“She’s not all right,” said the grave-digger. “She is clearly not all right. But then I don’t know who is. Our Het’s not. They never had any fun, any of these girls. Never, since the war, and they were only kids before it started. They don’t know where they are.”
Jane Gardam’s The Flight of the Maidens was an easy book for me to like. Its concept is immediately appealing: three girls — Hetty, Una, and Lieselotte — on the cusp of adulthood, spending the summer before they head to university to test the waters — to see what it’s like being themselves, to discover who they are without the influences and protections of home. It opens on an idyllic day in “the late summer of 1946”:
Years ahead, when other days had overtaken it, [Hetty] still felt the glow that almost brought tears in the goldness of summer sunlight, or saw a thick envelope and headed notepaper with her name on it or a blaze of snapdragons in a July flowerbed, or remembered a wide-open front door, her mother singing as she prepared the breakfast in the kitchen at the back.
Gardam is a lovely writer: her prose is crisp but capable of both drama and poetry, sometimes together, especially when she takes us out into the English landscape:
Along the dark railside walk she went, beside the asters and purple heliotropes, through the rose gardens where some papery roses still swung heavy on almost leafless branches . . . The park flower-beds had once held ranks of weedless wallflowers and antirrhinums and chrysanthemums, trussed tight with raffia. In the war they had been left to droop and slouch, die or survive, make countless common friends. Clouds of willowherb and dandelion floated around them and the once-pruned ornamental trees had grown wild above. Lofty sycamores gloomed over the tennis courts, which had become a cracked green asphalt pool in a dark wood. Their surfaces were like creeping jenny lying treacherous on water.
The damage done by war lurks here as it does all across the country and in the lives of all three girls: Hetty and Una both have fathers who “suffer from something known as The Somme,” and Lieselotte came to England with the Kindertransport, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who was sent to safety after Kristellnacht and later learns the rest of her family died in Auschwitz. When Lieselotte travels to London, she passes the shells of bombed out homes; a handsomely brooding young man who catches Hetty’s eye tells her how his rear gunner was “hosed” out of their plane after they were “shot up together over Holland.
This is the world these “maidens” know, and also the one they are each, in their own ways, trying to leave, or perhaps (though they haven’t quite seen it this way yet) to change. Gardam limns their individual characters effectively, along with the other people in their lives: Una’s flighty hairdresser mother; Hetty’s kindly father, returned from the trenches “unscathed in body but shattered to bits in mind” and reduced to eking out a living as a gravedigger; Hetty’s pious, meddling mother; the kind and principled Quakers who took Lieselotte in but cannot wholly comprehend what it means to have her experience of the world. It is a differently eventful summer for each of the girls; little happens of immediately visible moment, but by the end of the novel you can feel them all settling into firmer forms, asserting more clearly who they are and will be.
It’s very nicely done — and not at all surprising, in form, concept, or execution. I’m not saying the details are unoriginal, only that when I had finished this novel I felt more or less the way I felt about Old Filth: that Gardam had (effectively, deftly, eloquently) written a book that fits, maybe a little too exactly, into a niche … my niche, right down to the detail that Hetty at one point says to herself “if life were all books, it would be easy.” It’s a book about England in a particular moment in time that allows the characters to represent both generational and historical change; it’s about young women coming of age, intellectually as well as sexually; it has eccentric aristocrats and cross-class romance and the subtle frisson of horror you get by keeping the Holocaust and the Blitz just visible underneath your English country gardens. To paraphrase Miss Brodie, for people who like this kind of book, The Flight of the Maidens is definitely the kind of book they’ll like. I certainly liked it! But that’s more a sign of a good fit than of a great accomplishment.
Novel Readings 