An Unreasonable Man

by Henrie Mayne | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 0704321173 Global Overview for this book
Registered by bookguide of Wijchen, Gelderland Netherlands on 1/16/2009
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1 journaler for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by bookguide from Wijchen, Gelderland Netherlands on Friday, January 16, 2009
This book has been sitting on our bookshelves since we bought it, probably in 1990 or so. It has already travelled:
1. Bought from a UK-based bookclub, The Good Book Guide
2. Elst (near Nijmegen) in the Netherlands
3. Hamburg in Germany
4. Wijchen (also near Nijmegen) in the Netherlands.

Since I joined BookCrossing our shelves, which were already full, have started to overflow, so it's time to let go of some books. I will be reading this book for a couple of BookCrossing challenges:
1. The Ultimate Challenge 2009. Read, release & themed reading.
2. Reduce Mount TBR Challenge 2009 - challenge yourself to read a certain number of books on the To Be Read shelf, or which were in your possession before January 1st 2009: rules and extra themes.
3. Personal Read-My-Way-Round-the-World Challenge (???)
4. Personal Time Travel Challenge (1890s - 1945+)
5. 2009 Pages Read Challenge - 276pp.

Journal Entry 2 by bookguide at Wijchen, Gelderland Netherlands on Saturday, March 6, 2021
This book is so interesting because of the way it combines the personal with the broader events of history. It was an unexpected joy and an unexpected memoir, unacknowledged as such. I eventually discovered that the main subject was Arthur Mayne (rather than the Arthur Boyne of the book, his wife Emily Bonnycastle Mayne (Isabelle) and their family, including their eldest daughter Lucy, who was actually Margaret Lucy Mayne, the author of the book under the pseudonym Henrie Mayne. As this book is extremely obscure, my review is full of a, so if by chance you have a copy and do want to read it, look away now!

HERE BE SPOILERS
I had originally assumed it was fiction and, judging by the cover and a desultory reading of the first few pages, had thought it was going to be something like [book:The Diary of a Nobody|535856], which I didn’t enjoy. What it turned out to be was the life story of Arthur Mayne (here called Boyne), a boy from the lower middle classes who managed to excel academically and win a scholarship to Cambridge where he fell in love with his friend’s younger sister, Isabelle. This in turn allowed him to pass third at the British Indian Civil Service exam. He was then sent to a backwater in India where his sheer hard administrative and organisational work kept deaths in his district to a minimum during two years of famine and epidemic. Once he was able to claim success, he managed to persuade Isabelle that she should marry him, but it soon became clear that their marriage was to have its ups and downs. Firstly, even though she had expected hardship and to support his work, she was totally unprepared for their isolation with no social life and for Arthur’s long working hours. She has a horror of pregnancy and childbirth, so their marriage remained unconsummated until a later intervention by her mother when she decided that perhaps it was her duty to the Empire to have children and ended up having five! Arthur, for his part, avoided socialising, which affected his career, even when he realised that his beloved Isabelle was suffering. Eventually a compromise was reached, with her moving to the hill station in the hot season, his busiest time. But he also contracted malaria, which started a pattern of illness where he became a hypochondriac and often used real or imaginary illnesses to avoid things he didn’t want to do, primarily going to social events or talking to his wife about unpleasant subjects. This section is full of fascinating snippets about colonial India. He did, however, take an interest in his children once they were old enough to learn to read, and revealed himself as an unexpectedly talented teacher,

After moving around India for years, it was usual to move on, but Arthur retired just at the start of the First World War, their ship was sunk before it reached them, so the family went to British Columbia in Canada instead where Isabelle he took to his bed to play patience and knit socks for soldiers. Isabelle nagged him to do something more manly, so he headed for England (where the two eldest were now at boarding school), intending to help the War Office, but ended up signing up to drive an ambulance in the north of Italy. Much to my surprise, I discovered that the area he was stationed, on the River Isonzo was close to what is now the border with Slovenia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, disputed territory with Italy. In Slovenian, this is the River Soča and I had a lightbulb moment: I have a book called The Front on Soča that I had reached from a BookCrossing meeting without realising what it was about and it is about exactly this period, so I have started to read that to find out more.

Before long, however, the Red Cross had obviously discovered Arthur’s organisational prowess and sent him off to work in Berne in Switzerland to help the Red Cross aid to POWs the form of food parcels. This was where I was able to find traces online of the real life Arthur, who improved life for POWs when he commissioned the development of rusks that could be reconstituted into loaves with water, a great improvement on bread sent from England that was stale and mouldy by the time it reached them. His great attention to detail also helped in attempts to trace missing people in the POW camps. This continued after the war when he was so efficient at organising the repatriation of POWs that he stayed on to help other countries do the same. He was never happier than doing something active to help organise relief efforts, whether in India or during the war. It was family life and social contacts he struggled with, so going back to England and reuniting with his family caused a relapse to his withdrawn bedridden life with his mysterious illness he referred to as his worm, releasing ‘fatigue poisons’. This changed somewhat when the family moved to Jersey because it was cheaper to li London. Arthur took to gardening as his escape and Isabelle started on lecture tours to Women’s Institutes and the like, and became a stalwart of various committees including the League of Nations Union, holidays for Welsh miners, etc. After this dried up, she was bored again. Her brother visited, looking unexpectedly old and worn, then without any warning committed suicide on the beach. They moved back to London where their mismatched personalities cause a great deal of friction. To escape this, Arthur came up with a novel solution: he bought a touring car and they went off to explore Europe.

The constant movement and novelty kept them from examining their relationship too closely. Arthur never really had friends and didn’t like socialising, but he enjoyed fleeting conversations with strangers and finding out new subjects to investigate; I suspect he would have loved the internet age. They even had a few adventures, helping out a young man who had deserted from Mussolini’s army, finding him a job in Germany and informing his family that he had not committed suicide as they believed after he had been posted to Abyssinia. Arthur also smuggled money and diamonds out of the port of Hamburg for an anti-Nazi German man fleeing to his son in Canada because he was unable to take his money with him. I’m not sure how true this story is; in actual fact, when Isabelle’s brother died, the newspaper reported that he had lost money and had asked Isabelle to keep diamonds for him, but they had been lost. This is not reported in the fictionalised version.

On the eve of the Second World War, their travels in Europe were nearing their end, but not before they had visited Italy, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, the Low Countries, France, Spain and Portugal, all by car. With their socialist sympathies, the threat of fascism began to shrink their options, so they headed for Scandinavia and the Arctic Circle. Their next tour was in Africa, but the poor state of the roads, the dust and the sheer distances became too much. Undaunted, they decided to visit eldest son Edmund (in reality Edward) who was working for Shell in San Francisco. Arthur enjoyed the people, the innovation and the food. They decided to settle down for a while, renting a house in La Jolla where Arthur decided to take up cookery, thus depriving his wife of yet another of her occupations. She didn’t manage to make friends there, possibly because she was aloof and old-fashioned. She also suffered terribly from insomnia, not to mention from stress living with her husband, who had never understood her. It came to a head when she tried to commit suicide. Once she had recovered, they set off on their travels again, getting as far as Niagara Falls where Isabelle was upset, reminded of a distant relation of hers who had died going over the falls in a barrel. This was Matthew Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel, who later died trying to swim across the Whirlpool Rapids below Nigeria Falls (not in a barrel). Arthur suggests going back to Africa to visit Victoria Falls, but it was not to be. They returned to England instead.

Soon after they had arrived, Lucy (Margaret/Henrie) had a daughter, Frances, and Arthur was besotted. Her husband had an important job so was mostly away from home, so Arthur went with her to stay at her home in the country, the gatehouse of a ruined castle, rather reminiscent of Dodie Smith’s descriptions in [book:I Capture the Castle|860532]. The next chapter of Arthur and Isabelle’s lives was to be apart. The war had started and Isabelle had trained as a VAD nurse, working at a casualty station during the Blitz and being sent as a nurse on ambulances taking air-raid victims to hospitals in the countryside. Finally she had a chance to take an active role. This final third of the book is also fascinating, reporting on Lucy and Arthur’s conversations about the progression of the war. At first it was a full house. In addition to the family, there were a succession of nannies, two Austrian refugees, who supposedly replaced the cook and house parlourmaid, but did nothing but eat, an Italian gardener (who also turned out to be a trained chef, rather fortuitously) and evacuees who came from a convent school for dockers’ daughters. The Austrians were eventually removed by the Home Office. They had had to remain within a 5-mile radius unless they had a special permit with a recent photo, but there was no photographer within a 5-mile radius: stalemate. The Italian was disappeared for a while without his wife being informed. It was thought he was on a ship that had been torpedoed, but he was safe and eventually returned, though he took umbrage at Arthur’s horticultural attempts and sabotaged his seedlings. As a gardener, I sympathise with Arthur’s rage and despair.

Arthur’s predictions about the war were often spot on. This section is also full of tales of grandfatherly indulgences and I thoroughly enjoyed the part where Arthur and Lucy were at loggerheads about appropriate songs to teach a toddler; when Lucy told her atheist father that she was going to bring up her child as a churchgoer, Arthur dug up what sounded like bloodthirsty hymns from those he had learned as a schoolboy. I have to say, many of Arthur’s supposed inappropriate responses to Isabelle overreacting to something sound more like humour to me than failure to understand her point of view. I liked Arthur far more than Isabelle, who struck me as a spoilt, hysterical drama queen. I suspect that her daughter felt the same because, in spite of calling her father an Unreasonable Man, she obviously had great affection for him, however exasperating he could be. He did have the ability to snap into action whenever there was a crisis, whereas her mother would have a meltdown. It says enough to me that when the doodlebugs started to devastate London, Isabelle retreated to the country but was unable to cope with life with her family, going to stay with a neighbour, then quarrelling with her too. She was certainly a difficult woman. It’s telling that Lucy didn’t write her memoir from Isabelle’s point of view because she really didn’t make the best of her life, though she was often thwarted by a lack of opportunity. She was unable to become a suffragette, which might have suited her, because she was in India during that period. She was unable to help in the war effort in the First World War because women and children were not allowed to cross the Atlantic, so she was stuck in Canada for the duration. According to Lucy, she eventually became a pleasant old lady, but that was later on. In fact, there’s whole book about her, Prepared for the Twentieth-Century? the Life of Emily Bonnycastle Mayne (Aimee) 1872-1958 that I would love to read for the other side of the story. By the end of this book, I had really grown to love the socially inept Arthur with all his peculiarities and was sad to read about his horrible death which must have haunted his youngest son who dismissed his inconvenient requests to summon a doctor when inconveniently on holiday 150 miles from the nearest hospital. I wonder if he would have survived to have further adventures if he had been in a less remote area. RIP to the so-called Unreasonable Man.

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