There are writers so prolific that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do give it a rest!’ There are others so costive that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do get a move on!’ It is into the second of these categories that Francis Wyndham falls. This 403-page volume contains all the fiction, three books in total, that he has produced in more than half a century. It is sad that there has not been far more.
The first book is a collection, Out of the War, published in 1974, but originally written during the second world war, when the still teenage author had been invalided out of the army with TB. It is amazing that he should have produced stories so accomplished at so early an age. ‘They seemed to have been written by someone else’, he remarked on their exhumation. One sees what he meant. In their recording of the bored, unsatisfied lives of a succession of girls in a dreary provincial town, they are totally unlike their two successors.
One of these girls, working in a café, finds that someone has forgetfully left behind a copy of A Tale of Two Cities. She discovers a name and address written inside the book and, mistakenly assuming these to belong to a customer with ‘a distinguished foreign air about him’ whom she recently served, she posts it back. An increasingly intimate correspondence then ensues, until the two arrange a meeting, at which, to her horror, she finds that the real owner is so unappealing that she rejects him out of hand. In another story a girl takes up with a handsome actor at the local rep, only to realise that he is exploiting her as a cover for his gay life.
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