Run-down people in Newby

Press, 23 January 1988, Page 25

Run-down people in Newby

A View of the Harbour. By Elizabeth Taylor. Virago, 1987, 309 pp. $14.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Joan Curry)

Not a great deal happens In Newby Old Town. It was once a busy seaside resort but now, just after the Second World War, it is old-fashioned and run-down and people pass it by on their way to the newer town round the bay.

One of the town’s rare visitors is Bertram Hemingway who has retired from the Navy and has come to Newby to take up painting. "He was not much of an artist in spite of having found a very good way of painting waves with tops folding over whitely, realistically,” and he does very little work. He would like to be remembered as a painter of charming harbour scenes, but knows in his bones that he has neither the talent nor the application. What Bertram Hemingway really likes to do is to prod at people’s lives: “I am a man with a passion for turning stones” he tells himself. He observes the people of Newby, who all

seem to be waiting for life to pass. Mrs Bracey is bedridden and must depend on her daughters and the occasional visitor for the gossip she so enjoys. She mourns the richness that has passed: “Gone the lamplighter and those yellow, spreading gas-lights, gone the organ-grinder with his wretched precocious monkey, gone the drunkenness, the church-going, the wife-beating, the wonderful funerals, the social calls to see the corpse ... Even the sea was smoothed out, for it no longer seemed to wash in

wreckage, no longer deposited corpses at the cliff-foot” Maisie Bracey wants only two things: to get married and for her

mother to die. Iris Bracey works in the pub and dreams of being “discovered” by somebody famous. This is unlikely as the pub is generally deserted, moving the landlord to remark nightly, with some surprise, that it was “quiet tonight.” Lily Wilson

reads colourful romances in her flat over the dusty, sinister waxworks museum that provides her with a tiny living when the dwindling number of summer visitors pay 3d. to peer at kings and queens and murderers. Tory Foyle is divorced, but is the kind of woman who is only happiest with a man in tow. Next door the doctor's wife is absorbed in writing gloomy novels and ignores the tiresome domestic details of family life. The doctor — what a fine, oldfashioned doctor he is, too, making fine, old-fashioned house-calls — the doctor nevertheless finds time to begin an affair with the lonely divorcee next door.

This book was first published in 1947 and is now re-issued in the Virago Modern Classics. It is a quiet, gentle story of life in a particular kind of shabby English harbour town in that austere time just after the war when they were still clearing barbed wire from the beaches. The book is full of just those small, wry observations and the “trivial but beguiling details” that quicken the novels Lily Wilson reads to take her mind off the staring, waxy figures in the museum below.