28 | June | 2024 | Thornfield Hall

The other day, a thief stole the stuff out of my bike pannier while I was in a bookstore. He took my jacket, my inhaler, a book bag, and a Penguin copy of Henrietta’s War. I was both wan and furious about the “robbery.” I was really mad about my favorite souvenir book bag, which is irreplaceable. And now I’ll have to call the pharmacist to get another inhaler.

As you can imagine, I was stunned. I don’t carry my jacket and all that stuff into the store because it’s awkward, and I’m always leaving things behind in the cafe. And anyway this is X City, considered by many “a good night’s sleep,” and not noted for its crime waves. If my bike wasn’t locked, and I don’t always remember to lock it, they would have taken that, too.

I sat down on the sidewalk to think. I cried a little, quietly. What was the thief planning to do with a decades-old jacket? And how about the book bag and the tatty copy of Henrietta’s War? He even took the garbage bags I use to line the panniers when it rains. The only thing left was a ball cap. Probably didn’t like my team.

I mean, what a crime scene, right? You can’t call the police because your bookbag was stolen. Still, it was an assault on my personal philosophy. I don’t always lock my bike; I don’t see why anyone would take it. And I once shared a house with someone who didn’t believe in locks at all. There was no lock on the back door, and we propped it open so the cats could go in and out. One morning I found a possum in the kitchen eating cat crunchies. I mean, what was this, The Wind in the Willows?

Another time, my boyfriend and I were sleeping when the light came on and a a strange man said, “Oh, I thought you were Liz.”

“She’s out of town.” I was pissed off by this unexpected guest. Liz had never entertained anyone at night in the time I’d known her, and I worried that some rapist had come looking for her. I would have been terrified if my boyfriend had not been there. The open door policy had never been violated by a stranger. Possum, yes, human, no.

Still I’ve never worried much about locks. I’m not saying I don’t lock locks, but give me a possum any day over a human thief. Possums eat kibble, but they don’t steal from your panniers.

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s delightful novel, Lolly Willowes, was the first Book-of-the-Month selection in 1926. It is the strange, cozy story of a spinster who escapes from her stuffy family to live in a village where she practices witchcraft and converses with Satan. Quirky stuff, magical, with bits of magic realism, as befits Warner’s imagination.

Many of her books have a fairy-tale element, but not all. I recently reread Summer Will Show (1932), a historical novel set in mid-19^th-century England and France. The heroine, Sophia Willoughby, a wealthy, grieving, cranky woman who has lost her two children to smallpox, ends up in France in 1848, during the Revolution fought by the Legitimists, Orleanists, Republicans, and Communists. Sophia has gone to France to demand that her husband, Frederick, from whom she is separated, impregnate her so she will not be childless.

She does not broach the subject with Frederick after all. Instead, she moves in with Frederick’s mistress, Minna, who has an enchanting talent: telling fairy tales rooted in the history of the Jews. Rich people pay her to perform at parties. And Sophia is spellbound.

Sophia and Minna converse intensely, go to cheap restaurants, and throw parties for bohemians and revolutionaries. They are radicals who visit the barricades and eventually get caught up, by accident, in the fighting.

The dialogue is intense and intriguing. Sophia becomes friendly with Inglebrecht, a Communist who “even among the Revolutionaries… is considered to go too far.”

The two of them argue about feminism. She asks, “Should there be no brains under bonnets?”

And that is a very Sylvia Townsend Warner aphorism.