RC Sherriff is best known for his 1928 play, Journey’s End, set in an officer’s dugout in northern France during the first world war. But he wrote several novels too, one of which, Greengates, has just been republished by Persephone Books.
It is set in London in the mid-1930s, where we find Edith Baldwin and her husband, Tom (known always as Mr Baldwin), rattling around in Grasmere, a dank terrace house just off Edgware Road. The Pooterish Mr Baldwin has recently retired as a City clerk, a change that has depressed them both. If poor Edith no longer has the place to herself, her husband has been brought low by the fact that for all his good intentions – he’d hoped to achieve so much in his retirement – he simply cannot seem to get anything done.
Increasingly desperate, one day Edith drags him into deepest Surrey for a walk. There, they stumble on a new estate, still in the process of being built. Intrigued, they look around the show house, which is at first unsettling – how modern it is, with its furniture of weathered oak, its “sanitary basins” and fitted cupboards – and then unaccountably alluring. Back in London, they resolve to sell Grasmere and everything in it. Brown furniture be damned. They will buy a house on the estate, raid Heal’s – or a shop much like it – and start all over again.
At once cosy and compelling, Greengates is an adorable story and a fascinating bit of social history. The Baldwins’ desire for what the social historian Juliet Gardiner calls, in her introduction, “an attenuated form of modernism” is touching, the reader longing for their move to come off. But it’s also, given the sneers that suburbia attracts, rather chastening. Even as Sherriff pokes fun at their aspirations – at their flushing lavatories and newfangled light switches – he never stops reminding us that they are, nevertheless, pioneers: plucky, determined and brimful of sweet ambition.
