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Tin the summer of 1976 he is calling for my generation of writers. We don’t remember, but we do remember what everyday life was like in those times, and the everyday heat puts everyday life under pressure that inspires fiction. In the first book of the Guardian journalist Charlotte Edwardes, Trouble Was , the events are caused by the temperature rise and her servant, the increase in the lack of water; the escalating marital and emotional problems of a mother of three young children; a remote farm in the West Country. Although in some ways the pace is slow – not to criticize, the rush of the school holidays with nowhere to go and nothing to do and it’s slow – the engines of this book start from the first page.
Edwardes took the risk of the first child narrator, Frank in the early years. Such figures are rare – there’s a reason nine-year-long books are rarely written and never published – and they tend to force our suspension of disbelief, but in this case they are convincing and compelling from the start. The use of the past tense helps, allowing both immediate exposure and a sense that the prose is in the steady hands of a great memory. Through the contrast between Frank and the reader’s understanding, the book provides what the reader needs to understand about the adult’s life. We know that many adults are adulterers, that the mother’s mental illness is genetic and that the situation is there, and that their efforts to hinder social services are enough.
We met Frank and his younger siblings, four-year-old Odette and little Patrick, in their mother’s smelly old car, parked “so close that it made my job of looking after us easier”. They walk through the night to their aunt Perry’s big house, having left the house many times before, for reasons Frank doesn’t understand. Their father is in the Navy, but Frank’s memory and willpower are complicated: the big man he watches over is a threat to his mother’s stability. Not there, Frank has to intervene.
But things are very difficult. Aunt Perry is also raising her sons mostly in their father’s absence, even though she has public schools and a big house, and she is unable or unwilling to meet the needs of the children. Food is messy and inadequate, water comes from a dirty well, maggots in the kitchen sink, urinates all over the bathroom and no one washes. Frank’s cousins are cruel and indiscriminately cruel, and they are only given the humiliating treatment and disproportionate punishment that he longs to give them. In Frank, Patrick and especially Odette, the cousins see scapegoats and victims.
Conspiracy is the inevitable painful destruction of this event. Since there is a common principle, the most important parenting for all women is “hardness”. Frank’s mother tells him in response to a strange complaint about the bullying of Patrick’s cousins, “If you want to survive in this world, you have to put up with it… They call Odette “Pudding” and call her big and fat, until Odette cries and is scolded for being too careful. She slaps Frank for wringing his hands when he is upset, telling him not to shake his head because “you look confused”. Even though Aunt Perry is supposed to be a reliable adult when Mothers can’t get out of bed or are in the hospital, they punish their children until they learn not to ask for help, whether it’s medical care for a fainting child, information about where their parents are or protection from wild cousins.
Edwardes has been a war correspondent, and he’s very good at the small details that tell a bad story. He knows that a side glance is more effective than a full description, and how to tease the reader without getting carried away. If all of this seems to be worrying and confusing, then, not only because of the lack of household items but also because of the increase in the health of women, the violence of their cousins is the result of sunburn. Like the construction of a storm through a hot day, the story makes us wait for judgment, justice and vindication, some kind of happy ending.
I don’t think it spoils anything to say that in many cases, the dedication to reality makes this book difficult to deliver. There can be no happy choice for children whose guardians do not care, and Edwardes has been very true to that responsibility to give it to be sure. His answer is, like all his writings, beautiful. Even if it rains at the end, there is no cleaning storm and you can’t imagine that the pain has been taken away. The fun here is in writing well.
