstances, I would have been ready to add this book to my pile, but these are not normal or ordinary circumstances. I am under siege and have ordered the drawbridge raised. Guards must not let anyone with even a single book past the gates.
This whole “minor” thing kills me. Today’s NYT obit for James Salter included a quote from Vanity Fair about his being America’s most underrated underrated author. And yet, they state that one of his sentences could break your heart. He died without ever producing a NYT bestseller. I’ve never read one of his books. Have you?
I’ve never heard of him Jilanne (another to investigate?)
Actually, being imprisoned in a castle would be the best place to tackle the TBR. Suggest you not be allowed out till books finished.
What is it about this love of reading. A cruel pleasure. The more you love reading, the more you realise that there are more potentially deeply wonderful books out there than any one person will ever be able to read. We joke about our TBRs but it is true that I yearn for the (wonderful) books I’m never likely to be able to meet. Why couldn’t I just have had the passion of a collector, where the only thing which might prevent adding to a collection is funds or space, and in theory, much pleasure resides in the search. But books are never ending, there will never be an ‘I have finished reading all the books I am likely to want to read’
In that Q + A I did with Rebecca Mascull she quoted Sylvia Plath wanting to speak to every person in the world, a desire to know everything. I do feel that with novels, I yearn to properly read every book in the world which might be able to pick me up, shake me and enrich me in some way. Having just finished another humdinger (Monday’s posting!) I’m in a period of mourning for the several other books shouting to be read, or re-read, and aware of the fact that the wonderful books take much longer to read than the less than wonderful do (the ‘fillers’, the ‘passes the time-ers’) because the well crafted need to be juicily savoured, smacked around the literary taste buds, and lingered over while you appreciate with gusto their words, phrases, concepts, images. Oh books, books, books, such pleasure and such pain!
EXACTLY!!!! I could not have said it better.