The Shell Seekers by Rosmunde Pilcher

It has taken me over thirty years to finally read this novel which was a bestseller in the 1980s. I must confess I was put-off by the cover – too obviously a ‘woman’s book’ or even worse ‘an older woman’s book’.

But someone I admire said they loved it, and as I am now myself an ‘older woman’ I thought it time to take the plunge. And how glad I am. This is a tome at almost 700 pages but I read it in a week and found I was putting off many pressing duties because I felt drawn back to Penelope Keeling’s story.

Pilcher’s writing was a surprise: her descriptions of landscapes and interiors are sublime. If you have ever visited Cornwall, then this book will transport you back to its pristine waters, meandering village lanes and sunny days. Her characters feel like real people: sometimes loveable, sometimes loathsome, but always real. Penelope’s grown children, two of them at least, are vexing:

‘They did not matter, those grown-up children of hers, who still behaved like the children they no longer were. It did not matter that Noel thought of no person but himself, or that Nancy had become so smug and self-righteous and middle-aged…What had gone wrong? What had become of the babies she had borne and loved and brought up and educated and generally cared for?’

When we meet Penelope, she is 64 years old and recovering from a heart attack, according to ‘those idiot doctors’. Her response? ‘Whatever. I have survived it, and I shall put it behind me, and not talk nor think about it, ever again. Because I am alive. I can feel, touch, see hear, smell…’ How can you not fall in love with Penelope Keeling?

Pilcher meanders through Penelope’s life, via the people who have influenced it. We see her idyllic, bohemian childhood with her artist father and French mother, her first love and hasty marriage, the war years and meeting her beloved Richard.

There is loss and heartache and grief in this novel. Pilcher doesn’t focus on these moments, she doesn’t draw on the heartstrings, instead leaving it to the reader to respond at their own pace. This made these moments even more poignant and effecting.

There were a few of moments in this book that personally resonated with me: Penelope’s wonderfully eccentric Aunt Ethel who would celebrate her shares going up a point by allowing herself ‘two pink gins instead of one as the sun went over the yard-arm. She called them her drinky-poos.’ I had a dear friend, now sadly passed, who always referred to her afternoon gin and tonic as drinky-poos and wish I could share this quote with her. Another was the reference to Penelope’s ‘useful drawer’. Who else can remember that draw, usually in the kitchen, where their mother kept ‘a tangle of picture wire, fuses, hammers, boxes of tacks, and flattened tubes of glue’? The last is when Penelope tells her friend Doris that ‘we’re all getting older. Time to put our houses in order.’ – a phrase I haven’t heard in years but I can certainly relate to.

I will finish this overly long review with a most beautiful quote:

‘A ring was the accepted sign of infinity, eternity. If her own life was that carefully described pencil line, she knew all at once that the two ends were drawing close together. I have come full circle, she told herself, and wondered what had happened to all the years. It was a question which, from time to time, caused her some anxiety and left her fretting with a dreadful sense of waste. But now, it seemed, the question had become irrelevant, and so the answer, whatever it was, was no longer of any importance.’

As the weather becomes cooler, this book will keep you warm. Highly recommended.

Reviewed by Gaby Meares
Murder on a Monday Reading Group