Yesterday in the Back Lane by Bernice Rubens

Yesterday in the Back Lane Reviews

• 
  Mark

  Odd,odd,odd. The story is of one family and the street on which they live over the space of some 50 years but underlying it all is the secret which the narrator, Bronwen, hugs to herself throughout that time. She killed the man who was seeking to rape her with a knife she was borrowing for the Christmas carving. She never explains or mentions this, she allows an innocent man to be condemned and hung for the crime and from that day on her weird guilt-ridden psyche never allows itself to settle into extended normality. Walking through the world carefully as if meticulously picking her way through mud and slurry which might sully her and yet she sees herself always as already sullied.
  
  Having never been in a situation approaching this young girl's experience I baulk at decrying the narrative but it didn't hang together in this respect; Bronwen is evidently a sensible and intelligent young woman and though the initial normality of her reactions; removing the knife from the corpse, washing it off, delivering it to her mother's kitchen, having a bath, reading her novel...could all be totally seen as the actions of someone in shock....would that extend to seeing the death of a 100% innocent man as necessary to keep the charade going.
  
  I can understand how once the injustice of an innocent man being murdered has been effected then her guilt and inability to move free would take over but it is this basic and central tenet of the narrative which I find hard to take as real. The rape/self defence killing/shock reaction.....tick. Watching innocent man die for something for which you would not be blamed....non tick. And the whole of the narrative relies upon the fact that you, as the reader, can believe Bronwen would do this and I could not.
  
  Another long thread which links and interlinks the stories, which 'weaves its way' through the awkward clichés and archetypes is the 'tart with the heart'. This is Mrs Pugh who runs the local brothel from which the murdered rapist had just been flung, where Bronwen and her mother take refuge during air raids and who becomes the lynchpin for much of the action. Either by comparison and contrast between her upfront behaviour and the disingenuous bleatings of the more 'righteous' characters or by the way she becomes the sounding board/bawd for the thoughts and ideas of both Bronwen and, surprisingly, her mum.
  
  Three aspects of the novel which struck me. One was brilliant, One for the good, one not so much.
  
  The bad one first, the dialogue jarred. The actual conversation was often witty and moving and scene setting but, and I know Rubens is welsh so she would know tons more about it than me, the welshness of the thing didn't ring true. It was like she was shoe horning in words and phrases and idioms from the 'how to write welsh dialogue' book. Didn't work for me, which was a shame because a good deal of the actual dialogue was well worth encountering.
  
  The theme of the bleeding nose is perhaps a little over-used and in the over-using perhaps loses its effect in the story. The cliché of 'having a nose for gossip/crime/scandal' etc etc is twisted on its head (if that is not too contorted a statement) by Rubens as we see Bronwen's nose being the literal expression of this as it bleeds its guilt or embarrassment or awkwardness everytime she encounters the slightest link to the unacknowledged situation in the back lane. Her nose senses and responds before she herself does, even to the extent of her nose recognizing the widow of the executed man 20 years or so after Bronwen had had one fleeting sight of her crying at the verdict.
  
  The device that really worked for me was the simple repetition of the 'Yesterday in the Back lane' theme. Bronwen in the very first paragraph says this:-
  
  'Yesterday I killed a man. Well it feels like yesterday........So I must have lived more than fifty years of yesterday. I don't know what happened to all those todays and tomorrows. It was only yesterday that mattered. And matters still'
  
  This simple device peppers the novel. The obvious yet unexplicit idea that Bronwen never sees what is in front of her because she is always looking back over her shoulder in guilt and fear. This refusal to look ahead, to plan or imagine a future curtails and impoverishes her and all around her. A simple but clever mantra chanted by us the readers as if a Greek Chorus.
  
  I did enjoy the novel but unusually for me for a book I enjoyed I only gave a two. That is because the basic premise of the book that Bronwen (no matter what the trauma) would turn a blind eye to another's death seemed ridiculous and unbelievable.
  
  
• 
  Allan McNeill

  TW: This review discusses descriptions of sexual assault within this novel.
  
  I've read other reviews here, and want to comment on the opinion of some that this novel has an implausible storyline. Specifically, some have claimed that a young woman's silence about the murder she committed in self-defence is unbelievable; especially, to remain silent when an innocent man is charged and sentenced to death for this murder.
  
  In essence, I see this book as a comment on men and male sexuality. From the narrator and main character, Bronwen's earliest experiences with men, they have been predatory. At the age of 17, she kills a man who tried to rape her, but at this age she has already been subject to sexual harassment from the local grocer as well. Not long after this, the chief fire warden in their town sexually assaults her, and after fighting him off, she battles the dilemma of whether or not to tell her parents about him. It is this third man who assaults her that Bronwen finally tells her parents about, and she is surprised and grateful when they believe her and take her side. This shows two aspects to her silence regarding the man she killed. While she knows she had a right to defend herself from rape, the reader gets the sense that sexual assault is rife in her community and something that characters simply put up with. Bronwen feels guilty that she killed her attacker and did not put up with it. Her unwillingness to talk about it is shown in a cultural shame surrounding sex, shown by how difficult it is for her to tell her father about Mr. Griffith's assault on her. She fears she will not be believed and that she will be judged.
  
  As a story about male sexuality, the brothel at the end of the street shows the hypocrisy of the culture (in which the town judges all the women who work there, and yet it is frequented by townsmen). The brothel seems to be one of the few places where consensual sex happens. Otherwise, sex is a secret, obtained through force by the male characters. The brothel shows how much the men in the novel are uncomfortable with their sexuality. The narrator, Bronwen describes her next door neighbour, Mr Thomas: "He was like lots of men. The only way he could have sex was to pay for it. He thought it was such a filthy thing to do. He couldn't function if he got it for free." In the narrator's eyes, sex is almost never connected to love or relationships, with the exception of her own parents' relationship. To Bronwen, sex is something men demand, and it is soaked in misogyny and self-loathing. She likes the brothel, because inside the walls of the "house on the windy corner" all secrets of the town are wide open, what is culturally shameful is accepted, and what is coercive on the streets of the town, is consensual within the house.
  
  At the same time as painting attitudes towards sexuality as ugly, Rubens shows a genuine love for the guilelessness and lack of pretension of the Welsh suburbs. The wonder of Bronwen's parents' first experiences of a package overseas holiday and her mother's faith in pots of tea to right the bleakness of everyday life is touching. Throughout the novel, despite the destruction of WWII, the Jurassic sexual mores, and hard work, all of the main characters face their fates without complaint, with gratitude and with steely will, and this makes "Yesterday in the Back Lane," a story first and foremost, about people living life rather than only one about battling the trauma of sexual assault.
  
  I recommend it.
• 
  Joan Barton

  excellent -I think she is a great writer!
• 
  Becky

  One sentence summary: Written in the past tense from the point of view of a girl in Splott during the second world war who kills a man who rapes her and then spends her life covering it up.
  I wouldn't have appreciated this book at all if I wasn't Welsh, as it was very Welsh. The story didn't really go anywhere and I found more fun in the mention of 'Abertillery' and the 'Valleys' than the story!
• 
  Mary Lou

  Bernice Rubenstein tells a story of an ordinary loving family making do during the war, but influenced by a dark tragic secret.