I must be one of the last people among the middlebrow fanciers to have read Beverley Nichols. He is perfect bedtime reading: light, frivolous, witty, of an earlier period so there won’t be anything nasty in the woodshed, and unexpectedly moving. I first noticed his existence in a delightfully poisonous parody in Leonard Russell’s immortal Parody Party (1936), and thought ‘gardens’, ‘camp’, prissy’. Fool that I was: he is so much better than all that shoved together.
I found three of his memoir-novels in the Oxfam bookshop off New Oxford Street in London, one with a shabby but intact dust-wrapper with gloriously 1950s spindly pen-and-ink illustrations. After reading them, I was consumed with curiosity about his real life, rather than just his memorialised life, and I found some of his journalism in collected volumes in the library. I gobbled them up too, but with diminishing speed. As an ingénue celebrity journalist in the 1920s Nichols was waspish before his years, and he rather traded on the success of Twenty-Five (1926), a very good collection of brief but perceptive celebrity puff pieces, with Are They The Same At Home (1927) which is twice the length and half the fun.
I will begin with Merry Hall (1951). It is immediately after the war, and Nichols is looking for a new home because his former home in London has been bombed flat. He suppresses the pathos of losing all his belongings because many of his original readers would have suffered the same: it doesn’t do to complain when others are worse off. He seems to have money, at least, and drives about the Home Counties with and without his valet / cook / housekeeper / manservant Gaskin, looking for the perfect home. But it’s not just the home, it’s the garden. They search and search and nothing is perfect, until an advert in The Times leads them to the perfect ENORMOUS garden with a fairly large dilapidated manor house attached. Sold, with Oldfield, the attached cantankerous, miracle-working gardener, all found.
The Merry Hall trilogy (it was followed by Laughter on the Stairs, 1953, and Sunlight on the Lawn, 1956) is about the garden. Nichols is at his best when arguing and negotiating with Oldfield and Gaskin about what to put in his garden, how to nurture it, and what to scour the countryside for to suit the garden’s haughty and aristocratic tastes. The heavy horticulture is inspirational, though I have no intention of following any of his advice because it’s all rather lavish. It could also all be completely invented: one simply has no idea.
When Nichols is not rhapsodising about his lilies and the massive garden ornamentation he brings in to properly set off a simple patch of something pinkish and Latinate, he is fighting viciously with the neighbours. No memoir works without people to animate the setting, or to amuse the reader with their quaint ways. I have no idea whether the awful maiden ladies among whom Nichols spends the 1940s and 1950s actually existed, but in these memoirs they are rather too obviously modelled on Mapp and Lucia. Their battles are epic, and Nichols’ solutions in the interests of community harmony and natural justice are unscrupulous. The loathing he feels for these ladies among whom he is trapped is unexpected. His allies are even fiercer, and by the third book there is detectable misogyny: he must have been feeling the strain of a limited circle.
He is such a kind and gentle soul, I was taken aback by the reserves of vitriol he was able to summon. Or perhaps this was invented too: in such an artificial construct as these memoirs, which are as much about reinforcing the Nichols persona as about amusing his readers, nothing can be assumed to be real. I rather liked the way he simply doesn’t care about being charming and funny all the time: it’s refreshing to read about grumpy camp behaviour, well sharpened.
The anecdotes about restoring the house have less urgency than those about the garden and its plants. Nicholls will spend a chapter describing how a certain aspect or prospect was achieved by the placing of tons of stone and planting hundreds of bulbs, all to create a vista that will only be perfection in a certain aspect of a season. Whole rooms are restored and furnished in half the time, with half the attention. There is much rushing about with watering cans, and stern advice given about setting the watering water to warm throughout the day. There is arduous piano practice, and great attention paid to the placing of perfect pieces to best advantage, and hide the ragged but expensive carpet. It all costs a vast amount of cash, so Nicholls is furiously dashing off books about his garden and house to pay for the next delivery of bulbs and trees, and then he overspends on Chippendale or glass and has to write another book to pay for it all. No wonder he had to move. The Merry Hall trilogy is the second of three sets of three books about his homes and gardens, but I’m not sure that I have the devotion to begin again.
(PS There are also cats. Nicholls has a lot of cats, and the books are rather full of them. If you’re interested in that kind of thing.)
Feet of Clay (1996)
The Fifth Elephant (2000)
Thud (2005)
This time in the 
Nadine is Dodo’s daughter, a chain-smoker (which was very daring), and the leader of the pack. She is an appalling flirt and an empty conversationalist: her attitudes are really so much like those of a caricature of the 1920s flapper that I had to check the date of this novel twice. But it really is 1913, and prewar. Nadine and Dodo are both totally egotistical, but they both cheerfully admit this, and expect the world to accept them as they are. They aren’t malevolent at all, they are very concerned that everyone has a nice time and gets what they want. But their efforts to get what they want take priority over the desires of anyone else.
Dodo’s Daughter is also rather interesting if you’re looking for early feminist fiction. Dodo herself is a financially independent woman (thanks to both her former marriage settlements), but she is also an independent woman in terms of making her own decisions, deciding whom she will marry, where she will live, and so on. She keeps having to throw her drunk ex-husband out of the house (that’s the second one, who was a German prince of very Prussian characteristics), and she won’t ask her third husband to do this. She goes downstairs herself and gets rid of the awful tyrant Prussian, time and again.
A highly satisfying novel of wish fulfillment bounds onto your screen in this 
Edward Henry goes out in a huff one evening, hurt that his domestic helpfulness is rejected in his own house. He finds himself at the theatre. To his surprise some business cronies invite him to join them in their box, and he finds himself being lobbied to buy 50% of an option to develop a plot of land off Piccadilly into a theatre. That’s Piccadilly, London, not Piccadilly, Manchester, and Edward Henry has hardly ever been to London. But he does know business and he is no fool. Somehow, as part of the discussion, he rises to an additional challenge, which is to stay at London’s most exclusive hotel, the Grand Babylon, while he’s down there looking at this plot of land. (The Grand Babylon Hotel is an invention, of course, by Bennett, whose rather good novel of the same title was published in 1902.)
When Edward Henry meets the other shareholders he finally feels in control. They’re all theatrical types; more concerned with naming the as yet unbuilt and undesigned theatre than with discussing its business plan or its capacity. Edward Henry can run these amateurs singlehanded, and in fact he runs them off the project entirely, getting rid of this useless baggage by buying their shares. They’re all so impoverished they will happily take his ready cash and abandon the idea of their own theatre in return of the assurance of some rent paid and expensive meals. And now that they’re off his hands, so he thinks, Edward Henry can get down to making his own plans for the theatre.
The continuing adventures of Sofia Khan have been much anticipated. I adored Malik’s first novel, Sofia Khan is Not Obliged, and its sequel begins very satisfyingly with the immortal words of ‘Reader, I married him’. This is of course the burning question at the end of Sofia Khan when she’s flying off to Karachi with Conall, whom she has only just realised has become a Muslim (the beard, the not drinking, the Muslim friends: none of that clicked before). Would they actually get married, or just save the world chastely together? Conall – her inscrutable, kind Irish neighbour – is all Sofia has ever truly desired, and one month into their new married life in Karachi she realises that she hardly knows him.
Everyone is distracted, or unnaturally reticent, or withholding information, although they know they ought to hand it over but haven’t the nerve, or don’t think it’s important, or think that it’s so flaming obvious that anyone who needs to know, will. I have rarely read a novel during which I wanted to scream TALK TO HER! so often, to so many characters, Sofia included. Again and again a massive load-bearing plot twist depends on X not having told Y the facts about Z. It gets to you after a bit. All the female characters spend their lives on social media, texting, talking in bedrooms or living-rooms, yet Things Don’t Get Told. The men are the really taciturn ones, except Conall’s brother Sean (I absolutely relate to Sean), who spends the novel asking helplessly why X hasn’t told Y the truth about Z, thus revealing Z to the grateful reader.
When William Came by Saki (H H Munro) is a complicated novel. On the face of it, it’s a straight propagandist story at the peak of the anti-German pre-First World War war fever craze, to warn the British to start preparing for war and get the young men into the army as soon as possible. Underneath that, it’s a classic Saki story. It’s witty and sly about glossy boys who prey on middle-aged Edwardian matrons, who know perfectly well what they’re doing, and understand the duplicity of their upper-class society. At an unexpected third level, it’s a rather strongly-felt hymn to the English countryside, English values and the tragedy of not being able to live in England. And I say ‘England’ deliberately: this novel is about England, not Britain. And, finally, it’s a strangely subtle fantasy about the grafting of European values and culture onto London society, which has the surprising effect of letting us see what Saki thinks about the rest of Europe, about Germans, Italians, Jews and all. I’m going to try to avoid the word ‘offensive’ because one person’s outrage can be another person’s delighted amusement, especially in fiction from a historical period that we don’t live in.
One hundred years later: is When William Came still worth reading? If you like Saki, absolutely. There’s a lot here for those who appreciate Saki’s particular style to enjoy. If you’re a war-fever collector: yes, certainly. This novel is a sophisticated addition to the canon, it’s by a most accomplished stylist and it’s actually a really fascinating read. There is no conventional plot: the novel is a series of scenes with political speeches laid on, but they are very cleverly arranged, have real characters, vintage Saki creations, who continue to live on after you’ve finished the book. The propaganda value is potentially immense, but I doubt whether anyone took the novel seriously because of who Saki was.
The scorn in this novel is very, very evident. It is a Tory rant. Decadent social customs are held up for ridicule: modern dance, couples who do not live together in harmony, the adoption of pretty boys by older women as agreeable social accessories. The most wonderful character in the novel is Joan Mardle, an irritating woman related to practically everyone in Society, who invites herself to events and then comments on them loudly at moments when the din of conversation has dropped. She is the spirit of inconvenient candour, a kind of anti-flatterer, whose ringing voice and piercing tones say aloud what everybody else has been thinking, or trying not to say, or would have preferred not to be noticed. She alone is worth reading this book for, but when she is part of a glorious satirical shower of scorn, she makes When William Came simply magnificent.
In a review posted this week on Bustle, E Ce Miller gave us 
The sad and ordinary fact of Bruce Bechdel’s death, hit by a truck as he crossed the road, is examined again and again for clues and for answers. He took the children camping, he took them to stay with friends in New York (where he could go cruising at night on Christopher St), he had them cleaning and doing chores every day, he taught them to swim. Helen Bechdel, a former actress who gave up her dreams to be the mother of a family, endures her husband’s erratic ways and endless, casual affairs with angry endurance. She retreats into acting and a thesis, while he is in a world of his own, sourcing chandeliers and Victorian glassware, and foolishly buying beers for underage boys. The children separate as well (the renovated house certainly has enough space), so isolation and private experiences become normal.
When Alison goes to college she works out the name and the meaning of her own sexuality, which adds another layer to her relations with her father. She had loved men’s shirtings and suits as much as he did, and she fetishised the lines of a man’s body, wanting that shape for herself, as much as he wanted their bodies. The artwork tells more than half of this complex, shifting story, with frames repeated to silently show that yes, there was more going in here, in this particular exchange or event, than the younger Alison had noticed. Although the seven episodes of the book move back and forth in time in a patchwork of recollections and linked stories, the language of the narration begins simply, increasing in complexity as more understanding emerges. When moments of comprehension surface in the small or adult Alison’s mind, the effect is stunning: word and image working together simply and beautifully to hit the reader for six.