Letting go is the hardest thing of all

Sing Me Who You Are by Elizabeth Berridge

But what was a ruction? How did it smell? Hot and pungent like smoke from a dying fire of rags and bones, or had it the sharp bite of newly scythed nettles?

Elizabeth Berridge

Sing Me Who You Are opens with a delicious premise. Thirty-seven-year-old Harriet, whose mother has recently died in circumstances fraught with pathos, turns her back on her dutiful, duty-filled suburban life and comes to live in the old converted bus she inherited from her eccentric aunt, alone in the countryside except for her two Siamese cats. It sounds like a perfect ‘Lolly Willowes’ set-up. Indeed, a frustrated poet who encounters Harriet walking the fields with a cat on each shoulder is repulsed by what he perceives as her witchiness. But Berridge was a post-war novelist: this is the English countryside of the 1960s, not the 1930s, and it presents Harriet with modern challenges which still have a very contemporary feel today. Her position is complicated by the fact that, although she owns the bus, she has no claim to the field on which it stands. In fact, the field is part of the country estate owned by her wealthy cousin, Magda, who is less than delighted by Harriet’s plans and sees the field as offering very different possibilities. The relationship between these two women, close since adolescence yet strained and unequal, will shape much of what follows.

Harriet at that time has been fat and big. It seemed that when she was most unhappy she gathered flesh as well as facts around her shrinking bones to hide them from the hard, spry laughter of the world.

Elizabeth Berridge

It quickly becomes clear that Magda finds her husband Gregg more of a nuisance than anything else. When his encroaching blindness, a legacy from his time as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, interferes with her aspirations towards influence in local politics, she is only too happy to entrust Harriet with his care. Harriet, who has come to see herself as merely an adjunct to other people, is equally happy to help.

In the last few years Harriet had grown to believe that other people’s troubles were a refuge from one’s own.

Elizabeth Berridge

The ensuing intimacy between Harriet and Gregg is as tender as it is inevitable. Berridge handles this aspect of her plot with an attractive lightness and sensitivity, particularly in writing about Harriet’s insecurities over her own large body. Neither Harriet nor Gregg is sure that this is love, but even as they wrestle with their concepts of fidelity, truth and deceit there is another uncomfortable secret behind their not-so-secret liaison.

Each of them had things to tell the other, but they would not tell all. Was the creation of taboos the beginning of the withdrawal of love, or did it signal a larger protectiveness, a surer affection?

Elizabeth Berridge

All of the relationships in Sing Me Who You Are have a fragile, onion-skin quality, arranged in layer upon delicate layer. Beneath Harriet and Magda lie Harriet and Gregg, and beneath each of them lies their older, and separate, relationship with the charismatic, narcissistic, damaged and deceased Scrubbs Malone. Both Harriet and Gregg are haunted by Scrubbs’s ghost. But their memories of him are very different: Harriet knew him and loved him when she was an impressionable teenager; Gregg entered into an uneasy co-existence with him as a fellow prisoner-of-war. Each of them has recollections fixed upon different parts of his life and character, and it is only through the conduct of their affair — and Gregg’s determination to break the hold that Scrubbs’s memory has on Harriet — that they are able to put the whole picture together in flashes of realisation.

Lightning illuminated many things at once; half-truths and sugar-coated lies and downright self-deceptions that looked like moralities. It was essential to stop making a virtue out of virtue.

Elizabeth Berridge

Planning for Gregg’s blindness, Harriet decides to record cassette tapes that he can listen to, and begins recounting her teenage life and memories of Scrubbs. The sudden shift from the third to first person as she dictates into the machine works incredibly well, revealing Berridge’s complete confidence in her narrative skill. After the certainty of Harriet’s recollections begins to shift and shock her, she decides to play the tape back to herself. It is a moment of intense poignancy among many.

But as Magda’s ambitions grow, the golden autumn turns to freezing winter, and more and more people learn of Harriet’s liaison with Gregg, how tenable can her position be?

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I really don’t want to tell you more, because it would be awful to give away too much of Berridge’s carefully-constructed plot. I found Harriet an immensely sympathetic character, although one with all-too-believable flaws. Hers is a terrific story, and I can only recommend that you discover it for yourself.

Sing Me Who You Are is a book of unquestionable soul, which looks like one thing at the beginning and ends as very much something else, through transitions so mature, natural and unforced that they do not strike the reader until the story’s end. There is a delicate but deliberate peeling of the onion, a process which inevitably ends in tears. But there is a kind of redemption, too. Berridge, new to me, has joined my personal pantheon of authors who trusted their readers, heart and mind. I am hungry for more of her writing.

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