A funny, well-observed 1970s tale
Iconfess, to my shame, that this is the first bit of Suzannah Dunn’s writing that I have read.
I will be rectifying that situation forthwith because she is a glorious writer. By my count, Dunn has 12 novels and a short story collection under her belt.
If they’re anything like as witty, well-observed and full of heart as this offering, they’ll be well worth the time.
Dunn has a penchant for historical writing and although this is set in the not-too-distant past, the story and the characters feel bang up to date.
It’s 1972 and the book’s feisty, astute protagonist, 10-year-old Deborah, is going about her life —living with her sharp-tongued widowed Scottish mother, navigating the weft and weave of her various friendships with the girls at her small village school.
There is a fairly comfortable equilibrium. Deborah knows where she stands.
She is among the poorer girls in the village and lives in a council house but she has been warned by her mother that this is not something to be either aspired to, or to be comfortable with.
Her role, in her group of friends, is that of “the new girl”.
Although she and her mother arrived in the village many years before, there has never been anyone newer.
All is as it should be, until the arrival of one Sarah-Jayne.
Golden-haired, blue-eyed, rigged-out in the latest flared and wide-collared fashions, Sarah-Jayne, who’s been mysteriously living in foreign places — Germany and Cyprus, no less — is like a bomb going off amid the close-knit gang of girls.
She has a 26-year-old sister who’s about to be married to a man called Max.
She and her family — “forces” Deborah’s mother informs her — have moved into the vicarage.
While some gather around this new exotic bird who knows all about vodka, swimming pools and how to nab a 10-year-old boyfriend, Deborah has her suspicions from the start.
This book is filled with humour, emanating chiefly from Deborah’s asides and her mother’s acerbic, short-and-sweet judgments of others.
It’s very, very funny but Dunn is not playing just for laughs. There is a profound authenticity to every word spoken, every cultural reference used and every slow piecing together of the true background story of Sarah-Jayne.
As Deborah starts to find her way to the reality of things, from exciting practitioners of levitation to protectors of hidden and uncomfortable truths, Sarah-Jayne and her family teach her some valuable lessons about the ways of the world, particularly for women and girls.
She learns to take her mother’s pronouncements with a pinch of salt. She learns to read between everyone’s lines.
“Because to Mum, a few people were all right – soap and water, a cut above, good to us – but so many, many more were do-gooders and chummy and rough-andready and hippies and tartars and common and boffins and gypsies and sheep.”
While the protagonist’s voice is that of a 60-year-old Deborah looking back at that short, formative period before the group broke up to go to separate schools and before she fully released the claustrophobic grip of her lonely mother, Dunn never veers from the child’s-eye view of adult matters that she can’t fully understand.
This is a wonderful, accessible story full of love, memory and the truth.