THE SHELL SEEKERS

FICTION:  THE SHELL SEEKERS/Rosamunde Pilcher – Dell/Bantam-Doubleday – 1987

This novel made me yearn for another car trip through Cornwall and the Cotswolds!

I’d never heard of or read anything by this prolific author, who is well into her eighties and retired from writing and living in Scotland’s Highlands. 

Pilcher tells the story of Penelope Keeling, from the present to the past to the present, from London to Pothkerris, Cornwall to her final home, Podmore’s Thatch in Gloucestershire.

Penelope is as strong as steel, weathering life’s hardships during World War II, a failed marriage and raising three children alone.  The protagonist is the daughter of Lawrence and Sophie Stern.  Marrying late in life, Lawrence, a renowned artist, was quite a bit older than his French wife.  And Sophie was more like a sister to Penelope.

The determined young woman was driven to participate somehow in the war effort and at eighteen, joined the women’s branch of the English navy.  She regretted it immediately and was lonely and unhappy in Portsmouth.  Already married but estranged from her husband and with child, she went back to her parents’ cottage in Cornwall and met a dashing soldier named Richard and fell in love.  Richard was training the Americans in climbing cliffs, just before D Day.  Their relationship was passionate and they planned to be together as man and wife at war’s end.

The young man died in the invasion and with heavy heart, Penelope eventually packed up her baby daughter and returned to her husband, a compulsive gambler.  They had three children while living in London and by mutual consent, divorced.

It is evident that Pilcher is very fond of gardening and there is vivid description of that throughout Penelope’s story.  It paints a lovely and very English picture, along with vivid details of Cornwall and the Cotswolds. 

Without going into Penelope’s whole saga, suffice it to say that her adult children play a big part in this tale.  Her daughter Nancy is pretentious and greedy and her son, Noel, is insufferable.  Olivia, a successful career woman, is the most like her mother and often at odds with her siblings.  There is much scheming towards the book’s conclusion.  While Penelope is not a wealthy woman, she has inherited her father’s paintings and sketches.  Painted mostly in the early part of the 20th Century, they have become quite valuable and trendy by the 1980s.  There is much infighting and manipulation over the art works, with two of her children urging Penelope to sell to bolster their own lifestyles.

This is unapologetically a women’s book, as is most of Pilcher’s novels.  Apparently, she lives simply and just tells stories of ordinary but interesting people.

I was most intrigued by the chapters set in WWII England, and overall, found this book quite satisfying and even realistic.