Poignant novel set in South East ENGLAND

1st July 2021

Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers, poignant novel set in South East England.

This novel has been highlighted all over Social Media (which is a great place to find top reads, by the way!) and it is a beautifully set story that really transports the reader back to England in 1957. Cars needed a huge amount of preparation to travel even short distances, meat was heavily consumed and women knew their place in society. Except Jean Swinney, working as a journalist at the North Kent Echo, has a quiet determination to find some happiness in her fairly dismal life – she is a woman of middle age, with a degree of sad history, who lives with her mother, a rather cantankerous and controlling woman.

She is tasked with producing a column for women, advocating domestic tips for the discerning homemaker (take an old Mackintosh and cut off the hood which now doubles as a vanity bag and the remaining carcass can line a suitcase, should the container get wet at any point!). It isn’t very fulfilling but nothing else is really on offer.

Then Jean discovers Gretchen Tilbury’s story who claims that her daughter Margaret came into the world as a virgin birth. Jean is on board to get to the bottom of this curious story and is soon welcomed into Gretchens’ family – her older husband Howard took on both mother and daughter after the birth. Jean soon bonds with young Margaret, and Gretchen, who is a dab hand at dress making, soon freshens up Jean’s dull wardrobe. It all seems companionable and easy.

Jean’s research takes her across the south east, back to St Cecilia’s, a convalescent home where Gretchen was recuperating and where conception occurred. She talks to fellow patients and carers and the more she unearths, the more she wonders – as indeed does the reader! We know that what Gretchen claims to be true is, in fact, impossible, and yet….

This is a story with a very odd premise at its heart and yet it works really well. It is so well observed, it conjures up place and era and does so with humour, panache and poignancy. There is sadness, too. The characters have a flesh and blood quality, which makes it is a joy to spend time with them. Recommended.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

Catch Clare on Twitter @ClareDChambers

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