The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club is Helen Simonson’s third novel. Her debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, was quite delightful. Her second, The Summer Before the War, had a charming cover but the novel itself did not live up to either its cover or Simonson’s first novel. Has she hit the magic formula again with Hazelbourne?
The quirky title is similar to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and one is tempted to suspect that Hazelbourne‘s title was chosen to capitalize on the success of Guernsey. Both novels (by completely different authors) are set immediately after a war in small idiosyncratic towns near the sea, and both have strong female protagonists. Beyond that, the similarities are few.
The small town of Hazelbourne-on-Sea lies by the English coast, and its hotel hosts summer visitors. In 1919, right after WW1, there are few with the money or time to enjoy its promenades and piers, but one of those few is young Constance Haverhill, companion to the infirm Mrs. Fog. During the war, Constance managed an entire estate quite capably, but now the men are back from the front and all such paid jobs must be reserved for them, says the English government as well as most of the populace. As thanks for her service, Constance is sent to the seaside with the dowager Mrs Fog for a few weeks, but thereafter she will have to figure how to make a living.
A young woman with no dowry, in need of a husband? She was both a fresh new topic and a very old story, at once as unique as a snowflake and as common as a pebble on Hazelbourne beach.
Constance runs into Poppy Wirrall, a baronet’s daughter who runs the titular Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle Club (the ‘Flying’ comes later), and is sucked into her circle: Iris, another trust-funded motorcyclist; Tilly, a mechanical genius who makes a living as a librarian; and the Morris twins who are extremely superior dilettantes, looking down their noses at the women who actually work for money.
Rounding out the Hazelbourne lot are Poppy’s brother Harris, a flying ace who has lost a leg and is depressed and bitingly sarcastic; Tom Morris, heir to an aviation company; and Sam Newcombe, heir to a machine parts company.
Simonson has a nice ear for British euphemism and social cues in conversations, and can gently underline the realities:
She wished, just for once, that a man might praise the “home front” efforts of women and actually mean it.
and she can be slyly funny:
It was her observation that older people conveniently did not remember having suffered any errors of judgement and lectured from an invincible high moral podium. One wondered how wars had ever begun or the price of coal inflated given the impeccable record of wise decisions by all those over thirty.
But more often, the characters are quite direct:
“Sam’s grandfather was a blacksmith while our family is ten generations of gentlemen in this country.”
“Relationships across the races [are] against the laws of the state and nature.”
The majority of the Brits, as in these quotes above, are smugly devoted to their class and race hierarchy. The one American character is thoroughly unpleasant, even more classist and racist than the British, and pompously self-important to boot.
As the protagonist, Constance lacks complexity and is almost ridiculously competent. She is brave, determined, a mental-math genius, a capable organizer, has nursing skills, does not suffer from in the racist and classist attitudes seen around her, is compassionate, unfailingly kind, and immediately beloved by both the downtrodden and upper-class. She feels no resentment, envy, or bitterness though she is very conscious that the young trust-fund women have vastly different prospects from herself. Her relationship to her patrons, the Mercers, is rather hard for the reader to believe: Constance’s kindly mother and the obnoxious Lady Mercer are described as lifelong friends, and likewise Constance and Rachel Mercer are described as close friends even though Rachel treats her like a servant and takes continuous advantage of her. Constance is aware of this exploitation, too:
[Constance] thought of all the affairs at Clivehill where she and her mother had been prevailed upon to give “the merest of assistance” only to find themselves exhausted, sweating, and completely unacknowledged.
I liked the way Simonson incorporated descriptions of the clothing of the era, inevitably important even to the women who are not fashion-conscious:
Her short bathing costume was still damp around the neck and knees.
Constance is not the only woman in the book to face the loss of paid work after the war. Some women are worse off, in fact — they are war widows with children to support, and no chance of a job, no matter how capably they worked during the war. The book reiterates this problem over and over:
“It was all very well and patriotic when we were freeing up men for the services,” said Iris. “But now we are just behaving oddly and diminishing our chances of snatching up one of the few available husbands.”
Every young female character talks about this postwar situation. This repetitiveness is one of the problems with the novel, along with a tendency to spell out the obvious:
She would work and be poor; and that would divide her from Poppy, who worked and owned her own business because she wanted to make a point.
Not all the members of the Hazelbourne Motorcycle Club are struggling to make a living; some independently-wealthy women simply want to break free of social constraints and race motorcycles or fly planes alongside the men. At frequent intervals the women are condescended to and belittled by the men, even the nicer ones. This is quite likely realistic, but the repetitiveness makes it seem less a novel than a message.
A separate problem is the plethora of stories. One whole side-story involves an Indian maharajah, (whose ‘demeanour was always quiet, but whose summer suits were well tailored’), who seems to exist in the book largely to point out British attitudes to race and class. Yet there are another two characters whose brown skin is a major plot point, so that the Indian maharajah really seems superfluous. A better integrated thread involves a German waiter, but he is lost from view for most of the novel. There is also, of course, a romance.
This would be an adequately pleasant piece of historical fiction, if it were not that Simonson set high standards in Major Pettigrew that this novel cannot match.
So glad you reviewed this one. Agree heartily with your comments on Simonson’s first and second novels. What a pity she has not yet produced another at the level of her first.