Bond Street Story by Norman Collins

A Review of the British Writer's 1959 Novel

Dec 31, 2009
Chris Saliba

Bond Street Story - 1950s Fiction - guldfisken's photostream

In this touching story of 1950s British life, Norman Collins follows the romantic fortunes and family dramas of a group of London department store employees.

First published in 1959, Bond Street Story was written by British novelist Norman Collins, who also wrote the enormously popular post-war novel London Belongs to Me.

London Belongs to Me was recently republished by Penguin Classics. Currently Bond Street Story is out-of-print, and only available at second hand shops, or at online second hand sellers.

The Themes of Norman Collins's Fiction

Bond Street Story follows many similar themes to London Belongs to Me. Collins’s mainstay themes of post-war British life include the importance of friendship, the dramas of family life, the difficulties experienced in the pursuit of love and the centrality of work to British society.

Norman Collins also has a great knack for describing contemporary life. There are many brilliant descriptions of London in the fifties, most notably the opening sequence, ‘the rush hour’, which evokes the bustle of workers catching the Underground rail system: shopgirls, typists, cashiers, junior secretaries.

A relentless populist (Collins also worked at the BBC as Controller of the Light Programme), we even learn of the reading matter of these 1950s London commuters: The Times, Telegraph and Daily Mirror.

Plot and Story of Bond Street Story

The action of Bond Street Story revolves around a group of employees of the department store Rammell’s, and the intertwining stories of their families and loved ones. Mr Privett lands his daughter Irene a job at Rammell’s, where he is employed, only to find his daughter is horrified at the idea of taking such employment. She had always had dreams of becoming an actress.

Mr Eric Rammell, who has taken over the business from his father Sir Harry, has all sorts of family problems he must deal with, most notably a wayward son and a selfish wife.

The novel’s pathos, however, derives from the story of Mr Bloot, Rammell’s senior floor walker and close friend of Mr Privett. The nicely spoken, corpulent and widowed Mr Bloot has fallen in love with Hetty, a fast-track type character who runs a tobacco shop. They marry, and as expected, the marriage is a disaster. Hetty is coarse and insensitive. She is also mean. She releases Mr Bloot’s beloved budgies, which causes the harried husband all sorts of agonies. Humiliated beyond reconciliation with his wife, Mr Bloot is too embarrassed to ask for the help of his friends or even turn up for work.

All is resolved in the end when Mr Bloot moves in with Mr Privett’s family and is approached to represent a new bird seed called, Tweeties.

A Novel of Warmth and Pathos

While Bond Street Story is not as good a novel as the brilliant London Belongs to Me, it contains many of that novel’s best qualities. It has warmth and pathos. While not avoiding life’s ugly realities, Norman Collins shows that the best side of human nature triumphs in the end, and that mistakes made in life, no matter how bad they may seem, can always be redeemed in the end.

Cultivate meaningful friendships, the novel seems to say, and everyone can rebound from any disaster in life, no matter how humiliating.