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The Book
The dedication of the book is "For my daughter Lindel". She was born
in 1939. There is an opening quotation from
The Wind in the Willows, which was the source for the main
theme.
... they saw a gipsy caravan, shining with newness, painted a
canary yellow picked out with green and red wheels.
"There
you are!" cried Toad, straddling and expaning himself. "There's
real life for you, embodied in a little cart. The open road, the
dusty highways, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling
downs! Camps, villages, towns, cities! Here today, up and
somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The
whole world before you and a horizon that's always changing."
Even though the book appeared nearly a year after the war started,
the setting is completely pre-war and there are only a few throwaway
references to potential hostilities.
The book starts with Mr. Finchley married to Mrs. Crantell, the
woman he had met in Cornwall in the first book, and attending his
retirement party. They have adopted Robert, the waif that Mr.
Finchley befriended in Paris, and sent him to boarding school in
Kent.
Mr. Finchley takes a fancy to a horse-drawn caravan that he sees for
sale. His new wife does not relish the prospect of a caravan journey
so goes to visit her brother while he sets out to explore Kent and
go house-hunting. He has various mishaps while learning to handle
the horse and the caravan, and encounters an array of scroungers,
eccentrics and country characters and sees several unsuitable
houses.
Meanwhile other people are showing an unnatural interest in his
caravan. It gradually emerges that it contains a secret, and in the
ensuing mayhem, Mr. Finchley is imprisoned in an empty house from
which he is rescued by the enterprise of his wife and of Robert. The
house he is rescued from turns out to be on the market and just
right for them.
Canning was living in a rented house in Kent (Forest Farm, Benenden)
around the time he wrote this book, and the descriptions he gives of
Mr. Finchley's ideal house resemble those of the house he himself
eventually bought in 1950, Marle Place, after his war service and
success with thrillers.
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Publishing history
This was the third and last book featuring Mr. Finchley, the
middle-aged clerk, a sequel to
Mr. Finchley discovers his England
and
Mr. Finchley goes to Paris. It was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1940 at 9/- with a
print run of 7,700, and there was an American edition by Carrick and
Evans in the same year. It was included in the Heinemann Uniform
Edition in the 1970s. The first edition is the rarest of the Mr.
Finchley books. The Lulu edition of 2002 has now been withdran,
but the splendid new edition from Farrago is published as both
print and e-book.
There was a dramatisation of this book and its predecessor,
Mr. Finchley goes to Paris, broadcast on BBC Radio 2 in 1990. This has been repeated in 2005
and again in 2009 and 2012 on the digital channel BBC Radio 7, now
called BBC Radio 4 Extra. Mr. Finchley is played by Richard
Griffiths (the actor who plays Mr. Dursley in the
Harry Potter films) and Mrs. Finchley, the former Mrs
Crantell, by Dinah Sheridan ("Mother" in
The Railway Children). The script was by the father-and-son
scriptwriting team of Eric and Andrew Merriman, distant cousins of
Victor Canning.
A short review in The Times of 24 August 1940 talks about
Canning's "kindly gaze" on his characters and the
countryside, and that sums it up well. In many ways this is the best
of the three Mr. Finchley books, and must have cheered up its
readers and distracted them from war. Canning himself enlisted in
the Royal Artillery in June 1940, soon after he had finished it, and
wrote very little for the next seven years.
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