Ruth Valentine‘s new novel strikes Rosie Johnston as being both relentlessly true and beautifully told
The Jeweller’s Skin
Ruth Valentine
CyberMouse MultiMedia, 2013
ISBN 978-0954837341
pp 400 £9.99
Ruth Valentine knows her stuff when she sets her novel The Jeweller’s Skin in Horton Haven near Epsom, Surrey; in 1996 she published a history of this former mental health ‘asylum’, now a mental health in-patient rehabilitation unit. In this oblique but compelling novel, she unfolds the story of Narcisa Humphreys who spent five years as a patient at Horton during the First World War, bore a baby there, was forced to give up her daughter and went on to become the asylum’s cook. By 1946 Narcisa’s daughter has discovered her mother’s whereabouts and would like to meet her.
Valentine is an established poet and her precision with language makes this book (published by CyberMouse Multimedia) a treasure. She takes us into the Women’s Acute Ward:
The curtain edges were red like diluted blood. All the poor fools in the ward were still asleep, more than one of them snoring. They had no idea how important this time was. Time was what mattered. She no longer had a wrist-watch – it must have been stolen – but she always knew exactly what the time was. Now, with the curtains red, it was nearly six. Soon the nurses would come to wake them. The rest of them will complain or plead or pretend to be unwell, but not me. I know what I will have to do today. I will say nothing; if I say nothing, they cannot do anything. I have had that happen, being taken by surprise; I’ve learned my lesson.
There is plenty to be said about mental health diagnosis and how it can be abused. Valentine is never heavy-handed:
The hospital, cramped and neglected throughout the (Second World) war, was starting up. The last of the civilian casualties … were to be transferred. The mentally ill would return. Those who all through the war had escaped diagnosis in the new sharp light were seen clearly again, their depression a silence amongst the festivities, the voices only they heard shouted down.
Why was Narcisa there as an inmate when her good sense and resilience sing out of every line? We are told little about her upbringing save that she is a French-speaking native of Prizren, Yugoslavia, the daughter of a jeweller whose stretching and refiring of spun gold is an image for Narcisa’s own suffering. Her lack of English isolates her but does not stop her falling for and marrying Edwin in London. Details about her marriage are also patchy:
That was how it had started, when she was young, with Edwin: days of crying, unable to stop or explain. But was that what had happened? So many years ago: thirty-three, thirty-four. She was hardly the same person. It was different, she told herself, hunched under the bedclothes. He was out at work and I was all alone.
Another shard of memory tells us that ‘Edwin even then had not much liked it, her being out on her own, while he was out at his work in the City of London’. More about Narcisa’s breakdown and of Edwin’s reaction would have made a fuller story but Valentine is relentlessly true in her depiction of her character’s sense of detachment, emotional numbness and fractured memory. This is how it would have been in Narcisa’s thoughts thirty years after it happened – traumatising events (including suggestions of physical and sexual abuse within the asylum) would have been lost or suppressed – so that is what Valentine writes.
The story of Narcisa and her daughter trying to find each other, the desperate loneliness and longing in both of them, is beautifully told and I confess that, at page 313, I wept. There is much in common with Martin Sixsmith’s story of Philomena Lee, told in the film Philomena. The Jeweller’s Skin is just as moving.
.
Rosie Johnston’s third pamphlet Bittersweet Seventeens has just been published by Lapwing Publications (Belfast). She also writes fiction and journalism, and facilitates writing groups in London and Cambridge.
www.rosie-johnston.com
Ruth Valentine‘s new novel strikes Rosie Johnston as being both relentlessly true and beautifully told
The Jeweller’s Skin
Ruth Valentine
CyberMouse MultiMedia, 2013
ISBN 978-0954837341
pp 400 £9.99
Ruth Valentine knows her stuff when she sets her novel The Jeweller’s Skin in Horton Haven near Epsom, Surrey; in 1996 she published a history of this former mental health ‘asylum’, now a mental health in-patient rehabilitation unit. In this oblique but compelling novel, she unfolds the story of Narcisa Humphreys who spent five years as a patient at Horton during the First World War, bore a baby there, was forced to give up her daughter and went on to become the asylum’s cook. By 1946 Narcisa’s daughter has discovered her mother’s whereabouts and would like to meet her.
Valentine is an established poet and her precision with language makes this book (published by CyberMouse Multimedia) a treasure. She takes us into the Women’s Acute Ward:
The curtain edges were red like diluted blood. All the poor fools in the ward were still asleep, more than one of them snoring. They had no idea how important this time was. Time was what mattered. She no longer had a wrist-watch – it must have been stolen – but she always knew exactly what the time was. Now, with the curtains red, it was nearly six. Soon the nurses would come to wake them. The rest of them will complain or plead or pretend to be unwell, but not me. I know what I will have to do today. I will say nothing; if I say nothing, they cannot do anything. I have had that happen, being taken by surprise; I’ve learned my lesson.
There is plenty to be said about mental health diagnosis and how it can be abused. Valentine is never heavy-handed:
The hospital, cramped and neglected throughout the (Second World) war, was starting up. The last of the civilian casualties … were to be transferred. The mentally ill would return. Those who all through the war had escaped diagnosis in the new sharp light were seen clearly again, their depression a silence amongst the festivities, the voices only they heard shouted down.
Why was Narcisa there as an inmate when her good sense and resilience sing out of every line? We are told little about her upbringing save that she is a French-speaking native of Prizren, Yugoslavia, the daughter of a jeweller whose stretching and refiring of spun gold is an image for Narcisa’s own suffering. Her lack of English isolates her but does not stop her falling for and marrying Edwin in London. Details about her marriage are also patchy:
That was how it had started, when she was young, with Edwin: days of crying, unable to stop or explain. But was that what had happened? So many years ago: thirty-three, thirty-four. She was hardly the same person. It was different, she told herself, hunched under the bedclothes. He was out at work and I was all alone.
Another shard of memory tells us that ‘Edwin even then had not much liked it, her being out on her own, while he was out at his work in the City of London’. More about Narcisa’s breakdown and of Edwin’s reaction would have made a fuller story but Valentine is relentlessly true in her depiction of her character’s sense of detachment, emotional numbness and fractured memory. This is how it would have been in Narcisa’s thoughts thirty years after it happened – traumatising events (including suggestions of physical and sexual abuse within the asylum) would have been lost or suppressed – so that is what Valentine writes.
The story of Narcisa and her daughter trying to find each other, the desperate loneliness and longing in both of them, is beautifully told and I confess that, at page 313, I wept. There is much in common with Martin Sixsmith’s story of Philomena Lee, told in the film Philomena. The Jeweller’s Skin is just as moving.
.
Rosie Johnston’s third pamphlet Bittersweet Seventeens has just been published by Lapwing Publications (Belfast). She also writes fiction and journalism, and facilitates writing groups in London and Cambridge.
www.rosie-johnston.com
By Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, Year 2014