LAKELAND
FOREST SILVER E. M. WARD
256pp. British Library. Paperback, £9.99.
Recovering from an injury during the Second World War, the pilot Richard Blunt arrives in the pretty Lakeland village of Grasmere. The protagonist of E. M. Ward’s novel Forest Silver has recently broken off his engagement to Maimie (“a pretty, shallow, babbling thing”) and longs for solitude. Embarrassed by the split, but seemingly unrepentant, the decorated war hero is eager to remain anonymous.
He seeks out the owner of an island on the adjacent lake, the seventeen-year-old heiress Corys De Bainriggs. A “spectral” tom-boy who is “not in the least conscious of being female”, Corys fascinates Richard (she is, in contrast to Maimie, “like the lower end of her beloved Grasmere lake, deep, cool, hiding who knew what in its silent depths’’). He takes up residence in a barn on the island, from which he has conspired with Corys to displace the malevolent tenant, Jownie Wife, while she is away on one of her regular rambles up in the fells.
Richard settles into his routine, rowing to the “mainland” for afternoon teas and social visits. Accommodation in Grasmere suddenly becomes scarce, meanwhile, as the Prince of Wales hotel, full of city evacuees, is requisitioned by the government. Amid the resulting overcrowding, Jownie Wife, resentful at her eviction, burns down an old woodsman’s residence. Corys determines to rebuild her elderly employee’s home, raising funds by selling a beloved piece of lakefront land to the desperate and rich Mr Lovely. But she quickly comes to regret the sale: Lake View, the ramshackle home that Mr Lovely builds, is grotesque. She is by now begrudgingly experimenting with women’s dress while being courted by both Richard and the junior Mr Lovely. (She is not yet “beautiful, or even pretty”, but there is a “distinction and promise and vitality about her”; the besotted chaps liken her peers to “delicately tinted blancmange”.)
E. M. Ward (1886–1955) lived in Grasmere and drew inspiration from the area for her fiction (though named after a local tax “paid for letting beasts run in the forest”, Forest Silver is equally suggestive of Lakeland trees in moonlight). Reissued by the British Library as part of its Women Writers series, the novel is steeped in the landscape and colours of the Lake District. The descriptions are instantly recognizable as coming from one who is not, as the locals say, an “off-come”, and the use of the local dialect is pleasingly convincing. The book has an interesting perspective on gender fluidity and reflects that very British stoic approach of the era to romance. “Are you going to be one of those men w
