A Bit of Singing and Dancing by Susan Hill

Here you'll find 11 varied but intense stories about emotional struggles of ordinary people trying to get to grips with life. For some unfortunates, the adjustment is too great and tragedy is inevitable, something very characteristic of Hill's writing as many of you will already know.
A Bit of Singing and Dancing is less dramatic and not quite so tragic.

I can stay out here just as long as I like, I can do anything I choose, anything at all, for now I am answerable only to myself.

Esme is still coming to terms with her mother's death and her new-found freedom. She is over 50 years of age and has reluctantly been forced into caring for her forthright and domineering bedridden mother for 11 years prior to her death. She had been half-alive satisfying her mother's needs and repressing her own needs and desires. Her mother's death had given her a new lease of life, an unexpected freedom which also attracted fear and bewilderment to someone who had been so sheltered and yet so greatly influenced by her ailing mother.

The shock of death came to her again like a hand slapped across her face.

Even after her death, her mother's spiritual presence still lingered, haunting Esme's conscious thoughts. She was constantly hearing her mother's voice, reprimanding her. The voice of oppression for Esme?

The arrival of Mr Amos Curry, not quite the knight in shining armour, allowed Esme the opportunity to become a bit more daring and adventurous as she approached her twilight years. Each day I should be ready for a new encounter. Having a man around, even a platonic relationship, gave her a feeling of pleasure and a curious kind of excitement. However, it is not plain sailing from now onwards because Esme has to confront such horrors as humiliation, disgrace and shame before she comes to her senses so that the story ends on a stable, if not happy note:

I always like a bit of singing and dancing, some variety. Like mother, like daughter. Read it and find out for yourself what I mean...

As a contrast, The Custodian is more sensitive but melancholic.

Things had to alter, things could never go on. Happiness did not go on.

There were many intense moments of silence, dread and fear of the future, yet Mr Bowry, or the 71 year old man, as he is commonly called, had adopted the boy when he was 9 months of age and they had fallen naturally in their life together. The story plunges into Bowry's despair, the fear of his imminent death and his constant anguish of what would happen to the boy he has nurtured and protected. He was haunted by ideas of some long illness or incapacitation.

He hadn't expected to survive the winter. However, with spring, his heart lurched with joy, amazed and overjoyed that he was still alive. He prayed that he would live ten more years until the boy was old enough to look after himself! He adored the boy, there was no doubt about that. The boy was his sole purpose in life.

A habitual walk through the marshes towards the sea in April had a devastating affect on the boy, creating a sombre mood.

You could die here. You could drown in the water and never, never be found.

The mist enveloped them, the air seemed to close in and suffocate them. A thick silence. Gunshots. The boy displayed feelings of fear, leaving the old man feeling totally helpless in offering protection from the future horrors which could cause him shock, pain and misery.

Blaydon's arrival is the storm in the teacup. Inevitably, it caused the greatest pain and misery which destroyed Bowry's well-being and the young boy's. Happiness was short-lived.

In The Conservatory is meant to represent a microcosm of society, the worst kind.

I don't like him, he watches us. I wish he would go away.

Boredom was the factor that motivated the wife to have a very public love affair. She was 32, had been married for 8 years, childless and incredibly spoilt and ignorant. She believed she was missing out on something, those things we call passions, jealousies and anxieties. You know the thing. She wanted to rock the boat and was childishly irritated when her husband Boris showed no interest at all in her affair. She wanted to make him jealous and quarrel with him so that she would ask his forgiveness. A bit like Wuthering Heights. He was too busily preoccupied with his books on military history.

The lovers discovered Fewings, their Victorian Gothic fantasy, groteque and ugly, housing such bizarre contents as instruments of torture in the cellars, not quite your setting for an illicit extramarital affair!

She found it sinister, she had nightmares centred upon the place, and all of this contributed to her sense of heightened awareness, of real, true living.

In her narrow-minded, distorted view of how she could achieve excitement she liked to be left alone in the cellars amongst the instruments of torture and feel fear! Exactly. A strange atmosphere, a very odd woman.

Unfortunately, the boy seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She didn't like to feel that she was being spied upon and this made her feel angry. She was frightened by the boy because she knew there was something not quite right about him. She confronted the boy, intimidating him, scaring him to death and from then onwards, things were never quite the same ever again....

Publisher: Penguin.   ISBN: 0-14-004073-0

Copyright 2013. Permission must be obtained from the author before any of this review is reproduced.