A Night in Cold Harbour

Too long neglected, Kennedy is a fine writer, and this is a compelling novel, with shades of George Eliot.

Acceptable is the condition of the only available copies of this magnificent novel within most people's price range, the rest being collectable editions at collector's prices.Which is a pity. In the age of chick-lit and because we deserve it, Margaret Kennedy's voice is profoundly welcome. What, first of all, is a cold harbour, and why are so many roads, lanes, and areas of rough land called, on the map, "Cold Harbour"?It is an old expression for an area for rough sleepers, a safe open-air or partly open-air refuge where the homeless and roofless congregated. In other words it's the resting-place for all of us, if you agree with the aphorism that we are all only two wage-packets from the street.In this novel a beautiful and fascinating young woman becomes middle-aged, faded, and dies alone. Her lover comes into a fortune but loses it, through his own selfishness and imbecility. He does not value the woman he abandoned until long after her death, nor can he remember the mother of his child, whom he begot in a drunken tavern orgy.A glorious pastoral landscape near his home is wrecked by a pottery-owner, a Georgian prototype of nineteenth-century industry, who sets up a manufactory at the hero's gates. The only man to bear witness to the obscene cruelties practised within its walls dies unheard (except by the people of the road), mad with grief, ending his days in the refuge of the title.This is our history in England, as much as the royal family and far more than the ridiculous costume-dramas flouncing across our screens these days. Kennedy never offered happy endings. She did not believe that virtue is its own reward, or that money or beauty were the road to happiness, or that if you work hard you will be acknowledged. It's one of the most moving and passionate novels I've ever read, with a Dostoyevskian depth of feeling and pity, and her historical erudtion, incidentally, is wonderful, and offered as an additional pleasure to the reader, not as an ornament of her own learning. And it's very funny at times. How on earth she got one of the slang expressions for an apron past her post-war publishers I cannot imagine - perhaps they didn't get it, but you will, I'm sure.It's a cold winter. Remember the poor. Remember the homeless, however rebarbative you find the behaviour of many of them. Have some thought for those who are working on the minimum wage - or below - as temps and casuals, with no job security at all. Read this novel and think a little.Thank you. By a homeless person.