In Coronation year, Betty and Percy Harlency and their daughter
April abandon the slog of running a Streatham gin palace, and
move to a Kentish village to take over the Copper Kettle Tearoom,
a charming but financially ruinous establishment. April meets
the ginger pig-tailed and fiery Ruby; their friendship is instantly
sealed when they burn loo roll together, in one of those curious
destructive childhood rites. They are conspirators and allies
– their secret signal the ‘lone cry of the peewit’ and their
hideaway a railway carriage where they smoke Woodbines and Gold
Flake, or puff on acorn stalk pipes. When April and Ruby first
prise open the door of the carriage, they stand ‘in the smell
of trapped time’.
The smell of trapped time, the nostalgia for remembered sensation
and emotion, is expertly conjured in The Orchard on Fire.
For anyone who was a child in 1953, this must be an extraordinarily
evocative novel, but the environment Shena Mackay creates is so
richly patterned and detailed that any reader feels intimately
connected with April’s sensual world. When the family arrive at
The Copper Kettle it is buzzing with bluebottles, and there is
a single iced fancy on a shelf. You can almost smell the weedy
insect-ridden outside loo and vividly picture the living quarters
where ‘tones of meat and two veg prevailed’. Having entered April’s
vivid little universe, the reader must also feel the consequent
nostalgia, the desolate sense of loss for what has passed away.
At the beginning of the novel, middle-aged April, in a sweet rustic
image, refutes the popular idea that the fifties was a drab, grey
decade:
It wasn’t grey. That’s not how I remember it at all. It was
politically, intellectually and artistically exciting. I see
the Iron Curtain, as I saw it then, rusting corrugated iron hung
with white convolvulus.
There are unconventional forces at work in the village; April’s
parents are unlikely political radicals, and there is a Bohemian
element represented by Bobs Rix with her bright coloured clothes,
and Dittany Codrington who is ‘like the Willow Fairy in Fairies
of the Trees by Cicely Mary Barker’. These gentle and charmingly
pretentious artists, in their innocent exchanges with April,
make her feel plodding:
‘Matisse is my God, ‘ Bobs told me. ‘Who is yours?’
‘God.’
The Copper Kettle’s finest hour comes when it hosts a magical
weekend party for Bobs and Dittany and their artistic guests,
with fairy lights and pink-shaded lamps.
But Stonebridge is not an Eden and The Orchard on Fire,
though intensely nostalgic, is not sentimental. Ruby is beaten
by her boorish father, and April has to endure the jovial but
increasingly desperate attentions of a ‘kindly’ elderly gentleman
– Mr Greenridge. April is lured to tea at his genteel redbrick
house Kirremuir, with ‘a galleon sailing in a bubbly glass
sea’ on its front door and a vile daschund whose claws scrape
April’s legs when Mr Greenridge is kissing her. Like Pip in Great
Expectations who has to ‘play’ with Miss Haversham grimly
looking on, April is forced to cavort with the dog on the immaculate
lawns of Kirremuir. As with Great Expectations, the reader
is deeply immersed in the child’s world – Mr Greenridge’s fumblings
are embarrassing and shameful, but are given no more weight in
the narrative than its other significant events. They are part
of the fabric of April’s life, as much as the fear evoked by reading
Valley of Doom (a ‘terrifying tale of espionage in the
Balkans’ bought at a jumble sale) and her horror when she loses
her Christmas present – a propelling pencil.
Nothing in April’s life, and nothing in the novel, can match up
to the vivid, troubling and joyful colours of childhood, and her
entire adult life is glossed over in a slightly unsatisfying way.
The adult April is a shadow of her childish self, as if she has
been damaged by her intense sense of her loss of childhood. As
a result, the novel has a somewhat flat conclusion, but the main
body of it is a glorious, heady plunge into childhood.
Reviewed by Helena Mary Smith