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.