dovegreyreader scribbles

Completed...

' If you can learn to lift your ribs right out of your waist...you will soon develop that upward buoyant poise which is the secret of grace and which would bring less drudgery and more joy to the daily dusting.'

Just a little extract from the 1949 book 101 Things for the Housewife To Do, and all I needed to hear after this week of persistent household attention. Bookhound's been outside doing a spot of building and I've been inside working, reading and very half-heartedly and intermittently trying to plough my way through the remains of last week's mess.
Anyway I called a halt to work, computer the lot and had not one but two treats.
Two Completer-Finisher afternoons in the kitchen with the radio on, so it's knitting all the way here this weekend.
I caught up with The Archers again after a very long gap and with that the sad news about the death of dear old Phil Archer.
RIP Norman Painting,
The afternoon plays this week have been a trilogy on the murder of language teacher Daisy Whitelock in Tokyo, these have made compelling listening and then a Sophie Hannah short story on Thursday which was excellent and reminds me to read the rest of them in The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets.
But what of the Completer- Finishing?
Just ignore that Halloween cat but you might remember this wool?



The cats took a real shine to it, wherever I stashed it they found it. So it was part-knitted up in about ten minutes two years ago, then a bit more in about five minutes last year, the pattern is Suzy from the Rowan Big Wool book by Kim Hargreaves. Then I washed all the bits and hid them from the cats and those bits have stayed out of sight out of mind  waiting for those finishing touches ever since.

Honestly, I'm never knitting anything as refined as a cardigan in Rowan Big Wool ever again.
It's fine for scarves and hats but not anything wearable in my humble opinion, it's a bit akin to a string vest for it's sheer hole-iness. Then there are the two caber-sized 15mm needles, and despite the fact that you blink and the sleeves are done, it hasn't been to my liking.
I need a project to last at least a few weeks, not an hour.
So I've strung it out for two years, but I set to and knitted up the collar and stitched it together, added a touch of eccentricity to the buttons to detract from the four rows of garter stitch on one hem and the three on the other and tried it on.

Unfortunately I think it makes me look a bit like a ruby-coloured Yeti.
Nevertheless I braved it out and paraded it for the Gamekeeper who happened to walk through the kitchen at that moment.
First thing he said...'It's uneven at the bottom.'
He has partly redeemed himself by catching not one but seven mice in the loft this week, which to my mind constitutes an invasion of terrifying proportions and he will be fully forgiven when he finds the point of ingress.

Eunice Fleet by Lily Tobias

So mention of Lily Tobias on Monday and Welsh publisher Honno Press, a relatively recent publishing discovery for me and probably long after everyone else had been reading them for years, but I have been very taken with the books and recently opened Eunice Fleet by Lily Tobias for its themes of the treatment of conscientious objectors during the First World War.
This in turn was coincidentally complemented by the arrival of another book, Voices Against War - A Century of Protest by Lyn Smith, also the author of Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust which I knew I had here somewhere.
I want books that will offer me some different angles on war for this year's Remembrance reading. I'm focusing on World War Two but not ruling anything out and the themes in Eunice Fleet caught my attention. I knew precious little about conscientious objectors but Lily Tobias knew a great deal because both her brothers had been just that.
The novel is divided into three, Present, Past and Present and Eunice is living with the exuberant Dorry in a flat in Maida Vale. There's money because they have a housekeeper, Mrs Johns and this is all because Eunice is big in corsetry, if you see what I mean. There is mention of a missing husband Vin, and hints of 'remorse and repentance on Eunice's part but nothing becomes clear until the book heads into Past. Slowly the tragedy unfolds, not only of Eunice's family life and quite who Dorry is but gradually Vincent's First World War pacifist stance unfolds and alongside it Eunice's feelings about it all.
The white feather, the coward's symbol, prevails and the horror, humiliation and cruelty of Vincent's incarceration and subsequent trials make for very uncomfortable reading. His letters from prison had me on he brink of tears.
This is courage of a different sort, but is it any different from a soldier facing the enemy, and who has the right to say? There were plenty of questions to ask myself as I read.
Lily Tobias presents the pacifist stance from several different angles and I crept away from this amazing book both quietly stunned and deeply enlightened, not only with what had been revealed but for the book's courageous subject matter and prescience written as it was in 1932,

'According to the signs, there was bound to be a "next war". which might really prove to be " the last war." The horrors would be greater than ever. And perhaps it wouldn't matter if objectors weren't listened to then, for everyone, militarists, pacifists, soldiers, civilians - everyone - would be swept away in the holocaust.'

To say more would be to spoil but suffice to say Eunice struggles with her own beliefs in the face of outright hostility and disdain from the local community and must decide her own position whilst Vincent must also decide how steadfastly he will keep to his, a man beyond broken in body, but not in spirit.

'It was simply that she was weary of rancour, and that there was a great gap in her heart that felt like a bottomless pit, into which everything might fall - good words and ill - without filling a fraction of space.'

As the book moves back into the present and towards its final pages, I wonder if you might have to remind yourself to breath as I did. From one page to the next, quite suddenly it hit me and with a growing sense of disbelief I realised a terrible outcome beckoned and to be honest...well DON'T READ THE LAST LINE before you get there, but when you have please come back and tell me what you think happens, because I'm still very uncertain. This book has echoed in my thoughts ever since and my thanks again to Honno Press for putting me in touch with Jasmine Donahaye because I needed to know much more about Lily Tobias once I'd read Eunice Fleet.

So the horrors of war from a very different perspective; in its own way every bit as heartbreaking as accounts of death and destruction from the front, and revealing yet again the underbelly of conflict. For an account of that century of protest and a book the Imperial War Museum are promoting as a means of understanding war in its entirety, the personal testimonies in Lyn Smith's Voices Against War make a perfect, thought-provoking and incredibly moving companion read.

'Mark Hayler, absolutist CO, HOS, Princetown, Dartmoor (First World War)

...I remember once when we went out to work on the moor, this chap said, ' isn't it odd that I'm here in Dartmoor because I won't kill anybody and my father-in-law had been here because he killed someone.'

Changing my Mind - Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith

Changing My Mind, the occasional essays of Zadie Smith and published by Penguin, won't actually be in the bookshops until November 26th and time to confess that until now I have failed miserably with Zadie Smith's fiction, but I plan a revisit because have all the time in the world for her essays.
I managed to desert my post as chief decision-maker about rubbish...throw it...throw it...throw it... and get some precious time with this book and it was the cover that first caught my eye, bit of Bermuda Blue in there but also it felt like those doodles we used to do on the covers of our school books when triple geography lessons took off into something about the Rio Tinto Zinc corporation (why have I never forgotten that?)
From where I sit, this side of fifty, I think of thirty-four year old Zadie Smith as one of the bright young things, that breed of new generation young university thinkers who never stop learning and developing those skills, applying them to a broad range of subjects and thus becoming, before our eyes, writers with a fierce and penetrating intellect, preparing themselves to nip at the heels of the 'old school'.  Ready and waiting to take up the mantle of observers and commentators who keep the rest of us on our toes.
Thirty-four seems young to be doing that and in her introduction Zadie Smith says as much,

'When you are first published at a young age, your writing grows with you - and in public. Changing My Mind seemed an apt, confessional title to describe this process. Reading through these pieces though, I'm forced to recognize that ideological consistency is, for me, practically an article of faith.'

I certainly don't mean to sound patronising but if from where I sit I think I might have been watching Zadie Smith serve an apprenticeship as I have followed her non-fiction writerly progress, then to my mind she's now out the other end and with flying colours. Her writing here feels mature and replete with insight, and she seems completely at home in the medium, right in there using the essay as 'a space in which to think freely', so much so that I called a halt on all mess-clearance to read more.
As I sat down and flicked through the various sections Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling and Remembering I could feel that frisson of excitement I get about a book that is really going to give me something back for the time and effort I will invest in reading it...I know it's sad, I should get out more.
Changing My Mind will make me think, will doubtless make me change my mind because the range is vast, from British comedians to pondering how George Eliot's love life affected her prose, to Kafka, then onto good old Barthes' killing of the Author but does Nabakov revive him , the Oscars and what not to wear, to what makes a bad movie.
For obvious Tinker-like and seasonal reasons I focused on a slow read of a very gratifying piece about Zadie Smith's father, Harvey Smith (yes, I thought the show jumper too but no sight nor sound of a horse thus far.) Zadie had talked to him about his involvement in the Normandy landings for a newspaper piece. Eventually, and after unsuccessfully trying to direct Harvey's story to fit her own purpose, Zadie reached the very moving conclusion that,

'He didn't lose himself in horror. Which is a special way of being brave, of being courageous, and a quality my father shares with millions of ordinary men and women who fought that miserable war.'

It won't be a book to rush, it will be full of scribbles and I will be back and forth to it on here a great deal in the weeks to come I'm sure.
Meanwhile I think it looks quite nice on the grown-up sofa and please note that thing called a window sill, now seeing daylight for the first time in years.

Dyeing

This last week I have been mostly tidying and dyeing and please note the careful placement of that 'e'.
Rev, Cheryl's into dyeing (again note the 'e') and on my recent visit to Cambridge and the vicarage I was completely enthralled by her dyeing room (definitely note the 'e') and a glorious array of hand-dyed fabrics using natural plant dyes. These are subsequently stashed and stitched into Cheryl's equally wonderful quilting projects. Cheryl has lifted her technique way beyond mine, I'm stuck firmly in the traditional, Cheryl's quilts and wall hangings are modern and laden with significance and I loved them.
So when I took to dyeing I couldn't help but think of my visit to Cambridge except I haven't been sweating over vats of woad or out trapping cochineal beetles for my purposes.
We are making keen headway on the house mess.
Though the nest never quite seems to empty with this boomerang generation, the Kayaker's departure to antipodean shores for a year feels like a bit of a staging post, a time to sort out bedrooms, clear out what has been the shared teenager's sitting room for years and most importantly deal with the Kayaker's whim which had overruled all dissent and dyed their sofa covers Bermuda Blue.
Fair dues, it did look bright and jolly and yes the sea really is that colour when you go there, but we were all a bit sick of it so a simple transformation to a nice shade of indigo was suggested and agreed by me, with me.

This is actually Grand Cayman but just angle your computer screen towards you a fraction and it's Bermuda Blue alright.
Once I decide on these things I have to do them NOW.
No time to procrastinate and wonder where I can go picking woad, it's straight into town at 4.30pm to pick up some Dylon stuff for the washing machine and the salt and set this slouchy couchy mess off on its journey of transformation into a grown-up sofa.
I don't know about you, but two days of this clearing out thing and hardly any reading time and I've about had enough. One room transformed into a minimalist paradise whilst all the clutter seems to be scattered everywhere else between the doorway, the back of the car and the seven miles to the tip.
In the midst of all this anguish, and despite postal strikes, a book arrived to cheer my very being and I kept eyeing it on the kitchen table all day as a sort of antidote to all this parental rite of passage that was going on, this reclaiming of the home.
Meanwhile dyeing a sofa cover and all its cushions is a recipe for torrential rain, then of course when you try to get the thing back on, that sofa seems to have grown at least a foot since you last looked and naturally there has been internal shrinkage of piping cord.
Re-clothing the now grown-up sofa akin to a jolly good cardiac workout.
More about how my day was strangely and unexpectedly salvaged by Changing My Mind - the Occasional Essays of Zadie Smith, tomorrow.

The Dead Man's Message by Florence Marryat

No sooner was I deposited in post-Booker nineteenth-century rehab with my prescription ready to be dispensed, than to my rescue with emergency supplies came Catherine of Victorian Secrets, a small independent publisher busy reviving neglected nineteenth-century works.
Would I be interested in reading Florence Marryat's The Dead Man's Message?
Well yes I most certainly would because this felt like an unusual way back via a writer and a book I'd never heard of and today being the 110th anniversary of Florence’s death seems like a good day to do my bit to resurrect her for some general perusal.
I’ve had a really pleasurable time looking Florence up in books various on my shelves here. Background research I find can often be as engrossing as the book itself, entries and mentions often slight but they have all helped me build up a picture for myself to go alongside Greta Depledge’s introduction to this book.
There is no doubt that Florence was definitely the daughter of Captain Frederick Marryat of The Children of the New Forest fame and with the Oxford DNB assertion that Florence wrote over seventy-five novels,  well that's an awful lot of novels for me never to have heard of either author or titles, especially given that one of them was  Miss Chester, as indeed was I until the age of twenty-two.
Florence Marryat was very much the middle-class woman who supported her family with her writing which included playwriting 'as part of her broader career as a woman of letters'.
In fact at one time nine adaptations of Florence's novels were out there running simultaneously in provincial theatres, and nor were they tucked away on the fringe in private theatres or clubs but out there being performed in popular accessible venues.
Interestingly,

'While women playwrights struggled to participate on something like equal terms with their male colleagues, the theatre was voracious in its devouring of women's fictional texts.'

Yet still I had never heard of Florence Marryat.
Kate Flint suggests in her excellent book The Woman Reader 1837-1914 that despite the male researchers of the day suggesting otherwise, Florence Marryat was indeed a truly popular writer among young girls and that perhaps those interviewed had offered suitable rather than accurate responses to the questions, thereby pushing Thomas Carlyle slightly higher up the popularity list than he really deserved to be.
On my shelves, one of  Bookhound’s ancient old £1 market finds, thrown out of Exeter Library, a 1910 edition of The Literature of the Victorian Era wherein Florence's father Frederick Marryat is crowned the laureate of the British sailor for his sea-faring novels, our best first-hand authority on the great age of the English navy and who can know the wealth of tales he returned home with  after fifty battle engagements.
Good to know this then

‘Like Thackeray, Marryat transmitted to a daughter Florence, a portion of his literary gifts; but it appears in an attenuated form , and is, of course, exercised on other fields.’

So having satisfied my curiosity it was clear that invisibility had beckoned for Florence here until now, and what a good read The Dead Man’s Message has proved to be, as the domineering and patriarchal scientist Professor Aldwyn wakes from a quick nap to discover that he’s actually dead.
Really properly dead, but still very much of this world as a spirit.
This rational and scientific man now finds himself plunged into the abyss of his own cynicism about the existence of an afterlife by actually being forced to live his own. Worse is to come because all his sins are about to jump up and bite him as he is kept chained to his own body and must stand by and listen to what everyone has to say about him. Understandably it’s not pretty.
Childhoods blighted by a domineering father have taken their toll on son Gilbert and daughter Maddy whose mother Susan has died, and under what repressed circumstances I could only begin to guess. Comfort must now come from the Professor's long-suffering but highly sympathetic second wife, Ethel, rather disconcertingly called Mumsey by Maddy, which is a mirthful diminutive used here on occasion.
There is much in here that offers primary source information about Victorian beliefs in spiritualism and communicating with the afterlife, one of Florence's greatest interests. Fascinating insights into the world of spirit photography alongside interesting and seemingly early psychological explorations of how parents as a role model for their children may well reap what they sow.
I find Florence Marryat quoted elsewhere (Guardians and Angels - Parents & Children in 19th Century Literature by David Grylls) as saying of the influence of parents

'Not one hundredth part of the men and women who marry are fit to become fathers and mothers.'

When Professor Aldwyn is finally faced with the potential outcomes of his lifetime of vile behaviour...well, I'll leave you to discover that for yourselves.
Plenty of wonderful Victorian melodrama but all underscored by some profound and, for the time, some forward-thinking language and ideas from Florence Marryat. This novel first published in 1894, perhaps at a time when all those fin de siecle anxieties may  have been looming. This edition blessed not only with a good introduction but also a really useful Appendix of added contemporaneous writing on several of the issues highlighted in the book.
Alongside this I can highly recommend Justine Picardie's book If the Spirit Moves You, which I had coincidentally just finished reading. It offers a really interesting latter-day perspective on so many of those issues that exercised Florence too, as Justine explores that year in her own life after her sister Ruth's death and seeks answers to those eternal questions,

...of the search for the afterlife in the age of reason, of scepticism, of science. It tells of the yearning for a voice among the silence, of how we fill the space that appears when someone dies; of how the space fills itself.'

           

Lily Tobias

So who is Lily Tobias?
If I hadn't stopped gambling after my two recent scoops before it became a habit, I'd put money on someone here knowing something about Lily Tobias, but I knew nothing until I picked up her 1933 novel, Eunice Fleet, a few weeks ago thanks to Honno Press. The cover looked as if it would fit my recent flurry of hot-water-bottle-y reading which in the interests of balance has all served a good purpose.
I have needed contrast and safe sojourn because I've set myself quite a challenge with this year's Remembrance Reading, now in progress since Dame Vera Lynn has already launched the Poppy Appeal. But it's all gone off on a frolic of its own and I find myself veering into a rather emotionally challenging child's-eye view of the Second World War. I never quite know which road in I'll take as November approaches, but the books seemed to be grouping that way and I went with the flow. It was never going to make for comfortable reading.
In fact Eunice Fleet with its themes of conscientious objectors and pacifism is far removed from any hint of 1930's nostalgia, and I am very grateful to Honno Press who responded to my pleas for more information about Lily Tobias by putting me in contact with Dr Jasmine Donahaye. Dr Donahaye wrote the introduction to the book and has published and lectured widely on Lily's life and work and is currently working on her biography.
This is what I love about my reading life; writers I've never heard of and happy afternoons spent digging around for information. Dr Donahaye then very kindly sent me some wonderfully informative articles which slaked my thirst for Lily information and I have referenced two at the foot of this post for anyone who may want to pursue them further.*

That's Lily on the cover of her book, and to my astonishment I discover she was an author who was very well-received in the 1930s, but

'being out of print has meant effectively that her work has been out of sight'

according to Jasmine Donahaye's introduction to the book.
Born Lily Shepherd in Swansea in 1887 and growing up in Ystalyfera in the Swansea valley, Lily was the daughter of a Jewish immigrant family from Poland, the first Jews to settle there and how interesting it must have been for Lily to speak Yiddish at home whilst speaking Welsh out in her local community.
Jasmine Donahaye quotes Leo Abse, brother of Danni Abse and nephew to Lily, who speculates that Lily's father was the first person to speak Welsh with a Yiddish accent, what a wonderful combination.

I'm reminded of an event at Dartington with Bernice Rubens who talked at some length about her own background living in Cardiff's Welsh-Jewish community and urging us all to read Brothers, the book that she told me contained her heritage and the one she was most proud to have written. Bernice Rubens sadly died about three months after that event and in her honour I did then read Brothers. It all had a profound impact on me and I recommend it far and wide.

In the 1920s and now married, Lily Tobias and her husband moved to Rhiwbina in Cardiff, a tenant's cooperative and garden suburb, a mixed lower and middle-class community where Lily's latent political aspirations were realised with her involvement in the the cause of Zionism.
Lily and her husband Philip, along with her father, subsequently moved to Haifa in Palestine in 1935, where sadly Lily's husband was killed in a riot in 1938. Apart from four war years spent in South Africa, Lily remained there until her death in 1984.
I am grateful to Jasmine Donahaye for sharing much more biographical detail with me and I have to impart one last little gem with you, and one that feels like another sure and certain sign that I can't put off reading Daniel Deronda a moment longer. Lily Tobias is rarely credited with being the first person to adapt George Eliot's novel for dramatisation and a prestigious one at that starring Sybil Thorndike, thus beating Andrew Davis by quite a few years.
Imagining Lily's home, described by Leo Abse as

'a combination of pacifism...socialism and the William Morris ethos' 

somehow set the scene perfectly for what followed in Eunice Fleet.
More about Eunice Fleet later this week, but tomorrow, for reasons that will be apparent, I have to parade yet another author I had never heard of for your delectation.

* "The link of common aspirations" : Wales in the work of Lily Tobias
Dr Jasmine Donahaye
From In the Open : Jewish Women Writers and British Culture. Ed. Claire Tylee
(Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2006)

*   "Hurrah for the Freedom of the Nations"
First published in Planet 147 (2001): 28-36                                                              

The annual Tamar Walk , the second & third hour...

I LOVE this day. We don't do clocks back at 3am, and waste that hour sleeping, instead I will spend a good deal of today trying to decide when to have my extra hour...then I suddenly announce 'OK it's now' and enjoy it.
Meanwhile rounding that bend in the river and there's Georgiana, Duchess of Bedford's holiday cottage looking resplendent from down here and I did a lot of very annoying 'I expect Georgie walked along here with Landseer ' imagining out loud.
Do you do that sort of thing ? I get really carried away by it all.

The people behind us thought this might be an Endsleigh crop circle so we didn't spoil the magic by telling them that this is where all those helicopters that traverse our airspace over a Sunday lunchtime are aiming for.

Talking of Sunday lunch we're very big on rhubarb and vats of custard down here...

and a chance to see some rare wild orchids something Himalayan and invasive (many thanks Maggie)

and the shoes by the end were concealing some very tired feet.
Yet again I was delighted to see a bus.

The annual Tamar Walk...the first hour

It took us three hours or more but I'll let you all take two days, a rest from words and space for some weekend strolling and thinking time.
Last Saturday, we pitched up for the annual Tamar Walk hardly believing that we've lived here for fifteen years and never done it before. Always a good excuse, no time, raining, got to clean the windows, comb the grass or something; this year chaos ruled at home so we were looking for any excuse to go out.
Once a year all private rights of way are wavered and hundreds of people trek the eight miles from a field that leads down to the Tamar just five minutes from us here, and along the meandering river bank to Greystone Bridge near Launceston, all in aid of the Parish Church. The fishing season has finished and it really does seem to mark the end of summer, cue Emily Dickinson.

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away -
Too imperceptible at last
To seem like Perfidy -
A Quietness distilled
As twilight long begun,
Or nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon -
The dusk drew earlier in -
The Morning foreign shone -
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone -
And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.

 
I have to say despite the low water I was hoping to glimpse a leaping salmon or two because they are still making their way up river, but every time I thought I did I was promptly told it was a trout.

and just around this bend a very different view of Hotel Endsleigh, take your time, we'll see it tomorrow.

Endsleigh Salon update

I know book groups run on all manner of successful formats and much depends on the needs of everyone there, but I have to say, for anyone thinking about starting a reading group or even just getting a group of bookish friends together, you can't go wrong with themes as your central organising method.
No having to read a book you don't quite fancy, no running out of things to say about it after thirty minutes, and descent (or in our case ascent)  into off -track nattering is perfectly permissible because with themes anything goes, you can talk about whatever you want.
So where would this month's theme of Scandal take us?
October was also our third birthday so we raised a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit to ourselves and the evening we all look forward to so much. I had pondered the dusk as I drove in realising that we are now heading into winter mode with no gorgeous views to set the scene, somehow we'll just have to cope with log fires and Georgiana's Birds of Paradise wallpaper as we tuck up into our cosy salon room.

So onto Scandal and we threw the chairing task at A.
It's just that you need someone who walks in looking full of beans and wide awake to keep things ticking along and A always looks wide awake and up to the task because she's usually spent the weekend before running a marathon through the Lakeland Fells in pouring rain or something, while I'm exhausted after a weekend in the armchair.
I had done a quick dictionary check for a definition of the word scandal and that proved quite useful because our choices ranged across the centuries and led to much debate about what would be considered scandal then but might be quite acceptable now, and where have our tolerances taken us and how and why might that be.
Madresfield - The Real Brideshead by Jane Mulvagh got us off to a fantastic flying start, I woke up very fast.
This is purported to be the real-life story behind Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Waugh was a regular visitor to the ancestral seat of the Lygon family which had been in the family from 1196 to the present day.
Earl Beecham the patriarch was a pillar of the community, a friend of King George V until revelations about his private life and homosexuality were exposed for reasons various by the Duke of Westminster whose sister was married to Earl Beecham.
The fifty-nine year old Earl fled to the continent in 1931 and the family's fortunes predictably took something of a turn for the worse. Beaverbrook connections kept everything out of the press but the family and particularly the Earl's children were shunned and rejected by their peers and forever paid the price. Golden futures replete with opportunities melted into dust overnight.
Well we went to town on this one and to my chagrin I was the only person in the room who hadn't read Brideshead Revisited so I must schedule an appointment with it very soon, but nevertheless, the tea trays had arrived and we were off to a great start.
Next Lady Worsley's Whim An Eighteenth Century Tale of Sex, Scandal and Divorce by Hallie Rubenhold. The presenter of this book had gone into the local bookshop and asked what they'd got on scandal to which the owner had replied
'Are you from THAT book group?'
So our reputation grows apace.
Lady Worsley's whim was actually Captain George Bissett even though she was married to Richard Worsley, things went from bad to worse for Lady W with a child, an elopement and no friend in the Beaverbrook family to control the media, so salacious treatment in the press. Having brought her fortune to the marriage Lady W lost the lot and the children too and presumably the very nice Appuldurcombe House on the Isle of Wight.

We went to town on that one too.
I threw in a play which I had been really looking forward to reading but which hadn't quite met my expectations, Gethsemane by David Hare first performed in November 2008.
A critique of New Labour though David Hare denies the remotest connection, family scandal promising to throw it all into chaos, but to be honest I think we're getting harder to impress these days, perhaps we're becoming immune to it all?
It hardly felt like scandal, more like every day news of ministerial duplicity so at times like this it's always good to look to the Westend Whingers for a definitive theatre-goers assessment. I was interested  to see they thought likewise after seeing the play at the National Theatre, being more impressed with the standard of the roasted peanuts and the space for your bag behind the seats in Row T than the play itself.
Mixed in with the real life scandal, plenty of made up scandal too,  though the scandal itself often seemed more in the eye of the beholder than the sole purpose of the novels.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and great debate about just how scandalous can it be to race around full speed in a carriage with the blinds drawn, actually just how uncomfortable was it in there and how often is the scandal all in the mind of the reader.
The L Shaped Room by Lynn Reid Banks
And a signed first edition copy was flourished. Loved in the 1960s but which now made for slightly uncomfortable reading, times and attitudes have changed and the book reflected that.
Lolita by Nabakov...oh dear.
Loathed and then loathed some more by the reader, turgid writing, dodgy themes and even debating the social mores of the time didn't really help us figure out just why this one is a classic.
It did all made us think carefully about what we now class as scandal and thoughts progressed through each book debate about what we now see as depravity and how those definitions might have changed across the centuries.
Anthing Goes by Lucy Moore had been read specifically following a recent Sunday magazine article about Harry and Caresse Crosbie, the couple who made the 20s roar and we proceeded to find out how. Harry would go out minus a hat on for starters which was enough of a scandal, but all made much worse when he took the married-with-two-children Polly Peabody as his lover. Changing her name to Caresse seemed a minor detail in the end.
Peyton Place by Grace Metalious was last and in the new Virago edition. I have a copy and have been looking at and wondering when to start.
Well now I will because apparently it's a remarkable read.
Written in 1956 and evoking a benign conformist world but with much ugliness beneath the surface, Grace Metalious was villified for telling it like it was. Most of us could remember our mums watching the TV series but not a lot else.
So what a brilliant evening we had, next month Adventure which I will miss which all gives me time to gear up for South America in December.
Incidentally we often sit in our room and wonder at that wallpaper's survival.
It's listed now so can't be touched but how often in the past might someone have thought it looked a bit grubby and stood in front of it with brush and emulsion poised?
Now that would have been a real scandal.

That was the week that was...

'Your honours, the facts of the case are simple. The issue is that nowhere in her clever books does the irresponsible female in the dock portray elderly women in any true light of kindness.'

I wonder, can you hold onto that quote and trust me that we're going to get to Jane Austen and Chawton, via New Zealand, Gala Bingo, and a trip to Fowey and Doublebois in Cornwall, really all things are possible 'neath a blog title like that.
First things first, he's there.
This is the view I usually have of Bookhound driving someone off to the airport and in this case it's the Kayaker off to New Zealand for a year. It was a quick turn around, he'd barely been back from Africa and the White Nile a week and he was off again. The house has been complete and utter chaos, half of Australia arrived on the doorstep to say cheerio and stayed...well two of them but really they were so full of energy and laughter it felt like many. They were delightful though completely taken aback by the width of the 'highway' to our house and even endured with much hilarity the now traditional Gala Bingo farewell evening on Saturday, they then all go off clubbing and us 'olds' come home for cocoa and the ten o'clock news.
Anyone who has visited the scribbles for a while may recall the last Gala Bingo celebration event where I was robbed of my winnings because I shouted 'ME' a fraction too late (you get about three seconds) and I also fell off my chair with the excitement.
Honestly, don't knock bingo until you've been.
Surrounded as last time by nonagenarian professionals running three sets of numbers with a dibber pen in each hand and a third strapped to their foreheads, I was not to be phased or distracted this time; eyes down and I was in like a shot with 'HOUSE' and £25 better off....yes I'll spend it on books or wool, of course I will.
Monday and I had a little pang of motherly missing-ness, just thinking of my middle twenty-six year old baby up there flying to the antipodes, but it quickly passed when I saw the mess around the house, really completely around the house. So I did the sensible thing, turned my back on it all and nipped down to Fowey to meet long time friend of dovegreyreader, Ruth, in the South West for a sojourn in deepest Cornwall. Fowey is about half way for both of us and a favourite spot for some du Maurier wallowing.
Of course we went in and said hello to the lovely Ann in the bookshop and talked of all things Daphne before heading off for tea.

It was Ruth who spotted this dovegreyreader-ish sign to welcome us, though we had tea elsewhere.

We had the teashop mostly to ourselves, which was fortunate as there was no oxygen left for anyone else because we had about two years of catching up to do. We talked family, books and blogs and weaving and knitting and things until dusk beckoned at which point Ruth thought we'd walk back up the steep hill to the top car park as she had so often done as a child. I thought differently and bundled her onto the bus and we'll gloss over the driver asking if we had free bus passes. He only lived to see Tuesday because I had no plans to climb that killer of a hill.
On the way home I thought I'd divert a mile off the road to Doublebois.

I've been reading Kisses on a Postcard by Terence Frisby for this year's Remembrance reading. Terry and his elder brother Jack were evacuated from Kent to the Cornish hamlet of Doublebois, near Dobwalls in 1940 and the book is a memorable account of their life in the countryside.
Doublebois and Dobwalls are those places you pass but never stop at, well not intentionally that is.
We know all the names because, until the new bypass opened, Dobwalls was a complete bottleneck and you'd sit there in stationary traffic after a day on the beach, with three tired but jolly children in the back of the car making a game of how to pronounce Doublebois and finding words to rhyme with Dobwalls.
Which is why I'm afraid to this day we still call it Dogballs,
It's hard to imagine the contrast between life in suburban London and rural Cornwall for Terry and Jack but this is the view from what I could find of Doublebois, given that the light was fading fast and I was having flashbacks about the mess waiting for me at home.

Rather than deal with the mess I thought a book was called for and so the timely arrival of Dancing With Mr Darcy - Stories inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House from Honno Press saved me from gavotting with Henry hoover for a while longer. Now I'm not hugely besotted with Jane but I do try hard and so these stories have come as a very pleasant surprise indeed. The brief for the competition, for which Sarah Waters was one of the judges, was as it says on the tin, and having read the winning story Jane Austen Over the Styx by Victoria Owens and the runners-up, Second Thoughts by Elsa A. Solender  and Jayne by Kirsty Mitchell I will certainly be reading the rest.
Returning to where we began,

'Your honours, the facts of the case are simple. The issue is that nowhere in her clever books does the irresponsible female in the dock portray elderly women in any true light of kindness.'

Victoria Owens imagines a recently deceased Jane answering for the crime of ageism in her novels, the prosecution led of course by who else but Lady Catherine de Bourgh (only after a little altercation with an array of fellow Austen senior ladies) finds her guilty as charged and the punishment is harsh. Though the novels will be spared so they can be read for all time... well you’ll have to read to discover what else but it's clever and I loved it.
Elsa Solender sensitively explores Jane’s near miss as the future Mrs Bigg-Withers whilst Kirsty Mitchell’s topless glamour model Jayne displays a great deal more than an astute awareness of the finer elements of her namesake’s fiction; a salutary lesson in never rushing to judgment about people before really getting to know them, and one of which I feel sure Jane would have heartily approved.
So we got there in the end, who’d have thought it, just the house mess to sort out now.

 

Eating Air by Pauline Melville

'Victor began to think about the current stars of the literary firmament. Was it possible that Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard and Julian Barnes were all government spies and trained assassins? The cream of literary London? Why hadn't he spotted it before? What chance did he, Victor Skynnard, have against that sort of opposition? No wonder my work is not well received, he thought bitterly.'

Welcome to minor player Victor's paranoid world and I couldn't possibly comment but it all foreshadows his wonderfully dramatic demise that really made me chuckle, though I might not have been meant to.
But welcome also to the frenetic world and imagination of Pauline Melville and her third novel Eating Air published by Telegram Books and with a ringing endorsement for her writing from Salman Rushdie blazoned across the cover.
I'm getting a feel for Telegram Books now, often quirky and unusual and something challenging in there to keep my reading wide awake and on its toes.
I read Another Gulmohar Tree by Aamer Hussein back when the days were long and sunny. Such a profoundly quiet book and at just over a hundred well-spaced pages one that whispered into my consciousness before I dashed off to summer literary festivals. When I eventually sat down to try and share my thoughts somehow I couldn't do it justice with any more words, so I decided to leave it as one that had been a purely personal pleasure to read.
Eating Air by Pauline Melville, at over four hundred pages, has required quite a different degree of commitment and stamina.
I had heard of The Shape Shifter thought not the author, but it had won the Guardian Fiction prize so clearly I wasn't paying attention, so as I strolled along the shelves looking for some post-Booker- post - 19th century rehab reading I plumped for Eating Air.
You'd think I'd be used to this by now but I still never cease to be amazed at the power of a book to transport me into a parallel and unknown reading universe, and if you'd told me that I'd really enjoy a book about a ballet dancer and some terrorists I doubt I would have believed you.
It's the 1970s and Surinam-born Ella de Vries dances with the Royal Ballet, gradually becoming involved in a terrorist network and falling in love with the enigmatic and peripatetic labourer and part-time terrorist Donny McLeod.
Donny is Mr Mysterious, detached, unpredictable and Bohemian, a free spirit who somehow convinces those around him to accept his foibles and just take or leave him...mostly leave him, because he just ups and goes on the slightest whim.
These are the days of the Baader-Meinhof and the Brigate Rosse whilst in England the IRA have stepped up their operations.
There's a thirty year narrative gap before the story melds into the terrorism of the moment and a sort of collision of the old and the new, so expect to move quickly from gestetner machines being used to duplicate propaganda leaflets and marzipan-flavoured gelignite to see it all through, to latter-day semtex. In the interim Ella has fled into exile in Brazil and significantly transformed from dancing Swan Lake at Covent Garden to making the Firebird her speciality. On her return to England old contacts make themselves known as the book builds towards it's final fairly shocking denouement.
There is much that is unusual about Eating Air.
Ella for a start is not your usual over-precious ballet dancer, here is insouciance defined. It's all in a day's work and there is little of the fawning over the state of her feet or her diet that you might expect. Ella's late home to cooking dinner because she's had an evening performance, her feet bleed, so they go in a bowl of water and she gets on with it, and thinks nothing of running bare foot over the Scottish highlands.
Just about every character has a quirky and memorable out of the ordinary twist to them.
Take Ella's one-time flat mate, the American Hetty Moran, an inveterate liar who regularly 'dips her ladle into a soup of false ancestry', you never quite know what Hetty will do next but it is invariably for her own ends and destructive of others.
Felix Caspers the airline pilot with a penchant for...no you'll have to find that out.
Vera Scobie, the actress with a human rights agenda so redolent of...well, I'm sure you can hazard a guess.
Pauline Melville also has many moments of descriptive perfection.

'The dinner party had reached the stage, during dessert when it generated a steady warmth like a banked down fire.'

When Ella first meets and falls in love with Danny, the most unlikely of partners for her...

'She felt that her bloodstream had been irreversibly altered and started to flow in the opposite direction.'

But I'll be honest, there were moments when I also quite thought the nuts of bolts had rattled loose and the wheels of the plot were going to fall off completely, moments when my disbelief had to be firmly suspended and my incredulity boxed up, but perhaps I rush to judgment too quickly on matters of credibility.
Out it comes and we pronounce a book flawed in some way, but it's fiction I'm reading after all.
Simon Mawer crystallised it in his recent Guardian interview,

'I'm a novelist. I don't want to tell the truth. I want to manipulate things as I choose. I want to lie.'

That said I wonder whether an author does sometimes paint themselves into a plot corner and the only way out is to think  'well...you know what, we're going to walk away from this unscathed' because actually he needs to die and she needs to live or we have no more book.
Ella frequently survives to live another day when you quite think she shouldn't.
But the more I thought about this, and fiction generally, I started to examine whether this was about me exercising an element of control and wanting a book to go one way, when an author clearly wanted it to go somewhere else and took it there. We are very quick to say a plot device is implausible, even get a bit cross about it, but actually isn't a great deal of life implausible and unlikely too?
It was only on turning the final page of Eating Air and reading an acknowledgement to Euripides and the reworking of themes from The Bacchae that I suddenly felt a bit of a klutz. I spotted a few episodes but there is doubtless a whole sub-text to this book that my mythology lacunae have unwittingly passed over, those with this knowledge may read this book quite differently.
That said, I can focus on the foxgloves because I'm still uncertain about  foxgloves growing in profusion in the early autumn (long gone here in Devon) but that's just pernickety old me, I can't deny that I have thoroughly enjoyed this book on many levels and clearly missed several more and I'd be very interested to know what anyone else thinks about this one if they decide to read it.

Some really useful books

Back along (as we say in Devon) when my lumbar spine was crocked and I had dosed it with that pack of frozen sausages in the absence of the peas, I also reached (carefully) for the only book I know that works when you have a crocked back...well two books actually.

The first was Sarah Key's Back Sufferer's Bible with that wonderfully uplifting exhortation on the front cover, You CAN treat your own back!
Actually nine times out of ten you really can and having worked my way through every self-help back book in existence this is the one that wins for me. Although Sarah Key, who is a physiotherapist does recommend getting the once over from a physio, chiropractor or osteopath to isolate the problem, most of us with backs that misbehave tend to know where the problem lies and just get on with it.
Zap it with painkillers (and frozen sausages) and keep it moving for me.
Sarah Key explains everything really clearly and the exercises are all very detailed to help work towards sorting things out and, barring the need for surgical intervention, with the emphasis being on the owner of the back actually being the person who has to take responsibility for doing that, which makes sense too. There's positive thinking and mind over muscle spasm involved which really works because there can be nothing more guaranteed to reduce me to a state of terminal woe and melancholy than a crocked back.
I somehow become incapable of rational, logical thought.
So while I do my curl-ups and my lumbar rolling and toe touches to rehydrate that disc and decompress those vertebrae there's another book I have to find.
Sarah Key recommends something called a Back Block, which is akin to a house brick.
You lie on your back on the floor, place it under your sacrum and stretch out your lower spine across it...it's the most wonderful of wonderful things to do when you have an acute back. When I first started using Sarah Key's book back in 2000 you could order a back block for £25 which seemed expensive and I still don't have one, because I find The Oxford Companion to English Literature works just as well.
The one edited by Margaret Drabble is best, entertain no substitutes.
I'm sure it's exactly the right dimensions.
I think in desperation the Norton Complete Works of Shakespeare would probably be fine and if push came to shove I'd probably be able to make do with The Greatest Benefit to Mankind - A Medical History of Humanity From Antiquity to the Present by Roy Porter but I really it's Oxford and Drabble for me every time.
How much excruciating pain have I imparted into this poor book?
How many times have I blessed it and given thanks for its therapeutic qualities down the years?
I just have to look at it now and my heart lifts because I know relief from pain is but a lie down away, and if I need to find it it's usually still on the floor under the coffee table from the last time I needed to lie on the floor and use it.
I often just lie there and think of all that inspiration contained therin, all those books and authors to know about and immediately I start to feel better, so imagine my excitement a few weeks ago when this arrived.
It's the very new and gorgeous seventh edition and thankfully too broad to be of use as a back block so at last I have a copy that is not pain-related and perhaps I can use if for its intended purpose.
This one edited by Dinah Birch of the University of Liverpool,

'The Oxford Companion has long been established as the leading reference resource...unrivalled coverage pf all aspects of English literature - from writers, their works, and the historical and cultural context in which they wrote, to critics, literary theory, and allusions.'

Of course I want to add and 'a world leader in the treatment of acute backs' but Oxford University Press might not appreciate that, but it's also good to know what's inside this because I'll own up that I haven't really perused the other one that often.
Every time I think I really should look at it, I've been lying on it.
In fact this new and luscious volume has already been open several times this last week and weighing in at 5lb 2ozs, the same as a newborn Offspringette, that's giving me another whole lot to think about as I brace those stomach muscles and balance that spine as I pick it up.

The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein

When the 'Africa' theme came around for September's  Endsleigh Salon gathering I was really spoiled for choice.
I had dipped into several general books on the continent itself but none seemed to fulfill that need to know something specific and different that would make a good book-sharing experience.
Richard Dowden's  Africa Altered States, Ordinary Miracles really is excellent and a book I will turn to country by country as I want to know more but it wasn't going to make a good cover to cover read for me. I couldn't find my copy of Out of Africa anywhere, completely forgot about Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm and its Vera Brittain connection...wasn't it the book Roland gave to Vera? So wandering around the shelves my eye settled on The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein, ten pages in and that was me sorted.

I thought I knew it all.
I had read Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom years ago, of course I knew. I'd read it in the press, watched the news, seen the violence, remembered the sjamboks, the necklacing...thought I understood
But I didn't really, not until I'd read this book and my eyes were opened even before I had started, with this epigraph from The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon, author of the more famous poem For the Fallen

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before,
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there:
Let them go to the fire with never a look behind.
That world that was ours is a world that is ours no more. 

Dedicated to the nine men of Rivonia, famous names like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and of course Lionel 'Rusty' Bernstein husband of Hilda, who wrote this account of their life together as white activists in apartheid-riven South Africa and the Rivonia arrests and trial which led to the eventual imprisonment of Nelson Mandela.
This is South Africa in the early 1960s and sensing and then railing against the deeply inhuman policy of apartheid, the Bernsteins apply themselves actively to the campaign for its abolition. The dangers are rife and manifold and I could only marvel at the courage of a couple who loved each other deeply, could hardly bear to be separated yet were distinct individuals and were prepared to risk it all to stick to their principles whilst so many of their colleagues left the country, rightly concerned for the safety of their families.
It must have been the toughest of calls and the ever-present danger to the Bernstein children too made it even more so, yet Rusty and Hilda principled perhaps many might argue to the exclusion of all common sense, stayed and stayed and eventually had no choice but to stay even longer once Rusty was arrested whilst meeting secretly with other members of the ANC at Rivonia.
It quickly becomes apparent that absolutely nothing was secret in this ailing country and the depths of depravity to which the security forces would sink really defies belief, except this was in my lifetime and I had watched it all on the news for years and yet somehow it was all allowed to happen and I still haven't quite figured out quite how or why that was.
Simplistic and naive my thinking may be, but quite straightforward surely, hadn't the Hitler experience revealed the terrible never-to-be-repeated lessons of facism?
For much of the book I felt I was reading a thriller of a  page-turner because the moments of tension are frequent as are the moments when Hilda's fear and frustration just seep off the page and create that sense of sympathetic anxiety in the reader. I had to start doing some deep breathing as Hilda rushed to get the washing in the machine before dashing out to evade arrest, or the day she risks all to be home to kiss her son before he sets off for school. Feel that sickness as she and Rusty, head for the border once they decide that escape is their only option. Rusty had eventually been acquitted but his and Hilda's rearrest on rapidly invented technicalities, at which the South African government of the day excelled, seem only a matter of time.
Hilda's daily trials as she attempts to visit Rusty in prison aroused those same feelings of cruel despair that I always sense in Anna Akhmatova's poem Requiem, as she stands outside the prison in Stalin's Russia waiting to see her husband and her son.
There was a small yet defining moment for me in The World That Was Ours that somehow epitomised hope and everything that everyone was fighting for.
The accused men are led into the dock for the first time...

'Nelson Mandela comes first, almost unrecognisable. He has lost about forty pounds in weight. His splendid figure seems to have shrivelled, his skin has a greenish-grey prison pallor; he is dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts, wearing sandals on his bare feet, and this what eighteen months in jail, sitting in a cell for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four, being kept apart from other prisoners, has done to the man who was a political leader and distinguished lawyer. Have they so easily reduced this proud and sophisticated man to the dress and status of the African tolerable to whites - to a 'boy'? As he files into his place at the right of the dock, Nelson turns to the public gallery where there are relatives and friends, and flashed that magnificent smile as of old, splendidly confident, full of brilliance and power; this is the Nelson we knew.'

And somehow, though I had the gift of hindsight unavailable to Hilda in 1963, I hope that perhaps deep in the recesses of her heart she knew what we now know; that this battle would be won eventually just as Laurence Binyon knew it too, in 1942, as he wrote  The Burning of the Leaves

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendor,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring. 

Picture of Hilda and Rusty Bernstein

© www.rustybernstein.com

A little thank you note from Susan Hill...

Perhaps people would like to know that I have gone back on what I say in the interview with Lynne and I AM now blogging again from my re-launched re-designed website. But it is only about books and reading, not about general matters which will be from the Spectator online.
I hope people who were kind enough to say they enjoyed the blog before will visit both. I have had so many e-mails about books and reading after HEIOTL that I just had to start again.
Thank you all for your kind words and comments and thanks Lynne, for your hospitality on your blog.

PS - Susan has very kindly offered free postage worldwide to anyone who orders a copy of Howards End is on the Landing via her website to all readers of dovegreyreader scribbles.
Just put "via dovegreyreader" in the Paypal notes and include the postage you have to pay to get the order processed via Paypal and it will be refunded afterwards (or it throws the website into confusion apparently)

Knit-a-Poem

The Poetry Society have invented a new genre and they're calling it Kniterature and I love it. It's been a great project to be involved in and my thanks to The Poetry Society for organising it.
The centenary Knit-a-Poem was unveiled at the British Library last week and I've borrowed these pictures from the Facebook site, which I hope is allowed.

Though I haven't seen a big picture of the whole thing, I feel sure that could be my 'O' in that 'NO' because between you and me it was a bit snug on the tension side and I can see that 'O' is also looking a bit that way inclined.

We were all asked to stitch a label on the back with our name and favourite poem and in the end I plumped for The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes, because that was my favourite that week, this week it might be something else entirely.
It all sets you wondering what we could knit up next.
But what of the poem?
It was all a well kept secret until the very end...well news didn't reach Devon that's for sure, but here's what we knitted and please do stop and say hello to what might be my 'O'.

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay nO praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art. 

Dylan Thomas

A Book of Days

It must be getting colder because my little wandering foot-warmer has taken up her place on the footstool under my desk, another of the Tinker's masterpieces,

and I had also been heading towards October with Roger Deakin who has been listening to the distant pollarding of an oak tree, the chainsaws buzzing and growling,

'Next afternoon my friend and neighbour Ben Box and I began clearing the 'lop and top' of the oak from around the roots and loading logs and branches into my tractor trailer, carting them to each of our wood stacks - ready to be sawn up and split into firewood...'

And it's been very much like the thing here in recent weeks.
I hate the noise of the strimmer, it's like an oversized dentist's drill and I find it calls a halt to any hope of concentration, but for some reason I can happily work through both the lawn mower, the hedge-trimmer and the chain saw.
It must all be down to my ears and sound frequency.
Since the sweeping of the chimneys and the annual stove blacking, swiftly followed by the ingress of the log baskets it's only a matter of time before the logs follow.
Now as far as I'm concerned these come via the gift of the log fairy while I'm asleep. I don't get involved in the collecting of, it's a 'boy' thing and there's nothing they love more than news of a tree down or a river bank needing some clearing and off they go with the Land Rover and the chain saws and back they come with their booty.

There's a complex log-rotation system going on out there, piles of roundels drying which won't be for burning until 2011 at the earliest; what's been out drying for a year or so will be logged up and stashed in the woodshed for winter 2010 and now the verandah is dressed overall for winter with the wood from 2007 and it's all such a lovely sight.

And my best friend after a box of firelighters, a pile of kindling wood. Ask me to torch a building and it would probably be easier than lighting a woodburning stove when the wind blows from the north, which it doesn't like at all.

So I readily understand Roger Deakin's enthusiasm for free wood and yet again it all demonstrates my ongoing love of  Notes From Walnut Tree Farm throughout this year. It's created a form of regular meditation, a single sentence can trigger so much thinking on the cycle of the seasons, but Roger frequently inserts a good moan and a groan about what he sees as desecration (which we do too) so it's not all idyllic happiness, this is the reality of rural life alongside those little joys.
Today it's on with the walking shoes as we are off on the annual Tamar walk, eight miles along the Devon bank of the river from Horsebridge to Greystone Bridge, to enjoy the one day of the year we can legally walk through all the bits that are supposed to be private (who knew).

Team Ulysses - Camp Four

Oh dear, Team Ulysses, solidarnosc and all that, but what a feat of endurance this month's reading has turned out to be for me.
And how aptly named both sections have been, Scylla and Charybdis and Wandering Rocks, tell me about it. Having traversed that ice field and dragged myself up onto the Camp Four ledge I'm just hoping there are one or two of you still hanging on in there too...or was it just me who found these two sections quite tough reading?
I have had to permanently strap on my oxygen cylinder cleverly disguised as this.
Bless Marilyn for making it look so easy.
It's also been about motivating myself to pick up the book in amongst some stellar reading going on alongside. Each time that seems to involve putting down Stefan Zweig to pick up James Joyce.
Might this have been the point, if reading alone, that I would have thrown in the towel?
But interestingly, when I take a deep breath, sit down and think about my impressions of the book so far, it's all so pleasurable and interesting, there is so much that is firmly etched in my mind in a completely visual way.
The scenes feel vibrantly alive so how has that happened?
I'm picturing so much of it so readily, the Martello Tower, Poldy cooking his breakfast, the funeral, the newspaper offices and this time around Stephen's rather grand Shakesperean debate, that moment when Bloom brushes past him as they leave the library and then the individual little scenarios that followed.
How odd that they seem to have entered my consciousness too, yet as I read I felt sure I was taking nothing in at all. I sometimes get to the end of a page and wonder what on earth was all that about.
It was therefore interesting to fall back on Declan Kiberd's interpretation and read that he also saw these episodes as filmic, like early movie shorts. Much else of comfort from Declan too, suggesting that at this point readers may feel as if they are lost in a labyrinth and apparently that is exactly how James Joyce wanted us to feel, to sense that randomness of life which cannot be pinned down in a 'neat narrative.'
The episode when Bloom is so busy studying the stars that he misses someone having a good time with his good lady Molly is seen by Declan Kibberd as a means of expressing the dangers of systematising and how often and how easy it is to miss those homely things happening right under your nose. He then suggests it could also be seen as a warning to those who try to over-systematize Ulysses which of course was an idea I cheered at, because there's little chance of that happening here in Devon.
So I'm still here and I feel encouraged that I still am because slowly the book seems to be getting a hold on me, establishing itself in my memory. I quite thought I'd be reading to the end and then not have a clue or any recollection of what I'd read, but far from it, somehow Joyce's writing is embedding the detail quite securely in my mind. When I think back I can picture a scene surprisingly clearly which perhaps confirms my ongoing policy of not trying to understand too much but just letting the words work.
The one thing I am now doing is reading the scene-setting footnotes before I launch off because that is really helping me to get my bearings.
I'd also love to pick up and run with The Odyssey analogies eventually because those are starting to interest me more and of course are exposing great gaps in my knowledge of the Classics, but not yet. There was however going to be one sidetrack I wouldn't be able to resist and that was to read something of James Joyce's life.
To the rescue, a bite-sized introduction from the Very Interesting People series from Oxford University Press. Each book is based on the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the link is on my toolbar and, thanks to my library ticket number log-in, I'm in there all the time. It  is all offering some real insights into episodes from the life of James Joyce that also feature in Ulysses and something I haven't really been ready to take in until now.
So how's it going Team Ulysses, are you still there and I do hope Joan's still around with the thermos of comfort because I feel as if I need a great big swig from it this time around.

dovegreyreader asks...Susan Hill

Unfortunately Susan Hill has had to cancel appearances at the Cheltenham Literary Festival this week so perhaps this will be some small consolation and I am very grateful to Susan, fortified by the virtual cream tea,  for taking the time to sit in the dovegreyreader asks... virtual armchair and tell it like it is.

So why Howards End and why On The Landing? I know you explain all this in the book but could you give us some insight into where this book came from, how it came about, what inspired you to write it?  

Title because my copy of Howard’s End is on the landing and it just sort of fitted. It’ll be a cataloguers nightmare of course. I was wandering round the bookshelves looking for something one day .. I didn`t find it but I kept finding other books, ones I had not read for a long time, not read at all, books which had memories attached to them, of the writers perhaps, the place where I had first read them.. books do acquire their own history.  I don`t have any sort of order or organisation to my books in this big house so it became a sort of treasure hunt. Then I started to think about how many stories I could tell after 50 years in the book trade as writer/reviewer/commenter/publisher, and of course reader… but I know I would never want to write a proper autobiography or memoir. The books seem to be my autobiography, in a way so I decided to put at least some of it down. I also realised that piles of new books come into this house – some unsolicited or review copies, but far too many bought, when I already own a lot I haven`t read yet. So I decided to try and spend a year ‘reading from home ‘ – reading only books that are here already, not new ones. I did make an exception of review books, of course – that’s part of my job. 

The recollections flow, so how easy or difficult was all this and has this book been the pleasurable experience to write that it is to read?

It was the easiest book I`ve ever written. It wrote itself really. I just went round the house pulling out books, re-reading them, remembering things…lovely.  

Could there be a sequel, I'm sure you have more books in the loft?  

I think there could but I`m always wary of spreading things too thin.  If this one sells well they may ask me. Or not. But I`d leave it a year or so and see.  

Can you tell us about your writing day, we do like to know just about everything, pen, paper, laptop, vintage Remington so don't spare any details especially about the new writing venue  

I don`t have a typical writing day, no routine, no rules. I write when I feel like it, fitting other things round it. I used to be a lark – because I had young children and a school run etc but since the youngest left school, I have become an owl. I often work till 2 or 3 in the morning, but  then I sleep in the afternoon.  I make notes and do my thinking on paper with a biro but I now write mainly on a laptop. I never typed, never used the old huge computer but a laptop is so intimate and close to one and quiet…. I need quiet. If something isn`t quite working out, I`ll go back to pen and paper though.   I work anywhere – kitchen table, on my lap, deckchair… but this year I have acquired a wonderful private space, a restored Cotswold shepherd’s hut, known as the Red Hut. It has been placed at the top of the cherry orchard. It has a little fold down desk, a chair, a box bed, a wooden barrel roof, small windows looking out onto all the views , around,  and for winter, oil lamps and a small wood burning stove with a chimney. I am surrounded  by fields, trees, deer, hares, rabbits, badgers and foxes and no one knows where I am. There is no electricity, no phone… it’s a magic place.  

At this point we usually ask what writers do when they don't write, can you tell us?

Do you mean, at the end of the day, or when I don`t have a book on the go ? The latter almost never happens, I am always writing something, but in fact I am having a break now till after Christmas, as I have written 6 books without a pause and I`m  booked-out. I know what I`m doing next and  after that  so I can relax. As we speak I am compiling the Village Hall Quiz for the Quiz night I will compere on Saturday – Village Hall Funds.  I'm also doing some book stuff – I don`t do book tours now but there are a few interviews, Cheltenham litfest etc. I also do all the usual domestic stuff and walk the dogs. I read. I sleep. I watch Coronation Street. I used to watch The Bill but I hate the new format so I`ve given that up. I eat. I used to play internet poker but it is dangerously addictive so I had to go cold turkey on that one.   I sit in cafes and people-watch. And I run a small publishing company.   Other than that, not a lot.  

Now this is really daft because this question is 'who must we read...which writers mustn't we miss' and you've just gone to a great deal of trouble to write a book telling us that, but can we know a selection anyway and why?  

No, you can`t, why do you think I wrote the flippin’ book ?  

Might you start a blog again and if not could you perhaps please explain why to all those people who still keep emailing ME to ask where it is, and tell me how much they loved it, how wonderful it was and how much they miss it...    

I won`t start a blog from my own website again, but I am about to start blogging for the Spectator online – they have a thing called Coffee House and I am going to blog there.  It won`t be quite the same as my old blog because that was quite intimate, this will be more public but I`ll talk about some of the same things – books, book life, the country and especially how people who do not live in London think and talk about current issues – because honestly, in the hothouse that is London – whether politically, the literary scene, the media scene – they don`t even KNOW  there is a  populated world beyond the M25. So I am going to enlighten them.   I begin any day now.. www.spectator.co.uk and go to Coffee House and Blogs. I hope some at least of those who liked my old blog will join me there.                          

Us went an' zeed th' 'osses ...

....an' th' yaffers an' th' yaws,
Us went 'pun arl th' roundabouts an' inter arl th' shaws;

Us did too and what a glorious morning it was. Perhaps once every five years the sun shines on Goozey Vair and today was warm, the atmosphere was upbeat and actually really good to get that sense that, whilst the world trundles on its merry way, nothing changes on the second Wednesday in October down Tavi way.
First thing of note, the parking restrictions stretch much further out of town, up as far as our old house which was right at the top of the hill, and legions of traffic wardens (we usually have just the one around town) were in clover, dishing out miles and miles of tickets. Scores of people will have to spend £60 more than they meant to today.
Clever town council...you can just imagine this being discussed at the Income Generation from Goose Fair meeting.
As you get nearer the smell of onions gets stronger and the screams get louder, there's no connection but you scan the skyline to see which rides seem to be defying gravity the most effectively this year.
We had a look at the nice rides first in what is usually the bus station, the Golden Gallopers and the barrel organ music always look so enchanting.

These in the Square less so.


Never wise to stand directly beneath so we didn't for long, and you can only wonder what the Duke of Bedford was making of Roy Orbison staring at him...is that Roy Orbison... and sandwiched in by the dodgems

I'll bet Duchess Georgiana would have been on those like a shot, tucked up cosily with 'good friend' Landseer.
Bookhound and I decided this one was probably more suited to our stomachs.

We found the man with the microphone selling the bedding and I nudged into the crowd but not a nano-second after I'd raised my camera and I heard this loud and clear
'NO PHOTOS FOR SECURITY REASONS...'
I froze to the spot feeling like a criminal until he said,
'Social Security reasons, I sign on for me benefits tomorrow.'
Bookhound sneaked around the back and got a much better shot.

I think the pictures prove what we have always said, you can buy everything at Goose Fair.

We don't partake of fairground refreshments, we've learned that one the hard way, but we did walk across to our reputable pasty source, en route to the Tinker's perfectly located town centre abode with his beautiful views across the town to Dartmoor beyond,

On the way we were thrilled to spot a goose. A real live one, sitting on a lap in the front seat of the car and looking for all the world as if Christmas and dinner and gravy were light years off, not ten weeks away...we didn't like to spoil his day.

And then I did go and wave at Linda W in her window as promised.

Down yer prong, tes Tavvystock Goozey Vair...

An' uts "Aw thun, whur be'e gwaine, an' wot be'e doin'of there?
'Aive down yer prong an' stap down long, tes Tavvystock Goozey Vair."

Yes please do down yer prongs because it's the second Wednesday in October, this year the 14th so double celebrations because it's Cliff Richard's birthday...have a good one Cliff.
But we must forget all thoughts of work and enjoy all the fun of the fair today as Tavistock closes all the roads and Goose Fair comes to town.
This is the first sign, it'll be Christmas soon.
Traditionally the day when all the geese were sold to be fattened up for Christmas and a day to behold as the town begins its transformation on the Tuesday evening and by this morning is unrecognisable, heaving with fairground rides, market stalls, candy floss, helter skelters and visitors flocking in from far and wide. The schools close for the day and a good time is had by all.
By Thursday morning you'd be hard-pushed to know anything out of the ordinary had taken place,everything disappears overnight and normal service is resumed.
In the past a working day for me so we'd sit holed up in the surgery surrounded by the smell of burgers and onions and the fearsome anti-gravity rides; the day we'd give the office an annual clear-out whilst praying that no one rang up and asked for a home visit...which strangely they never did. We haven't been fair-ward for a couple of years, but today we will venture down and capture a bit of live atmosphere for you.
There's always the gimmick of the year to look out for, one year inflatable axes and the children played Vikings for the rest of the day.
And how nice it would be nice to see this sign again.


Now please just let me know, who wants a ride on the golden gallopers, who wants a go on the dodgems and how many for candy floss?

Plus roll up, roll up, does anyone need a set of  candy-striped sheets for not thirty...no ladies and gentelmen not even twenty-five pounds...no I like the look of all of you...it's not even going to be twenty pounds...come on, what's the matter with me today, it must be the Devon air...no this is madness, not even fifteen pounds...ladies and gentlemen I'm going to be bankrupt and my children will starve but I am giving you these luxurious candy striped pure flannelette sheets for a mere ten pounds....
 

A Kid for Two Farthings by Wolf Mankowitz

'Can you lend me five shillings to pay for this unicorn, Mr Kandinsky?' Joe said.
'For a unicorn,' said Mr Kandinsky, reaching for the box he kept his change in, 'five shillings is tukke cheap.'
Later Mr Kandinksy made a careful examination.
'Clearly,' he said, 'this unicorn is without doubt a unicorn, Joe; unmistakably...it only has one small horn budding on its head.'

So little Joe, is the lone child with the huge imagination and this is one of countless magical moments in A Kid for Two Farthings by Wolf Mankowitz, the latest addition to the Bloomsbury Classics range.

Joe's father is absent in Africa so, whilst his mother Rebecca works at a milliners, five year old Joe is cared for by the tailor Mr Kandinsky and his able assistant Shmule, the prize wrestler in training for the big fight with Python Macklin.
Mr Kandinsky weaves magical tales for Joe and unicorns predominate. This is the world of the street markets where you can buy anything, kittens, herrings, hokeypokey ices, puppies, sarsparilla and local specialities like jellied eels, cockles and whelks.

So when Joe, a desperate little nurturer whose day old chicks die with great regularity, comes home from the market one day with a 'unicorn' of his own, actually a little baby goat with a single horn, Mr Kandinsky keeps the magic going.
No more plot details, that's enough to set the scene on this little bubble of childhood magic determinedly floating in a world of post-war hardship and change. There is little money, employment is becoming scarcer and poverty beckons, but the adults who surround Joe spare him any of this. He is allowed to be a child, to be independent and escape on vast flights of fancy and imagination, to play and to wonder and Wolf Mankowitz allows us to see the world around him through Joe's eyes.
I couldn't have been more delighted when this arrived in the post box last week and opened it in an instant.
A Kid for Two Farthings, a book that feels like an intrinsic part of  a 1950's childhood because I remember reading it and the fact it was first published in 1953, the same year as Bookhound and I were 'published' makes it extra special.
Somehow  film tie-in editions seemed far more acceptable then, how could you fault this 1955 cover?
Bookhound remembers the film in minute detail.

He comes from a large East End family who lived in Bethnal Green, and though he didn't do much treading of cobbles or have to cope with the outside privy, because new town life beckoned soon after he was born, he would have been born within the sound of Bow Bells...if they hadn't been lost in the Blitz. When I asked him what he remembered about the film it was a myriad of lovely memories of David Kossoff's moving and emotional performance, unicorns, the incredible Diana Fluck (who by this time had sensibly changed her name to Dors)  and a very sad ending.
Now of course we've had to order the DVD.
I read on enthralled and had a wonderful nostalgic wallow, not only for a childhood book but also for the East End of London where I lived and worked for a year (at the London Hospital, Whitechapel) in 1975, and where I met Bookhound of course. I lived there little knowing that the area was on the cusp of great sociological change, it was then still a world predominantly populated and worked by the Jewish and long-established East End families and the Kray twins were still a regular topic of conversation. We used to go for a drink in Ronnie and Reggie's local, the Blind Beggar just because we could; the talk was still of the Mad Axeman escaping from Dartmoor with Kray assistance and speculation still rife about whether his demise had been under the concrete pillars of a motorway.
A Kid for Two Farthings is a beautiful read with a wonderful ending; sad but hope-filled as the adults around Joe prepare him for life by allowing him the freedom to be a child, softening the blows but still helping him to cope with loss. Nurturing his independence at a time when children seemed to be safely cared for by everyone around them in a known community as Joe is happily able to wander off on his own. I love the moment when he comes home with the 'unicorn' and no one bats an eyelid...my mum might not have been so pleased.
Mr Kandinksy is a bygone treasure who would now need an enhanced CRB check and have to be registered as a childminder with regular Ofsted inspections. No criticism of those processes because I  understand were we are with all that in 2009, and nor am I naive enough to believe every five-year old was as safe as Joe wandering around the streets of the East End, but nevertheless these were those carefree innocent days when those worries didn't prevail. As a reminder of the book's immediate post-war setting there are hugely poignant and understated moments, easily overlooked, when we know how acutely the recent holocaust dwells in Mr Kandinsky's memory,

'Sadly beating his fist on the bench Mr Kandinsky sang:
Then came the Holy One, blessed be He,
The angel of death to destroy utterly...
Shmule's low voice joined Mr Kandinsky's cracked one in the chorus. Together they finished the song.
'One kid, one kid, which my father bought for two farthings.'

What a perfect and wonderfully atmospheric read this has been, entirely suitable for capable child readers and published in larger print accordingly, how lovely to see it back in print, nice one Bloomsbury.
Scroll down for treats.

Prize draw copies of A Kid for Two Farthings

Names in comments for the chance to win one of three prize draw copies of A Kid for Two Farthings by Wolf Mankowicz.
Rocky will choose winners eventually and thinks he might like to have been a unicorn but has enough trouble getting out of the cat flap as it is, without the added worry of a silly protuberance on his head.
 

Look what's arrived...

I'm so very sorry about all the bank balances, and those of you who've written with news of irate managers had better look away now, or look quickly and add it to your Christmas list, but I just had to share a book that arrived in today's post with you right this minute because I get very over-excited about these.
I've been stroking it all day and Rocky and I have been reading it sitting out in the sun (on October 12th!!!) this afternoon.
I was just beginning to think that I'd read volumes 1,2,& 3 to distraction and excess repetition when along comes The Paris Review Interviews Volume 4 from Canongate and the selection is fantastic as always,
William Styron
Marianne Moore
Ezra Pound
Jack Kerouac
E.B.White
P.G.Wodehouse (ninety-one and a half and brilliant)
John Ashbery
Philip Roth
Maya Angelou (incredible)
Stephen Sondheim
V.S.Naipaul
Paul Auster
Haruki Murakami
Orhan Pamuk
David Grossman
Marilynne Robinson (need I say more)

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

'In early June I spotted Stefan Zweig's latest book Spinoza, in the window of a bookshop on avenue Kleber. Today I hurry over there to buy a copy. The book is no longer in the window, and the bookseller informs me that she is not allowed to sell it anymore. I refuse to give up, and in the end she reveals that the Zweig books are packed up in the room behind the shop; after swearing me to secrecy, she eventually agrees to let me have a copy. It appears that the list of banned books has already been drawn up, and that they will be destroyed. So we no longer have the right to read or say what we want in the privacy of our own homes.'

This was the redoubtable Agnes Humbert in Paris on 7th August 1940 and an episode recounted in her book Resistance - Memoirs of Occupied France. and I had cause to recall it because I'm deeply embedded in the life of Stefan Zweig right now. I hope I'm not over-egging my love and respect for the man, his life and his writing in recent weeks, but his autobiography The World of Yesterday will certainly be in amongst my best reads of the year if and when I try to pin them down to a list.
Stefan Zweig confirms what I sensed I knew about him from his fiction, a modest and self-effacing man nursing a profound sensitivity and an astute line in judgment all of which he utilises to full effect here.
I've been reading this one at snail's pace over the last month or more and have just made the 200-page halfway point,

'Then on June 29, 1914, in Sarajevo, the shot was fired which in a single second shattered the world of security and creative reason in which we had been educated, grown up and been at home - shattered it like a hollow vessel of clay.'

Europe is a rumbling volcano, the stack is about to blow and as he reflects on the world rushing headlong towards that war, Stefan Zweig has offered me some new perspectives.
Firstly, whilst admitting what we all now know,

'Calmly reflecting on the past, if one asks why Europe went to war in 1914, neither reasonable ground nor even provocation can be found..'

he then goes on to elaborate,

'Every state had the feeling of being strong and forgot that every other State had the same feeling, each wanted more and wanted something from the other. And the worst was that just the sentiment which we most highly valued - our common optimism - betrayed us. For each one thought that in the last moment the other would draw back affrightedly; and so the diplomats began their game of bluff.'

It's a  chunk of world history I have never really explored in any depth and as Stefan Zweig recounts the 'slight discomfort whenever a rattle of shots came from the Balkans' and proceeds to offer some personal observations about the people and daily life that worried him, I began to build up the picture for myself and the route to conflagration became increasingly clear.
Stefan Zweig writes with a piercing and self-effacing honesty that cuts to the quick,

'Never, and I say this without pride, but rather with shame - has any generation experienced such a moral retrogression from such a spiritual height as our generation has.'

There is so much in this eminently readable book to savour as Stefan Zweig allows himself to step back, positions himself firmly in that crow's nest vantage point overlooking a history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, and becomes a primary source and witness to the rise of anti-semitism and fascism.
The book is a fine social history too; pre- and post- fin de siecle Vienna had bred several generations who knew nothing of conflict and applauded the rise of the Jewish bourgeoisie as a positive force for good in the cultural life of the Austrian capital,

'nine-tenths of what the world celebrated as Viennese culture in the nineteenth century was promoted, nourished or even created by Viennese Jewry.'

Stefan Zweig met and knew many of the prophets, names to conjure with, Sigmund Freud, Rudolf Steiner, Rilke and Rodin and was a part of this milieu, leaving him perfectly placed to reflect on the rise of many of the luminaries of the day.
Mahler and Schonberg, Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, Sonnenthal and Reinhardt burnishing the city's universal reputation for music, literature and the theatre respectively. Meanwhile Freud was busy doing what Freud did best and his influence on Stefan Zwieg's thinking is nowhere more evident than in the chapter Eros Matutinus. Stefan Zweig reflects on a puberty and adolescence blighted by reserve, secrecy and misinformation for a generation who were preparing for something very different

'...we grew up in this sticky, perfumed, sultry unhealthy atmosphere. This dishonest and unpsychological morality of secrecy and hiding hung over us like a nightmare.'

Zweig's dissections of the conceits and the buttoned-up world of repression in which he and his friends were raised, the disparity and inequalities between men and women in dress, behaviour and social expectations to all of which they were expected to conform, highlights just how ready this generation was to rebel and break free of the world their parents and grandparents had known.
The Cassandras were there alright.
The unknown to me Berta von Suttner, the woman who took it upon herself to hinder any progress towards war in any way she could, the woman who persuaded Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, to atone for that discovery with the endowment of the Nobel Prize for Peace and International Understanding.
I've just been turning page after page thinking how amazing that one book can offer me so much inspiration, more to explore, other writers to seek out and I still have the second half to go,

'The summer of 1914 would have been even more memorable for us even without the doom which it spread over the European earth. I had rarely experienced one more luxuriant, more beautiful and. I am tempted to say more summery...the heavens were a silly blue, the air soft yet not sultry, the meadows fragrant and warm..,'

Gangway...gangway, let me at the rest of this book right now.

The Kayaker returns from Africa bearing gifts...

Sunday Confessions & post Booker rehab

I've had quite a marked post-Bookerthon reading reaction this year, off into rehab and have barely set foot near a contemporary novel for several weeks now, whilst working my way slowly towards November's Remembrance reading with a few books that are setting the social and political scene for the Second World War quite differently.

The French Revolution is keeping me nicely out of trouble too and it's also been a joy to settle into the novels of Willa Cather, currently The Professor's House and also High Wages the forthcoming Dorothy Whipple,  but I know me well, this can be a dangerous place to let my reading stay exclusively for too long; as the Gamekeeper says when he comes in with another handful of deceased rabbits, 'it's all a question of balance...' and I say 'and Christmas menus at local hostelries.'
Trust me rabbit will be big around here this year.
But it is a question of reading balance, and the danger is that I can quite suddenly and unexpectedly feel sated and jaded with reading the past and end up walking away from it for months on end when in fact I'd like to weave it in all the time. So occasionally I need to drag my eye back to the contemporaneous because I have that constant urge to read what's being written from the perspective of the present too. I always find it fascinating to see how long it takes for current issues to feed into fiction, there should be plenty of financial collapse perspectives in the pipeline surely?
So I have a wander along the 'Books In' shelves to see what takes my fancy.
The system I have means that books that arrive from publishers are shelved in their own corner,(you'd be right to be wondering just how many corners a book room can possibly have) ordered according to month of publication and I can see at a glance what's of the moment, or almost.
I've pulled out a selection to get the first fifty page treatment and I'll take it from there over the next few weeks.

Nothing contemporaneous about Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver because it was written in 1982, though I suspect the sentiments will be entirely of the moment because I find there is something timeless about Tove Jansson's writing. Thinking again about The Summer Book, there is usually an abundance of wit and wisdom that readily translates into the here and now.
I'm way behind with the Audrey Niffenegger party not having read The Time Traveller's Wife, but in the end that might be helpful as I can avoid all comparison issues and just read Her Fearful Symmetry for what it is.
I haven't read any Paul Auster for quite a while, Invisible is published in November so I might be ahead of the game if this one works for me.
Bahaa Taher's Sunset Oasis just looks good and sometimes that's all you have to go on. 1890's Egypt, a society at war with itself and a marriage in trouble, an exploration of power, occupation and rebellion, we'll give it a go.
Eating Air by Pauline Melville, praised by Salman Rushdie...if it had been Hilary I'd have snapped it up sooner, still appeals for Royal Ballet dancer Ella de Vries's return to a 1970's setting of political radicals, extremism and the promise of a shocking and unexpected outcome which always intrigues me.
The Rapture by Liz Jensen has been highly recommended all round and I have never read any John Irving so I plan an attempt with Last Night in Twisted River and we'll see what happens.
....so that was a week or so ago and I have much to report on Eating Air and The Rapture soon, sufficiently absorbing that I am a Ulysses slacker and must head off for Camp Four where I expect you're all ready and waiting with the bivvy fixed and the soup bubbling away in the billy can.

and the winners are...

Rocky and www.random.org have chosen the lucky winners of a copy of My Antonia by Willa Cather from Oxford University Press and they are

8 Pia

23 Marleen

29 Jade

31 Kathy P

37 Richard Spencer

41 Priscilla

You might want to check it's really you against your comment number here  and then if you could e mail your address to me at dovegreyreader at gmail dot com your book will arrive soonish. I'm going to be really efficient in future and line through your name above when I've heard from you so that you know I've received your email, and if you could add "Winner - My Antonia" or similar in the subject line that would assist the clerical department (me!) greatly.

Also waiting to hear from one more prize winner for their copies of The Snow Geese and The Music Room by William Fiennes to be dispatched...ANMARU IT'S YOU!
The others should be on their way.

The Rake's Progress

I really should keep you updated on Bookhound's recent estate management garden adventures because he's done a magnificent job of septic tank repair that seems to have stayed magnificent. It's almost (only almost) a joy to stand next to it and hear the efficient flushing and gurgling which has replaced its rather potent and congested sludgy gulp. Meanwhile he's been working on all those little bits of landscaping too.
In my personal experience it's a dangerous combination.
A man at the controls of a digger he has hired for a week for £150, surrounded by 3/4 of an acre of God's own earth beneath him; the task it was hired for is done dusted and filled in, he's beaming with delight at having saved the £2,800 outlay quoted for repairs and there are still five days to go before the toy will be forcibly taken away.
Torrential rain being no deterrent, the upshot looked like carnage but the man's done good. In complete harmony with his garden rake, a fine tilth has been achieved out of great clods of earth and mud. 
There has been much rolling and shaping and coaxing, a bit like painting a picture I suppose as the garden has slowly been restored back to something akin to its first incarnation as grass when we moved here fifteen years ago. This is the source of much mirth here.
In between, and dependent on need, it's served as a mini football pitch, a badminton court, a cycle track, a vegetable garden with greenhouse and then without greenhouse (twice) and all life has been lived out there.
The recent 'nature' garden has gone...that was an excuse for neglect that even we couldn't sustain, and it will soon be joining the rest of the mowable grass as lawn. But the butterflies are still around and enjoying the asters.

And the espaliered Cox's Orange Pippins are almost sweet enough to eat.

The shady bank which came very near to the far end of the house, and which we felt sure contributed to the damp, has been taken back several feet to allow the sun to get in and work its occasional magic.
The area around the summerhouse, now reclaimed from kayak-storage and worse, has been cleared and will sort itself out in a wildish but controllable way of its own.That eucalyptus tree incidentally hardly native, but it has been good for tree houses and swings and does offer lovely, rustling dappled shade.


Best of all every bit of rubbish that had accumulated around the garden has gone on several trips to the tip and wandering things like flowerpots safely gathered in before the frost hits them.

How exactly did we manage in the olden days, before cars and tips and black bin liners...can you imagine life without black bin liners now? Well I expect the diligent recyclers amongst you can, but I'm afraid at the first sight of rubbish gathering around the house I grab a bin liner and walk it round.
We do have the occasional bonfire because we have no neighbours, only ourselves to annoy.
But this week has seen the icing on the driveway, the new gravel chippings.
Could life get any more exciting than this?
The Booker prize going to Hilary and new gravel on the drive all in a week

It's important (to me anyway) to be able to traverse mud-free terrain from car to house. Don't ask how many tons have gone down over the years and where it disappears too is anyone's guess, beyond perhaps a six foot sub-strata of embedded gravel lying beneath perhaps. I do know a lot finds its way indoors and rattles up the hoover.
There was however a tense post weed-killer, pre- new gravel moment.
The Gamekeeper had come home with a back pack, masks and a spraying machine, did the rounds and then his parting shot...'
'Don't let the dogs walk on that until it's dry.'
'What about the cats' I said....no I shrieked in alarm.
'Oh yes, won't do them much good either.'
'But Rocky's famous' I bleated...
So I stood guard over wet weeds and sleeping cats nursing visions of them licking poisoned paws and keeling over and me having to come on here and tell you honestly how Rocky had departed this life through sheer negligence.
Rocky snored on and all was well.
I've come to the conclusion that normal gifts are a waste of time for Bookhound.
We are all agreed he is impossible to buy for, he smiles wanly at wrapped, present-sized things with ribbons.
Just hire him a digger for a week and see his face light up or buy him a new handle for his rake or do as we've done this week and buy him six tons of gravel and he's as happy as Larry (who was Larry?) and stays out of mischief for days.



Of course now there's talk about the first person to drive in with muddy wheels being hung drawn and quartered but how we avoid that heaven knows.
Give it a week and the novelty will have worn off.

The Country Diaries - A Year in the British Countryside

I was delighted when another book arrived that I might be able to slot in alongside my daily reading of Roger Deakin's Notes From Walnut Tree Farm, this one The Country Diaries - A Year in the British Countryside edited by Alan Taylor and published by Canongate.
The cover suggested that the book would work but I've been test-running it through September just to be sure and I can report it's definitely fit for purpose, plus it has a ribbon bookmark which surely should be standard on all books like this.
A daily compilation of extracts from rural diaries in the same style as The Assassin's Cloak which I enjoyed so much.
Those of you who endure grievous disquiet at the notion of writing in books should look away now because I often use a book like this as a diary of my own too, scribbling alongside the date something that has happened here that will jog my memory in successive years. It gets worse because I only had a fountain pen with J.Herbin's Violette Pensee ink to hand so that had to do I'm afraid.
In books like this I always dash to my own special dates just to see how they have been remembered and thought the entry for my birthday just had to be a really special one and then I could look forward to it every year, perhaps Kilvert out walking with someone who had met Wordsworth at Ambleside and been to tea at Rydal Mount or one of his marvellous little anecdotes about country customs,

'I called on Mrs Martin. She was busy picking pheasants' feathers to make a pillow. Talking of feather beds she said, 'Pheasants feathers will do very well for a bed, but no pigeons' feathers. People don't like to sleep on pigeons' feathers.' 'Why not?' I asked. 'Well,' said Susan Martin mysteriously, 'folk do say that a person can't die on pigeons' feathers.'

or going out to tea

'At tea I sat between Miss and Mrs Oswald and opposite and tongue. May I never sit opposite a tongue again, at least if I have to carve it with a new round-headed small knife as blunt as a fruit knife...'

Or perhaps my day would be blessed with a little nugget from Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Hopkins has that unerring microscopic eye for detail that I'm slowly trying to acquire on my Book Pondering walks, it's all about giving enough time to the looking and it's not easy,

'There is a large-leaved kind of ash which grows in tall close bushes: when the wind blows it the backs of the sprays, which are silvery, look like combs of fish-bones...'

or perhaps a Gerald extract that spoke pure Hopkins-esque language

'Young elmleaves lash and lip the sprays. This has been a very beautiful day - fields about us deep green lighted underneath with white daisies, yellower fresh green of leaves above which bathes the skirts of the elms, and their tips are touched and worded with leaf too...'

Oh, yes, please let my day be a Gerard Manley Hopkins one, so I rushed to the date with great anticipation,

1818 [Yorkshire]
'Had a thorn taken out of the middle of that part of the body which Derham calls a large flat cushion of flesh by my wife last night.'
Benjamin Newton

Never mind.

Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

'For a week, everybody in London had been saying every day that if there wasn't a war tomorrow there wouldn't be a war. Yesterday people were saying that if there wasn't a war today it would be a bloody shame.'
So this afternoon a group of lucky people will be comfortably seated in the Persephone shop in Lamb's Conduit Street in London possibly debating the merits of those opening lines, entitled a Letter From London and dated 3 September 1939. They will then settle down to discuss the short stories that follow in Good Evening Mrs Craven : The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter- Downes.
This will all happen over tea and cake and surrounded by books and really I can see no good reason for us to be left out just because we might be hundreds or even thousands of miles and several continents distant.
Thanks to Karen who does this sort of thing so wonderfully well, we can all nip over to Cornflower and enjoy a virtual tea of our own today, we've decided virtual knitting's allowed while we chat too and we're going to try and make this a regular  dovegreyreader - Cornflower joined-up blog day to coincide with those Persephone teas.
My introduction to Mollie has been quite recent, this my third of her books in the last month or so and I now slip into her writing with ease.
This selection of short stories, like Minnie's Room, ordered chronologically from 1939 to 1944 and thus enabling an identifiable progression through the war years.
This is the underbelly of war, the flip-side, a chance to see what lies beneath the reported heroics and gallantry, that blitz spirit with which the nation was so readily identified, yet often the reality was so very different.
Those who are actually enjoying the war, benefiting in some way from it all, for some indeed it is bringing certainty of employment and regular wages. There are those who are barely inconvenienced by it, the lights and shades of human relationships and those like the lonely spinsters who suddenly discover purpose and happiness in their lives. So many of them the women side-lined in the marriage market after the Great War and now finding they can be useful to someone.
Much of it is very funny too, Mollie has the wryest sense of humour and listening in on the conversation at Mrs Ramsey's Red Cross sewing parties is priceless. As the ladies handstitch pyjamas for the soldiers talk ranges far and wide and imaginations run riot as Mrs Ramsay announces the destination for this next parcel of comforts

'The Greeks!' said Mrs Peters suspiciously. 'Ow, what an original idea!' she held up the pair of trousers she was making and regarded them with a frown, as though meditating what it would be like to put one's feet up against a Greek.
The rest of the party looked dubiously at Mrs Ramsay. The idea of swathing Grecian torsos in good English winceyette was obviously difficult to digest right away.'

Poor Mrs Peters really can't get it out of her mind,

'Greeks!' said Mrs Peters, 'Well wait until I tell Daddy! He'll have a good laugh at me stitching away for the Greeks. Kind of little men aren't they?' She held up the trousers again. 'I suppose these things are going to fit them?'
The garments in question looked to Mrs Ramsay as though they would accommodate not only a Greek but a couple of Albanians too...'

The women demonstrate interesting conflicts of their own at these gatherings, a warfare of words that you would quite expect to escalate into a village-wide lifetime feud, yet things are always resolved amicably and they all leave the best of friends, nursing no hard feelings towards each other and perhaps a pertinent social reflection from Mollie on the peace-keeping capabilities of women that could be utilised in times of conflict.
War becomes the great leveller in Mollie's hands, reminding me of the bigger picture of this mixing of the social classes painted in another Persephone book, The Village by Marghanita Laski.
As the stories progress through the war years a certain weariness sets in and contrasts powerfully alongside an insatiable thirst for the latest news from the front and with it all emerges a deeper psychology, one that burrows beneath the surface and roots out those true feelings.
By 1944 the novelty has definitely worn off the resident evacuee family for Mrs Dudley and she's more than glad to see the back of them when they finally leave, but when approached by a desperate young mother and her baby for somewhere to stay Mrs Dudley's own reactions dismay her desperately.
Then there is the inevitability of post-war social change reflected not from the entrenched upper classes but from those lower down the scale who can't bear to let go of that master-servant bond. Mollie identifies a largely unrecognised mutual relationship, the servants, their sense of security along with their need to be needed.
How astutely this contrasts with the independent post-war Minnie of Minnie's Room desperate to make her escape.
Gregory Lestage's preface and afterword in this volume are both hugely informative,

'Women were in the wings as understudies in the theatre of war. They were the grievers, not the grieved; the absented, not the absent. Women were charged to keep things the same, men to change things.'

So what a wonderful collection, scattered with those astute observations that Mollie makes her own as a writer who, as Lestage points out, takes up the position of observer in preference to participant, making Good Evening Mrs Craven a fine scene-setting start as I approach this November's Remembrance Reading.
Now whatever you do, don't miss that delicious Cornflower tea.

Grantchester, Rupert and...

Back to that Cambridge trip and the real Grantchester Meadows where RevCheryl and I set off from one vicarage, ostensibly to walk Amy the vicarage dog, but to go and look at another vicarage and have a wander around Rupert Brooke country. This is RevCheryl's home turf so my thanks to her for the guided tour and my apologies for being an embarrassing tourist and snapping everything in sight.
I read Jill Dawson's The Great Lover this 'summer' and had quite thought I liked Rupert Brooke before I started it.
Stunning adonis-like, floppy-haired privileged lad that he was, not doing anyone any harm and then those immortal lines of poetry

If I should die, think only this of me: 
That there's some corner of a foreign field 
That is forever England. There shall be 
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; 
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware...'

All marvelously and quietly stirring, then dying ingloriously of septicaemia following an insect bite to his lip before he'd even fought a battle, and buried in some distant olive grove, well that always seemed to add to the poignancy.
Jill Dawson, having immersed herself in Rupert Brooke's letters then began to elaborate and fictionalize his life and loves at Grantchester, his indecision and confusion about his sexuality and moving around the edges of the Bloomsbury set which won't have helped, a fear of madness and actual nervous breakdowns, affairs of the heart including much lusting after both Nell the maid from the nearby Orchard tearooms and then a schoolfriend from Rugby, followed by a prolonged stay on a South Pacific island.
Except perhaps none of that really happened and in the end I suppose it shouldn't matter, The Great Lover is fiction after all.
The trap for the unwary, and I fall head first into it every time, lies in trying too hard to discern the fact from the fiction, what happened, what didn't, what is myth, what is not.
Where exactly does the author's imagination begin and how far can it go?
Hilary Mantel talked fascinatingly about this in relation to Wolf Hall (I'm still on cloud nine for Hilary, the Booker win so richly deserved)
The Great Lover opens with a letter sent to Nell the lusted-after maid in 1982 from a child fathered by Rupert Brooke whilst on Tahiti (did he?)
As Nell the maid says in her letter back, and perhaps this is Jill Dawson's early explanation to her readers,

'A biography is a good way to find out things but to my mind, well. It has its limits. After all, a biography is written by a person and a person does not always understand another as well as they might think...I do think they set too much store by facts and not enough by feelings. As a girl I set a lot of of store by facts, but I learned that they could be wrong.'

Nor have I read Christopher Hassall's biography of Rupert Brooke so I have litte to go on but Virginia Woolf who in 1918 pronounced Rupert Brooke,

'jealous, moody, ill-balanced'

After reading The Great Lover I'm afraid I'm agreeing with Virginia, and Jill Dawson certainly conveys these elements of his personality, sadly by the time I got to Tahiti with him I've got to own up, I'd sort of had enough of Rupert and I wanted to get home.
All was not lost.
Nell, as the daughter of a bee-keeper, offers access to that rich, honey-sweet element in the book which kept me reading, especially as a foil for Rupert Brooke's odd ways, his over-bearing mother and his frequently selfish and eccentric behaviour. Too much of Rupert would be a bad thing, Nell's feels like the voice of balance and reason and for all her lack of education, yet possessing acres of good common sense and useful intelligence, she almost becomes the choral character, there to offer a grounding in the realities of life and in stark contrast to that life of privilege enjoyed by so few. 
So with all this in mind it was good to trace Rupert's footsteps just a little and wander through The Orchard tearooms on a quiet Monday morning that week and not difficult to imagine Rupert lounging there too.
and of course another famous 'author' now lives in The Old Vicarage at Grantchester, so we had to go and look there as well.
No signs saying 'Go Away...No Circulars, No Hawkers, No Bloggers ' so I took a few shots for the record.
Statues abound in the vicarage garden and nor is Rupert forgotten,
...and at least he's a little warmer than this poor chap.

and the winner is...

...well I don't know yet because I'm poised here listening and half watching the BBC News channel online because for some reason this year I've got hyper-acute Booker anxiety.
Currently I'm being warned not to let my dog paddle in the River Trent because of raw sewage and next up news of a major security hack into emails...just give me the Booker please.

Right we're off and Andrew Motion and Helena Kennedy are our resident experts and Andrew is giving his verdict on Hilary Mantel...he thinks it's flat...hmm he's unimpressed!

Camera pans to Hilary looking pale and petrified.

Adam Foulds, Andrew admits an interest because he taught him on the Creative Writing course at East Anglia, not a fussy or over-scented poetry.

Helena Kennedy supports the whole Booker list as a benchmark for good reads.

The first three authors read from their books... Byatt, Coetzee & Foulds.

Andrew M offers an opinion on Coetzee and his reclusiveness in direct contrast with his books becoming increasingly about himself. Helena sees it as a new development in writing.

Is Byatt too much a book of ideas? Andrew Motion considers this among her best work and plenty of the characteristic Byatt interplay of lecturing and imagination, was the lecturing perhaps too obtrusive, Andrew Motion thought it might be.

The second three authors talk about their books...Mantel, Mawer & Waters.

Is this perhaps not Waters' best book? Does the prize sometimes go to the wrong book but the right person? Yes it does agrees Andrew Motion,

Cue Naughtie for the ANNOUNCEMENT...

A run through of the books and their merits...and then there was one...passionate and committed discussions

and it's....HILARY MANTEL!!!!!

It's Booker day...

Finally Booker Prize day arrives and I can almost hear you groaning 'Oh well alle - *&£$%* - lulia and thank God for that...'

The process does feel so long and dr-a-a-a-wn out I'll admit, though hands up I haven't talked about if for weeks now. I was carted off long ago jibbering and booked into my annual post- Booker rehab, clutching a prescription for a prolonged course of 19th century reading therapy which thankfully never fails.
Us Booker addicts start trying to spot 'hopefuls' from...well from October 1st really and it's downhill all the way until the following July. Then this interminable summer of long and short listing before we finally hit prize day.
You can but feel sorry for Hilary Mantel who came right out and proclaimed herself sick with anticipation weeks ago, comparing the wait for the shortlisted authors to those interminable summers spent waiting for exam results.
I have to admit that watching the Guardian's Not the Booker alongside the real thing has been the most entertaining sport going too, beats Strictly any day. Leaving it to the nation to decide a winner is like standing on top of a smoking, rumbling Vesuvius and saying 'go on then', little encouragement needed for the thing to blow. Disgruntled authors then appear who feel their book has been degraded by insinuations of vote-rigging, poor Sam Jordison must be at least three stone lighter and hairless by now.
It's also been very interesting to see this weekend's Guardian squeezing in last minute pieces on Simon Mawer and Adam Foulds as potential Booker dark horses, but to me this year feels like the closest run short list for a long time, and I would personally not be in the least disappointed to see any of the contenders win.
It's fashionable to knock the Booker as elitist claptrap, someone always does and year on year the whole caboodle takes some stick for being a bit 'out there' on a reading planet of its own, nothing to do with ordinary readers who are all supposedly made to feel a bit lesser in the reading stakes, as if we might somehow not be quite up to the eventual choice.
I'd agree with a few in recent years but definitely not this year, well not here anyway.
Bookerthon 2009 has all been a joy, the books an inspiration to read in their own various ways, especially where I've had the chance to hear the authors speak or where they have kindly answered the dovegreyreader asks...questions. Then the books have fair bounced into life and moved my thinking into another dimension.
The debate has been fascinating and varied around the blogs too; taking the books out there and talking about them. I know I'm inclined to go off on an emotionally subjective frolic of my own, so my corner is often the 'let's all dance around about this book' one, but debate out there on the blogs is two-way, it's far-ranging and intelligent. There has been some great discussion in comments here for which I thank you and, though I only have time to visit a few others, I know John Self's Asylum has offered his usual stellar standard of appraisal and KevinfromCanada has done likewise before returning to home tundra with his Giller Prize shadow jury. Countless others have girded their loins and joined the annual Bookerthon, a word actually invented here incidentally to cope with my own addiction back in 2006.
I read those early endeavours of mine now and cringe, but it takes years to train up for these things and this is for pleasure after all.
Opinions have been polarised about several books this year, no one book seeming to garner unanimous praise, several taking a respectful hammering from some quarters and undying praise from others, which all makes up that conglomeration of different readers that we are.
As to the winner, well despite the bookie's predictions (I have this vision of people called William Hill and Paddy Power sitting down with the pile and reading them) I think the smart money is on Coetzee, Foulds or perhaps Mawer, but I gamble with a slightly different currency, heart money, and it's on Byatt, Mantel or Waters but which one?
I couldn't possibly jinx the book's chances by saying.
Every year I say I'm not doing this again and every year I do and I love it.
Meanwhile, unless I've missed something in this evening's TV schedules, I will be hovering over the BBC 10pm News tonight for those precious crumbs of coverage they set aside for us Booker faithfuls, usually about a minute.
James Naughtie will be standing there in his Sunday best waiting for his cue...
Kirsty Wark will be talking over the speech going on in the background, then 3-2-1 ANNOUNCE and one of the world's most prestigious literary awards is hurriedly presented to the winner who then fights their way to the platform from their table having hugged and mwah mwahed all and sundry along the way.
And I'll be crying with tears of joy as Hilary Mantel embarks on her emotional vote of thanks of which we hear half a sentence before things move swiftly onto the look-away-now football results and the weather.
Oh drat...did I really say that?
Sorry Hilary, I didn't mean to.

Sleeper's Wake by Alistair Morgan

I don't know about you but I do read the 'puffs' on book covers quite purposefully now, having discovered that they often offer many hidden clues as to a book's potential, or perhaps a publisher's hopes for a book's potential.
I mentioned on an online list pre-Booker, Not Untrue and Not Unkind by Ed O'Loughlin as a 'perhaps possible' purely because it had quotes on its magnificence from two writers with Booker previous, Anne Enright and Joseph O'Neill.
It's all set me thinking and a-wondering just how much I am influenced by these quotes nowadays and I think I have to own up that it is probably far more than I realise.
For example I'm not sure I've read a 'wrong' book for me if Hilary Mantel has done a cover quote.
In fact I'll go out of my way to start a book that Hilary has praised and that probably goes for many-an author I've read, though what on earth makes me think because I love their writing I might love their reading tastes as well is all beyond me.
So when Sleeper's Wake by South African writer Alistair Morgan arrived from Granta I was interested to see a cover quote from Anne Landsman also a South African. Albeit also a Granta author, so perhaps some in-house conspiracy was afoot to seduce me, but I overrode that because Anne Landsman's novel The Rowing Lesson had been, for me, one of the great mysteries of our time.The book flattened me, as I recall it was an amazing read and I quite thought to see it win prizes, yet it disappeared here in the UK at least, virtually without trace and largely unreviewed so that was me egg-on-face.
Except Anne Landsman's efforts were finally rewarded in her home country recently with the Sunday Times 2009 Literary Award for The Rowing Lesson and I was delighted, not only for Anne but also that perhaps it hadn't just been me who'd sensed the power of this book and I could wipe a bit of the egg off my chops.
So perhaps I'm a bit onside with Alistair Morgan before I open the book, not least because alongside Anne is Andre Brink queuing up to praise this book. I didn't know a lot about Andre Brink either beyond a revered name and reputation, but having done some research I plan to know much more.
As John Wraith regains consciousness after a car accident which has wiped out his family, it's clear this is going to be an exploration of one man's travails through grief as he takes up his sister's offer of a solitary stay in a holiday cabin on a remote part of the South African coast.

'...the pain of their deaths. It hasn't arrived yet. But it is coming. I can see it nearing the coastline, like a tropical cyclone on a TV weather report. Common sense says that I should get out of town, that I should hammer planks of wood over the windows and flee with whatever possessions I can carry in my arms...'

Intended perhaps as a time to reflect on his many failings  and John's no slouch in flagging up his weaknesses, there's an honesty in here,

'...my life over the last few years has consisted of nothing more than a mass of stagnant potential, contained within a brittle shell of denial.'

Unfortunately it's all less solitary than John had planned as he is hopelessly unable to resist being drawn into the strange web of the god-fearing Roelf and his teenage children, Jackie and Simon.
Another family escaping life's traumas, and it's inevitable that this head-on collision of grief reactions in all its many guises is going to become a tough, uncompromising read. Everyone's nursing too much pain of their own to really empathise with each other's.
I can't deny that this is both a complete page-turner but also a disturbing book, and one I had to read whilst keeping in the very forefront of my mind that John was a man disturbed and distorted by the excruciating guilt and anguish of the loss of his family. Though we always say there are no rights and wrongs about grieving, it has to be done by the individual as they see fit and there are some moments here which would certainly shock given a lesser context. Plenty to ponder as John becomes increasingly embroiled with the family and in particular seventeen year-old Jackie, Roelf's deeply traumatised but superficially functioning daughter.
When you know what has happened to Jackie it may well raise questions in your mind, as it did in mine, about the 'what happens next' aspect of Sleeper's Wake, but Alistair Morgan's premise to the book, the 'Sleeper' theory, and that primitive and often brutal instincts may prevail when personal survival is at stake, just about held good for me, two people dealing with their grief in their own way, though none of this felt too certain as I finished the book.
Incidentally the neatness of the title and the added inference of the 'wake' as the post-funeral gathering now very apparent.
That was a all few weeks ago and it's taken this long for me to decide to write about it and post here because I honestly wasn't sure how I felt about the John-Jackie situation but having gained that perspective of distance from the final page I'm now quite able to see that Alistair Morgan has genuinely examined how far grief can and does reshape behaviour into something basic and instinctive
It's been another in a succession of challenging reads for the likes of little old me, but I do think it's good to weave those in from time to time and I'd be very interested to know what others think of this one if they decide to give it a go.

and...

...a lovely revolving (just to confirm that's revolving not revolting) bookcase to house the contents of my Roger Deakin shelf, books various that have that certain indefinable something about them, some of which are listed over here <<<<< and down a bit.
I've come to know Roger quite well this year having followed his Notes From Walnut Tree Farm throughout the year and I suspect Roger himself would have been happy with something made up out of driftwood or an old railway sleeper, but I wouldn't and I absolutely love this.

It's sits neatly on the table to my right hand side (I have a sort of L shaped arrangement which seems to work) revolves nicely and the top was begging for a piece of quilted-ness so I wandered around the house looking at everything hanging on the walls and finally settled on this.

It's a piece of Baltimore cut-and-sew whole cloth applique from Elly Sienkiewicz's Baltimore Beauties and Beyond called Divine Guidance, and made from a piece of Liberty fabric that was a skirt I caught my neighbour of many years ago throwing into a dustbin. That name seems entirely right for such an intricate piece that became the beginning and the end of any notions I may have had of making a whole Baltimore Album Quilt, but also for the blessings at my right hand that these books have become.
And just so you can get your bearings here's the slightly bigger picture.

The Gifts

I think I have drowned you all in words this week and there are more coming next week, so a couple of days to give your virtual ears a rest and let you drink in the beauty of my birthday gifts from Bookhound, who does this sort of thing so very well.
A lovely old print of Branwell Bronte's portrait of Emily for my book room.

Dated 1914, it seems to be number 68 of 500 published by The Medici Society and was found languishing in Tavistock Market.

It now has pride of place on my book room wall in the only available space, above a yard or so of Virginia Woolf which sits on top of the Special Signed Books and First Editions Cabinet.

Lots of Anita Brookner, Bernice Rubens and Penelopes Lively & Fitzgerald in there
I've gathered a few Bronte pics to make Emily feel at home and now can't decide whether to go the whole Bronte-hog and move them all from the Bronte Shelf across to here and rehouse Virginia somewhere else.
What do you think, is Virginia happy there with Emily watching over?
You can just glimpse a corner of The Daphne Depository on the left?
Have I got this grouping right?
I spend hours doing this book shifting; it's therapeutic bookish thinking time and I do like to think they all pass through my hands every so often, rise to the surface and tell me something, perhaps inspire a new reading trail.
Just opposite the French windows is the Poetry & Shakespeare Dresser and just along a bit the Ted & Sylvia Cabinet but I'll save those for another day, tomorrow the other gift and you'd be guessing right if you thought it might be bookish too.

Inner Child - October

So I have failed to connect to my intended Inner Child this month and I hold all you Swallows and Amazons dissenters partly responsible for helping me to see the error of my ways.
In fact I didn't get very far at all, only as far as mother anticipating the need, buying the canvas and making the tents,

'the tents were of the simplest kind. Each tent had a three-cornered piece for the back. The back was sewn to the sides, and a piece of stout rope was stitched to the canvas inside to make the ridge of the roof...along the bottom edges of the back and sides there were big pockets, to be filled with stones...at the front of the tent there were loose flaps, joined to the sides, so that they could be rolled up and tied out of the way with two pairs of tapes that worked life the reef points in a sail.'

Yes well that all sounds very simple indeed and I can only begin to imagine the state of mother's poor fingers by the time she'd stitched that rope onto the inside, to say nothing of the pockets for the stones. Then to have young upstart John suggesting that really they shouldn't be taking tents at all but knocking something up out of the sails and oars, well, someone sort that ungrateful child out please.
By this time I knew I was not entering into the spirit of the read and mother's endeavours had me thinking like an indignant grown-up and one who was likely to get more crabby as things progressed.
I think I was also diverted into grown-up territory at the beginning of September with my trip to Cambridge, Margaret Atwood and The Year of the Flood so I didn't really immerse.
Eventually I cheated (because that's allowed...did I mention that?) and moved swiftly into latter-day Inner Child reading with The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner.

I was so ready for a young person's- eye view of the French revolution because my adult's-eye view is still not sufficiently honed to feel confident about it all yet. It's all taking time and I was in need of much more scene-setting making this brilliantly evocative novel of 1780's Paris just the ticket and the wonderful endpapers, maps of ancient Paris had me squinting at the street names and really getting into the spirit of the book.
It is the run up to the Revolution and Yann Margoza and his friends Tetu the dwarf and magician Topolain are wowing and mystifying the Parisian audiences with their stunning new stage act.
Think France's Got Talent and Piers, Simon and Amanda sitting there with the baying hordes behind them and on walks a man with a wooden doll.
Ant and Dec are in the wings chatting to Yann and Tetu, who can't understand a word they are saying and really want them to pipe down because they need to focus.

The audience is now performing a synchronised eye roll with additional sniggers.
'So what's your name...'
'Topolain, monsieur.'
'R-i-g-h-t...and what are you going to do for us.'

'Mais oui, Je ferai cette poupée marcher et parler et alors elle lira votre esprit, ensuite cela j'inviterai quelqu'un à mettre le feu à une balle à moi et je l'attraperai....'

'R-i-g-h-t.. so you  will make this doll walk and talk and then it will read someone's mind, after that you will invite someone to fire a bullet at you and you will catch it.' translates the multi-lingual and gifted Simon Cowell for the benefit of us all. Simon has no need of Babelfish as I do and resigns himself to another load of rubbish happening before his very eyes. He really had hoped for better in Paris of all places.
Much more eye-rolling in the audience.
Amanda looks a bit fixed-grin zut alors shocked, Piers a bit je ne sais pas non-plussed..
'Of you go then'
Indeed it all comes to pass, the doll walks and talk of its own volition, and then successfully reads Piers's mind.
Piers is embarrassed to find that everyone now knows he was actually thinking about that interview he's just done with Cliff Richard (did you see it, bless Cliff) and wondering whether perhaps he'll get a free loan of the Barbados estate with the infinity pool after being so nice to him. The Grim Reaper is tricked again as Topolain catches the bullet fired by Simon who by now really has had enough, the applause is deafening, it's two 'ouis' and a 'non' but enough to go through to the next round and the video is watched 54 million times on youtube etc. and Oprah beckons.
Riding on the crest of this success Topolain is easily seduced by a summons from the sinister Count Kalliovski to perform their gig at the chateau, and doing so against their better judgment, Tetu and Yann are rapidly consumed by events as their party piece trick goes horribly wrong against a backdrop of everything going horribly wrong for everyone in Paris too.

The Red Necklace has comfortably restored my faith in my Inner Child reading but also satisfied my Inner Adult too, and of course everything is edging slowly on a rumbling tumbril towards the guillotine, so what good fortune that I have the recent sequel, The Silver Blade to hand.
Even better I can completely erase all associations of that title with Saturday's spent ice skating badly at Streatham Silver Blades Ice Rink when I was eight and even more fortunate that I have another month of Inner Child reading starting today so that's me sorted.
How about you?

Howards End could be on your landing

So here's where it gets even more interesting, because perhaps the best way to use the gift of a book like Howards End is on the Landing is not only for the sheer pleasure of reading about someone else's bookish life but also as an ongoing resource for reflection; after you've turned the final page and marveled at the excitement of those shelves of treasures various, time to sit down and marvel at your own.
It's a book that certainly made me reflect on my own reading life so I went out for the Howards End is on the Landing walk to do just that and it took me two hours of steady striding to work it all out
As I leaned on this gate and looked at the world on my doorstep...

...well, I was actually stung by a wasp, but once I'd got over the indignity of that and could concentrate again I realised that for all of us that reading life holds many other things of interest too and that Susan would probably be the first to agree that you don't have to be a famous writer to reflect on a lifetime's reading. Anyone can do it whenever they choose, OK you might not have met Ian Fleming leaning against a mantelpiece at a party, but I met Phil from Eastenders at a petrol station once, that was exciting.
Everyone's list will be different and unique for its own special reasons, its own life experiences, for its own important memories and no less valid for that.
Perhaps there are some of you, like me, who have reached this certain age in a bit of a panic at how much reading 'catch up' you are immersed in. I've yet to read Daniel Deronda once let alone three times and so perhaps we do look as if we are reading a lot of books right now, though I am incapable of speed reading I am reassured to know that I am not the book-blogger mentioned in the book
'who boasts of getting through twenty books plus, a week'.
But sadly I am one of those people who stamps any book I've read, scribbled in and written about here, with my mark of possession...

The Kayaker brought this back from his last trip to Uganda where it was carved by hand by a local craftsman and I'm very sentimental about it...and he's bringing me back another one from this trip which I'll be sentimental about too.
I was reading a great piece entitled Reviewing the Reviewers recently.
It popped up in the Literary Review of Canada and, though I go to great lengths here to distance myself from any assertion that I am a book 'reviewer', I was interested to read why Linda Hutcheon feels that so many of us 'modern humans' are out there trying to talk about books and I think she has hit the nail on the proverbial.
Plenty of us have been educated in the art of what is known in the NHS as 'reflective practice'.
All nurses registered with the NMC here in the UK are required to maintain a portfolio of reflective practice, that method of analysing what has happened, reframing it as a learning experience in a day's work.
Right so we all groan and dread the day our portfolios are called in but I've done it frequently when faced with a challenging situation. Many of us in all walks of life have become familiar with this process and the knock on effect for me is to want to write about what I've read, try and pin

down what that experience has given me and I consider myself very fortunate, nay blessed that others choose to read it here, because for several years it all went in journals that never saw the light of day.
Susan Hill quotes from a book by David Cecil, Library Looking Glass: A Personal Anthology and I want it... well, actually I've ordered it already for 1p on Amazon.
Here's what David Cecil says about literary criticism,

'the aim should be to interpret the work they are writing about and to help readers appreciate it, by defining and analysing those qualities that make it precious and by indicating the angle of vision from which its beauties are visible.'

Susan of course does this time and again throughout her book, the illuminations are sometimes dazzling, the insights often whispering gently and thoughtfully whilst always remembering David Cecil's assertion.

'...you cannot force taste on someone else, you cannot argue people into enjoyment.'

My Final Forty would be very different to Susan's because I would almost certainly have some contemporary fiction in there, at least this week I think I would...who knows about next week.
An intrinsic aspect of this late-flowering stage of my reading life has been the ability to read something of the moment and feel fairly sure it will stay by me. Susan's list contains very little contemporary fiction, possible John McGahern's Amongst Women the most recent, published in 1990. W.G.Sebald is much praised in the book but doesn't make the final cut, I suspect because of his inherent inducement to that state of melancholy.
I would take Wolf Hall to the moon and back for its ability to transport me effortlessly to another time and place and to always remind me of the summer of 09, my first spent willingly cut adrift from the NHS since I was eighteen.
The Music Room by William Fiennes, I doubt I would ever tire of reading of the familial love and devotion expressed therein.
Could I manage without something by Margaret Atwood, or A.S.Byatt?
I don't think so, but I quickly realised that reading choices are also tied up with unique and very special reading memories for every one of us, so the thinking trail began in earnest on the Howards End is on the Landing Walk and so it will continue for years to come.
Your lists will be different again to mine making this book a fantastic and lasting catalyst for readers to reflect on their own reading, debate it all endlessly and perhaps write about it if they don't already.
So Howard's End is on the Landing packs that double explosion of sparks, not only will you have read a great book but perhaps like me it will light the blue touch paper for you too and set you thinking about defining and revisiting those blessed favourites of your own.