A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

In her autobiography, Rumer Godden takes us through the years 1907 to 1946. She was the second of four daughters born to British parents who made their home in India. She tells magical stories of her life in India and how the colorful and lush country influenced her as a writer. The family seemed always to be traveling between England and India. The early part of her story is filled with the support of her warm and loving family. Her writing began as a child and continued throughout her life. Besides writing, she also loved to dance. As a young woman, she taught dancing and also ran several dancing schools.

Her marriage to Laurence Sinclair Foster took place in 1934. He was a stockbroker and a good deal of his life centered around social and athletic interests. She gave birth to two lovely daughters, but she ended up being their sole support because her husband was constantly in debt and deserted his family. BLACK NARCISSUS, which was her first truly successful book was published in 1939. Europe was in a turmoil and World War II was about to begin. Not the best time to begin a career as a novelist.

Godden spent the war years in Kashmir. She sustained her life and that of her children by renting Dove House which was an abandoned house far removed from the closest village. She grew her own food, and lived on very little money. Godden and her daughters suffered health problems because of the deprivation that they experienced during that time. Her strength and courage was impressive to read about. She wrote constantly and always spoke lovingly of her years at Dove House.

The book ends with a very hopeful Rumer Godden arriving back in England with the finished manuscript of THE RIVER tucked under her arm.

In "A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep" Rumer Godden powerfully evokes her childhood in India, the jolt of returning to England and to school, her beginnings as a writer, her debutante and young married years in India, her marriage and life as an "abandoned family" in India while her soon-to-be-ex-husband was in the army, and her brave and touching experiment of living with her daughters in Kashmir in 'Dove House', the house she loved more than any of her other houses. Her creative spirit and extraordinary lyricism shine through the pages.

I was thrilled to come across a copy of this out-of-print book at my public library's used bookstore where I volunteer. It was on my tbr list, but I didn't have high hopes of finding it. I've loved Rumer Godden's writing for decades - her novel *In This House of Brede* is one of my all-time favorites, and several others are excellent as well. ((She explains how she got the name Rumer in the book - I've always wondered about that. It is her real name.)

This book is Volume I of her autobiography. Volume II is titled *A House With Four Rooms*; and she also wrote *Two Under the Indian Sun*, the memoirs of her childhood in India, together with her sister Jon. (Unfortunately, she doesn't explain how Jon, whose real name was Winsome, got her nickname. Maybe one of the other books tells that. I haven't found copies of them yet.)

After the prologue, the book starts out a little slow, with details of her genealogy. It's actually pretty interesting (especially if you are into history and genealogy), but the action quickly picks up once she starts talking about her own life. What an amazing life it was!

Rumer Godden was a member of the last generation of the Raj - British imperialism in India. Her family was solidly British, but her father was employed by a transportation company in India. Rumer and the rest of her family shuttled back and forth between England and India all their lives. I realized while reading this that many of Godden's novels (especially the ones set in India, but also *The Greengage Summer* which takes place in Normandy, France), are highly autobiographical. Born in 1907, the book opens when Rumer was sent to live with her grandmother in England at the age of 12. The stuffy atmosphere and cold climate of 1920 England was quite a cultural shock to Rumer, whose emotionally (and often physically) absent parents had let their four daughters "run wild" in the warm climate of India. Thrown abruptly into the often-harsh British public school system without any emotional support whatsoever, the Godden girls were left on their own to sink or swim. No wonder they grew into such strong adult women.

They were to need that strength. Rumer's first baby died at the age of only 4 days, and her surviving two children were both born prematurely and dangerously frail. The family spent World War II in India, where it was felt that the children would be safer since Britain was undergoing the blitzkrieg bombings. But Rumer's husband abandoned her and the girls, running off to join the service where he soon took up with another woman, leaving Rumer and the children with no means of support in a very primitive and rural area of the country. Rumer's sister Jon was also in India, but was far away and she too was in a desperate situation. In fact, Jon was so overwhelmed with her war work for the Red Cross that Rumer ended up raising Jon's son along with her own girls.

After frantically trying several ways to make a living without success (this was wartime and times were hard for everyone), Rumer realized that the only way her family would survive was to live in a way that didn't require any money - to live off the land. With what little money she had left from the publication of a book, she leased an abandoned and dilapidated old house on a remote mountainside. Rumer and the children fixed up the house, raised chickens, grew their own vegetables, and sold medicinal herbs that they'd grown. Eventually they befriended the villagers and a few eccentric neighbors, teaming up with them in the fight for survival.

The book ends with the end of World War II and a catastrophe that forces Rumer to return with the girls to England. The story is continued in the next book, *A House With Four Rooms*.

It's hard to describe the book in a way that does it justice. You really need all the details (and Godden's writing style) to experience the things that made her life so exciting and very unusual. She truly was a global citizen, at home in vastly different cultures and able to adapt so well to all the different circumstances that confronted her. Although this book was copyrighted in 1987, Godden writes with the old-fashioned style of her own much-earlier generation. It is so fitting to the time setting of the book. She also uses far more vocabulary than modern writers do. With her unorthodox, intermittent, and partly self-taught education, her knowledge and intelligence is all the more impressive.

Given that *Black Narcissus* and *In This House of Brede* are about nuns, and that the title for this book is taken from a Bible quote, I was most surprised to find that Godden was raised in a non-religious family and was a vehement and outspoken agnostic at this period in her life. (She converted to Catholicism later.)

I respected Rumer Godden's honesty and openness in this book. Not only is she outspoken about her agnosticism, she also describes a lesbian love affair in the 1920's, and becoming pregnant out of wedlock in the early 1930's. Respectable people like Godden didn't talk about such things in her generation. It made me admire her even more.

Godden has been criticized for being class-conscious. It's a typical attitude for those of her time and place, and I do see that when she writes about England and about her ancestry. But it's a whole different story when she writes about India and its people. There, I find her far more egalitarian than other writers of her time. She clearly views the rural villagers as her peers, equal partners in the fight for survival. And while living in Calcutta, she was ostracized by the British expatriate community for welcoming mixed-blood Eurasian students and treating them as equals in her dance school. As a result, she preferred living simply in an Indian neighborhood rather than the much better conditions of the British residential areas.

There are also many great black-and-white photos in *A Time To Dance, No Time To Weep* that help to bring Godden's story to life. I was startled by the photo of her parents' house in India where she spent her early years. According to the text, Godden's family seems pretty middle-class, maybe upper-middle. But the house looks like a palace. Perhaps that's typical of the way all British citizens lived in India. She does explain that poverty was so prevalent that Indian people were desperate for work even at very low wages, thus even the poorest British families could afford several servants. In any case, the book does give the reader a real feel for a long-gone way of life, including both the negative and the positive.

I can't wait to read the rest of the story in the second volume (if only I can find a copy.)

(243 pages)

Quotes From A Time to Dance, No Time To Weep:

" . . . a child's hatred . . . is searing because it is unmitigated."

"It is difficult, with the novel I was to write about those two months in Chateau Thierry and the film that followed it, to know what I remember as happening, what is transposed in the novel and what is overlaid by the film; each seems to shimmer through the others."

". . . 'shaken into life'; that is what dancing does to all of us who have any spark of gaiety and response and perhaps it is what we all need, certainly what I needed at that particular time, though I was only to discover its finer shades far later."

(About her novel The Lady and the Unicorn): "I have a tenderness for this book; it belongs to a poignant time."