Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Celebration of Repetitive Failure

Two young people who are reasonably content on their own decide to create a life of misery for themselves and others by joining forces. It happens every day. Is this a matter of stupidity, wilful ignorance, a lack of imagination, or species-wide psychic disorder?

In Our Spoons, a naive, hapless, probably slightly retarded (but solvent) 17 year old girls gets married to a witless, unemployed, somewhat passive-aggressive (but reasonably well-fed) artist in Depression-era London. What possibly could go wrong?

Well for starters, of course, the merger creates a medical burden. She finds that thinking very hard about not getting pregnant is an inadequate form of contraception. He finds the facts of life a complete and unwelcome surprise, and considers the pregnancy a betrayal. The net level of misery in the world’s population has been increased substantially.

To call her experience of childbirth medieval would be an affront to primitive medical practice. Her labour and delivery are part of an industrialised process as impersonal as it is humiliating. The real function of this process obviously is to encourage those who were forced to participate in it not to have any further need for it. This warning about expanding the world’s population of the miserable will undoubtedly be ignored.

Grinding poverty does just that: grind whatever unique personality there might be into uniform fragments of various needs. His need is to remove himself from responsibility. Her need is to protect her child from his irresponsibility. He lives on denial; she on hope; the child on almost nothing. Misery expands outward from its epicentre to make any number of family and social relationships untenable. It moves like a disease vector throughout a large population with no immunity.

But poverty is not the most lethal source of misery. It only seems that way to those trapped within it. There’s the botched abortion and the doomed affair with an older man, and the estrangement between mother and child, and yet another pregnancy, father uncertain. None of these things are driven by poverty but by self-delusion.

The self-delusion also suggests a number of obvious but futile solutions - a change of air, a new flat, running away with the children. Meanwhile the gas gets cut off, then the telephone, then the electricity. But even these events don’t suggest to her that reality is other than what’s perceived. The death of an infant child from exposure does raise a glimmer of recognition that perhaps not all one’s life-decisions have been life-affirming.

And despite all this experience, she starts it all over again in middle age. Nought stranger than folk.

By the way is it Woolworths or Woolworth’s? I can argue both ways and am confused... as usual.

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