A review by sarahmatthews
A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor

reflective medium-paced

A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor

Read in Braille

Vintage Modern Classics

Pub. 1947, 313pp

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This was a surprisingly good choice for a holiday read, seeing as it’s main theme is loneliness so not the most uplifting of topics! I found myself reading it by the coast and the sound of the waves and clattering masts of boats along with the warm breeze all added to the experience.

There is a cast of about 8 quirky characters to get to know in this quiet and rather shabby post-war coastal town and it does take a while to get into their lives, but once you’re there you’re hooked.

The central friendship of Tory and Beth is so well told; they’ve known each other since school and are very different and argue, but also have moments of wonderful companionship. They live next door to each other now, Tory has a son, Edward, who’s at boarding school, and is divorced from her wealthy husband who’s run off with a young servicewoman he met during the war; and Beth and her doctor husband Robert have two children.

Beth is a writer and I was struck by how her storyline is concerned with the timeless issue of mother’s guilt, as she carves out a way to write which results in her becoming completely absorbed in her creativity and oblivious to what’s going on around her. And there’s a great scene where Tory’s delighting in dressing Beth up for her trip to London to meet her publisher where she’s comically disappointed at the end to find that Beth’s editor is a woman.

Bertram’s a key character who weaves the story together, and we’re introduced to him right from the beginning. He’s a retired naval officer who’s visiting Newby to take up painting but mostly spends his time ‘insinuating’ himself (as he puts it) into the lives of women in the town. He’s staying at the local pub where he spends his evenings playing dominoes with the men and meets Lily, a widow who he starts to befriend, and who craves his company. He soon transfers his interest to Tory who he’s admired from his vantage point at the harbour and also spends time with the housebound and rather bitter Mrs Bracey, who he gets to know through her daughter Iris, the pub’s barmaid. He thinks he’s doing good by making these connections but soon shows himself to be rather self centred:

“‘Yes,’ he thought to himself, ‘they will all remember me. Yes after, they will say to one another, ‘that was the summer he came,’ like the man in the concert party who wore the pink-and-white striped blazer and whom they all remembered and so often talked about. Where was he now? But wherever he was he had left something of his personality in the place as other visitors had not, a thumb-print, something not tangible like Mr Walker’s oil-painting hanging in the Anchor, but the very gentlest of mementoes, a stirring-up of the imagination merely. And I will leave both,’ Bertram decided, ‘the tangible and the intangible, the souvenir and the memory itself, the thumb’s pressure and the painting in the bar parlour.’”

Later in the novel I was rooting for Prudence, Beth’s 20 year old daughter. She’s a quiet girl who doesn’t have much of an independent life, cooking for her beloved cats and looking after her 5 year old sister Stevie, while her mother works. She sees what’s going on between her father and Tory and is filled with rage but is not mature enough to influence the situation. There’s a lovely scene where she finally goes on a date:

“While the sun was setting Prudence and Geoffrey sat under the may-tree in the churchyard. Prudence wore her sage green dress, her coral bracelets. Geoffrey read poetry out of a little suede-covered book. Prudence passed her hand across her jaw and put a little yawn into it as she did so.” That made me laugh!

This beautifully observed novel has a lovely afterword by Robert Liddell, a writer friend of Elizabeth Taylor. A touching book which leaves you wondering about the fate of the characters.