The summer of 1976 calls to my generation of novelists. We don’t remember it, but we remember the textures of daily life in that era, and a heatwave puts daily life under the kind of pressure that fuels fiction. In Guardian journalist Charlotte Edwardes’s first novel, Trouble Was, the scene is set by that heatwave with its attendant, escalating water shortage; the escalating marital and mental health crisis of the mother of three young children; a remote farm in the West Country. Though in some ways the pace is slow– not a criticism, the pace of school holidays with nowhere to go and nothing to do is also slow – the novel’s engines thrum from the first page.
Edwardes has taken the risk of a first-person child narrator, primary-aged Frank. Such figures are necessarily precocious – there’s a reason full-length novels by nine-year-olds are rarely written and never published – and tend to make demands on our suspension of disbelief, but in this case it’s convincing and compelling from the outset. The use of past tense helps, allowing both strikingly immediate observation and the feeling that the prose is in the steady hands of a remembering adult. Through the gap between Frank and the reader’s comprehension, the book conveys what the reader needs to understand about the adults’ lives. We know that most of the adults are also adulterers, that his mother’s mental illness is hereditary as well as situational, and that her efforts to fob off social services are just about adequate.
We meet Frank and his younger siblings, four-year-old Odette and toddler Patrick, in their mother’s smelly old car, packed in “so close it made my job of looking after us easier”. They’re driving through the night to the big farmhouse of their Aunt Perry, leaving home as many times before, for reasons Frank never really understands. Their father is away in the navy, but Frank’s memories of and longing for him are complicated: an adult reliably in charge when present, but also a volatile threat to his mother’s stability. In his absence, Frank is required to step in.
But the situation is, naturally, unmanageably complex. Aunt Perry is also raising her sons mostly in the absence of their father, albeit with private schools and a large house, and she too is unable or unwilling to meet children’s basic needs. Food is erratic and inadequate, water comes from a dirty well, there are maggots in the kitchen sink, pee all over the bathroom and nothing and no one is ever washed. Frank’s cousins are casually brutalised and brutal, given attention only in the form of humiliation and inconsistent punishment that they yearn to pass on. In Frank, Patrick and especially Odette, the cousins see scapegoats and victims.
The plot is the painfully inevitable deterioration of this scene. Inasmuch as there’s any consistent principle, basic parenting, for both mothers, is about “toughening up”. Frank’s mum tells him in response to a rare complaint about the cousins’ bullying of Patrick, “If you want to survive in this world, you have to put up with it … put up and shut up.” She calls Odette “Pudding” and sings to her that she’s big and fat, until Odette howls and is scolded for being too sensitive. She slaps Frank for twisting his hands when he’s upset, tells him not to shake his head because “you look deranged”. Though Aunt Perry is meant to be the responsible adult when Mum can’t get out of bed or is in hospital, she punishes the children until they learn not to ask for help, whether medical attention for a convulsing toddler, information about their parents’ whereabouts or protection from predatory cousins.
Edwardes has been a war correspondent, and is excellent at the small detail that tells a terrible story. She knows when looking away is more effective than a full frontal description, and how to haunt readers without sensationalism. If all this sounds grim and disturbing, it is, not least because of the mundanity of domestic squalor and the incremental worsening of Mum’s health, the cousins’ malice and the effects of the heatwave. Like the building of a thunderstorm through a sultry day, the story makes us wait for resolution, for justice and vindication, for some kind of happy ending.
I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that as often, the commitment to realism that makes this book also makes the ending difficult to deliver. There can be no cheerful resolution for children whose carers don’t care, and Edwardes has been too true to that position to betray it for a fairytale conclusion. Her solution is, like the rest of her writing, elegant. Though the rain falls at the end, there’s no cleansing storm and you don’t get to pretend the pain is washed away. The joy here is that of good writing.
