Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

Monica Dickens' novel opens in a juvenile court in London. One of the young offenders is a 16-year-old girl, Kate, who is described as being in need of care and protection. In the court is a girl only slightly older, Emma, daughter of the magistrate. From her experience of going around with a social worker on his calls she knows that adolescents and, more important, small children are daily subjected to neglect and brutality and that "care and protection" cannot be prescribed like National Health aspirin.

She meets Kate again, by chance, in her Uncle's supermarket where she is learning the business from the bottom up. And between these two girls, from different backgrounds, with very different parents who have different personal problems, there springs up a friendship which is deep and, for a while at any rate, beyond misunderstanding.

Each girl has her way to make in life; each has her love, hate, despair, and hope; each the complications of parental control sapped by the inner knowledge of marriages that no longer work.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, British Literature

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

From the publisher: MONICA DICKENS, born in 1915, was brought up in London and was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Her mother's German origins and her Catholicism gave her the detached eye of an outsider; at St Paul's Girls' School she was under occupied and rebellious. After drama school she was a debutante before working as a cook. One Pair of Hands (1939), her first book, described life in the kitchens of Kensington. It was the first of a group of semi autobiographies of which Mariana (1940), technically a novel, was one. 'My aim is to entertain rather than instruct,' she wrote. 'I want readers to recognise life in my books.' In 1951 Monica Dickens married a US naval officer, Roy Stratton, moved to America and adopted two daughters. An extremely popular writer, she involved herself in, and wrote about, good causes such as the Samaritans. After her husband died she lived in a cottage in rural Berkshire, dying there in 1992.
http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/page...

Reviews

[Preeta · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't decide between three and four stars. I'm giving it four because I read this in a week and it was the first time in almost ten years that I've read anything that fast. This book made me remember what it was like to check out a mile-high pile of books from the library and devour them all while eating sour candy in bed. And it did that despite being about child abuse -- so it must be doing something remarkable, but I'm having trouble summing the appeal up, as you can see. Part of it is the understated English humour -- this isn't P.G. Wodehouse-funny at all, but your mild, spinsterish, Barbara-Pym-Beryl-Bainbridge sharp wit. Lots of spot-on descriptions, characters I could love despite their obvious failings, a very clear *point* that, most of the time, isn't made heavy-handedly. The book has some glaring flaws -- for one thing, it's going for this epic look at two women's lives, but for some odd reason it chooses to cover only five years of those lives. If the narrative had spread out just a little more, say over ten years, I would've bought those epic pretensions, but five years?!? And then there are a *few* heavy-handed moments, and finally, I wasn't entirely sure about the ending. I wasn't sure if it meant to leave things somewhat unresolved, or if it was hinting at conclusions I couldn't quite grasp.

Any synopsis will not do the book justice, but here goes: Emma (rich girl) and Kate (wretchedly poor, abused) become friends while still teenagers. For a bit it seems as if Kate will escape her past, but then, one bad decision, and you know how it goes. Before you know it, she's living in a hovel and, yes, abusing her own children. The two women's lives become more and more different, but the lasting power of their friendship is convincingly depicted although I've made it sound like a bad Hindi film, and it's also somehow empowering to read about. All in all, I'm not sure why Monica Dickens continues to languish in obscurity while other quite similar writers -- Doris Lessing came immediately to mind -- earned the towering reputations they deserved.

[Carol Fenlon · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting viewpoint on class and poverty in this novel from the 1960s by Monica Dickens. Two girls from very different backgrounds strike up a friendship that endures for many years. Emma is the JPs daughter, the world is her oyster she has everything that Kate, dragged up by an intolerable family and abused at all turns, has not. Emma takes up social work and they meet when Kate comes up before Emma's father as in need of care and protection. Their lives are then revealed from the viewpoint of each over many years. It's a tragic story for Kate and Emma's story reveals even her father has feet of clay but the interest for the contemporary reader is the perspective of the 1950s and 60s on social work and poverty. The senior social worker with whom Emma works is hardened to the worst effects of poverty and ignorance but deals kindly and with real care with his clients. Children are even taken into his own home in emergencies. Emma pulls out all the stops for her friend Kate, even when Kate's behaviour to her own children is intolerable. I was quite surprised to read that the social workers in the book returned Kate's other children to her even though she had been unspeakably cruel to one scapegoated child and regularly went out leaving the others on their own, doping them with aspirin to keep them quiet. Despite the kindness and care towards Kate there is a subtext in the novel to the popular social work theories of the time, Bowlby and the theory of the cycle of depravation . I'm not sure if the subtext was saying that while poverty exists people will always be trapped in it or whether it was saying that people brought up in the poverty trap cannot be helped because they will always revert to type. For this reason it was an engaging read, though not one for the squeamish.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been one of my favourite books since I first read it many years ago. Always a good one to go back to from time to time. A brilliantly depicted and very moving account of the effects of chronic poverty on human lives.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

MY FAVORITE BY THE AUTHOR--MUCH BETTER THAN THE OTHERS. BECAUSE OF THIS I WILL RED MORE BY M.D.

***********************

*One Pair Of Hands 4 stars
*One Pair of Feet 1 star
*Mariana 3 stars
*Kate and Emma TBR
*The Winds of Heaven TBR
*The House at World's End TBR

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very sympathetically written and amazing how the author makes you sympathetic to someone who abuses their children. I don't think it is that dated either. Definitely recommend it.

[Rita]

AUthor 1915-1992

I have a copy of Angel in the Corner [1956], but Kate and Emma [1965] sounds like it might be one of her better books.

The best known is apparently the first one, about working as a servant. After completing school, "she decided to go into domestic service despite coming from the privileged class; her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her first book, One Pair of Hands in 1939." [semi-autobiographical]

My Turn to Make the Tea (1951) [semi-autobiographical; her work as a junior reporter]
The Winds of Heaven (1955]
Joy and Josephine (1948)
In 1978, Monica Dickens published her autobiography, An Open Book.
And many more novels, many children's books, and a few nonfiction.

She seems to be classified as 'light' but I should wait and form my own opinion!

"Rebecca West said 'It is life itself that is caught up in the pages of her books' and later, in a long article on her works, AS Byatt argued that she was much underestimated. John Betjeman declared that she was a novelist 'who has all the airs and graces a reader could wish for'." [from the obit in The Independent]

[Elizabeth Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kate and Emma...where to start? I will begin on a positive; I liked the authors writing style, some wonderful examples of simile (if a little overused,) and the fact that she invoked strong feelings shows that the story engaged me. However, from the outset I imagined I was entering into a scene from Dickens (the other Dickens) it appears she was so influenced by her Great-Grandfather, Charles’s works that she may have unintentionally fallen into recreating similar characters and conditions. The mention of a bathroom and the child with a plastic bottle jarred with the scene I had already pictured. My problem was, once I had this 19th Century image in my mind, I never lost it.
Bingo, Television and supermarket shops were mentioned, but other than a mere hint now and again, my original impression of a gloomy, cold, impoverished existence prevailed above everything. If I hadn’t been told that the period was late 1950’s early 1960’s, I would never have guessed. It appeared to be poverty and winter throughout the whole story which spanned about 7 years.
I had pictured Saint Emma in her long fitted coat with little leather boots and gloves, (on occasion a hat with a plume, true) and Kate in a long tattered dress and shawl around her shoulders. I don’t recall much of the clothing description except the little urchins in their father’s sawn-off trousers; (straight out of a Dickensian novel, or 1930’s maybe.)
The ‘car & prot’ man came across as one of the portly, ruddy-faced do-gooder characters (in his tall chimney-stack hat) who suffered the snots and pee from the urchins he cuddled. Saint Emma too, allowing the child with scabs on his face to lay his head on her smart coat, apparently she loved his scabs too, bless! Her speech was sometimes ‘Olde Worlde’ too. *[“I was so happy when a small crusted girl, who turned out to be a boy with long matted curls, climbed up on me, that I didn’t mind the smell and dirt of him.”] Yes! As if.
Apart from little Sammy and the other children, I hated most of the adults.
Kate, at 16, was placed in care which could have been her saving; little Sammy, her 4-years-old son, didn’t do so well. I attributed Sammy’s fate to Saint Emma and her mission to save the self-obsessed Kate. She became Kate’s enabler, spending so much time and effort pandering to her, Emma came across as not there to help this family, but to make herself feel good about it, a sort of willing victim forsaking her own life to show how selfless she was. Miss. E. Bullock, caseworker.
I couldn’t understand Emma’s rejection of her father when she was doing the same thing with a married man and then went on to desert her fiancé so she could play the martyr again!
I also found it quite unbelievable that, in the time period, any social services would allow those young children to be taken from the hospital after their father almost killed them by tampering with the gas pipes, and this was beside the neglect and abandonment while the parents went out leaving them alone???
If Monica Dickens had wanted to bring a Dickensian story into the twenty-first century, she could have done it so much better by using information from that time period; this is why I was lost in a sort of no man’s land, the visions were so mixed and vague.
Could Mollyarthur possibly be a pseudonym for Clara Peggotty?
* Kate and Emma p7 Monica Dickens 1915/1992

[Herbi (Heather) Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a social worker I find this a really interesting read. The themes are still so relevant 50 years later.

[Adrien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why does Monica Dickens end her novels basically mid sentence? Argh! I could have easily read another 300 pages about Kate and Emma.

[Kate Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took getting used to the writing style. Interesting reading this today and some politically incorrect comments evident of 1964 thinking.

[Huda]

I've read around 10% of the story and I couldn't read anymore, I got confused by the writing style...

[Katrin V · Rating 1 out of 5]

I cannot stand to finish this book. It is depressing and saturated with hopeless lack of direction.
I have given up on it.

[gemmedazure · Rating 5 out of 5]

My mom had recommended this book to me when I was younger, she was a huge fan of Monica Dickens.
This book didn't disappoint. It tells the story of Emma, a magistrate's daughter in England, who travels with a social worker to learn more about the system. She encounters gritty poverty, child abuse, and sees a side to life she hadn't before.
In the midst of this, she sees Kate in her father's courtroom. Kate is brought in as a teenage runaway with an abusive home. She is placed in foster care, and Emma feels a kinship with her and becomes her friend.
The chasm that divides them due to background and class widens as the book goes on. Kate gets pregnant by Bob, a childlike young man who seems to have an intellectual disability. They marry and soon Kate finds herself replicating the home she grew up in, neglecting her children, living in abject poverty, and being abused by Bob.
Emma is working for her uncle's chain of supermarkets and travelling to the USA. She has an affair with a married man, and learns her father is having an affair with another woman other than her mother. Emma eventually becomes engaged to marry an American Air Force member.
Emma is summoned home when Kate is in serious trouble. She has severely abused her eldest son and has him apprehended. Emma's engagement falls apart as she leaves her engagement party to help Kate.
The book doesn't end with all things being rosey. Emma has to start her life over again, and deal with the guilt of not disclosing Kate's child abuse sooner. Kate is placed in a hospital for mental health treatment, and Bob has been in jail. That is where the book ends.
Monica Dickens is a masterful writer (like her grandfather, the famous Charles Dickens) and writes so clearly and keenly about poverty even though she grew up upper class. She did a lot of social work type jobs and faced these issues head-on, and seems to have a good grasp of what their lives were like. I was once a social worker and found it rang very true.
An excellent read.

[Janet Bird · Rating 5 out of 5]

A favourite author, have been reading her for years. I saw her mentioned in another book, maybe a Jilly Cooper, as 'endless Monica Dickens' on the bookshelf. That about sums it up, excellent reading. I can't read her grandfather though apart from A Christmas Carol. Not sure why. Too heavy going probably. I will read this book again at some point.