In praise of Rumer Godden’s ‘An Episode of Sparrows’

There are some books, I realise, that we wait all our lives to discover; there are tales we have never heard that we long to be told.  For instance, I have long wished for a novel that tells of the ordinary lives of ordinary people so richly and compellingly as to make those lives seem momentous, as momentous as our own joys and sorrows are to ourselves — indeed, as momentous as they really are.  No stunts, no fireworks, no shock-tactics; simply the writer’s skill — and it would have to be a skilful writer — in depicting the heights and depths of lives the world calls unspectacular, and in showing how perfectly plausibly a miracle might, with soundless brilliance, burst into the mundane.  

Well, I have now found this book.  Somehow I had heard of neither its name, ‘An Episode of Sparrows’, nor its author, Rumer Godden (1907–1998), before I came across two articles about it (here and here) by Dorothy Cummings McLean (to whom I owe a debt of gratitude).  For indeed I have found it at last, and have spent the past week or so feeling rather as if I had been electrocuted.

Here are some of the many reasons why.  For one thing, there is the extraordinary challenge that Godden set herself from the very beginning: practically the entire novel is confined to two or three bomb-disfigured streets in the dilapidated but self-respecting London of the 1950s; specifically in a district strongly reminiscent of (though never explicitly identified as) Pimlico.  All the action, bar a few vignettes, is in or around the ‘gracious and imposing’ Mortimer Square and its more down-at-heel neighbour, Catford Street, running (with its ‘swarming vital houses’) from the High Street down to the river.  Narrow as these bounds may seem, the setting they contain is to prove more than ample.  The Street and the Square form a world of their own; even a world of worlds.  In the very opening sentence, our sense of scale is already being calibrated:

The Garden Committee had met to discuss the earth; not the whole earth, the terrestrial globe, but the bit of it that had been stolen from the Gardens in the Square.

For the briskly competent committee woman Angela Chesney, the unfolding narrative, the ‘episode of the sparrows’, initially presents simply another item to be crossed off her to-do list.  She is blind to its quiet significance, and at one moment of crisis accuses her lonely, regretful, listless older sister Olivia, who has taken a different view of things altogether, of is “making a mountain out of a molehill.”  Olivia’s answer is perhaps the crux of the whole book.  “A molehill can be a mountain to a sparrow,” she replies.  Beyond the Street and the Square many large things loom: the river, its ships and their sirens, the Power Station, the whole mass of London, the rest of the world.  Yet it is that tiny quantity of stolen earth which is to bring the story magnificently to its climax, just as a a single packet of cornflower seeds began it.

Who are the sparrows of the novel’s title?  They are the street children of Catford Street; specifically those aged between seven and about fifteen.  Ubiquitous but unnoticed, they ‘disappear into anonymity, camouflaged by the stones and bricks they played in’.  Even at the scale of this small sliver of London, their projects and squabbles merit no attention, for ‘they led a different life and scarcely anyone noticed them.’  But Rumer Godden notices them.  Moreover, she understands them; she teaches us again how to see and think as a child, as in a vivid street scene to which we are soon treated: Saturday morning on the High Street, as observed by sharp-eyed Sparkey, the newspaper-seller’s five-year-old son —

When the bus came it stopped just by Sparkey and sent out visible fumes of warmth and smell from under its red sides, it looked as if it were a real big animal breathing.  Sparkey watched the people file in; the bus looked comfortable with its paint, the pale steel of its handles, the glimpse of seats behind its glass.  It started with a harsh grinding noise, the people were carried away, and Sparkey’s mother rattled the coppers in the pocket of her big newspaper sling; she rattled them, thought Sparkey, because the conductor had rattled his in his bag.

‘Melodramatic’ is one word Godden applies to Sparkey; even before he can read he seems somehow to have imbibed the papers’ lurid headlines, and he gleefully terrorises other children with his blood-curdling tales.  Though sickly, he also aspires to a full and active membership of the boys’ street gangs — indeed, specifically of the toughest, his hero Tip Malone’s, for all that Tip is eight years his senior.  Yet even Tip is only one of a large Irish family living at number seventeen (“There can’t be more than nine,” Angela says), and his gang scarcely lacks competition in the streets round about.  Soon, though, we meet the sparrow par excellence: Lovejoy Mason, aged nearly eleven, who in spite of her saccharine name is a tough little nut, quite capable of scrapping and biting and spitting according to the law of Catford Street — though still not as tough or hard as all that, as we are to discover.  Her mother, a singer who between her bookings lodges at Vincent’s restaurant in Catford Street, is mostly absent from her daughter’s life; her father is simply never mentioned; Lovejoy herself is looked after to an extent by the restaurant’s owners, Vincent and Mrs. Combie, but even for them, as we are told, she is a ‘little extra tacked on’.  

Nevertheless, it is inside this little girl’s head that we are to spend most of the novel, among her words and thoughts.  Insignificant even among the insignificant sparrows, unremarked-on even in that unremarkable street, the doings and feelings of this wayward ‘little extra’ are set deliberately and carefully at the story’s centrepiece.  The most trifling of trifles, the world would consider them, but Rumer Godden makes them momentous.

Godden’s depiction of childhood is astonishingly lucid.  She conveys its enthusiasms and eagernesses, its frustrations and sorrows, its humour and simplicity; but also its powerlessness, its loneliness; the impossibility of finding solitude; the primal hierarchies, the ruthlessly-enacted instincts.  Godden knows the speech, too; the ‘pecking questions from sharp little beaks’, the interrogations which their victims can never hope to withstand — 

 ‘Where d’ya live?’ 
 ‘Two-hundred-and-three, Catford Street.’
 ‘That’s the rest’raunt.  No-one lives there.’ 
 ‘Mrs. Combie does,’ said Lovejoy.
 ‘Is Mrs. Combie your Mum?’ 
 ‘No, she’s not,’ said Lovejoy indignantly. 

 ‘Where is your Mum?’ 

 ‘She’s away.’ 

 And then one of the children would cry, ‘Don’t believe you’ve got a Mum.’ 

 ‘I have,’ but Lovejoy said it too fiercely and they would know and cry, ‘There’s something fishy about her Mum.’

Rumer Godden understands the dignity of children, and in this book they are as rich in character as any of the adults, with individual and distinctive, even complex, virtues and vices.  Lovejoy’s battle against her own vanity, for example, culminating in the hard choice she makes over her red shoes, forms a tiny sub-plot, easily missed, but it is there.  We are reminded of important and easily-forgotten truths: that a ten-year-old can be nostalgic for a lost past, that children are often highly principled and serious by nature; that they notice small details and are generally able to see right through dissimulation; and again, above all, that ‘a molehill can be a mountain to a sparrow’.  She renders the relationship — or the gulf — between children and adults with the same striking realism, at one point evoking with terrible accuracy ‘the dreadful power of grown-ups, the power and the knowledge’.  There is one particular moment, at a crucial juncture in the tale, when a Literary Discussion group, the sort of thing that Godden would have known herself and her own readers to enjoy, is made to appear so hilariously, so tragically irrelevant, so frivolous — one could almost say childish — with its silly little dainty salmon sandwiches — which Vincent could have provided, you poor blind fools! — that the adult reader can perceive it as a child would.  We feel in our bones once again how unimportant and how stupid a roomful of chattering grown-ups appears to a child’s eye — especially by comparison to a mountainous molehill.

The book’s main characters are children: is it a children’s book?  Not straightforwardly so.  It is true that many reviewers on the Goodreads website attest to having read and loved it at a young age; the children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, who encountered it aged ten, says it was the first book that ever made her cry.  I could well believe it; all the same, I would not say it was primarily a book for children.  I sense that it is grown-ups who should read it most urgently; who have more to gain from it; more to learn.

There are other reviews, too, that call the book ‘sweet’ and ‘charming’ — but its taste is far deeper and more lingering than that.  Most of the time it is at least as bitter as it is sweet.  The worldly powers in the tale are real and threatening and seemingly closing in all the time; and then there are the dangers from within, people about to be undone by their own folly or short-sightedness or plain weakness.  Injustices gross and petty, self-interest, destitution, betrayal: all loom large even when they do not actually do their worst.  There are misunderstandings, too — and how acutely Godden understands misunderstandings, both the everyday and the catastrophic, the tragedy in them as well as the comedy, showing how easily hurt can be done with how few hardly-meant, careless words.  And even apart from mere misunderstandings, the tale has some truly agonising moments.  The book does admittedly now carry a sepia overtone that it would not have had when first published in 1955 — in that ‘street children’ are now more or less an extinct species in British cities, and there are now cruelties in modern Western childhood worse even than those of Catford Street — but still, this is certainly not, as it could easily have been, a merely sentimental book.  Just as easily it could have been a gritty nihilistic desolation, but the author steers adroitly in between.

It is not only the plot that lends this book its power, but Godden’s remarkable prose style.  Writing as if she herself had lived in the street for years, using the definite article and proper nouns to create a seemingly well-established and long-familiar world, she has a neat way of interlacing dialogue and description, whereby she quotes constantly from her own characters, using their words to set the scene as well as to unfold the plot.  Few of the characters are ever short of words, but the narrator deftly clarifies their meaning if needed: she and her cast seem to be helping each other to tell the story.  Some might dismiss this technique as a conceit, but to me it seemed completely natural and entirely convincing.  It has several considerable advantages: it enlivens the descriptive passages, often with a dash of humour; it whets our anticipation by hinting at future developments in the plot; it allows a momentary scene to linger for a little while without dragging; and also, over the course of the whole book, it has the effect of building up the characters so wonderfully richly that by the end we have come to know them, as we do real people, mainly through their own words — or the kinds of things they say — even if we do not quite remember exactly when or why they said them.  This makes the novel something else altogether that I have long hoped to read: a tale doubling as a tapestry of rich character portraits.  (The characters have such depth, such an aura of their own, that Godden can even speak of what they ‘might have said’ or ‘would have thought’, as one might of a real person).

And her ear for dialogue is flawless, allowing for brilliant little flashbacks and snippets of conversation which add to the novel’s beautiful depth without strain on the reader.  There is her eye for detail, too; her descriptive brush-strokes are fine and bold and unerring.  Every individual character, however minor or fleeting, has a name, and the world of the Street and the Square is lavish with smells and sounds and sensations: the barren rubbly wasteland of a bomb-site, the ‘apricot’ light shining invitingly from Vincent’s restaurant at night, or the crushing sunshine of a London summer, ‘white and mercilessly bright’.

All this takes place, too, against a backdrop of countless vividly-drawn contrasts: between the rich and the poor, the large and the small, cleanliness and dirt, strength and weakness, noise and peace.  And between still profounder opposites: age and youth, Adam and Eve, the spiritual and the earthly, innocence and guilt, power and love.  The contrasts are not simplistic, either.  For instance, the faded Square is no longer as rich as it once was, nor is the Street quite as poor.  Nor even is it simply the case that the children are innocent while the adults are guilty.  The young characters are quite capable of duplicity and manipulation, to say nothing of violence.  We hear Lovejoy described variously as a ‘marauder’ and a ‘tyrant’; Tip as a ‘dictator’; we laugh, but Godden is only half-joking.  With an extraordinary subtlety the novel records how the tense, serious, fastidious Lovejoy (whom Mrs. Combie’s dreadful sister Cassie even mocks as ‘an old woman’ at one point) actually recovers an innocence that almost nobody realises she had lost, shedding age that has grown over her before her years, so that she becomes something like a healthy child again.  Tip has had a happier start to life than Lovejoy, and received a stronger moral formation, but even this brings with it unexpected and insidious temptations: to vindictiveness, even to a kind of pharisaism which is depicted with extraordinary subtlety.  And yet, in spite of the hardness of their surroundings, in spite even of themselves, and in a way without realising it, these two bring into being something ‘careful and innocent’, as Olivia is to call it.  The Garden of Eden is almost remade in Catford Street.  One of the many things this novel does is to affirm the tenacity of innocence and wonder, growing green and fierce against the forces of cynicism and nihilism.

Finally, this is also, in my view — though Rumer Godden was not received into the Church until fourteen years after writing it — a profoundly Catholic novel.  It contains that rare thing (in English-speaking literature at least), a recognisable and reasonably sympathetic portrait of the Church.  The church of Our Lady of Sion, having been bombed in the war, now consists merely of a ‘makeshift and gimcrack’ substitute put up hurriedly amid the ruins.  The parish is hopelessly short of money, materially on its beam end — and yet it is exactly where it should be, down among the poor and the poorest of the poor: the sparrows, whom Olivia remembers are sold for three farthings, ‘and yet not one should fall to the ground without your Father knowing...’  And there are other lines of Scripture, not all explicitly mentioned, that come to mind: ‘the kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed’... ‘blessed are the poor in spirit’... ‘a sword shall pierce your heart also’...  The sacramentality of plain objects, the earthiness of the miraculous, the gently chastening wisdom, the keen moral sense equally alive to justice and to mercy, the obstinate concern for the smallest and humblest... all suffuse the book with an unobtrusive but unmistakeable spirituality.  

All these qualities this novel has — its masterful craftsmanship, its piercing and compassionate morality, its cinematic detail, its rejoicing in particularity — and yet there is a curious weightlessness about it.  It is never prim or ponderous; it wears its profoundness as lightly as spring leaves.  So natural are its pace, its dialogue and the cadences of its prose that we hardly notice them, and meanwhile its understated brilliance and quiet urgency creep up on us, waiting to dawn silently but overwhelmingly in the mind and heart.  Is there anything at all wrong with this book?  If there is, I will write about it once I have come down to earth — earth about which I shall think differently from now on.