Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of ‘Yes'

Nadin transports us to 1960 in this lively and intelligent story, the companion novel to A Calamity of Mannerings. Margaret ‘Birdy’ Arbuthnot is eighteen years old, living in the very comfortable middle-class suburb of Surbiton with Mummy and Daddy, studying for the Cambridge University entrance examination and set to fulfil her parents’ expectations of a glittering future. However, this neat and stereotypical life path is, most assuredly, what Birdy does not want. She longs for a vivid life in Soho, far away from the muted beige of Surrey.

Her adventure begins when she is queuing for the toilet after a Shakespeare performance Daddy has taken her to in London and she is accosted by Charlie, an overwhelmingly dramatic and beautiful young woman, who insists that Birdy must come and help out at the theatre the next evening, which is New Year’s Eve. Fired by the resolution which Birdy has made to say ‘Yes’ to new and exciting opportunities, she agrees to help. One night of helping at the theatre, a tissue of lies to Mummy to enable her to do so and an instant and fierce love for Soho makes her determined, somehow, to stay. When she fails her Cambridge entrance exam after writing about I Capture The Castle instead of Chaucer, the way forward is clear-and, somehow, stern and intransigent Mummy is persuaded by Daddy that she should be allowed to reside amongst the horrors of the ‘racy aunt’ of Soho for a year.

And, as Robert Frost would say, ‘way leads on to way’: Birdy becomes a part of the colourful and unpredictable ‘family’ living in a ramshackle house owned by the kindly yet redoubtable Rollo, who also owns the bookshop on the ground floor, a magnet for the characters of the area. And what characters they are: artists, actors, a theatre owner and the endlessly interesting and eccentric.  Soho flotsam and jetsam. Nadin conjures them beautifully, brings them alive, makes us want to know and read more about them. As underbellies are eventually revealed, we only feel closer to the sprawling ‘family.’ Despite their unconventional lives they still live, love and suffer in just the same way as less conventional people do. Nadin skilfully weaves their triumphs and difficulties through the conduit which is Birdy and the myriad situations she brings to the reader are thus translated into human concerns: issues of class, inequality, love, abandonment, artistic endeavour-the list goes on, but it is fully-fleshed and entirely credible.