The Weather at Tregulla

By Stella Gibbons

Terence danced, alas, only fairly well. She tried to hide the fact from herself.

Una Beaumont, nineteen years old and desperate to leave the small Cornish town of Tregulla to try her luck on the London stage, finds her hopes dashed by her mother's sudden death and its financial implications. She broods about, working with her fath

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Release date: Jan 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913527785

Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons nació en Londres en 1902. Fue la mayor de tres hermanos. Sus padres, ejemplo de la clase media inglesa suburbana, le dieron una educación típicamente femenina. Su padre, un individuo bastante singular, ejercía como médico en los barrios...

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Introduction

The publication in 1962 of The Weather at Tregulla marked the thirtieth anniversary of Stella Gibbons’ debut as a novelist. The reviewer in The Sphere (28 April 1962) wrote of the new novel, ‘A simple, incontrovertible statement is that Miss Stella Gibbons knows as much about the craft of writing a warmly human, engrossing story as anyone now practising the profession‘, mentioning that her ‘characters are wonderfully well drawn, with a clear-eyed unsentimental sympathy of which Miss Gibbons has the secret’. However, within the review he did not fail to mention that this new novel was the work of the ‘author of one of the funniest and spikiest satires of our days!’

For early success had been for Stella Gibbons both a blessing and a burden, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), that ‘funniest and spikiest satire’, casting a long shadow over the subsequent twenty-three novels published in her lifetime. ‘That Book’, as the author came to call it, had been a great popular success, had received rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, and in 1933 had won the Prix Étranger of the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse, much to the disgust of Virginia Woolf, a previous winner. An excoriating parody of the ‘Loam and Lovechild School of Fiction’, as represented in the works of authors such as Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith, and even D.H. Lawrence, Cold Comfort Farm was also for Stella Gibbons an exorcism of her early family life. There really had been ‘something nasty in the woodshed’.

Stella Dorothea Gibbons was born at 21 Malden Crescent, Kentish Town, London, on 5 January 1902, the eldest child and only daughter of [Charles James Preston] Telford Gibbons (1869-1926) and his wife, Maude (1877-1926). Her mother was gentle and much-loved but her father, a doctor, although admired by his patients, was feared at home. His ill-temper, drunkenness, affairs with family maids and governesses, violence, and, above all, the histrionics in which, while upsetting others, Stella thought he derived real pleasure, were the dominating factors of her childhood and youth. She was educated at home until the age of thirteen and was subsequently a pupil at North London Collegiate School. The change came after her governess attempted suicide when Telford Gibbons lost interest in their affair. Apparently, it was Stella who had discovered the unconscious woman.

Knowing it was essential to earn her own living, in September 1921 Stella enrolled on a two-year University of London course, studying for a Diploma in Journalism, and in 1924 eventually found work with a news service, the British United Press. She was still living at home when in 1926 her mother died suddenly. No longer feeling obliged to stay in the house she hated, she moved out into a rented room in Hampstead. Then, barely five months later, her father died, leaving his small estate to Stella’s younger brother, who squandered it within a year. As a responsible elder sister, Stella found a new home to share with her brothers, ‘Vale Cottage’ in the Vale of Health, a cluster of old houses close to Hampstead Heath. These Hampstead years were to provide a rich source of material. Not only the topography of the area but friends and acquaintances are woven into future novels. One young man in particular, Walter Beck, a naturalised German to whom she was for a time engaged, reappears in various guises.

In 1926 Stella’s life was fraught not only with the death of her parents and the assumption of responsibility for her brothers, but also with her dismissal from the BUP after a grievous error when converting the franc into sterling, a miscalculation then sent round the world. However, she soon found new employment on the London Evening Standard, first as secretary to the editor and then as a writer of ‘women’s interest’ articles for the paper. By 1928 she had her own by-line and, because the Evening Standard was championing the revival of interest in the work of Mary Webb, was deputed to précis her novel The Golden Arrow and, as a consequence, read other similarly lush rural romances submitted to the paper. This at a time when her own romance was ending unhappily. In 1930 she was once more sacked, passing from the Evening Standard to a new position as editorial assistant on The Lady. Here her duties involved book reviewing and it was the experience of skimming through quantities of second-rate novels that, combined with her Mary Webb experience, led to the creation of Cold Comfort Farm, published by Longmans in 1932.

In 1929 Stella had met Allan Webb, an Oxford graduate a few years her junior, now a student at the Webber-Douglas School of Singing. They were soon secretly engaged, but it was only in 1933 that they married, royalties from Cold Comfort Farm affording them some financial security. Two years later their only child, a daughter, was born and was, in turn, eventually to give Stella two grandsons, on whom she doted. In 1936 the family moved to 19 Oakeshott Avenue, Highgate, within the gated Holly Lodge estate, where Stella was to live for the rest of her life.

For the next forty years, in war and peace, Stella Gibbons continued to publish a stream of novels, as well as several volumes of poetry and short stories. The Weather at Tregulla was the first novel she wrote after her husband’s death in 1959. She took Cornwall as her setting, the action centring on the area around Padstow, the part of the county that she knew best. For in the 1960s and 1970s she rented ‘The Bryn’ at Trevone from a former headmistress of her old school, North London Collegiate. In the novel that house becomes ‘The Lynn’, Trevone becomes ‘Tregulla’ and Padstow is ‘Selstow’. One of the leading characters, Lieutenant Barney Trewin RN, is based on her nephew, a former merchant seaman, who came to live with her in Highgate. Tregulla born and bred, Barney, reliable and competent, cannot compete in the eyes of Una, our heroine, with a new arrival, the artist Terence Willow, (‘how beautiful he is’). She is restless, unable, after the recent death of her mother, to go to London to train for the stage, and longs for Life to begin. Amoral and wilful, Terence, his sister, and their hippie friends proceed to disturb the local peace, leading to a conclusion that may take the reader by surprise. Along the way we are drawn into life in Tregulla, ‘a hamlet where the pace of life was slow, set in a county thrust far out into the sounding Atlantic, flown over by seabirds and chosen as a dwelling place by seals’, and can relish the Cornish scenery, including the view from ‘The Lynn’ with ‘the meadow and its low slate wall slop[ing] away to the cliffs and the sea’, just as Stella saw it. 

After Allan’s death Stella never remarried. Although avoiding literary and artistic society, she did hold a monthly ‘salon’ at home, attracting a variety of guests, young and old, eminent, unknown and, sometimes, odd. She continued to publish novels until 1970 and even after that wrote two more that she declined to submit to her publisher. As her nephew, Reggie Oliver, wrote in Out of the Woodshed (1998), his biography of Stella, ‘She no longer felt able to deal with the anguish and anxiety of exposing her work to a publisher’s editor, or to the critics.’ She need not have feared; both novels have subsequently been published.

Stella Gibbons died on 19 December 1989, quietly at home, and is buried across the road in Highgate Cemetery, alongside her husband.

Elizabeth Crawford

CHAPTER I

Risk of Thunder

After the burial of Evelyn Beaumont, her widower unostentatiously withdrew from the crowd of old friends and relatives and made his way, as quickly as his sense of decorum and the effects of four days of deep grief on a sixty-eight-year-old constitution would permit, to where Lieutenant Barnabas Trewin was pausing for a moment before driving away from the churchyard.

Barney—

Oh, hullo, sir. Barnabas did not quite salute, but he kept his feet together and his head well up, and his stance expressed respectful attention.

I’m going to ask you to do me a rather odd favour. It’s about Una, Captain Beaumont said.

The young man continued to look deferential, but at the name of this companion of his childhood—babyhood, almost—his heart sank.

She would be in a state, naturally. She always was—nowadays, anyway: and her mother dying suddenly in the night, during the recent great storm, would give her plenty of legitimate excuse. But he said:

Anything I can do, of course. My parents asked me to tell you how very sorry we all are.

Thank you. Barnabas could see now that the man whom he respected and admired as a fine sailor in the old Navy had been crying. Well, can you give her a lift home and break it to her that she can’t go to London?

It needed some of the discipline that Barnabas had been acquiring since childhood to aid him in repressing a dismayed whistle.

It’s a rum thing to ask you, I know that, Captain Beaumont went on rapidly, "and it’s bound to hit her hard, especially after failing to get that award from those people at Truro (I shall never understand that business: I think she’s very good; of course, I can’t see why she wants to act that sort of part—loose women, and that sort of thing—I think she’s better in comedy)—and now—the fact is— he paused. I just can’t face it."

Barnabas thought it best to look wooden.

I never have been much good with Una, the father went on quickly, don’t understand tantrums. It may go on for some time, (his hearer thought this more than likely) and—er—I don’t feel—up to it.

I quite understand, sir. I’ll do my best.

"Tell her it’s a question of cash, as usual, will you? Evelyn had this little bit of money of her own, you see, and it would just have covered Una’s living cheaply in London and finding some kind of a job to do with the stage, and I told her she could go, after the Truro business fell through. (She was so cut up, I had to do something.) But the income died with Evelyn."

I understand, sir, Barnabas said again.

He was surprised to learn that any Beaumont had had private money; when he thought about the matter at all, he had supposed these old friends of his family’s to be dependent upon Captain Beaumont’s pension and the scanty earnings from the flower farm, and, therefore, hard up as they come.

She doesn’t know about her mother’s income. I’ve never mentioned it. I don’t believe in telling women about money. They don’t understand it, Captain Beaumont ended firmly, and the long line of his lips straightened.

If they had not been standing in Saint Petroc’s churchyard, surrounded by the pale, tilted slate gravestones that suggested, in some region of Barnabas’s mind which he preferred not to acknowledge, pages torn from a book fashioned of stone, he would have ventured on a joke.

Recalling his own short—very short—list of take-out-able jobs, it seemed to him that women understood money a bit too well. But if one’s taste was for creamy blondes with dimples, they were bound to be extravagant; their rarity, he supposed, authorized their expensive tastes.

All right, sir, he said, —er—shall I ask her now? You don’t think it’ll look a bit odd, her going off with me instead of with you?

You’d better wait until nearly everyone has cleared out . . . thank you.

Captain Beaumont nodded, and went briskly off. Barnabas took a sailor’s glance at the sky, all snowy shreds and wet depths of blue, with some dirty clouds scudding in from the west over the hidden sea. It was going to rain. In Cornwall, in March, it usually was. Sitting with Una in the car, rain pouring down, explaining, comforting, perhaps even patting . . .

He looked across the blue-grey and green stones, through the deceivingly sunny air to where, isolated from the slowly departing groups of mourners, his childhood’s friend stood apart.

She was staring at the ground, with that broody expression which he had come to know well in the last year or two. Patting . . .

That he might, while comforting her, go further than patting, did not occur to him. Some months ago, during his Christmas shore-leave, a local male acquaintance had said to him: I saw you in Camelot the other day, with a real beauty. Any chance of an introduction? and Barnabas had been honestly surprised to discover that the dazzler to whom he had been giving a lift was Una.

A beauty? All that black, and white, and too thin, and awful clothes (though that wasn’t her fault, poor kid), and thinking herself a budding Vivien Leigh and, lately, always in a stew over something? Only lately, though; one had to admit that when she was twelve she had been, even to someone of seventeen, very good value; a fearless scrambler up cliffs, a swimmer who had to be held back with blows from daring the most dangerous tides, a runner and a laugher and a lighter of impromptu bonfires. Pity. But people did change.

But it didn’t do to stand about thinking. Duty (a word which Barnabas seldom used even in his thoughts) called.

He waited a little longer, until everyone had left the churchyard except Captain Beaumont and the Reverend Mr. Miniver, and then made his way briskly towards Una.

She had noticed him standing with her father, by the shadowy porch of the ancient church where the list of vicars, going back five centuries, was painted in flaking black on the stucco wall, but she had not wondered what they were discussing.

She was dreaming: the silver sunlight caressed her and she was glad just to stand still in it. She was atavistically responsive to seductive weather; and a fair day could raise her spirits to ecstasy while a dull one filled her with despair.

She was glad, too, to have the funeral over. Poor Mummy—Una’s eyes moistened as she thought how much she was going to miss her. Now, there would be no one at home who understood how she felt. All would be briskness and stiff upper lips . . . but at least it would not be for long. London and the Stage beckoned.

Una? Like a lift?

She looked vaguely at Barnabas. Fair, quick-moving, slender, a round brown Cornish face with a nose in the middle of it like the beak of a young eagle. Good to look at; some other girl’s dream, no doubt. To Una, dull as Tregulla on a wet winter evening.

What?

Can I give you a lift home?

Oh . . . I don’t know . . . thanks, I’d like to but I’m supposed to go in that thing—she indicated the decent black car hired from Camelot—"I suggested we came in the Land-Rover. It’s so hypocritical . . ."

If you want to go with Barney, Una, it’s all right, her father called, pausing at the door of the despised conveyance.

Una was surprised, for during the morning’s events he had seemed to lean on her and need her company, but she suddenly felt that she must seize the chance of escaping, if only for half an hour, the sunny loneliness of the house and his silent anguish. She turned to Barnabas and nodded.

After all, they attracted some attention as they went down the rising and dipping road that followed the line of the coast, for a few of the mourners had lingered to gossip before they drove or walked away, and stares—some curious, some idle, some frankly disapproving—followed the dead woman’s only child and Admiral Trewin’s eldest son as they went quickly past in Barney’s small scarlet Fiat.

Barnabas did not feel comfortable. She ought to have gone with her father. Captain Beaumont must have been thrown clean off his course to have suggested this breaking of the bad news by someone who wasn’t family . . . or if Barnabas must do it, couldn’t it have been broken later?

"Of course, you think it simply wouldn’t have been ‘done’ to use the Land-Rover?" Una said suddenly.

I think it would have looked peculiar, certainly. He was not going to get irritated. He would need all his patience later.

I can’t see it. Why hire a car ’specially to be miserable in? Either we mind Mummy being—dead—or we don’t. The car doesn’t make any difference.

It’s the look of the thing.

Oh, if you’re going to talk about the look of the thing! As a matter of fact— she hurried on, "why I feel bad about having that black object is because I’m not particularly miserable. I don’t mean I don’t care. Of course I do. (She was the only person who understood about my acting.) But it’s no use pretending I’m broken-hearted, because I’m not."

She waited, in increasing uneasiness, for his answer . . . sometimes the longing to pour out her feelings to a friend was so intense that it seemed it must crack her heart, and she had known him since she was born, hadn’t she?

Gradually, Barnabas had been feeling his expression becoming disapproving. He tried to prevent it; he knew that he ought to make allowances. But stiffen his face would, and when he did answer, instead of soothing remarks about not really meaning that, you know, there came out in a decidedly upper-deck voice:

Rather a peculiar thing to say, isn’t it?

How do you mean—peculiar? It’s true.

Then if it is—but I think you must be rather worked up or something—all the more reason for not saying it.

That did it. Wide swung the flood gates.

"I can’t always keep things to myself—I have to keep pretty well everything as it is—Daddy hasn’t a clue about how I feel, we simply don’t speak the same language, everybody needs to talk sometimes."

Then she broke off. She knew that he himself never talked, in the sense that she had used the word. Neither his father, nor his younger brother, Hugo, nor their sister, Martha, now married and living in London, was a pourer-out.

I do think you might listen, she added crossly.

There was no reply, and in a moment, maddeningly, she found that she must search for her handkerchief.

They were approaching Trelynn Bay. Here, the cliffs which in general along this coast climb hundreds of feet out of milky green water, and are made difficult of approach by bold rocks draped in yellow weed, were low and turfy, and sliding away into slopes of dazzling white sand. The most conspicuous object in sight was the sea. Una kept her head turned towards it.

Try the top of your stocking, he said, in a minute.

"Don’t talk to me as if I were ten!"

Sorry. But he did not sound it, because he was thinking how much nicer she had been when she was.

She found the handkerchief where he had suggested, and then turned quickly on him to see if he were gloating, as they (brought up by elderly parents who had read Stalky & Co. aloud to them) used to say when they were children.

The face she saw was not so grave as to suggest the suppression of amusement, yet neither did it have any hint of the familiar smile that was less like sunlight than summer lightning. For all its clear beauty, it was not a face immediately attractive to strangers. Authority and reserve can be intimidating.

You are the nearest thing to a brother I’ve got, she said resentfully.

At that, he glanced into the glass that reflected the empty sunlit road, then pulled the car in to the side of the slate wall bordering the quiet fields. This was it. At least it wasn’t raining—yet.

Now, he demanded turning to her, what’s the matter?

It was a surprisingly severe young face, and the mouth—already that of a man—was set in a judicial line. The blue eyes were not kind. Una quailed, shook her head and muttered something while she used her handkerchief.

The utter hopelessness of even attempting to convey to him what was the matter—her loneliness, her detestation of Tregulla and all its inhabitants, her craving for love, her passion for acting, her large ambitions and her vague sensation of guilt—all this lay upon her and kept her silent.

I’m sorry you’re in this state, he pronounced, —though you always do seem to be in a state about something lately—because I’ve got to tell you some bad news. Your father asked me to.

"Daddy asked you?" staring.

Yes. I suppose he knew you’d make a fuss, ruthlessly, and naturally, as he’s had a shock already, he doesn’t want anything more. As you say you don’t care about—your mother, you’ll be able to take it better, I expect.

Pause. Una was staring at him. It occurred to him what an unusual colour her eyes were; that kind of bluey-mauve seen on the outside of some hyacinth petals was nearest to it. The fact moved him not at all.

It’s about your—mother’s income, he went on, with faint embarrassment (incomes could really only be discussed jokingly, and on this occasion, of course, jokes were out). I gather you don’t know anything about it? Your father said you didn’t.

She shook her head. Well? she said defiantly.

Well, she did have some money of her own, you see, and—er—this is the bad news: it died with her, the income, I mean; goes to someone else, I expect, your father didn’t say; and—er—I understood him to say that now there won’t be—er—enough for you to go to London.

Silence. The eyes, blazing now, stared at him.

He had ended on a briskish note, not untouched by satisfaction at having got the thing said. But she was looking at him as if he had announced the imminency of global war.

Not go to London? she said at last, in a voice pitched even higher than usual. But I must. I’ve got to get into the Central School of Speech and Drama at Swiss Cottage. I’ve got to get some kind of job, first, and save enough, and then . . .

He interrupted relentlessly, for the next thing would be hysterics: I thought you’d find it rather a bake. But that’s what he said and that’s how it is . . . I’m afraid.

"There must be some mistake."

He shook his head. Your father was quite definite. He said, after that competition—

Audition, angrily.

Sorry—audition—you went in for at Truro, and—and your not getting a grant from those people after all, he did promise you you could go to London and get some sort of a job, either to do with the stage or something . . .

I’ll do anything. I’ll scrub floors, empty dustbins—

Oh don’t be so silly, Una. You must have somewhere to live and you must eat. As for emptying dustbins, Barney began heartlessly to laugh, for the delicate, crimson, furious face confronting him looked so unlike dustbins, you haven’t the physique.

"It’s all very well for you to laugh—you’re all right, you’re perfectly comfortable—you’re doing the job you like—you’ve got plenty of money—"

I’m very hard up, he retorted with dignity. Sailors always are. You know what my father’s always quoting, about sailoring being a poor man’s profession.

Well, you know what I mean, with angry impatience. "You’re all right. I haven’t got anything."

Don’t talk rot, said Barnabas with an energy matching her own. "You’ve got your family and you live here—blimey, if you could see some of the places I’ve seen in