A Bit of Ursula Bloom

A few months ago I read and reviewed Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Shortly afterward I received an email for Ian Skillicorn at Wyndham Books telling me of a podcast about the life of Ursula Bloom. What is the connection? Ursula Bloom and Mary Essex were the same woman. She wrote over 500 books under various pseudonyms and also worked as a journalist. I listened to all five episodes of the podcast over the last few days and only wish there were more. It is adapted from Bloom’s autobiographical writing and is called Ursula Bloom: A Life in Words. You can find it on various podcast providers. I listened to it on Spotify. Go, listen, and then read her books because they are absolutely charming.

Wyndham Books also kindly sent me an ebook copy of Wonder Cruise. It was a joy. Ann Clements is stuck in a job she doesn’t like, living a life she finds boring, and putting up with annoying relatives that try to direct her every move. She thinks she is too old to ever change and this is all she can ever hope for. After all, “For twenty years she had dwelt in a country rectory where nothing that was in any way nasty ever happened. This had, though she did now know it, been a tremendous disadvantage.” But then, Ann wins some money and rebels against all the practical suggestions for its use.

The first green was on the trees, and in the gardens there were crocuses and daffodils, and a tree not as yet green was pale pink with blossom. It was one of those mornings which you felt would be full of lovely happenings, and somehow, as she crossed the Fulham Road, the idea of the Mediterranean occurred to her. It was absurd that the idea of the Mediterranean should occur to anybody in the Fulham Road, but it did. It may have been the sight of the policeman on point duty, or the old curiosity shop opposite with its bundles of dusty old books, and its quaint china ornaments, or more likely–much more likely–the flower shop on the corner. In the flower shop there were bunches of cream freesias, and great white arums and dark red roses.

Ann went on her cruise to the Mediterranean. She went with trepidation and the wrong clothes and a fatalistic attitude that this was all a mistake, but she went. She met new people and went new places and thought new thoughts.

She stood against the taffrail, leaning her head to a wooden stanchion which supported her. Something had happened to her; something that was unreal. The old woman in the Alameda had awakened some realization of the curfew to youth already tolling within her. Youth that had not yet gone so far as to be entirely out of her reach. She could still touch it with her finger tips. Then to have had her hair shingled; left behind in Gibraltar, that very hair that she had cared for and brushed so repeatedly, now blown into somebody’s dustbin in a Spanish courtyard. Men talking to her, highly improperly Cuthbert would have said, and she was still uneasy as to whether Cuthbert was not right. She had realized that there were other ways of thinking, less definite and more tolerant ways, and that they were the lines along which she had always wanted to think.

I loved Ann. She was awkward and sincere and utterly charming without being aware of it. From the beginning, I was cheering for her to throw off the traces and find a bit of happiness. Wonder Cruise reminded me of The Enchanted April. Both are the stories of woman who escape their boring lives, travel, and become who they are meant to be. This is high praise because I love The Enchanted April and reread it regularly. I’ll leave you with one more quote because it illustrates the sheer charm of the writing.

And now, as she dressed in the little cabin, with the open port disclosing a blue and glittering lagoon without, she felt all hot and cold at the memory of the previous night. She reiterated that she must have been quite mad. She decided that there was something curious about foreign places, which affected you in that way. For instance, you could not do that sort of thing in a level-headed country, in such district as Golders Green or Clapham or Chingford. There people behaved nicely and properly and did not find atmosphere taking hold of them and making them behave oddly. There was no Serenata in Kensington, for instance; if you wanted music you went to the Albert Hall, and the Albert Hall did not supply you with a cushioned gondola, in nature peculiarly like a bed, and your escort did not kiss you.

This was a book that you close with a smile on your face and a firm conviction that all you need to make you happy in life is a wonder cruise to the Mediterranean. Ursuala Bloom may have churned out books with an uncanny speed but we can all be grateful she did since it gives us such happy, joyful stories to read. We can also be grateful to publishers such as Wyndham Books who see the value in these older, out-of-print books and who are making them available once again.