Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows. The weight of water had forced the windows open; so the ducks swam in. Round the room they sailed quacking their approval; then they sailed out again to explore the wonderful new world that had come in the night. Old Ives stood on the veranda steps beating his red bucket with a stick while he called to them, but today they ignored him and floated away white and shinning towards the tennis court. Swans were there, their long necks excavating under the dark, muddy water. All around there was a wheezy creaking noise as the water soaked into unaccustomed places, and in the distance a roar and above it the shouts of men trying to rescue animals from the low-lying fields. A passing pig, squealing, its short legs madly beating the water and tearing at its throat, which was red and bleeding and a large flat-bottomed boat followed with men inside. The boat whirled round and round in the fierce current; but eventually the pig was saved, and squealed even louder. The children, Hattie and Dennis, watched the rescue from a bedroom window, and suddenly the sun came out very bright and strong and everywhere became silver. (pgs. 1-2)

So begins Barbara Comyns’ 1954 novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead – set in a small country village in Warwicksire England. The Willoweeds live in the village manor home and are led by a deaf, unpleasant, tyrant of a Grandmother. She terrorizes the servants, her son Elbin (a lazy, no-good widower) and his three children: Emma, Hattie, and Denis.  This little jewel of a novel has a plot similar to the river that flows by the Willoweed’s manor – slow and meandering with hidden dangers lurking underneath. It all starts with the flood and as the village recovers, people start dying in gruesome, mysterious ways.

Grandmother Willoweed is most concerned about maintaining her hold over everyone in her vicinity as well as her comfort. She takes one woman dying and crushing her cat as a personal insult. Elbin is concerned with doing as little as possible. Emma the oldest, dreams the dreams of a young girl on the brink of adulthood all the time conscious that she lives in a house with impossible adults. As the novel goes on some of the characters are changed and some are dead while the reader is in the same place they started, a small village. Only now the reader has gone through a disquieting sense of unease.

I found this novel very reminiscent of Edward Gorey: a rural setting, a manor house, upper-class characters, and the same quirky juxtaposition of the unthinkable and the amusing. Even the size of the book and the cover illustration reminds me of reading a Gorey work. Both Goery and Comyns are adapt at portraying the eccentric in such a matter-of-fact way that what we may find odd instead, seems quite commonplace. Comyns is very good at generating this same type of atmosphere and she fleshes out a Gorey outline with word-images:

Strange objects of pitiful aspect floated past: the bloated image of a drowned sheep, the wool withering about in the water, a white bee-hive with the perplexed bees still around; a new-born pig all pink and dead; and the mournful bodies of the peacocks. It seemed so stark to see such sorrowful things under the blazing sun and blue sky – a mist of rain would have been more fitting. (pg 3-4)

Comyns is also masterful at her descriptions of people, using a few words to give a complete picture of even minor characters:

His mother was a little frightened bird of a woman, who held her twisted, claw like-hands clasped near her face as if she was praying. This made it rather difficult for her to play cards and they would fall around her like the petals from a dying flower. (pg. 29)

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is a short novel, worthy of a comfortable afternoon curled up and reading. Comyns combines the wonder of a child playing with toy boats of the river with grown-ups acting despicably, a destructive flood in a bucolic village, people who die and people who change. And through it all I enjoyed myself immensely.

I received this book from Gavin of Page 247

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