As Green as Grass, by Emma Smith – review

The title, the subtitle, the author’s plain name, even the jacket’s photograph of a laughing old lady in sunglasses: none of these is particularly enticing. But the book itself is a delight. Written in the crisp present tense by a 90-year-old with a remarkably clear recollection of the trains of thought of her teenaged and post-teenaged self, it draws you deeply in, so that by the end you feel that you, too, have been to a harsh girls’ school in Plymouth, and then to a keyboard-clattering secretarial college in Surrey and then — best of all — that you have manned canal boats carrying coal from Birmingham to London during the war years with your friends Kitty and Eve.

Emma Smith won prizes (Llewellyn Rhys and James Tait Black) in the late 1940s for her novels Maidens’ Trip and The Far Cry. Then, widowed very young, she disappeared into the shade to bring up her family. Persephone Books reprinted The Far Cry in 2002. Now we have a remarkable resurgence by this woman, who turns out to be alive, well, fluent and living in Putney.

The opening volume of her childhood memoirs, The Great Western Beach (2009), described the first 12 years of her family life in Newquay, where all was not well in her parents’ marriage; As Green as Grass begins when the family moves to a house called Melrose in the village of Crapstone, Devon, where all continues to be not well between Mummy and Daddy. When Emma’s father (a poetry-loving banker, depressive, failed artist, first world war hero) is at home, the tiptoeing atmosphere of unease in the household is palpable. Then one night, during a short holiday in Emma’s beloved Newquay, Daddy tries to strangle Mummy:

No one can save me, nobody in the world, I realise, from facing up to what is the truth I must bear somehow by myself, alone: Daddy, my father, is mad.