We’re so fortunate that bloggers Kaggsysbookishramblings and Stuck-in-a-book run “year weeks” two times a year, where they pick a year and the challenge is to read books published in that year and review them within that week. This time, the week is 10-16 April and the year 1940. Knowing that a certain favourite publisher of mine was likely to have a few possibilities, I didn’t leave it to chance that I’d have suitable books on my TBR when the week came around, but rather disingenuously stuck them on the birthday lists I gave Ali and Emma, and three duly appeared on the day! Two from my birthday pile have now been read, and hpefully a third will be added!

Susan Scarlett – “Ten Way Street”

(21 January 2023, from Emma)

“I’m a weak-spirited, gutless creature, but oh, dear, I’d love to give in my notice. You can’t think what it’s like, Sarah. Everything in the house revolves around Mrs Cardew. Nothing else seems to matter. And somehow it’s all so soulless, everything frightfully grand, masses of servants and nobody caring twopence about real things. I believe that Mrs Cardew would rather any of them won a beauty competition than showed signs of growing up into nice people.” Sarah set her shoulders and looked severe. “What’s the matter with you, Beverly Shaw? This seems to me the exact job for you. You said to me on the very night when you got the letter telling you to go and see Mrs Cardew, ‘I hope i get a job somewhere where I’m really needed.’ My goodness, where could you be more needed? If nobody else is going to bring the children up, what a chance for you.” (p. 41)

Here we have of course another novel by Noel Streatfeild under the pen-name she used to publish twelve “romances”. I have already loved “Clothes-Pegs” (a career novel masquerading as a romance) and have “Babbacombe’s” (presumably that wonderful thing, a shop novel, masquerading as a romance) on my TBR and this is a governess novel masquerading as a romance. Because it’s so much more than “just” a love story, with another fully realised family and a villain to hiss at.

Beverly Shaw was raised in an orphanage and sent by them to train as a very superior kind of governess. Looking for her first job, she knows she must get a decent one to pay them back, so she takes, with reservations, a position with the horrible Margot Cardew, an actress, to look after her three precocious children, prone to bilious attacks caused by nerves and too much chocolate at cocktail parties. Here the author uses her knowledge of the stage, described to such effect in her “Shoes” novels, to portray a good actor but a bad mother, and children used to scurrying around backstage.

Beverly brings a good dose of the everyday to her charges, aided by the loyal and marvellous Annie, and she catches the eye of Margot’s unwilling beau, Peter, who is much keener on someone with sense and kindness. As Margot becomes more hysterical and demanding and her personal maid Marcelle more conniving, Beverly must gather her support around her – including her college friend Sarah, working for a very different kind of family – and withstand confrontation and untruths billowing all around her, and, did she but know it, the downtrodden secretary, Winkle, revealed to have a past of her own.

What a lovely, engaging novel, with not a whisper of war about it, which must have been such a comforting, escapist read in 1940!

Although they’re sadly not now republishing any more new books, Dean Street Press are keeping their current offering available while they still have the copyrights – so you can buy this book here – maybe pick up a copy to read and discuss in Dean Street December, which I will be running again this year. And Scott at Furrowed Middlebrow reviewed the book here after he announced the exciting republication of this lovely set of novels. This was my second read for #1940Club and I hope to get one more in before the end of the week!