Hop, Step and Jump

In the beginning, the love story of Jenny Dennet and Bert Murray ran the appointed course of all similar love stories in their neighbourhood. It differed in the end because Jenny had character as well as charm and Bert had only charm.

Jenny wants more. Much more. Born into poverty in a small industrial town in the north of England, she is determined to find a way out. After taking up with a handsome rotter named Bert who works in the same factory as her, it’s not long before she gives in to his pleas to marry him. But he turns out to be a drunk and a philanderer with an occasional propensity to violence and she soon walks out on him (the ‘hop’ of the title). ‘You can’t leave me. Where’ll you go?' asks Bert. ‘I’ve got my hands an’ I’ve got my brains and I can work,’ Jenny replies.

Sure enough, Jenny quickly gets a job as a housemaid. She falls into an affair with her employer’s son, Hugh (the ‘step’), but, finding herself both morally compromised and – even worse – bored, she borrows some money from him to open a bakery (the ‘jump’). But will running her own business be enough to fulfill her? And what about love? 

This spirited tale of upward mobility, written in Winifred Watson’s distinctively direct style, was first published in 1939 in the same week as the outbreak of war. The Guardian described it as ‘unusual and entertaining’; ‘subtle and romantic’ was L P Hartley’s verdict in the Observer and, according to the Sketch, ‘Without being hard, Miss Winifred Watson is a matter-of-fact writer and endows her heroine with these qualities. She reminds one a little of Arnold Bennett.’

Certainly, there is an explicitness in Hop, Step and Jump that in some ways makes it more akin to a realist novel. For example, the impoverished surroundings in which Jenny and her husband Bert have to live are described in great detail, as is the way they are virtually imprisoned because of their circumstances. The novel is brutal at times and doesn’t gloss over squalor or poverty. Yet at the same time, it is extremely entertaining and flows along like the best kind of light fiction.

The endpapers for Hop, Step and Jump are ‘Stanford’, a hand-screen printed chintz designed in 1937 by Marion Dorn for Donald Brothers, exhibited in 1939 at the British Industries Fair © Marion Dorn / Victoria and Albert Museum, London.