I'm reading A Peaceful Retirement, the last book of the Fairacre series of books, written by Miss Read. I've read the first two books in the series--Village School and Village Diary, and now the last two--Farewell to Fairacre and A Peaceful Retirement. Miss Read is the pen name for the author Dora Jessie Saint, who lived from 1913 to 2012, and who, like her character Miss Read, was a schoolteacher and headmistress for Fairacre School. The interesting thing is that the name Miss Read serves as both Saint's pen name and as the author's main character. Miss Read the author was married and had a child; Miss Read the schoolteacher is unmarried and firmly decided to remain that way, despite being pursued by two suitors. Since Saint was a schoolteacher herself, one can imagine that she drew on her school experiences when she wrote her books. Fairacre, a fictional village, depicts village life in all its glory and problems; gossip is what connects the townspeople and it spreads like wildfire despite the best efforts to contain it. If you are looking for anonymity, you won't find it in a small village, where everyone knows about the doings of everyone else. The books are dated; the first two are from 1955 and 1957, respectively, and the last two from 1993 and 1996, respectively). They depict an era when social media, smart phones, computers and the like did not exist. And when you read the books, you don't miss their absence. People managed their lives quite well (or not so well) for hundreds of years without being glued to their phones 24/7.
I love Miss Read's world, like my mother before me. I especially like the last two books in the Fairacre series, and I probably should read the intervening books. Perhaps I will if I get the chance. But I've gotten a real chance to immerse myself in the Fairacre goings-on, and I've enjoyed them immensely. Miss Read the schoolteacher is a shrewd observer of human behavior and the books are peppered with her short reflections about life, love, marriage, spinsterhood (as the state of being unmarried was referred to back then), school, children, their parents, getting older, getting sick, and death. The nice thing is that she doesn't dwell morosely on any of the sadder events in life; she comments on them and moves on. The townspeople are closely connected to the land and to the seasons, and she comments on both as well.
A Peaceful Retirement especially is filled with laugh-out-loud humorous situations and comments. Miss Read retires from school life after almost forty years of service, and many of the villagers have (well-meaning) advice on how she should use her free time. Her retirement starts off well but she has to learn to fight to preserve her free time. You can't get perturbed when reading about some of the village types; they exist everywhere and have done so at all times in history--the well-meaning busybodies, the complainers, the nitpickers and naggers, the doomsdayers, the drunkards, but also the truly caring people, the optimists, the ambitious people, the hard workers, the kind people, the churchgoers. I don't know if the books have ever been filmed, but they should have been. They would have been wonderfully entertaining.
I'm very glad I stumbled upon these books after all these years. As I wrote about in a previous post from March of this year (A New Yorker in Oslo: Odds and ends and updates (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com), my mother used to read these books when we were children in the 1960s and 70s. She seemed to truly enjoy them. So thanks are in order to Early Bird Books who send out daily emails with great deals on Kindle books; the Miss Read books have been among them. I have purchased a number of books in this way; some of the books are available for less than two dollars. You can't beat that price.
