Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

Do you remember when books used to regularly have order forms at the back of them with similar books you might like so that you could fill it in and post it off next time you passed the post box rather than going into town to your local bookshop?  It was like internet shopping without the internet.  I felt like I hadn't seen one of those in a newly published book for years until I got to the back of my copy of Stella Gibbons' Nightingale Wood and there was a page asking me if I'd like to fill in a form and send in my cheque so that 28 days later, one of these 5 books would be mine.  I didn't of course, I have no idea where my cheque book is, but one of the titles of the books caught my eye - Our Spoons Came from Woolworths.

Isn't that such a lovely name for a novel?  Isn't it so nostalgic?  Especially now that Woolies has closed.  Who even knew that Woolworths sold spoons though?  I'm just about old enough to remember shopping there so when I reminisce to my future children about it I'll tell them how I went there when I was a young'un to buy Pick n Mix and clogs and they won't even laugh about the clogs because by that time they'll be back in fashion again.  

So the name of the novel stuck in my head and a few months later I finally got around to buying it.  Our Spoons Came from Woolworths is written by Barbara Comyns and tells the story of Sophia's life between the ages of 20 and 28 in the 1930s and 40s.  The first chapter almost gives you an outline of the whole story, that things weren't great for a while but it all turns out OK in the end, which is good because at the end of the novel you can go back to re-read it (the chapters aren't very long) and see how the whole thing fits together.  Sort of like How I Met Your Mother but much shorter and with fewer canned laughs.

Our Spoons... is funny and also a little sad in parts but is written in an unusual way.  The best way I can describe it is 'practical', it details what happened, beginning sentences with 'After this....Then he said....Then he opened....Then he walked....Then he saw....The next day...Soon after' There aren't great big chunks of dialogue or brilliant exchanges between characters, Sophia simply wants to tell us her story without any bells and whistles.  She doesn't embellish things or give a sob story, she'd be totally useless on The X Factor.

At first I found this style of writing annoying until I came to Chapter 9 where Comyns actually addresses the fact that the book isn't written in a 'typical' style and I suddenly realised that it's Sophia's story, rather than Comyns', and Sophia wouldn't know how to write in any other way than the way she writes.

So, to the content of the book. If you're looking for something incredibly complex that's going to make you think about the book you've just read for days on end then I wouldn't go for Our Spoons... as it's an interesting, but not earth-shattering, account of life in the 30s.  It talks of marriage, working, children and all the other things that novels of today also deal with except the people in this don't have telephones so there are no drunken text mishaps to deal with. 

I love reading books from the 20s-50s because that time is within living memory and yet it is so entirely different to how we live now.  That's why I pick up books like Our Spoons...  I can't believe Sophia's life and the choices that were available to her and it's a life that people lived not that long ago.  I don't want to make it sound like this book is one massive downer though, because it isn't.  There is humour in it and Sophia has that typical 30s attitude of not letting sad stuff make you sad.  And standing at 196 pages it's a quick read, perfect for if you're busy and don't want to make a big time commitment to a book.

Buy Our Spoons Came from Woolworths at Waterstones