The Grass Is Singing

Finished November 13 

The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing

This novel was one I was due to read with my book club this year, but plans changed. I decided to read it anyway since I had it on my shelves. 

To me this reads as a tragedy. The main character here Mary, grew up in South Africa and Rhodesia, moving around to different stations with her parents. Theirs was not a happy marriage, and Mary escaped to the city young, and became an office worker. Her emotional growth was a bit stunted, never leaving the phase of innocent teenage flirting. She was good at her job, and it was only when she overheard gossip about herself that she became dissatisfied with her life and began to look to marriage as a solution. 

Her impetuous marriage to a veldt farmer in Rhodesia was not the solution she needed, but it is where she found herself. 

We know from the beginning of the book her end, there on the farm, through an act of violence. The book takes us through how she got to that place, the various people that had a role in that life, from her husband Dick to their closest neighbour and the black workers that were on the farm.

This is an immensely sad book, and one mourns the forces that took these characters on this journey. Mental health is definitely one of them as we see the deterioration in both Mary and Dick through their time together. 

So well written, but so so sad.

Language warning: First published in 1950, this book uses racial terms that are not acceptable now.

The Yellow Duster Sisters

Finished December 28
The Yellow Duster Sisters by Susan Kennaway

This memoir covers the years of World War II when Susan and her older sister Gyll were evacuated from Watford to Africa and then their return to England.
The decision is made to send the girls to Africa where their mother's sister works as a governess. They stay with the family she works for, who have a son and a daughter. The daughter, Mavis, is the same age as Susan. They hadn't previously met their aunt, and find her hard to warm up to. Their new guardian treat them as poor relations, forcing them to wear patched up clothes, adhere to strict rules, and go to bed at six. Unbeknownst to the girls, their father had sent the guardians money for their upkeep, but they were made to feel as charity cases. When the letters from home grow further and further apart and then stop coming altogether, the sister feel completely abandoned and find comfort only in each other.
In the fall of 1942, the girls are sent from their guardians in Rhodesia to a boarding school in South Africa. By the spring of 1943 ships heading to England are starting to take civilians, and with the girls desperate for their old life they manage to work with their guardians to arrange a chaperoned passage back to England.
The second part of the book covers their return to England until the end of the war.
The girls are disappointed that no one meets their ship, but manage to get to London on their own where their father meets them. Their mother is in Scarborough working with Polish servicemen and the father living alone with servants. Neither parent seems glad to see them, and their father soon packs them off to a very strict boarding school where once again only being together makes it bearable.
The unhappiness with this time in their lives comes through clearly and looking it back on it several decades later hasn't dulled the pain for Susan. This amazingly open and honest memoir brings the loneliness felt by those girls to life.