The Pilgrim’s Inn is the second book in the Elliot family trilogy. For some reason, the British version has a different title, The Herb of Grace.

In the first book, The Bird in the Tree, family matriarch Lucilla Elliot fought hard to reunite her son, George, with his estranged wife, Nadine. When Nadine fell in love with Lucilla’s grandson, David, reconciliation looked impossible. (It sounds weird that a woman would fall in love with her husband’s nephew, but apparently she was much younger than her husband and a little older than David.) This is a spoiler alert if you haven’t read that book, but eventually David and Nadine broke up and Nadine went back to her husband.

As The Pilgrim’s Inn opens, seven years have passed. George and Nadine had a set of twins in addition to the three children they had before. David had gone off to war (WW2) and came back a broken man in need of quiet and rest.

Though David and Nadine did the right thing, their hearts aren’t all the way in the right place yet. They’re not doing anything inappropriate. Lucilla feels George and Nadine would have a better chance in the country rather than London (where Nadine wants to live). Lucilla manipulates circumstances to get George and the children to view an old inn that’s for sale, the Herb of Grace. An older lady had run it, but it was getting beyond her capabilities now. George and the children fall in love with the place, as Lucilla knew they would. Nadine ends up agreeing.

Their oldest son, Ben, who is a pre-teen or young teenager, discovers the house was a “pilgrim’s inn”–a hostel run by the monks of a local abbey. The family lives there and restores the place, thinking at a later point they’ll open it to guests. But then a man and woman who live in a boat and say they are father and daughter come along and help with the repairs while taking their meals at the inn. Nadine is drawn to the young woman, Annie-Laurie, in a maternal way that she hasn’t felt with her own children. “She was not an unloving mother, but she was not naturally a lover of children, and she was so desperately tired” (p. 35, Kindle version). Everyone feels there’s something a little off with Annie-Laurie and her “father,” but their story doesn’t come out til later.

Meanwhile, David runs into a young woman named Sally Adair at a London party. Sally’s father is an artist, and she recognizes David from one of her father’s paintings. She is drawn to David but senses that his heart isn’t free. Plus, he is a famous actor, and she feels herself too plain and ordinary.

Sally maligned herself when she said that she had no intellect. It was true that at school she had never passed any examination by anything except the skin of her teeth, but when it came to the business of living she was a clever woman. She liked everyone she met, and she enjoyed everything she did so intensely that her relationships and her activities were touched with that spark of light that men call genius. She was not an artist in the accepted sense of the word, but when she cooked a meal or tidied a room she was yet unmistakably her father’s daughter. A room arranged by Sally, a meal she had cooked, were as unforgettable as her father’s pictures. Imaginative, deft touches here and there were like the glimmer of light on water that without it would have been opaque and dull (p. 8).

When Sally’s father books them at an inn called the Herb of Grace for a few weeks, she’s surprised to learn that the children are the same ones she saw regularly at the grocer’s in London, and that David is staying with his grandmother nearby.

The inn, as well as Lucllla’s house, Damrosehay, are almost characters in themselves. Much is made of the fact that people feel safe and welcomed there, not just from the residents, but from the houses.

There’s a lot that takes place in the woods as well as several mentions of The Wind in the Willows.

This is the second book of Goudge’s I have read which had child characters who were unruly and self-willed, yet somehow supposedly adorable. It doesn’t usually work like that in real life.

Though I felt Lucilla came across as manipulative in this book (even though meaning well and having everyone’s good in mind), and a couple of characters were way more intuitive than anyone I’ve known in real life, I loved this story.

All of Elizabeth’s books seem to have a theme. This one appeared to be the importance of home, especially in the aftermath of WW2, still dealing with shortages and healing from the war and what it did to individuals and families :

It was homemaking that mattered. Every home was a brick in the great wall of decent living that men erected over and over again as a bulwark against the perpetual flooding in of evil. But women made the bricks, and the durableness of each civilization depended upon their quality, and it was no good weakening oneself for the brick-making by thinking too much about the flood (p. 58).

A few other quotes that stood out to me:

Funny thing, memory . . . Like a storeroom full of cupboards. Something makes one of the doors fly open, and out falls a lot of stuff you didn’t even know you had (p. 254).

Excessive shame was just as distorting to the judgment as excessive arrogance (p. 342).

I know of no better incentive for the building of a decent world than the possession of children who must live in the world you’ve built (p. 360).

I listened to the audiobook which was nicely read by Elisabeth Martin, except she had an annoying habit of pronouncing words that end with a “d” sound as if they ended with a “t.” You don’t realize how many words end with a “d” until someone does that. Plus, this is an English book, and she is American. Though she reads the narration in an American accent, she does a great job with the different voices of the characters. I also borrowed the ebook via LIbby to look up some quotations and read a few sections in more depth.

Unfortunately, the third book in the series, The Heart of the Family, doesn’t come out in audiobook form until next week. But I look forward to listening the last book of Goudge’s Eliot trilogy.

The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge takes its title from Job 14:7-9, KJV: “For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.”

The novel shares the story of several people in a small English village in the late 1950s, but especially Mary Lindsay. She’s a woman in her fifties in London who began as a teacher, then went into government services, then became something like an administrator for a ministry. She receives word that an aunt for whom she was named has died and left Mary her house in the country and a small legacy. At first Mary plans to go down to Appleshaw, get the house in order, and sell it.

But then she remembers visiting Aunt Mary when she was about eight. Aunt Mary had showed her a collection of “little things,” miniatures, that young Mary had been enchanted with. Aunt Mary had offered to give them to her, but in the busyness of a London home with other siblings, she was afraid they’d get lost or broken.

Mary wonders now whether the “little things” are still there. She uncharacteristically decides to quit her job in London and take possession of Aunt Mary’s home in the countryside.

As Mary starts to get the house in shape, she meets other villagers. There are children next door who regard her garden as theirs and are quite hostile, until Mary makes friends with them. There’s a blind veteran, Paul Randall, with his discontent, grumbly wife. There’s the vicar with his anxious, easily frightened sister. And a dear older, feeble couple with a wayward son.

Part of Mary’s reasons for coming to the quiet of the country is to process her feelings for her aunt and her fiance, who had been killed at war a week before the wedding. She felt like perhaps she hadn’t really loved him as she should have since she didn’t grieve as deeply as she had seen others do. And she wanted to get to know her mysterious Aunt Mary, whom she had only seen that one time as a child. Fortunately, she finds Aunt Mary’s diary.

“The scent of water” is mentioned many times through the book as different characters experience renewal and new life in various ways.

Some of the quotes that stood out to me:

I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can’t, and you hate yourself because you can’t, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do. And this in a way is easier because with God’s help you can command your will when you can’t command your feelings. With us, feelings seem to be important, but He doesn’t appear to agree with us.

Suffering had had an effect with which she was familiar. The refusal of self-pity and despair had turned it from lead to fire, burning up the subterfuges and dishonesties below the surface of the inherited veneer of manners and thought that most men and women think are their true selves, and the veneer with them.

Mary sat up late that night with the diary. She had been reading it slowly and steadily, passing with Cousin Mary through the first few years at Appleshaw, years of alternate illness and respite, so much at one with her cousin that she seemed to be learning with her how to accept the first with hope and the second with wonder and gratitude. Cousin Mary hoped her journey through periods of dark and light was like that of a Swiss train toiling up the mountainside, in and out of tunnels but always a little farther up the hill at each emergence. But she could only hope that this was so. She did not feel it.

No desert is so dusty as not to have an oasis here and there.

I liked this quote about a writer who gave Mary some of his work to critique.

He had found in her what he had never had, a sympathetic but intelligent critic. She could wield the pruning knife mercilessly yet at the same time she watered the roots.

I think most writers would appreciate that kind of feedback.

However, there were a couple of things that puzzled me. One was that Mary finds herself falling for a married man. She never acts on her feelings or lets anyone know. He’s a writer and finds in her a meeting of the minds unlike what he has with anyone else. But that being understood and appreciated seems to make him more determined to make his relationship with his discontent wife right.

Another was this exchange with a child who had taken a couple of the “little things” from Mary’s house:

“Then you don’t think I’m awfully wicked?” whispered Edith. “You don’t think I’ll go to hell?”
Mary laughed. “No, I don’t. It’s like this, Edith. Why you do a thing is more important than what you do. And so stealing because you love is really better than not stealing because you don’t. Not that I am advocating stealing exactly. This question of good and evil is very complicated. Life has been very difficult for us all since Eve ate the apple.”

Mary was not a believer at this point, so she can be forgiven for not having her theology quite right. But it seemed an odd thing for the author to include.

I was surprised to see a handful of “damns” in the book.

In an earlier book I read by this author, The Dean’s Watch, it seemed to take her a long time to actually get into the story. In this book, she seemed to jump right in, so that was helpful. Still, it’s kind of a slow-moving, character-driven rather than action-packed novel. But I liked the theme of renewal and how it worked out in the lives of its characters.