Tin Toys Trilogy

by Ursula Holden

Born into an affluent family, Bonnie, Tor and Ula have been left to the feckless embrace of the cook and their nanny. Their father is dead. Their mother is away entertaining the troops.

When their infant brother falls ill and dies, the household disintegrates. In The Tin Toys, Ula escapes with Cook, barely out of girlhood herself, and lands at the mansion of an enigmatic matriarch. In Unicorn Sisters, the three sisters are sent to an English boarding school where the pupils are pitted against an anarchic gang of East End evacuees. A Bubble Garden, finds the girls in Ireland, where they scrape a life in a crumbling farmhouse while their mother and her new husband are mired in their private traumas.

Genres: Fiction, Ireland

418 pages, Paperback

First published January 17, 2013

About the author

Ursula Holden is the English author of thirteen novels, some inspired by the years she lived in Ireland.

Reviews

[Girl with her Head in a Book · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my full review, see: http://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/2...

This was another library discovery and although I enjoyed it, it’s not something that I think I could face re-reading. It combined the high-wired macabre of Let’s Kill Uncle with the absurd decrepitude of Cold Comfort Farm but yet with an unhappiness at its core which neither of those possessed – in tone, the trilogy reminded me most of all of the work of Barbara Comyns. I can think of few novels which contained quite so many bizarre and unfortunate deaths; although they contain many of the elements traditionally found in classic children’s fiction – nurses, boarding schools, groups of three siblings – Tin Toys Trilogy is like a diabolical inverse with no guaranteed happy ending and absolutely no buns for tea.

This edition sees all three books published together for the first time – they were first released in the 1980s as Tin Toys, Unicorn Sisters and The Bubble Garden. The central characters are three sisters; Bonnie, Tor and Ula. Tin Toys centres round Ula, the unloved and unnoticed youngest sister. With their father recently dead, Ula is despised by her two elder sisters and their governess and ignored by her Nurse in favour of her infant brother Bruno. Their mother is notable only be her absence. The only person who loves Ula is the Irish cook Maggie. Within the first few pages, Ula and Nurse return from a dance class to discover that Bruno stripped of his clothes by Bonnie and Tor and placed under the Christmas tree. He develops croup and dies abruptly. With this, the household is broken up and Ula is sent to Ireland with Maggie. From there, things get even worse.

Unicorn Sisters is told by Bonnie, the eldest. All three girls are abandoned at boarding-school by their mother who refuses to even get out of the car to speak to the headmistress. Headmistress is even rather a stretch as a term since there is only Miss Gee and Miss Patrice, with no other mistresses available. With the outbreak of war, servants have abandoned the school, poor management has driven away the teachers and the school’s poor reputation means that even pupils are thin on the ground. With the arrival of a party of Cockney evacuees, once more things get even worse – but this is no faux-St Trinians.

The final story takes a march forward by a few years for The Bubble Garden, with the narration shared between visitor Eden and Tor. By now, their mother has made a disastrous remarriage and had another son, the brattish Boris, better known as Bo. The family has decamped to their stepfather’s derelict mansion in Ireland, with Ula stuck in England hospitalised with polio. Eden arrives, employed by their stepfather to work on the ‘farm’ (there’s one cow and a duck on the premises) and is instantly smitten by Bonnie, but Tor watches with concern. And for a third time, things get much worse.

The common denominator to all of this is Mamma – their very nearly comically dreadful mother – instead she is just cruel. With her heavy make-up and perfect hair, she is beautiful and well-polished and utterly selfish. In Tin Toys, Mamma arrives home and asks crossly why the children are still up, only to be told by a hysterical Nurse and an aghast Maggie that Bruno had just died. She tells the seven year-old Ula that she had had the children only to please their father and she felt thoroughly cheated by the fact that he had died – Mamma feels that she has the right to please herself and hands off responsibility for the girls to others so she can make it on the stage. She is interested in the girls only when they admire her. There is a hyperbolic quality to a lot of the trilogy but the most overblown character is Mamma, defined only by her vanity – she is the bad fairy at every turn, the villainess in this almost-fairy-tale.

Each of the narrators shifts the tone – in Tin Toys, Ula casually notes that Nurse is in fact Aunt, the woman who raised their father but is so reviled by their mother that all three girls are instructed not to acknowledge the relationship. At Bruno’s funeral, Nurse shows her despair and humiliation by hurling a chamber-pot out the window. Ula is the lightest narrator, bouncing back from each setback and completing her section of the story with the aside that she wonders if she was perhaps exaggerating about all the things that befell her in Ireland – but she thinks that she probably was not. Bonnie is more emotional – worrying about what her schoolmates think of her and her sisters. fretting over being the elder sister and hoping to fit in. The final section is the most detached, with the newcomer Ed uncertain of the rules of the family and Tor feeling very removed from the emotion of what has occurred.

Yet the sisters cannot seem to quite agree over what happened in previous instalments. Ula is upset about how her sisters ignore her, yet Bonnie remarks at the beginning of Unicorn Sisters that Tor is the only one who has ever taken the time to try and educate Ula. The question of Ula’s guilt in the death of her companion in Ireland is not easily resolved, as is exactly how the baby Bruno came to be unwrapped under the Christmas tree. The reader watches as Bonnie tries to remonstrate with her mother over her upcoming remarriage and hoping that Mamma would not try to buy her approval by making her bridesmaid, but in The Bubble Garden, Tor recalls Bonnie smiling and following her mother up the aisle. Similarly, Tor never comments on what befell the mice in Unicorn Sisters. Is it an inconsistency or did Holden intend for us to mistrust the narrators?

The first volume ends just on the outbreak of World War Two, meaning that the series catches the crossroads between the downfall of aristocratic values and the dawn of the post-war age. In Unicorn Sisters, mouthy evacuee Red is contemptuous about the hopeless boarding school girls who are so clueless about how to take care of themselves. She boldly takes the helm of the school which descends into Lord of the Flies chaos. These three girls who say Mamma and Pappa and who had a cook, governess and a nurse – they are poorly equipped for this bold new world. There is barely even malice as Red comments in The Bubble Garden that the girls cannot take care of themselves – like a set of fairy princesses, they are powerless in a land that is fresh out of white knights.

The idea of sex is itself an object of fear within the trilogy. Tor notes in The Bubble Garden that past events have led to them all having a nervousness of men. Ula feels betrayed after her adored Maggie abandons her after a friendly man gives her the glad eye. Physical loneliness draws Mamma towards her terrible second marriage. The boarding school girls giggle over their ‘You-Know-Whos’ and their blossoming ‘pommes’ but are stunned to encounter the evacuees and their physical sexuality. Bonnie is delighted when a schoolmate’s brother Percival asks her to dance with him but then her dreams are shattered when she is confronted with the physical realities of sex. The final pages of the trilogy felt in some ways like an unnecessary step into tragedy but again underlined sex as danger.

Tin Toys Trilogy captures the moment of biting into the Apple – of discovering the truth about Good and Evil. I feel that it works best in this format, as an amalgamated trilogy – as individual novels, only Unicorn Sisters truly works as a standalone piece, with Tin Toys and The Bubble Garden acting as book-ends although there is no true resolution. The three sisters are lost girls, living a story that they did not quite fit. Holden’s prose is striking, full of striking details – the scenes where the parents arrive to collect their children in Unicorn Sisters and discover uniforms which have been chopped to pieces or with glued-on accessories is particularly effective, but even so there are the recurring details about Ula’s white streaked hair, the girls’ bad teeth – the careful way in which the girls observe those who have beauty, trying to understand how it is achieved.

I enjoyed the trilogy, once I began, it was hard to put down. Like Let’s Kill Uncle, this is one of my favourite ever library finds but yet I have no desire to re-read – the tragedy feels a little excessive and ends with a final extra twist of nastiness which left me with a frown. Yet still – there are few books this year that I have felt an equal desire to analyse and discuss – why were there so many characters whose names started with B? What did it mean that Ula’s friend Maggie and Bonnie’s friend Midge were both called Margaret? I know nobody else who has read this – but if there is anyone else out there, please do get in touch!

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

The three novels which make up Ursula Holden’s ‘Tin Toys Trilogy’ have been reprinted in a lovely edition by Virago. Holden, sadly a relatively forgotten author in the twenty first century, is heralded on its cover by fellow Virago published Molly Keane, who states that the ‘Tin Toys Trilogy’ is ‘extraordinarily good’. Holden has been compared to both Beryl Bainbridge and Muriel Spark, and this alone makes her a perfect candidate for the Virago list.

Lisa Allardice, the author of the book’s introduction, tells us that the three sisters whom all three novels focus upon are rather different in their temperaments: ‘the eldest beautiful and mild-mannered, the middle grave and thoughtful, the youngest innocent and watchful’. It is, essentially, a coming of age trilogy, in which we see these three sisters grow and mature despite the adversity which surrounds them. ‘It is the archetypal fairy-tale set up,’ Allardice tells us, ‘three sisters and a wicked mother – and as in all fairy tales there is much darkness, randomness and cruelty’. Allardice’s introduction is very informative, but be warned – it does throw up a couple of spoilers from time to time.

The novels are set before, during and after the Second World War, and each is told from the perspective of or with its focus upon a certain sister. The first, Tin Toys, is told by lonely Ula, the youngest, Unicorn Sisters takes the perspective of the eldest, Bonnie, and The Bubble Garden is partially narrated by middle sister Tor.

In Tin Toys, the girls’ baby brother, Bruno, dies of exposure just weeks after his birth, and Ula is sent to Ireland with the family’s cook as a result. Ula is six years old when Tin Toys begins and, as one might expect, childish elements of life shine through in her story. She tells the reader, in retrospect, how she so enjoyed the dance classes of this troubled time: ‘I could be certain of happiness on Saturday mornings because of my dancing class… I hopped to Miss Dance’s playing and forgot that I had two older sisters and an awful brother wrapped in a shawl’. Ula’s narrative voice is engaging from the outset, and is filled throughout with a sense of childlike joy and hope. When meeting a new, mysterious girl named Lucy at her aforementioned class, she states: ‘We hadn’t spoken to each other but I thought she was spellbinding. I had never seen anyone touch their nose with their tongue’.

At home, Ula’s life is troubled. Following the death of their father and with a largely absent mother who flits in as and when she wishes, the girls are separated from one another, and Ula is largely brought up by her nurse. ‘I longed to be friends with my sisters,’ Ula tells us, ‘to share their sisterly world, but they neither needed nor wanted me’. Her only comfort in the dark world in which she inhabits is the kindly Irish cook, Maggie, who understands her situation: ‘Is it any wonder Ula likes it downstairs with me. She gets a laugh and a cuddle down here’. A sense of pity is struck for our protagonist at the first.

The entire trilogy, in fact, is filled with sadness – the absence of parents, the death of a sibling whom none of the sisters really knew, bullying, unfairness and growing understanding of their plight. Perhaps the saddest element of all is their mother’s lack of compassion: ‘She disliked children, she’d had them for him [her husband]. The boy was born, she’d not cared… She had accommodated three lost souls who cared for her children [in the guise of a governess, cook and nurse]. She had time now for herself’. Later on, after baby Bruno’s death, their mother returns to the house: ‘She had come for some clothes, she repeated. She had enrolled at a school of acting. Three children in Sussex wouldn’t prevent her… Nothing would stop her career’.

Much is battled against in Tin Toys, and the case is similar in Unicorn Sisters, in which the sisters are packed off to a second rate boarding school ‘out of reach of Hitler’s bombs… Mamma was relieved to be getting rid of us so conveniently. War was declared. We must go at once’. Mamma happily goes off to entertain the troops, sending the girls to boarding school a day early in the hope of getting rid of them. Here, they face challenges of monumental importance to such young girls, and are forced to grow up quite against their will. Again, in the last novel of the trilogy, A Bubble Garden the girls move over to Ireland with their mother and her new husband, a situation which throws up problems of its own.

With regard to the novels themselves, the first half of Tin Toys is incredibly strong, but it does seem to lose momentum somewhere towards the novel, and the situations which Holden introduces are far too convenient to be believed. Unicorn Sisters, Bonnie’s tale, is the strongest of the trilogy, and is a difficult book to put down. Bonnie’s narrative voice is the strongest of the three, and her maturity adds to the more wonderful elements of the book. A Bubble Garden is told partly from the perspective of Tor, along with a third person narrative perspective. As a novel, it is by far the weakest of the three, and does end on rather a tragic note. There seems to be far too much sadness crammed into its pages, and comes across as rather a pitiful and depressing end to the trilogy on the whole.

The characters in all three novels are not constant, and they are continually changing as a result of the circumstances which they find themselves in. Holden has clearly put a lot of thought into how her characters act and react in a whole host of different situations, and she seems to know their minds incredibly well. Although they seem realistic, very few of the characters are likeable. If you want a cheerful read, this is certainly not the book for you, but if you want to see the human psyche masterfully created in all its many guises, then this is perfect reading material.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set before, during and just after WWII, this stunning trilogy consists of the novels Tin Toys, Unicorn Sisters and A Bubble Garden. Centre of the novels are the three sisters, Bonnie, Tor and Ula, whose father has died before the first book, leaving them in the care of a glamorous, flighty and neglectful mother. From the start, the girls are always outsiders - even when we first meet Ula at her dance class, we are aware that the girls never quite fit in to any situation. Everything looks fine from the outside, with a nice home, a governess, housekeeper and 'Nurse'. Scratch below the surface though and there is a feeling of disquiet. Nurse is really an elderly relative, the housekeeper a young girl who pines for her home in Ireland and it is debatable how good an education the two elder girls are receiving. In the first book, a tragedy (the first of many) leads to Ula being sent to Ireland with Maggie, the housekeeper. The story is told from Ula's point of view, as we follow her on a trip to the country we will again visit in "A Bubble Garden".

The middle novel, "Unicorn Sisters" is set in a school, during the war years. 'Mamma', ever keen to discharge her responsibilities, sends her children off to boarding school - not even entering to meet the Headmistress before bolting in a taxi, and making the girls feel their difference to other girls yet again. This is, arguably, the lightest read, with evacuees lending a certain dark humour to the situation, as the school collapses under a lack of staff and ending in a farcical Christmas pageant held for disbelieving parents. Again, left abandoned, the girls make their unwanted way homeless and "A Bubble Garden" then leads to a summer in Ireland, where Mamma attempts to make a new life.

Each novel tells the story from the point of view of one sister, although the third book is narrated partly by a young man who is offered a job at the estate in Ireland where the girls are staying. Although these books do deal with dark themes, they do so with a light touch and from the viewpoint of a child; always with the sense of a child's optimism and the despair of being in the control of adult decisions. They deal with tragedy, with death, neglect and sadness, but there is enough humour and the author controls our emotions so well, that they are not depressing reads - but deep and satisfying and full of humanity. We see everything so well through a child's eye that a tin toy becomes of utmost importance in Ula's life - worth everything she does to keep him safe. The three sisters do their best to survive in an adult world they cannot hope to understand or cope with, but you both recoil from the circumstances they find themselves in and sympathise with them. I have never read anything by Ursula Holden before, but I hope more of her books are reprinted, as she is a magical storyteller. The Tin Toys trilogy would be ideal for book groups, with so much to discuss and is a wonderful personal read, which will stay with me for a long time.

[kymdotcom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think I've ever read another book with quite such an array of interesting deaths.

[Leonie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A trilogy of three novellas about three sisters growing up, pretty uncared for, in the forties. This might be called "I Saw Something Nasty in the Woodshed." I think that suggests a lot about what this book does and what it ought to do but doesn't. It's about childhood confrontation with experience, specifically sex and death. It's about vulnerability and unhappiness. The problem with this book is that it is too explicit and too overblown. It loses its power over the reader when the narrators tell us too directly how they feel and when there are too many faintly ludicrous disasters and unpleasant incidents. It is dangerously prone to the merely silly and will tip over for some readers. Their mother is too clearly and simply seen by her children as a beautiful, shallow, irresponsible and elusive woman, an instantly recognisable type of bad mother. All this is not what the Something Nasty atmosphere, which this book is all about, thrives upon.

But I give it four stars. It does achieve a jumpiness, a frenetic tone that captures something about the vulnerability, the messiness, the uncontrol, of reaction. None of the sisters really act; they can only react to outside circumstances and pressures. It's the worst of the state of childhood.

The first book is about Ula, who I think is about seven at the time. Her older sisters have formed a self-protective union from which she is excluded. She feels terribly left out and no one is willing to take responsibility for her. She ends up being taken to Ireland to stay with her family's cook, Maggie. Maggie is sometimes jolly and nurturing, but she is ultimately irresponsible and her care turns out to be intermittent. She comes from a dismally poor, dysfunctional family and a recurring theme of the book is the sisters' idealisation of down-to-earth family closeness among the working classes and an accompanying disillusionment. Ula does not stay with Maggie; she ends up somewhere quite different, where an unlikely sudden death occurs. Ula is the most resilient of the girls and we are assured she is not really much damaged by all this. This novella has the problem I have noticed with books that are a little more realistically narrated by younger children: this narration is annoying. The children are annoying. There is something shrill about the tone and the children are always wanting and paying attention to the wrong things. It feels like an obscuring of what is real, though I know that the idea is to capture what is real about younger children's experience.

I preferred Unicorn Sisters. This is narrated by Bonnie, the oldest girl, when she is 11 or 12. The sisters have been sent off to a halfcocked little school for more or less genteel girls. Bonnie suffers a great deal of worry about fitting in. She makes fragile investments in happiness and trust. Then a group of hardboiled London evacuees are billeted at the school and proceed to be a bad influence on the sheltered pupils. The school begins to dissolve, while the girls live for dancing the jitterbug together each night. Clothes are no longer jealously guarded individual status symbols but are carelessly shared common property. Despite some resentment at these girls upsetting the status quo, Bonnie enjoys the relief she gets from her own worries in this communal experience. Obviously it can't last, and Bonnie witnesses something she finds very distasteful and disturbing when it does. The school collapses entirely and the three sisters return home.

A Bubble Garden is about Eden and Tor, the middle sister. The sisters' mother has married again and they are marooned in his rundown Irish house while he loses himself in alcoholism. Eden is an old acquaintance of the husband who he has employed to come and sort things out as a kind of agent. It felt as if it should be solely about Tor, for balance, but I suppose she and Eden share the book because the preoccupying desire for both of them seems to be ownership of Bonnie. Eden has a tendency to mythologizing and social climbing and sees Bonnie as delicate and upper-class. Tor is quiet and intense and has been resenting Bonnie's relationships with others and the loss of their childhood exclusivity since the previous book. Naturally it all ends badly, with perhaps the most sudden and dangerously silly disaster of them all.

I'm not quite, quite sure I'd recommend this, but there is something about the atmosphere that works for me. It does remind me of The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns in its passive, somehow fairytale-ish treatment of outlandishly awful events.

[Elyse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad and bleak

[Jane French · Rating 3 out of 5]

Again a book I can't remember much about

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up to 4 because I think Ursula Holden's stories should find more readers.

Childhood is presented from the POV of the main characters as cruel and nonsensical, but growing up is seen as far worse, especially when it comes to love and sex which are inextricably linked to death. And yet, the trilogy is also full of beauty and humor. Only really, really dark, like Edith Blyton's tales seen through a very distorting mirror. Like a mash of Roald Dahl's children and adult stories, but with even fewer happy endings. I was not expecting that ending and it shook me for days.

[Josie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was such a strange novel. None of the characters felt real; their bizarre behaviour and distant way of speaking meant they were nothing more than stereotypes -- the flirty Irish cook, the vulgar Cockney evacuee, the feckless mother. None of them were particularly likeable, and I certainly didn't care about any of them -- perhaps with the exception of Ula, who annoyingly didn't feature at all in the final book, having been struck down by polio. The similarity of the names in The Bubble Garden (Brad, Babs, Bo, and Bonnie) meant they all started to blur together. And there was no plot or overarching story, just a string of random events that defied logic and made no sense whatsoever. The girls' boarding school is even described as "comically abysmal" in the introduction. Oh, and let's not forget the deaths -- lots and lots of deaths -- that just got more bizarre and ridiculous. Characters died from pneumonia, botched abortions, falling on knives, being crushed in their beds... The whole thing was absurd from start to finish.

[Nic]

Not a bad book BUT I didn't finish it as it didn't draw me in!Written in three parts, each for the perspective of a different sister. I enjoyed the first part but then didn't want to go to the trouble of bonding with the second sister. Beautifully written though.