I'm Not Complaining

by Ruth Adam

"Squalor did not frighten me...But somewhere beneath it all was a live, burning thread that ran through these human miseries that was not just mismanagement, nor stupidity nor a faulty social system, but something living, primitive, terrible - something I dare not look in the face"Madge Brigson is a teacher in a Nottinghamshire Elementary school in the 1930s. Here, with her colleagues - ranging from the beautiful, "promiscuous" Jenny to the earnest communist Freda and kind, spinsterish Miss Jones - she battles with the trials and tribulations of that special nits in the hair, abusive parents, inspectors' visits, eternal registers, malnutrition, staff quarrels and staff love affairs. To all of this Madge presents an uncompromisingly intelligent and commonsensical laughter is never far away as she copes with her pupils, with the harsh circumstances of life in the Depression, and with her own love affair. For Madge is a splendid determined, perceptive, warm-hearted, she deals with life, and love, unflinchingly and gets the most out of the best - and worst - of it.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, British Literature

346 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1938

About the author

Ruth Augusta King was the daughter of a vicar in a Nottinghamshire mining village. After school in Yorkshire, she taught for five years, before marrying the journalist Kenneth Adam and moving with him first to Manchester and then to London. She travelled a great deal, pursuing her wide-ranging interests in education and social policy. Four children were born between 1937 and 1947, by which time the Adams had moved to a large house outside London to live communally with other families. During the war Ruth Adam worked, like many other writers of her generation, in the Ministry of Information; meanwhile her husband joined the BBC, where he later became Director of Television. Ruth Adam wrote twelve novels between 1937 and 1961, all of them concerned with social issues; she also co-authored, with Kitty Muggeridge, a biography of Beatrice Webb. A Woman's Place, a history of women's lives in the twentieth century, appeared in 1975.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another discovery from Virago: an author I knew nothing about. This is set in the 1930s at the time of the Depression. It is set in an industrial town in the Midlands/north of England where there is poverty and factories are closing. The main setting is a school and the novel is told from the point of view of Madge Brigson who is thirty, single and a teacher. The novel revolves around the school and its teachers. They are all women and have to be single. If they marry they have to leave their jobs. Each chapter is almost stand alone, but they do follow on. The novel covers the whole of a school year and Adam develops the characters of the teachers and some of the pupils and parents. There is a cross section amongst the teachers: a communist, someone who would have been described as promiscuous, some more conservative. There is a local Church of England curate who might also be described as a “Red”.
Adam describes the poverty and the struggles of the poorer families and their children pretty well:
“It was the last mild day. At the end of that week the winter began in deadly earnest, as though the cold days before had been merely a temporary substitute for the real thing. I had a persistent sensation, as we plunged deeper into those short, icy days, with their lowering fogs, that the town was plunging down with us. It was frightening. We all seemed to be one — the huge husks of the great factory buildings whose heart-beats had stopped — the grey, stained houses round them, the tragic men who stood for ever at street-corners, and the children who came to school in fewer and fewer warm clothes, because as the weather got colder they were pawned for food. I would like to have been detached from it — a visitor, coming down to work and then going away. But I could not get the feeling of detachment. I was part of it, bound irrevocably to their miseries because my work was their children.”
Adam is not afraid to address difficult and controversial issues such as abortion, the after-effects of shell shock, cruelty and abuse to children and the politics of the time, including hunger marches. There’s even a bit of a riot with police brutality thrown in! The police don’t come out of this particularly well. The characters are all flawed and often not particularly likeable and all show their prejudices. She was an elementary teacher herself
There are shades of Holtby and E H Young here. There is a little double twist at the end. Initially I thought Adam was going to ruin the whole novel: but she didn’t thankfully. It’s a good novel, not without flaws, but Adam is a bit of a discovery and I will read more. I believe Persephone have also published one of her novels.

[Iva · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are looking for something like a Barbara Comyns/Barbara Pym British novel, look no further. Reliable Virago Press presents Ruth Adams, a worthy supplement. This novel often seems like a memoir and is set in 1930's in an English mining village where our narrator is a teacher during a depressed time of unemployment. This has a direct impact on both teachers and students. Adams know school politics as she was a teacher in a similar school. The issues faced are quite contemporary: abortion, child abuse, workplace politics. Adams isn't quite Comyns or Barbara Pym, but she entertains nonetheless.

[Jenny Yates · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such a good book. It’s a bit hard to get into at first, because it deals with a world that’s very different from our own. There are gas-rings, sprigged smocks, knickers, school registers, Peg’s Paper, and flap-jacks (in which face powder is kept). The author, Ruth Adam, was born in 1907, and this novel was her second. It was first published in Britain in 1938, and then reprinted as a Virago modern classic in the 80s.

The heroine of the novel, Madge Brigson, is a teacher in depression-era England. She lives and works in Bronton, a factory town in which many of the factories are closed, and many of the people out of work. Her point of view is realistic, just a little on the cynical side, often funny, as she interacts with the various characters around her. There are those who take seriously their work of managing the system – school inspectors, well-meaning philanthropists, and an idealistic curate, among them – and then there are those who are quite adept at gaming the system. And then there are a few who fall by the wayside.

Women’s work is fairly circumscribed, and there are no married teachers. When they marry, they stop teaching and become housewives. Adam never questions this absolute dictum directly, but she does show its effect very vividly. She never preaches, nor does she espouse a simple solution to the social problems she describes. She describes this world in all its variety, all its contradictions. You put down this book feeling admiration and amazement.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I have a superstition - my only one, I think - that when you allow yourself to become low and miserable for insufficient reason, Providence provides you with a real cause for misery, just to teach you not to give way about nothing.”

I loved this! A perfect autumn read. Tales of a school teacher. So many moments that left me shocked and touched. Surprisingly creepy in parts. Also very forward thinking (it was written in 1938) in dealing with topics so openly such as sex work, BDSM, mental illness and abortion.

I saw in another review someone described the book as “clunky” because Madge (the protagonist) “just happened to be around at various dramatic moments involving other characters” - this caught my eye because it’s something I loathe in books, where an author is lazy and relies on coincidence or chance, it completely takes me out of the story. I don’t agree this is the case at all with “I’m Not Complaining”. Madge, the first person narrator, simply tells us the goings-on of her work life and all the noteworthy stuff that happens to her - when you’re a teacher, I feel a huge part of the job IS to notice things, to look out for any unusual activity and get yourself involved, which (in the case of this book) sometimes does lead to dramatic scenes. Everything developed very naturally to me. Also, oftentimes Madge would seek the drama out amongst her colleagues and neighbors, curious about the gossip, which was one of my favorite things about her character. She’s not perfect by any means, and some of the choices she made had dire consequences (and were not the choices I myself would make), but that’s life and made me appreciate her and the novel even more.

The quiet passages where Madge is alone in the school preparing for her night-classes were some of my favorites. Same with the scenes of the teachers in the break room talking, gossiping, commiserating, arguing. Adam has a knack for creating a strong atmosphere that really stood out to me.

“I remember that it was one of those mild sunny winter afternoons that come so occasionally in Bronton, and that the children were unusually good. I let them have the reading-books they liked the best and their favorite story about an old ball who married a faithful top after years and years of waiting. I opened the classroom window and stood looking out on to the faint gold afternoon sky. Someone was having a bonfire on the waste ground and the smell reminded me of the country. I was nearer to being perfectly happy than I ever remember being during term time. Old age - my own old age - suddenly receded into the distance and lost its terrors for the moment. I thought of it with pleasant speculation, and decided that I would have a very small cottage in the country and keep a little maid to do the work.”

I really enjoyed how many of the plot lines concluded in ways I did not expect, but made total sense.

Not sure what to make of the ending, I'll have to think more about it.

Will definitely check out more by Ruth Adam in the future!

[JimZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hidden gem of a book, once again put out by Virago Modern Classics. 🙂 🙃

A schoolteacher sometime during the post-World War One depression in Nottinghamshire (landlocked county in the East Midlands region of England) England circa 1930s...in a factory town with closed and shuttered factories. Men out of work, poverty, young girls in their late teens desperate for work or to find a husband to avoid becoming an old maid/spinster. Women had so few options back then.

The main protagonist is a teacher aged 30, Madge Brigson. Other characters in the novel include other teachers at her school, and as we come to find out, each with their own story in the novel. Her best friend is Jenny who is attractive and at the beginning of the novel is having an affair with a married man, and becomes pregnant. Madge and Jenny while friends are candid in what they say to each other...Madge speaks her mind and sometimes I found to be really blunt when talking with the other teachers ...she certainly was not afraid to call a spade a spade. The conversations and interactions between the different characters in the story were totally believable. When I commenced reading I was thrown into Nottinghamshire and stayed there until I put down the book. I was never interrupted by phoniness of the writing. Her prose was wonderful. She reminded me a bit of Barbara Comyns who had a sharp and oftentimes wicked sense of humor. This is a book that is humorous at times, but also sad at times.

This is an exchange between Madge and Jenny I found to be humorous, but it also gives you an idea of how blunt Madge can be. Jenny just got engaged to the curate and is sewing some clothes for her wedding trousseau, and Madge sits down and says...:
• “You are a snobbish little beast,” I said.
“Yes,” answered Jenny complacently.
“ I can’t imagine what Gregory sees in you. You’re the absolute antithesis of everything he believes in. You’re a horrid little middle-class snob, you’re a petty bourgeois reactionary, you’re promiscuous and immoral, you’re far too fond of money and the flesh-pots, and you accept everything and give out nothing. How in the world you managed to get off with him beats me, unless he means to spend his life reforming you, and is marrying you as a painful duty he owes to his cloth.”
“I expect so,” said Jenny, sucking her cotton and hunting about for a needle..

I had to look up ‘flesh-pot’....meaning ‘places providing luxurious or hedonistic living’.

Throughout this read, and overall, I was thoroughly engaged and recommend you put this on your TBR list for 2023!!! 🙂 🙃

Note:
• This book is available for free on the Internet Archive (https://openlibrary.org/ ). It’s a wonderful site, no fees, nothing....just many, many books!
• More about Ruth Adam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Adam

Reviews:
• https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2019/... In her review HeavenlyAli says: I’m Not Complaining is a wonderful novel – which would appeal to fans of writers like Winifred Holtby and E H Young.
• http://agirlwalksintoabookstore.blogs...

[Lesley · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some good things in this, about a teacher in an elementary town in an industrial town during the 1930s Depression, but also some clunky things - I found it a bit implausible that the narrator, Madge, just happened to be around at various dramatic moments involving other characters! Also some things that make me wonder if she was responding to some of Holtby's work - South Riding and Poor Caroline in particular.

[Gary Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel from the 1930's that would still be seen as shockingly progressive in its attitude towards abortion, open marriages, the institution of marriage, promiscuity, Socialism, a woman's autonomy, etc.

[Felicity · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having acquired vastly more books that I have wall and, increasingly, floor space to accommodate, many of them have lain dormant for decades. Ruth Adam's long-neglected novel is the most recent retrieval from the bottom of one of my Towers of BABLE (Book Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy), a lifelong disorder to which innumerable readers and writers are also vulnerable. My sole complaint is that I have wasted so many reading years before discovering how richly rewarding a writer Adam is. (By now, most of her other titles are out of print and/or beyond my price range.) The duties of a National School teacher may be dull -- the title and four-line epigram derive from Ruddigore -- but Adam's 1938 novel never fails to instruct and delight. She presents a convincing portrait of the volatile, often inconsistent or incoherent, affinities and antipathies of parents, teachers, pupils, employees and unemployed in a working-class district of a fictional Nottinghamshire town on the eve of WW2. The credibility of her exquisitely drawn characters is due to the flexibility of their moral, social and political beliefs and their perceptible incongruence with personal conduct. We are following the erratic progress of history in the making; all the characters are liable to change their minds about issues and events that will change their lives. Unconstrained by consistency, they frequently trade insults, brickbats and blows with erstwhile allies, but if the riotous assembly never reduces to an inarticulate rabble it is because Adam extends the same sympathy and generosity to the mutinous and misguided of down-market Bronton as George Eliot does to the disgraced of up-and-coming Middlemarch. It's a fine art rarely found in the fiction of current affairs.

[Suzanne]

Nancy Pearl's favorite of the Virago editions.

[Ayreon · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Adrien · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5. I think. Still sorting my thoughts on this one but I know I liked it.

[Tamsin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never knew quite where this book was going. The narrator really did not pull her punches. The cast of characters were intriguing. At times brutally honest. Well constructed. A rewarding conclusion.