dovegreyreader scribbles

dovegreyreader asks... David Vann

I am so incredibly grateful to David Vann for taking a seat in the virtual armchair and answering the dovegreyreader asks... questions on his book Legend of a Suicide today, and I hope you'll understand why when you read what he has to say. I have been moved beyond words by David's responses here and will be reading the book again very soon in the light of them. I have also divided the post into two, the answers to the fourth question about reading recommends will appear tomorrow, when David has also very kindly agreed to stop by and reply to any questions of your own or comments you may wish to leave after reading this.

David, where did Legend of a Suicide come from? Can you tell us the whys, the hows, and also the highs ad the lows of writing this book?

For three years after my father killed himself, I told everyone he had died of cancer.  This was because what he did felt shameful and dirty.  He killed himself while talking on the phone with my stepmother (the second marriage he had broken up through infidelity), telling her “I love you but I’m not going to live without you” and having to repeat it since she was at work and couldn’t hear well.  This was eleven months after she’d lost her parents to a murder/suicide, so it was an especially cruel thing to do.  And then she received flowers from him a few days later, on her birthday.  I felt that what he had done transferred to me, became my shame.

I also lied because I didn’t want to cry in school.  I didn’t return to school for two weeks, but for months after that, anytime anyone said something kind to me, I would cry.  Or I’d just suddenly think of him and start crying.  I was afraid of this lack of control, and I think that’s why I became an insomniac for 15 years.  I also didn’t have my first alcoholic drink until I was 22, and I believe that again was about control.  What he did came as such a shock, I just couldn’t sleep or drink, and I didn’t want to talk about him and wouldn’t tell the truth.  Instead, I wandered the streets at night with his guns and shot out streetlights.  I led a double life.  By day, I was a straight-A student, in student government, sports, band, etc., but at night, I roamed our small suburbia with a .300 magnum rifle, which is why I have trouble now believing that any 13-year-old boys are not up to something (unfair of me, I realize).  During this time, I also lost all my friends.

So that’s the background behind the 3rd story in the book, “A Legend of Good Men,” which is the most autobiographical.  The title comes from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, and the word “Legend” means a “legendary” or series of portraits, from the hagiographic tradition (saints’ lives).  That’s what “Legend” in the title of the book means, also, a collection of portraits of my father’s suicide, his despair, and my own bereavement.  The book also borrows from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in that it’s a collection of pieces which debate each other in style and content.  Taken together, they gain their full meaning and present the overall story.

The other very autobiographical story is the first one, “Ichthyology.”  I really did vandalize the neighbors’ house with the contents of their refrigerator when I was four years old and my parents were fighting, heading toward divorce.  And my father did have a commercial fishing boat.  But the event at the end is made up, and many events are made up in “A Legend of Good Men,” too.  The novella (“Sukkwan Island”) at the center of the book is entirely made up (we never went homesteading, I’ve never been to that particular island, etc.).

In my experience, fiction can be truer to a life than what was actually lived.  The moments in the novella better represent how I experienced my father than any of the real moments I can remember.  And fiction has the power to work beyond the conscious mind.  There’s a startling turn at the center of that novella, and I was shocked by it.  I didn’t see it coming until partway into that sentence.  But once I wrote it, I could see it was inevitable and was where I had been headed all along without knowing it.  And that moment provided such a perfect and satisfying psychological revenge after all the years of carrying his suicide around.  So that’s why I write, for moments like that when the work comes alive and speaks on its own, forms pattern beyond what I had imagined.

I worked on the book for ten years from when I was 19 years old until I was 29, and finished revisions just after I turned thirty.  Then the book sat for about 12 years and no agent would send it out, so I finally sent it to a contest, and it won the contest.  During the years I worked on it, I mostly failed.  I threw everything away from the first 3 or 4 years, in which there was far too much emotion on the first page.  But then I heard something more generous and lovely in the voice of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, and in Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, and I wrote “Ichthyology” very quickly, in a day.  I knew the material from all the failures, and I just needed the right voice, something more distanced.  Over the rest of the years, everything I labored over was finally cut, but the pieces that came quickly remained.  I wrote most of the novella in 17 days of sailing from San Diego, CA to Hawaii, for instance, in waves with my laptop strapped to my legs.  It came all in a rush as I was reading six novels by Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner.

“Ketchikan” works in the collection as the final story.  “A Higher Blue,” which follows, is an epilogue, telling the same story as “Ichthyology” but in a different mode, as fabulism.  But Ketchikan tests how close I can ever come to understanding the origins of ruin or recovering my father.  It also pushes landscape description and style as far as I can take it, borrowing from Elizabeth Bishop’s “At The Fishhouses” and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship.”

So the stories were a journey, a test, and finally the biggest truth I could tell.  And I’m so grateful for how the book has been received in the UK and Ireland.  The generosity has been overwhelming, and this has been the best time in my life.

We are very inquisitive here and love to know about the process of writing for you, is there a ritual involved, special space, special pen, special jumper (yes we've had pictures of those) Does the house have to be painted and the dog walked before you can sit down to write? Can you tell us about your writing day?

I recently finished a new novel, Caribou Island, which will be published by Viking/Penguin in January or February 2011, a little over a year from now.  I worked on that book every morning for about two hours, 7 days a week, not skipping days even for holidays.  I made no lunch dates.  I did nothing else for quite a while, because I wanted to ruminate on the book for much of the rest of each day. 

I don’t write for more than two hours because I’m afraid the work will suffer as I tire.  I wake up, grab a bowl of cereal from the kitchen, and return to sit in bed propped up with two pillows and my laptop.  I wear ear plugs, the bedroom door is closed, and my wife doesn’t come in.  The phone is off.  As I eat the cereal, I start reading through previous pages.  I read anywhere from 20 to 50 pages up to the point where I need to add new pages, and when I hit that point, I always feel afraid that nothing will come.  And the first paragraph is usually slow, taking about half an hour.  Then I write an additional two or three pages in the next half hour or hour and that’s it for the day.  I stop even if I know where I could go next, because I know it will work out better the next morning, when I’m fresh again.  And every two or three pages, every day, I try to find something.  Some richer moment, an image that becomes significant or a moment when one of the characters slows down and is revealed.  A story is always about something else, and I try to find some hint of that something else each day, or I feel I’ve failed.  It’s an emotional rollercoaster, and I do believe that if I don’t feel anything when I write, the reader won’t feel anything either.  I believe in the power of the sentence to communicate how it was created.

What do you do when you're not writing...and if there's a mention of salmon and fishing Bookhound will be very interested

The perfect day for me begins with writing but ends with a  long walk for several hours right before sunset, when the shadows are longest and the light is warmest.  And my favorite place to go for this walk is in New Zealand, where my wife and I have been residents since 2003.  So few people there, so friendly, and such beautiful land and sea.  My perfect yearly schedule would be Dec-May in New Zealand, May-Sept in Europe, sailing the Med or visiting the British Isles or other parts of Europe, then two months at most in California.  An occasional summer spent sailing and hiking Alaska.  But alas, I have to work.  I have a good job as a professor at the University of San Francisco, and so I live in California for 7 months of the year, with only 6 weeks in December and January for New Zealand.  Very sad.  Plenty of time in the summer for Europe or Alaska, and I’m very lucky in my job and should never complain, I realize, but I really am sad that we’ve never been able to fully live the New Zealand dream.  I can’t even get an interview for a job there for some reason.  Our bit of land is 5 minutes from the most beautiful harbor, deeply crenellated with bays and inlets, exposed dark South Pacific rock and lush tree ferns.  A place Bookhound would love to fish, I’m sure (and we must talk Alaskan salmon).  My wife and I have gone fishing at the mouth of the harbor, and even as we look at the mountains towering around us, we can’t believe the scenery.  It’s too beautiful to be real. 

Scroll down for prize draw copies.

Prize draw copies of Legend of a Suicide

Names in comments and three lucky winners worldwide will receive a prize draw copy of Legend of a Suicide by David Vann

Planned excursion...

By way of explanation it might be an unusual few days here at dovegreyreader and I may be a bit tardy in comments because I'm up in London for a few days, so I'm leaving you home alone in the Book Room for a browse.
Any librarians amongst you please feel free to tsk loudly and if you want to sort it all out please do have a go.

Bookhound and I went to see The Pitmen Painters at Plymouth's Theatre Royal this week, more of which when I've sorted out the superlatives, and by the time you read this I will have waved him goodbye and with a fair train and tube will hopefully have been on my third theatre trip of the month, this time musical, and will be seeing a few of the London sights on a weekend jolly with my Girl's Night In friends.
Whilst they travel home on Sunday I am staying up in London for a few more days to see and do a few more exciting things and I'll tell you all about those eventually.
Meanwhile, on Monday I hope you'll enjoy David Vann's incredibly moving replies to the dovegreyreader asks... questions on his recent novel Legend of a Suicide (and there will be a prize draw for copies of the book) and on Tuesday, David's fabulous reading suggestions.
David has also very kindly agreed to stop by on Tuesday and answer any questions and respond to any comments that you may have left for him. I've said it's impossible to predict whether there will be any or not, but if you could see your way to one or two that would be very welcoming (because I've told him you're all lovely, chatty and friendly ...hope that was alright) and if someone could make the tea and cut the cake that would be good too, and don't worry I'll do the clearing up when I get back, just make yourselves at home.

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

There's nothing to beat some comfort reading in amongst all this month's wartime reading and mine's been a Pym. I always have trouble typing Barbara...it usually wants to come out barabarabarra for some reason in the same way that I have a list of other words that always type up worngly...excatly.
I have been browsing through A Very Private Eye, Barbara Pym's Autobiography in Letters and Diaries too. I seem to do this each time I read one of her novels, just to gather in some contemporaneous detail about her life and her writing.
It might help if I didn't do this but instead picked the book up one day and just read it cover to cover because I have a completely disjointed, piecemeal collage of Barbara Pym's life with little sequence or order about it. So I was hovering around the wartime years, wondering what Babs was up to and something crops up that is complete news to me because I haven't read the book properly. So I became completely engrossed in her doomed love affair with Gordon because I hit on the news of the sadness that Barbara was feeling in June 1943

'I still love him as much as ever and nothing will alter that except meeting someone else.'

What's all this about then?
All news to me and I had to hastily backtrack to 1942, thought details seemed sparse.
Barbara had fallen for the charms of the writer and broadcaster Gordon Glover and a serious love affair ensued, serious enough at least on Barbara's part for her to burn all her diaries for that year, so little record exists beyond mentions in letters to close friends and occasional diary entries. These entries suggest a lengthy period of tearful sadness with matters complicated by the fact that Barbara was very amicably sharing a house with Gordon's ex-wife Honor and had inevitably became embroiled in the emotional melee.
In July 1943 Barbara decided to make a break and joined the WRNS working in naval censorship. Suddenly, based in Southampton, her life was an unexpected whirl of social opportunities and when she was posted to Naples in 1944 things became even more hectic but Barbara never quite lost that eye for the artificiality of her situation and the rather fraudulent disguise that she felt a uniform offered.
So there I discover the source for one of the threads in Excellent Women and one that weaves in neatly with my recent reading of Alan Allport's Demobbed. I was spoiled for choice because I have this in that perfect Virago birthday edition too, the purists might be relieved to know I've scribbled in the paperback.
Enter the delightful Mildred Lathbury, one of those classic and beloved Pym characters,

'I suppose an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people's business, and if she is a clergyman's daughter then one might really say there is no hope for her.'

and as Mildred prepares to welcome anthropologist Helena Napier, a new tenant to the flat beneath hers, she ponders her methods,

'I don't know whether spinsters are really more inquisitive than married women, though I believe they are thought to be because of the emptiness of their lives, but I could hardly admit to Mrs Napier that at one point during the afternoon I had arranged to be brushing my flight of stairs so that I could peer through the banisters and watch her furniture being brought in.'

These are the post-war years and Helena is awaiting the return of her husband Rockingham's (Rocky to his friends) return from the war. Rockingham has been very busy in the defence of his country...well as much as being the Flag Lieutenant to an Admiral in Italy and living in a luxury villa demands of him,

'Rockingham hasn't had to do anything much but be charming to a lot of dreary Wren officers in ill-fitting white uniforms, as far as I can make out.'

As a regular churchgoer Mildred has another circle of friends which inevitably includes a marriageable vicar for whom she has no intentions, in fact Mildred is almost content with her lot, it is everyone else who assumes she is not. Whilst being a wonderful observer of the emotional mayhem going on around her, Mildred is self-effacing, kindly but firm in her purpose, a lover of her independence and no slouch at spotting when she is being used, 

'Yes, it would make a nice change,' I agreed. And before long I should find myself at his sink peeling his potatoes and washing; that would be a nice change...'

Potential suitors enter stage right and and exit stage left whilst I fell into the same trap as Mildred's friends.  As the mismatched Napiers struggle with Rocky's return to civilian life and Helena's independence, which has grown considerably in his absence, Barbara Pym had me working out who would be the best partner for Mildred too.
Mildred of course, smitten by Rockingham Napier is keeping a very open mind about the whole thing,

'Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with nobody to watch one's struggles. Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite someone eating spaghetti?'

It was my read of  Excellent Women that sent me scuttling to find this quote again from an insightful piece by Barbara Brothers Living and Loving in the Novels of Barbara Pym and I've read it many times for its analysis of Barbara Pym's depiction of women

'Those who never light a flame in a man's heart... those whose prince is really a frog after all... her 'excellent women' are those 'who can just go home and eat a boiled egg and make a cup of tea and be very splendid.'

Excellent Women, published in 1952, surely demonstrates something emerging in those post war years, those early hints of feminism to come
Another Pymtastic read, every one a gentle winner to my mind and scroll down for gifts.

Prize draw copies of Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

How lovely to begin and end the week with another Fatso in the Red Suit prize draw, names in comments and Rocky, the poised, elegant and excellent,  will choose three lucky winners excatly worldwide and without getting it worng to receive a copy of Excellent Women by Bbarabaarara Pym.

and the winners are...

Congratulations to the lucky winners of a copy of Family Britain 1951-1957 by David Kynaston,

9 Carol Norton

74 Maggie May

expect a very large book to arrive eventually, so send your address to me

dovegreyreader at gmail dot com

When in Wales...

It seemed that if I was exploring Welsh literature from my armchair, as I have been doing so pleasurably with the help of Honno Press, then there was but one shrine at which I needed to pay homage.
I had to stop by at Laugharne and check out Dylan Thomas.
We had a memorable holiday in a little cottage near Laugharne, very light on facilities and mod-cons, very heavy on the damp and the woodworm and with two very small children in tow. This might have been the holiday when we decided that in future it would be far easier to stay at home.
Now I'm not even sure why we went, other than thinking that holidays are what you are supposed to do and despite the fact that we live in a holiday county and within 45 minutes of the countries most beautiful beaches. But no, it would be good to get away and explore, plus the beach at Pendine had looked perfect, miles and miles of glorious sand, until we arrived and discovered that the miles of sand were for military training and we were herded and wired off into a tiny fraction of it.
This was the early 1980s, and strangely we didn't feel welcome; call me sensitive to atmosphere but everywhere we went we were confronted with burned out holiday cottages and signs that seemed to suggest we should leave...English Go Home. It couldn't have been plainer and so after three days we did and sadly we have never returned.
We did make the pilgrimage to Laugharne though, babies in the double buggy but clearly nothing was going to go right on this holiday, we must have chosen the wrong time of day. Laugharne felt like something out of an old Western,(one of us probably whistled the old Good the Bad and the Ugly tune) we quite expected a shoot-out, deserted, closed up and very much asleep at 3pm in the afternoon, probably some tumbleweed blowing down the main street and do you ever get the odd feeling that everyone's looking at you from behind the curtains?
We glimpsed the boat house from afar in a been-there-seen-that sort of way and we left feeling thoroughly spooked and discomfited by Laugharne in particular and this bit of Wales in general, I think we caught it all on a bad day.
Now of course I want to go back and scour every inch of the place because I have been delving into the life and works of Dylan Thomas and with interesting results.
Whetting my appetite, In My Father's Places by Aeronwy Thomas, a portrait of childhood by Dylan Thomas' daughter which had arrived from publishers Constable. One of those books you open and can't put down for the quite astonishing life that Aeronwy portrays, and perhaps a really good place to start, more of that soon.
Next some purchasing was in order and my thanks to all of you for clicking through to Amazon from here because a gift voucher (which is how the commission on those clicks is paid...Amazon aren't stupid) arrived in my in box last month. Having scoured my shelves and found them devoid of much by or about Dylan Thomas I had a flurry and came away with a selection to add to Aeronwy's book. I'm even thinking about having a Welsh section over in International Corner.


The Dylan Thomas Omnibus - Under Milk Wood, Poems, Stories and Broadcasts
My Life with Dylan Thomas double drink story by Caitlin Thomas
A Child's Christmas in Wales - Dylan Thomas
and two CD sets
Under Milk Wood (the 1964 BBC version starring Richard Burton)
and Dylan Thomas reading his poetry

Mystifying that I have never really listened to Under Milk Wood until now and I'm kicking myself for the years of pleasure I could have had from it, especially Richard Burton's voice. I've got my time line in place now so realise this was the part that Dylan Thomas would have narrated himself had that spectacular lifetime of excess not caught up with him.
Is listening to Dylan Thomas reading his own poetry an acquired taste?
Am I allowed to say that I find some of his recordings slightly melodramatic? Bellowing and overwrought?
Might I be Anne Robinsoned in Wales for even suggesting that?
Already disgruntled at having to share his very own Aga mat (£1 in Tescos) with a pair of boots,

even the usually comatose Rocky stirred a fraction.
Dylan Thomas all a bit of an assault on the senses, accustomed as I am to the mellifluous tones of Ted Hughes and it will take some acclimatising, so hearing Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood was all something of a pleasing respite.

My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather

The first of my lesser-known-to-me Willa Cather purchases whilst in Oxford and  My Mortal Enemy is more of a novella set in what I would normally envisage as Whartonville not Catherland. This is New York society, as fifteen-year old Nellie Birdseye is invited to travel from Parthia, Illinois along with her Aunt Lydia to spend Christmas with Myra Henshawe in her Madison Square Garden, brownstone apartment.
The high-spirited Myra had grown up in Parthia, adopted as an orphan by a wealthy local businessman,eventually risking his wrath and subsequent disinheritance from the family fortunes by eloping with Oswald. It's been the talk of the town ever since and initially what's not to like about someone who gives up fortune for true love.
'All Myra's friends were drawn into the web of her romance' and Aunt Lydia clearly remembers every last detail of that 'thrilling night' of Myra's winter elopement, me too.. the first hint of snow and sleighs and I'm there and thinking of more Edith Wharton and the inimitable Ethan Frome. Young and impressionable, Nellie is transfixed by the confident and charismatic Myra, the hostess with the mostest, but also mystified when asking Aunt Lydia of Myra and Oswald's life...

'But they've been happy, anyhow?' I sometimes asked her.
'Happy? Oh, yes! As happy as most people.'
That answer was disheartening; the very point of their story was that they should be much happier than other people,'

With their increasing acquaintance little snippets and snitches of dislike creep in as Nellie starts to see Myra in her true colours, the falsities and the duplicitous behaviour, the moneyed friends who would certainly not be friends without the money, the unforgiving nature of Myra's temperament and slowly the illusions are replaced with the reality

'When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason has left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like a shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.'

When Nellie stumbles across Oswald and Myra living in very different circumstances some years later, there are more lessons to be learned by everyone before Willa Cather has finished her story. 
My Mortal Enemy is short, readable in one sitting but I took plenty away from that one sitting.
Marcus Klein in his 1961 introduction to my US Vintage Classics edition suggests that the book may have been based on a personal experience in Willa Cather's life. The mortal enemies are several and various, different for each character and I spent a while defining them once I had turned the final page and allowed the mood of the book to swirl around in my mind.
Marcus Klein argues that

'Willa Cather's mode was elegy, and as it must be for all elegists, the enemy was time, mortality itself.'

Klein also examines a 1936 essay by Willa Cather on the fiction of Katherine Mansfield,

'human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never wholly be satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them..'

but on reflection never has such a conflict been more evident than in the books I have read by Willa Cather to date, My Antonia, The Professor's House and now My Mortal Enemy.
Even more interesting to me for an ending that bore great similarities to that of another recent read which played tricks with my sense of disbelief, The Night Following by Morag Joss (more of that soon) yet why was my disbelief not stretched beyond capacity here?
Just how did Willa Cather sneak it through as believable, appropriate and entirely in keeping with the book?

My admiration for Willa Cather is growing steadily, book by book and it was back to A Jury of Her Peers and Elaine Showalter for more thoughts.
Elaine Showalter cites Sarah Orne Jewett as Willa Cather's great literary mentor, reminding me that I have had The Country of the Pointed Firs at the ready for about the last ten years, but I was intrigued to read of the letter that Sarah wrote to Willa, 'passing on the professional torch to her' and urging her to forsake journalism for a full-time writing career,

'If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better in your life than you did five years ago...you need to dream your dreams...to work in silence and with all one's heart, that is the writer's lot; he is the only artist who must be solitary and yet needs the widest outlook on the world.'

On book buying...

First, let me say I'm bypassing all the guilt about book buying and assuming that most of you who visit here love to buy the occasional book when finances allow (and if you're like me, even when they don't) and take great pleasure in doing so. Guilt won't be in the equation today.
I like it a great deal when a bookseller strikes up a conversation and asks or tells me more about the books I've chosen and then does a very simple thing like wrapping my books nicely in paper and sticking a label on, in fact then I'm completely smitten.
I suspect we might all be different, perhaps you prefer silent purchasing?
Perhaps you don't mind how the book is delivered into your hands?
In fact does it really matter?
Well call me fussy but it does to me because the buying is all part of the process, but the times I've been served by curmudgeonly people talking on the phone, or eating a pasty and smothering my books in greasy fingermarks before then dropping them from a great height into a plastic carrier bag are all the stuff of nightmare and legend here. I wince and mark their card because all I can envisage are the dented corners and scuffed covers, even worse just supposing the cover has bent back?
OMG excuse me...I need some air.
Especially as I will, for sure, have rummaged through what's on the shelf to find a decent unscuffed copy with undented corners. I at least like to start with a book that looks new if I've gone to the trouble of paying for it to be so, even if a week later I've written all over it and the cover's looking a bit well-worn.
In fact to digress, tell me, are you a preservationist or a fully paid up member of the I Like My Books to Look Read club?
I'm the latter, spines are for creasing and nor do I remove a dust jacket when I read, that has to go through the same real-time handling and aging process as the book itself. It might even get torn but I don't mind as long as I've done it. That said I haven't forgotten KevinfromCanada's advice recalled from his primary school days the last time I mentioned this, no spines now creased before page forty.
It was my complete pleasure to meet up with a couple of fellow bloggers whilst I was in Oxford recently and after lunch with Kirsty from Other Stories I had about half an hour before meeting Harriet from Harriet Devine's blog for afternoon tea (and I still had an evening meal at the hotel to go plus a very intense working day to follow) so I asked Kirsty to point me at ...well a bookshop of course.
The Albion Beatnik Bookstore in Walton Street, a bit quirky Kirsty had explained, but some different stock and my word it was different too.
Nice jazz music twiddling away in the background and plenty of jazz and music orientated shelves but the fiction had me mesmerised, a fantastic selection of lesser-known titles by favourite authors and many of them American. If you look for Carson McCullers elsewhere you will find the usual trinity, Ballad of the Sad Cafe, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and A Member of the Wedding and little else, well plenty more to choose from here including her letters but it was the Willa Cathers that won me over.
Two of her lesser known novels (to me) were quickly in my grasp.
Harriet tells me that there is a burgeoning movement, growing with the speed of that Guthrie-like Alice's Restaurant momentum and it's the knock-on effect of Susan Hill's book Howards End is on the Landing. Everyone is taking the pledge of abstinence and buying few or no books for a year in order to read what they already have. I can't decide whether that might be easier to fulfill when you live somewhere surrounded by bookshops so can browse at leisure but are assailed by temptation on every side, or is it harder when you live miles from a decent one and pounce on any you find, gorging your book-starved senses to the limits of book-buying gluttony?
It's noble I know and something I considered for about a minute when I read the book...but only a minute or so, with willpower like mine it's ridiculous for me even to try. I'd be setting myself up to fail, I am the one that used to spend the Child Benefit on books after all; forget shoes, the state would benefit if I could just keep almost sane with three children under the age of four. Books were my prescription to myself and have been ever since.
So heading to the till at The Albion Beatnik Bookstore how lovely to see my books carefully wrapped and handed over like gifts, which all books are no matter whether I've paid for them or they've arrived of their own accord.
As to which books I chose, more of one of them tomorrow, and of course having cleared out all that space here I've had a little bit of a spree online this week too, confessions will be in order any day.

Family Britain 1951-1957 by David Kynaston

Bookhound, being a man of conscience, often dashes out if he hears Jim the Postie's van in the lane to save him the trouble of getting out, and I can usually tell by the tone of their voices what to expect...incredulous and apologetic from Bookhound suggests an armful and often a monster tome (usually non-fiction) will be in the mix.
I love them but I also look at these doorstops and think, well it'll be 2012 before I turn the final page of that one and under the circumstances there's only one bookmark to use.
I often have books like this as a backdrop and may dip into them on an every-so-often basis building up a reading trail around them, so we'll have to do 'early assessment'... or 'interim appraisal' in order to offer fledgling thoughts on some of these chunksters in progress.
This one's a corker...Brasso, Brillo, Lifebuoy, Silvikrin,Toni Perms, rompers, knicker elastic, Green Line, trolley-buses, jumping jacks, cap guns, Uncle Mac, Nellie the Elephant and so the back cover blurb continues, I was bound to love it.
I have a feeling I may finish it long before 2012 because David Kynaston's Family Britain 1951- 1957 is my kind of history, social, relevant, page-turningly readable and completely fascinating, especially if like me you were born in the middle of it as us Coronation year babies were.

Clearly these were the years when I didn't take too much notice of what was going on out there because like all young children I was at the centre of my own universe, but I could so easily have been that little girl in the swimming costume on the cover. I don't think we ever took our buckets and spades to the banks of the River Thames, but we were regulars at Bognor Regis where perhaps I was a little housewife in training, because apparently I would happily spend all day doing this...

Well look, someone had to do it and thankfully I'm over it now but who knows what reading  this book might explain?
After all we were the generation that forsook scrubbing the floors for something else entirely and I know I have my mum in particular to thank for that...I knew from a very young age that, as a woman, I would have the education and the career that she had lost to the war.
Family Britain 1951-1957 part of a series to which I had paid little attention entitled Tales of a New Jerusalem and which will cover Britain from VE Day in 1945 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The first volume Austerity Britain must also have thudded past me unnoticed so I will have to backtrack.
Within this 700 page volume are two separate books and the first, The Certainties of Place, opens with the King and Queen visiting the 1951 Festival of Britain and at least I have the stamps to show for it.
The Festival itself something of a minor post-war miracle and seemingly, like the Millenium Dome, not without its naysayers and critics and I am already marveling at the depth of David Kynaston's anecdotal research, placing as he does so effectively well-known figures within the context of the times.
Footballer Bobby Robson continues to train three night a week at Fulham, whilst working as an electrician by day.
Princess Margaret's foot is accidentally trodden on by 'over-keen reporter' Keith Waterhouse...what was it with HRH Margaret's feet?
Struggling young actor Kenneth Williams finds it all 'madly educative and very tiring.'
Vere Hodgson (of Few Eggs and No Oranges fame) bought a cup of tea and a roll for 6 1/2d and was delighted.
Marghanita Laski and Dylan Thomas were impressed, as was a seven-year old John Simpson, though obviously in his pre-BBC days.
Sir John Barbirolli was not impressed but waited four years to say what he really thought about the Festival Hall.

These were also the days of the migration of the London population out to the twelve New Towns and though smaller houses were the new order, the luxury of indoor toilets and warmth more than compensated for the cramped, single-room conditions that many families had been living in. New communities had to be created out of the people and the buildings, and there was much dismay about shared front gardens and wire for fences which revealed the contents of washing lines to the world and its mother, and what on earth was supposed to happen at a Community Centre?
No one really had a clue and for many this all took friendliness a step too far.
David Kynaston even makes politics fascinating and few writers manage that for me.
Labour can't quite decide what they stand for, Anthony Wedgwood Benn is starting to emerge on the political scene and the word is he's not to be trusted (how interesting that I now see him as one of the few to trust) and Margaret Roberts is about to marry Dennis Thatcher.
At the cinema the film of the moment is The Lavender Hill Mob and husband and wife Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier are doing their own thing with Anthony and Cleopatra, Foxhunter is jumping at the Horse of the Year Show...I could go on and on.

Though it's these details that are making the book such a winner for me, it's not just a nostalgic wallow. David Kynaston is explaining the world and the times I was born into and setting it into a context I had never quite appreciated. The post-war anxieties, Labour's pledge to create the classless society dubbed disparagingly by Churchill as 'Queuetopia'

'We are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue. Let each wait his place till his turn comes.'

and there was my family with its working class roots, a foot on the housing ladder and living slap bang in the middle of all that.
David Kynaston utilises a wide range of women's voices too, Mollie Panter-Downes, Barbara Pym, Nella Last, Vere Hodgson and Frances Partridge, all the women diarists and journalists who were keeping a watchful eye on proceedings.
The death of the King brings the nation to an abrupt halt.
Well actually it brings the BBC to an abrupt halt with the suspension of all programmes and a diet of solemn music for the entire period of mourning,  which soon wears very thin with even the most die hard Royalists. The nation's loyalty tested to the limits without their daily diet of entertainment and Mollie Panter Downes told the New Yorker as much in her regular letter.

'there are few English who do not say frankly that the time has dragged like a year and who are not relieved it is over.'

Interesting too are the details of that famous picture of Queen Mary with two Queen Elizabeths in mourning, which created quite a stir when the Daily Express published it prompting loud mutterings of shocking impropriety. But I had always wondered about those veils which from film footage had always seemed impervious to light, so I was pleased that David Kynaston solved the mystery with an extract from the Crossman diaries,

'After the coffin came the most extraordinary sight, the Queens and Princesses...clothed in dead black, swathed and double swathed with veils so thick they couldn't read the order of service through them.'

Magic Moments one of the songs my mum and I used to sing and this book is full of them. (Que Sera Sera was our other favourite and that's probably relevant too.)
So I'm galloping on now, Barbara Pym's Excellent Women has just been published (and finally I've read that) and David Kynaston, my friendly guide, is about to delve into education. I'll be back with an update but searching around for some fiction to suit, quite by chance I started A.S.Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden, which couldn't be more appropriate for the era. I'm in complete reading clover right now.  
Scroll down for gifts.

Prize draw copies of Family Britain 1951-1957 by David Kynaston

I'm only going to whisper this but like last year, we have some lovely prize draws coming up in the weeks before that season when we hang up stockings and, to quote the poet Matthew Sweeney, the 'Fatso in the red suit' comes down the chimney and puts things in them.
Now I know I know, no one wants to think about all that yet but in order to get done in good time we'd better make a start.
Where better than with today's offering, two great big copies of Family Britain 1951-1957 by David Kynaston which Bloomsbury will happily send out worldwide.
It's early to be putting up this picture but I do it every year and really I'd quite like to get it out of the way and forgotten and it's appropriate today. This is Christmas 1950s and me and my brother visiting the 'Fatso in the red suit' at Kennards in Croydon circa 1957 ... I look happy and relaxed sitting there don't I (NB clenched fist) and there's my brother grinning away with gratitude that he hasn't had to perch on that lap.
Names in comments and Rocky (another Fatso it has to be said) aka Santa Paws, will set to waxing up the runners and painting the sleigh and start delivering...remember last year?
If you can see your way to obliging, his preference is for a soothing stroke and a nice dish of local fare when he arrives followed by a sojourn on a plumped up cushion in a place of warmth before he continues on his travels.
Names in comments and let's get this year's sleigh underway.

and the winners are...

Congratulations, the owner of the paw has woken long enough to do the draw and copies of  Demobbed by Alan Allport will be winging their way to

17  Verity

23  Liz F

45  Pauline

If you could e mail your addresses to me at dovegreyreader at gmail dot com there will be a nice thud on the doormat soon.

Knitting update...

I was having a browse through the V&A online collection thanks to a link from Karen at Cornflower.
I'm really looking forward to the V&A's exhibition of British quilts coming up in March 2010 and I'd had a look at those and was just idly flicking through the knitting collection which Karen had warned would happen, it's addictive and interesting and then I hit the third page .
Nothing quite like spotting something of your own which is now in the V&A as I realised when I saw this.

This was my mum's Knitting Nancy, "keeps our little girls busy" and handed on to me as a child and look, there's even some on there that I've done earlier...well, about fifty years earlier I think.

It did keep me busy and don't ask me how many miles of this I made and never quite knew what to do with next and it would seem that 'Wendy', whose box now resides in the V&A didn't know either because she's made 810cms of it.
I think the idea was to stitch it into a coil and make place mats and things but mine never got that far and nor can I believe that a six year old would now be allowed to wield that lethal stabbing needle thing, how nobody lost an eye we'll never know.
 
Carrying on with my completer-finisher pledge these are off the needles and ready for the feet.

Don't you just love the unpredictability of a ball of Noro?
This used about two thirds of one skein leftover from the gilet and a standard top-down sock pattern invention using 36 sts on 6mm dpns. Doing the maths that meant 18 stitches (half) for the heel flap and then picking up 9 stitches (quarter) each side of the flap once the heel was turned and into gussetting. Very quick to do and perhaps a really good starter sock now I think about it because you get encouraging results in a single evening.
Hopefully that makes sense to all you sock-knitters out there and what a plethora of them I have come across in all this wartime reading.
Then a little gift of a hat for the new baby of a work colleague and finished off with my first attempt at something called I-cord, (aka Idiot cord and invented by Elizabeth Zimmerman)  so simple to do on dpns once I'd got the hang of it and which in the end resembled all those yards of Knitting Nancy.

It's theatre time

Things like buses do come in threes, perhaps they even come in fours and fives and we just stop counting but three it is for this month's theatre visits.
I shall be a fully-fledged Westend Whinger apprentice by the end of November and have been cutting my teeth again on the annual village drama production before moving onwards and upwards to the Theatre Royal in Plymouth and thence to the pinnacle of my theatrical month, London, the music, the greasepaint, the boards  and the bright lights, by which time I will be an expert.
I didn't take my camera so have had to rely on last year's pictures to illustrate, but little changes front of house.
We'd decided against taking a box in the village hall and settled on plastic chairs seats in the front row of the dress circle also known as Row E. Rows A-D being the stalls and Rows H to the back, the gods.

Pre-show supper was in the kitchen watching the news before remembering to exchange slippers for shoes and heading into the traffic.
Nightmare I tell you, we should have allowed far more than five minutes, seven at least.
Rush hour...country lanes...who'd drive 'em.
More time spent going backwards than forwards and then the parking ...well don't even get me started on the parking.
Twas a rotten stormy evening, severe weather warnings urging us not to venture forth unless absolutely necessary but we'd paid £5 a ticket and there was a raffle. You might recall my success at the Village Show raffle back in September so clearly the village hall a source of great luck and good fortune for me as long as the roof stayed on and only lifted with the rapturous applause, not the force ten gales.
It's a little corrugated iron structure and there were no certainties but we all piled in as usual.

Bookhound and I settled down in our front row of the dress circle seats, right alongside the Playgroup, which we now have to call Pre-School, notice board and some very nice colouring-in and glittery pictures. We'd forgotten the chocolates but the row behind hadn't so it was good to have that regular rustling going on as we settled down to enjoy Trivial Pursuits by Frank Vickery. Unfortunately we were also seated behind the tallest man in West Devon but we managed.
Here's the plot...

"The leading lights of the Trealow & District Operatic Society meet at director Nick and his wife, Roz's home to hear what their next production will be. As the evening wears on everyone has far too much to drink and some members try to influence Nick's choice of the new production - by all sorts of devious means. They drink even more and lots of bitchy bickering breaks out.
Derek cannot get used to his impending divorce and Deidre, his soon to be ex-wife arrives with a new man - television addict Eddie (in real life the man from the garden centre)
Nick is having an affair with Jessica (in real life the practice nurse from the surgery)
Joyce a once talented actress is an alcoholic.
Teddy is delightfully camp and alternately sweet and strident.
There are plenty of mishaps - the barbecue wont light and then when paraffin is poured on it it goes up in flames and Teddy is badly burnt. Eddie climbs on the roof to change the television aerial to get better reception and Derek agrees to donate money to the Society as long as Deidre gets a leading role.
And what will the next production be??"

Enough there to keep us all amused and it was of course hilarious, moments of pure farce, brilliant acting as always, the funniest finale I have seen in many a long year which had us all crying with laughter and all replete with those wonderfully endearing moment of AmDram production
...the hand that creeps out to assist the recalcitrant curtain stuck on the rope pulley opening device.
...the prompt who comes in after a bit of a silence with a whispered line.
Then in the interval the tubs of ice cream, (the Whingers would not have approved, no bar) though sadly my luck was out with the raffle.
So that's my first November theatre event done, two to go.

The Tamar, roused and blinking...

There's a line in Anna Akhmatova's poem Requiem which comes into my mind whenever I see or hear a river

'Quietly flows the quiet Don;
into the house slips the yellow moon...'

I have no idea why that line became the essence of that poem for me but it did, along with a couple of others like

'I've woven them a garment that's prepared
out of poor words, those that I overheard..'

Most of the time it's quietly flows the quiet Tamar here, it just trips along across the way and apart from the ethereal early morning mist that hovers over the river and follows it around the valley in front of us, we don't even know it's there.

You may recall the river looked like this a few weeks ago.

Until we have a few days of a drenching downpour that is and like many of you we've had torrential of late.
Then I can only think of Ted Hughes' poem Rain Charm for the Duchy in which he brings all the rivers of Devon to life with the awakening battle cry of a storm that ends months of drought...

'Thunder was breaking up the moors. It dragged tors over the city..' 

and we get a mention.

'And the Tamar, roused and blinking under the fifty-mile drumming,
Declaiming her legend - her rusty knights tumbling out of their
  clay vaults, her cantrevs assembling from shillets,
With a cheering of aged stones along the Lyd and the Lew, the
  Wolf and the Thrushel...'

Cantrevs appropriately 'small kingdoms' I discover, so from that rural, back-of-beyond kingdom of our own choosing, and accustomed as we are to its silence, you open the bedroom windows and immediately hear that distant river-roar.
So a break in the weather and there seemed to be enough blue sky to make a sailor a pair of trousers, which is supposed to be a good sign, and I set off on a book-thinking walk down to the river to have a look.
At this stage please note the word 'down'.
The road is long but hardly winding to begin with

and the skies cleared enough to kit out the entire navy and a lovely view of yonder homestead from various gateways

Plenty of surface water

and then uncertain skies

Finally the Tamar, roused, blinking and definitely drumming,

and with a precarious lean a glimpse of the debris under the bridge...there's a job for someone...somehow

So with all that downhill, there can only be one way back and that's up and it's steep, so I'm afraid I cheated. Bookhound arrived, we had a swift half in the pub and then home





 

Dew on the Grass by Eiluned Lewis

Dew on the Grass by Eiluned Lewis, (Welsh expertise please...Ay-loo-ned ?) and first published in 1934, has been another happy read and a gorgeous cover from Honno Press.
Unlike my last Honno foray into the writing of Margiad Evans aka Peggy Whistler from Uxbridge, Eiluned Lewis was born and bred in the Welsh countryside in 1900, the daughter of a wealthy Montgomeryshire landowner Hugh Lewis and his wife Eveline.
The family lived in comfortable circumstances at Glan Hafran and Dew on the Grass is another fictional autobiography, a child's eye view of life in Wales in the early twentieth century and offering a very different perspective to the poverty-stricken mining community accounts that I have also been reading.
There are pictures of Glan Hafran and its surroundings but also the visitors, J.M.Barrie and the Lost Boys; Michael and Nicholas Llewellyn Davies were regular guests and joined in all the theatricals of which the young Eiluned, Lucy in the book, is so fond.
Interestingly it was another Lost Boy, Peter Davies, who first published Dew on the Grass in 1934.
Nine-year old Lucy is the younger sister of Delia with six-year old brother Maurice whose measurements are all etched on the stable door along with three year old Miriam

'who ran to width rather than height and barely managed to reach the keyhole.'

What follows is an evocative, enchanting stream-of-consciousness account of a child's life through a child's eyes, a compression of childhood memory released with all those seemingly minor incidents that assume such great significance with the application of a nine-year old mind.
Between them, Lucy and Delia have sufficient imaginative resources to sustain a nation and day after day they are allowed to exercise it with play and make-believe, all occasionally interrupted by education in the shape of a visiting teacher who tries to put the girls through their paces, but largely against the odds when the freedom and adventures of Pengarth (Glan Hafran) beckon. Children's maid Louisa also has her hands full with Lucy's regular dramatic re-enactments of imaginary adventures

'Lucy would begin in a thrilling voice: 'She put her foot on the cold marble step..."
'Don't go putting your bare feet on the washstand." Louisa interrupted
"She looked at the great keep above her." the tragic tale went on; "the rushing moat below. And all around she heard the sound of war and tumult. Then a voice cried:' Mother! Mother' but she answered: 'Daughter! Daughter! What canst I do for thee?'...
'Naught! Naught! I will cast myself into the moat below.' "
"You'll break the springs of the bed if you carry on like that," remarked Louisa folding up the clothes.'

There are all those certainties of childhood, the world that seems to revolve around a child's magnificent flights of imaginative fancy and parents who are able to provide for this to happen; there's no question it's a privileged world with only occasional intrusions from the realities of the poverty of those around them. A fire in an estate cottage and we learn little of what happens to the occupants, Lucy's father much more exercised over how he will rebuild, whilst the arrival of a tramp signifies the destitution and poverty that was blighting the mining communities.

Plenty of timeless childhood moments of nostalgia too.
The counting games to choose who would be 'it' ..."Ip dip sky blue, who's it not you" in my day, Lucy has something far more interesting involving the Virgin Mary.
Then that fishpond game with the rods and lines with the magnets on the end.
What about the way the eyes always came out of a teddy bear (horrors...remember them on great long bits of lethal wire?) and the teddy had to remain eyeless ever after because putting them back in just made them look all wrong.
In fact look, I found my second-best bear, the eyeless Bimbo who would be impressed upon me when I'd been sick on the equally eyeless best bear Fred, who was a complete person with a soul and feelings and was very real let me tell you, and who would have to be mysteriously whisked off for 'laundering'.

There's just no way to make Bimbo look pretty or to convey even the merest hint of what he meant to me as a child or how I felt when he needed surgical intervention... I hope you've all got strong stomachs, I'm having to look away when I see this, I probably cried for weeks. In fact it's all reminding me that I passed it onto my own children, Offspringette was distraught for days when her beloved Marmite's head came off and I was a nervous wreck trying to stitch it back on.

There are some gloriously funny moments in Dew on the Grass too, a child's impression of hymns and the day Lucy ponders about heaven,

'I thought that everyone in heaven - Jesus and the angels and all - went to bed in a long room, and in the early morning I would get up, very quietly, and put on my cap and apron and cook breakfast and make the coffee. Then when Jesus woke up He would be very surprised and pleased and say: " Well done thou good and faithful servant!"

Lucy, the writer in the family proceeds to compose a Liturgy of her own for an all-purpose pet's funeral,

O dog of dogs, have mercy on us sinners,
Be good to us, O King, and make us joyful;
Save us from all breaking and illness... ARMEN'

So a childhood exquisitely recalled but with that growing realisation that Delia will be the first to leave this safe world of the imagination and head off for boarding school; suddenly Delia is above it all and owns a proper tennis racquet and life will never be quite the same at Pengarth / Glan Hafran again.
Katie Gramich's excellent introduction offers more unique insights into Lucy's frequent blurring of those boundaries between the real and the imaginary which for me made reading this book such a pleasure, and any mention of comparisons of this child-centred narrative to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield is always going to strike the right note too. Likened in her lifetime to a host of good authors...Jane Austen, Mrs Gaskell, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Arthur Ransome and Kenneth Grahame, I have to agree with Reginald Massey, it is indeed sad that Eiluned Lewis is almost forgotten today.
But really it's Lucy aka Eiluned herself that you love for the way that the world of the grown-up makes so little sense

'How did grown-ups manage to exist all day with so little imagination? They even dressed in the morning without imagining themselves other than they were, whereas Lucy felt that she could never bear to put on clothes at all if she were not consoled at every phase by pretending to be someone else - the Young Acrobat, the White Lady or the Innocent Child.'

On making space...

So the books have been arriving for about three years now and I have read quite a lot of them, skimmed plenty more, read the first few pages of most and only a few have remained mostly unopened... Zombies -  A Record of the Year of Infection has been a tough call. But eventually we had reached tipping point, many were not going to get a third chance and something had to give before it was the foundations of the house. Books not only from the last three years of dovegreyreader but from the last forty or more of book buying.
I have also finally convinced myself that I really don't need four copies of Middlemarch, five of Pride and Prejudice, doubles if not trebles of most of Dickens... which is a bit rich when I'm not a devoted die hard fan, quadruples of all the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald's and so it went on...and on.
How odd then that I go on a little stroll to visit old friends around the blogosphere and find that over at Me and My Big Mouth, Scott Pack has been doing likewise.
Like Scott, I know those I might want to read and those I want to keep and I also give many of the others away to friends and old work colleagues, but eventually I think people even get fed up with that.
Selling them would probably be sensible just to pay the monthly Typepad bill, but in fact that's now covered by those clicks to The Book Depository ( that many of you make from the link over here >>>>> and thank you for every one of them.)  Selling is fine if I've paid for the books in the first place, but so many have come to me free, and something just doesn't feel quite right about that.
So I set to and blazed a trail through it all a few weeks ago, it took all day and Bookhound finally delivered twenty eight bags of books to the The Children's Hospice South West shop in Tavistock last week and narrowly avoided a parking ticket in the process.
The poor volunteers had to sit down and do some deep breathing as they surveyed the floor from till to door and the carrier bags snaking around the shop, but they are well-stocked for a while and I have known so many families who have benefited from children's hospice care, so the cause feels completely local and worthwhile.
But I almost feel like I can breath again, though I wonder if you struggle to part with books as I do?
It really is against my religion so I have to pick the book up first, gaze at it and see if I get a pang, which could be why it took all day.
I can't describe a pang, it's just a fleeting moment when even the most obscure book can exert an unspoken influence and hint at future usefulness, who knows when I might need it.
The first unwanted book is the worst, after that it gets easier and soon I was running out of bags and it felt good too; being surrounded by a bottom-less pit of un-read-ness, which looked likely to remain unread, had been starting to feel weighty, to crowd and panic me a bit.
This of course not an entirely risk-free strategy because there is every chance that Bookhound, doing his rounds of the bookshelves in the town's charity shops, will buy back one of my own books having picked it up and got that pang that he gets of the 'this might come in useful' variety.
This could just go on into infinity and beyond.
I do now however feel quite light as a feather, the house foundations seem safe for a while and can you believe I got a bit of a pang when I opened Zombies - The Year of Infection and kept it?
Who knows how handy that might be because I hate to tell all the purists and the Janeites out there but, in need of humour, I bought a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith at Paddington station, realising that I'd been in London all day and hadn't bought a single book, and I'm really sorry but I'm afraid I was ....well... er.... I was enraged at the desecration of a sacrosanct text shaking with laughter before the train had even got past the points and the signal box,

'Unmentionables poured in, their movements clumsy yet swift...some wore gowns so tattered as to render them scandalous...
'As guests fled in every direction, Mr Bennet's voice cut through the commotion. "Girls! Pentagram of Death!"
Elizabeth immediately joined her four sisters in the centre of the dance floor. Each girl produced a dagger from her ankle and stood at the tip of an imaginary five-pointed star...by the time the girls reached the walls of the assembly hall, the last of the unmentionables lay still...

When Jane and Elizabeth were alone, the former, who had been cautious in her praise of Mr Bingley before, expressed to her sister just how very much she admired him
    "He is just what a young man ought to be," said she, " sensible, good-humoured, lively; and I never saw such happy manners! So much ease with such perfect good breeding!"
    " Yes," replied Elizabeth, "but in the heat of the battle, neither he nor Mr Darcy were to be found with blade or bludgeon."

I'm not sure whether the conceit will stand up to 300 pages-worth of unrelenting mayhem. I fear not and  I suspect the originality and humour may wear a bit thin after repetition, but it lasted all the way to Exeter which was good enough for me and I couldn't help but wonder what the very nearly Mrs Bigg-Wither would have made of it all.

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann arrived from Penguin with plaudits months ago and I shelved it but I knew I would have to read it.
David Vann admits in his acknowledgments that he was writing about an uncomfortable topic, his father's suicide during his own childhood and confiding that

'there's exposure in these stories. They're fictional but based on a lot that's true.'

To my mind that's a high risk personal strategy involving courage and emotional maturity, a confidence in your own ability to be able to take it all out and look at it again, probably recall some of the most traumatic events in your life, because the suicide of a close relative forces those left behind to traverse a lifelong territory they had no intention of crossing.
That journey can be a minefield and, whilst reading Legend of a Suicide as fiction, I inevitably spent a great deal of time wondering where those mines had been laid for David Vann. If something like this happens in childhood the problem is compounded, that loss has to be re-experienced again and again through each stage into adulthood and beyond, each time it surfaces it may be as raw and excruciating as it the day it happened, so I don't underestimate the difficulties David Vann may have encountered.
Phyllis Silverman has written one of the best books I have come across on the subject of bereaved children, those young but 'fully-fledged mourners', A Parent's Guide to Raising Grieving Children. I refer to it constantly in my day to day work and she talks of her book as a 'road map for a long journey'. I know the 'journey' word is becoming a bit of a cliche these days (from X Factor to Strictly via I'm a Celeb) but in the context of mourning I cannot think of a better one, and David Vann's book feels like an integral part of his own journey and that need to make sense of what had happened, perhaps to understand.
Whilst it may be stating the obvious to issue a health warning I'd be negligent not to, Legend of a Suicide may inevitably make for traumatic reading if you have any experience of such a tragedy and
brace yourself for a massive shock about half way through too, quite a devastatingly bizarre and unexpected twist that threw me off course completely. I was settling in and expecting one story when quite suddenly it was as if I'd been turfed out of a slightly uncomfortable hammock, but one I was just about managing to keep balanced and on an even keel.
I metaphorically spent the rest of the book lying on a hard cushionless floor.
The title seemed to be offering me first clues with the various interpretations of that word 'legend', both as an event acquiring mythical status, but also in twenty-first century speak as a hero.
Roy and his father Jim are both legend and hero to each other, but that realisation comes in various ways and at differing times in the book as perceptions are shattered and reshaped constantly between them. Legend of a Suicide consists of five novellas of varying length and narrative perspective and to approach it as a novel makes for interesting reading because it becomes almost impossible to get a sense of reading continuity between them. Each one positions reader and characters slightly differently and perhaps that is the point, the disjointed, jarring moments that don't quite seem to fit and are quite unsettling, once I'd been turned out of that hammock my confusion perhaps mirrored that of the characters in the book.
I haven't told you much about the plot and I don't really want to focus on that for fear of giving anything away but it is Sukkwan Island the backwoods Alaskan survival experience shared by Jim and a thirteen-year old Roy that forms the backbone of the book. Roy becomes father to the man, disturbed by, yet sensitive and perceptive to the needs of his father, whilst Jim is completely unable to 'send his life into another's' and understand his son.
I suspect that like me you will tell no one the details of that shock moment if you read the book.
We have to keep the faith about it as we have kept it over Kevin in Lionel Shriver's book. If someone tries to tell you before you read this, just block your ears and la-la your way through it.
Carol Staudacher in another really excellent book, Beyond Grief, suggests,

' It is vital to understand that suicide is not solely the result of some sudden-bizarre impulse; nor is it one single act which can be isolated and analyzed without examining the whole life context in which it occurred.'

And to some extent that is what David Vann has explored in Legend of a Suicide.
I rarely read what the review pages have to say while I'm reading a book, a bit like I won't ask for directions if I'm lost, I just have to figure these things out for myself and it may take me some time, but once I'd drafted out my thoughts I did have a skate around and this book is getting some really good and well-deserved coverage,
I just can't better Tom Bissell's splendid observation in the New York Times Review so I have to share it here

'The central event of "Sukkwan Island," shocking for several reasons, appears to take place in a parallel universe. The Roy and the father of the other stories cannot be the Roy and the father of this story. Vann does not choose to explain this, and he should not have to. But it is strange, like encountering Borges, in waders, within "A River Runs Through It." 

and I was quite relieved to see that Observer reviewer Alexander Linklater and I are of like mind

'Then there is the third thing you need to know which is, rather, something you must not know. As this book reimagines its central death, an event occurs that utterly transforms the encounter between protagonist, father, author and reader. Do not let anyone tell you what this event is before you start. To know what happens in advance would be to spoil not just a narrative surprise in a heart-thumping tale, but the entire apparatus Vann has constructed to wrench out the dreadful and meaningless facts of existence, to master them, and, in a violent act of fictional transmogrification, to reconfigure them as something not less, but more real.'

It wasn't just me that fell out of my hammock and took a vow of silence then.
So I hope I've given you the essence, an emotionally charged and challenging book but one that is echoing and reverberating in mind still, moments when I really thought I might suffocate as I read, but having fought my way to the surface and the final page, a book I am actually glad to have read.
Now it has me searching my shelves for more father and son books and I seem to have a dearth beyond Turgenev's Fathers and Sons and Joseph Roth's Zipper and His Father, so all suggestions welcome.
Meanwhile, if you decide to read Legend of a Suicide I'd love to know your thoughts.

Team Ulysses - Camp Five

A really tricky reading month here but I'm not going to mess with the mountain or make excuses Team Ulysses because I think that's been more about me than the book. It's all been down to other books which I haven't wanted to set aside and trips away which play havoc with life in general and my reading in particular. I choose traveling reading which is most definitely not Ulysses, so I knew I was going to be very last minute, if I made it at all.
But I did and even managed some background reading from  Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation - A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties & Thirties by Noel Riley Fitch.
The more I read the more I feel I want to know (it always happens, I can't stop myself) about this book's background and its genesis in the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop. James Joyce declared by Leon Edel in the puffs on the book to be

'the most incredible literary leech of all time.'

But with relevance to the two sections I have read this time, Sirens and Cyclops just knowing those extra details about the friendship between Sylvia Beach and Joyce has added an extra level of enjoyment to this month's reading.
James Joyce described in a play by Tom Stoppard as

'an essentially private man who wishes his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized'

The whole process of publication seems to have been akin to the twelve labours of Hercules for the poor long-suffering Sylvia Beach who admitted that Joyce's affairs were considerably more trouble to her than many an ordinary author. This all compounded by her willingness to allow Joyce the indefinite right to correct the proofs. Joyce made copious additions and the proofs became legendary for containing more handwriting than print.

' There were light moments of friendhsip and mutual excitement associated with the birth of Ulysses. Joyce would read aloud from Ulysses for her, often the Cyclops section. They would burst into peals of laughter at Joyce's rendering of the dog and joke about the growth of the novel. Joyce would tell her that Ulysses was no longer than many other novels, such as The Forsyte Saga, only instead of running into many volumes, his was packed into on hold-all.'

Sirens was a mystery read in a cloud of unknowing here, and but for footnotes I would have had little idea of the musical connotations that Joyce was aiming for. The deeper into Ulysses I wander the more aware I become of those parts which need to be read aloud and which I do in a sort of sotto voce mutter which would sound very odd if you overheard me. But I am also picking up the Odysseyian hints more frequently and given my scant knowledge of the sirens and their ability to lure the sailors onto the rocks, though I nearly ended up on the rocks again myself, I did see those analogies with the bar maids and the punters. I did emerge from that section, yet again, and to my ongoing complete and utter amazement, with some sense of what had happened, and of course laughing at Leopold's final Pprrpffrrppfff.
How long did it take James Joyce to work out how to spell flatulence I wonder?
With occasional mention of stars fading, that line from The Duchess of Malfi also kept flitting into my mind,

'Look you, the stars shine still'

Please don't think I have The Duchess of Malfi, at my fingertips because I don't, but that was quoted in a book I read last year, Molly Fox's Birthday by Irish author Deirdre Madden, and it's stuck in my mind.
However I was a bit pleased with myself and kept dashing to the footnotes thinking I'd been really clever to pick up a Joycean reference to something obscure, only to find that I seem to be on my own with that connection.
Heading on into Cyclops, feeling slightly one-eyed and mystified, how pleased I was to be able to say I've been there when the reading of the obituaries mentioned Barnfield Crescent in Exeter and I've probably been driven past 179 Clapham Road, Stockwell on many an occasion.
How odd that something like that draws you back into a book and much to laugh at alongside James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, especially the list of those Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity engraved on the seastone girdle 'which dangled at every movement of his portentous frame'...William Tell, Thomas Cook & Son and the Last of the Mohicans suddenly making an appearance and lest we forget, the Queen of Sheba, and Lady Godiva.
I'm also getting a sense of other people's unfavourable opinions about Leopold Bloom and also wondering when Stephen will really come to life, he seems like a minor and rather undeveloped character thus far.
I keep thinking back to Declan Kiberd's reference to his Dublin-born father's love of Ulysses, parts known by heart, parts glossed over and wondering which they were and for this month I'm trying yet another new schedule, the book is sitting on my desk and I will read a few pages each day.
Time for Joan's thermos of comfort soup now I think but don't miss Lisa's fantastic in-depth Team Ulysses thoughts over at ANZ Litlovers Litblog and please let's hear news of how you are all doing, the suspense is killing me....
Simon S is that you waving at us from the peak of Mount Garnet Vickers?
Ellinchador did you make a dent in it?
KevinfromCanada still with us?
Cheryl are you still have those trudging pages with moments of joy? I am!
Lisa have you sent the spouse away again?
Lauren, Curzon and Lesley Ann are you still there pitching the tents ahead of us and cooking up a feast?
Lesley have you got your breath back and stayed with us?
Erika, could you pass those chocolate biscuits around?
Novel Insights and Knitting Out Loud can you hear me...are you still there?
Caroline, have you given up your footnote tendency and has Declan Kiberd helped? Declan has been my best friend this month.
ss are you still doing the listening version and swimming gently rather than climbing strenuosly?
Sandpiper, did you ditch that bookmark?
Jean, any more unexpected crevasses to distract or are you bivouacked here at Camp Five already?
Do you all realise that by Camp Six we will have passed the halfway point?
How amazing is that?

Auntie

So here I am and on time, even the iron exploding and taking out all our electricity the night before hadn't stood in my way.

'And who is expecting you?'
So I gave the producer's name with whom I had been in close contact all week getting these 400 words that I had to read out just right.
Frown...type into computer....another frown.
'Oh well she's based in Bristol.'
Might you have felt a bit sick then too?
Had I just jumped to conclusions? Was I really supposed to be in Bristol?
That would be just like me.
Fortunately all was well, right place, right time, right shoes and so I sat in the foyer and waited.
This helped no end. Nothing like a bit of Latin leering down at you to make you feel a bit daunted and out of your depth.

To the rescue O Level and I'd almost done a translational guess that my Latin teacher (who might still read this) would have been proud of by the time I was led through here
 
The programme, Off the Page presented by Dominic Arkwright requires lively studio debate so you can but oblige and after about a minute you completely forget the world will listen to all this and you're away, so heaven knows what I said but I think it is scheduled to broadcast on Thursday December 3rd at 1.30pm and I'll be leaving the country that morning:-)
One thing I will apologise for.
I read my intro piece out slowly as requested by several of you, enunciated wonderfully and expressively and didn't cough once. Except it was too slow and when the producer came back into the studio with retakes and everyone had a few words to repeat or the odd line, not me, I had to do the whole lot again and all I could think was 'they'll kill me for reading this so fast'.
Sorry.

The smoke

London, for anyone who gets there as infrequently as I do is always a bit of an adventure and this trip was no exception.
London in late Autumn

All those Plane leaves to scuff through and pewter skies that left me so convinced I was in for a drenching and would turn up at the BBC sporting the 'Just Up From the Sticks- Drowned Rat' look that it sent me scurrying off to buy a brolly...which was a cue for the day to remain dry.
But those do look like rain clouds don't they?
I love those views around every corner of the Telecom Tower...pshaw to that, it's the GPO tower,
and I was reminded, with a guilty smile, of the lanky Physics teacher who was the only one tall enough to play the double bass in the school orchestra without needing a stool to stand on, and who we fondly called the GPO Tower as a result.
I was on Blue Plaque alert as I walked from Baker Street, along Marylebone High Street, stopping here of course

and heading along here looking for the obvious one

Was it my imagination? Had the Barretts of Wimpole Street all been a figment of fiction?
I couldn't find it and didn't know then what I know now, it's No 50, but round the corner in Cavendish Square a name I did know.
 
Sir Frederick Treves, the surgeon who brought the Elephant Man to the London Hospital but anyone who has worked in an operating theatre knows a set of Treves forceps when they see them. Even me who decided theatres wasn't my bag after a surgeon threw a set of tonsils at me, heaven knows what it might have been the week after.  All surgeons invent something and name it after themselves and as Sir  Frederick performed the very first appendicectomy he probably had to invent quite a lot.
I always think it's good to see what London fashion is dictating for our Christmas decorations this year...

before I drag in the Christmas bough for the kitchen and get the box of ancient tatty old bits down from the loft as usual. This year perhaps perforated by the seven mice...the invasion seems to have stopped at seven.
Then around the next corner, Auntie was waiting for me...

The Wooden Doctor by Margiad Evans

Had I actually finished Charlotte Bronte's The Professor the last time I picked it up I might have been able to offer you some Bronte-esque comparisons to certain aspects of The Wooden Doctor by Margiad Evans, but I've been stuck on p96 of The Professor for the last four months, so I can't...well not with any certainty anyway and I'd better not speculate beyond saying I sense echoes of schools in Belgium.
But The Wooden Doctor has been another splendid read from Welsh women's press, Honno. First published in 1933 and like  Eunice Fleet by Lily Tobias, this novel also met with enthusiastic reviews,

'an astonishing story...Heavens! What characters and what a plot!...This young woman can write.'

Sales never quite met up to that enthusiastic critical reception and yet another book went the way of  lost classics.
And The Wooden Doctor is an astonishing story.
Narrated in the first person by Arabella, a tormented young girl who, emerging from a childhood blighted by a violent, alcoholic father and with veiled implications of much darker abuse, finds herself seriously ill at the age of twelve, an illness for which her mother ominously blames her father. Dr Flaherty pays a house call and Arabella develops an infatuation for him that develops into an obsession from which she can find no release. More serious illness follows and with it an exploration of the impact of Arabella's unrequited love for the doctor.
It's the first person narrative that does such a fine job here, locking the reader into Arabella's thought processes and her illness, described as a fox clawing away inside her and requiring all manner of delicate and painful investigations, hospital stays and long periods of convalescence, all requiring more of the hapless doctor's professional and often unchaperoned attention.
Margiad Evans' use of imagery is wide-ranging and frequently creates a wonderful correlation between landscape and Arabella's state of mind,

'Autumn, wild, angry, tumultuous, riotous autumn; killing. cleansing, ushering autumn, stripped of the gorgeous colours and the placid fruits, undimmed by hazy bonfire smoke, unseen but heard and felt in bitter storm alone at black midnight.'

and likewise the imagery of pain,

'In the night the pain came back. It was like a fox in a bag scratching and rending to get out. My spirits trailed in the dust. The claws penetrated my sleep; dragged me awake...I knew that I was ill.'

Pain not easy to describe and I'm reminded of my read of Mikhail Bulgakov's White Guard where the pain likewise leaped right off the page.
As the years move on, and Arabella's unchecked obsession gathers force, profound depression, that 'black dog', sets in and Arabella turns to the therapy of writing to help assuage her passion becoming compelled, driven and possessed as she commits everything to paper. Thus divested of the sharpness of her grief and having perhaps shed that obsession for Mr Wrong, might this be an opportune moment for Mr Right to come along?
If so, can Arabella's emotional state allow her to fall properly in love and can she sustain the demands of a grand affair?
Who will do a runner? 
Arabella or Mr Right?
Or will there be wedding bells?
Well, I couldn't possibly comment but I hope you can see that Margiad Evans has set the scene perfectly for yet another Honno ending that ratchets up the pressure on the reader in those final pages...yet again I have to implore you...DON'T READ THE LAST LINE until you get there.
But who was Margiad Evans, a name that lends itself to a wonderful Welsh lilt if you pronounce it Marg-y-ad ?
Well I hate to disappoint but Margiad was actually Peggy Eileen Arabella Whistler, born in Uxbridge, Middlesex in 1909, and quite possibly I might be more Welsh than Peggy with my Griffiths ancestors.
A childhood visit to Wales left a lasting impression on Peggy and eventually the family moved to Ross-on-Wye. But the clue really lies with Peggy's second middle name, Arabella, because this book is autobiographical fiction and with that knowledge emerge all those complex issues of identity which Sue Asbee's excellent introduction explores in some detail. Much of that which is recounted happened to Peggy and it is her own interesting picture that graces the cover of the book, and how revealing that is when you look closely and see that clawing fox.
I'd have sold a cat (perhaps) to have been at this one day centenary conference on Margiad Evans earlier this year, because for me books like this gain huge ground with the application of some twenty-first century evidence-based theories of attachment and bonding. Much interesting evidence now also available that reveals the potential impact of an abusive childhood on adult behaviour and Margiad / Peggy / Arabella's mental health unwittingly offers clear signs of that impact.
There is plenty to speculate over concerning Arabella's obsession with the doctor, perhaps the first gentle man she had ever known in her life

'All that I craved, all the things existence had so far denied me, I found in him and him only...'

and then fascinating to look at the original illness, seemingly genuine and excruciatingly painful and trying to identify when and whether that develops into something fabricated.
Was this attention-seeking behaviour?
Was it all a cry for help from a desperately and deeply disturbed mind?
Had Arabella been so abused that she had taken few coping strategies into adulthood and was this reflected in her inability to enter into normal relationships and the resultant recourse into serious and life-limiting obsession ?
Using those themes there is a great deal to explore and debate in The Wooden Doctor and I've had a rare old time talking it over with myself in the absence of a one-day conference.
In reality Margiad Evans' demise was a sad one, diagnosed with epilepsy in 1950, a brain tumour was discovered in 1956 and she died in 1958 at the age of forty-nine but she did leave us the legacy of this amazing book.

The Man Who Never Was

So I had Operation Heartbreak lined up to read and had heard Duff Cooper's son, John Julius Norwich, speaking at Dartington last year about his father, but I knew little about Duff Cooper himself, so time to head to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and back up the reading with some details.
A gifted orator and debater, Duff Cooper sustained a steady rise through the parliamentary ranks having reached the ranks of First Lord of the Admiralty in Chamberlain's pre-war cabinet, though he was seen by many as something of an 'indiscreet and belligerent firebrand'.
It was Chamberlain's Peace with Honour acceptance of the Munich agreement, at the price of Czechoslovak disintegration, which brought matters to a head.
In Duff Cooper's eyes legitimate reasons for war had been lost and, having seen and been considerably alarmed by Hitler's Nuremberg rallies in the early 1930s, Cooper had been warning of the inevitability of war for some time. Sensing that war remained inevitable but would now be one declared with dishonour, Duff Cooper tendered his resignation in 1938, but returned to the Ministry of Information under Churchill's leadership in 1941.
More visits to my primary source and his veteran's point of view and the Tinker always says, 'you needed to be there and to be living it to know'. He concurs with the opinion that though Chamberlain may have been pilloried for the Munich agreement, he bought this war-thirsty country, predominantly eager though unprepared as it was for war, some very valuable time.
Duff Cooper seems well placed to write a book like this, though Max Arthur mentions in his afterword that the novel's post-war appearance caused some consternation in diplomatic circles, fearing that it might harm Anglo-Spanish relations, whilst even suggesting that perhaps the operation might need to be repeated one day. Cooper was having none of that (indiscretion and belligerence to the fore) pointing out that Operation Heartbreak was fiction and in any case it was one of Churchill's oft-recounted dinner party stories.
And how clearly I remember the film, The Man Who Never Was.

One of those dreary 1950s winter Sunday afternoons, soaking up something of a war of which I knew little except that we'd "won" and my dad had helped.
Am I right about that opening scene, a deserted beach, waves lapping on the shore and... I look back now on all that heroic post-war glory that we imbibed as children and when I see the films again now, with a little more knowledge and life under my belt, it's slightly embarrassing to think we would then go out and play wars and battleships and heaven knows what else.
I'd take my maroon, coach-built doll's pram with me because I was a girl and girls did then, but it made a brilliant tank and with my roller skates on I could certainly rev up a good charge down Queen Anne's Gardens where my best friend Ann and her sister Christine lived, plus it was a cul-de-sac and very few cars...I'd be wearing a smocked frock, just visualise that if you can.
Novel, real story, film, whatever I'm delighted to have finally read this book because when I took the Tinker's little memoir Bugle Boy down off the shelf, there it was, a picture of a young Tinker with the following caption.

'HMS King George V, June 1943 at the invasion of Sicily. This was taken just prior to closing up at Action Stations. We wore boiler suits as anti-flash protection and my action station was in the 14" gun turret behind me. We were about to bombard the port of Trapani, where a Herman Goering Panzer division was stationed to make them think there was a landing imminent to keep them away from the beachhead, we also bombarded the islands of Favignana and Marsala on the way through.'

I know about 14" guns now I've been to the Imperial War Museum but I can also guarantee that as we sat and watched the film and Sicily was mentioned, the Tinker would have said 'I've been there' and we'd all have groaned and said ' you always say that,' because he did, and we'd have laughed without really understanding that actually he had been and why.

Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper

Operation Heartbreak had sat unread on my shelves since it was first published by Persephone Books in 2004, but I've been browsing the books again with new eyes for this year's November reading and several have been a perfect fit.
This one has the lovely blue endpapers taken from a Jacqmar printed rayon entitled 'Happy Landings'
and I know those  little decorative flourishes at the top of each page are carefully chosen too... for Operation Heartbreak these like little sets of wings.
It was interesting to walk around the Imperial War Museum and spot those little swatches of Persephone endpapers in the exhibitions, I instantly recognised 'London Wall' from Vere Hodgson's Few Egg and No Oranges.

Duff Cooper recounts the life of Captain Willie Maryngton, an orphan with an income, a career army officer who is utterly desperate to go to war. Bitterly disappointed to have missed out on active service in the First World War by a matter of days, Willie is even more distraught and disillusioned to find he is too old to serve in the Second World War and must stay at home and train the troops. Having been a cavalry man and subject to the all-consuming hobby of hippolatry (it's in the book, honestly) the changing face of warfare and increasing mechanisation leave Willie, a man without a war horse, stuck in the old groove.
But Willie nurses a constant sense of unbelonging and remains emotionally 'stuck' too, his parentless background has done little for his emotional maturity despite the presence of a family who have taken him under their wing, his relationships with women are doomed, often a complete disaster. His life takes on a routine of monotony and dullness, then add in the unrequited craving for front line action and it all breeds in him a streak of bitter regret and suspicion of those around him.
Everyone else is joining in the 'party' and somehow Willie is always on the outside looking in.
It slowly becomes clear that Willie is going to play a major role in the war and gradually Duff Cooper builds towards the ending that you know is coming if you are aware of the real wartime events on which the book is based. It is a book charged with increasing emotion and the final pages just turn those screws steadily as they quietly increase the poignancy of Willie's life.
I'm thinking these facts are well known to many but if not, and you think this might spoil your enjoyment of Operation Heartbreak, stop reading here ** and scroll down to ***

**
Operation Mincemeat, the actual British Intelligence Operation to deceive Hitler into thinking the allied invasion of Sicily would take place elsewhere, so the plan was for the body of Major Martin RM to wash up on a strategically chosen Spanish beach carrying secret papers. Spanish intelligence handed the papers to German intelligence before returning them supposedly unopened to Britain. It was only the misaligned refolding of the papers that gave any hint that the ruse might have worked and in fact it did. Hitler continued to expect an invasion via Greece and Sardinia weeks after the invasion of Sicily had begun.

***

Max Arthur's afterword offers a context to the events recounted in the book but more about Duff Cooper and the film of the real events on which the book is based tomorrow. I'll bet some you of you watched The Man Who Never Was, curled up on the floor on a dreary winter's Sunday afternoon as I did.

On hype

Sometimes a book arrives steeped in publisher's praise as did Legend of a Suicide by David Vann and my thoughts on that next week, but I look at it and think, do I really want to read that?
Then the publisher might write to you again and ask if you've read it yet, and if not please, please do because it's really good.
Then you might hear again with news of a launch and little snippets of stunning reviews.
This is presumably the thankless world of the publishing PR person and you wonder if anyone does ever thank them?
Well I try to, though it's a bit of an uphill task keeping on top of the emails, often well into three figures daily, but I do try and so if any of you are reading this, thank you again, you do a great job of keeping me informed about what's out there and testing the boundaries of my comfort zone.
I have a shelving system that keeps them in month order of publication so that I can see at a glance what's current and thus occasionally try to offer some contemporaneous comment, though that can never be guaranteed if my reading mood is elsewhere. A book often has to bide its time and sometimes I like to let all the glitter and hype subside.
Hype, and hands up guilty as charged because I can readily jump on that bright sparkly roller coaster too, can be unpredictable because it can go either way, in fact it can seriously backfire here.
I'm thinking back to Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, a reading experience from which I learned so much about not rushing to early judgements. Perhaps the hype unwittingly sets me off on the wrong foot and I sub-consciously end up determined to find fault.
I'm picky about that brand new suitcase on the dust jacket and I have distracted myself from the writing.
I can't get a grip on the book at all, my thoughts are disparate, unfocused and scattered because I'm a bit cross.
Then perhaps I've read something about the author that determines me not to like them, so I'm busy blaming the book, the writer, the paper, the font, what they've written about, the characters... anything in fact that will become a Room 101 repository for my dissatisfaction and lead to that damning indictment and the dismissal of the flawed book...but of course none of it's my fault.
Thankfully I've managed to turn my narrow thinking around to something much more open-minded. The book goes back on the shelf until I can approach it in a much gentler, more conciliatory mood, it will get another chance because I now tend to perceive that as a fault of the inner me, not the book, and I am quietly amazed at how often, given that chance, a book may then succeed where once it seemed to fail.
How fatally misguided I would have been to listen to those early misgivings about all things Irene Nemirovsky and discard her writing, and thank goodness you all took me to task in comments and told me to return to the book.
Equally how  oddly liberating it is to be able to come here, eat some humble pie and admit that I got something wrong and I'm wondering if any of you have had reading turnarounds like this?
But one thing I'm now very careful not to do is to turn the final page of a book, rush to the laptop, type out my thoughts and post on here immediately.
There's a pondering process involved and it may span several weeks because isn't that the hidden and recurring value of a book? A sort of literary compound interest, a mathematical calculation which apparently no one comprehends anymore, but needs to if they are to understand credit card repayments.
How many hours did I labour over compound interest in maths lessons?
A book sinks down into my sub-conscious and needs time in there to ripen and mature, something will quite suddenly bubble to the surface out of nowhere to increase my understanding, often days if not weeks later giving me a completely new perspective on my reading. David Vann's book has been a fine example of that, a book which has delved right down and repaid a great deal.
The joy of this space for me is that I have no deadlines...except for Ulysses that is, and perhaps for some books a deadline is essential...can you tell I'm behind with it as of today?
I have been answering lots of questions about dovegreyreader scribbles of late and as always trying to explain that it is for pleasure not pain, but that's been good because it's all made me revisit those founding principles and also look at how things have developed and moved on since that day in March 2006 when I was setting this up and I had to think of a strap line. I dashed that bookaholic, sock-knitting quilter who was a community nurse in her spare time off the top of my head thinking I'd keep this up for about three weeks not three years. In fact if ever I try and tweak it to something slightly more refined one of you notices and swiftly and rightly reminds me of my proper place in the world and my thanks as always to Ruth for that picture of the dove bearing those books.

On W.G.Sebald

Once I'd read Rings of Saturn I bought all of W.G.Sebald's books. I then read Austerlitz and The Emigrants and still have Campo Santo and Vertigo left unread, saved as you do (well as I do) when I discover a writer and know that what I have is all there is.
But On the Natural History of Destruction has always felt like a challenge too far, especially if read out of  context and it has been down to Mathilde Wolff - Monckeberg to offer me that context with her book, On the Other Side : Letters to My Children from Germany 1940-1946.
To be honest, it would have been much easier to avoid both of these and just stick to books about evacuated children in Cornwall (which I've loved too), somehow skirt around and evade the whole tragedy or else read it slant, but there is something extraordinarily compelling about Mathilde's letters and I felt I owed it to her courage to explore further.
Born in the Allgau Alps in May 1944, W.G.Sebald argues that he inherited a silence, a sense of a collective amnesia, an aura of something forbidden, a war that wasn't talked about and in particular a series of events which he examines in the first of four essays contained in this slim but incredibly hard-hitting volume.
One of the most controversial campaigns of the Second World War was the carpet bombing and destruction of many German cities by the RAF in the latter years of the war. The figures advanced by Sebald, even if guesstimates, are staggering; a million tons of bombs dropped, 131 towns and cities attacked, 600,000 German civilians 'fell victim' as Sebald puts it, 42.8 cubic metres of rubble for every inhabitant of Dresden.
Mathilde Wolff - Monckeberg wrote letters to her children from Hamburg, a city decimated in air raids during a long heat wave in July 1943.
The details of those raids are out there for anyone to read up on and Christopher Beauman in his excellent afterword to On the Other Side suggests three outstanding volumes which address the history and the morality of the strategy. I don't want to be drawn into the whys and wherefores because I think everyone has to reach their own personal understanding of it all.
Sebald proceeds to explore and prosecute his case with no small degree of disbelief verging on disdain in an attempt to identify exactly why so little of this punishing devastation had found its way into post-war German literature. Sensing feelings of a shared guilt, few writers seem to have fulfilled what Sebald sees as the writer's task,

'to keep the nation's collective memory alive.'

Sebald's inherited silence is one also identified in reality by Janet Flanner, wartime writer for the New Yorker, and visiting Cologne after the bombing. Janet Flanner observed and reported first-hand the death throes of a once glorious city which now

'lay by its riverbanks...recumbent, without beauty, shapeless in the rubble of loneliness of complete physical defeat. Through its clogged streets trickles what is left of its life, a dwindled population in black and with bundles - the silent German people appropriate to the silent city.'

I'm very much a two-sides-of-the-story person and plenty in W.G.Sebald's book troubled me. Being aware of the storm of controversy On the Natural History of Destruction had stirred up on publication, I turned to The Emergence of Memory - Conversations with W.G.Sebald to explore this further.
I needed some balance to Sebald's anxieties because something within me was uncomfortable with his insistence, his expectation, that those who had lived through this devastation somehow had a duty to find the words to describe it, as Ruth Franklin suggests in this book, the need

'To resurrect a memory he never experienced.'

Surely this is about saying the unsayable and Ruth Franklin quotes German writer Dieter Forte's response to On the Natural History of Destruction which seems to confirm that,

'there is horror that exists beyond language...He overlooks my generation, the generation of the children in the big cities, who can remember, when they are able, when they can find words for it - and for that one must wait an entire lifetime.'

In three further essays Sebald examines the work of three German writers and it quickly becomes apparent which of them merits his respect and which his barely disguised disgust.
On the Natural History of Destruction has been one of those astonishingly powerful reads for where it has led my thinking, and though I know it might seem mystifying... a bit like taking myself off and rolling in barbed wire for fun...somehow I don't want to shy away from the more challenging reads.
This, another quote found at the Imperial War Museum, seemed to encompass all my thoughts about this book and Mathilde's, more of which soon,

'I pray on you to believe what I have said.
I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it.
For most of it I have no words.'

Ed Murrow Buchenwald 1945

Remembrance...

'They buried him among the kings because he had done good toward God and toward his house'

I shall do a further Remembrance post on Wednesday but I recently looked into the history of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior thanks to Richard Jenkyns' book Westminster Abbey published by Profile. This one of course made me realise that I haven't been to Westminster Abbey in years either, but how interesting to note that whilst you may walk around the Abbey and tread on the memorials of who knows who underfoot, no one steps on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. It's in a central entry spot too, blocking the path to the West door, but all processions, no matter how regal or solemn, must walk around it.
As Richard Jenkyns points out,

'the pain of war properly interrupts the smoothness of pageantry. And the commonplace lettering is humanising in its ordinariness, the sort of thing you might find on the grave of your own loved one.'

Imitated across the world but never quite with the significance that is created by burying 'everyman among the mighty', the body of the unknown soldier killed in the Great War was laid in the nave on November 11th 1920 and I had no idea that the grave was then filled with a hundred bags of soil brought from the battlefield. In the ensuing week that the grave was kept open, one and a quarter million people filed past it, how many must have hoped and imagined that it was their missing loved one lying there?

Inner Child - November

What day is it?
Where am I?
Amazing how a trip to London throws the usual weekly routine and more disruption next week with a work-related excursion to Oxford...it's always cold in Oxford, or perhaps that's because I always seem to go at this time of year.
But lest we forget, it's Inner Child weekend.
Now, I have to own up that last month's choice The Silver Blade, in fact the entire French Revolution has gone on hold. Wouldn't they just have given their last sou to do that back in 1789, but needs must I wanted to steal a march on the November reading so I'll be back with the guillotine soon.
But whilst I was in London I had a few hours twixt this

and that and off I went here.

The Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, nicely on the Bakerloo line so I could stay until closing time and then just whizz up to Paddington and the train home.
But what a very amazing place The Imperial War Museum is, and can I now confess my ignorance?
I had heard of 15" guns but had never really given it much thought, beyond them perhaps being something just over a foot long.
Wrong.

So this is the old Bedlam mental hospital transformed, but if you've ever worked in an old hospital building, those echoes remain in the corridors, the wide staircases, the windows even the smell and what on earth would they have made of it now.
Walking into that entrance and then to be met by this aerial display is quite breathtaking.

I did at least think I knew this was a Spitfire and that has been confirmed by Bookhound who certainly knew his Airfix kits.
I moved on around the exhibitions and headed straight to The Children's War.

"Cast of part of a bronze sculpture commemorating more than 4,000 people of Liverpool and Bootle who lost their lives during air raids from 1940-1942. The youngest victim was a day old and the oldest over 90. The sculpture was made by Tom Murphy and was unveiled at Liverpool Parish Church, Our Lady and St Nicholas, in July 2000." Lent by Tom Murphy

A child's eye view of the Second World War and this beautifully evocative bronze is the first thing you see as you walk in, somehow it set the tone perfectly for what followed, more of which when I've had a chance to think about the exhibition, it was all very moving.
I have been looking at that child's eye view through this year's November reading but some of the books had proved just more than I could manage. Inevitably traumatic and tragic, just too painful to read this time round, so I quietly closed The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (thank you for it Margaret, there will be a right time) and Morris Gleitzman's Once & Then and settled on a few children's books.

Robert Westall's Blitzcat and The Machine Gunners and A Candle in the Dark by Adele Geras and Judith Kerr's When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, some old favourites, some new reads.
Currently The Machine Gunners is winning my heart for Nan's dire warnings about Hilter [sic] and the Jarmans.

The Professor's House by Willa Cather

I'm so delighted that The Reader magazine in cahouts with Oxford University Press made me read My Antonia (Anto-nee-a...have I got that right?) last month because it's started something that I know won't stop now.
I had promised myself that foray into US women writers with Elaine Showalter's book A Jury of Her Peers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx glowing bright orange at me from the little shelf on my desk and now I've got...well at this point I was about to do my usual medical thing and 'itis' it,  but Catheritis sounds a bit too uncomfortably like a real condition for my liking so suffice to say I'm hooked.
Thanks to Virago I have a pile of Willa's books ready and waiting and it was just a case of which to pick up next, so I decided to let Elaine Showalter do the choosing,

' In her greatest novel, The Professor's House...'

That was easy, The Professor's House it was, except I have a feeling each successive Willa Cather novel I read might become my favourite, until the next one that is.
Professor Godfrey St Peter must be the fairest man in all of Christendom, often 'amiable but quiet' according to Willa Cather and displaying not only the patience of a saint with the demands of his family but also taking the time and effort to be a fair and non-judgemental listener to many others. Having been there for all and sundry, the Professor approaches his own mid-life crisis with few people there ready and willing to listen to him. Wife Lillian, preoccupied with the family, somehow knows him too well to be objective and young Tom Outland, who would doubtless have been his close confidante has tragically died on the battlefields of Flanders.It is Tom's legacy to the family that is causing so much heartache and conflict.
Tom's vacuum gas invention, patented and willed to his fiancee - the Professor's elder daughter, has now become a veritable mint of money, providing luxurious living and an enviable standard of life for Rosamund. With the funeral baked meats hardly cooled Rosamund announces her engagement to the enthusiastic but rather insensitive Louie Marsellus,

, 'a mackerel-tinted man' ...

and yet again, how wonderfully Willa Cather conjures up the imagery with such small detail. Louie busies himself with the money and commissions the building of a country house in the Norwegian manorial style with all the finest trimmings,

'We got our wonderful wrought iron door fittings from Chicago...none of your colonial glass knobs for us.'

Meanwhile younger sister Kathleen, with veiled hints of a love of her own for Tom, has to make do with a bungalow just 'glass-knobbed throughout' and the lesser Scott McGregor,

'Scott had a usual sort of mind, and Kitty had flashes of something quite different. Her father had thought a more interesting man would make her happier.'

The Professor, a lover of the familiar and the comfortable, introspective, astute and perceptive, a man who is, according to A.S.Byatt's introduction,

'both intensely drawn to civilized family life, and intensely drawn to fierce solitary contemplation'

is further disturbed by a new house of his own, having been dubiously blessed with the financial success of a vast academic work now in print. But his life is happy where it is, the change feels too great and he decides to sit out the summer recess in the study of his old house.

'The world was sad to St Peter as he looked about him; the lake-shore country flat and heavy, Hamilton small, tight and airless. The university, his new house, his old house, everything around him seemed insupportable, as the boat on which he is imprisoned seems to a sea-sick man.'

and his mid-life crisis ensues.
Tom Outland's story of adventure and his discovery of an ancient cliff-side civilization on the Blue Mesa of New Mexico breaks into the book halfway through providing some respite from the Professor's reflections on his life, as well as offering a bridge between the material and the primitive worlds. A return to the professor's house is inevitable before the end of the novel, and I was holding my breath for good outcomes.
Willa Cather creates differing landscapes both of place and of the mind in The Professor's House and I was willingly drawn into them all but most especially the cliff-side civilization. A picture had fixed firmly in my mind which I just couldn't shift, of an old card I knew I had somewhere.

Found eventually, long after I had finished the book.
So long afterwards that I could quite easily have forgotten but you don't forget Willa Cather in a hurry and as I've sat to write my thoughts on the book that atmosphere rushes back into my mind. My apologies, I have no idea of artist or source (hopefully someone will know) and though I feel sure this is grander in scale and more utopian and classic in design to Tom's discovery on the Blue Mesa, somehow Willa Cather's descriptions still fitted my memory of it perfectly,

'Far above me...I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was a still as sculpture..it all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower.'

So much more that I could say about this book but hopefully that's sufficient to tell you it's been another of my favourite reads of the year...sorry did I say that about My Antonia too...and... and

Today I will be...

here...

recording something for BBC Radio 4 for an edition of Off the Page with Dominic Arkwright, and then doing an interview for The Bookseller, more of which when it's all in the can, as they say.
There's many a slip twixt Devon and London so let's hope

• The alarm goes off at 5am
• We get to Exeter station in time
• The train appears and works...all the way to London
• I have time to go to Daunt's Bookshop first
• I don't start getting palpitations when I walk into the building
• The presenter doesn't seem to be speaking in Swahili
• My tickly cough doesn't happen...it will, I know it will.
• I've remembered to take the 400 words that I have to read out with me
• My mind doesn't go blank
• I understand the questions
• I can think of answers
• I see someone famous so I can crow to Rhys (we have an ongoing competition and I have to top his David Beckham sighting)
• I have time to go in another bookshop
• I have time to see an exhibition
• I get back to Paddington in time for my train home
• Bookhound is back and waiting at Exeter station at the end of the day

High Wages by Dorothy Whipple

'But there was a point below which Carmen and her colleagues would not go: they referred to this as 'the Whipple line', after Dorothy Whipple, a writer of popular fiction in the Thirties and Forties.'

A quote from Carmen Calill in 'that' 2008 Guardian interview with Rachel Cooke, discussing the history behind Virago books and a quote which we should probably address before embarking on any thought-sharing here about High Wages, the latest Dorothy Whipple book to be republished by Persephone Books and with an excellent introduction by Jane Brocket...except to tell you there's a wonderful tea over at Cornflower to day too.
Oh yes and this book has a lovely Crysede fabric print on the endpapers of which there is a fine display in the Penlee Museum in Penzance because much of it was hand-blocked in Cornwall in the 1930s.

Carmen Callil's mother had read all of Dorothy Richardson's books, I think in contrast my mum might have read all of Dorothy Whipple's and how I wish she was alive now for me to ask her, but I suspect these were the books for the likes of my mum.
Thirteen, and from a working class family living in Liverpool 8, the Dingle, when the Second World War broke out. My grandmother had been in service, my grandfather worked on the docks where he was tragically killed in 1949 and I love this picture of them.
My mum Vera had been evacuated to Chester but was brought back to Liverpool by her father at the height of the bombing because he had been sent to fetch her by my grandmother. Vera was far too happy in her home in Chester, was adored by a childless couple and had settled into a lovely school, she might never want to come back, my grandmother couldn't bear it. Just like the plot of another Persephone book, Doreen by Barbara Noble.
So for me, to read a Dorothy Whipple is to feel a connection with my mum and the world she grew up in, the difficulties she faced with an education interrupted by the war, and I wouldn't have been any the wiser but for these reissues.
There is something comforting about sneaking off for an afternoon read with a pot of a tea and a Dorothy Whipple but for all that I read so widely, why am I never disappointed by Dorothy?
Jane Carter is Lancashire born and bred (as was Dorothy Whipple), a shop assistant in that twilight world of the drapers' shops those little emporiums that existed before the arrival of  ready-mades. The window displays designed to seduce those with money through the doors, and here you bought your fabric and had your dress made-to-measure, there was haberdashery from which to choose your trimmings and it would be 'a fine thing' if Jane could work in Chadwick's in Tidsley, a step up from Commins' drapers in nearby, and considerably inferior, Elton.
Employment for women remained severely limited in the 1920s and 1930s, it was housemaids or shop work, perhaps some menial office work but not a lot in between and little thought given that women might have ambitions for anything more fulfilling.
Spotting the advert in Chadwicks' window, Jane dons her gloves 'dazzlingly white, fluffy enormous' and proceeds to try and pick the white fluffy bits off her black coat (a hopeless task) before going in to ask about 'the place.'
Jane is successful and ten days later moves in, as was customary, to share the shop-worker's accommodation above the store.
This is the world of fabric unfurled across the counter, the thud of the bolt as it unrolls and if you enjoyed Emile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise, here's another utterly worthy 'shop' novel to add to the shelf. Moleskin shoulder capes and underwear called 'neathies', bolts of flannelette, crepe duchine, gaberdine, alpaca, foulard and eolian all vie for madam's attention, most noticeably Mrs Greenwood who has married into the lucrative mill business and is always accompanied by her spoiled-rotten daughter Sylvia.
I quite thought fascinators were a 21st century invention, how wrong I was, but I do wonder quite what this one looked like,

'Jane went out to find Mrs Chadwick's head draped in a woollen fascinator, with blue and white bobs around the face.'

The social hierarchy that Dorothy Whipple always exposes so well is clearly evident, there's an inter-war years' pecking order to be observed amongst the women of Tidsley and when Mrs Briggs, married to the other partner in the Greenwood mill empire, confesses to Jane that she feels out of her depth in those remote and chilly social waters, a friendship develops that will most certainly do no harm to Jane's career development.
There's plenty of town romance going on and themes of class, fashion, change and resistance to it prevail, and all beautifully crafted by Dorothy Whipple's pen, this was a world she knew and it's a little bit of a world that I knew too.
My mum was a great needlewoman and I still have her school needlework book from 1939, complete with a few working samples. She was taught the meticulous approach and she never lost it, we tacked to within  an inch of there being no point in sewing the thing together, but it always fitted first time.
My eyes were forever peeking over the top of the counter in Allders or Kennards in Croydon as yards of fabric were rolled out and the Butterick paper pattern consulted. Then we'd match up the cotton and it would be home to the pinning and the cutting out and then out came the Singer treadle sewing machine and we were away. Tacking and darts, tucks, gathers and pleats and eventually a frock.
So jolting myself out of that bout of nostalgic reverie I think it's quite easy to see why I enjoyed High Wages so much and why I'll always happily traverse that Whipple line and read her, though just one very minor worry.
Come back and let me know if you spot something that doesn't quite add up as I did...I'll say no more but it's a minor detail and no matter, this is a lovely book and don't miss a fine tea over at Cornflower's today, you've earned a treat if you've read this far.

To Trollope or not to Trollope?

Do you ever ask yourself this because 'To Trollope or not to Trollope' is a question I often ask myself and I wonder if others see Trollope as I do?
Susan Hill has not one but two of the great man's novels in her list of 40 books so I don't think she'd know about this at all.
For some inexplicable reason a read of an Anthony Trollope novel rarely seems to come to fruition unless I'm in search of a long seasonal read and want to set aside all else and dive into one book over a long holiday week.
Then somehow I seem to talk myself right out of it again and remain un-Trolloped until the next time.
I don't quite know what the problem is, perhaps I've come to it all too late in life. I've dabbled in the first three Barsetshires and done a bit of Pallisering in recent years, but sadly my heart doesn't do that little leap of joy at the sight or thought of a Trollope.
So when a big fat package arrived from The Reader magazine containing my next surprise classic read for their Readers Connect page, (last time My Antonia by Willa Cather) I spent a fair bit of time wondering if I was in for a Dickens or a Dostoevsky when to my surprise out fell a Trollope...I won't reveal which one, but to my un-Trolloped mind it's less well-known. I can always be won over by a new volume of anything if I'm honest, who can dislike the arrival of a brand new book with an invitation to read it, rate it and comment accordingly. So despite the book's deceptive weight (hefty) I was pleasantly surprised on turning to the final page to discover it was a mere 400 or so pages long...how odd that it felt so much heavier than that.
So I was quite relieved for about two minutes or so as I flicked through, except hold on what's this, halfway through another p400 quickly followed by another p1?
Yes I'd been duped, it's that Trollopian classic, a book of two halves, 800 + pages and eek, I gulped.
All was not lost because has anyone else been listening to Radio 4's Open Book and the Neglected Classics? 
Well-known writers have set off for the hustings, climbing onto their literary soapboxes to try and convince us why their choice of a Neglected Classic should win our vote. The result will be announced on November 7th, so still time to choose your favourite.
I caught it on one of my Completer-Finisher afternoons and JoanneTrollope waved the family flag and advanced good, solid reasons for reading a lesser known Trollope novel, Miss Mackenzie (not the one I've been sent) and she sold it, and Anthony, to me most persuasively, hook, line etc. Duty-bound to read her illustrious ancestor as a child, Joanna Trollope cited this as one of the treat novels after a wade through some of the mightier tomes. The gold-diggers arriving to court Miss Mackenzie, the on-the-shelf spinster who suddenly finds herself in possession of wealth and in unaccustomed demand; a novel that Joanna Trollope argued would be eminently well-suited to the serialisation which will be the final accolade for the winner of the public vote.
The suggestions have been varied and unusual but bless Michael Morpurgo for his choice, a favourite here too, The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico. Radio mention of each seems to have sent sales whizzing  up the Amazon charts, I know those sales figures can be deceptive but Miss Mackenzie can't have been anywhere near the 485 it seems to be as I write this, with Susan Hill's choice The Rector's Daughter by F.M.Mayor, likewise now hovering at 294 and Colm Toibin's selection, Esther Waters by George Moore at 963. I feel sure they would all have been languishing down in the six figure doldrums for years until now.
So I felt comforted, and thanks to Joanna, Trollopely re-energised and once I emerge from this year's Remembrance reading and get back into the groove I shall pick up...no, can't tell you what it is, with the same enthusiasm I always have for this little collaboration with The Reader magazine, and we'll see what happens next.

Demobbed by Alan Allport

(1) Did you have a good time old chap ?( This is asked with a frowning sort of look which says I know you can't tell me in front of the ladies!)
(2) By Jove! You are lucky to have seen a bit of the world at the country's expense!
(3) You are looking jolly fit, old chap, but then of course you fellows in the Services had all the good food!
(4) You were lucky to have missed the fly-bombs and rockets! (Now follows a discussion on fisherman lines as to the size and closeness of the missiles which affected the people in the room)...

This was the helpful advice and information offered in February 1946 by one of Picture Post's readers to servicemen newly returning home from demobilisation, and it may seem odd to launch into my November Remembrance reading with the homecoming, but this book has been irresistible. Demobbed - Coming Home After the Second World War by Alan Allport and published by Yale University Press has been wonderfully  readable and informative though to me not a complete revelation for two reasons.
Firstly, the Tinker (father of dgr) of course because, though demobilisation came much later for him in1955, I had known it was a strange time and then whilst gathering together the little cameos he wrote for Bugle Boy, he put that sadness and fear into words for the first time in more than fifty years,

'In my hand a small cardboard attache case, eighteen inches by ten I suppose, and in it were all my worldly possessions. Looking back at the barracks I thought what have I got to show for sixteen years, all of World War Two and the Far East? I had one month's wages, one month's ration money and a single ticket to Exeter Central station and a letter in my pocket which said that if I didn't return my uniform within fourteen days, I would be charged for it...I am so pleased to know that everything is much better now. It surely needed to be.'

Secondly, through my teenage years in suburban Surrey, we had lived next door to an ex- Far East Prisoner of War, a veteran of the Burma railway. I have no idea how old he was but I can see him now; a broken man, destroyed in mind and body, thin, stooped and grey, a virtual recluse who rarely spoke to us but worshiped a little chihuahua dog. A man who would shuffle around in carpet slippers and who traveled nowhere, because the sight of a train made him incontinent with fear. Childless and with a wife whose bitterness seemed palpable towards him, towards us the happy family living next door and to the world at large, every minute of every day. Having presumably chosen to stick by him, who can know the hidden traumas of their life together?
So I came to Alan Allport's book with a few thoughts but certainly not the depth of knowledge that I now have, not only about the complete debacle that being demobbed involved...the Tinker laughed when I asked him about it...it was utter chaos he remembers it well, but so much more about the lives of men who had fought for King and country. For the Tinker like so many the war was not over on VE Day, there was the little problem of the war with Japan to be resolved and this, plus the ensuing logistical nightmare of bringing the troops home, is often lost in the post-war literature.
Many had left lowly employment in grocer's shops or banks and returned having gained vast experience in the theatre of war, commanding troops, perhaps displaying great heroism whilst witnessing sights they would wish to forget, only to find they were now complete misfits. Alan Allport delineates the sociological implications of a war clearly, many men now equipped with language and behaviours that they felt sure equipped them to rise through the social classes, only to find that no one was the least bit interested in them. Conversation peppered with 'old boy' and ' actually' and 'I say' and a demob payout, all sadly insufficient to allow the average man on Civvy Street to move to the houses at the top of the hill, and the streets below were most certainly not paved with goodwill and gratitude.
Britain was a 'land of nerves' and the anxieties were manifold, not only for the returning men but for the loved ones waiting for them at home who had suffered greatly too and Alan Allport covers all this accessibly whilst evidencing all his findings with fascinating anecdotes.
Appearances and mannerisms had changed, women had become independent and self-supporting both financially and often emotionally. Homelessness and unemployment were rife, bigamy and divorce were increasingly common, crime levels rose and there were real concerns that the war had allowed a slackening of moral fibre throughout the nation that would be difficult to rein back in. There was a flurry of stabbings, bludgeonings and strangulation of unfaithful wives by cuckolded husbands to whom judges then saw fit to hand down lenient sentences citing mitigating circumstances, whilst several chapters examine the psychological effects of combat and the lack of help available. Many World War Two veterans have only asked for that help in recent years, finding that very public anniversary memorials and film footage have allowed unwelcome memories, long buried, to surface
It was all a bit of a moral mess and Alan Allport covers it all in a very readable way, I suspect this was a book that could have been 500 pages long not the compact 250 it is and I sense there would have been difficult decisions about what to leave out.
There are some good references to fiction of the time that attempts to express some of those anxieties, A Wreath of Roses by the inimitable Elizabeth Taylor, The Chequer Board by Nevil Shute (now there's an author I have neglected for years) On the Side of the Angels by Betty Miller (my Virago copy has that gorgeous cover,) so plenty of reading trails to follow.
Alongside all this I have been dipping into another excellent book, Stranger in the House by Julie Summers. These women's stories of men returning from the second world war offer a unique and personal testimony and though I have yet to read it in depth I most certainly will because the chapter entitled Children of the Bamboo : The FEPOW Children's Tale makes for heartbreaking but very revealing reading and the book sits perfectly alongside Demobbed.
What has made Demobbed even more enjoyable for me has been the chance to sit down with my primary source and ask him about it all, but even without one of those of your own, this is a treasure of a book that will add something special to any wartime shelf. The Tinker remembers his unwearable demob suit, hat and demob underwear with that fondness born of the memory of hysterical laughter. The suit akin to a very stiff hair shirt and thrown at him across a counter by a man who looked him up and down and said 'You look like a medium to me'.

Prize draw copies of Demobbed by Alan Allport

Many thanks to Yale University Press who have kindly offered prize draw copies of Demobbed by Alan Allport to three lucky winners worldwide.
Names in comments and Rocky will don his demob suit when the time comes to choose.
Meanwhile he continues to 'cook' nicely.
 

and the winners are...

The Paw has chosen the three lucky winners of a copy of A Kid For Two Farthings by Wolf Mankowitz from Bloomsbury Classics and they are

4 betsytacy

11 Cristina

48 Becca

Can you e mail your addresses to me at dovegreyreader at gmail dot com and the book fairy will do the rest.

and another call for Jade...JADE, CAN YOU HEAR ME... a copy of My Antonia waiting for you as soon as we have your address too. 

and don't miss tomorrow, another splendiferously wonderful prize draw awaits.

...and finished.

Do you gauge?
Or for us UK knitters, do you knit a tension square?
You do...
Honestly?
Every time?
I've been dipping into Stephanie Pearl McPhee's little book of knitty words of wisdom and smiling as I always do whenever I read the musings of the Yarn Harlot.
This one is Things I Learned From Knitting...whether I wanted to or not.

Stephanie has comforting words to say on the subject of gauge and they were words I needed to read this week.
Firstly rather than gauge, amongst other things Steph would rather 'babysit two-year old triplets whilst simultaneously diffusing a bomb' or if needs must 'bathe a cat'...anything but knit tension squares.

'Every knitter knows that there's a 50/50 chance that something will happen to gauge along the way and that our sweater could, for no other reason than the fact it's a Tuesday, turn out much larger or smaller than predicted...a knitter will often opt for a larger size "just to be sure". The result can be a knitter proudly wearing a sweater upon her body like the mainsail of a grand schooner billowed out in a full and hearty wind.'

My mind was instantly filled with flashbacks of  this...

...the Alafoss Lopi pink elephant that suffers from a very abnormal growth rate of six inches per annum as it stretches...and stretches year on year.
I'd been having terrible trouble getting the right tension on my recent purchase of the Manos del Uruguay chunky wool and it was fast looking as if I was knitting a blanket of 4" squares.
In the end I thought it was a bright idea to just knit the jumper in a bigger size.
On the positive side of all this, the wool is dazzlingly special the colour is 7073 Neptune and it's a dream to knit so I have really enjoyed this one, and after the Big Wool this feels like a delicate one ply.

Did the whole boring blocking thing which the Stitch 'n Bitch book says not to bother with preferring the stitch 'n wash method.

But here we go again, too engrossed in the radio, so my fault for not reading the bit about 'leave the left raglan open' and knit a simple rib neck on straight needles. I'm still a bit uncertain about whether I favour a raglan sleeve or not so having stitched it together and to within an inch of its life I couldn't face trying to unstitch it.
Perseverance was key if this wasn't going to end up in the 'finish in 2011' basket.
There was nothing for it but to go off piste and reinvent the neck using dpns, and by the time the 5pm news came on I was well and truly off on a frolic of my own, having strayed far from that Sirdar ordinary jumper pattern's original intentions.

To add to the stress, the wool situation was looking precariously lean with a mere 24" left by final cast off, but enough ends hanging off to cobble it together and just these bits left over...close call.

Success in the end I hope and how unusual for me to be wishing for some Arctic weather.