After enjoying the headlong narrative sprint that is Eileen Winncroft’s first novel, Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! (1938), I took advantage of a recent visit to the British Library to scan the first few chapters of her second (and last), Angels in Ealing. I enjoyed reading them on the train home so much that I went ahead and purchased the one and only copy I could find for sale.
Winncroft — Henrietta Pryke Franckeiss Macloughlin in real life or Martha Blount in the pages of The Daily Express — must have gained tremendous self-confidence from her first foray into fiction, for in Angels in Ealing her omniscience doesn’t even draw the line at wandering through the mind of God himself (or the Most Beautiful One or the Holy One as he (it?) is referred to here). What sets this plot in motion is the Holy One’s exasperation at one particular resident of Ealing, Mr. Plantagent Jones. “I have been watching him for nearly forty-five years. And during that time he has never really tried once to behave properly,” he complains. “It has got to stop.” So, he dispatches the Archangel Michael to attend to it.
Jones — Plaggy to his wife and friends — is speeding down the Great West Road with his “under-nourished, under-exercised but very optimistic” nineteen-year-old new secretary, Vera, sitting next to him, on their way back from an afternoon drive in Surrey. Working with little more than the Holy One’s typically vague commission, Michael, at a loss what to do, sends down a great bolt of light into their path. In the resulting crash, Vera’s head is sheared off but Plaggy survives. Vera finds herself floating above the damage but soon loses interest: “she found she could move herself up and down as though in flight, and so she moved off in search of amusement.” Plaggy, however, is pulled from the wreck and soon finds himself on trial for manslaughter. When he pleads that he was only reacting to “the mighty finger of God” reaching down from the heavens, he is ruled insane and sent off to an asylum.
Relying on an act of God to kick off a story is always risky. In the real world, acts of God — or force majeure to use the contractual term — are often followed up by a great deal of cleaning up and fixing up: not exactly the sort of thing that allows a story to arc toward a climax. In the case of Angels in Ealing, the problem is compounded by the fact that the leading characters, Plaggy and his faithful wife Nellie, are so utterly conventional. Plaggy, the author notes, supports his wife “because everyone did support their wives unless they were cads. And he deceived her because he had no one else to deceive except himself, and being English deceit of some kind was essential to keep up appearances.” Though he goes off his head with a divine vision and Nellie soon finds herself in demand in high society as a fortune-teller, unusual spices rarely make up for bland base ingredients. Even Plaggy’s escape from the asylum is possibly the least exciting in all of fiction: after helping to open the front gate one day, he simply walks out and keeps going.
To liven things up, Winncroft introduces a counterplot involving something she had firsthand experience with: a Fleet Street reporter. In this case, it’s a very good-looking young man with a very well-respected family name — Prosper Haines, only son of a milk millionaire. Unfortunately, Prosper fails to make up through enthusiasm what he lacks in basic intelligence. His chief assets, in the eyes of his editors, are “his name and his connections and very often his photograph.” Without resort to divine intervention, the author puts him in the wrong corner of a love triangle, torn between the good-hearted but middle-class Joy and the empty-hearted but ever-to-stylish Julia. Winncroft devotes several chapters to the machinations among this trio, but clever asides aside, she manages to make them even less interesting than Plaggy and Nellie.
Ironically, it’s the eternally nineteen-year-old Vera who ends up experiencing the only substantial character development in the book. She devotes years to floating through most the the great homes of England, finding the inhabitants full of themselves but the interiors rich in thoughts and dreams: “Thoughts that had sunk deep into walls and dreams so strong and tenacious that they hung like a mist in the corners.” Finally, she looks in on her own family and decides to intervene. Although she manages to rescue her sister from the “horror and greed” of her parents, Vera discovers limits to her heavenly powers. She manages to coax a few neighbors over to have tea with her mother and make sure “that her father fell on something fairly soft when he did fall on his way home from the pub,” she is at a loss with her brother Henry:
He was so frightened of everything that she just couldn’t get hold of him at all. He was frightened of living and frightened of dying. Frightened of holding a job and frightened of losing it. Frightened of drinking too much and frightened of drinking too little and being thought a fool by someone else. Frightened of knowing nothing and far more frightened of finding out something. Just an ordinary normal half well-, half ill-, and half-developed young man, but with all the cunning of his kind to avoid knowing it.
This passage suggests where Winncroft’s real growth as a writer lay between Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! and Angels in Ealing. Gone is the relentless string of “And…. And…. And…” sentences. Where she uses repetition, she uses it sparingly and with good effect. And there are more than a few surgically-precise cuts into the hearts, minds and pretensions of English society of the late 1930s.
Sadly, Angels in Ealing marks the end of Eileen Winncroft’s career in fiction. One can’t blame her for the unlucky timing of the novel’s publication. The war hadn’t gone on long enough in November 1939 for readers to have a healthy appetite for escape. Angels in Ealing did get a second printing, but soon disappeared from the shelves for good — and if WorldCat.org is accurate, there are fewer than a dozen copies of the book now to be found in libraries worldwide. A sad fate for a writer whose work is highly readable and certainly not lacking in satiric insights — or ambition.
Other Opinions
- • Kate O’Brien, The Spectator, 5 January 1940
- Angels in Ealing is another book which ought to entertain a good many people, if they can put up with, or skip, certain unlucky whimsicalities about God and the angels and their direction of suburban destinies. Leaving Heaven right out of it, Miss Winncroft had a good idea, and could have made it just as lightly entertaining, and kept in all her best jokes — some of which are better than you expect. But even as it stands this is an odd, lively little story of strange events in the lives of a middle-aged couple in Ealing.
- • Frank Swinnerton, The Observer, 3 December 1939
- Angels in Ealing is both more serious and more flippant. Those not offended by its arch glimpses of Heaven will find that in spite of poor invention and occasional descent into girlishness the tale has a sort of quicksilver charm…. Miss Winncroft has much talent, many scathing perceptions, and often a beautifully light touch. When she gives her mind to invention she will write a good novel.
- • J.S. The Times, 24 November 1939
- Angels in Ealing is a slighter and more fantastic work than Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent, and one is inclined to support that this was the earlier piece. Yet a straggling plot and artificial premises cannot conceal the original twists of this author’s mind…. Her comments on her people are often shrewd; her invention runs to a scene in which a Continental dictator has his fortune told; and her inconsequences have at least the merit of keeping the reader awake. What makes Miss Winncroft particularly engaging, however is the fact that she is never self-important.
- • R. D. Charques, The Times Literary Supplement, 2 December 1939
- A previous novel by Miss Winncroft was welcomed as a shrewdly entertaining piece of work. It is difficult to know what to say of this present venture save that it is a tangle of apparent inconsequence. Evidently humourous in intention, its occasional jocosities have a disarming flatness, while the element of fantasy signifies everything or nothing. Frankly this seems a rhymeless and reasonless essay in fiction.
- • Time and Tide, December 1939
- Miss Winncroft’s unusual novel can be read as an inconsequent gay review not pretending to rhyme or reason, or as an unorthodox morality play covering with a sparkling cloak of wit and satire a severe criticism of man’s selfishness and self-importance. In either case it makes an excellent entertainment of real originality.
- • James Agate, Daily Express, 25 November 1939
- This is as trenchant and witty as the first…. This is a brilliant novel which says more in half a page than most best-sellers say in 300.