‘Rather Dated’ June: Stella Gibbons’ ‘Westwood’

[MotherofPearl]

Our latest RD book is Stella Gibbons’ Westwood. It’s set during WWII in Highgate, North London, and tells the story of school teacher Margaret, who moves to London with her parents from a provincial town. She is a serious and romantic person, and gets sucked into the lives of the glamorous inhabitants of Westwood, the house owned by playwright Gerard Challis and his family.

I had mixed feelings about this one, though overall I enjoyed it very much. Towards the end I thought some of the writing and plot manoeuvres were a bit clunky, especially when Gibbons sort of addressed the reader directly and said things like “Let’s see what happened to Gerard Challis… and there we leave him and now return to the story of…” I also didn’t quite know what to make of the party towards the end. Margaret accepting kisses from drunken Alex and Lev all seemed a bit out of character somehow?

In terms of RD features, the depiction of Linda felt quite shocking from a 2025 point of view, with both Margaret (at first anyway) and her mother being quite openly repulsed her by, and casually describing her as a ‘backward’ child. I suppose those were the attitudes of the time. I think Gerard Challis’ pursuit of Hilda also felt RD in a way - not so much his attempt to seduce her, but her parents being seemingly perfectly happy for her to be going out with a man maybe 30 years her senior!

Some of the characters were very well-drawn, especially Emma (co-co!) and Zita, who I found quite fascinating. I loved the set up at Lady Challis’ country house and thought that all sounded pretty idyllic.

I’m looking forward to hearing what others thought.

Thanks for starting the thread, @MotherofPearl.

Well, I was worried I’d be late to the discussion because when Fuzzy posted about getting a discussion going, I hadn’t had time to start the book, and it’s quite long. I shouldn’t have been too concerned, as I raced through it and couldn’t wait to get back to it every time I had to put it down (which, tbh, is something I feel rarely these days with my reading).

I absolutely loved it - with the obvious caveats about Gibbons's characterisation of Linda. You’re absolutely right, MOP, in that attitudes were starkly different in the 1940s, and I just wonder whether a scenario where a loving single father was devoting considerable effort and resources to looking after a beloved child with disabilities was itself vanishingly unusual. This was the era of consigning such children to institutions and it must have been incredibly daring to imagine this mode of living. Having said that, the notion of leaving Linda on her own for long periods, as Dick seemed happy to do, was astonishing to modern sensibilities. I also couldn’t help wondering how Linda would have fared had she been born to the affluent Challises or the Nilands - would she have been at home, a part of the loving wider family, or sent 'away' to be cared for discreetly at some nursing home-type arrangement?

Sorry to have gone on about this so much - I'll come back in a bit after others have commented with more thoughts on the rest of the novel. But the Linda storyline is so interesting and chimed in with a non-fiction book I read a few years ago about exactly this subject - Family Secrets by Deborah Cohen.

Hello! I have a little bit left to read in the book (again). I wanted to read it again to reassess what I thought about it.

My feelings about it are closer to MotherofPearl's than Terpsichore's. I didn't absolutely love it and while I enjoyed certain aspects of it, I didn't love it as a whole. I read it again to wonder why I didn't.

I think the set-up was interesting; the storyline was good and the backdrop of life during ww2 was well drawn, but I didn't like the characters much. I found them rather tiresome. I nearly felt sorry for Margaret, but she seemed a very willing doormat. Early on I thought of her as a kind of Dorothea from Middlemarch, always striving for beauty and nobility and then I thought of Gerard Chassis as a cross between Casaubon from Middlemarch and a better-looking version of Jacob Rees Mogg. And those images didn't endear them to me any more during the course of the book.

Back later.

I got Gerard's name wrong, Challis. Oops!

I also thought that the Linda interlude was fascinating. Very RD in terms of attitudes, but the care of children with special needs is rarely depicted in books so this was unusual and really interesting. I can imagine that the easiest option for a single father with a child like Linda would be to marry again, so I wasn't surprised that Dick remarried. I think it was a close call for Margaret. It felt a bit like he tossed a coin between Margaret and Mrs Coates!

I also felt that the 'Marcus/Daphne' relationship was odd, particularly how it was deemed acceptable for Hilda to go on dates with a much older man and know nothing about him and not bring him home to meet her parents. It went on for months as well. Very odd! I enjoyed the ruined afternoon tea in Kew Gardens. That was very funny. I think Gibbons enjoyed herself writing it.

I also thought that the encroaching authorial voice was rather strange. She just seemed to wander in at around three quarters of the way through...There was a clunkiness for me in it as well. The passages describing Alex's solo jaunt to the county and Margaret reading about Bishop Odo's Lodge were a bit rambling and not very necessary. However, these are minor points.

I also enjoyed the children's voices, Emma and Barnaby ('I haven't had my tea yet') and the children playing at air raids was well written.

I agree that the ending was a bit odd. I'm not convinced either that drinking and kissing was what Margaret liked but that maybe that night she accepted that she could relax and not take life so seriously? She seemed more contented at the close of the book. I think she was still going to end up being useful for other people and maybe fully embrace her teaching career while enjoying life outside school as well. At least she wasn't going to see people through rose-tinted glasses as she had done with Gerard Challis.

It’s an odd mix but I think that unexpected unconventionality was what appealed to me.

I love a saga - tick for that.
Also books set in the war - tick.
Ditto books set in London - tick.
Gibbons's interpolations felt rather Trollope-like to me, and I treated them as humorous on the whole; she’s telling a story with many threads and pulling them all together, so I thought it was OK for her to be commenting in an omnipotent way. I could see from a mile off the eventual showdown with Hilda/Gerard being brought face-to-face with Margaret, and was really enjoying the fact that Gibbons took her time about it: Margaret needed to shed her earnestness and reverence for the pompous old fraud that Gerard actually was (a fact that his wife and daughter saw in him only too well).

Also interesting, I thought, was the frank portrayal of Margaret's parents and their unhappy marriage, contrasted with the very relaxed Wilsons. Yes, maybe they were a bit unrealistically permissive, but I think we’re meant to assume that Hilda is a 'good' girl, ie no sex before marriage - lots of boyfriends but nothing serious, and their relationship is one of such mutual trust that they’re happy she won’t do anything foolish.

Did anyone else pick up the odd echo of 'Cold Comfort Farm'? I certainly did, in the very funny descriptions of Gerald's truly terrible play plots - Kattë sounds absolutely abysmal, and he was so very proud of it! (I’ve read somewhere that Gibbons based Gerard on the real-life novelist Charles Morgan, whose equally pompous writings she loathed).

Grantey also saw through Gerard. She had no time for him at all. I think Gibbons enjoyed writing about him and while he was a terribly tedious, pompous creep, I enjoyed the description of his awful plays. That's interesting how Gibbons based his character on a real writer. She nearly made him into a parody.

I liked Hebe rather less. Gerard was awful but he was entertaining, for example how he had to put up with his grandchildren or dodge them at home or out and about. Hebe was just living her best life and came across as being rather spoilt and mean towards Margaret. I thought the comparison between the two Westwoods was good; both were very different households. Gerard's household was so privileged that they wouldn't let the war interfere with their lives. Party on!

Zita is an interesting character. It would be hard to be her friend, however! She would be difficult to deal with. You would need the patience of a saint (or be Margaret!)

i was a bit ambivalent about Zita as she was such a spiky character, but I think she was well-written, and I could absolutely picture her. Gibbons wrote another novel a couple of years earlier, The Bachelor, which has a similar young woman refugee-type character, Vartouhi, who finds sanctuary in an English household in wartime. But she’s from an invented, vaguely Ruritania-like country and I wonder whether Zita is a more rounded attempt at something Gibbons had tried before.

About Hebe - was I reading correctly that at one point she said she was 22?! Barnabas was 6 so did she really get pregnant at 16, or did I misread/misunderstand somewhere?

Hebe is twenty-two. That much I remember. She is very young, but her comment about having more children* *annoyed me as she isn't too bothered about the ones she has already.

Pompous old fraud is exactly the right description of Gerard @Terpsichore!

I’ve enjoyed reading both your comments. I’ve not read Cold Comfort Farm so can’t make any comparisons there, but I liked this book enough to try another Gibbons.

I was also quite shocked to learn that Hebe was only 22, and that it surely meant she fell pregnant with Barnabas at 16! I agree that the bit about Alex going off to brood in the countryside was a bit pointless, and some of the old Highgate reveries were a little tedious.

I felt a bit bad for Margaret’s brother when she didn’t stay to see him off to war, though obviously the allure of a weekend away with the Challis/Niland family was too much to resist.

Did anyone else think that Hilda and Earl might get together? I thought the story might be moving in that direction after the afternoon at Kew, but Hilda ended up with someone we didn’t really know.

Yes, Mother, I thought so too. Earl Swinger, the vurry nice American boy :)

It was interesting how Margaret turned down Hebe's job offer to be her nurse/governess. Margaret did grow up a bit at the close of the story. A year ago she would have been highly honoured and accepted it.

I haven't read 'Cold Comfort Farm' either but wouldn't mind reading another Gibbons at some stage. * *

I ended up not really enjoying this much. I thought it started well, and I enjoyed the descriptions of wartime London and the houses. However, once the Challis/Niland families were introduced it started to drag for me. I didn’t really understand why Margaret became so obsessed with them. None of them were particularly likeable, and they didn’t come across as glamorous enough to explain why Margaret may have been interested.

I didn’t like the bit where they all went to stay with the grandmother, and the rather farcical scene in Kew Gardens. Overall though I was expecting the book to be much funnier - the blurb on my copy describes it as ‘delightfully comic’ but Kew Gardens was the only bit I found amusing.

I also agree with the comments about Linda - the attitudes to her were hard to read.

I’m glad I’ve read something else by Stella Gibbons (beyond Cold Comfort Farm and its sequels which I really enjoyed) but not sure I’ll be rushing to read anything else by her.

I agree that it was hard to see why Margaret was so enamoured with them when they were not very nice to her, with the possible exception of Seraphina and Gerard's mother. She didn't see them for who they were, only for what they represented and their status as artists until the close of the story.