April, come she will

I’m finished with Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy, and not a moment too soon. Poor miserable Baba and Kate were getting me down. Now I’m reading Barbara Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, which is right up my alley. I read Barbara Pym for the first time last year, when Excellent Women was one of my favorite books of the year. An Unsuitable Attachment is more of the same, really - English clergy families in post-war Britain, women young and middle-aged and old preoccupied with class and busy morning to night with church bazaars and household affairs and - of course - food. Every single English female novelist of the postwar era wrote in great detail about provision gathering and meal preparation and serving. Food was scarce and they probably all thought about eating a lot. 

I was the only person home this morning, so I picked up my book to read as I ate my very Barbara Pym breakfast of soft-boiled eggs and a piece of toast. I was sure that food would appear within a page after I opened the book, and I was not wrong. The young librarian from the good clergy family was taking a Christmas parcel of chocolate, chicken breasts in aspic, and shortbread to the recently retired elderly library secretary. I’ve never understood the whole idea of meat jelly, but at least I’d heard of it. I had to look up fairy cakes, which appear in another scene. They’re basically British cupcakes. I learn something new every time I read Barbara Pym. 

I’m about a third of the way through the book, and the characters - the vicar Mark and his wife Sophia, the canon’s niece and librarian Ianthe, the veterinarian Edwin and his sister Daisy and all of their friends and connections in and around the Anglican church, are preparing for Lent, which they observe with rigor - no meat or sugar or butter, and not just on Fridays but every day. I’m also observing Lent and it’s hard enough just giving up sweets and sugar six days a week and meat on Fridays. Post-war Britons lived an abstemious life already, even without Lent, and a certain moral imperative surrounded their choices regarding what and how much to eat and what clothing to buy and wear and whether or not to turn the heat on. Read Barbara Pym or Muriel Spark or Elizabeth Jane Howard and you’ll find that all of the characters in the books that take place in the immediate post-war years and throughout the 1950s are preoccupied with thoughts of material comfort - not wealth, but comfort, because the moral imperative to live frugally and simply and rather uncomfortably applied even to the rich. 

I thought about this this weekend, the third weekend of my own personal Lent. After an unusually mild winter, it is of course sharply cold and damp, long days of gray dullness and chill, unrelieved by sweetness, not so much as a single Hershey’s Kiss, which would go a long way toward brightening up this rather dreary March. Yesterday was Sunday, so I had some chocolate but it’s Monday again, the Mondayest of leaden gray Mondays. My energy is so low on days like this. I took a walk around the track at the base today. It was more like a trudge. I took a trudge around the track, wrapped up in my coat and scarf, as two young Air Force officers practiced kicking soccer goals. These young people and their energy. 

But just as I’m settling into the cold early spring London gloom of a 1950s Anglican Lent, Mark and Sophia and Edwin and Daisy and Rupert and Ianthe and Penelope are all about to abandon me, flying off to the warmth of Italy where presumably they’ll look at paintings and eat pasta and drink wine and Rupert will probably fall in love with one of the two single women (Ianthe), while the other one (Penelope) falls in love with him and they’ll all revel in a romantic, sun-drenched, wine-soaked holiday and forget about Lent altogether. Protestants, I tell you. But it’s all good because it’s already March 50th, so we’re a third of the way through the third and longest month of the year. 

*****

It’s Tuesday now, just as cold as yesterday - maybe even more so because it’s very blustery today - but at least the sun is shining. I worked from home and now it’s 5:10 pm and I’m looking at a parallelogram of sunlight (that is Ian McEwan’s phrase, not mine, sadly) on the carpet, and rejoicing in the second full day of Daylight Savings, which means that we’ll have daylight until about 7:10 PM. We’re paying for it on the dark black coffee-bitter mornings when my son gets up for swim practice in what seems like (essentially is) the middle of the night, but it’s almost worth it. The days will get longer on both ends, and the warm days will be more frequent, and the figurative postwar gray London of early spring in Maryland will give way to the sunshiny Italy of summer, and I’ll stop complaining for five minutes. But now I’m going to go for a walk. I’ll need to bundle up first. It’s freezing out there.