What a contrast between Kathleen Sully’s last novel, A Look at the Tadpoles, and her first, Canal in Moonlight (1955). Canal was about a family of umpteen kids living in rat-infested digs in the midst of some nameless industrial hellhole. Tadpoles is about two only children who spend a lovely summer day traipsing merrily around Sussex. Yet the two books are united in a belief in the indestructible power of a child’s optimism.
When sixteen year-old Mark decides to escape from the train taking him back to boarding school, he triggers a chain of events that knocks an ever-widening array of characters out of their routines and into new perspectives. His first victim — or rather, beneficiary — is twelve year-old Cecily, stuck in her garden flat by some unnamed handicap (Sully glancingly mentions withered legs and dependence on “walking aids”). “Why are you running away?” she asks:
“Running away?” he replied. “I’m not running away. I’m running to something — there’s a vast yet subtle difference.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Because it’s just the kind of day to run to something. Look at it — it’s perfect.”
He sweeps up Cecily and carries her off on a random spree on a cart stolen from a neighbor’s yard, the first of a series of hijacked vehicles that ultimately includes a horse and buggy, a city bus, and a Piper Colt airplane. Mark brims with a young man’s untested self-confidence, but it’s given an extra boost by Cecily’s capacity for enjoyment: “Her happiness gave point to everything and enabled him to push all thought of tomorrow and consequences.”
Together, their spirit infects everyone they come in contact with. A grumpy farmer falls back in love with his wife. A despondent inn-keeper reawakens to the value of her little place as the hub of its community. Cecily’s mother and her boss discover a mutual attraction. A bus driver realizes how much he loves his baby son. And a failing circus finds its power to entertain again:
Cecily was quiet and still, showing nothing of the excitement she felt within until a clown lifted his hat to her and a jet of water sprang from his head. Then she shrieked with laughter and it was not long before the ringmaster and everyone in the ring knew that they had with them the magic kernel of all great audiences — an innocent heart which believed the unbelievable, an unsophisticated soul with the capacity and capability of being lifted to the highest heights of happiness and laughter.
A Look at the Tadpoles has all the substance of champagne bubbles. It’s a giddy, harmless bit of fun in which a great lot of sensible English people go mad in a very moderate and middlebrow way. It reminded me very much of the wonderful 1986 film, Clockwise, starring John Cleese (and written by Michael Frayn), in which another missed train sets off a similarly anarchic chain of events that upsets a few well-dug-in mindsets. And merely whet my appetite to continue exploring the works of Kathleen Sully.