Brought to book: Kate Macdonald on Elfrida Vipont and The Lark on the Wing

‘She moves the moral centre of the girls’ school story to a powerful Quaker ethos.’

In the 1970s, when I was reading my way through Aberdeen Children’s Library, I discovered an old novel from the late 1940s. It was about a girl who decides she wants to be a singer, and all the characters wete Quakers. I had never heard of Quakers, but I gobbled-up the book – The Lark on the Wing by Elfrida Vipont – and borrowed it often to reread.

In the late 1980s I began attending Forest Hill Meeting in south London. While I was tidying up the Children’s Meeting Room one weekend, I found the same edition of the book and borrowed it to re-read. I still loved it, old-fashioned and saccharine (in places) as it was, for the musical expertise that underpinned the plot – and also because, like the protagonist, I too was a young woman finding rooms and a job in London for the first time. As is often the way when I reread novels after a gap of years, I spotted things I hadn’t noticed before. The Lark on the Wing was clearly a sequel; I needed to find and read the preceding novel, The Lark in the Morn. I didn’t manage it then, but now, thirty-five years later, I finally have.

In The Lark in the Morn Kit Haverard is the youngest child in a mid-twentieth-century Quaker family. She has grown up under the care of her crashingly-insensitive older cousin Laura Haverard. Laura moved in to look after the family following Kit’s mother’s death, presumably in childbirth. Kit’s oblivious older brothers, and preoccupied professor father, have failed to see that Kit is being ground-down by Laura’s ideas about what is ‘suitable’ for every aspect of her life. Kit is taken by her brother to a performance of Carmen, against Laura’s wishes, and she experiences an epiphany about the power of music and singing. But no one will take her to a symphony concert. Kit realises that if she works hard she can win a school medal that will let her accompany her friends Pony and Helen to Heryot, the girls’ Quaker boarding school. The stress of swotting plunges her into illness, and she goes to convalesce at her great-aunts’ home in Manningleigh, where she meets a whole new family of Quaker cousins she has never known. She discovers that music, specifically singing, is not the ghastly experience she has suffered at Laura’s ‘musical evenings’, and realises that it is what she wants to do with her life. There is a subplot about schoolgirl loyalties and betrayals, and an overall message that doing what feels is right inside is the correct thing to do, no matter who or what tries to prevent you.

In The Lark on the Wing (which won the Carnegie Medal in 1950), Kit and her friends have grown up, left home, and are beginning jobs and student life. They live in a shared flat in London, and Kit is working as a typist at Friends House while also taking singing lessons with Papa Andreas, a great teacher who has seen Kit’s potential. Kit finds her way into professional singing circles, learns about loyalty and hard work all over again, and also about the limits of love and devotion. She makes her debut in a broadcast concert, singing soprano in a new oratorio. Once again, the Quaker values of being true to oneself, and taking one’s chances when they are offered, are strong.

Elfrida Vipont went on to write three more ‘Lark’ novels (The Spring of the Year, Flowering Spring, and The Pavilion), which seem from online reviews to have the same basic plot of a child or young adult finding a way to do the thing they have always longed to do, despite familial objections.

Vipont’s career as a writer, from 1930 to 1983, covered children’s fiction, biographies and devotional anthologies. I hope very much that her most successful work, the children’s book The Elephant and the Bad Baby, is still supplying her literary estate with royalties. I am pretty sure that my own children enjoyed it.

A 2010 biography of Elfrida Vipont, written by her niece Susan V Hartshorne, gives a strong sense of the two Quaker cultures – one repressive and one more liberal – in which Elfrida Vipont grew up. It also tells of the remarkable twentieth-century network of English Quaker schools, and their far-reaching web of pupils, parents and teachers. Most illuminatingly, we learn about her own career as a professional singer before she became a teacher and then a stalwart of Friends’ House committees – she will be remembered by many Friends as an active force in British Quaker work. I jumped when I came across her signature on a letter in an archive recently, feeling as if I had met a friend.

The first two Lark novels fascinate me. As a non-Quaker child reader, the grammar rules defining the circumstances in which Quakers used ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ rather passed over my head. Only now can I see how complex this usage is. I don’t think I’ve come across another example of authentic Quaker-speak in modern fiction, written by a Quaker drawing from her own experience.

I’ve come to see some dark elements in these novels, too. At the great-aunts’ house, Kit is welcomed by Aunt Maria and Aunt Priscilla, but has not realised that there is a third great-aunt, the formidable and quite Gothic Aunt Henrietta. She lives in the top floor of the old Kitson house, with her own servant and a parrot, and refuses to appear in company. She has voluntarily withdrawn from society, angry because her father would not allow her to train as a singer, and refused to allow any but sacred music in his home. Henrietta, a born singer and a passionate artist, was repressed by her family’s religion, and suffered from this all her life, her frustration gnawing inwards like a canker. Kit encounters her by accident, but refuses to be frightened of her, and Henrietta’s wasted life comes to an end with something like acceptance. Her potential was wasted by rigid nineteenth-century Quaker beliefs. Her angry presence in a defiant red dress is a powerful image, and not a forgiving one.

A more insidious element, which features in both novels, is the power of ‘too much busyness’ and not considering that one ‘might be mistaken’. Laura has a utilitarian approach to life, which is at odds with the joy many of the Quaker characters experience. While Kit struggles to find a way to turn her singing into a career, Laura is against this on principle, just as she prevented Kit’s brother Tom from learning to play the clarinet because it was ‘ridiculous’ and unsuitable for what Laura thought Tom should do with his life. Laura blights anything the children do to explore their imaginations or express emotions or needs. Her need for control extends beyond spring-cleaning and strict mealtimes to active censorship of Kit’s letters to her father, and a deliberate withdrawal from the Kitson family, effectively cutting off the children from their dead mother’s family, and all the artistic and musical influences they represent. But Laura’s juggernaut certainties can be manipulated. Other adult Quakers find ways past her controlling impulses to manoeuvre the right way forward for Kit, at school and at work. Their approach is always gentle and imaginative and avoids confrontation. Elfrida Vipont is illustrating a power struggle here. She may have detected something in mid-twentieth-century Quaker culture that was a modern version of the Victorian Quaker refusal of music, in that it could not comprehend it, rejecting the arts completely.

Considering the first novel as part of its wider genre, Elfrida Vipont (pictured above) did a remarkable thing. She moves the moral centre of the traditional mid-century English girls’ school story from its traditional Church of England model to a powerful Quaker ethos. And she does it without changing any of the other tropes of the form. In the first half of the twentieth century, fiction about girls at school, from Angela Brazil to Malory Towers (always as boarders or as day girls – state schools didn’t seem to have novels written about them until the 1970s), followed the same patterns: the testing of the newcomers; identification of types, friends and foes; the exposure of a false friend and recognition of an overlooked source of strength; and a dramatic rescue (in this case, of a Stradivarius violin). Elfrida Vipont presented a Quaker background as the norm for all her protagonists, and their Quaker home-training guides them as they squabble and struggle through adolescence in a way that is very rarely seen in the Church of England model. School stories with a Church of England background rarely involve characters discovering their own spiritual growth, whereas Elfrida Vipont presented everyday Quaker characters reflecting on daily life in terms of Quaker belief. It’s quite an achievement to write this without also producing prigs and evangelical caricatures.

Vipont’s characters are engaging and believable, perfectly nice and sometimes-hearty young men and women. They are all white and middle-class – they all expect to study medicine or the arts or work in the family firm – and none of them have any black or brown friends. Rather, the girls have a running joke about Laura going to volunteer at one of the many Quaker missions in Africa. Other minority groups are not represented. Money is not guaranteed, however; Kit needs to earn her own living, but she instantly gets a secretarial job in Friends House because, it appears, her best friend’s mother is on the right committee.

I was fascinated by Elfrida Vipont’s depiction of London in 1950. Kit takes singing lessons with Papa Andreas, who has a small old house just behind Kensington Palace. She walks there across the parks all the way from Friends’ House after work. She could have taken a bus to Hyde Park Corner, but even so, that’s still a very long walk. Cousin Milly is a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on Gower St, and lives at the Penn Club (called the Swarthmore Club in the novel). And that is Kit’s London: she seems to go nowhere else, and never uses the Tube. She goes to the cinema quite a lot, but we never hear about the kind of film she likes to see. A ‘flick’ is casual entertainment for these girls, not art, which is odd considering that cousin Milly wants to be an actress. Kit also doesn’t go to concerts, which is strange for a singer; perhaps money really was tight.

The most remarkable thing that Elfrida Vipont does with these novels is to saturate them with Quaker life and values, and with music, as if no other ways of life exist in that world. There is a twenty-first birthday dance, but, apart from the ‘flicks’, all these very-cultured young people do for fun is go to classical concerts and sing lieder together at home. The only non-middle-class person that Kit encounters is a burglar, whom she helps escape because she has been thinking about the shockingly-high value of the violin that he is trying to steal, and the impossibility of him ever being able to sell it, when he is so clearly desperately poor. It is, as he says, his life at stake. This welcome arrival of a sense of social justice in The Lark in the Morn is repeated in the second novel, when Laura embarks on a second career in social work, but we do not feel that Laura will ever be able to empathise with the people she may be called upon to help as Kit had.

Indeed, Kit’s world feels doubly artificial when one considers the setting: these novels were published in 1948 and 1950, when rationing was still in force in Britain for many daily goods. What the adult male Quakers did during the war is not mentioned at all, and there are no mentions of bomb damage, trenches, Andersen shelters or demobbed troops on the streets. The family firm of Kitsons is a grocery chain, yet no one says anything about how it has survived the war, and food in general does not seem to be in short supply.

This doesn’t matter: Kit’s journey over two novels is delightful to read, and her musical education and spiritual growth are charmingly depicted. As portraits of post-war England the two novels should not be taken as documentary, but rather as impressionistic. As portraits of Quaker life and values and history they are remarkable.

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