The Half-Crown House

by Helen Ashton

This is a story about a house, an old (and yet ever renewed) English country manor house, and of the splendors it has seen, the births and deaths, the hard times and the good. But mostly it is the story of the vivid people who have lived there and the mark that each has left. One would build a pavilion; another would pawn all but one precious piece of silver service. One brought tapestries from Belgium, another porcelains from China or brasses from India. A queen slept here during one glorious week of pageantry.

And so the past lives in this house. But it is very much the present which concerns this book. The Hornbeam family, for all their colorful history, is hard up, and the only way they can keep the old mansion house going is to open it on summer Sundays to tourists who, for the admission fee of half a crown, wander about and examine the treasures, and in so doing relive that past almost at first hand. And the reader relives it with them.

It often seems to Henrietta Hornbeam a sorry fate for a proud old family, but she feels also a quiet satisfaction in sharing her heritage. And then suddenly the great house, which had seemed at times such a burden, presents a surprising and dramatic solution to the things in life which she was to learn were dearest to her heart.

Genres: British Literature, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Classics

253 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Helen Ashton was the daughter of the Arthur J. Ashton, K.C. Encouraged by her father, the author of a delightful book of legal reminiscences, she wrote three juvenile novels, then her literary work was interrupted by WWI and she took up nursing. In 1916 she began studying medicine, working at Great Ormond Street Hospital until her marriage to Arthur Jordan, a barrister twenty years older than herself, in 1927.

Over the next thirty years Ashton published 25 novels: Doctor Serocold (1930), her most successful, was about a day in the life of an English country doctor; Bricks and Mortar (1932) is about the life of an architect over forty years; and from 1941-7 she published an excellent quartet of novels about contemporary village life.

Reviews

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had seen mixed reviews of The Half-Crown House – the third Helen Ashton book I have read – but I have to say I very much enjoyed it. Many readers might find it a little bit of a slow burn – I do think that that is simply Helen Ashton’s style. The story is that of a house on one day – with flashbacks to the past and the recent-ish history of the family who live there.

In the difficult years following the Second World War the families who owned large houses of a certain type had to rethink the way that they were run – if they had any chance of surviving. Fountain Court is a much smaller house than the famous houses like Chatsworth and Althorp – and is less of a draw to sightseers. On Saturdays and Wednesdays between April and the end of October Fountain Court is open to the public –for an entrance fee of half a crown. The household staff and members of the Hornbeam family who live there act as guides to keep down the costs. Built on the foundations of a Cistercian Abbey; Fountain Court had been home to the Hornbeam family since the Reformation. I loved Aston’s portrayal of the house, a place definitely feeling its age – it has its attics and dark corners and alongside the human occupants are the creatures that find their way in through its ancient nooks and crannies.

full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2016/...

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was so thankful to get a copy of this book from Thrift Books after Rachel reviewed it at Book Snob. Rachel and Simon compared it to The Foolish Gentlewoman by Margery Sharp on their podcast called Tea or Books?, which I also recently read. Though I do love Margery Sharp, I actually preferred The Half-Crown House. The form and content meld together so beautifully and cleverly. The book often reminded me of The Remains of the Day, too.

The story is about a house, Fountain Court, and its inhabitants in the year 1954. The owners of the house for several hundred years have been the Hornbeam family. The world wars wreaked havoc with the country house style of living that had been the norm for hundreds of years in England and old houses like Fountain Court are struggling for survival. The "upstairs" residents of Fountain Court are Henrietta, whose twin brother Harry had inherited the house and died in WWII, Charles, a several-times-removed cousin who lives above the stable and runs the market garden (the only profitable venture on the estate), the bedridden dowager Lady Hornbeam, and Victor, Harry's nine-year-old son who now owns the house. In an effort to keep the house maintained, the Hornbeams have opened the house to visitors twice a week from April to October.

The story takes place over one day and shows how both the "upstairs" and "downstairs" residents of Fountain Court are involved in keeping the house going and showing around visitors. Besides the cook and kitchen maid, the other servants have been at the house for decades, so we see the history of the house and its owners, the Hornbeams, through their eyes. The reader goes on the house tour, too, and thus hears the history that way. Against the drama of the dead in the house tour with its former occupants is the drama of the living inhabitants, especially of Victor, so young and vulnerable, and Henrietta, who has a chance to marry an American and be freed of the burden of the house if she chooses.

The form of the novel is so clever because it gives a sense of both the grandeur and decay of this house and the Hornbeam family as well as the minute concerns of the current inhabitants. These two narratives, past and present, are woven together as we follow different characters throughout the novel, all while the future is being discussed, worried over, and planned for: Whatever are we going to do with the house?

Henrietta is a melancholy and yet endearing protagonist. Because we see her on a single day, we see her burdened with the responsibility of the house since her grandmother is too old and her nephew is too young. In a sense, she is imprisoned by the house and yet it has been her home for 29 years and she loves it. She loves it even more now because of her twin brother's death in 1944, which she still grieves over. We spend a good amount of time with her cousin Charles, too, who lost an arm and eye in the navy in WWII and whose wife and young son were killed in the Blitz. We get to see Charles' and Henrietta's friendship over the course of the book and the tension in the air that things are changing, are coming to a head, but no one knows what will happen. It all comes to a rather startling, but strangely fitting conclusion, rather like the end of Rebecca.

From here, there will be spoilers, so proceed at your own risk. ;) First, I thought the American, John Cornell, was endearing, but I didn't think there was ever any real chance for him. It was clear pretty early on that Henrietta and Charles were both dancing around a much deeper affection for each other than they were able or willing to acknowledge. I have a weakness for romances where the man/woman knew each other as children. Maybe because of my early Anne/Gilbert indoctrination. I love Henrietta's late confession to Charles that she purposefully exposed herself to measles so she could miss being a bridesmaid in his wedding because she loved him even then. The final scenes between them are very satisfying.

The old dowager Lady Hornbeam is a piece of work. It's through her spendthrift behaviors that Fountain Court is ruined even before it's ruined by the American plane at the end of the novel. Ironic of course that the woman who contributed to the downfall should mourn the good ol' days the most. I'm surprised that Henrietta wasn't more bitter towards her grandmother. I certainly would have been. There are interesting generational tensions in the book. The old people--the grandmother, Leaf the butler, and Mrs. Branch the Nanny--all remember the house in the splendour of its Edwardian days and mourn, to different degrees, the loss of those halycon times.

There is a mixed middle generation with people like Henrietta who are attached by sentiment, and the neighboring woman Elsa Holly, who thinks the whole house is a joke, completely out of step with the current day. Of course she's right. I've visited houses like Fountain Court on my trips to England and had memories of walking through the rooms and seeing furniture, artwork, etc. The book references a nearby American aerodrome a number of times and the juxtaposition is clear: the American way is the future way. The class system is being dismantled in England to be more American. All the English housewives want the American conveniences. The Americans come to Fountain Court to gawp and have little care for the history of a place like Fountain Court or a country like England and its throes of social and cultural upheaval. We live in that future in America, and we wouldn't ever want a class system with its values. And yet there is a palpable sense of grief in this novel that moves me. I've known upheaval in this COVID year and it's tough. It's going to be tough going for Henrietta and Charles, but I have faith that they will work it out.

The young generation, Victor, is of course almost completely unaware of the previous struggles. Clearly, Victor will grow up more free, more able to present in his own generation because of the loss of the house. His family history still exists, but it's just not as tangible as it was. Maybe that's a loss? I'm not sure. My grandfather's house and land are now a housing development, so maybe I do have some sympathy for the Dowager whose family home was turned into housing estates.

There is so much more I could say, but I'm petering out in my review energy. I know I'll love returning to this novel in the future. It was a lovely reading experience and so rich in content and detail and with surprising depth. I'll look out for more of Helen Ashton's novels, too. She has one called Parson Austen's Daughter about Jane Austen. How great does that sound?

*Note: Since I read this, I have read China Court by Rumer Godden, and there is a lot of similarities between the two novels. They both focus on one grand house and weave its history in and out of the present day inhabitants' lives. Interesting that Half-Crown House was published first in 1956. Did Rumer Godden read this and was influenced to write her own similar story (yet very much in her own style)? Interesting!

[Caro · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up thinking it would be a light romp about living in an English country house and opening it to tourists. It is that, but hardly light. Set in 1952, much of the book is about past glories (the hunts, the sparkling dinner parties, the time the King came to stay), contrasted with the post-war realities of too much house and not enough money (damp, dry rot, peeling wallpaper, untended gardens). She's very good about class differences and the modern way of life that has no room for big houses and lots of servants. In the last chapter the past and the present quite literally collide, and Ashton wraps it up with a happy ending in the very last paragraph.

[Alana/MiaTheReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't you just love a book that happens entirely in one day? I can get into that kind of slow unroll of characters and settings, because by midway through the novel, you can't help but feel you're right there in that day with the characters. A one-day-book proves the truth that our lives our made of minutes and our minutes are all connected so deeply to and built upon all the other minutes that have happened to us and our ancestors over years and years. Helen Ashton is an artist I've never read, and I loved her detailed writing style about the history of a British estate and its family, and her ability to weave a story of a whole family together in an old house in the course of one of its days. Fans of The Remains of the Day or One Find Day should check out this book.

[Dianeh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this book up at my library semi-annual book sale. It sounded interesting and it was! Although, I got a bit tired of the descriptions of rooms, furnishing and art work, I feel they were necessary to understand what the house had been in it’s better days. I liked the variety of characters- very old to young. And the ending was a very pleasant surprise!

[Rhode PVD · Rating 2 out of 5]

Its splendors are that it is falling to pieces and nobody has the funds to fix it.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book very much although I thought the writing was a little rushed at times and Ashton occasionally got her generations wrong. The main characters, Henrietta and Charles Hornbeam (distant cousins), are well, if sparingly drawn. Charles is immensely likeable; Henrietta a little brusque and aloof. The one-day narrative moves slowly with many digressions on details of the house, the Hornbeam family history and characters, and several extraneous characters. Ashton is keenly interested in the staff of the house and discusses their characters and loyalty to the house and family in detail. Several characters are portrayed as insensitive or malicious (Elsa Holly and the Swiss maid Maria) and they thrive despite their unpleasantness. One remarkable feature of the novel is that more than half the characters have surnames which refer to the natural world - Moss, Leaf, Roote, Branch, Hazel, Wood, Hornbeam itself, Thorne, etc. One guesses that Ashton was amusing herself and her readers, but to a modern reader this trivializes the story just a bit. This is the first book I have read by Ashton, so I don't know if she has playful gimmicks in her other books as well. I gave this book a four-star rating because I really enjoyed reading it - both for the story and the painstaking portrayal of a great house, the people who live and work in it, and the over-arching sense of the English class system which was breaking down at the time of writing (1956).

[Lora · Rating 3 out of 5]

I discovered that there's an entire subgenre of British lit reflecting on the massive upheaval of British society during and after the two World Wars. In particular, the old manors of the fading nobility and the way these incredible buildings became sore financial spots in the economy practically overnight.
This story is a day or so in the life around a fictional noble manor and how it is affected by time and rationing and shifting public interest.
There's quite a surprise at the end of the book, and that was so interesting to me that I added a third star. Strong endings always make a difference to me. Other than that, I was kind of annoyed at the slow build up in the beginning half. I like slow burns, but everybody in the book was complaining for CHAPTERS, thank you very much. Yeah, I get it, they were affectionately complaining, but geez, go take a nap.
I prefer The Laughing House by Warwick Deeping. The difference in what happens to each house in each of these books really just fascinates me. The attitude towards each house is a contrast. It reflects two different perspectives which probably were real issues and decision that British people had to make.
I love houses-as-characters, so I'll be looking for more.

[Joanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

The novel is about a family but it’s also about a house. Set in the early 1950s, when society was shifting in England, it records the changes including the end of the big houses. The big house in this novel has become a burden. I think I read once that half of England’s stately homes were torn down after the Second World War. Ashton clearly knows architecture but she also knows people. A very good read.

[Tina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel essentially is an anthropogical/archaeological study of an aging post-WWII English manor and the family that struggles to keep it running with dimished fortunes. The story, quite slight, takes place over one day (in 1952, 4 years before the book was published). There's an enormous amount of detail, with granular descriptions of the house, the paintings, sculptures, gardens, furnishings--it really feels like the author was trying to preserve the place in amber. Sometimes it's a bit slow, but overall it's interesting.

[Hina S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommend by Clair at 'The Captive Reader'

[Kay Robart · Rating 3 out of 5]

See my review here:

https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2022...

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book!