John Bower died in 1940, so their marriage was to last only eight years, but it seems to have been very happy. The Bowers are remembered in the village even today for the big summer parties they used to give for the local children, whose mothers, however, were always apprehensive of the Commander’s method of signalling the end of the party; he would fire one or both of two enormous guns usually hanging in their entrance hall. It became a village legend that he had been a big-game hunter, although there appears to have been no truth in this.
In 1936, Barbara’s Worzel Gummidge stories finally found a publisher. Such was the success of the first book (it was chosen by Penguin to be the first of their children’s series, Puffin Story Books, when the series was launched in 1941, and has been reprinted many times since) that it was followed by nine other Gummidge tales. The stories became still better known after the war when Barbara’s friends, radio scriptwriters Mabel and Denis Constanduros, persuaded her to adapt them for the then enormously popular ‘Children’s Hour’ programme with Uncle Mac. At the time of her death, negotiations for the television rights were underway, but no agreement had been reached. It is sad that she was never to see her favourite character immortalised by Jon Pertwee. She also wrote at least eighteen other children’s books, but rarely returned to the same characters as she did with the Scatterbrook farm series.
Contributing a profile of the author to Twentieth Century Children’s Literature, Norman Culpan maintains that:
The fame of Barbara Euphan Todd will rest on the stories that feature Worzel Gummidge and his fellow-scarecrows. Typically, in Worzel Gummidge, or the Scarecrow of Scatterbrook, John and Susan, aged 10 and 12, spend holidays at Scatterbrook Farm, where they have hilarious and singularly credible adventures, protecting the nature and escapades of these walking, talking scarecrows from discovery by adults.
He praises ‘the strongly individualised’ characterisations of the scarecrows: ‘Chief among these is Worzel Gummidge himself… full of professional pride, unpredictable, and almost always irritatingly right.’
Gummidge’s principal enemy is the officious Mrs Bloomsbury-Barton (a forerunner of Ambridge’s Lynda Snell – no village event is safe from her interference), but he usually manages to get the better of her, putting her down notably on one occasion when she has mistaken him for a tramp, and addressed him as ‘My good man’. Gummidge snaps back:
‘That’s where you’re wrong… that shows that you don’t understanding nothing about anything. I am not yours, I am my own. I am not good, I am just fair to middling, and I’m not a man – I’m a scarecrow.’
Elements of Mrs Bloomsbury-Barton (described by Barbara Euphan Todd in the introduction to a later Gummidge story as being ‘very good and proper, but very, very tiresome’) are apparent in various female characters in Miss Ranskill Comes Home.
After Barbara Bower’s death, her step-daughter, Ursula Betts, wrote very fondly about her; Barbara had been, she said, ‘deeply and strongly emotional, although this was strictly controlled. She was warm and kind, and I personally owe her much. I think, however, I chiefly remember her for her dry – and sometimes wry – sense of humour.’ These qualities permeate Miss Ranskill Comes Home.
When the novel opens we meet the heroine digging the grave of the man who has been her sole companion on a desert island for four years and two themes are immediately established. Firstly, the capitalisation of ‘Carpenter’ suggests a religious dimension, which perhaps unsurprisingly is most in evidence as Miss Ranskill is striving to call to mind the liturgy of the Burial Service in order to give her former companion a Christian, however unorthodox, interment. The second theme, contemporary class consciousness, is more widely explored. Miss Ranskill is wryly aware that her own sense of propriety had verged on the absurd. She reflects on the Carpenter’s invariable form of address to her:
‘Miss Ranskill’, yes, she had always been Miss Ranskill to him since the time he had dragged her chilled water-heavy body out of the sea. The ‘Miss’ and her surname had made her armour against an assault that had never been hinted at. She had called the Carpenter, Reid. His surname seemed to set the right distance between them.
In C S Forester’s The African Queen (1935), a similarly disparate pair are thrown together in survival conditions, but Miss Sayer, the prim missionary’s sister, so memorably portrayed by Katherine Hepburn in John Huston’s 1951 film version, rapidly becomes Rose, Rosie, old girl, sweet’eart, to the Cockney engineer, Allnutt, who in turn becomes Charlie, dear, (and, following the consummation of their love, ‘husband’ in her thoughts) to Rose. But Miss Ranskill ‘had cherished the flower of her virginity’, which
had remained the same all through the years on the island. She had always been proud of her integrity and of the Carpenter’s too. They had made between them a greater story than the ones usually begotten on desert islands in books.
The New York Times reviewer, for one, did not however find this aspect of the novel unbelievable. Anne Richards’ verdict was that:
The relationship that develops between prim, virtuous, old-maidish Miss Ranskill and the gentle Reid, who is still intensely devoted to his home and family back in England, becomes with the author’s fastidious and imaginative touch, a fragile, guileless experience, touchingly persuasive and real.
There is, however, a degree of wistfulness manifest in Miss Ranskill’s recollections of the preservation of her honour, and also the recognition that her feelings about class differences have undergone a change which would be incomprehensible to her previous friends and family in England. Had they been rescued together, they had planned to visit each other’s homes, and she imagined the perplexity of Edith, her elder sister, as to how he should be received:
‘The man is neither fish, fowl nor good red herring now that you have made a friend of him, as it were. Yes, I know the circumstances are peculiar, but that makes it all the more difficult: people won’t understand. We can’t let him eat in the kitchen with Emma if he’s a visitor – so unsettling for her, and he can’t possibly feed with us.’
Nona Ranskill returns home to a world radically changed by the outbreak, unknown to her, of the Second World War, and not to the nostalgic image of England that she and the Carpenter used to summon up in mental pictures to entertain each other most evenings. Nevertheless she finds many class barriers still intact. The Commander of the convoy who has rescued her prophetically warns Miss Ranskill that nostalgia, translated literally from the Greek, means ‘return pain’, and she has much reason to remember his remark.
The contemporary reader would have understood about the innovations presenting seemingly insuperable obstacles in Miss Ranskill’s path; having lost her naval escort, she encounters suspicion and hostility as she attempts to buy food without a ration-book, clothes without ‘coupons’. The younger reader of today, while appreciating the humour often inherent in the situations, might also share Miss Ranskill’s Kafkaesque bewilderment as to the meaning of overheard conversations: