Sing Me Who You Are, page 21
Early in the novel, Harriet walks in woodland governed by ‘one of those tacit understandings that abound in the country; land half-private, half-public’. It’s the sort of ‘tacit understanding’ that is falling by the wayside as the value of land increases and its use becomes something that needs to be codified in law. The concept of planning permission was relatively new in the UK when Berridge was writing the novel: the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 had been the first to introduce the idea, with all pre-existing buildings being granted planning titles. Until this point, ownership had also automatically conferred the right to build. While the change was intended to control what happened to land, it also led to a large jump in land value when permission was given for development. And that’s why, twenty years after the initial Act was introduced, Magda is very tempted to sell her farmland to the Council for a housing development.
“With building permission I have it on the highest authority that the price would be between two and three thousand an acre. Twelve acres. That’s about thirty thousand pounds at a conservative estimate. Isn’t that something? We could do a lot with that.”
Thirty thousand pounds when Sing Me Who You Are was written is the equivalent of almost half a million pounds today. Concerns about rocketing land prices were raised in the House of Commons on many occasions: in a July 1961 debate, for example, Michael Stewart MP (later Foreign Secretary under Harold Wilson) spoke strongly against ‘the continuing sharp rise in the price of building land which enriches landowners and land speculators at the cost of the community’. In his speech he uses a simile that, given the presence of the Siamese cats in the novel, is aptly feline:
The fantastic profiteering in land which we now experience is related to that true right of private property only in the sense that a tiger and a cat are related. To say that, in the sacred name of private property, we must not interfere with the profiteering which is going on in the land market at present is as if we should tell a man that he should invite a tiger into his house to keep down the mice.
The faction offering Magda this controversial incentive is the Housing Committee, which, in turn, is supposedly being influenced directly by the government. “I understand there’s a certain amount of pressure at Ministry level to expand Maxmead,” explains Merion to Harriet – careful to add, “Oh, not to new-town proportions.”
The year before planning permission became a concern in the UK, the New Towns Act 1946 was intended to enable the government to designate new towns to be developed. The idea was to help alleviate housing shortages after the Second World War. Initially in the 1940s, these were largely in the south east. The second and third waves, in the 1960s, looked further afield. In the year that Sing Me Who You Are was published Milton Keynes and Peterborough were designated ‘new towns’ in Buckinghamshire and Cambridgeshire respectively.
Though these new-town levels of development aren’t on the horizon, there is the prospect of 124 houses on Magda’s land. She sees the plan as ‘one hundred and twenty-four families housed’ and sees herself ‘graciously accepting the gratitude of these people’. The expansion of housing has not removed a sort of deferential class system where Magda sees herself as a modern-day Lady Bountiful – even though she would be the one receiving a significant sum of money. (It doesn’t seem to occur to anybody that a woman of Harriet’s class could, herself, move into one of these homes – indeed, unmarried, childless women would be unlikely to be top of the priority list.) And that is, indeed, the sort of tone with which the sale is announced in the local press:
PUBLIC-SPIRITED GESTURE FROM ONE OF MAXMEAD’S LANDOWNERS
Mrs Gregory Witheredge has offered the Council a twelve-acre field, now under barley, to ease the housing problems of the district. There are three hundred people on the waiting list for Council houses and Mrs Witheredge has said that she wishes to set an example which she hopes that other landowners will follow. The price has not yet been decided, but subject to planning permission being granted, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government will be approached for a loan.
This was a period when more and more council houses were being built. They were originally developed in the UK in the late-nineteenth century, often part of slum clearance programmes, but (like new towns) also became part of providing housing after the Second World War. This boom for council house construction took place in 1951–55, but the numbers were rising steadily again through the 1960s. This reached a peak in 1967, of 159,300 homes completed in England and Wales and a further 34,000 in Scotland. Under new legislation in 1967, this housing had to adhere to ‘Parker Morris Standards’, which included requirements for minimum floor area and kitchen storage space, a flushing toilet, and heating systems that kept kitchens at 13°C and living spaces at 18°C.
Magda’s contribution might be a small percentage of the national number, but a huge difference to a small community – and to one woman living in a bus on this land. With £30,000 on the table, you can see why sentimental reasons aren’t sufficient for Magda to leave Harriet’s rural corner in peace. Indeed, her final decision is ‘a very subtle revenge’ for Harriet’s infidelity. Even before this, though, all Harriet wants to do with the land in Magda’s eyes is “let it run wild, I suppose, for her damned cats to roam around in”. But this was a decade where the concept of ‘letting it run wild’ was a choice garnering growing respect from some corners.
While many were concerned with housing a growing population, others were equally focused on the maintenance of nature. Harriet’s epiphany comes when she meets Captain Malone later in the novel – a spokesperson for an ecological point of view that feels very modern. His passion is for trees, and against deserts – or, more broadly, for ecological fertility and against ecological barrenness.
Did she realize, he asked her, clenching his mottled hands on the table at either side of his plate, did she realize that the Sahara desert advanced thirty miles in a year on a two-thousand-mile front? The desert was the enemy. Man had made the desert, now it was marching on them. With the earth’s population increasing, food must be grown in places where before it was thought to be impossible. And it could be.
In 1967, the world’s population was 3.5 billion – less than half what it is today. Captain Malone’s predictions about food scarcity, and his recognition that the solution ‘costs money and goodwill and the co-operation of governments’, today no longer cast him as a lone voice in the wilderness. His anxieties are very ahead of their time, and the same questions are being asked more than half a century later. His theory about ‘ectyl alcohol spread as a thin layer on top of open water in reservoirs to prevent evaporation’ is still actively used in research – presuming he meant ‘cetyl’ rather than ‘ectyl’, though it’s unclear if the error is Malone’s, Berridge’s or someone else’s. As recently as 2016, a research paper found that a surface covering made of cetyl and stearyl alcohol saw a 19.26 per cent saving in evaporation loss on a reservoir in India.
But Captain Malone’s fixation, which he passes on to Harriet, is chiefly with trees. In her mind, it ties together with land ownership, short-sighted government policy, and the erosion of a romantic vision of home that no longer makes much sense in her own life.
Harriet at last found herself warming to him. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landowners had watched their trees grow. They had had their grounds laid out by men like Capability Brown and planted avenues, created vistas which they knew they would never see in their full perfection. That was no longer possible in the England of today, for we had reverted to being a nation of shopkeepers and shop stewards. Government departments wanted trees that gave them a quick return; the time for the planting of oaks was gone.
Modern development seems to be in opposition to this arboreal dream, and not just on this specific farmland. In a 1964 House of Commons debate, Charles Loughlin MP asked the Minister of Housing ‘if he is satisfied that the present legislation which prohibits the felling of trees in cases of property development is adequate’. Sir Frederick Corfield’s response about tree preservation orders under Section 29 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1962 is undermined by the fact that fines for developers found to disobey the orders could be as little as a pound.
Trees are firmly on Harriet’s mind when she returns home to find one in the process of being cut down.
Her mind had been so full of planting trees – she had brought back from the British Museum a list of books she would consult in Cambridge on the whole dizzying subject – that this steady chopping sounded to her like an infidel’s cry of defiance to a crusader.
This single act of tree felling becomes indicative of something much wider. Is the tree landing on Magda some last gasp of retribution from nature, or is it simply one of a pattern of accidents in a novel strewn with accidents? As well as the tree felling, there is burning at a bonfire and the sad fate of Bella. No reader can finish Sing Me Who You Are believing that the rural world is paradisiacal, or even safe. When Harriet tries to decide which animal she is most like, when it comes to making a home, she makes an unusual choice, one which reflects Berridge’s thoughtful and unusual take on the domestic and natural worlds:
“I’m a cricket,” she thought. “A cricket’s home is for itself alone. A place where it can be warm, snug and safe, and it will fight fiercely if other insects enter by mistake. It is not a home where the young grow up, like the bee’s hive, and it is not a trap for insects like the spider’s web.”
Harriet isn’t escaping everything in the modern world. Ironically, one of the elements that feels most dated in Sing Me Who You Are would have been at the forefront of domestic technology in 1967 – the tape recorder, on which she tries to record her memories of Scrubbs. But neither retreat to an atavistic version of ecology or attempts to keep up with modern advances can protect her home. She has fought fiercely against the ‘other insects’, but without success. ‘Animals were admirable; they adapted to circumstance’, she thinks early in the novel. She has not managed the same feat. The novel ends with her car heading back on the London road, any sort of fairy tale over.
Simon Thomas
Series consultant Simon Thomas created the middlebrow blog Stuck in a Book in 2007. He is also the co-host of the popular podcast Tea or Books? Simon has a PhD from Oxford University in Interwar Literature.
Berridge, Elizabeth, Sing Me Who You Are
