Love Comes Home

By Molly Clavering

"Love romps home and sets the whole place by the ears, gets her own way in everything, and father and mother don't even notice they're being crossed!"

Jane Cranstoun is having a lovely time with friends in England (and has just been proposed to by the charming John Marsh) when she is summoned home to Scotland to welcome her young

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781914150463

Molly Clavering

Mary 'Molly' Clavering was born in Glasgow in 1900. Her father was a Glasgow businessman, and her mother's grandfather had been a doctor in Moffat, where the author would live for nearly 50 years after World War Two. She had little interest in conventional schooling as a child, but enjoyed studying nature, and read and wrote compulsively, considering herself a 'poetess' by the age of seven. She returned to Scotland after her school days, and published three novels in the late 1920s, as well as being active in her local girl guides and writing two scenarios for ambitious historical pageants. In 1936, the first of four novels under the pseudonym 'B. Mollett' appeared. Molly Clavering's war service in the WRNS interrupted her writing career, and in 1947 she moved to Moffat, in the Scottish border country, where she lived alone, but was active in local community activities. She resumed writing fiction, producing seven post-war novels and numerous serialized novels and novellas in the People's Friend magazine. Molly Clavering died in Moffat on February 12, 1995.

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Introduction

Describing Love Comes Home as ‘full of local colour and genuine humour’, the Montrose Standard (18 November 1938) commented, ‘It is a pleasure to welcome a writer who can give us glimpses of heathery moors and rippling burns and makes her characters as natural and healthy as their surroundings’, this remark predicated on the reviewer’s opinion that ‘so much of our fiction is unhealthy and sexy’. In this, her sixth novel and the third published under the pseudonym of ‘B. Mollett’, Molly Clavering created a love tangle around two sisters, Jane and Love Cranstoun, combining robust humour with romance and ensuring that anything the Montrose Standard might consider ‘unhealthy’ was performed off-stage by minor characters. 

Born in Glasgow on 23 October 1900, Molly Clavering was the eldest child of John Mollett Clavering (1858-1936) and his wife, Esther (1874-1943). Named ‘Mary’ for her paternal grandmother, she was always known by the diminutive, ‘Molly’. Her brother, Alan, was born in 1903 and her sister, Esther, in 1907. Although John Clavering, as his father before him, worked from an office in central Glasgow, brokering both iron and grain, by 1911 the family had moved to the Stirlingshire countryside eleven miles north of the city, to Alreoch House outside the village of Blanefield. In an autobiographical article Molly Clavering later commented, ‘I was brought up in the country, and until I went to school ran wild more or less’. She was taught by her father to be a close observer of nature and ‘to know the birds and flowers, the weather and the hills round our house’. From this knowledge, learned so early, were to spring the descriptions of the countryside that give readers of her novels such pleasure.

By the age of seven Molly was sufficiently confident in her literary attainment to consider herself a ‘poetess’, a view with which her father enthusiastically concurred. In these early years Molly was probably educated at home, remembering that she read ‘everything I could lay hands on (we were never restricted in our reading)’ and having little ‘time for orthodox lessons, though I liked history and Latin’. She was later sent away to boarding school, to Mortimer House in Clifton, Bristol, the choice perhaps dictated by the reputation of its founder and principal, Mrs Meyrick Heath, whom Molly later described as ‘a woman of wide culture and great character [who] influenced all the girls who went there’. However, despite a congenial environment, life at Mortimer House was so different from the freedom she enjoyed at home that Molly ‘found the society of girls and the regular hours very difficult at first’. Although she later admitted that she preferred devoting time and effort to her own writing rather than school-work, she did sufficiently well academically to be offered a place at Oxford. Her parents, however, ruled against this, perhaps for reasons of finance. It is noticeable that in her novels Molly makes little mention of the education of her heroines, although they do demonstrate a close and loving knowledge of Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope.

After leaving school Molly returned home to Arleoch House and, with no need to take paid employment, was able to concentrate on her writing, publishing her first novel in 1927, a year after the tragically early death of her sister, Esther. They had both taken an active interest in the local Girl Guides, although Molly was sufficiently aware that a character such as Jane, the elder of the Cranstoun sisters in Love Comes Home, might regard such involvement as more a matter of duty than pleasure. It was, however, as a means of fund-raising for the Guides that Molly, by writing scenarios for two ambitious Scottish history pageants, found another outlet for her literary talent. The first, in which she took the pivotal part of ‘Fate’, was staged in 1929, with a cast of 500, in Stirlingshire. However, for the second in 1930 she moved south and wrote the ‘Border Historical Pageant’ in aid of the Roxburgh Girl Guides. Performed at Minto House, Roxburghshire, in the presence of royalty, this pageant featured a large choir and a cast of 700, with Molly in the leading part as ‘The Spirit of Borderland Legend’. For Molly was already devoted to the Border country, often visiting the area to stay with relations, and using it as a setting for many of her novels. 

Love Comes Home, however, is unusual in being located further north, close to her family home. Like Blanefield, ‘Milton Riggend’, the Cranstouns’ local village, lay a few miles north of Glasgow, and had once relied for its prosperity on a ‘tiny Turkey-red dye-works which had given work to the community’. That had now closed and ‘there was a good deal of hardship and unemployment in the place.’ This, together with the fact that one of those involved in the love tangle is the prospective Unionist [Conservative] parliamentary candidate, prompts considerably more political discussion than occurs in other of Molly’s novels. But, although both Hitler and the Spanish Civil War lurk in the background, centre stage is village life, the countryside around the Cranstouns’ home, and, described in considerable and fascinating detail, a Court Presentation at Holyrood Palace that took place to mark the Coronation of King George VI.  Here fact and fiction collide, for Molly Clavering was herself presented at this Court, three regulation ostrich feathers on her head, dressed, like Jane Cranstoun, in silver lamé, her train lined with green satin. In her hand was an ostrich-feather fan, now held in the collection of Moffat Museum. The printed dedication to Love Comes Home reads, ‘J.A. H.-W. Cousin Jean In affectionate remembrance of 8th July 1937’, the initials referring to Mrs Hay-Wilson, who acted as Molly’s sponsor on that great day.

 Molly Clavering published one further novel as ‘B. Mollett’ before, on the outbreak of the Second World War, joining the Women’s Royal Naval Service, based for the duration at Greenock, then an important and frenetic naval station. Serving in the Signals Cypher Branch, she eventually achieved the rank of second officer. Although there was no obvious family connection to the Navy, it is noticeable that even in such pre-war novels as Love Comes Home many of the leading male characters are associated with the Senior Service.  

After she was demobbed Molly moved to the Borders, setting up home in Moffat, the Dumfriesshire town in which her great-grandfather had been a doctor. She shared ‘Clover Cottage’ with a series of black standard poodles, one of them a present from D.E. Stevenson, another of the town’s novelists, whom she had known since the 1930s. The latter’s granddaughter, Penny Kent, remembers how ‘Molly used to breeze and bluster into North Park (my Grandmother’s house) a rush of fresh air, gaberdine flapping, grey hair flying with her large, bouncy black poodles, Ham and Pam (and later Bramble), shaking, dripping and muddy from some wild walk through Tank Wood or over Gallow Hill’. Molly’s love of the area was made evident in her only non-fiction book, From the Border Hills (1953). 

During these post-war years Molly Clavering continued her work with the Girl Guides, serving for nine years as County Commissioner, was president of the local Scottish Country Dance Association, and active in the Women’s Rural Institute. She was a member of Moffat town council, 1951-60, and for three years from 1957 was the town’s first and only woman magistrate. She continued writing, publishing seven further novels, as well as a steady stream of the stories that she referred to as her ‘bread and butter’, issued, under a variety of pseudonyms, by that very popular women’s magazine, the People’s Friend. 

Molly Clavering’s long and fruitful life finally ended on 12 February 1995. Describing in her the very characteristics to be found in the novels, Wendy Simpson, another of D.E. Stevenson’s granddaughters, remembered Molly as ‘A convivial and warm human being who enjoyed the company of friends, especially young people, with her entertaining wit and a sense of fun allied to a robustness to stand up for what she believed in.’.

Elizabeth Crawford

Chapter One

FAREWELL PARTY

Jane Cranstoun, abruptly roused from sleep by the banging of her door, had to remind herself, as always on first waking, that she was not in her own room at Craigrois. This was a mere slip of a place, so small that she could open her dressing-table drawers from bed and, by using her umbrella, which she kept in a corner beside it, could push the door shut, or work the light switch, without the bother of getting up. So different was it from the large, old-fashioned bedroom in her own home, with its faded roses rambling up and down the wall-paper, and the thin rugs scattered here and there on the polished boards, and the solid, shining mahogany furniture, that each morning she wondered afresh how she could have made such an absurd mistake, even in sleep. To-day she had some reason for thinking herself back at Craigrois, because she would soon be there again. In less than a week, now, she would open her eyes to see, through the window which looked north, a glimpse of the Greenriggs, those frowning, scar-faced hills, glowering in at her.

A cup of tea stood steaming on the combined dressing-table and chest-of-drawers, and the breeze which entered on a beam of early sunlight blew the thin pink curtains into it and blew them out again, like the whiskers on Michael Finnegan’s chin, leaving a wet trail across her brushes and mirror. Sleepily supposing that George’s had been the kind hand which had set it just where the end of the curtain could not avoid it, she sat up, stretched out a bare arm and rescued it.

Dear George: how sweet of him! she murmured, as she drank with a wry face, for it was cold, and stewed, and tasted strongly of curtain. It must, of course, have been George himself who had crashed into the room a few minutes earlier, wakening her by the simple expedient of banging the door as he went out again. Jane’s lips curved into a smile as she thought of what her mother’s comment on such a procedure would have been. Lady Cranstoun, as she said herself, was seldom shocked, but she had a strong sense of what was fitting. She would most certainly not have approved of Lieutenant-Commander Mariner’s calling his guest and bringing her an early cup of tea.

Oh, lor! muttered Jane vulgarly, with a grimace. How I don’t want to go back to the endless round of good works and dull county functions!

She groped for her mother’s last letter, which the breeze had swept lightheartedly on to the floor, unfolded the crackling sheets and read again:

Your father and I feel that you have paid a very prolonged visit to the Mariners and think it is time that you came home. Milly Graham tells me that she met a Mrs. Longdale out at luncheon the other day who has recently been staying at Admiralty House with the Hortons, and she—Mrs. Longdale—said that the reason for your being at the Mariners’ so long was quite a topic for amused conjecture among the Admiralty House circle. I don’t like this, Jane. Besides, as you know, Love comes home next week and is sure to be disappointed if you are not here. I have said that you and she will help Milly Graham at her flower-stall for the Unionist Fête at Blanchlands, and the Guides are having a district church parade next month which you really ought not to miss.

Jane groaned and crammed the letter back into its envelope. ‘If only mother didn’t have to be so disgustingly energetic, on my behalf, at least.’ When all I ask is to be left alone. I’m so much more at home here with Kitty and George and their friends,’ she thought resentfully. ‘As for Mrs. Longdale—her name ought to be Longtongue! I suppose she was the female who tried so hard to pump me at Mrs. Horton’s charity bridge the other afternoon, and I did think I’d put her off the scent by telling her I lived near Glasgow. It didn’t sound a bit like Craigrois, but evidently I wasn’t clever enough. A pox on all inquisitive hags! They always turn out to be friends of friends of mothers.’

A new and almost equally disturbing thought suddenly struck her. ‘Heavens! If George is up he may have bagged the bath while I’m sitting here!’

She jumped out of bed, flung her dressing-gown about her and made a dash for the bathroom. By right of being cook to the establishment she had first claim on the bath in the morning, but this did not prevent George, if in a freakish mood, or merely feeling energetic, from sometimes sneaking in before her and upsetting the entire domestic routine of the bungalow.

All was well, however. The steady hum of Kitty’s voice, reading and commenting on the naval appointments in the morning paper to her husband, came from behind the closed door to reassure Jane, who knew that she always read them in bed. Presently she was brushing her teeth to the usual terrifying rumblings of the geyser, as it reluctantly decanted a thin flow of boiling water into the bath; and in a remarkably short space of time she was dressed and preparing breakfast on the gas-stove.

The kitchen was in many ways the most pleasant room in the house, for it was so arranged that, while cooking, you could look out of the window at a narrow strip of lawn, with a flower-border full of young green things up each side, and beyond it, through a rickety gate, was a small orchard, now a wonder of pink and white apple-blossom. Jane, dreamily poking sausages about in a frying-pan, could see between the branches a wide field of rough grass, with a little wood standing against the pearly sky on its far side. A rash of small bungalows was springing up and gradually encroaching on this green space; the wood, as if it knew its doom, wore a forlorn air. Kitty Mariner declared that the ugly little houses grew in the night like mushrooms and that there was a new one every morning but, with the philosophy of a true naval wife, consoled herself by remembering that George’s time at the Barracks here would be up before their field—for to her and Jane it was peculiarly their own—was entirely swallowed in dwellings with names like ‘Corbière’ or ‘Dunromin’ or ‘Chatsworth.’

This furnished bungalow in which the Mariners had set up their household goods nine months before, was called ‘Harrietville.’ Kitty and George had made a valiant effort to ignore it and during their tenancy at least to have it known as Number 42 Gibson Avenue, and nothing else. But their more facetious friends considered the name a glorious joke and sent them letters addressed to ‘Kittyville’ in honour of its temporary châtelaine, and even, on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, ‘Egroeg,’ which, after much passionate argument, had been triumphantly translated by Jane as ‘George backwards.’ That settled it. They gave up the attempt to return to a mere number, and, except for official purposes, ‘George backwards’ the house remained, to the great confusion of new acquaintances who did not know the origin of this very unusual name.

The sizzling of the sausages grew louder as they turned brown. From the dining-room came the clatter of plates and cutlery as Kitty set the table; from the bathroom a dolorous, tuneless rendering of Spanish Ladies, broken by many pauses, sure sign that George had reached the shaving stage of his slow toilet. Jane cut several slices from a crusty loaf and pushed them under the grill to toast, sniffed appreciatively at the coffee and stuck her head right out of the window to listen to a blackbird perched on the swaying tip of a branch.

Good morning, my pet, said Kitty’s voice behind her. "The table’s all set; George has finished shaving and is dressing himself absent-mindedly in pages of the Daily Mail, and—the toast’s burning!"

Oh, Lord! So it is. Jane ruefully pulled out a charred and smoking piece, broke it up and threw it out into the garden for the birds. I never seem able to escape without burning one bit, do I?

It’s part of your breakfast drill by this time. I’ll probably do the same myself from force of habit after you’ve gone, said Kitty. She flung her arms around Jane and hugged her warmly. "Oh, Jenny darling, do you really have to go?"

Well, you saw mother’s letter. She who must be obeyed has spoken, said Jane with a sigh. Yes, I’ll have to go, if only to be waiting on the doorstep with the rest of the family to receive Love.

‘Love’, repeated Kitty thoughtfully. It must be an awfully difficult name to live up to. What made them call her that? There was a girl at school with me called Charity, but that’s not quite the same, is it?

Hardly. Not nowadays, whatever it may have been when the first epistle to the Corinthians was written, said Jane, prodding the sausages to encourage them to burst, because George liked them that way. "No, Love was christened Magdalen Lovett, which was careless of the parents, when they’d already saddled the heir with the family name of Magnus. Of course he was always called Maggie at school, and as soon as Love could speak she threw away Magdalen, in case it dwindled to Maggie, too, and insisted on using Lovett, and it gradually shrank. She’s been called ‘Love’ since she was quite little."

Pretty determined, is she?

She is, Jane said drily. She inherits it from both sides, you see. Somehow all father’s and mother’s determination passed over Maggie and Stair and me and concentrated, after a long gap, in Love. It seems a bit unfair, but that’s heredity all over.

But goodness me, Jenny, you’re no doormat yourself, expostulated Kitty, as Jane dished up the sausages and poured clear, dark brown coffee into the green earthenware coffee-pot with a steady hand.

Not when I’m away from home, Jane said, taking up a laden tray and starting for the dining-room. . . . bring the toast, Kitty, there’s an angel! But at Craigrois with the parents I can feel all the self-confidence oozing out of me from the minute I walk into the hall. Maggie and Stair are the same, but Love—Love romps home and sets the whole place by the ears, gets her own way in everything, and father and mother don’t even notice they’re being crossed!

Kitty, the adored only child of elderly parents, the beloved daughter-in-law of George’s father and mother, who had no daughters of their own, could hardly understand this family of Jane’s. As she followed her with the toast-rack, dropping bits of toast all the way and picking them up again unconcerned, she murmured: Extraordinary, several times.

Breakfast was a silent meal by the decree of George, who considered it grossly uncivilized to have to utter a single unnecessary word at eight-fifteen in the morning. His wife and Jane tried their best to bow to his wishes, since he seldom asserted himself, but they were both talkative, and their idea of unnecessary speech differed so greatly from George’s that there was occasionally friction; especially when they were sternly forbidden even to talk to each other. Then a host of remarks, witty, interesting, or of urgent domestic importance, crowded to their lips, and it seemed that they must explode if not allowed to give voice to them.

George usually glanced over the top of the paper to catch them conversing in dumb show and to say resignedly: Better just get it over, hadn’t you?

It amused him to hear the sudden rush of eager chatter in Kitty’s clear high voice and Jane’s rather low-pitched tones, which seemed to well up and bubble over ceaselessly and without effort. ‘God knows what they find to talk about when they’re together all day,’ he thought, but the flow never failed and, as far as he knew, never had since they had first become friends.

It was a source of great satisfaction to Kitty and Jane that marriage had made no difference to their staunch and usually unquarrelsome friendship. If George had not liked Jane it would have been very awkward, but, fortunately, he not only liked her but in quite a short space of time had included her in the rather small circle of those for whom he felt real affection.

This morning, in spite of the quite abnormal vivacity of his wife, who was plying Jane with eager questions about life at Craigrois—for one reason or another Kitty had never met her friend’s people—entirely forgetful of the embargo on conversation, he was sorry that Jane was going. Kitty would miss her and so would he; besides, apart from being fond of Jane, he always had a feeling that she kept Kitty out of mischief as far, that is, as Kitty could be kept. The feminine voices continued, and he growled, savagely spearing the last sausage on to his plate:

That infernal animation of yours ought to be made a criminal offence, Kit.

"Oh! I quite forgot, darling! cried Kitty. Have some more coffee? I do think it’s hard, when I always feel so gay in the mornings, that I should have to bottle it up because I married a morose man."

Gay! said her husband, and groaned.

It’s my fault too, George dear, said Jane penitently. I started to talk about the family, and I get quite eloquent on that subject.

George groaned again. You do. All the same, he added with an air of generosity, "you aren’t naturally so disgustingly cheerio at breakfast as Kitty. Frail but bright is the way I’d describe you. He threw down his napkin, glanced at his watch, and exclaiming: Good God! Is that the time? I shall be late!" dashed from the room, overturning his chair and leaving the door wide open.

The girls loped after him to take their part in the daily uproar known as ‘getting George off.’

My gloves. My cap! he shouted from the garage, above the angry burrings and whirrings which told of Kitty’s struggle with an unwilling self-starter.

Here they are. Jane pressed the brown leather gloves and uniform cap into his hands.

"My stick, my pipe. My pipe! Anguish rang loud in the last word. My tobacco!"

Here’s the stick and the pipe. I can’t find your pouch. I’ll look again, promised the breathless Jane and fled indoors to search wildly through the bungalow. It did not seem possible that six rooms, including bath, could have so many hidey-holes; but, of course, the bedroom occupied by George and Kitty, which at present looked as if it had been recently wrecked by a tornado, might have harboured any amount of lost property. Pages of the Daily Mail, entwined in George’s pyjamas and yesterday’s shirt, lay about the floor, shoes and socks and ties were heaped on the tumbled bed, a bath-towel hung over the dressing-table mirror. ‘And they say sailors are tidy!’ muttered Jane disgustedly, stirring a pile of garments with her foot. ‘A dozen pouches might be adrift among this mess, but it’d take me all day to find them!’

Jane! Hi, Jenny! called George, his voice echoing through the length and breadth of the house. Aren’t you coming out to see me off? I’ve got my pouch.

With a shrug and a laugh, Jane went out to the gate as Kitty drove the car competently into the road, steering clear of the dustbins ranged for emptying at the edge of the kerb.

Oh, by the way, you’ll have to get my tin trousers down from the loft, said George, as his wife climbed out and he took her place. The C.-in-C.’s dining in Barracks this evening, and we’ve all got to be there, of course.

This evening? wailed Kitty. Oh, George! My sherry party! Our last party for Jane!

Can’t help it, said George with masculine brutality.

Won’t they be able to come at all? Jane asked. She and Kitty hugged each other in a fever of anxiety while they waited to hear the verdict.

Oh, yes, but they can’t stay long, and they’ll all feel damned fools, dressed to dine in Mess, was George’s cheerful reply. He let in the clutch and roared above the roar of the engine something that sounded ominously like: John Marsh can’t manage it, anyhow. Good-bye!

The car shot off down the long hill which led through Chatham to the Naval Barracks, leaving the two girls to stare sadly after it.

Well! said Kitty