The Five Grey Geese

From "Our Tuesday Book Feature" in Evening Express (Liverpool, Merseyside, England), 20 Feb 1945:

Flowers and birds and the daily life of the Fens, written with an authentic touch of the country. Tells how March came and worked on the land and conquered - falling in love not only with the local doctor, but also with the life of the countryside. A bit prosy but succeeds by its simple sincerity.

[Photo from ABE listing] I discovered The Five Grey Geese, like so many of the titles here, through Scott's wonderful "The Furrowed Middlebrow" blog. There, he describes it as "A cheerful romance about five young women in the Land Army" and, in other entries, as: "a quite silly, yet charming, novel about five impossibly chipper Land Girls finding adventure and love during World War II" and "a lively, gung-ho tale". After finishing it, I'd have to ask him: what on earth are you reading otherwise that "cheerful" "silly" and "chipper" come to mind with this one? :D It's kind of got D.E. Stevenson The Four Graces vibes, but without the humor and with way more death (like, 6 deaths of named characters -- mostly violent -- 7 if you count the pet raven) and angst. It's like Graces crossed with George Stewart's The Storm (published in 1941 so Turk may even have read it): at least half eco-novel about the way people are shaped by the land, even as they shape it, and how the physical world -- in this case, the river -- is a dominating personality in the collective lives of the people around it. Much of the latter half of the book, like Storm, is about a constellation of meteorological events that result in natural -- and human -- disaster (and salvation). There's a touch of magic realism: the appearance of five grey geese flying in a line portends, as it has in the past, "some tremendous happening" -- disaster on the river, of course. But not just disaster: the girls, too, are five grey geese, and their coming to Pollington Stacey heralds immense change to the village and in their own lives. There's a romance, for each, (being the 40s, and popular fiction, all heterosexual) but that's not really the focus. It's more about five very different young women -- pushed or pulled out of their home surroundings -- who come to understand and appreciate each other. Grey Geese passes the Bechdel test in spades, and there are several beautiful lines about female friendship. One of my favorites, from early in the book: "They accepted each other as they found her. They had no hard and fast rules. They were all women together and they understood the different desires with no thought of condemnation." Interestingly, as Turk has the girls, in keeping with village tradition become known, and address each other, by their last names, and because the work they do is traditionally, masculine, and because they are, in Gardner (attributed) terms, the "stranger" that "comes to town" a layer of gender is stripped out. This allows to Turk to, in their interactions with the men in the village, give readers a glimpse of what the world might have been like if men and women met each other on an even playing field and respected each other for their skills and talents as individuals. There's one scene where, in a deadly emergency, a man finds himself wishing, momentarily, that one of the women were there, instead of him, to deal with it: she's not his love interest -- instead, her personality and competence have brought her almost desperately to mind. I've not seen this in any other vintage light fiction. Of course, there's a lot of idealization, too, and some really overwrought dialogue -- it wouldn't be a vintage read without it -- and it really should have come with an interior map because all the villages and flats and rivers and banks and cuts and locks gets really confusing. And I'm not sure the fen residents would really appreciate Turk's characterization (salt-of-the-earth, but uneducated, small-minded, stubborn, gossipy, superstitious -- the usual rural stereotyping). But it's an interesting read that pulls you along in its emotional -- and literal -- currents. And it inspired me to learn more about the different four types of wetlands (marshes, swamps, fens and bogs) -- like, how to distinguish them -- which is cool. I would read more of her books.

Flags: Brief but particularly cruel ableist comment, jarring for coming out of nowhere and from the most sensitive, intelligent character. Pet killed.