In the Gwyn Thomas novel, VENUS and the VOTERS (1948) the too slick by half Rollo disappoints old Morris' daughter even as she wears her shiny new government bought clothes and her hair with a record amount of fixo in it - a hair stiffening agent.. By doing this Rollo earns the wrath of the out-of-work fellows who are the main characters of the novel.
In Barbara Comyn's 1950 novel: OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS, a different Rollo, in timely fashion, saves Sophia from a life of poverty, frustration, and low expectations. The eight year story of privation is told to a Helen who

went home and cried. Sophie wishes she hadn't told so much. She still sees the white pointed face of that blighter Charles. Sophie keeps remembering and remembering.
Long after the bicycles were put away Sophie pondered over sitting there with Helen on a lovely spring afternoon, drinking coffee, watching the egg-carrying ants career over their bare legs. To Sophie it all seemed a waste of time. but she told the story anyway.
Very few writers do this sort of thing better than Comyns. ( )

This book begins and ends with Sophie Fairclough telling her life story to her friend Helen, and we know from the first paragraph that it will end happily. It's good to have that knowledge in mind while reading her tale of love gone stale, dreadful poverty, sickness and sorrow. But Sophie tells that story in such a matter-of-fact fashion, from the sunny other side of the troubles, that it almost feels as though it all happened to someone else. I enjoyed this Virago Modern Classic very much. ( )

This delicious, daffy, and swift read is reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye in that the protagonist, Sophia Fairclough, speaks with a unique and captivating simplicity that is at once fresh, naive, and funny. Unlike Holden Caulfield, who lapses into pessimism, Sophia, with a detached but not-detached, Zen-ish shrug presses on - through Depression-era poverty, a marriage to a self-absorbed Bohemian artist, and domestic trials that would have some housewives shrieking, confessing, and swinging at spouses on the Jerry Springer show. She's that rare kind of person who seems to have an extra endocrine gland that secretes Prozac.

Sophia not only sidesteps one calamity after another, at one point, she steps right out of the narrative, like George Burns used to do on the Burns and Allen show, and comments:

"This book does not seem to be growing very large even though I have got to Chapter Nine. I think this is because there isn't any conversation....I know this will never be a real book, that businessmen in trains will read, the kind of businessmen that wear stiff hats with curly brims and little breathing holes let in the sides. I wish I knew more about words. Also I wish so much I had learnt my lessons at school. I never did, and have found this such a disadvantage ever since. All the same, I am going on writing this book, even if businessmen scorn it."

And it's all presented with a very British sensibility.

"The woods were delightful all year round...When it was summer there would be wild raspberries, and we seemed to be the only people who bothered to pick them, and I used to make them into the most heavenly jam. There were blackberries, too. Everything that should be in a wood was there."

And everything that should be in a charming book is in Our Spoons Came From Woolworth's. ( )

http://www.lonelymountain.net/books/a... ( )

There is something lovely about being guided through this novel. It's written in the first person, told by a woman called Sophia. She relates her unhappy early life in a simple, childlike (that isn't to say it's artless) way. She recounts her cooking and the traumatic birth of her first child with the same simple, truthfully voice.

The story opens with Sophia's marriage at 21 to a poor bohemian painter with a family who hates her. There is the only account of birth I have ever read in a novel which is one of the most distressing things I've ever read. To here how poor women gave birth in 1930's London makes me glad that I was born a good 40 or so years later. The second, more comfortable, birth reads like a day in the park after that.

The birth scene is a great example of what happens through the book. A simple childlike prose describes the big and little facts of life. The horror in the language doesn't even attempt to match the horror of the birth just as the joy of the language doesn't attempt to match the joy of falling in love. By not being prescribed an emotion we can feel it all the better. ( )