Let the Monica Dickens book binge continue!

Nightingales Are Singing starts in post-war England. Thirty something Christine Cope is a spinster who runs the book department at a London department store. She’s plump and lonely and leads a narrow life with her father and aunt and their animals. Occasionally she goes out with her jerk-ass cousin Geoffrey who treats her like dirt. Geoffrey is from the rich side of the family and my brain imagines him as sneering and pompous as Vincent Price in Leave Her to Heaven. Christine meets a US Navy officer, Vinson Gaegler, who seems nice enough but all the food parcels, cigarettes and nylons and steaks in the world can’t replace Christine’s dead love Jimmy. My brain Vinson is played by the early 1950s Kirk Douglas.

But Vincent persists and Christine (played in my brain by Jeanne Crain using her best MGM British accent) goes to America to marry him. And if Christine didn’t like her life in England, well, America is going to be just as and possibly more challenging. Vinson may love the US Navy even more than Christine. The Admiral coming to their wedding party seems to mean more to Vinson then his new life with Christine. But the fault doesn’t lay entirely with Vinson. Sure he has a hard-on (Blacklight: “do you have to be so crude?” Me: “yes”) for the Navy and could have given Christine the damn ‘How to be a Navy wife book” BEFORE they got married,  but Christine has her faults too. She is used to be taken care of by her Aunt Josephine, being a career woman and not realizing that married life is more than a pretty dress and fresh lipstick when Hubby comes home. And she is still carrying a torch for the dead Jimmy.  Add that to culture clashes and of course things will go dark. At one point, I started making a “dead” checklist (baby, car, marriage, dog, lover, another dog…), but I kept reading.

Nightingales Are Singing didn’t grip me in the same way as Kate and Emma. Once Christine hits America, I started wondering how many pages until her nervous breakdown or the revelation Vinson is gay. Apparently he’s straight but I have my doubts. Either that or Vinson, scarred by his trying mother, is just Navy-sexual. Because I only see him being able to impregnate Christine if he pretend she was the Admiral. (Blacklight: “You think everyone is gay.” Me: “No, just Vinson.”) What is fascinating besides playing “Is Vinson Gay?” was the look at being an English woman transplanted to America as a bride. Learning to deal with shops, America’s “classless” class system, the surreal world of being a military spouse (I’ve seen actual How to be a Military spouse guides and wow…the regulations when you’re not the one in uniform), and being an older bride. The tragedies mounting on Christine at a certain point seem like something you would have heard on “Queen For A Day”. The only thing that doesn’t die are the poor goldfish trapped in a weird tank in the kitchen. Wait, did anyone remember to feed them when Christine goes off for the week with her doomed lover?

If you want to be a Monica Dickens completest or are interesting in seeing how she might have used her own experiences as a military spouse (I really hope she didn’t endure everything Christine goes through), then track down Nightingales Are Singing. Otherwise, you may wish to stick with the true memoirs.