My Friends...
18 total works
'One wants to believe that everything lasts for ever, but it doesn't,' said Twice. 'One has to move on . . .'
Janet and her husband 'Twice' Alexander are on a homeleave visit from St. Jago in the Caribbean. Motoring down from Reachfar to Crookmill, the house they made for themselves out of a string of ruined cottages, the most human of married couples in fiction realise that, with the pattern of their lives changing, a hard decision must be made involving two of their dearest 'Friends'. But fate intervenes in the person of the exotic clairvoyant, Madame Zora, and nothing is quite the same again . . .
It was a long journey from the West Indies to Scotland - but Janet's holiday turned out to be unforgettable . . .
It was a wrench for Janet to leave her husband behind-but Twice's heart condition did not permit him to leave the West Indies. So she set off to Scotland without him, to spend a holiday with her family-her brother Jock, his wife and their three lively children, Liz, Duncan and George.
Having to take their mother's place while she is in hospital, Janet finds the Hungry Generation almost too much for her . . . but stories of her childhood at Reachfar prove the first step towards a surprising alliance . . .
'This Paradise community doesn't seem to me to be the secure, feudal, friendly affair that everybody likes to think. There's a change working . . .'
As the turbulent island of St. Jago reaches a turning point in its way of life Janet and Twice Alexander are once again deeply involved in the daily life of the community.
Many loved Friends reappear and now added to these are the gentle Mrs Miller from Achcraggan, a link with Janet's childhood; the widowed Mrs Miller in the toils of a mixed marriage, and coloured Mrs Miller who becomes Twice's secretary. When a double crisis occurs in her personal fortunes, Janet finds a new maturity.
After her husband's death and her own breakdown, from which she has been rescued by her good friend Sashie, Janet Sandison sets sail from her West Indian home to return to Scotland and make a new life for herself as an author. She is beset by doubts, but as the days pass aboard R.M.S. Mnemosyne the personalities and dramas of her fellow passengers claim her attention more and more, not least of all the puckish child Helga, and the three elephantine sisters, the Misses Kindness, whose mission in life is to make everyone as much like themselves as possible.
Behind their backs they are soon nicknamed 'The Friendly Ones' for, like the Furies of Greek mythology, they must be placated as well as, if possible, avoided. There are other Furies aboard too, for each passenger has his or her private interior demon; but in the young Second Engineer Janet finds an unexpected and rewarding friend, and as the ship draws near to England the threads of all their lives dramatically come together for a while.
The deep vein of truth that underlies all Jane Duncan's books is here at its most impressive and, together with her sharp observation of human nature and her story-telling skill, make this one of her most compelling novels.
'It seems to me,' my father said quietly, 'that one always tries to leave a place better than one found it . . .'
From the time when she was small enough to be held high above his head Duncan Sandison was the most important person in Janet's life . . .
This remarkable novel, the story of a remarkable man who has appeared in many previous Friends, begins with Janet as a young child at Reachfar.
As she grows up her admiration for Duncan deepens into a bond of true affection that sustains her through many trials and adventures.
After her marriage to Twice Alexander it is her father's letters that bring the scent of the heather to the Caribbean, carrying with them all the comfort of his love . . .
Janet and 'Twice' Alexander break new ground in the island of St. Jago, British West Indies-a setting as far removed from the Highlands of Scotland as a calypso from a lament.
But it takes more than a planter's punch compounded of island feuds, jealousies and intrigues to put out the exuberant Alexanders-as this further sparkling episode in the now-famous saga shows, through an unexpected drama provides a startling climax.
'Since I lost the baby, you and I have been so close together that we have been almost a single person'
Janet Alexander returning by sea to the Caribbean with her husband 'Twice' finds their domestic harmony threatened by the emotional problems of the two young people aboard.
Ashore at St Jago the shipboard characters find themselves at the centre of a fast-thickening plot, with Friends old and new joining in against the colourful background of Carnival and sugar-harvest, regattas and plantation life.
And on land or sea is Cousin Emmie herself, dominating the scene in her shapeless dresses with her voracious appetite and her uncanny ability to get at the heart of a problem.
'From the rail I looked down at Sashie's upturned face and the brilliant, early tropical sunlight made me think of the lights upon the stage of a theatre long ago . . .'
With these thoughts Janet Sandison says goodbye to the West Indian island that has been her home for many years, for her husband Twice has died, the great house where old Madame Dulac held court for so long is to be sold, changes are coming to the island, and Janet herself is setting out on a new and adventurous life.
That she is doing so is due in no small measure to her friend Sashie, the ex-RAF pilot who walks on 'tin legs' and whose tender, sensitive friendship has drawn Janet from the dark limbo of desolation into which her husband's death had plunged her. The flamboyant Sashie is a brilliant and subtle character, as readers of Jane Duncan's previous 'Friends' books know; and in this story of Janet's move to a new life he is revealed with all the perception and clear-sightedness that make Jane Duncan so compelling a story-teller.
My Friend Annie takes the reader back into Janet Sandison's childhood. It opens as the death of her mother shatters the bliss of her Highland home. Janet migrates with her father to grimy, lowland Cairnton, where she meets the hateful and stupid Jean, soon, alas, to be her step-mother-and pretty Annie Black.
Years of unhappiness are relieved by holidays among the unchanging loveliness of Reachfar. But while at school, Janet finds out about Annie's profession-a discovery that troubles her strong sense of right and wrong.
My Friend Flora is set in the 'Reachfar' country-the Black Isle in Rossshire-where the narrator, Janet Sandison, spent her childhood and which was the setting for the first of Jane Duncan's enchanting books, My Friends the Miss Boyds. The same marvellous sense of the countryside and its people gives its colour and warmth to the story of Flora 'Bedamned' and her family.
Flore and the other Bedamneds (the bye-name, inherited from Flora's great-grandfather, is strikingly apt) first impinge on Janet's life when, at the age of five, she goes to the village school in Achcraggan in 1915. Jamie Bedamned and his forbears have cast their own special and sinister blight on the countryside for generations-morose, black-browed, independent, ill-favoured craftsmen better suited to the construction of dark, satanic mills than the bridges and buildings of the Highlands. But Flora's bedamnedness is of a more passive nature. When her mother dies, she leaves school to bring up her younger brothers and sisters, including the terrifying Georgie, and to keep house for her curmudgeonly old father.
Janet, George and Tom and, in particular, Janet's young aunt Kate battle to improve the lot of the patient-maddeningly patient-Flora, a natural-born doormat. But in the end it is Flora who turns the tables on her would-be benefactors and is the means of bringing unexpected happiness to the Sandisons of Reachfar.
My Friend Flora is without doubt one of Jane Duncan's finest books.
Bursting into Janet Sandison's life at the moment of her marriage to 'Twice' Alexander comes the mercurial, red-haired Monica who hits post-war Scotland like a tornado.
Through Monica, Janet and Twice find the charming row of old cottages that becomes their home-and incidentally Monica's too, since she decides to move in with them.
At a time when Janet most needs help, Monica is there. But why should she have set her cap at Twice?
Here, seen through the uninhibited eyes of eight-year-old Janet Sandison, is a vanished world-an isolated community living by its own unquestioned code of decency and integrity.
Into this remote backwater come the 'Miss Boyds'-a clutch of flighty, townbred sisters. At first they are figures of fun, but the tragedy that overtakes them arouses all the compassion of the highland people.
Full of humour, incident and colour, this delightful novel brings a forgotten era vividly to life, captures all a child's excitement as the world expands around her.
'Janet, what do you mean? What has been going on between you and that bloody boy?'
When Janet Alexander learns that young Roddy Maclean intends to defy his parents and become a writer, not an engineer, she readily helps him run away from St Jago. Her impulsive action infuriates Rob and Marion Maclean, and harsh words end a long friendship.
Interwoven with Janet's discovery of deeper currents under the placid surface of the Paradise estate, are unrest among the plantation workers, the convalescence of Twice Alexander, and the advent of Madame Dulac's grandson Edward, who falls more than a little in love with Janet.
Not until Roddy unexpectedly returns to the island does Janet come to know the truth about her friends the Macleans . . .
'She was very small with fragile birdlike bones, and although she had slept in the white shirt and shorts she still looked fresh and airy, as if she had just flown in from the open sky . . . '
When Janet Sandison returns to her Caribbean home from a holiday in Scotland she finds her husband Twice Alexander wonderfully restored to his old self, full of hope for the future and no longer haunted by the illness which had shadowed their lives for several years. Sir Ian has made him Manager of the Paradise sugar mills, with gawky young Mackie as his assistant; but Janet senses that almost the main contribution to his recovery is the arrival on the island of a girl who is keeping house for a team of young social workers, whom the island has nicknamed the 'Teeth and Feet people'.
For Twice this is the daughter he has never had, but for Janet the relationship is more complicated. The girl has flown into Janet's house and Twice's heart but seems somehow always ready to take wing again, like the swallows of Janet's beloved childhood home, Reachfar.
This is a wise story of ends and beginnings, for the lives of not only Janet and her husband but of all their friends in St Jago and in Scotland are moving on, changing and developing in a way which holds sadness and fortitude, gaiety and love, all woven together with that mixture of humour, hard sense and understanding which make Jane Duncan's novels such engrossing reading.
Janet Sandison made her bow in My Friends the Miss Boyds, Jane Duncan's sparkling first novel.
Here she is again, now a determined young woman of twenty with a University degree. Taking a job with a cranky Pen-Friend organization, she meets Muriel. Muriel is uncompromisingly plain, but clings like ivy.
As the lively narrative unfolds, Muriel's story and Janet's diverge and interlace again, aided by a blushing curate, an eccentric she-dragon and her severely repressed husband, by a shady confidence trickster and a suit of armour!
'I think you are forgetting one thing, Twice,' I said. 'You seem to forget that my home is where you are.'
Janet is unhappy in St Jago. Although Twice Alexander is now convalescing from his serious illness, the strain of the past year has caused an emotional rift between them-and Reachfar, her beloved childhood home, is sold.
Friends from Cairnton, past and present, unknowingly provide the help she needs. The rich, pathetic Lady Hallinzeil arrives with Mrs Drew, her malignant companion; and later come those beloved friends of Janet's schooldays, Violetta Cervi and Kathleen Malone-now a famous singer.
When these memorable characters leave, Janet and Twice are able to face their new life together with hope and understanding.
When the problem-child Dee Andrews runs away from her Knightsbridge home to see her father in his City office, she starts a chain of events which involve Janet Sandison in the life and loves of her step-mother Rose. The beautiful tawny-gold Rose; the cold-creamed Rose in her fantastically-ornate bedroom; the vulgarly 'frank' Rose who regales Janet with the intimate details of her love affair with such relish . . .
Yet for all her brashness, Rose exerts a curious charm which makes this one of the most engrossing of all the warmly human and popular stories about Janet Sandison and her engaging 'Friends'.
Janet Sandison comes home to the small fishing village of Achcraggan in Scotland. Behind her are ten years of happiness with her husband Twice, whose death has brought to an end their life on the island of St Jago in the West Indies. Before her lies a new career as a novelist and a return to the countryside of her childhood-and above all to George and Tom who were her closest friends, mentors and allies, in those early days. But now, Reachfar, the family croft on the hill overlooking Poyntdale Bay, has been sold and George and Tom in their old age are living cheerfully if haphazardly in Jemima Cottage in the village.
Janet, George and Tom quickly take up their lives together after nearly forty years apart; Janet buys and converts an old barn on the shore and the three of them set up house. Janet, who has not found it easy to face the loss of her beloved Twice nor to adjust to the strange new world of the professional writer, rediscovers with delight that the old Reachfar values still hold a firm grip on her family and neighbours, but the one thing she cannot face is the ruin of the Reachfar croft itself. Not even the urging of her young nephews and niece- the Hungry Generation-will persuade her to climb the hill. This psychological problem is only a small part of the dramas and happenings, some sad, some joyous, which fill the pages of this enchanting and wonderfully enjoyable book.
Readers of any or all of Jane Duncan's 'Friends' novels will rejoice particularly in My Friends George and Tom, for the wise and funny characters of the title have played important supporting parts in many of the earlier books and finally have a book which is triumphantly their own.