by D.E. Stevenson

This one was not a favorite. Mainly because I didn’t care for Bel so much. She is timid, shy, conventional, and too self-effacing. Bel’s story is divided into two parts that could be called “City Mouse” and “Country Mouse”. Bel being the Mouse in both the first part and the second part. No growth or change for the better here! I preferred the City Mouse part because interesting things happen. Not that it is action packed, but Bel has some challenges on her job to add suspense and tension and two and a half incipient romances. We suspect one guy will be the one that will win the right to be Bel’s swain caretaker but we are briefly teased with another possibility and a half which turn out to be false leads.

Bel is a girl who comes to London to make her way in life after the aunt who raised her dies and she realizes that she must make a living. Bel has some qualities that I admire. It is these good qualities that earn her a quick promotion from the typing pool to private secretary to the junior partner of the firm, Mr. Brownlee. She is a good girl, hard-working, responsible, capable, and conscientious. Of course, she is also attractive.

She is even intelligent and sensible, except when she’s not. And that is when she lets her mousy qualities override her common sense. One example of this is when she goes on a day’s road trip with False Lead #1 and their car breaks down. It transpires that she won’t be able to get back to London and work the next morning but will have to stay the night at a little inn. She is thrown into such a state of panic that she becomes almost demented with worry and anxiety. She loses her grip to the extent that she prevails on a complete stranger to drive her to London rather than stay at the inn overnight along with the nice, if a little flighty, Mark. Poor Mark is as confused and put out by her behavior as I was. I still don’t know what she was afraid of. In fairness, I did listen to this on Audio, so the actress, Patience Tomlinson, may have made her a little more overwrought in her interpretation than she appeared on the page.

The second big drama is when she is fired by being nice to the son of the founder and head partner of the firm. Mr. Copping’s son is just out of college and he wants to learn about his Dad’s company on an informal basis before he is taken into the business. Bel puts Mr. James Copping to work and they become friendly although Bel being Bel meticulously observes the formalities and protocol. Nevertheless, a bad spin is put on their friendship by the jealous and resentful head of the typing pool and the nut case who has put himself in charge of the business in the temporary absence of the other two partners. (And he literally is a nut case. We learn at the end of the book that he ends up in an Insane Asylum!) Even though she is esteemed and respected by the head honcho, Mr. Copping Senior, as well as by her immediate boss, the temporarily absent Mr. Brownlee, Bel is thrown into despair especially because she doesn’t have a reference! She dwells on her reference-less state the rest of the book although it is no one’s fault but her own. In her anxiety to avoid conflict at all costs, she just gives up and does nothing to save herself by reaching out to her powerful friends and supporters. She drops off the face of the earth as far they are concerned.

But every cloud has a silver lining and because she is now jobless, she is able to accept an invitation to go on vacation with an old school friend, Louise, and her father. This is “The Country Mouse” part. Readers who loved the Dering Family Trilogy (#1, #2, and #3) will be thrilled that the vacation just happens to be in the Drumburly, Scotland area where Mureth is and where James and Rhoda live. Readers of Bel Lamington who haven’t read about James and Rhoda Dering and company might not be as entertained by the change of scene. Rhoda, being the force of nature that she is, takes Bel in hand and by the end, all of Bel’s problems are solved very much in spite of herself.

Now, not all heroines have to be full of spirit and fire. In fact, I like heroines who start out shy and too nice for their own good. But I also like them to develop some backbone and cease to be doormats. Although all turns out for the best for Bel, it is kind of by accident. She has very little agency of her own, and when she does, she comes across as foolishly stubborn. At one point, Rhoda, who pretty much takes over the book as soon as she appears, confides to Bel that at first she thought Bel was a bit “wet” but that she was “mistaken”. I laughed and thought, “I’m not so sure about that, Rhoda.” I gather that in the sequel to Bel Lamington, Fletcher’s End, she comes into her own a bit more. I hope so. I liked Louise, Bel’s friend, and her father, and it looks like they are featured. Also, I hope we hear that Rhoda has thrown out all of her Childcare manuals which were making her a terrible mother. I sure don’t want to hear in a yet to be read Stevenson novel that her two sons have become serial killers.

Rounded up…