I've just finished listening to this first volume of The Cazalet Chronicles, written by Elizabeth Jane Howard, and beautifully read by Jill Balcon.

It's a perfect book to listen to. The perspective changes frequently as you look through the eyes of three generations of Cazalets and their staff, but it's all well flagged; it flows chronologically; there's lots of conversation.

And it is a beautiful book. As luminous as the title promises.

Its chief merit is that it offers us a very clever composite of the late 1930s. Through the different gazes, you see different socio-economic contexts. On the one hand, we have the Cazalet family, who are not recklessly rich, but are generally very comfortably off (although the youngest son, Rupert, is a little short of the ready, and the sister-in-law of Edward, the middle son, has married into very straitened circumstances that will be resolved only when her miserable husband's rich old aunt dies); on the other hand, we have the serried ranks of their servants, ranging from kitchen-maid to governess, but all contending with various degrees of penury, which they deal with in a matter-of-fact manner largely devoid of self-pity. We're also offered a geographic contrast. As well as the various households' London residences, we encounter the sprawling old Sussex family seat of the senior Cazalets (William, the "Brig", and Kitty, the "Duchy"), with all its adjunct outbuildings, meadows, and woods.

Through these multiple lenses, we learn about the clothes of the time, and the daily routine. We learn how houses were furnished, and how people of different classes managed their bathing (less frequently and less privately pretty much sums it up); we shudder at the approach to dental work (mass extraction was obviously the preferred route); and we hear the language of the time (beastly, ghastly, frightfully, "light me a gasper"...)

We hear frequently and mouth-wateringly about the old-fashioned, homely food, as the thrifty Duchy consults with Mrs Cripps, the cook, about the menus. A sample:

"Mrs Cripps spent the morning plucking and drawing two brace of pheasant for dinner; she also minced the remains of the sirloin of beef for cottage pie, made a Madeira cake, three dozen damson tartlets, two pints of egg custard, two rice puddings, two pints of bread sauce, a prune mould and two pints of batter for the kitchen lunch of Toad-in-the-Hole, two lemon meringue pies, and fifteen stuffed baked apples for the dining-room lunch. She also oversaw the cooking of mountainous quantities of vegetables -- the potatoes for the cottage pie, the cabbage to go with the Toad, the carrots, French beans, spinach and a pair of grotesque marrows, grown to an outlandish size by McAlpine, who won first prize every year for his marrows."


The photos in this post are from trips to London in 2016 and 2019

But this is no idyll. The physical and mental scars of the last war hang over Hugh, the eldest son. The next war looms. Rachel, the only Cazalet daughter, is covertly in love with Margot Sidney, whose Jewish heritage not only familiarizes her with the currents of anti-Semitism washing round England at the time, but also with the European politics that has turned Germany into a powder-keg.

And each relationship is troubled. Hugh and Sybil seem unable to express their preferences to each other, their partnership a tangle of polite deference. Edward is a cheat and an abuser, while his wife, Viola, constantly suffers under the disappointment of having given up a career in dancing in exchange for what seems like very little. Rupert can't seem to achieve lift-off for his career as an artist, especially as his young second wife, Zoe, demands so much of his time. Rachel feels honour-bound to stay with her aging parents, at the expense of losing her chance to set up some kind of household with Sid.

Nor are the children of these various menages exempt from struggles of their own. Louise has to fend off inappropriate attention from her father, Edward. Clary, one of the children of Rupert's first wife (deceased), dislikes and resents Zoe. Christopher, Viola's nephew, dislikes and resents his father, who seems to delight in demeaning him. Some are dreading schools where bullying is rife; others are dreading the threatened war; several dread not fulfilling the potential they feel growing within them.

It's mostly girls in that last category. Because the position of women is just dire... Marriage is the only game in town, and on its altar everything else is sacrificed. Women are not consulted or taken seriously (unless they're the cook). The little boys regularly give thanks that they've not been born as girls.

All this interaction and social history I find quite fascinating. I absolutely cannot agree with the view that the book is "ultimately blighted by its lack of narrative impulse... There are no epiphanies, no confrontations with irreversible truths in this peaceable work." That's how it largely was for that generation (and the subsequent ones, really, probably up until my own). You didn't talk about stuff, least of all your feelings. You didn't engineer confrontations and catharses. You just got on with things, while all the emotional mayhem churned away beneath the surface.



The picture the book paints feels so authentic and genuine that it came as quite a shock when -- after finishing it -- I realized it had not been published until 1990... More than 50 years after the events it depicts... By which time the author was over 60, and writing about a time when she would have been 14 going on 15.

Which made me start to wonder. I'm not sure I could be so pitch-perfect in my recollections of the social environment of my teens.

And how, in any case, would I recognize the authenticity I seemed to detect? Maybe my perception of authenticity derives from the fact that The Light Years chimes so perfectly with the 1930s that has been constructed in my brain by authors such as Nancy Mitford, Daphne du Maurier, Dorothy L. Sayers, Elizabeth Bowen, Dodie Smith, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, even Elinor M. Brent-Dyer...

Was Howard's recreation also a composite of what she remembered and what others had remembered?

Does that even matter, if the whole is so convincing?

Admittedly, there were one or two bits that didn't sound quite right. For example, the cat-murdering German maid, who spits at her ex-employer, and calls him a "Schweinhund", sounds more like the recollection of an anecdote bred of 1930s spy fever.

But maybe I'm wrong, because much of the book, it turns out, is autobiographical, and I guess we do viscerally and enduringly remember what we have been scarred by.



I know we shouldn't be obsessing over what's "true", but in this case it's very revealing, as many of the details in the book are present in Howard's life, albeit in different configurations.

According to Hilary Mantel, Howard's family were in the timber trade, and her father had served on the western front. Her mother, like Viola, was a disappointed dancer. Overall, "her parents' marriage and their subsequent relationships, together with her own, provided a model of instructive dysfunction for almost every story she wrote".

An obituary (Howard died aged 90, in 2014) describes her mother as "a cold, repressed woman", and her father as more forthcoming, but with an attention that became inappropriate once she reached adolescence. Howard's first marriage was contracted with the aim of escaping her parents. It didn't last.



There's always a peculiar poignancy about the 1930s, of course, because we know how they ended... The conclusion of The Light Years is marked by the return of Neville Chamberlain, on 30 September 1938, from the Munich Conference that had ended the previous day. The whole household anxiously tunes into the wireless to hear his assessment of the outcome: "peace for our time".

We've already seen the Cazalets and their entourage collecting their government-issue gas masks, and making preparations for moving out of London, and for safeguarding the firm's timber stocks. So they, like so many others, are vastly relieved that war won't be coming quite as soon as they'd feared.

Nevertheless, William, the patriarch, gives voice to the widespread suspicion that this was only a temporary reprieve: "There was something about the whole business -- one could almost call it a transaction -- that he distrusted, although he couldn't say why..."

Howard chooses to close her book not with the politicians or the grand folks, but with Miss Milliment, the learned but impecunious and self-effacing governess. In a shallow grave in the woods, she buries the letters of her only love, lost not in the Great War but in the Boer War. She shuts her eyes "to recall him for the last time on the evening before he had left for South Africa", as he recited to her the end of Matthew Arnold's melancholy Dover Beach.

There she stands, a sad, brave, lonely figure, as the world again resembles more and more that "darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night".