Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, published in 2010, is one of those deceptively genteel novels that initially appears to offer nothing more alarming than an English village, a retired army officer, a widow, a few country houses and an assortment of social proprieties. Yet beneath this seemingly tranquil surface lies a novel of considerably greater ambition: an exploration of ageing, loneliness, class, race, cultural prejudice, familial obligation and social transformation — and, above all, of the courage required to pursue personal happiness when convention has decreed that one’s emotional life ought already to have reached its terminus.

At its heart is the apparently improbable romance between Major Ernest Pettigrew, a sixty-eight-year-old retired British Army officer, and Mrs. Jasmina Ali, a Pakistani-English widow who runs the village shop. Their relationship is affecting precisely because Simonson refuses to rush it. This is not the fevered romance of youth, propelled by hormonal urgency and romantic idealism; it is something quieter and, in some respects, more profound: the gradual recognition between two people who have lived long enough to understand loss, compromise and the value of companionship. The novel’s central proposition is disarmingly simple: it is never too late to fall in love, although it may require considerable courage to acknowledge that one has done so.

Major Pettigrew is an especially compelling protagonist because he is neither a conventional hero nor an entirely unblemished liberal. He is a retired military man who places enormous value upon manners, restraint, honour, tradition and civility. He regards vulgarity and commercialisation with undisguised distaste, and has little sympathy for a society in which everything — from personal relationships to inherited objects — appears increasingly susceptible to commodification.

His greatest source of exasperation is, fittingly, his own son, Roger, whose materialism, social ambition and acquisitive instincts seem to embody almost everything the Major considers objectionable about the modern age. Yet the Major’s journey is not one of suddenly acquiring enlightenment and becoming a different man. Simonson is subtler than that. His relationship with Mrs. Ali compels him to interrogate assumptions he has long regarded as self-evident. His “last stand”, therefore, is not merely a resistance to the vulgarities of modernisation or to his son’s mercenary instincts; it is also a confrontation with the limitations of his own worldview.

The relationship between the Major and Mrs. Ali constitutes the novel’s greatest achievement. Simonson could easily have transformed their romance into a sentimental tale about two lonely elderly people discovering love in the autumn of their lives. Instead, she gives us something considerably more convincing. Their attraction grows through conversation, intellectual compatibility, humour, shared experience and mutual recognition.

Both are widowed. Both have known bereavement. Both value books, conversation and civility. Both inhabit that curious stage of existence in which society tends to regard romantic desire as an eccentricity rather than a legitimate human impulse. Their relationship consequently possesses a quiet dignity. What moves us is not merely that they fall in love, but that they recognise themselves in one another — each discovering a companion who understands the peculiar conjunction of freedom and loneliness that accompanies later life.

Simonson’s treatment of ageing is consequently among the novel’s most refreshing virtues. The Major may be approaching seventy, but he is not portrayed as a man whose emotional existence has expired. On the contrary, falling in love restores to him a sense of possibility. The romance thus acquires a significance beyond the circumstances of its protagonists: it becomes a gentle repudiation of the assumption that advancing years necessarily entail emotional diminishment.

The Major and Mrs. Ali are not merely two individuals who happen to fall in love; they are, by the very fact of their relationship, challenging several deeply entrenched boundaries. He is an English military gentleman; she is a Pakistani Muslim widow. The village is perfectly comfortable with their friendship. It becomes distinctly less accommodating when that friendship begins to acquire the inconvenient appearance of love. It is here that Simonson’s comedy of manners begins to reveal its sharper social purpose.

Edgecombe St. Mary may resemble an idyll, but beneath its tea parties, village clubs, country houses and exquisitely modulated conversations lurk assumptions about class, race, religion and belonging that are anything but idyllic. Mrs. Ali is particularly revealing in this regard. Born in Cambridge, she is nevertheless perceived by the village as an outsider because of her Pakistani ancestry. The Major, despite having been born in Lahore, is accepted as quintessentially English. The irony is delicious and the implication unmistakable: belonging is evidently less a matter of birthplace than of who is permitted to define the boundaries of Englishness.

The novel therefore poses an uncomfortable question: Who, precisely, gets to decide who belongs?

The pair of Churchill sporting guns inherited by the Major and his late brother Bertie provides one of the novel’s most effective symbols. On the surface, the dispute is merely about inheritance. Yet the guns gradually acquire a significance far beyond their material worth, coming to represent heritage, memory, masculine identity, family continuity and the elusive meaning of possession.

The Major wants the guns reunited because, to him, they constitute fragments of family history, objects invested with memory and honour. Roger sees them principally as valuable possessions that might be sold. The disagreement between father and son is therefore not really about firearms at all. It is a dispute between two radically different conceptions of value. For the Major, value resides in history, sentiment and continuity; for Roger, it is measured principally in monetary worth and social utility. The guns thus become a miniature enactment of the novel’s broader conflict between inheritance and commercialisation, memory and monetisation, continuity and convenience.

The Major’s relationship with Roger is among the novel’s most perceptive elements. Roger is not merely an irritating son, nor simply a convenient embodiment of everything the author wishes us to dislike about modernity. He represents an emerging Britain in which older structures of status, obligation and social continuity are increasingly supplanted by money, ambition, professional networking and consumerism.

The Major regards him with an affecting amalgam of affection, disappointment and incomprehension. This is poignant precisely because Roger’s behaviour forces him to confront one of the less comfortable realities of ageing: parental authority does not survive indefinitely. Once children become adults, they cannot simply be instructed; they must be negotiated with. To lose authority over one’s children is, in a curious sense, another form of displacement.

The Major is simultaneously mourning his brother, adjusting to widowhood, watching his village mutate around him and discovering that his son no longer inhabits the moral universe he once hoped to transmit. His relationship with Mrs. Ali consequently becomes part of a much larger process of reconstructing his identity. He is not merely falling in love; he is discovering who he might still become.

The novel’s treatment of cultural prejudice is central to its social commentary. Mrs. Ali is accepted, but only conditionally. She is useful as the village shopkeeper, respectable as an individual and familiar as a neighbour. Yet the moment she becomes romantically associated with the Major, her “foreignness” acquires an exaggerated visibility. Simonson astutely demonstrates that prejudice does not always announce itself with crude declarations. It can operate through gossip, discomfort, social exclusion, insinuation, assumptions and the subtle policing of what constitutes acceptable behaviour.

Indeed, some of the novel’s most telling observations arise from precisely this distinction between overt hostility and genteel exclusion. Nobody need actually declare, “You do not belong here.” Belonging can be denied more efficiently through raised eyebrows, lowered voices, awkward silences and the quiet withdrawal of social approval.

Simonson is also careful not to reduce cultural conflict to the simplistic opposition of tolerant English villagers and intolerant immigrants. Mrs. Ali’s family contains its own tensions — between generations, between individual desire and familial expectation, and between personal autonomy and religious or cultural obligation. The pressures experienced by Mrs. Ali therefore mirror, in different forms, those confronting the Major. Both are caught between what they want and what others believe they ought to want. This symmetry gives the novel considerably greater depth than that of a conventional interracial romance.

Simonson’s prose is elegant without becoming ostentatious, and her most formidable weapon is dialogue. Characters rarely parade their prejudices in explicit declarations; instead, their assumptions emerge through understatement, euphemism, social nicety and the exquisitely calibrated insult. There is something quintessentially English about the comedy that results: the characters can wound one another profoundly while maintaining the outward appearance of impeccable decorum.

The contrast between the Major’s ceremonious diction and the brisker, more contemporary voices around him is particularly effective. His language is not merely a quaint affectation; it embodies an entire moral and social sensibility that is gradually becoming unfashionable. His formalities are at once admirable and limiting. They confer dignity upon his world, but they can also prevent him from recognising how much that world excludes.

The title, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, is consequently more ambiguous — and more moving — than it first appears. On one level, it describes the Major’s resistance to a world that seems intent upon dismantling everything he values: manners, continuity, inherited obligation, restraint and a certain conception of Englishness. But the “last stand” is equally personal.

He has arrived at an age when society expects him to accept a prescribed future: retirement, family rituals, memories and perhaps a quiet resignation to whatever remains. Instead, he discovers that there is still something worth risking himself for. His last stand is therefore not simply a defence of the past. It is a final claim upon the future.

That is what makes the title so unexpectedly poignant.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is, in the end, a gentle novel with surprisingly sharp edges. It presents itself as a traditional English village romance, furnished with tea, country houses, eccentric neighbours, family secrets, social embarrassment and the elaborate choreography of polite society. Yet beneath this comfortable façade, Helen Simonson is examining a society caught between inheritance and reinvention, between the reassuring certainties of the past and the unsettling pluralities of the present.

Its most beautiful insight is also its simplest: growing older does not mean becoming emotionally finished.

Indeed, the Major’s age makes his romance with Mrs. Ali more, rather than less, affecting. They have both experienced loss. They have both acquired the wisdom that comes from compromise. And they both understand, perhaps more acutely than younger lovers do, that time is finite. Their love therefore possesses an urgency that youthful romance can sometimes afford to postpone.

What Simonson finally offers is not merely a romance between two unconventional lovers, but a quiet meditation on the human appetite for renewal. We may grow older; our circumstances may narrow; society may insist that certain doors have already closed. Yet the possibility of beginning again remains stubbornly, gloriously alive.

That combination of wit, romance, social observation and emotional generosity makes Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand a thoroughly satisfying novel — and a remarkably perceptive one about the possibility of a second beginning, even when life appears to be entering its final chapters.