I was at a writers festival recently where a former bookshop owner declared she pressed this book into the hands of every customer she could that ventured into her shop. A Terrible Kindness had caught my eye before that, reminding me of the episode of The Crown (on Netflix) that describes the terrible events surrounding the Aberfan disaster. A colliery spoil tip collapsed after weeks of heavy rain, forming a slurry that slipped downhill and smothered houses but worst of all a school. The death toll topped 140; 116 of the victims were children.
A Terrible Kindness describes the life of newly qualified undertaker William Lavery. We meet him at an undertaker’s dinner, to which he’s finally had the courage to invite Gloria, the love of his life. He’s just nineteen and has a bright future with Lavery and Sons, the business run by his uncle Robert, and he’s come top of his class in embalming. But the dinner is interrupted by the news about Aberfan and the call goes out for embalmers to head to the mining town to prepare the bodies for burial. William is a good-hearted sort and immediately volunteers.
William’s experiences at Aberfan will change his life for ever. Today, anyone helping at such a disaster would be offered counselling. But this is 1966 and it’s back to business when William gets home. This isn’t the only traumatic event that’s happened to William. He lost his father to cancer as a young boy, and something has happened to him at school. A promising singer, he has been selected for a prestigious school in Cambridge where for training as a chorister, his voice full of potential.
Two pieces of music haunt the book. I’d never heard Myfanwy before, but it’s a popular (and achingly sad) Welsh song composed in 1875. The other is Allegri’s Miserere, which I was more familiar with. In fact if you think of boy sopranos, then this is probably the music that springs to mind.
As he sits next to the window on the tired upholstery, with a spring nudging him in the backside, William is unexpectedly overwhelmed with a sense of his mother. Not the mother who moved to Swansea without him and now manages the biggest music shop in Wales, but the mother who took him to Cambridge, who knelt on the gravel in her stockings to tell him how proud she was, trying so hard not to cry. He stares out of the window, not bothering to wipe his face until he feels drips on his hand.
But the book is about a lot more than tragedy and music. William has to navigate a problematic relationship with his very loving mother. Evelyn adores William, he’s all she has left, and has high hopes that singing will save him from the family undertaking business. Robert Lavery was her husband’s twin brother, a living breathing reminder of what she has lost, and Howard, also in the business is Robert’s other half. Homosexuality couldn’t come out of the closet in 1966 and it’s a lingering awkwardness between Evelyn and Robert. But they all love William. As does Martin, the great friend William makes at school, and Gloria of course but is she prepared to wait for him to sort himself out?
These are all wonderful characters, all loving William, but how do you love anyone back when your heart’s full of pain. Jo Browning Wroe puts William through a lot before letting him find some resolution. For such an apparently blameless young man he certainly creates a storm around him.
The Aberfan disaster is hauntingly made real in the descriptions of the work of kind strangers tasked with a terrible job. It’s sensitively done as is the work William does in the mortuary at Lavery and Sons. You develop a new respect for the work of undertakers and learn a lot of the process. It definitely takes a certain kind of person and the author, having herself grown up in the business, is just the writer for this story.
A Terrible Kindness has polarised reviewers, particularly the way the Aberfan disaster is employed as a device to change a character, suggesting this is a little insensitive. Much of the story has little to do with Aberfan, but then perhaps that’s true of lots of wider events that can affect a character, like war for instance. As a reading experience, I felt I disengaged a little – you can get a little frustrated with William – and the story lags a little. But a little after the middle things pick up and I was pulled into the story again.
Overall, I’m glad I read A Terrible Kindness and hope Jo Browning Wroe has another book in the pipeline. She’s created an original and heartfelt story and has brought Britain in the 1950s and 60s to life. Her characters are ordinary and yet special at the same time. This debut novel gets three and a half stars from me.
Judith McKinnon 