At the start of a new year, it seems particularly pertinent to be writing about this curious collection of calendar-themed entries, recently published by Persephone Books.
One Woman's Year is part-memoir, part-how-to, part recipe book, beautifully illustrated with woodcuts by Malcolm Ford. Arranged into 12 monthly chapters, each begins with a musing for several pages from Stella Martin Currey on something topical that would happen in her life at this time. Maybe, in summer, it is the peculiarities of having a foreign exchange schoolboy come to visit. Maybe, in December, it is a piece about the joy to be found in the dressing-up box.
The whole book, which was originally published in 1953 and has undercurrents of living in the tail end of rationing and war-time bomb devastation (most notably during a day trip to London when bombsites are everywhere), is very much of a type. Stella is a middle-class, married woman with wholesome children, and they all live in the countryside. Their activities number visiting a Norman keep or taking the children to see Shakespeare. Pastimes include going for picnics and deciding which mushrooms are the edible ones.
Yet while One Woman's Year is clearly a calendar for a very particular type of privileged woman, there are some fascinating little curios in here. A short essay describing buying a large chest at auction and struggling to get it up the stairs, only for it to get wedged tight on a corner, can only be read with the word "Pivot!" echoing on refrain in the back of your head. The suggestion of taking the children to visit an automatic telephone exchange as a day out is extraordinary on so many levels: that such a place was still functioning in the 1950s, that this place of work permitted people in to have a poke around and, most significantly, how tempting Stella makes it sound that I actually feel envious that I now cannot go to see one myself.
I often pass a small road in central Bristol called Telephone Avenue where, as you would expect, the city's exchange was one housed, and always look down the road with curiosity at the grand building hidden on it. This is Armada House, which I have had the pleasure of being in, and it is more like a National Trust property than a once-functional place of business. NB: Armada House was not the original telephone exchange but next door to it, although it was later bought by British Telecom. It was also the location of the first non-operator call in the UK, which was made by the Queen in 1958.
Sticking with the Bristol theme for a moment, Stella herself interests me because she was a woman who built Bristol: the title of a series of books I have written celebrating, to date, 500 unfairly forgotten important women from Bristol's past. Stella (1907-1994) was initially a journalist at the Bristol Times & Mirror until 1932 and her debut novel Paperchase End (1934) is a fictionalised take on her time on the newspaper. I have yet to read this book as it is hard to locate a copy but I would love to track one down. PS: In her later years on the Bristol Times & Mirror, Stella became the paper's zoo correspondent. She wrote about, among other things, Betty the bag-snatching chimpanzee. Imagine!
One Woman's Year is an extraordinary book. I have never come across anything quite like it and doubt I will again. It's a fascinating glimpse into the real life of an everyday housewife and mother who is living - comfortably - in the years after World War Two. She is a good sort, caring for her children, cooking them wholesome dishes, and making education interesting to their young minds. The illustrations are wonderful, too, and really bring the book to life. It's well worth seeking out a copy.
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