A year or so ago, I picked up this cute Ballantine paperback copy of No Wonderland from 1967, one of a half-dozen or so contemporary British novels published to exploit America’s fascination with the Beatles, Carnaby Street, and everything gear fab. “A young girl alone in London’s swinging night world,” with a picture of a mophead and his bird sipping from what appears to be a glass of water, and from all appearances very much in love. So one might expect this to be something of a mod rom-com.
Alice is just under 18, secretly loves Elvis (considered very old school by then), and is in London to experience life. She is intrigued by, then attracted to, then fully under the sway of Matthew, just over 19 and quite full of his own worldly-wiseness. Alice moves into his flat. Only it’s not entirely his flat. There is also David, a student, and Al, a somewhat older Jamaican man.
Matthew and Alice is a match made in Soho. Which means that Matthew sometimes has to work the streets as a rent boy while Alice sips endless espressos while wedging herself into crowded tablefuls of loud artists and drama students and people of ambiguous employment. This relationship swirls around with the current for chapter after chapter, with the only episode of real interest being when Al gets beaten up by a group of white fascists protesting against immigrants. At the end, Alice declares to Matthew, “I don’t want to marry anyone but you,” to which Matthew replies, “Don’t let’s get bored, Alice.”
While No Wonderland is not particularly interesting or successful as a novel, it’s scattered with moments of genuine observations. Like how awkward it is for a young man to pretend to enjoy dancing with a stranger while her boyfriend has disappeared, obstensibly in search of a drink, or how exhausting to sit and pretend to be interested in the conversation of people strenuously trying to win an ennui competition. In fact, what struck me most about No Wonderland was how most of this life that Alice seems so eager to experience is tedious and uninspiring.
And yet, there was something that made me want to give Lindsay another try. No John, No (1966), her third novel (No Wonderland was first published in England in 1962), is about another woman, just a bit older than Alice, and her search for love. “This is a novel about what it is like to be poor, rootless, intense, and lesbian, trapped in a desperate bohemian life on the wrong side of Notting Hill,” the book’s dust flap tells us. Well, at least we know not to expect a rom-com.
“At the moment,” Kate tells us, “I’m living with Terry who is a girl like me and I rather love Terry in a way.” Although Terry is in her 30s, Kate is pleased that she’s “not like most lesbians who get broad in the hips when they pass the age of twenty-nine.”
This is from the second paragraph on page one. Two paragraphs later, we read that “Kate as usual is doing nothing, she bites her fingernails and is waiting for me to do everything for her.” So, now this is Terry speaking. A page later, the author tells us that “Kate and Terry shared a flat near the Portobello Road market.” Then we’re back with Kate, then over to Terry, then back to the author, and so on for roughly half the book, until Kate meets Anne and now we get four perspectives.
Telling a story through multiple narrators is nothing new, of course. Changing them from paragraph to paragraph is somewhat more challenging, but it tends to be less so when what the author is trying to do is help the reader see the complexity of the story. Unfortunately, the story in No John, No is actually quite simple: Kate wants to be in love and, if possible, be loved in return, though that is of secondary importance. The switches of narrators is more distracting than revealing, particularly when the characters themselves seem preoccupied with figuring out their own identities.
The one person in the book who seems to see things clearly is Kate’s married friend, Helen. Helen finds Kate’s good-natured muddle-headedness infuriating, not endearing. “Do you want me to be like you, then? Are you worried that I’m different?” Kate asks her. “No, I don’t want you to be like me,” Helen replies, “but I don’t want you to do things without understanding why, and there is a reason, something to do with your past, a psychological reason Kate.”
Helen may have been addressing her author as much as Kate. For Lindsay’s life was a journey full of abrupt changes of direction. Her granddaughter, Tanya Perdikou, reflected on its erratic course in a 2021 article for the Wellcome Collection:
She received little love from either of her parents and reacted by spurning obligation to others, spending many years erratically pursuing her own desires. Her rejection of the traditional role of ‘mother’ was extreme: she moved from home to home, lover to lover, descended into alcoholism, neglected her five children and ended up founding The Old Rectory, a commune in rural Norfolk.
At the time No John, No was published, Lindsay’s fourth child had just been born. Its father was Anthony Blond, who published Lindsay’s second novel, Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces. Blond was quite deliberately pulled by Lindsay into a complicated triangle with her and her lover, Mark Hyatt. Recalling the bohemianism of her grandfather Norman Lindsay, Blond writes that:
She was equally bohemian in outlook and had three children by three different men. When she met me she decided I was to serve as papa no.4. She stalked me with delicacy. Her current lover, papa no. 3, was a gypsy and a poet called Mark Hyatt. He was beautiful…. A sensuous poetic face, tender lips, eyes you could swim in and a faultless nose…. Of course I fell for him.
After sleeping with both Lindsay and Hyatt, Blond bought her the country house she longed for — The Old Rectory — and was dumped by Hyatt for a tall younger man named Atom. Some time later, when Blond was visiting Lindsay and the chidren there, Atom arrived to say that Hyatt had committed suicide after learning that he was about to be left for a woman.
She married Peter Hammerton in 1968 and had her fifth and last child by him. Her next novel, Lovers and Fathers (1970), is something of a fictional account of how she ended up with five children and at least as many lovers. Lindsay, the American publisher’s blurb tells us, “has always been completely open to love in whatever variety it presented itself, whether casual, Freudian, heterosexual, lesbian, forced, seductive, or literary.” Whether we’re quite sure of what all of those adjectives refer to, we certainly get a healthy sample of the frenetic and eclectic nature of Lindsay’s love life:
For six months I had lived with the children and a few lovers. For a week I had fallen in love with a journalist because his eyebrows hung over his eyes like a moustache, and his mouth was red and he had life so well organised…. Then for weeks I liked sleeping with me…. one evening I fell in love with a tall man who had green eyes….
And then there was Bill, off to Canada the next day, he talked of the forests and pines and he drank beer very quickly…. Also Robin. Sometimes he stayed and he was good to hold, and also to be held by. One day, he said, “I’m glad your Jason affair has burned itself out.”
Then we’re on to Thomas and Gloria and Robin and it becomes like trying to remember faces on the sidewalk from a seat in a fast-moving bus. Around the time of Lovers and Fathers , John Swinfield visited Lindsay at The Old Rectory and filmed a short piece for Anglia Television that is available for viewing (if you’re in the UK) on the BFI Player. It shows a vibrant if chaotic community of writers, artists, and musicians centered around the rough country house, with children wandering on and off camera and talk and music and laughter filling the air.
If Lindsay’s like was full of children and lovers and friends at the time, it was also full of alcohol. What she couldn’t silence with the noise and energy of the people around her she could try to numb with drink. Perhaps a clue to the demons she was struggling with can be found in her second and best novel, Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces (1963).
At least one reviewer joked that the book’s title tells us all we need to know about its plot. But plot is of secondary importance here. “This book makes shocking reading,” the paperback edition’s blurb tells us. Shocking is the wrong adjective, though. Shocks are sudden. They have lingering effects, but they are usually brief, like a bolt of lightning. Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces is like fifteen rounds of being bludgeoned by an exhausted but relentless prizefighter.
When the book opens, ten-year-old Rachel has found a purse with some cash on the street. She takes it home but know better than to tell her mother Lucy about it, for Lucy will just take the money down to the pub to get drunk and probably come home late that night with a man she’d picked up. Much of the world may still be a mystery to Rachel, but she knows that money buys food, which she never gets much of.
Rachel’s father has gone to war. We gather from a few things Lucy says that he was probably taken prisoner in the British Army’s retreat from the German blitzkrieg of May-June 1940, but it’s clear that Lucy has given up hope and Rachel is trapped in a limbo of deprivation and neglect. She has a few other children to play with and together they built a little shelter that becomes a refuge for Rachel, but it’s a rough sort of refuge. Stan, a thuggish boy just turning teen taunts Rachel as a “Lying Jew puss” and attempts to force himself on her.
Lucy’s drinking progesses to the point she staggers home one night in a fit of DTs and her ravings become so loud and violent that the police are called and take her away. Rachel is then sent to what she’s told is a girl’s school but is obviously a reformatory. The attendants, known as rats, feel free to insult, mock, and slap the inmates. “This is not a rest home for young ladies, you know,” one of the rats tells her.
Her situation improves a bit when she is moved to a Catholic convent, though the sisters inflict a form of religious abuse by hounding her with the need to memorize the catechism and prepare herself for conversion. Rachel spends almost four years here, but they pass in a few pages. Then one day, a balding man in a thick overcoat and a grubby shirt shows up to take her away. “Are you Daddy?” she asks. “I never expected such a grown-up daughter. And quite pretty,” he tells her. What follows are the worst three pages in the book.
Though Cressida Lindsay may not have experienced quite the level of abuse and poverty that her character Rachel does, she did have a childhood marked by extreme highs and lows. Her father, the novelist Philip Lindsay, was friends with many celebrities and a lively figure in London creative society, but he had trouble holding onto money and Cressida spent more time with the sisters at her convent school than with her parents. The title Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces may give some indication of the abandonment she may have experienced and explain why she so fervently sought the company of others, seeking a level of contact and commitment that not all of them were willing to give.
After over decade at The Old Rectory, Lindsay and her husband Philip moved into the city of Norwich. She became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and cared for Philip when he began to suffer from dementia. After her death in 2010, her son Dylan Hyatt discovered the manuscript of a fifth novel, written around the time of her move to Norfolk, and arranged to have it published as an e-book. The Mole and the Mountain is available from Amazon.