Crusoe’s Daughter is the story of Polly Flint, who, when she’s six years old, comes to live with her two aunts in a big yellow house on a marsh in the North-East of England. Polly’s mother has been dead since Polly was one; her father is a sea-captain and not around much, and, as it turns out, he is soon to be dead as well, leaving Polly permanently with the aunts, and with sour Mrs Woods, a widow who lives with them, along with Charlotte, the housekeeper. It’s Polly’s story but it’s also the story of a place and a country and a time—the changing light and shifting winds on the marsh and the beach, and England at the very start of the twentieth century and then later, leading up to and including WWI and WWII. It’s also the story of a solitary child whose biggest love is a character in a book—Polly has a youthful infatuation with Robinson Crusoe that stays with her well into adulthood.
I picked this up at a whim on the library, having heard of Gardam’s work (I want to read Old Filth eventually, and I have a copy of Bilgewater that I picked up in the kitchen at work) but never having read her, and it turned out to be exactly the kind of book I was in the mood for. In the preface that’s included in this edition, Gardam writes of wanting to write a book set in the place she was born, a book that captured “the elf-light of childhood” that she still felt, and “the wonder of the marsh,” and whose heroine would be “a sort of castaway girl,” marooned in the island of her place and time and life (13). She says she wanted to capture “the enfolding murmuring magical marsh so flooded with light, sunshine, silvery rain and mist, and the running sea” (14). And she does, beautifully, and describes the details of Polly’s life beautifully as well. When Polly first arrives at her aunts’ house, we get this lovely child’s-eye image:
With the gentle aunt I did a jig-saw the size of a continent. I did not look up as high as the aunt’s face but watched our four hands hover over the oceans of mahogany. (17)
Of her journey to the yellow house, from where she’d been living in Wales, Polly says this:
I remember light and shadow over pale fields—black towns, cold moors—stone walls swooping through rain and a night in what must have been a railway hotel, for there was a blackened glass roof below a window. Steam leaked up through this in spires. There were booms and echoing clanks. Fear and joy.
[…]
Out of the carriage window on the other side of the train, fields stretched out to colourless hills with a line of trees along the tops. The light showing through them made them look like loops of knitting pulled off the needles. The train rocked and my father whistled through his teeth. (19)
Polly loves her aunts but sometimes chafes against her circumstances: at twelve, she’s certain she doesn’t want to get confirmed, and rebels against going to church, with “all the dreary people dirging away” and the “awful giant crucifix with the dead body and the blood-drips all carved in wood” (44). She thinks about the housekeeper, and how she envies her a bit: “she had known,” Polly thinks, “a bad uncertain complex knockabout world and the one I wanted” (45). But the yellow house, Oversands, is in its own way full of warmth and good things: I loved this:
Charlotte, as usual, had been baking and the room was the warmest in the house and smelled of the lines of loaves and cakes that stood about on every surface, gold and brown and cream. All the loaves stood on their upside-down baking tins with their tops puffing out like clouds and it was comfortable because you could stretch out and pick little crazed bits off when Charlotte wasn’t looking. Outside the blizzard blew and snow fell and was even settling quite deeply on the marsh, which was rare. There was an exciting light across the yard and the sea roared. (59)
As Polly gets older, she sees a bit of the world elsewhere, when she goes to live, for a time, with a family friend and his sister, a patron of the arts who opens their home to poets and painters and pianists. Polly writes sweet and funny and wonderful letters to her Aunt Frances, and has encounters with an ambitious young poet and also with the Zeits, a brother and sister she’d actually met once when she was younger, too. But things aren’t easy (“Oh I wish I didn’t understand things only when they were over,” Polly laments at one point (142)), and Polly doesn’t actually manage much time in the wider world before she has to return to the yellow house on the marsh.
Polly comments, when she’s ruminating about Robinson Crusoe, on “Defoe’s unhurried pace, his grandly confident unrolling of the years,” and the description applies to this book just as well (184). It’s wonderful to see Polly Flint’s life unfold: she’s a smart and compelling narrator, maybe especially compelling to me because of how bookish she is, and how solitary.
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