Babbacombe's

Babbacombe's / Susan Scarlett
Dean Street Press, 2022, c1941.
211 p.

After reading the charming, light Clothes-Pegs by Susan Scarlett recently, I was really looking forward to this one -- it's a department store novel, which I usually really enjoy. Sadly, I was a bit disappointed in this one. It felt a little treacly, a little bit Grace Livingston Hill-ish with its focus on the good daughter and the racy cousin competing for a man's attention. 

The cover is fabulous and the parts about the workings of the store were engaging and interesting to read about. But our heroine Beth Carson is a bit sappy, with the perfect home life with well-meaning, scrimping parents, younger siblings who need Beth's extra mothering, and an ability to shine with extreme goodness. 

After she is introduced as leaving school with the highest awards, she goes directly to work to help support her family. As her father is a long-time employee of the department store Babbacombe's, he gets her a place in the shop. She, of course, is excellent at her work, attentive and a rule-follower, and her department heads are impressed with her. On her first day of work, however, she gets stuck in a lift with a young man who doesn't seem to have much of a work ethic or character, and ends up telling him off. Of course she later discovers that he is David Babbacombe, son of the owner; what she doesn't know is that her earnest moralizing in the elevator has turned his life around and he's now decided to work his way up in the firm. 

To add a little drama to the story, Beth's cousin Dulcie (brought up loosely by a maiden aunt) has come to live with them in London, as it's time for her to find some work of her own. She also gets a job at Babbacombe's -- as an elevator operator -- but she's the opposite of Beth. She loves to flirt and is a bit vulgar, with her eye on the big prize at all times. It's almost the fairy tale duo of good and bad stepsisters, one having diamonds and pearls falling from her lips, the other one with toads. There isn't a lot of nuance here; we know who we are supposed to cheer for! 

As a tale of a lower middle class family trying to keep it together, and hard work and moral rectitude being rewarded, you couldn't ask for more. The store bits were great fun, even if the family togetherness was a bit treacly at times. I'll still try more of these books, though - they are light reading and have lots of enjoyable period detail.