Nell's own temperament, with its roots in the liberal tradition [...] had combined with the shortage of labour and the decay of the class-system in England to produce a situation too complex for the privileged children of the new proletariat to grasp, and they felt only an uncomfortable mingling of embarrassment, superiority and mockery. (p. 165)

This paragraph is the nub of Here Be Dragons. First published in post war Britain in 1956, it's a mid-career novel by the English author Stella Gibbons (1902-1989). Wikipedia tells me that Gibbons never repeated the success of her comic novel Cold Comfort Farm, (see my review) and I've read a couple of disappointed reviews of this one reissued by Vintage in 2011, but I like it better than Cold Comfort Farm. I think its depiction of the tectonic changes in postwar English society is horribly, brilliantly perceptive.

And I am always interested in reading about the society my parents chose to leave when we set off for warmer climes. (Plus, there's a passage about the London fog that nearly killed my mother that is chilling to read, if a reader knows that it killed thousands of people.)

Here Be Dragons is an allusion to the dangerous and unexplored regions of the uncharted areas of medieval maps, and the novel explores uncharted territory in the brave new world of postwar Britain. The imperial map of the globe was starting to decolonise, and there were massive shifts in British demographics along with the pain of postwar austerity which contributed to an exodus of people who could leave for economies in better shape. Stella Gibbons nails this upheaval through the character of Nell, who is whisked out of her dull life in Dorset when the Church ejects her father Martin from his living because he has lost his faith. Penniless, the family moves into a grace-and-favour flat lent by Aunt Peggy, and since neither Martin nor his stalwart wife Anna have ever had a job, it falls to Nell to support them. Aunt Peggy, who has a new career as a 'personality' at the BBC, steamrollers Nell into a dreary job in an office. For Nell's parents the idea of 'work' for someone of their class is anathema, but they agree to Nell's badly paid and boring employment because they have no choice, and it is, at least, 'respectable'.

Gibbons doesn't labour the point, but the ensuing years have demonstrated the cruelty of churches to their errant clergy. After years of unpaid labour, they are cast out of their communities with no money, no job, no home, no provision for their old age and no fitness for other kinds of employment. Remember Margaret Hale's father in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854) and the upheaval caused by his dispute with the church, and how Gaskell used it to expose the schism between new 19th century industrial wealth and old money?

Nell's demoralised parents do not know, of course, how awful her office work is. She is stifled there not just by the smoke-filled room but by her employer's patronising, gendered and anachronistic assumptions. Nell is smart, hardworking and blessed with untapped initiative, but she has no future at Akkro Products until some other hapless woman who is trapped there leaves to marry. Women's work and the labour of the working classes, which was essential to the wartime economy and materiel production, has resumed its prewar limitations, as if nothing had changed. But it has. People of Aunt Peggy's class can't find staff willing to work under the oppressive conditions of domestic service. Nell isn't willing to work for a pittance either. Not for long. She gets herself a much better paid job in a tea-room, and before long has savings to put towards opening a tea-room of her own!

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/11/21/here-be-dragons-by-stella-gibbons/ ( )