Thursday Afternoons

by Monica Dickens

Successful, admired, fairly happily married and ambitious, Steven Sheppard is very much a pillar of the community. But inside him lurks a little demon of boredom which prompts him to ask if there isn't more to life than this.

Genres: Fiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1945

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.
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Reviews

[Jayaram Vengayil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Monica Dickens has the natural ability to make her characters stride out of the pages of her book and acquire a life of their own. She gets so engrossed in painting their little idiosyncrasies with the deftness that only a Dickens can muster up that she almost forgets that the novel really has no plot. She tries to make up for it towards the end and messes it up a bit. I guess in 1945 you couldn't get away with writing an open ended book and hence the need for the unnecessarily dramatic climax. All in all an engrossing read for the exquisite word portraits and the insights into a vanished world.

[David Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully realised tale of pre-NHS smooth consultant physician, Steven Sheppard's day to day life on the eve of WW2. Monica Dickens had first hand experience of hospital work and the description of life in UK hospital wards and clinics is funny and accurate. The tendency of nurses to refer to their patients by disease rather than by name is accurate and endearing as is the awe in which they hold Steven. Every character, no matter how briefly they appear, is wonderfully drawn - a family trait I suspect.
Steven's growing boredom with his life and work, surounded by parasitic females cause him to long for a simpler, more masculine life that the war might excuse. His one bit of unthinking philanthropy however may just come back to bite him.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another engrossing and finely written Dickens novel. Steven, a physician, is so well described that you feel you inhabit him. The book itself seemed to me to be the story of a man casting about for happiness and judging himself a fake in all his jollity and success. It was compelling.

[Alex Ankarr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has its charms, nicely written, and she perceives some things quite clearly. But it lacks some quality of warmth and compassion, any fine-grained empathy for the human condition. A little cold, overall.

[Yael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is quite readable. The description of the life in hospital is interesting, triggering searches for images of cuffs, caps and bows...
None of the characters is really likable (even the dog this time). I know that nobody is perfect but, well, I wouldn't want to sit for a cup of tea with any of them.

[Peggy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good story of a successful man who seems to have it all, but still feels empty and longing for that illusive 'more' he feels there must be. I enjoyed the writing and the characters, but the ending was such a dramatic letdown. Left me feeling a bit unsatisfied with the read. I will try another book by this author though as I like her writing.

[Moppet · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was such a well-written book that I honestly did not expect to be giving it only three stars. Thursday Afternoons, set in 1939, explores the life of Dr. Steven Sheppard, a charismatic and successful doctor who now regrets both his choice of profession and his choice of wife. He never has any intention of divorcing his insecure wife, but drifts from one affair to another while trying to write a novel and hoping to get away from his demanding private patients by volunteering to serve at sea in the rapidly-approaching war.

Steven reminded me of Don Draper (Mad Men), a man who has it all but is never satisfied. Although he interested me, I didn't warm to him. My sympathy should have been with the betrayed wife, Ruth, but after a few pages of listening to her wittering on, I could understand all too well why she got on Steven's nerves. Stephanie, Steven's girlfriend, seemed like someone I could have been friends with...if she wasn't dating a married man. Another important character is the rather pitiful Nurse Audrey Lake, who works at Steven's Thursday afternoon clinic, adores him, and becomes increasingly obsessed with him as the book progresses. Then there's the house-parlourmaid Ethel Garrard, who needs Steven's help to escape her violent husband. But she is portrayed as so cold and self-centred that I couldn't warm to her either.

Not that the absence of sympathetic characters would bother me as a general rule, as long as they were convincingly drawn - which is certainly the case here. Monica Dickens brings to vivid life every character, however minor, and every setting - especially the hospital, where her experience as a nurse shines through, and the wardroom of a destroyer (she married a naval officer). I'll give two examples. First, the genteel Mrs Delacroix, one of Steven's patients:

But here was Mrs. Delacroix, in her tweed dress and jacket and pseudo-Austrian hat, putting on her private patient act, which was intended to show that she was more accustomed to visiting doctors in their consulting-rooms than in clinics. She was the widow of a bankrupt solicitor, and lived with her hulking, adolescent daughter in a bungalow which smelt of bread and butter and damp tea cloths. She could not afford to be a private patient, but was not going to let Dr. Sheppard or anyone else forget that she had once been one. She went through the necessary formalities at the registration office and the Lady Almoner's with a remote, disinterested air, receiving her folder in her fingertips with a slight laugh to show how absurd all this was. On the benches, she and her daughter sat immersed in books from the twopenny library, in which they kept the celluloid markers from the days when they had belonged to Boots'.

It was the detail of the celluloid bookmarks which pinned down Mrs. Delacroix for me, as well as anchoring the story firmly in its period. Boots' Booklovers Library was a private subscription library, patronised by the middle classes, as opposed to the cheaper working-class twopenny library. By clinging on to the Boots bookmarks, Mrs. Delacroix is clinging to her former way of life.

Nurse Lake, we learn later, also patronises the twopenny library: she is reading a novel called Romany Wildcat. This sounds like one of the popular bodice-rippers filmed by Gainsborough Pictures in the 1940s, and it adds a touch of humour, because no-one could be less like a wildcat of any ethnicity than Nurse Lake. However, it's also a deft touch in her characterisation, a hint that she dreams of being a much bolder, sexier, more adventurous woman.

So why the three stars? Well, unfortunately I felt the structure of the book let it down. There are numerous scenes and characters, excellent in themselves, which feel extraneous. Most of the plot strands don't go anywhere much. The book ends with a turn of events which I will call dramatic rather than melodramatic, as it's well prepared for - but it leaves the characters up in the air, unable to complete their arcs. The result is a rather baggy, unsatisfying novel, which frustrated me because I felt it could have been so much better. In fact I found myself trying to rewrite the plot, never a good sign:

I felt the book would have been better for dropping the entire sub-plot of Mrs Garrard and her husband. It's well-written, but only exists to sweep Steven off the stage in the last chapter. By contrast, Nurse Lake's obsession with Steven is so powerful and well-portrayed - why not make her the murderer? She seems sanguine about his leaving the hospital, but I could see her deciding that if she couldn't have him, nobody could. Or it could be she who deliberately tells Garrard where he is so that she can be a heroine and save the day, not realising she hasn't got it in her.

Nevertheless I feel the book is worth reading, if only because it demonstrates that Monica Dickens inherited the talent of her famous forebear when it came to cross-sectioning, dissecting and analysing British society. It's just that as far as plot goes, this is more of a Pickwick Papers than a Bleak House.

[Squeak2017 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Monica Dickens has a great facility for creating characters. From the vignette of the bus conductor complete with a snapshot of his domestic life to the main protagonists, every person but one comes to life credibly - only Arthur Gerrard is a mere caricature and the chief weakness of the novel. Dr. Sheppard is the aloof, egocentric and self confident physician, successful and admired both professionally and personally with every appearance of a happy life. His bovine and brainless lump of a wife, neither use nor ornament, is one flaw in the otherwise perfect arc of his life as well as the unhappy story of their child. The conniving Mrs. Garrard, Steven's rich bourgeois friends and rich fussy patients, the painfully repressed Nurse Lake who is shocked into paralysis at the one moment when she could have made good - all of these are drawn deftly with a shrewd eye for the telling detail.

I enjoyed the novel for the upbeat tone and the lively characters, but the shock of the ending was too harsh and too contrived. It was too great a contrast from the bright and breezy narrative to the sudden violence and I wish Dickens could have punished her protagonists a little more believably.

[Deirdre · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the surface, Steven Shepperd is a man who has it all: a successful career as a hospital consultant, many friends, an adoring wife, and women fluttering around him like bees around honey.
Steven nonetheless is bored with his life and most of the people who populate it, and begins to seek change and diversion.

This novel beautifully captures the dying days of a quintessentially English world in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of war. The descriptions of a provincial hospital, a smart London home, a country weekend are all imbued with the poignancy of a final farewell as we move through the Summer of 1939 knowing, with the benefit of hindsight, what must lie ahead.

The characters also jump off the page -in particular Steven's wife, the clingy, insecure Ruth, and gauche Nurse Lake who harbours a secret but hopeless passion for the attractive consultant.

I agree with other reviewers, however, that the ending is overly dramatic and unbalances what was, until that point, a beautifully quiet and gentle narrative.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 1 out of 5]

Insufferably boring.

[Nigel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little tedious unless you are interested in the domestic arrangements of the middle class between the wars. And as is so often the case the finale is hurried and unlikely.

[Timothy Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable story if slow moving at times, varied, believable characters, slightly marred by the somewhat unsympathetic, slightly callous ( in my opinion ) chief character, Dr.Steven Sheppard. Some of the many medical references may not be understood by the layman/woman. Although written in a different age, the phrase 'working like a black' ( used twice ) is very unfortunate.
The first of MD I have read, will definitely try another !

[Daniela Sorgente · Rating 3 out of 5]

The description on the cover of this book is a bit misleading: "Some of the events in the day-to-day life of a young doctor". I was expecting a series of portraits and cases like Cronin's Dr Finlay's Casebook. Instead, the doctor in question is very different: he is not very sympathetic towards his patients and in his thoughts there are some physical descriptions and descriptions of illnesses that today would be considered very impolite. Furthermore, the doctor has a rather tormented personal history.
It's a pleasure to read even if the author likes to keep the reader on edge and only reveal a tragic story that explains many things on page 116 or 36% of the book. There is generally no shortage of tragedy in this book.
The character of the doctor, his life, his wife are very reminiscent of Doctor John Christow from Agatha Christie's The Hollow.
I really liked this sentence: "And breakfast would be waiting whenever he wanted in a room where the morning sun fell across the table and made the marmalade transparent".