Mothering Sunday - Graham Swift

The painting of a Reclining Nude by Modigliani is a bold choice for the cover of Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday, but painted in 1917-18 it's contemporaneous and appropriate for the approach Swift takes to his female subject. Set in Berkshire in 1924, the world is changing, both for society in England and particularly for Jane Fairchild, a maid for the Niven family. Many of the more privileged families have felt the impact of recent years, have lost sons in the war and have seen the war and the changing times reduce the class status they have enjoyed up to now. 

"And the house was not any more, let's face it, as in the old days, a firmly governed, a strictly regimented house. Look where regimentation had got the world".

Viewed from the perspective of 22-year-old Jane/Jay who, along with the cook Milly are the only remaining servants for the Niven family, the novel opens with Jane lying naked in bed with Paul Sheringham, the Sheringhams being close friends of the Nivens. The distinctions between the classes are in a way also to be laid bare, reduced to the basic essentials. A foundling and maid from a young age, not having a mother to visit or make dinner for on Mothering Sunday like all the other servants and families who have made plans for the day, Jane has instead met up with Paul, who has made a gap in his schedule. The two of them sharing what feels like be a final fling on March 30th 1924 as Paul is soon to be married to "a vase", Emma Hobday, move to London and become a lawyer. 

The two of them are like "two pink salmon on a sideboard" in "utter mutual nakedness". In this state they are equals; breeding and birth meaningless. It's a state that Jane wishes to prolong as much as possible, savouring every moment of this incursion into the normally out of bounds areas of the Sheringham household. Dressing after lovemaking only emphasises the differences that are to grow between them, Paul's trinkets, his signet ring, pocket watch and cufflinks "claim him, confirm him". Time is not on her side however, but looking back on it from a perspective of a now 80-year-old woman, now a famous writer, Jane has found her own way of making time extend far outside its normal boundaries. "Was there ever such a day as this? Could there ever be such a day again?"

Also in utter nakedness, Swift reduces language down to bare essentials; perfect, measured and meaningful, using plain-speaking words but not without care, precision and a degree of poetry, adopting the experience of a young girl with little education and little experience of the world - other than the visits of Paul Sheringham. Still young, Jane however is an avid reader when women were not expected to be readers and certainly not expected to have adventure in their lives, least of all from her social background. Mothering Sunday is a coming of age story in some ways, for Jane, for Paul, for society, but there is a sense of a loss of innocence as well for new beginnings, entering in ignorance and blissful naked optimism for what lies ahead.

The situation and Swift's writing also manages to play with time, breaking distinctions of hours, minutes, days and lifetimes down into a single day or moment where everything expands outward from it. The moment of perfection slips away, never to be recaptured, regained or equalled, but crystallised nonetheless in the exquisite writing. Mothering Sunday is a short novel since the moment it captures is necessarily brief, and not a word, phrase or gesture is wasted or superfluous. The novel finds its own way to encapsulate a life from within a moment, and in doing so touches on the nature of and the need to be a writer, using words and narrative to control time. Jane, as well as being a 22-year-old is simultaneously an 80-year-old woman who lives to be 98. All these perspectives, the real, the fictional, the experienced and imagined are all brought together.

It's not just class distinctions then that are laid bare and their validity questioned, but also in Jane's wandering naked through the rooms, through the library normally inaccessible to her, it of course addresses the place of women in this society and the change that it is about to undergo, or tentatively start to undergo. A lady writer, such a thing could never have been imagined when she was a foundling, a maid at 14, Jane represents a new generation, one that sees no reason to accept the way things are as they way they should be or always will be. She wants to live. And in essence, that's what the beauty and joy of the book boils down to; to living and experiencing life as an adventure. Jane's journey on Mothering Sunday might just be a simple matter, but in Swift's writing it does indeed become a great adventure into the unknown.

Reading notes: Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift was first published in 2016. I read the 2017 paperback edition that was given to me and recommended by my friend Joe. I wholehearted agree with his assessment of the quality of the writing. It's staggeringly good, the choice of words and phrases precise, evocative, line after line of brilliance that you just have to stop and admire. I've just discovered that there was a film made of the book in 2021 with a screenplay by Alice Birch which sounds intriguing and makes you wonder if it can capture the essence of Swift's writing.