Susan Settles Down Read online

  Molly Clavering

  Susan Settles Down

  “Don’t, please, write and tell me that we’re mad. I know it already; and even if I didn’t, every friend we possess has pointed it out. My spirit is quailing at the prospect of life at Easter Hartrigg, because I know what pitiful figures we shall cut as landowners in a country quite strange to us.”

  Young Susan Parsons has just moved, with her unmarried brother Oliver, to a newly-inherited property in the Scottish Highlands. Their neighbours prove a mixed bag, including the towering, kindly Jed Armstrong, a farmer whose land ‘marches with’ theirs, the local vicar and his family, and the three gossipy Pringle sisters, who travel by donkey-drawn cart and get their knives into one and all. After a bumpy start, with a disagreeable cook and her nincompoop daughter as their only help, Susan and Oliver begin to settle in nicely, and find themselves in the midst of romance, confusion, and earthy hilarity.

  Molly Clavering was for many years the neighbour and friend of bestselling author D.E. Stevenson, and they may well have influenced one another’s writing. First published in 1936 (under the pseudonym B. Mollett) and out of print for more than 80 years, Susan Settles Down is one of her most cheerful and vivid romantic comedies. This new edition features an introduction by Elizabeth Crawford.

  FM65

  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

  About the Author

  Titles by Molly Clavering

  Furrowed Middlebrow

  Copyright

  Introduction

  ‘A jolly Lowland fling’, was the verdict of the Birmingham Gazette (1 April 1936) on Susan Settles Down, neatly placing the novel in southern Scotland, while indicating that it was one to lighten the spirits. Molly Clavering had already published three novels under her own name but, after a gap of six years, was now re-launched as ‘B. Mollett’. The change of name was most likely a whim of her new publisher, indicating neither, it would seem, any desire for privacy or change of style or genre. Whether writing as ‘B. Mollett’ or as herself, Molly Clavering centres her fiction on life in the Scottish countryside, with occasional forays into Edinburgh, the novels reflecting the society of the day, with characters drawn from all strata, their gradations finely delineated, the plots fuelled by sherry parties and small-town gossip, rendered on occasion very effectively in demotic Scots. She is peculiarly adept at describing, in all seasons, the scenery and atmosphere of the Borders, the area in which she eventually chose to settle.

  For Molly Clavering had been born, on 23 October 1900, in Glasgow, the eldest child of John Mollett Clavering (1858-1936) and his wife, Esther (1874-1943). Named ‘Mary’ for her paternal grandmother, she 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 from an office in central Glasgow, brokering both iron and grain, by 1911 the family had moved to the Stirlingshire countryside 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. Happily, her mother, while also entirely supportive, balanced paternal adulation with a perhaps necessary element of gentle criticism. In these early years Molly 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 she later admitted 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. Always sociable, she took an active interest in local activities, particularly in the Girl Guides, with which her sister Esther, until her tragically early death in 1926, was also involved. Although friends from later life never remember Molly speaking of Esther, she did use her name (which was also that of her mother and grandmother) in several novels. For instance, in Susan Settles Down ‘Esther’ is the name Molly gives to Peggy Cunningham’s dead sister.

  During these years at home Molly not only acted as an officer for the Girl Guides Association but was able to put her literary talents to fund-raising effect for them by writing scenarios for two ambitious Scottish history pageants. The first, in which she took the pivotal part of ‘Fate’, was staged in Stirlingshire in 1929, with a cast of 500. However, for the second in 1930 she moved south and wrote the ‘Border Historical Pageant’ in aid of the Roxburgh Girl Guides. Performed at Minto House, Roxburghshire, in the presence of royalty, 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. Novels such as Susan Settles Down drew on her knowledge of Border society, high and low, the introduction of a novelist, ‘Susan Parsons’, into the life of a Border village perhaps reflecting an element of personal desire. Like the author, ‘Susan’ is in her mid-thirties and apparently destined for spinsterhood before moving to ‘Muirsfoot’ and embarking on a new way of life.

  During the remainder of the 1930s Molly Clavering published three further novels as ‘B. Mollett’ before, on the outbreak of the Second World War, joining the Women’s Royal Naval Service, 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 to the Navy it is noticeable that even in her pre-war novels, such as Susan Settles Down, many of the most attractive male characters are associated with the Senior Service.

  After she was demobbed Molly did follow in the footsteps of the heroine of Susan Settles Down and moved to the Borders, setting up home in Moffat, the Dumfriesshire town in which her great-grandfat
her had been a doctor. She shared ‘Clover Cottage’, a more modest establishment than Susan’s ‘Easter Hartrigg’, 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. The latter’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’. Molly’s love of the area was made evident in her only non-fiction book, From the Border Hills (1953).

  During these post-war years Molly Clavering continued her work with the Girl Guides, serving for nine years as County Commissioner, was president of the local Scottish Country Dance Association, and active in the Women’s Rural Institute (meetings of which feature in many of her novels). 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. She continued writing, publishing seven more novels, as well as a steady stream of the stories 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.

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

  1

  Sunday was the busiest day of the seven at the Manse of Muirfoot. In her rare moments of rebellion Peggy Cunningham, the minister’s daughter, sometimes thought it was the longest and dreariest. Waking early one dark Monday morning in January, her first feeling of thankfulness that the so-called day of rest was behind her for another week was tempered by the remembrance that this particular Sunday had been drearier than usual. Bun and Colin had gone south to their other grandparents by the night express, and would not be back at the Manse for six months.

  Peggy’s heart sank. Six months . . . ! Tiresome though her nephew and niece, children of her elder sister who had married and since died in India, could be on occasion, they certainly added interest and variety to life, especially to Peggy. She played with them, bathed and dressed them, taught them elementary lessons in an unconventional but effective manner of her own, and grudged every minute that they spent with their father’s parents, the Richardsons, in Hampshire. Of course it was fair enough; they were Christopher’s children as well as Elspeth’s; but somehow Peggy was illogically but firmly convinced that “the Infantry” really belonged to the Manse, and were only on loan during their six months in England. They had no young aunt to play with there, and a girl of six, a little boy of not quite four, must surely be happier running wild in a place like Muirfoot, than carefully watched over by an expensive nurse on the crowded sands of a south-coast seaside resort, or going for guarded walks along prim English roads. Be that as it may, the Infantry were shared with scrupulous fairness between the two sets of grandparents, and until July, Peggy would have to resign herself to their absence, softened by an occasional letter in staggering script to “Deer pegy” from Bun, adorned with Colin’s row of enormous crosses. . . . She sighed and wriggled farther down under her sheets and blankets until only the tip of her nose could be nipped by the chill air stealing in at the faint grey oblong which was her open window. At least it was Monday.

  Breakfast brought a little compensation in the shape of a piece of news.

  “I hear,” said Mr. Cunningham, as he finished his porridge and cream, “that the new owner of Easter Hartrigg has arrived.”

  He was not disappointed of the mild sensation he had hoped to cause. With one accord his wife and daughter stopped eating and gave him their undivided attention.

  “Who is he, James?” asked Mrs. Cunningham.

  And: “Tell us, father, quickly!” begged his daughter, her blue eyes alight with interest.

  “Well . . .” began Mr. Cunningham deliberately, and with what seemed to Peggy infuriating slowness, “He’s a godson of old Sir Hugh Blackburn, and used to be a sailor, or so I heard.”

  “A sailor!” from Peggy, charming memories of the “Flag Lieutenant,” “The Middle Watch,” and stories by Bartimeus thronging her romantic mind.

  Mrs. Cunningham said: “He’ll not be coming to live at Easter Hartrigg, though, James? Won’t he just let the house again?”

  “Not at all. Not at all. He means to live there. He told Jed Armstrong so.”

  “That house will require a lot done to it before anyone else lives there,” Mrs. Cunningham said. “The Morgans really neglected it shamefully. And as for the garden, it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “He told Jed Armstrong he hadn’t a penny,” said the minister doubtfully. “But maybe that would only be his way of talking. I’m sure I hope so, for his own sake, poor fellow, as well as for the place.”

  “Oh, well, some people’s idea of not having a penny is riches to others,” answered Mrs. Cunningham. “And if he is really meaning to settle down at Easter Hartrigg he must have something.”

  “Time will tell.” Mr. Cunningham’s conversation frequently consisted of platitudes, which the good man uttered as if for the first time. “Now, Peggy, is that my tea beside you? Pass it up, my dear, before it gets stone cold.”

  Peggy, with an obedient start, passed the large cup of strong milky tea, generously sweetened, to her father. But though she did so, though she mechanically ate and drank, her thoughts were far away from the breakfast-table, picturing a figure, blend of Prosper le Gai and all the sailor heroes of fiction about whom she had read. Life, even without the Infantry, began to assume a faintly roseate hue.

  While she was supposed to be making the beds, she spent some minutes in surveying herself earnestly in her mother’s wardrobe mirror, since she had only a small round one, dim with age, in her own room. The sight of her ingenuous healthily pink face, framed in hair of dull gold, failed to please her. It was far too round, far too childish. “Babyish” was the term she herself applied to it. In fact, with her slender unformed figure and lack of height, she looked even younger than her nineteen years.

  “No one could possibly realize how grown-up I feel inside,” she thought ruefully, and wished she could look like the heroine of a novel. As it was, the only heroine she resembled at all, and that in nothing but appearance, was Amelia Sedley, a young woman for whom she had felt the utmost contempt since she had first read “Vanity Fair” at the ripe age of twelve.

  The sound of a voice floated up to her from the hall below, “Peggy! Are you not nearly done yet?” With guilty haste she turned from the mirror and started to make the wide old-fashioned bed in which her parents spent their placid nights. Still the glimpses of herself which she caught from time to time offended her, and with sudden irritation she picked up her mother’s crimson ripple-cloth dressing-gown and threw it so that it hung right over the wardrobe, completely hiding the looking-glass.

  She had smoothed down the white counterpane and was laying the quilt over it when Mrs. Cunningham came in.

  “Oh, you are finished,” she said. “I began to think you were never coming. Your father wants you to go a message for him, and—Mercy me! What’s my dressing-gown doing up there?”

  Peggy, her cheeks as red as the garment in question, mumbled something incoherently, and tugged vainly at the dressing-gown.

  “It won’t come down,” she said at last.

  “So I see,” said her mother drily. “I’d like to know how it got up! No, don’t drag at it, you’ll only tear it. Stand on a chair—not that one, Peggy! The cover’s clean. . . .”

  By the time the
dressing-gown had been freed and hung on its rightful hook behind the door, Peggy was too breathless to bother about her own appearance or that of the unknown who had come to Easter Hartrigg. Meekly she listened to her father’s message, and sticking a navy-blue beret on her head without troubling to see what it looked like, she shrugged herself into her old school overcoat and went out.

  2

  The Manse of Muirfoot was set, as a good shepherd’s dwelling should be, where it overlooked the houses of his flock without seeming to interfere with that flock on its lawful occasions. Half-way along the village, which consisted only of a straggling double row of cottages, facing each other across the road, a high wall, pierced by a gateway, marked the ministerial out-buildings. These were substantial, and included a barn, lofts, and stable, used to house the minister’s cow and horse in the more pastoral days of other centuries, now occupied only by sacks of hens’ food, lawn-mowers of advanced age, and during the vacations, when he was home from Cambridge, the somewhat noisome motor-bicycle of Peggy’s only brother, Jim. The Manse itself was further separated from the road by a pleasant expanse of green lawn, and the rose-garden which was Mr. Cunningham’s pride and delight. Directly opposite the gate was the post office, a small cottage with an old thatched roof, and by craning his neck a little from a window in the upper passage of his house, the minister could see, had he wanted to, whoever entered or left the solitary public-house.

  But Muirfoot was a well-behaved, douce place, and the post office rather than the Kirkhouse Inn was the real centre of its social and commercial activities. By watching that doorway it was possible to know exactly what was going on in the village, and Mrs. Davidson, the indefatigable post-mistress, occupied a strategic position of whose importance she was perfectly aware.