Near Neighbours Read online

  Molly Clavering

  Near Neighbours

  Miss Dorothea Balfour was nearer seventy than sixty, but there was something childlike about her . . . She felt rather like a child, a lost, bewildered child, and she was doing what Belle had always objected to so strongly: staring out of the window at ‘those rather odd persons next-door’ . . .

  Shy, uncertain Miss Balfour is still finding her way after the sudden death of her domineering sister Belle, who—following a failed marriage many years ago—had returned home and made a career of brow-beating her meeker sibling (her memorable final words were ‘Don’t be a fool Dottie’). But Dorothea soon begins exploring her newfound freedom, observing and then becoming happily enmeshed in the doings of her neighbours, the widowed Mrs Lenox and her five unusual and charming children, with whom Belle had always forbidden contact. Domestic challenges, romantic difficulties, and efforts to aid a painter’s abandoned family—all are facilitated by Dorothea’s calm intelligence. And before long she has drama of her own, from her spontaneous rescue of an endangered child to her encounter with Belle’s long-lost husband, from whom she learns some surprising secrets.

  Molly Clavering was for many years herself a near neighbour and friend of bestselling author D.E. Stevenson, and they may well have influenced one another’s writing. Originally published in 1956 and set vividly in post-war Edinburgh, Near Neighbours is one of Molly Clavering’s most cheerful and amusing tales. This new edition includes an introduction by Elizabeth Crawford.

  FM72

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Elizabeth Crawford

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  About the Author

  Titles by Molly Clavering

  Furrowed Middlebrow

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Near Neighbours is unlike most of Molly Clavering’s novels, being set in a city, Edinburgh, rather than in a small Scottish Border town or village. Its theme, however, is one constant to all her fiction, summed up by the reviewer in the Liverpool Evening Express in the phrase ‘an absorbing tale of family life’. Near Neighbours brings together two contrasting households, that of the rumbustious Lenox family, five young people and their war-widowed mother, and that of their next-door-neighbour, elderly Miss Dorothea Balfour, who, with the death of her gorgon of a sister, has now, for the first time, control over her own life. With this change of circumstance, a fresh synergy sweeps these individuals along, allowing them to carve out new paths through Life, while giving us a glimpse of a world that has all but vanished.

  It is notable that in all Molly Clavering’s novels, if one of the Scottish principal cities is to be visited, it is Edinburgh rather than Glasgow that is the destination of choice. Yet it was in Glasgow, on 23 October 1900, that Molly was born, the eldest child of John Mollett Clavering (1858-1936) and his wife, Esther (1874-1943). She was named ‘Mary’ for her paternal grandmother, but 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 in central Glasgow, brokering both iron and grain, by 1911 the family had moved 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 she 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 later admitting 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, the year following the tragically early death of her sister, Esther. Always sociable, Molly took a lively interest in local activities, particularly in the Girl Guides, for whom she was able to put her literary talents to fund-raising effect by writing scenarios for two ambitious Scottish history pageants. The first, in which she took the pivotal part of ‘Fate’, was staged in 1929 in Stirlingshire, with a cast of 500. However, for the second, in 1930, she moved south and in aid of the Roxburgh Girl Guides wrote the ‘Border Historical Pageant’. Performed in the presence of royalty at Minto House, Roxburghshire, 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, on occasion, attending a hunt ball.

  In the late 1920s Molly published two further novels under her own name and then, in the 1930s, another four as ‘B. Mollett’. The last of these was published in 1939 and then, on the outbreak of the Second World War, she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service, eventually achieving the rank of second officer, 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, it would appear that the Navy had long had an appeal for Molly, as many of her male characters are associated with the Senior Service.

  After she was demobbed Molly moved to the Borders, to Moffat, the Dumfriesshire town where her great-grandfather had been a doctor, and in 1953 published a paean to the surrounding countryside. This, From the Border Hills, was her only work of non-fiction. She published seven further novels in the post-war years, 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.

  Published in 1956, Near Neighbours was Molly’s fourth post-war novel, the close knowledge of Edinburgh that sh
e demonstrated in it stemming from the fact that her mother had grown up in that city before marrying Glaswegian John Clavering. Esther Clavering had retained a flat at 1a St Bernard’s Crescent in Stockbridge, while her sister, Anne, lived with her husband at no. 3. Molly had dedicated her 1939 novel, Touch Not the Nettle, to this aunt, and had doubtless paid many visits to the two houses. Her description in Near Neighbours of ‘Kirkaldy Crescent’, ‘placed on the downward slope from Queensferry Street’, built originally as ‘a crescent, a half-moon of tall Regency houses with pillars on either side of each front door, which was further embellished by a semicircular fanlight above it, with wrought-iron balconies in front of the first-floor windows’, is a mirror of St Bernard’s Crescent, and even situates it close to a stream, in real life the Waters of Leith. The artist commissioned to create the original dust-wrapper image, reused on this reprint, could well have had St Bernard’s Crescent in mind.

  Although on occasion visiting Edinburgh, Molly was content to live in Moffat for the rest of her life, sharing ‘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. D.E. Stevenson’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.’

  For many years Molly played a prominent part in civic affairs. 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, was active in the Women’s Rural Institute, president of the local Scottish Country Dance Association, and served for nine years as County Commissioner for the Girl Guides.

  When Molly Clavering’s long and fruitful life finally ended on 12 February 1995 her obituary, written by Wendy Simpson, another of D.E. Stevenson’s granddaughters, cited exactly the attributes that characterise Molly Clavering’s novels, remembering her 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 1

  The elegant oval of Kirkaldy Crescent was placed on the downward slope from Queensferry Street with such consummate art that it looked as though it had arrived there by happy chance.

  When first built it had really been a crescent, a half-moon of tall Regency houses with pillars on either side of each front door, which was further embellished by a semicircular fanlight above it with wrought-iron balconies in front of the first-floor windows, and looking out over a green garden set with fine trees running right to the edge of a stream.

  The stream was still there, confined between stout railings above walls, but it would not have been visible to the Crescent, for the gardens had dwindled to a meagre lawn where the last of the trees still lifted sooty heads towards the sun, and the leafy distance was occupied by the other side of Kirkaldy Crescent.

  This other side was broken in two places by the entrances to side-streets, and it lacked the harmonious symmetry which made the older part of the Crescent such a pleasure to look at, but the houses were good, for all that, and it was they which had turned the half-moon into the beautiful oval spreading down the hill.

  As the nineteenth century progressed, town planning degenerated to a race to build enough houses for the ever-increasing population. Behind Kirkaldy Crescent, especially on the north or original side, there sprang up street after street of high ugly dwellings, which backed on to their high-walled strips of garden. Now the “other side”, saved by the stream from sharing this fate, could speak pityingly of “those dreadful slums” opposite, so close to their superior neighbours. Fortunately for them, none could look into the future. In their worst nightmares they never dreamed of the days to come, when almost every house on both sides of the Crescent would be convened into flats, and their roomy, beetle-haunted basements, once occupied by kitchen premises, became the abode of separate tenants, taxi-drivers who parked their cabs beside the garden railings in the centre of the oval, or bus conductors, and their noisy families.

  The changes wrought by two world wars brought this to pass, and of the whole stately Crescent only two houses remained unaltered. These were Number Six and its next-door neighbour Number Four, at the lower end of what the owners of Number Four still called “the good side of the Crescent”. Number Six hardly counted, for it had been bought cheap by a Mrs. Lenox, a widow with several children to bring up, who found the good schools in Edinburgh sufficient recompense for the dull neighbourhood.

  But Number Four was different. The Balfours had lived and died there for upwards of a hundred years; and now the last remaining member of the family was sitting crouched on the window-seat of the top-floor back room, staring down at the rectangular greens and gardens far below her.

  Miss Dorothea Balfour was nearer seventy than sixty, but there was something childlike about her, partly her undignified attitude, curled up as she was, partly her slight figure and the mouse-coloured hair which hardly showed any grey, taken back from a high wondering forehead to a small bun at the nape of her thin neck.

  She felt rather like a child, a lost, bewildered child, and she was doing what Belle had always objected to so strongly: staring out of the window at “those rather odd persons next-door, as if their washing could have any possible interest for you!”

  Almost she expected to hear the door open briskly behind her, and her elder sister’s sharp voice saying these words, and ending with the plaint, “Really, Dottie, I sometimes think you have no sense of what is fitting. If you must gaze out of the window in that imbecile fashion, at least you might look at the gardens in the Crescent.”

  But she would never hear Belle’s voice again. She would never see Belle looking down her handsome aquiline nose in disdain at her, for Belle was dead. The whole house still felt so full of Belle’s overpowering presence that Dorothea could not really believe it, though she had followed the motor hearse in a car with Mr. Ferrier, the lawyer, and old Doctor Kinnaird at a decorous pace through the sunny streets to the Crematorium only a few hours earlier. At the thought of the Crematorium Dorothea shivered.

  “I will not be cremated!” she said aloud, and after glancing guiltily and automatically over her shoulder, realized that there was no one left to decree how her bones should be disposed of: no one but herself. She could make a will and put in it that she wanted to lie in the little country kirkyard at Kersland, and the lawyers would have to see that this was done. How extraordinary, how unbelievable, to know that she could do as she wanted, without reference to Belle or Papa!

  For as long as she could remember, Dorothea had lived in a continual state of giving-in: to Papa at first, and after he died, to Belle. It had not been so bad while Mamma was alive to share this bondage, but during the last ten years, alone with Belle in the big gloomy house except for Edna far below in the basement, life had become almost unbearable. Belle’s temper, always domineering like Papa’s, had grown really shocking, and Dorothea had borne the brunt of it, for to have raged too openly at Edna might have driven that handmaid, long-suffering though she was, to give notice. So Belle called her a lazy slut (to Dorothea) and found fault with her up to a certain point, but beyond that she did not go. There was no need, however, for her to restrain herself where Dorothea was concerned.

  “She’ll be the death o’ you, Miss Dottie!” Edna exclaimed sometimes, after a more than ordinarily ferocious outburst, and Dorothea had thought this quite probable.

  But she had not. Instead, she had died herself. She had finished one of the enormous midday meals which she ate with such relish, fallen off her chair at table with her face all drawn sideways, and died in three days of a stroke.

  “I don’t want to think about it. I
won’t think about it!” said Dorothea, and turned again to the window which had been her solace ever since the room it lighted had been her nursery.

  The outlook had changed for the worse, with the streets of mean houses rising at the farther end of the long walled strips of garden belonging to the Crescent. Other rows of tall tenements ran at right angles to the end house, Number Two, away to the noisy main street where the electric tramcars bucketed clanging to and fro.

  When the sun caught the slate roofs after rain, they were touched momentarily to the sheeny purples and greens of a pigeon’s feathers, but there was only one thing of real and lasting beauty to be seen from Dorothea’s window, an ash-tree growing high and slender in the corner of the Balfours’ garden.

  It was interesting to watch the starlings and sparrows which chattered among its branches, but far more interesting were the glimpses of the teeming life in the grim-looking houses to the side of it. Sometimes, when the lights were switched on, as they had to be quite early in the afternoon, for these houses were dark, Dorothea could see right into the rooms.

  She would watch, absorbed, while the children rushed in from school, were given huge “pieces” of bread and jam, cut on a newspaper on the cluttered table, and rushed out again for their evening’s play in the streets. Later, when the men came home from work, she could see them hastily sluicing face and arms at the sink, eating the meal dumped before them on the same newspaper, and then settling with the sports edition, or following the children out, perhaps to the local pub, perhaps to go to “the dogs” by the bus that passed the end of the street. The girls, too, would drink tea and then mince off in their shoddy best; the older women seemed never to go out. They stayed behind in the hot bright rooms ironing, or washing, or occasionally doing nothing but sit, while the wireless blared and bleated unnoticed.