Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950) by Barbara Comyns

🥄 Barbara Comyns is an author I have first heard from #booktwitter. I've been meaning to try her book to see what the fuss really is about, when I spotted Our Spoons Came from Woolworths on the "Audiobooks Recommended for You" section on my Everand the other day. (I love you, algorithm!) And so, without further consideration, I listened to it. Now I can report back that #booktwitter had been right, Barbara Comyns is something of an author, and that I've found yet another author I'd love to read more of!

🥄 Our Spoons is a semi-autobiographical novel, based on Comyns' marriage to John Pemberton, which ended in 1935. Sophia Fairclough is the heroine, a twenty-one naïve young girl who lived in 1930s bohemian London. She's a painter, and having fond of a fellow painter called Charles, they were soon married. Young (Sophia is just about nineteen), poor - very poor, and naïve, it's pretty hilarious to follow their ignorance and blunders throughout their household lives. Sophia's cooking tasted like soap at first, and she thought that strongly wishing not to get pregnant is an effective birth control.

🥄 To support the household costs, Sophia had a job as model for painters. Whereas Charles, he's as selfish as most painter characters I've read in novels - they only think about their paintings, and what they need to create the art. If people don't buy it? Well, let them keep painting. Sophia seems to be ignorant of many things, but she correctly called Charles' behavior as Peter Pan's.

🥄 Of course, when they were poorest, Sophia got pregnant. Her labouring process provided many scenes which would have been painful to read, if Comyns didn't polish them with wit and humour, which resulted into a quite entertaining piece. It was one of several parts from the book that derived from Comyns' real experience. The hospital is terrible to poor people, and Charles' rich relatives weren't helpful either. They all blamed Sophia for being pregnant and thus hindered Charles to be creative - as if being pregnant isn't a work of two! This phase - pregnancy to the birth of their healthy boy - must have been horrifying for Comyns; though she had written about it with such humour and wit that made it ironically funny.

🥄 Then entered another artist called Peregrine, with whom Sophia had had an affair. When I thought he was a better man for her, another crisis came that thwarted my hope. But in the end, those struggles shaped Sophia to be a better person. Her cooking was much improved that she even worked as a cook. I'm happy for her in the end, she deserves a happy ending!

🥄 Needless to say, I loved this book. Comyns wrote it brilliantly, she successfully presented a satire of the hypocrite British society in that era in a funny piece of fiction. The narrator of the audiobook I listened to (Madeleine Leslay) also did a good job in performing it. She voiced Sophia perfectly.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

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20 Books of Summer

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