Antimacassar City

This historical novel, published in 1940, is a somewhat Dickensian depiction of an Ayrshire family as they establish themselves in Glasgow society. Set in the 1870s, the central character is Phoebe Moorhouse, the only daughter of the second marriage of her father. When they are killed in a pony-and-trap accident, the ten-year-old orphan moves to Glasgow to become part of her half-brother Arthur's family. During the course of the novel, Arthur, a provisions merchant, works his way up from living near the toughest parts of the city and they join the exodus to the prosperous western suburbs. The novel formed part of the Wax Fruit trilogy. The trilogy in turn was followed by two sequels.

The author, Guy Mc Crone (born 13 September 1898), grew up in Glasgow. In January 1917, prior to taking up a place in university, he volunteered  to serve with the Young Men’s Christian Association on the Western Front. In an interview he explained this: "being ineligible for the army, I went to scrub floors and sell cigarettes in soldiers’ Y.M.C.A. [centres] in Normandy and Paris”. He went on to study economics at Cambridge. After university he worked as a printer in Glasgow and was a major proponent of opera there. He began writing in 1931 and his first novel appeared in 1937. A further seven novels were published. He defended the fact that he wrote mostly about Glasgow society:
“People have asked me why I continue to write almost exclusively about my own kind of people...Here is my reason. I had not gone far with the study of the novel before I saw that a novelist, especially if he has a recording talent and not a talent for fantasy, writes best about the place that has been his home; that is, the home of his childhood and adolescence”.

Phoebe Moorhouse, the central character, has a particularly traumatic experience early on in her life in Glasgow. This produces a peculiar change of mindset — she seems to lose all feeling for other people:
“She regarded him with her usual impersonal interest. He must be racked with anxiety. Did people express so little when they were faced with ruin? Did they merely sit quietly and look before them? Was she really hard, that she could not feel more for this stranger? Was there something left out of her make-up? Had she a limited supply of sympathy?”
This change of mindset is typically of what is now termed post-traumatic stress disorder, known in the First World War as shell shock or neurasthenia.