Novels can be journeys of discovery for their characters – and sometimes readers. Some describe development and bring revelation, while others expand on and confirm what has already been stated, perhaps early on. Among the latter is Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay (1881-1958). First published one hundred years ago, Macaulay’s fifteenth novel seems to have been in demand. There were four further impressions that year. The copy I read, discovered on the crowded shelves of a bookshop in Southeast London, was the sixth, dated June 1927. Full of wry and dry observation and comment, Crewe Train is one of those novels that cries out to be described as a ‘comedy of manners’. It is that, along with much else, including tragedy, misunderstanding – and love at cross-purposes. And perhaps above all, of a tremendous loneliness.
Denham Dobie – ‘named for her mother’s favourite Buckinghamshire village’ – was the daughter of a clergyman. Mr Dobie gave up his calling after his wife’s death because ‘he was tired of being so busy, so sociable, and so conversational, […] calling on parishioners and asking them how they did – an inquiry the answer to which he was wholly indifferent.’ Wishing to get away, he moved to Mallorca, taking his daughter, then seven, with him: ‘abroad you are less surrounded by inquisitive and sociable persons who wonder why you do nothing, and insist on conversing with you.’ After several years he found Mallorca had become too busy with visitors, so moved to Andorra, because it was difficult to get to. Rather to his surprise, Dobie married again and had two more children. But he still felt plagued by visitors who had discovered the ‘Hidden Republic’. Then he suddenly died.
Denham’s maternal aunt, Evelyn Gresham, who was visiting at the time, carries Denham, now 21, off to London – which from the outset she dislikes intensely. Denham, who had grown up to not like people and talking, must adjust to a crowded and frenetic life in London. She had been taken into a large and loud family of high achievers. In effect swallowed alive, Denham is embarked on an odyssey: that of an unconventional young woman made to feel that she must seek the ‘Higher Life’: the constant activity of socialising and talking, reading and playgoing, parties and dinners and weekends at country houses that is normality to the Gresham family.
In Crewe Train places are more than just settings, backgrounds. In such a character-driven novel they take on some aspects of characters, their own distinctions, especially the vibrant all-embracing London of crowds and incident that Denham detested and longed to escape. (This is in contrast to the tired. shattered London of Macaulay’s penultimate novel The World My Wilderness [1950], in which Denham would have felt much more at home.)
Denham remained an outsider: ‘Into their gay, urbane civilisation Denham returned, like an explorer from solitary places, full of secret, savage joys and cares’ (173). Crewe Train explores how someone such as Denham can live in the world – and the world live with her. Late in the book, a cousin speculates: ‘Suppose…that people always did literally and precisely what they were bidden to do, took what was said to them at the foot of the letter, what a different world it would be, and how oddly it would behave. A world of people all behaving rather like Denham, who was at present perhaps the only literal adult person in it’ (269).
This is the Denham who has fallen in love with Peter Gresham’s publishing partner, Arnold Chapel. They marry, Denham having converted to her husband’s Roman Catholicism. Her loathing of London does not decrease, but her husband’s work dictates that he must live there. Denham finds and furnishes a cottage in Cornwall, but holidays are not enough. In love but deeply conflicted, the couple come to find themselves periodically living separate lives. Questionings occur. ‘Perfect freedom was never attained, never while you had a companion. […] Did one, then, never break down the prejudices of the well-bred about how to live? Did there never come a day when the well-bred said, “Dash it all, we won’t wash to-day, neither our persons nor the plates and cups?”’ (191)
Eventually Arnold and Denham buy a house in Metro-land Buckinghamshire – within commuting distance of London. In a sense Denham has come to where she started, named before the beginning of the novel by a family member the reader never meets. She gets back, ‘numbly acquiescent, to acceptance of the Higher Life’ and becomes resigned. ‘Love broke one in the end, ground one down, locked the fetters on one’s free limbs. […] You might struggle and rebel but in the end love got you’ (299). Faced with the prospect of her life being run to a timetable, Denham ‘thought of it…’ (307)
Perhaps only a reader as literal-minded as Denham Dobie would wonder about the title Crewe Train: although there are trains in the text, none of them go to Crewe. On the title page Macaulay quoted two lines from the music hall song “Oh Mr Porter” in which – as it’s surely not possible not to know – a young female train passenger laments: ‘Oh Mr Porter, whatever shall I do? / I want to go to Birmingham, but they’ve sent me on to Crewe!’ The lost young lady had found herself on the wrong track. She had missed her intended destination and ended up somewhere that only existed because it was a vast junction.
It was not Denham’s fault that she had the same experience: her father, through his outlook and example, had determined her direction and then abdicated all responsibility. Rose Macaulay dedicated Crewe Train to ‘The Philistines, The Barbarians, The Unsociable, and those who do not care to take any trouble’ – and showed that Denham was one of them. At the other, far, end of the book Denham came to a halt as if having hit the buffers. Or will she realise that the terminus was a junction after all and it might still be possible to change and set out again on the right track? Or was remaining on the platform, lost among the branching tracks, the only way for Denham to be true to herself? Any journey is made at a cost. Whatever should she do?
(John Howard)
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