Helen Ashton

My favourite writing discovery over the past year has been the now largely forgotten mid century novelist Helen Ashton. Her early novel, Bricks and Mortar, about the life of an architect from the 19th to the early 20th century, has been republished by the wonderful Persephone Books, but everything else she has written has gone out of print. I’d like to say that I can’t imagine why, but sadly many of us keen readers of middlebrow fiction are all too familiar with the fate of many excellent female novelists whose focus is on the more domestic, ‘uneventful’ end of the fictional spectrum.

Ashton was a diverse writer and her novels range across medical, contemporary domestic, historical, literary and biographical themes. Each of her novels that I’ve read have been reassuringly familiar in style, but often totally unexpected in theme or setting, and as information about her work online is quite hard to find and rather vague, I’ve bought many of her books with no idea of what they are going to be about. In all, she wrote well over twenty books across four decades. I’ve not been disappointed by any of hers yet, and there are still so many I have to track down!

My first foray into her work beyond Bricks and Mortar was The Half-Crown House, which is an absolutely marvellous novel set in the early 1950s. Its heroine, Henrietta, is scarred by her losses during the war, and while trying to cope with an utterly changed world, and a very different future to the one she had imagined for herself, is also struggling to maintain her family’s crumbling stately home with no money or means to do so. Set over the course of one day, on which the house is open to the public at the cost of half a crown (hence the title), we follow Henrietta as she tries to navigate various problems involving the sale of a painting, the overtures of an American admirer, the arrival of her dead brother’s young son and heir to take up residence at his ancestral home for the first time, and a shocking revelation from her elderly grandmother that throws a very large spanner in the works of a plan to revive the house’s fortunes. Within all this is also a wonderful journey through the history of the house, which is described with such loving detail that you can quite easily imagine yourself walking through its faded rooms. It offers a fascinating insight into postwar England, and reminded me a lot of Marghanita Laski’s The Village, which is another Persephone reprint. It is beautifully written, filled with convincing and engaging characters, and has a memorably unique premise; all ingredients for a novel that really should be better known, and certainly still in print. It is fairly easy to get hold of second hand and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

My next was The Captain Comes Home, a wartime novel with another intriguing premise. A hasty wartime marriage between childhood friends is brought to a tragically early end when Captain Johnny Crowe is reported as missing, presumed dead mere weeks afterwards. After a couple of years his pretty, flighty young wife Phyllis marries again, and moves on with her life. However, an unlikely coincidence on a Greek island in the final days of the war brings Johnny home again; a neighbour of Phyllis and Johnny is posted to the Greek island where Johnny’s company was last seen, and realises the shellshocked madman the locals have been sheltering for two years is the man they have all thought was dead. Johnny is severely psychologically damaged by the trauma of his ordeal, but expects his life to resume and cannot accept that Phyllis has moved on. When Johnny and Phyllis’ new husband come to blows, the whole village is drawn into the conflict, and it threatens to tear the whole community apart. I absolutely loved this - once I had accepted the slightly bonkers premise, I was utterly hooked. The only other novel I have read that deals with a similar situation (though this time reversed) is Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier -another excellent book - and I found this perspective on the implications of war on ordinary people’s lives absolutely fascinating. It’s very much about what war did to those left behind, and while it is very sad, it’s also full of hope for a new - albeit very different - future. Beautifully written and so well observed, it should be more widely read as an example of wartime fiction (though it was published just post-war, in 1947). It’s part of a trilogy of wartime novels set in the same community - the other two are Tadpole Hall and Joanna at Littlefold, neither of which I’ve managed to get hold of as yet and can’t wait to find and read at some point. If anyone has read them, I’d love to know your thoughts!

Prior to the war, Ashton was mostly known for her novels to do with the medical profession - she trained as a doctor and practised briefly at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital before her marriage. I very much enjoyed her trio of hospital/doctor focused novels - her earliest is Doctor Serocold (1930), which was so popular it was published as a Penguin paperback and adapted for television. It follows a day in the life of an elderly doctor in a small town practice, who is starting to question whether it’s time for him to give up and hand over to his young partner. It’s a beautiful book about the role of the general practitioner in a small community, where people had the same doctor from birth to death, and about the impact one person can have on the world around them. I found it very moving as well as highly entertaining, and really it should be a modern classic - it’s also an interesting novel to read in conjunction with John Berger’s excellent, recently reprinted A Fortunate Man, about a real-life country doctor in the 1950s, who could easily have been Doctor Serocold himself.

Yeoman’s Hospital (1944) is a similar premise to Doctor Serocold, and set in the same town, but this time follows the goings on in the local cottage hospital, which is under threat of closure. We follow several doctors and nurses as they go about a day in their lives, and it’s an absolutely wonderful picture of the realities of medical care in the forties, as well as being an absorbing tale of various personal dramas, including a secret love affair between two doctors. It was made into a film fairly soon after it was published, and still feels a very fresh read now. It’s not hard to find second hand, and comes highly recommended for a Sunday afternoon on the sofa.

Her final medical novel I’ve managed to track down is Hornet’s Nest (1934), which details the aftermath of an arrogant young doctor’s error in treating a woman. Like Yeoman’s Hospital, it is set in a local hospital while also ranging out into the lives of the medical staff and their families. It is both a story of a community as well as an exploration of a moral dilemma - the young doctor who failed to treat his patient properly is also the son of the chair of the hospital, and a shoe-in for promotion, though everyone knows he isn’t really up to the job. Will the Chair keep his son’s secret to preserve the status quo, or will he do the right thing, and potentially lose his relationship with his child in the process? Despite the setting being fairly similar to her other two medical stories, Ashton ups the stakes in Hornet’s Nest by the introduction of the central moral dilemma, and I found this unputdownable as I waited to find out what would happen to the doctor - and if the woman would survive!

The only novel of hers I would say I found less successful as a premise is People in Cages, which is somewhat bizarrely set in London Zoo. It follows the lives of several people who are all loosely connected to one another, and who all happen to be visiting the zoo on the same day, unbeknownst to each other. Two of them are having an affair, two of them used to be married, and one of them is on the run from the law. All of them are in some way trapped due to their life choices - hence the title - and the setting of the zoo is a rather unnecessary metaphor to hammer this point home. While it’s entertaining and the characters are well drawn, I thought that Ashton’s use of the zoo to bring her characters together meant she needed to rely on a fair few coincidences that began to jar after a while, and I would have rather seen the events play out in a more conventional setting. That being said, it’s the only novel I’ve read to be set wholly in a zoo, so it was worth reading for that alone!

If you’ve not read any Helen Ashton, then start with Bricks and Mortar, as it’s currently in print, but then go forth and see what else you can pick up second hand. I hope you’ll give her a go, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Perhaps if I can generate enough of a fan club, it will encourage someone to get more of her novels back in print!