The Dreaming Suburb
Read The Dreaming Suburb Online
Authors: R.F. Delderfield
The Dreaming Suburb
Also by R.F. Delderfield
A Horseman Riding By
Long Summer Day
Post of Honour
The Green Gauntlet
The Swann Saga
God is an Englishman
Theirs was the Kingdom
Give Us This Day
The Avenue Story
The Avenue Goes to War
Diana
To Serve Them All My Days
Come Home, Charlie, and Face Them
Too Few for Drums
Cheap Day Return
All Over the Town
The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon
About the author
R.F. Delderfield was born in South London in 1912. On
leaving school he joined the
Exmouth
Chronicle newspaper
as a junior reporter, where he went on to become Editor.
From there he began to write stage plays and then became
a highly successful novelist, renowned for brilliantly
portraying slices of English life.
With the publication of his first saga,
A Horseman Riding By
,
he became one of Britain's most popular authors and his
novels have been bestsellers ever since. He died in 1972.
First published in Great Britain in 1964 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © 1958, 1964 R.F. Delderfield
The right of R.F. Delderfield to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British
Library
ISBN 978 1 444 73251 1
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
To my three old friends
Frank Gentry
Alan Walbank
Vic Whitworth
each of whom, in their several ways,
helped to father this book
The Dreaming Suburb
is dedicated.
R.F.D.
Although, here and there in this book, the names of actual localities have been employed, Manor Park Avenue is not any particular Avenue, and neither are the Carvers, Friths, Frasers or Cleggs any particular families, residing in or around this area. They might be any people, of any South London suburb, indeed, their lives throughout the period 1919-40 might be the lives of any suburban dwellers, on the outskirts of any large city in Britain.
These people are, for the most part, unsung, and that even though they represent the greater part of Britain's population. The story of the country-dwellers, and the city sophisticates, has been told often enough; it is time somebody spoke of the suburbs, for therein, I have sometimes felt, lies the history of our race.
R.F.D.
Acclaim for
The Dreaming Suburb:
“A first-rate bit of storytelling!”
“A book to be reckoned with.”
“An incredible amount happens... gay, sordid, pathetic, dramatic, to a multitude of figures ... the invention is sure and prolific.”
“Surveys the families living in a quiet road, quite literally the outermost road on the Kent/Surrey border ... between wars and in one of them. An acute, ironically endowed novelist has filled it with really fresh observation, genuine people; has worked with surprising range and made nobody, weak-headed spinster or girl adventuress, boy profiteer or jazz maniac, in the least a type. With so many threads in his long story, Mr Delderfield has to drop and pick up whole families chapter by chapter; it's a tribute to his ability that after a couple of pages you're lost in each new swing of the tale.”
“Has an immense appeal. Mr Delderfield, an adept at graphic detail, infuses his writing with a human warmth and interest which should hold the attention of the most blasé reader.”
Also available in Coronet, the sequel to this novel, covering the years 1940-1947, is
The Avenue Goes To War.
INTRODUCTION
I have never been persuaded that history was made in the tents of the mighty. Social development, that most of us recognize as progress, together with the trends of thought and emotion that ultimately become the policy of a nation, have their origin in far less exalted places, the towns and villages of the governed whence they filter through to leaders standing in the spotlight. This, I think, is particularly true of the Western democracies, at least during the present century. The newspapers and the television screen record the outfall but they seldom penetrate to the sources, high up in the headwaters of the bedsitters, the sparsely populated rural areas of market towns and villages and, above all, the suburbs. Two-thirds of Britain's population live in suburbs of one sort or another, in long streets and terraces that have crusted round our cities. In
The Dreaming Suburb
and
The Avenue Goes to War
I have tried to tell the story of the British thought-developers and policy-makers from
1919
to
1947
and here, for the first time since the first of these books was published, the story is presented as a continuous saga, in a single volume spanning a period of twenty-eight years. A great deal of history was made in that half-generation, more perhaps than in any century that preceded it. Some of the older characters in this book, people like Jim Carver, Harold Godbeer and Miss Clegg, were closer to the England of the Stuarts in, say,
1910,
than we today are within reach of the Boer War period. Life has moved at a terrifying tempo since the trench veterans came home to a land fit for heroes to live in after the
1918
Armistice, the real starting point of the story, and in the decades that follow after the story ends Western Europe is still catching its breath in an attempt to keep up with the pace of events. I like to think of this
book as a modest attempt to photograph the mood of the suburbs in the period between the break up of the old world and the perambulator days of an entirely new civilisation ushered in by the bleat of Russia's first sputnik in the 'fifties. In the main, of course, the story concerns the personal lives of the twenty odd men and women who spent these years in the terrace houses of Manor Park Avenue but in a wider sense the main-spring of the book is the time in which they grew up, loved, laughed, despaired and had their being.,
R. F. DELDERFIELD
IN
the Spring of 1947 the bull-dozers moved down the cart-track beside Number Seventeen and deployed across the meadow to the fringe of Manor Wood.
The grabs and the bull-dozers ravaged the Avenue and despoiled its memories. In the first week they clawed down the tiny greenhouse, where Esme first kissed Elaine, and Elaine's father, Edgar, had tended his hyacinths, and planned to abandon his family; it was not long before concrete-mixers were set up on the very spot where Judy Carver had pledged her soul to Esme Fraser and later, when the first Dorniers droned overhead, Elaine Frith had lain with her Polish lover in the long, parched grass. The Clerk of Works himself set up his office in the abandoned sitting-room of Edith Clegg, where, long before, she and her sister Becky had played
Horsey, Keep Your Tail Up
on the cottage piano during the evening soirees with their lodger, Ted Hartnell. Workmen flung their tools into the half-ruined hall of Number Twenty-Two, scratching the primrose paint that Harold Godbeer had lovingly spread at the behest of the pretty Mrs. Fraser. These, and many other desecrations were performed briskly and cheerfully, for everyone was shouting for houses, more and more houses, and the Manor Estate was wide. It was merciful that the families whose homes these had been for so long were dispersed when all this took place.