Last time we left you with London’s Clapham Junction and Battersea as they were in the 1960s. Thinking we could sneak in a seasonal book – well the title is seasonal – we picked up Barbara Comyn’s A Touch of Mistletoe with a fabulous introduction by Megan Nolan. Written in 1967, it seems uncannily close to Up the Junction in time, but read on and you will discover with us how Comyn’s autobiographical narrative gives a very different perspective on the lives and encounters of young people in an early twentieth century metropolis.

 

We begin in a stifling and broken country house, where the status of the owners is inverted, through debts, so that the family struggles to maintain the cold, wet, and seemingly always dirty home. Sisters Vicky and Blanche dream through the drudgery, dodging their alcoholic mother in a setting reminiscent of Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm but without any of that novel’s tingling carnality. The girls do get away, to intimate encounters alternately squalid and exotic and pathetically hopeless, finding kindness in the darkest places, and sensation in the banality of back streets of a sordid pre-war 1939 London, in Mornington Crescent, focus of artists between the first and Second world Wars, around the former Fleet Street printing district and into ‘Tramland’. Look at a London Transport map of tram routes before 1935 to discover for yourself the suburbs huddling against the centre and stretching out to nowhere very much. For Vicky, the ultimate nowhere is work as a housekeeper in the wastelands outside Amsterdam, where it is always dusk or dawn, and no amount of ‘fortitude’ warms the tear-provoking misery.

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A Touch of Mistletoe is preoccupied with details: personal objects, textures and colours of clothes and hats, make-up, the rainbow in a fountain’s jet. We see London through the perceptions of an outsider who walks into the poverty of places, and particularity of domestic routines and social customs. We share the sense of frayed and patched places inhabited by makeshift characters, strangers who are themselves at odds with their environment. We are drawn into details like the texture of paintings on canvas, the consistency of cheap soup, gaudy and inappropriate hats which are momentary expressions of millinery excess. Everyone has an agenda: Dylan Thomas is an amorous drinker in Charlotte Street, where in restaurants like Bertorelli’s, film executives made deals late into the twentieth century. 

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Augustus John commands another public house in the book, reminding us that Comyns attended Heatherleys School of Fine Art near Oxford Street. She exhibited paintings with the London Group, an important artists’ collective also featuring Vanessa Bell, Barbara Hepworth, Nina Hamnett, Jacob Epstein, John Piper, and Henry Moore. Comyns’ is moving alongside Matisse exhibitions, the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, and the first explosion of modernism in art and architecture in London: much of it flourishing a few miles north in Hampstead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A generation or so earlier the same art scene, and the same shadowed haunts had been captured by Walter Sickert, principal of another private art school. In Soho there is Berwick Market, where food and nightlife were close neighbours in communities of migrants and the marginalised. North London and Soho would be changed forever after 1945. Comyns moved to Europe, returned, remade her life. But Vicky was never far in heart from Mornington Crescent. And the mistletoe? For Barbara Comyns it’s not the kissing kind, but a tenacious parasite of bad luck.

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If you haven’t already bought A Touch of Mistletoe, or want to see other titles we think you’ll like,

 

 

 

See you next post, starting in a book.