Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge —changing times
Hostages to Fortune — my latest selection from the TBR Book Jar — is a quietly reflective novel about the life of a doctor’s wife in a rural village in the early part of the twentieth century. Through it, Elizabeth Cambridge shows the frustrations and challenges of marriage and parenthood; the sheer exhaustion of raising small children and running a household on limited income.
The novel begins with a birth. Doctor’s wife Catherine is initially disappointed to have delivered a girl for “...who wanted girls, now, in the middle of a war? Catherine had never believed in the equality of the sexes. Women simply did not have the same chance as men. Nature had seen to that.” But once the child is in her arms her attitude changes to one of “Love, deep, impersonal and compassionate.”
In 1917, when her husband William is invalided home from the war in France, they move to a rambling house in Oxfordshire where he begins in practice as a GP. Two more children follow — Adam and Bill — taking every ounce of Catherine’s time and energy. William isn’t much use because he’s exhausted through long days and nights serving the medical needs of multiple villages. Even when his wife reaches the point of desperation that she will ever get the children to understand the basics of reading and writing, he tells her she just has to do her best, and goes off to his surgery.
As the children grow up and become opinionated teenagers, new challenges and anxieties arise about how they will make their way in the world. Catherine constantly frets about them but by the end of the novel, she accepts she’s done all she can as a mother. It’s time to let her offspring make decisions for themselves as people in their own right, not merely extensions of herself and William.
I’ve made mistakes. I’ve been angry. I haven’t often understood what I was doing for the children. But I’ve loved them. I’ve had a wonderful time. ….. I used to think it would never be over … the bringing them up, the endless work … But all the time I was enjoying it/ And now I must sit back, out of the way. Not grab nor claim, not tryi to insist on what they do and what they are.
Hostages to Fortune doesn’t have a plot as such; the novel is essentially a tale about relationships and small domestic events set against a background of broader social changes. It’s an episodic narrative built through vignettes of family life at home and in their relationships with local villagers.
This was Elizabeth Cambridge’s first novel, its content drawn from her own life as a country doctor’s wife. it explains why Hostages to Fortune captures so clearly the difficulties of life in the countryside in the years after the war when “everyone was worried, underfed and and under strain. … The War was over, but the nightmare went on. “
The domestic elements were interesting up to a point. i became rather tired of the endless details of each child’s personality and what they liked/disliked doing to keep themselves amused. Far more interesting was the sense of time passing bringing fundamental changes to the traditions and way of life of rural people.
Green spaces give way to houses; horse drawn carriages and rough tracks are replaced by cars and smooth black roads. The scourge of litter begins to make its mark as motorists drive through, leaving torn newspaper, banana skins, broken bottles and cigarette cartons in their wake along the verges. its effect of change on nature that has the deepest effect on Catherine and her children however.
Trees Catherine and William had grown to love and look for were cut down. They missed the familiar print of their boughs upon the sky in winter and the blocks of shade upon the wayside grass in June. It seemed to be nobody’s business to replant although in the open country the loss of a tree was as remarkable as the loss of a house or a hill.
That was written in the early 1930s yet the sentiment is one that is still felt today. I live in a rural village which has almost doubled in size in the last twenty years as field upon field has been given over to housing developments. I know people need some place to live, but I do so miss the hedgerows and the sight of cows grazing in the fields I drove past on my way to work.
This was one of my first Persephones and I really loved it – I suppose it was also one of my first introductions to mid-century domestic novels.
My little village seems to be protected from building for some reason, and I’m grateful that (so far) I have nice views in every direction. But the village I grew up in is now so crowded with mini housing estates- what makes me sad is they’re always 3-5 bed homes, so nothing for young people trying to get on the property ladder.
Yes that’s happening here too. I had an arguement with a council official over the amount of building they are allowing on greenfield sites (despite their declaration of a climate emergency). She said people need affordable homes – so I pointed out that the houses on the latest development were selling at £400K. Affordable? I think not
I suspect that I would feel like you about this. I love a book which captures a period long gone, but I might have found the focus on the individual children etc too much. It’s always a balancing act!
I skipped some of the pages where it was just going on about the kids. I was much more interested in hearing about the countryside and village life
I was thinking, won’t writers ever leave WWI alone! and it slowly dawned on me the writer was writing about her own times, a different situation altogether. I’m not sure how I feel about change. I remember open paddocks in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs and horse drawn milk carts (and rattly old trains), and I hate trees being removed. Apart from anything else, it makes the place hotter. But as Suzuki pointed out, the world’s population is going to keep doubling every few decades and they all have to go somewhere.
People do need to live somewhere – I just wish the planners would stop giving permission to build on fields when there are large swathes of former industrial land just lying unused. It all comes down to money – it costs the developers more to tackle any pollution on those sites.
There’s nothing more calculated to get us to appreciate the scale and pace of change in the possibly dim and distant past than experiencing it ourselves in a more recent past. We’re of an age to smile at Gen Z which expresses incredulity that there was a time before mobile phones and flat screen televisions …
If you watch any quiz programmes on TV , there are an extraordinary number of occasions where a contestant will say they can’t answer a question because “it’s before my time”, as if nothing that happened outside their life time has any value in knowing or understanding
I agree with the two previous comments, and I too am now tempted to give this one a go.
I think you’d like it Margaret.
Noted! Thanks.
I haven’t got over the loss of my vista. In the very early mornings, as I ate my breakfast, the dawn would come creeping across my line of sight out of the French windows. Now there is a double-storey duplex in the way. We have planted trees to obscure the sight of it, but we can’t get the dawn back.
That’s awful Lisa. Good. idea to try and block out the sight of the duplex; it would have reminded you every day of what you missed.
This sounds very poignant–the trees quote esp. I love “my” trees so understand. I could completely relate to that quote about parenting and what you wrote: “It’s time to let her offspring make decisions for themselves as people” Oh, is that hard! Very good review. I’ll probably read this one since your review hit points that resonated with me.
It certainly is poignant at times, lots of small scenes which are quite touching