dovegreyreader scribbles

The Paris Wife ~ Paula McClain

I have variable luck with fiction that is based on real lives and can think of some recent notable failures. There's something about feeling a little duped, especially if it's a life I don't know well and the author takes liberties in going off on a frolic of their own with events which never happened, and then I get completely confused and frustrated over the blurred boundaries between fiction and fact. If I know the life well it can be even worse.

The Paris Wife by Paula McClain arrived in proof copy from Virago months ago and I had reluctantly set it to one side to read nearer to the March publication date. I say reluctantly because it came in a really unusual and very appealing proof edition, a facsimile of an aged and well-read book with a couple of postcards inside, but I still had my reservations...

'Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight year old who has all but given up on love and happiness, until she meets Ernest Hemingway...'

So a fictional account of that doomed marriage and a Big Scary Male Author to boot. A double whammy in that case because I have some Ernest Hemingway reading in my sights this year too,  having always been slightly put off by everyone's else's apparent distaste for a man that many seem to regard as brutish and unpleasant.

It takes me back to the debate about reading authors we have reason to dislike as people, do we read them unfettered by prejudice or do we bring along the baggage?

Can we and should we overlook personal flaws in order to appreciate the writing or are we too influenced by what we know about them?

So I picked up The Paris Wife with some trepidation having only the mere basics about Hemingway's life in place, along the lines of several marriages, not shy of a bit of hunting, shooting, fishing and killing before turning the gun on himself... very basic knowledge indeed, so I hardly needed to fill the gaps with fiction before I know the reality. I turned to the acknowledgements at the back first, just to reassure myself that there might be some factual references and to my delight there were plenty, along with a big reassurance from Paula McClain

'It was important for me to render the particulars of their lives as accurately as possible, and to follow the very well documented historical record. The true story of the Hemingway's marriage is so dramatic and compelling, and has been so beautifully treated by Ernest Hemingway himself, in A Moveable Feast, that my intention became to push deeper into the emotional lives of the characters and bring new insights to historical events, while staying faithful to the facts.'

There follows a detailed selection of other books as well as references to the correspondence between Hadley and Ernest, and Hemingway's original manuscripts all sufficient to allay any fears about being fictionally duped and so I proceeded with confidence.

There be spoilers here because I am assuming you all know the background but The Paris Wife is told through Hadley's first person narrative. Having lived a sheltered, stunted life with low expectations and the grief of a father who has committed suicide by shooting himself, Hadley carries an inherited kernel of anxiety that is buried deep within when she meets and falls in love with the young, unknown writer Ernest Hemingway. Somehow you know that kernel of anxiety sits there unbidden, barely concealed and will eventually surface, but the mere knowledge of its existence offered a useful tool for this reader, a way of interpreting the real anguish of what happens to Hadley versus the painted-on smile at which she is so adept.

In the early days Hadley seems able to cope with all Ernest's flaws, of which there are plenty. Shell-shocked and traumatised by the First World War, Ernest is portrayed as selfish and egocentric, almost child-like in his need for comfort and security, and most essentially for the couple's shared world to revolve around him. Yet he can be charismatic in company, one of those big people who take up all the air in the room, and there are moments when Ernest's brilliance and boyish charm shine through, seemingly dissipating all those flaws as the couple move from America to settle in Paris in order for Ernest to make his name as a writer.

Moving effortlessly into the Parisian cafe culture that would include Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and a passing acquaintance with Picasso, whilst regularly holidaying in Switzerland but living on greatly reduced finances by comparison to their friends, Hadley holds the marriage together with her devotion to Ernest's cause. Slowly the cracks start to appear, and nowhere more vividly than one horrific moment, brilliantly described by Paula McClain, when Hadley is travelling to meet Ernest and decides at the last minute to take all his manuscripts with her so that he can work on them, perhaps get some published. I think I felt as sick and panicky as Hadley at that moment when she discovers, to her complete horror, that they have been stolen on the train, and equally fearful at arriving at the destination where Ernest would meet Hadley and I off said train and we were going to have to tell him....I'm afraid I hot-footed off to the Ladies to powder my nose and left Hadley to it.

The defining moment when those cracks become a yawning chasm is Hadley's discovery that she is pregnant, and by this time I knew Ernest well enough to know that he wasn't going to be dashing off to Mothercare for babygros and making a start on decorating the nursery. Ernest is the needy, demanding child in this marriage...

'He loved and needed praise. He loved and needed to be loved, and even adored.'

Even as I read of the incongruity of Hadley sitting watching a gruesome bullfight whilst stitching a baby blanket, it's clear no amount of pandering to his whims is going to bring Ernest around. There won't be room for two children and with Ernest's threat systems in overload, Hadley allows him to retreat from her and write (still with little sucess) whilst she literally bears the brunt. As the baby, nicknamed Bumby, makes his presence felt, Hadley valiantly clings to her slowly dissolving essence of self in the face of Ernest's infidelity. The moments of happiness become increasingly fleeting and it is Ernest's slightly unreal insistence that his lover should become a part of the family, living happily ever after as a menage a trois, that finally crumbles the seriously depleted and disempowered Hadley's devotion to shreds. It's more the disturbing nature of Ernest's belief that Hadley, so biddable and controlled and still so in love with him, would actually agree to this and I found myself heaving a huge sigh on her behalf. That moment when 'easier to stay' is transformed into 'essential to leave.'

Hadley's voice throughout is beguilingly simple and easy-going, it's impossible not to warm to her yet somehow nor does Paula McClain cross the perilously tempting divide and villify Ernest, and that must have been seriously difficult not to do. Such authorial restraint offers up an engrossing read, especially for me with so little knowledge of the detail, a refined and beautifully balanced fictional account of a famous marriage and its route to breakdown, and I suspect there will be resurgence of interest in Ernest Hemingway's books from people like me who now definitely want to read more.

 

 

 

An interesting week ahead...

Today, February 27th 2011, would have been my brother Malcolm's 60th birthday, and somehow I couldn't let the day pass without remembering it here, and true to form there's me not wasting the opportunity to sit down and read a book.

Malcolm was diagnosed with leukaemia three weeks after his wedding in 1973 and he died eighteen months later, March 15th 1975, just two weeks after his twenty fourth birthday...  forever young in my mind and his loss frequently ambushing me unexpectedly ever since. Why him out of the two of us not me is an inevitable question I have asked myself many times, and of course there's so much I'd love to ask him now about our shared childhood... I'm sure I didn't really cry every time he won at Monopoly ... but alright, I suppose I might have done.

We have a manic whirlwind cool, calm and collected week ahead here chez dovegrey.

Offspringette is back home with all her worldly goods and getting packed up ready to embark on a year in New Zealand. Lots of challenges and things to look forward to, plus a Masters degree to complete, but of course hearts and minds are very much with the people of Christchurch at the moment. Offspringette is heading for North Island but having landed in the USA for a year just weeks before 9/11 she is well versed on the impact a huge disaster can have on a country.

Whilst he was in New Zealand last year, the Kayaker stayed with some friends in Christchurch who he had met whilst working in Canada (these paddlers get around, make lifelong friendships and stay in touch ) and we have been very relieved to hear that they are all safe, though sadly their house is uninhabitable. B's account which the Kayaker shared with us, was incredibly moving, here's just a snippet...

Anyhow, here we are four days (Saturday 11am as I write) after the quake and life has been turned upside down, end over end and any other which way you want to put it. It's as if what happened before Tuesday is a distant memory and almost of little significance when we consider the events our city and the people of this tight knit community have gone through the past 72 hours.

I had just left a meeting and was sitting in my car in the CBD listening to phone messages and taking notes when all of a sudden there was rumbling and loud cracking noises swiftly followed by continuous violent shaking of the ground and subsequently everything around. I had a million and one thoughts rolling through my head, I could see buildings collapsing nearby, dust was billowing from the fallen rubble, the glass windows of the building next to me blew out, people came rushing out of surrounding buildings onto the street, a lady riding her scooter on the street was brought to a halt and fell from her bike but was thankfully uninjured, there were enormously loud bangs, crashes and deafening screams and all the while I was thinking of S and L and if they were OK....

There have been many acts of heroism from the moment the quake struck and that continues locally, nationally and internationally with help continually being offered and accepted.
I feel somewhat helpless at present and very much unsure of what lies ahead. What I do know is that we will find a way through this and whatever that path is we are eternally grateful that we are able to be on the journey because unfortunately some journeys have come to an end.

 

I can't even begin to imagine the devastation so our thoughts are very much with B and his family right now.

Bookhound is doing the airport run with Offspringette while I stay home and bottom the house. I know it sounds like a very strange thing to be doing but it is the total immersion method I have for 'letting go' and dealing with my nearest and dearest disappearing off for a year. Of course I will miss her hugely, Offspringette's visits home are a leavening presence in this house full of men, but she is going to be my literary eyes and ears around New Zealand in contrast to the Kayaker who kept us appraised of the rivers, the mountains, the killer whales, road trips and the bars, and she has promised to write us a blog post now and again... and who knows, perhaps this time I'll visit.

And talking of New Zealand and literature how can I not add Janet Frame in the same breath. Coming up very soon a series of dovegreyreader asks...Janet Frame. I put the questions to Janet's neice Pamela Gordon and she has answered them in light of the Janet that she knew and loved and they make for some incredible reading.

But isn't this funny?

Does it happen in your house?

You think they've left home, and they think they've left home, so they accumulate a load of stuff and then decide to upsticks to another country and back it all comes again. We have been looking a bit like a sale room here and with endless trips to charity shops alternating with regular ascents into the loft, which was getting a little bit emptier but has now filled up again, so we've given up. If it brings the ceiling down, well... Bookhound will fix.

Then Vocal Harem & the Sultans have a concert on Saturday so plenty of singing practice to come.

World Book Night on the same evening so I have to collect my books from the local bookshop ready to give out to the choir after the concert, and I am praying they haven't done what I have heard one disaffected bookseller has done and left the boxes of books out on the pavement in the rain...eek.

Then it's the annual World Book Day quiz at the library and of course the Endsleigh Salon team will be turning out again ( Rebecca, even if your arm is still in plaster and wired and pinned with enough metal to receive digital radio and excruciatingly painful, I'm sorry that's really no excuse... I will personally come and fetch you and your Shakespeare-Film- and-Everything-Else brain!)

And as if that wasn't enough in my diary for the week, it's me and that World Book Night edition of A Good Read on Radio 4 this Tuesday at 4.30pm. Who can know what I said, I certainly can't remember, and spot the dovergreyreader typo on the website which I have tried to get corrected but haven't had much luck yet... never mind. I'm sure the Cinque ports are as nice as the Tamar Valley.

 

All is not Bliss with the dovegreyknitting...

I haven't mentioned knitting for a while which of course doesn't mean I haven't been doing any.

I have been ploughing on with the Debbie Bliss Shawl Collar jumper which I think I might have been about a year in the doing of, and here's what it should look like when it's finished...

I quite like it when the basket of wool has been replaced by a basket of knitted bits, and though I can't get the colour right in this picture you'll have to take my word that it is a very nice pea green and the wool is Debbie Bliss Donegal Luxury Tweed Aran.


So I had finally reached the collar stage, and having talked myself into a 'you-can-do-this' upbeat mood about picking up 188 stitches on a circular needle and setting up the rib properly, I then had several attempts at getting it right and a few weeks later I'm still not really sure I have.


The picture does make it look much worse than it is but puckers have riddled the front edge and my stress levels have risen to distraction accordingly but at least I remembered the buttonholes this time. There may need to be some judicious leaning on the iron over a damp tea towel to try and ease out these crimps and perhaps it will look better when it's on, but this won't be going anywhere near this year's village show... the WI judge would spot those puckers from Land's End.

Things are looking up a little now that I have stitched down the front overlap seams and set in one sleeve, and one more episode of South Riding should see completion....and this picture captures the colour more accurately too.

But still to come, that awful moment when you finish it and try it on. I know it will go over my head but beyond that it's still a bit touch and go... all is not bliss with this creation yet awhile.

So tell me what knitting is going on out there... I need something to do next and currently I'm a bit tempted by the Knit Your Own Dog idea, which would make a change from socks.

 

Island Cross-Talk ~ Tomas O'Crohan

Two books, chance finds among a pile of old editions from the Oxford University Press on a table outside a second-hand bookshop in Launceston last week, and I'd only gone there because the wool shop was closed for lunch. But these have kept me surprisingly engrossed in recent days. It was the cover that caught my eye, Island Cross-Talk - Pages from a diary by Tomas O'Crohan (first published in English in 1986, but available in Irish in 1928) and there underneath An Old Woman's Reflections by Peig Sayers (first published in English in 1962.)

I think we had a conversation in comments about islands when I wrote recently about David Vann's new book Caribou Island and though I know I live on a big one, I'm wondering does anyone out there live on a small island?

It's the ultimate dream sometimes, isn't it ...the times we say, even living where we do, let's just head for an island somewhere and leave it all behind. 'It' generally being the news or work or the latest bit of hassle that may be in progress, but of course once there I feel sure there would be a great deal I'd miss even with broadband... because I couldn't even manage without that for a start. But I'm always fascinated by tales of islands that are evacuated and left uninhabited.

As a child I can clearly recall the 1961 news reports about the evacuation of Tristan de Cunha after the volcanic eruption and on looking it up I see the entire population came to live in Surrey where we were living at the time, so perhaps it felt more immediate. And then there are all the highly emotive accounts of the last people leaving Hirta in the St Kilda archipelago off the Western Isles in 1930, and those pictures of the solemn faces and the barefooted men, so when I read that Island Cross-Talk was about the lives of the Blasket Islanders whose island was 'abandoned to the seagulls and the silence' in 1953 I thought this one might be interesting.

First things first, where on earth are the Blasket Islands? Sadly I hadn't a clue.

About three miles off the coast of County Kerry on the west of Ireland is the answer to that. Europe's most westerly islands, next stop the USA and apparently many of the descendants of island residents now live in Springfield, Massachussets; the US migration partly responsible for dwindling numbers and an unsustainable life on Great Blasket.

I can't quite imagine what it must be like to have to leave an island that has been your home all your life and head off to live in the midst of the civilisation that you have only heard about third hand, from those who have reason to make the trip to the mainland, but this was the case for many of the Irish-speaking Blasket islanders. It is the life on the island that Tomas O'Crohan has recorded... little cameos of daily occurrences, conversations that reflect the trials and tribulations of island life in the time immediately after the First World War and the resilience required to live there, and little did I realise quite how fascinating this book would prove to be.

I have also been dipping into A Story as Sharp as a Knife by Robert Bringhurst, the book that came highly recommended by Erica Wagner during her dovegreyreader asks... posts a while ago. It is an account of the native American oral literature of the islanders of Haida Gwaii, one hundred miles off the Alaskan coast and suddenly I sensed real similarities with the Blasket Islanders who were themselves also the subject of much linguistic and anthropological study.

In Haida Gwaii

'Shellfish are there for the taking twice each day when the tide recedes - and salmon, halibut, cod, herring...sealion, seal and other species pass like an edible calendar along the open coast and through the maze of inshore waters.'

and the rich tradition of art and oral literature

'is also rooted in the constant presence of the sea. Manna only rarely falls from the heavens; it emerges daily from the waves.'

 
Life on Great Blasket looks quite idyllic on a calm summer's day, but it is also about that edible calendar and about survival and that means food and weather, with either often the main topic of the day. How the potato crop is faring, the economy of the sheep ... you can eat it and wear it, then there's the fish catch and the price it's fetching, or perhaps some seals to hunt, the storms that are coming or the prohibitive price of salt to preserve the food. Then there are the women's lives, spent cooking and washing and keeping the children in check and what about health? Toothache is high on everyone's agenda, who can imagine the bliss of having a tooth pulled (and by all accounts a chunk of jawbone with it) after a year of consistent and unremitting pain.

But there's humour here too...the Hoax about Widows has the island's pensioners in a real flap as they are told  tongue-in-cheek in the 'news from the boats' that four thousand war widows are to be deposited in Ireland and the pensioners will have to marry them and will be paid half a crown a week for their trouble.

    'I'd rather see them in Hell than marry any old article across from England. By Our Lady, if they were from Ireland itself I might have some feeling for them, 'declares Padraig.
    'If you refuse the widow, you'll lose the pension.'
    'Then let me lose it! I'd prefer beggary and to be contented, ' says Padraig.

Now you'd be right in thinking this all seems of little interest, perhaps even a bit mundane, but there is something strangely alluring about Tomas O'Crohan's take on a life that we may call simplistic, but which to the islanders was their all. This is about survival in the face of real hardship with a rhythm to the writing too, a gentle rise and fall almost tidal in its feel, and of course this is in translation from the Irish so I can only imagine that the lilt of this, spoken in the original, must have been like music.

I have the second book to read now, An Old Woman's Reflections, and Peig Sayers oral storytelling (could a surname ever seem more right? ) which kept alive the myths, legends and history of this small fishing community,and all from memory. From Peig Sayers, 'the Queen of Gaelic story-tellers' one collector obtained 375 tales, of which forty were long folk tales ...once a story-teller heard a story it was never forgotten.

The Gaelic storytellers are the caretakers of a peasant tradition, the carriers of an oral culture, that once covered the Atlantic fringe of Europe. They belong to antiquity, to a Europe that had no books, no radio, no cinema or television, a Europe whose only entertainment was the parish lore or the winter-night's tale told by a passing traveller...Unlettered but not unlearned, they are the inheritors of a considerable art'

More about Peig when I've met her.

 

How the Girl Guides Won the War ~ Janie Hampton

"For great occasions, such as visits from the District Comissioner, there was a Grand Salute. 'The Brownies form a circle and squat on their heels...with both hands on the ground beneath their feet. When the important person comes in they howl very gently all together . "Tu-whit-to-who-oo-ooo. Tu-whit-to-who-oo-ooo, " the second time raising the voice and gradually rising to a standing position. "Tu-whit-to-who-oo-ooo." The third time it is louder and the forefinger on the right hand is placed to the lips and made to revolve, the noise getting louder and louder until it ends in a shriek, a leap in the air, and a clap of the hands. The clap comes as the feet reach the ground... then the Brownies are absolutely silent and raise their hands to the full salute."

Did we really do that?

No, I'm not putting 'that' picture up again, it's here if you want to see it and who knows what we'd have done if the Queen had walked in, but the District Commissioner was near enough to God for us to be completely over-awed, and it's all coming back to me yet again thanks to Janie Hampton's wonderful book How the Girl Guides Won the War. I've been reading and enjoying this for the last few months but felt I really should wheel it out for your delectation on today of all days. Olave and Robert Baden Powell's shared birthday, 22nd February, Thinking Day.

With little in common but being 'madly in love' and sharing their birthdays, Olave soon knew what was in store when Robert took her camping in the Atlas mountains in Algeria for their honeymoon. A spot of cooking over a fire and scrubbing out the pans with earth and dried grass followed,  presumably to fulfill the potential he had recognised

'a cheery and bright playmate and a woman who could be trained up to help with the Guide movement.'

Despite strangely looking forward to the romantic idea of going to camp and sleeping in a Bell Tent and digging mysterious things called Lats, I was a bit of a failed Girl Guide and having read this book I can now see why. By the time I was due to 'walk' (not 'fly' and get that set of wings, a source of lifelong humiliation) up to guides from Brownies in 1965 things had become a little staid, and Janie Hampton explains the listlessness that I and many others may have felt for the whole thing at the time.

For all my Brownie devotion to the cult of the toadstool and my Very Important Role as Sixer of the Gnomes in the 1st Mitcham pack ( and this being me I still have some of the badges) and having to sing that song every Wednesday evening... Here we come the laughing gnomes, helping mothers in our homes ...ahem.. and leading my six out the wrong way to dance around the toadstools because I didn't know my left hand from my right, and then messing up the joining of the big circle because we were all dancing in the wrong direction... well despite all this allegiance I never really bonded with Guides. It was probably all to do with starting without wings and somehow ending up as a Robin, then we moved from Mitcham across to Wallington and I quickly threw in the towel. I can't think why but I then had a major resurgence of interest when I was sixteen and realised that joining the Rangers meant access to the Venture Scouts, and there was me, back in the Guiding movement in Cheam and with a strangely renewed enthusiasm.

Had this been wartime though I'd have been in there like a shot because by all accounts this was when the Guides really did come into their own, and it has been a real revelation to read quite how those principles of guiding established by Baden Powell came to the fore. The uniform of a Guide a sign that Good Deeds were imminent and that a sensible, well-ordered girl was at hand always ready to proffer calm, organised assistance as required. During the First World War this ranged from setting up feeding stations for returning soldiers to organising sports days for the wounded ...yes really, a one legged soldier valiantly translated the triple jump into the triple hop for the occasion. And here's power to the girls.. the Guides considered by far the more reliable by the War Office, replaced the Boy Scouts as messengers for MI5 carrying top secret counter-espionage memoranda around London.

During the Second World War Guides throughout Europe were working in increasingly dangerous situations and doubtless without a signed letter of consent from their parents and CRB checks on everyone with whom they came into contact. In the UK the Guides role was initially confined to helping with the evacuation of children but in Poland the Guides were not beyond a bit of covert Nazi sabotage or more risky intelligence work, and several were tortured and executed as a consequence.

There's a great deal more here too but a book that I have really enjoyed, not only for the social history of the Guiding movement but for all those little reminders about life as a Brownie. How about the second class test, tweaked slightly by 1961 when I would have done it because I feel sure I had to master the envelope corner in the bed-making module, but just look how useful it all made us

• Know the history of the Union Jack ( upsidedown at your peril)
• Tie four complicated knots (remember the reef knot behind your back?)
• Make a useful article with a hem and decorative tacking (see, that's where it all started)
• Sew on two types of buttons (er...are there two types?)
• Understand the importance of clean teeth
• Skip twenty times backwards (been using that all my life ever since)
• Catch a ball six times
• Lay a table for dinner.

So Happy Thinking Day everyone and come on then, what six were you in... can you still remember the song... did you go to Brownie Revels and eat burnt baked beans...  did you fly up to Guides (if so I'm jealous)  .. and in case there are any District Commissioners hovering, well let's just do it shall we...

Tu-whit-to-who-oo-ooo... Tu-whit-to-who-oo-ooo... Tu-whit-to-who-oo-ooo.

 

 

 

Snowdrops ~ A.D.Miller

So one day I walk out and there are none, not an inkling nor a sign of them, and the next day there they are... snowdrops everywhere, and discovered over a weekend when I should have been reading War & Peace but found myself strangely lured into a rather sleazy yet incredibly evocative account of modern-day Russia via A.D.Miller's recently published novel Snowdrops.

Snowdrop holds another more macabre meaning in the context of this book because it is Moscow slang for a corpse that lies buried or hidden in the winter snows, emerging only in the thaw and it is the discovery of just such a corpse that opens this book.

Nicholas Platt, in the '30-something zone of disappointment, a lawyer assigned to Moscow where he helps to set up the big-money petroleum deals with the oligarchs. Side-tracked by Masha and Katya, two predatory Russian women, Nicholas loses his grasp on any sense of moral direction he may have had. Surrounded by a heady mix of decadence and corruption, the gullible and naive Nicholas switches off all alarm bells under the heady influence of Masha who slowly draws him into an expensive and tangled web of deceit.

Now all that may not sound like the sort of book I would normally read and I would have to agree there is nothing uplifting about Snowdrops at all, (so not perhaps everyone's ideal read for the January doldrums) but for one tiny redeeming feature with which the book begins. Nicholas is clearly writing this as a form of confession to his unnamed wife-to-be... his guilt, complicity and shame about the events to be revealed are self-evident, as is his need to unburden himself of this account so that his fiancee can then decide whether she still wishes to marry him. In a way that chimed nicely with my own interpretation of the title because I always look on snowdrops as a rather humble first flower of the year... a sort of prayerfully bowed head that somehow seems to be offering apologies and first reparations for the winter we have just been through, to be quickly followed by the arrogant spring-is-sprung trumpeting of daffodils.

That's probably just me and a bit of wild imagination but that sense of Nicholas's hubris and subsequent humility held true throughout the book, and with it the realisation of an insight and self-awareness gained by learning from some huge mistake, so there are the seeds of redemption here, all is not lost.

Quite what that huge mistake is I won't elaborate on other than to tell you that the book works towards it, dropping the doubts in via a narrative so understated, yet one that moves on with such a compelling drive that I read the book in two long sittings. Yes, I did get a little confused about who paid what to whom for what and why and when but despite the drab monotone of Moscow, the sleaze, the cold and the grubby, grimy lives, I was riveted. A.D. Miller has a way of investing this tawdry drabness with an interest that gives this potentially monochromatic world some colour, characters have 'equal parts twinkle and menace'  and I can strangely visualise the man who has a face 'like a perplexed potato' whilst the bitter cold pervades every page. That is until the action cleverly (or others may say obviously) moves to the much warmer Black Sea location of Odessa where truths, no longer shrouded and muffled by snow, are slowly uncovered.

As the Economist's Moscow correspondent for three years this is a world A.D.Miller clearly knows well and that shows up in the little details about modern Russian life and the people which I found so fascinating including something also evident in War and Peace, that the Russians are the world champions of the parquet floor.

I have to mention the book itself too. It's one of several that have arrived in this rather dinky, compact size which I discover (because I measured it at approx 7" x 5" and then looked it up) is called Crown Octavo and I then open up a whole new world of Royal Sixteenmo and Medium Thirtytwomo of which I knew little beyond something about the number of times the original sheet of paper is folded.

South Riding...

...it's taken me months on and off but finished reading in the nick of time, now very much looking forward to tonight's TV adaptation.

I have a feeling Penelope Wilton is going to make a superb Mrs Beddows. Plenty of melodrama but the final pages of South Riding among the most moving I've read in ages, and to think Winifred Holtby only had weeks to live when she finished writing it.

 

The train...

Ah yes, the Plymouth to Paddington train.

Well, having adhered religiously to my new regime of sitting in a normal carriage or even the entertainment one, (where you quite expect someone to stand up and do a bit of juggling or something) on the principle that surrounded by normal noise it would be far easier to concentrate than in the Quiet Carriage with the one person on the mobile who thinks 'Quiet' doesn't mean them, I may have to have a rethink.

Going up to London on a packed train so no chance of moving, I and the whole carriage were in the company of Cameron (probably about 5yrs old), ever such a lot of bags of crisps, his mother, his father and roughly five brothers and sisters... they were on the move and I kept losing count but they all took up occupancy in the disabled bay at the front of the carriage.

Actually I have huge sympathy for anyone travelling with that many children, I mean think of all the things you need to take along with you to keep them amused for three to four hours in a confined space ? Books, puzzles, games, colouring... but sadly parents of Cameron were woefully unprepared and whilst father sat with his feet up on the table and relaxed into the journey, poor mother sat and did the shouting... non-stop. It was obvious things weren't going to go well when Cameron, bored before we'd even left the station, was commanded to sit still or he'd be thrown out of the window and all that before we'd even got past the sidings. The moment when Cameron locked himself in the toilet was a tense time for the entire carriage to be honest especially as we all knew when his mum shouted

'I TOLD YOU NOT TO DO THAT'

...well we all knew that actually she had.... many times.

Anway, mine is not to judge and I immersed myself successfully in the books I was going to be discussing, then listened to a few podcasts (The Guardian one on Writing and Illness...very interesting) and we all hit London not a moment too soon, crunched our way through a carpet of crisps and out of the carriage to the heady aroma of a cheese and onion. I hope Cameron et al are all are having a lovely time wherever they are.

Coming home that evening the train back to Plymouth was even worse. I've never seen the like, how can there be standing room only on the 7pm train? I mean it's not rush hour anymore, or does everyone work late these days?

Anyway, no matter, after a night spent awake and talking to myself in advance of being ready for the radio programme, plus an early start and a full day, I was unconscious by the time we'd gone over the points coming out of Paddington and it was only a really odd dream in which I could hear the distant voice of someone saying 'Tickets please' over and over again, and getting louder and louder, that I woke with a jump to find the 'Train Manager' very much in my face and a completely different person sitting beside me to the one who'd been there when we set off. Clearly we'd gone through Reading and I'd missed it. Anway I sat and had a moment or two of inner mortification wondering whether I had been dribbling or worse snoring, got over that and proceeded to spark up the old Kindle and get on with this month's episode of War and Peace.

Except I couldn't because the young girl sitting next to me was watching an episode of Hustle on a very out-sized laptop screen. Most considerately she had headphones on but that was worse in a way, it wasn't even as if I could sneak a look too and laugh out loud with her ... you know, that loud laugh you do when you have headphones on? Instead all I could see was the flickering of the screen out of the corner of my eye each time the scene changed and though I tried a bit of lip-reading I really couldn't get the gist.... not surprisingly because Hustle is often complex enough with words, let alone without them. And there was no escape, if I turned to face the window I could see the reflection, if I looked down there it was in the corner of my eye...if I looked ahead the same.

Well it wasn't her fault was it, so once the train cleared out a bit at Taunton and a four-seater table in front of us vacated I politely shifted myself there. No sooner settled and with the Kindle sparked and propped than a giant sized net of footballs landed on the seat opposite and spilled onto the table, swiftly followed by two track-suited footballers.

'Now come on Steve, ask the lady nicely if she'll move her bag, don't just shove it'

And I did, so Steve and his crate of lager sat next to me and Ricky (names changed) sat opposite and I propped my Kindle on the balls...in the net. To their credit they were two very polite young men working for a professional club in the south west who had obviously been out all day at football trials with hundreds of schoolboy hopefuls. There were a lot of phone calls to be made and there was a lot of lager to be drunk by Steve sitting next to me, whilst Ricky sensibly stuck to cups of tea.

I was interested to hear Steve suggest to Ricky that for his birthday treat to himself he was planning to travel on the train from Plymouth to Edinburgh in a day, drinking all the way, and then he was going to come straight back the same night on the sleeper.

'Watdya want to do that for mate?

'Well I just do.'

Ah, they know how to have fun these days don't they, we'd never have thought of that. I really wanted to say there's no point because you wan't remember much past Totnes but instead thought no... don't be such a curmudgeon, let the youngsters have their fun and tried to concentrate on this month's rather gory Team Tolstoy War and Peace hunting-the-wolf scenario. I'd got to the bit where the half-dead wolf is draped over the horse and I'm also starting to struggle a bit with the haze of lager fumes.

Suddenly the conversation turned to websites and I was all ears at the suggestion that theirs needed some improving sections 'for the kids', interactive pages on keeping fit and healthy in order to be able to play good football... diet, exercise, dedication, discipline...

'Well, Steve, you're the Fitness Coach, you decide mate... you know what you're doing.'

 

 

The day after the day before...

My sincere thanks to all those who offered good wishes and helpful suggestions about staying calm in a radio studio....it seemed to work. My contribution to Radio 4's A Good Read World Book Night special is done and my thanks to the BBC for the invitation. It was all very enjoyable from where I was sitting, great books and some fascinating debate with my fellow guest (Tom Watt...better known to me as Lofty from Eastenders and now a journalist and broadcaster ) and the presenter ( Harriett Gilbert from BBC World Service.) I won't spill any beans because the book reveal is all part of the interest of the programme, and of course I had rattled on for ages before I was reminded that I hadn't actually said what my book choice was but hey-ho, I'm sure it will all translate and edit down into a coherent radio programme somehow. The programme is usually broadcast at 4.30pm on a Tuesday and think it might be the World Book Night week edition (? March 1st?)  but I'll share the timing details when I have them.

It was a relief to fall into the embrace of Villandray in Gt Portland Street afterwards and meet up with Amanda Craig and, as luck would have it, just as I was leaving for the station word came through that John Self had been let out of his Asylum for a day and happened to be in London too. He was meeting up with Linda Grant in the afternoon so we all joined forces and had a grand chat. It's always a treat to meet Amanda and Linda (who was dashing off to get her press pass for London Fashion Week) and it was also lovely to meet Mr Self for the first time and reminisce about our first joint Bookerthon back in 2007 when, struggling to get hold of the books, we posted them back and forth to each other.

Thank you too for the e mails alerting me to the fact that we are mentioned in dispatches in today's edition of The Times... the Web Search item on The Daily Register page and a lovely picture of my very muddy shoes. If anyone has found their way here via that link you are very welcome... please do make yourselves at home. Normal book service will be resumed next week and sometime over this weekend I will recount my discovery of the very latest thing that annoys me on a train journey. I actually moved seats very politely but it was out of the frying pan into the ...well the footballers actually. Details to follow.

 

Brief intermission...

Just to explain a couple of days of dovegreyreader book silence, I could pretend that I'm having a normal week but I'm not really, and though I have books posts ready to fly I want to be around to talk about them with you in comments.

What with work, and Offspringette on final countdown for a year in New Zealand, and me in the midst of  reading (or re-reading) three books and then preparing my thoughts on them in readiness for my trip to London on Thursday to record a World Book Night special edition of A Good Read for BBC Radio 4... and well yes, I'm as breathless as this sentence, and you can see I'll need a lie down or most likely a very long walk by Friday.

So I have been doing lots of soothing and 'staying calm', just like I suggest everyone else does when the pace hots up and I'll share this astonishing sunset that we had over the weekend and which I just stood and watched for a very long time... Tamar Valley magic.

Edith Cavell ~ Diana Souhami

'The hospital bedspreads at the London were blue-and-white check. Probationers were taught to ensure that precisely nine squares hung over the end of each bed they were making. When the squares did not align, Ethel Hope Beecher...Sister of Mellish Ward from May 1897 to December 1899, would strip the covers off the beds to humiliate the recalcitrant bedmaker.'

Sounds not unlike my humiliation at the hands of a ward sister some seventy years later, but that was the London circa 1898.
I wrote a great deal about the inspirational trails that Diana Souhami's book on Edith Cavell had led me down as I read it, though not about the book itself, but I think we may have already ascertained that I knew as much about Edith Cavell as could be gleaned from the 1939 film starring Anna Neagle coupled my 1970's sojourn at the London Hospital, so I was keen to find out more in that way that nurses always like to know much more about other nurses, and indeed the book is very simply dedicated 'to nurses'.

Born in the Norfolk village of Swardeston on 4th December 1865, Edith was the oldest child of the Reverend Frederick Cavell (to rhyme with travel), forty years old and married to twenty-six year old Louisa. Also born in that year Rudyard Kipling and W.B Yeats who would both go on to play pivotal literary roles through the years of the Great War, and who could have imagined that this baby, born into an ordinary family, would likewise become a name synonymous with that conflict too.

Brought up in an atmosphere of devout and rigid religious observance, Edith Cavell had little alternative but to embrace a life of piety, and one steeped in expectations of duty and service to others, though it would seem she did so with a glad heart. Working initially as a governess and proving herself to be a competent artist as well, in 1895 Edith decided to follow in her younger sisters' footsteps and train as a nurse, eventually applying and being accepted to train at the London Hospital in Whitechapel in 1896 under the legendary tutelage of  matron Eva Luckes.

If you watched the TV series Casualty 1909 based around actual historical events at the London - a hospital sufficiently diligent about its record-keeping that a wealth of important research material now exists along with a fascinating hospital museum, then you may recall Cherie Lunghi playing the part of Miss Luckes. A year before Edith Cavell's arrival, the London had been the first hospital to establish what many of us in the 1970s still knew as PTS, Preliminary Training School, a period of induction that supposedly broke you into the ways of hospital life and nurse training gently before throwing you in the deep end.

'A pause on the threshold would give eager beginners time and opportunity to realise the importance of the new life and work on which they were about to enter, work that is taken up far too lightly at the present time by many sadly lacking the necessary vocation.'

(Miss Luckes quoted in Ministering Angels by Stella Bingham)

Eager beginners we were in 1972 too, though I think we had all thought it through quite carefully before sacrificing our feet and lumbar discs, to say nothing of quickly gaining hands that resembled those of a seventy-year old, and all for £12 a week.

Dedicated nurse and friend of Florence Nightingale, Eva Luckes ran her school of nursing as a centre of excellence setting the very higest standards. Standards that it may well have been nigh on impossible to match, and it initially came as quite a surprise to me to discover that Edith Cavell was not the bright star in Eva Luckes's nursing firmament. Ward reports are often highly critical and lukewarm with but rare glimmers of a hint of praise, frequently disparaging and uncomplementary, Miss Luckes clearly subjective and highly judgemental, a very hard task master and quite intolerant of any hint of a dedication any less than her own.

Well we've all been there, even student nurses as late as the 1970s were subject to that, so how much more severe was it likely to have been in 1896 at the birth of a recognised nurse training slowly being rescued from the clutches of a poor and disreputable level of disorganisation. I'm thinking back to Helen Rappaport's wonderful book No Place for Ladies about the nurses of the Crimean War, only fifty years earlier. Except perhaps, just perhaps, Eva Luckes viewed a nurse as self-contained and quietly confident and capable as Edith Cavell, and a woman not that much younger than herself, to be a slight threat? Not unheard of in any profession for someone in power to use that power as they choose. My own suppositions not Diana Souhami's and that's why she's the biographer and I am not, but those thoughts did occur to me as I read on. It seems Miss Luckes was often lukewarm in the references she gave Edith in her search for employment after her training, and it was that lack of a fulfilling post to which Edith felt sufficiently committed that seems to have been instrumental in her acceptance of the post in Belgium in 1907.

Edith Cavell's success at establishing a nurse training school in Brussels is exemplary, and as I read on I became increasingly aware of how I knew this book must end... and I couldn't quite believe that it would end as it surely does.

How could this kind, serious, gentle woman be led out on the morning of October 15th 1915, to be tied to a stake, blindfolded and shot as a traitor? Well, no more detail from me because it is that detail and the aftermath that makes for much more fascinating reading, but I will tell you this much... when I reached that point, the night before the execution, as Edith is left alone in her cell with the light burning so that she can be checked to ensure she doesn't commit suicide before she meets the firing squad, I had to put the book down and walk away for a few hours.

I was genuinely upset at the mere thought.
I walked in to see Bookhound,
'They are going to shoot her and I can't bear it...'
and he went and made me a cup of tea.
That's how upset I was and not a little angry at the inertia of the powers that be who clearly failed to intervene effectively on Edith's behalf and seemed to let it happen.

So a book that engaged me at every level. Diana Souhami carefully avoids many of the biographer's pitfalls as I see them, one of which must be that of constantly assuming you know what your subject 'perhaps might have done or thought' and the temptation must have been great. Edith Cavell was incredibly self-effacing, any letters that do exist seem to deflect the focus from herself onto others as she worries about them and asks after their welfare. And whilst copious quantities of Miss Luckes's written records and correspondence survive, very little remains of Edith Cavell's. For example all her hospital records, reports and diaries meticulously written about her work in Belgium were destroyed for fear of falling into enemy hands, so it cannot have been an easy task to build up a picture of a woman who consistently deflected the attention away from herself.

There are some wonderful little moments of discovery...the diary fragments found many years later stitched into a cushion belonging to Edith. Edith's faithful dog Jack who saw out his life with friends and is now stuffed and on display in the Imperial War Museum in London... I shall go and visit him next time. But above all I will, for all the arguments and mayhem over its construction, go and pay quiet homage at Edith Cavell's statue near Trafalgar Square too, because I have emerged from this book with a deepened respect and heartfelt admiration for a very courageous and dedicated woman.

I'm not sure you can ask for much more than that from any book.

dovegreywalkers...

Still doing it apart from the day it really was tipping down. I'm boring for England on the joys of my Omron pedometer whilst walking the highways and byways, daily short walks with one much longer one each week and I'm now completely up to date with The Archers omnibus podcast .... everyone's grief at Nigel's terminal plummet is playing out slowly and it's interesting trying to predict where the plot will go next, but all I can say is that I think that baby of Helen's has read 101 Things to Do Before You Are Five and has this tucked up the sleeve of his babygro...

5 ~ Sleep Like a Baby Stay Up All Night

Lull your parents into a false sense of security in the first three days after you you're born by sleeping soundly 99 per cent of the time...clearly you're a very very easy baby.
Once the friends have drifted away and granny's gone home safe in the knowledge she's not needed, it's time to wake up and stay awake.

And it's only a matter of time before Helen develops post-natal depression I can sense it coming and I'm worried for Lily and Freddy, Nigel's children, and Jolene's obviously got her eye on Kenton and Ruth's getting antsy with David for not being around and how long before Elizabeth crumbles ... sorry, this must seem like tortuous rubbish to anyone who doesn't partake but I'm hooked in again. My only beef is that all that cooking of radio breakfasts had me starving before I'd even reached the end of the lane.

So half of The Archers podcast (and aren't podcasts just brilliant) gets me to here...

The half a mile or so stretch of green lane that does terrible things to my nice shiny shoes. I also learn from the Gamekeeper that this is called Maggie Purly lane by the locals and is haunted by the ghost of Maggie who hanged herself at these crossroads. We know no more so I have asked for a bit more detail.

So this week I by-passed the mud and headed down towards the river Tamar by more direct routes. Please note the word 'down' which will inevitably involve the word 'up' very soon after. I put it off for a while by crossing the bridge and walking part of the Tamar Valley Trail on the Cornwall side until it was obvious it had to be done.

I think you'd be proud of me because Bookhound had very temptingly suggested that if I didn't fancy the hill to home I could ring and he'd come and get me, but what is this all about, no loss without pain etc so I just want to tell you that, though it might not look like it (and how do you make a hill look steep in a photo?) this one is an absolute killer, long, steep and seemingly never-ending.

The occasional car passed me by full of enormous great big fat jolly unfit people about to tuck into a huge cholesterol and saturated fat-laden roast dinner down at the pub... well the cars probably were full of very fit racing-snake thin people, I just kept telling myself that to feel better, but to be honest by this time I'm in need of a life-support machine and could hardly see straight to be 100% sure.

The view back down to the river confirms what my heart rate and inner thermostat is telling me...that was 'upness' and I'm thinking about concealing an oxygen cylinder somewhere around this point.

Then once I crest the hill I walk along the flat for a while which is like being off life-support and in the recovery room, I then turn a sharp bend and see this...

More of the same but gentler and nearly at the 'only 3000 paces to go' point when I can ring ahead for the kettle to go on. By this time The Archers omnibus has long finised and I've caught up on Open Book and Mariella shredding Sebastian Faulks over his definition of heroes, and his slippery side-stepping of where the women fit into his new TV series... had I had the puff I'd have been singing 'Go Mariella...' as it was I left her to it and she managed fine without my help.

So at this point it's time for Desert Island Discs because in the absence of oxygen only music is going to get me home now. I'm way behind so last week I listened to Robert Harris and I liked him a lot, seems like a normal down-to-earth chap and I'm reminded how much I have enjoyed his books in the past. I am taking Howard Jacobson out with me next time because I heard a snatch of it this week and he sounded like a very normal-down-to-earth chap as well.

14,000 paces done on this journey and a lie down required... how are all you other walkers doing?

 

 

World Book Night update...

Well things are really hotting up now and I'm starting to get very excited about World Book Night. I've been asked to do a few interesting things as well as getting myself into some vexed and very tangled discussions with a few people who are very agin World Book Night for reasons various, all of which I respect.

I've had to take an executive decision about my stance on this, because whilst I can try to understand all points of view and acknowledge the anxieties and threats perceived from those within the book trade, some of whom see it as another nail in the coffin for their shops and publishing, I am first and foremost a reader and book lover with no loyalties elsewhere. I hope the booksellers won't hold it against those of us who, as well as spending an inordinate of money with them over the years, do our very best to support them and are also approaching this whole event with some much needed unbridled enthusiasm for their product, especially given the daily dose of February misery that equals watching the news these days. To balance that I am also thankfully hearing about bookshops with some great events and initiatives for the day and it's a book lover's paradise on TV and radio too.

So World Book Night Saturday March 5th, whilst Sunday March 6th happens to be the dovegreyreader scribbles 5th birthday, so I'm sure to be sick with all the excitement that weekend especially as Vocal Harem, the lovely women's community choir that I sing with, have a concert (booked eighteen months ago) on the Saturday evening too, and that is when I will be giving out my choice of book, The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy to choir members after the concert.

As well as all this I'm doing 'something' with the BBC, more of which when it's 'a wrap' or 'in the can' or whatever I'm supposed to say, and you will be the first to know about broadcast dates so I hope you'll forgive me if I'm a bit sparse around these parts next week. I won't be ignoring you, I'll be frantically reading books and then going to London to record.

Are there any other givers out there?

Any bookshops with events?

Please do let me know and I'll try and do a few round up blog posts to include them all and if you have photos of the day I'll include those afterwards... and I must mention one work colleague who will be giving her books away outside a football ground on the Saturday afternoon, there's brave for you.

One other point I do want to highlight though... if you are a book giver I think it would be wise to check with the collection point that you have chosen to ensure that they have actually agreed to take the books in. It was an opt-out rather than an opt-in venture and I hear some haven't done so. Whilst I don't want to spread panic and alarm nor can I bear the thought of people being disappointed... not all book sellers are happy about this initiative and I have heard that some will turn parcels away if people haven't been in to ask permission to collect their books from them. Which all made me slightly queasy at the thought of some disappointed givers who may have set up special events... so best to double check.

 

Team Tolstoy - Troika Stop Five

For anyone who has stumbled in here today and is wondering what on earth is going on, you have arrived at Team Tolstoy's monthly sojourn in their year-long shared read of War and Peace. It's never too late to start, even if we're now on page five hundred and something, but you'll find our previous posts starting back on Tolstoy's birthday September 9th last year via that link, and we stop by here on the 9th of each month for a discussion  ...and if you're really interested, you'll find the shared read from the year before, Team Ulysses, here.

I hope you don't mind but the troika horses were getting a bit unruly so I've brought these two in to do the steering. Would you just look at them wrapped up warm in the pelts of ... er synthetic animals I'm sure (do you remember the smell of Afghan coats? ) and just check out the Uggs and the slurping from saucers as we settle down for our chinwag around the samovar again, it soon comes round, but what an odd War & Peace month I've had.

I'm not sure I ever get this quite right. Do I pick up and start it the minute the troika slides off again, reading a bit each day, or do I read as a big chunk later in the month? I kept putting it off and procrastinating and delaying and reading other things until eventually I got there on Saturday and then if I'm honest I was a teeny bit wearied by the first half of this month's section, I'm not sure I could manage too many pages of Pierre's Freemasonry dilemma in a row... I was having a bit of a yawn in fact, nearly but not quite tempted to skim whilst I'll bet others may have loved those parts.

I'm still not sure where I stand on Pierre, is he really

'a great gentleman, the rather blind and absurd husband of a distinguished wife, a clever crank who did nothing but harmed nobody and was a first-rate, good-natured fellow.'

Am I to remain patient with this for as long as it takes...

'the complex and difficult process of internal development was taking place all this time in Pierre's soul, revealing much to him and causing him many spiritual doubts and joys.'

Would you lovers of Pierre out there please jump to his defence because I'm beginning to think he doth protest his dilemma a little too much even though I do feel sorry for him, plagued by his conscience and back with the rather shadowy Helene who is

'hardened by a varnish left by the thousands of looks that had scanned her person...'

Meanwhile things are certainly looking up for my previously rather wearied and early opinion of Natasha,

I'm loving Natasha's nightly forays into her mother's bedroom to talk about life and love...

'These visits of Natasha's at night before the count returned from his club were one of the greatest pleasures of both mother and daughter..'

And then good old Tolstoy delivered what for me was one of the best sections of the book so far... the ball and the Rostov family preparations. The countess in her claret-coloured velvet, the girls in their white gauze dresses over pink slips, roses on their bodices and hair dressed a la greque. Natasha's fussing over everyone else at her own expense, the long suffering maids following her around the room trying to stitch the hem of her dress as she flapped over everyone else and then her first dance with Andrei.

Andrei now emerging from his grief at the death of Lise and 'revived and rejuvenated' as the 'wine' of Natasha's charm rises to his head

'There's something fresh, original, un-Petersburg-like about her that distinguishes her.'

I have also noticed that Tolstoy interprets many of Natasha's emotions via her facial expressions as he tells us her smile suggests something, or her face demonstrates how she might be feeling, rather than putting words into her mouth that she may be too immature to express perhaps?

Funny moment of the month, and there always is one with Tolstoy, has to be Vera and Berg's first social evening in their immaculate new home...

'Berg smiled with a sense of his superiority over a weak woman...who could not understand all that constitutes a man's dignity...Vera at the same time smiling with a sense of superiority over her good, conscientious husband, who all the same understood life wrongly, as according to Vera all men did.'

And poor Maria (doesn't she look fed up poor love) continues to suffer the slings and arrows of her father's ageing outlook on life. The Count seems almost Lear-like in his unreasonable remonstrations, whilst the saintly Maria carries the burden on her shoulders and contemplates that it might be preferable to don the coarse smock, the bast shoes, a rough coat and a black kerchief and head off on a pilgrimage, but until the time is right she tolerates it all.

So as life looks up for Andrei, things seem to be getting gloomier for Pierre, as Andrei advances so Pierre retreats, where will it all head next, we must be due another war any day but meanwhile I can't wait to hear your thoughts.

 

For those reading to schedule, next month :: Part IV Chapters 1 - 13, Part V Chapters 1 - 22 which takes us to the end of Volume 2.

 

Mr. Fortune's Maggot ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner

'Today I heard that one of those little jump-up firms which proliferate like fireweed in the ruins of publishing wants to re-issue Mr Fortune's Maggot...'

Not me but Sylvia Townsend Warner writing to William Maxwell in 1976 about her novel first published in 1927.

It's months since I read Mr Fortune's Maggot, not just a few, we're talking six at least. Then there had been a delay in writing down my initial thoughts and I knew I hadn't quite nailed the book as I wanted to, it had felt slippery and elusive, any vaguely intelligent or original thought evaded me, so I had planned to throw in the towel and let the post slip down the order and on into oblivion.

Except for some reason the book has sat patiently by my desk alongside Lolly Willowes and both refusing to go back on the shelf. Each time I glanced in their direction I got that look of reproach and defeat a book is quite capable of giving. So I pick it up to admire the cover occasionally and recall that it was the writer Salley Vickers who recommended Lolly Willowes at a literary festival some years ago, and I had then scurried off to find it. It was Ruth (who comments here) who found the then lesser known but very delicious looking editions published by the New York Review of Books, and we both succumbed. I only really wanted Lolly Willowes but couldn't resist Mr Fortune's Maggot too, because they looked nice.
Lame but true.


So I have hauled this post blinking up into the daylight because Mr Fortune's Maggot really was a book too good to pass over, and because at the time I was reading the correspondence between William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and alongside that William Maxwell's novels, and then it seemed only right and proper that I read some of Sylvia's and write about them too. The introductions here are from contemporary literary voices, Alison Lurie and Adam Mars-Jones respectively here, and of course being NYRB Classics any boxes about paper quality and production values are firmly ticked.

Having progressed from the life of a bank clerk in Hornsey  the 'tall, raw-boned and rather rummaged -looking' Reverend Timothy Fortune has settled into the life of an island missionary on the Raratongan archipelago in the Pacific. Undaunted, easy-going and seemingly humble in his approach, further isolation beckons and he decides to upsticks and settle on the remote island of Fanua.

Warnings of much singing and dancing and plenty of immorality plus uncertainties about cannibalism don't deter Mr Fortune who, with his housewifely mind and staid and conscientious approach to his mission, somehow seems capable of riding out any storm, whether it be physical or emotional. Armed with a wheezy harmonium and the leaving gift of a very useful silver teapot, his arrival on Fanua is greeted with much excitement by the islanders... I did wonder whether there was enough meat on him for a good dinner.

Mr Fortune makes a rapid convert in the young boy Lueli who quickly becomes his constant companion, though with assurances all round that this is a chaste and uncomplicated friendship. Further converts do not flock in so Mr Fortune focuses all his attention rather single-mindedly on Lueli and his education.
Lueli's conversion is complicated by his worship of a wooden idol and of course the relationship becomes increasingly complex too as Mr Fortune's love for Lueli shifts and deepens, bringing with it come some agonisingly deep realisations for him about love, conversion, faith and idolatory and some mega-tussles with his conscience.

'And because I loved him so for what he was I could not spend a day without trying to alter him. How dreadful it is that because of our wills we can never love anything without messing it about!'

The sense of place is magnificent. Fanua is a volcanic island also prone to earthquakes and I was amazed to  discover that STW had done all her research from a single library book. The eruption, when it happens is likewise going to signal some earth shifting decisions for Mr Fortune too.

... and that was as far as that initial post went.

So without re-reading, I'm thinking back now to my firmest recollections of the book and I realise that I am left with a deep sense of empathy and sadness over it all, it is a book that warns about many things not least the dangers of obssessive love and passing judgement over the faith of others.
Of her own creation, STW said

'I love him with a dreadful uneasy passion which in itself denotes him a cripple...'

and I sense that too having read and reflected on poor old Mr Fortune.

It seems I was sufficiently impressed by Sylvia Townsend Warner's writing back in 2004 to join the STW Society but soon realised that I wasn't keen enough to want to go on rambles around her homeland of Dorset, but she does have a large and loyal following who thankfully do that and much more to keep her name and her literary legacy alive.

I do know that the two books I have read so far have left their mark but in a strange and rather intangible way. Sylvia's writing touches a chord and resonates. I love the way that she snatches those opportunities for wry humour right on the brink of deeply serious moments, whilst placing it all so sensitively in the midst of what can often be described as sad and disempowered lives. In Lolly Willows and now Mr Fortune's Maggot, lives that are about to make some very difficult decisions in order to wrestle that power back from elsewhere. I also know that there is something I can't quite touch and reading back through my one copy of The STW Society Journal  this evening (I went to the society website to find that link, saw the cover on the webpage and remembered mine on the shelf) and I see that Gillian Beer quotes John Updike who feels likewise when reviewing STW's short stories,

'She has the spiritual digestion of a goat. Her stories tend to convince us in process and baffle us in conclusion; they are not rounded with meaning but lift jaggedly toward new and unseen developments.'

Gillian Beer goes on to argue that the novels

'at once baffle and possess the reader. Douce, whimsical and shifting seamlessly across verbal registers, they suddenly expose us to appalling suffering that cannot be set aside. Calamity is simply there, and to be practised. It is shared with the characters. Sometimes it closes up again into comedy.... empathy is encouraged and then rejected.'

I could have done with reading all that months ago, if not earlier this evening as I wrote this as it would have explained something that I couldn't, because I have indeed been oddly baffled.

I'm still not sure I've done the book or Sylvia Townsend Warner justice but it's been good to think out loud with all of you and thank you if you've stayed the course this far. Six months later Mr Fortune's Maggot is still echoing around in my mind very clearly and it has not been difficult to recall it again, but I'm also quite relieved to be putting the book back on the shelf at last too.

Recently I came across The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner £2.50 for an unread 1995 Virago edition and dipping in I feel sure more of the bafflement may be explained, but I'd love to hear your thoughts if you've read this one or any others.

dovegreywalkers

Whatever happened to The Proclaimers and that song ' And ay wuud wuk wun hundrid miles...' because I've got the song on the brain now and find myself singing it every time I stride out of the gate, because yes, this walking thing is really happening. I'm going to become a talking/walking/pedometer bore for a moment but I wanted to thank nanosecond for the link and encouragement a few weeks ago on this post with mention of the the trans-America virtual walk which I think one or two of us here have signed up for. You register, log your daily mileage and the map tracks your course across the USA from East Coast to West which adds extra incentive to those miles, so if anyone wants to partner me I'm 63898, and I have set up a team, dovegreywalkers.
Are we going past anyone's house yet?
A cup of tea would be lovely...

Having decided that I was not going to get one jot fitter sitting behind my desk, or an ounce lighter reading a book, this little project has given me some much-needed January motivation to get the shoes on and walk with a purpose. There's no point in me joining a gym because all I do is bypass the painful things to seek out the exercise bike that looks like an armchair, settle into it comfortably with an audio book playing on the headphones and emerge with calves and thighs the size of tree trunks (Redwoods at minimum) but little aerobic or weight-bearing fitness achieved.

So I set myself up to pass with the walking by pitching my target pitifully low but achievable at 5 miles a week, a bit like the way you used to have to 'run in' the engine in a new car (I'm just an older model with a bit of a spluttery engine) and decided I'd use the lane as my treadmill. Though treadmill, with all its connotations of repetitive boredom couldn't be further from the reality because it's no hardship to be out there enjoying the scenery. End to end it's 1.3 miles but I have conjured up all manner of permutations to achieve distance and variety each time I nip out and to my astonishment easily clocked up 40 miles through January, thus doubling my target.

Out of the gate turn left, go as far as the dip, turn round come back past the house and as far as the farm track...or turn right go as far as the farm track and back to the other end. Or when I have a little more time walk across to the little Methodist chapel and back (5000 plus steps, about 2 miles) I can ring the changes and have noticed a real difference up the hills after just a few weeks  and don't they just look like little slopes when you drive them? I now know we live ON THE TOP OF A HILL. It's amazing when I can slot in 4000 paces, because I also have my Omron pedometer to guide me and which I must stop calling a pacemaker.

I bought one for Bookhound too which he cleverly tried to 'lose' on day two, but luckily for him someone found it in Morrison's and handed it in... he rang back around his footsteps just in case and there it was.

But how often do I sit and wait and sigh while my computer switches on and decides to update everything and then asks to be restarted... twenty minutes in which I now grab the shoes and power up to the top of the lane and back.

The Omron arrived and I duly set it up and went out for a trial walk, came home, 4500 paces later and announced gleefully that 34 minutes of those were indeed aerobic paces which had used up 7.6gms of fat....

'Great' said the very helpful and encouraging Kayaker, ' that's a bacon sarnie in the bank mother.'

It's all about mindset and motivation and there's something about adding in a pedometer that addresses both, making me keen to waste no opportunity in walking as often as I can. I was always the one to moan when Bookhound parked the car in the furthest corner of the Tesco's carpark and we seemed to walk miles to the entrance. Now I'm thinking we'll park at Tesco's in Plymouth and walk to Tesco's in Launceston to shop.

Once a week at least I really am going for the five miler complete with map, rucksack, water, banana, plasters, waterproofs, camera, kitchen sink, iTouch, headphones...the incredibly comfortable ones that come with the £3.50 entertainment carriage package on the train, and hook around outside my ears so that I can hear the tractors. Last week I found a new (to me) green lane which brought me out high above the Tamar and in a part I hadn't explored on foot before.

And on the way I'd listened to The Archers omnibus, two episodes of Open Book and some Desert Island Discs and I wanted to tell Sandy Shaw she might get bored with those choices after a week, but perhaps not if they mean something special to her. The only trouble with the green lanes is their unpredictability,  fine and dandy for horses but very likely to be impassably muddy for humans and at one point my lovely shiny Brasher walking shoes, you know the ones that shine like conkers after years of being polished and loved, had been transformed from this

to this...

With obesity problems and all the health-related issues now ranking high on the agenda here in the UK, I can't believe that someone hasn't  thought about setting up a Trans-UK virtual walking equivalent or something related to the coastal paths perhaps. Fortunately we're near enough to go and do those and have some in our sights this year, but just imagine the glorious virtual scenery the UK could be sharing around the world. As regards the Trans-American crossing, I'm sure the view will improve, but I'm here and passing Kittewan Creek apparently.

So I think Devon might be winning on scenic route points, because there's nothing nicer, as I walk my way around in a giant circle, than seeing home in the distance.

I can ring ahead from this point and say get the kettle on I'll be there in about 8000 paces....which is of course another couple of bacon sarnies in the bank.

 

 

101 Things to Do Before You Are Five ~ Sally Norton

Over the years I have understandably gathered quite a large selection of baby and child care related books and during my time as a caseload health visitor I would keep a shelf of Books for Loan in my office, for beleagured parents who needed to know they were not on their own with this little rascal, and that was how a few real favourite books emerged. This wasn't about what I thought parents might find useful, no indeed because it was all very professionally evidence-based i.e. which books, once loaned, never came back. Then I'd take my 'evidence' to the surgery's Patient's Association and ask if they'd buy me more. I could guarantee that six copies of just a few books would always be out and very hard to retrieve 'oh please could I just keep it a few more weeks' ... Raising Boys by Steve Biddulph was one, The Social Baby by Lynne Murray and Liz Andrews was another.

However the most popular and in demand book, and the first amusing one I can recall arriving on the scene after the serious years of Hugh Jolly and Penelope Leach, was Toddler Taming by Christopher Green. I could never have enough copies and we all cried allelulia that at last someone had got it... could look at all this with a sense of humour and perhaps parents stood a chance of feeling less haunted by the lasting damage they were supposedly doing their children, and may be more inclined to view the whole process, replete with all its challenging moments, as at least halfway enjoyable and on many occasions downright funny.

I used to tell parents to store up those moments that seemed so dreadful at the time for future use... after all we now lovingly recall the day the Kayaker played barbers and cut the hair of all Offspringette's friends,  solemnly bringing the cuttings, ranging from fair to dark to curly and little ponytails, to me in a box in the kitchen. It was such a memorable day I can almost recall how many hyperventilations per minute I was doing.

Writers sensibly jumped on the hilarity bandwagon and the books all became much more light-hearted but lately we've been back in a serious phase with books about contented babies and baby whispering and continuum concept parenting and what mothers do when it looks like nothing and no-cry sleep solutions, so when 101 Things to Do Before You Are Five by Sally Norton arrived from Penguin last week I was prepared for a wry smile, but perhaps not much more. I wasn't prepared for a little book that has had me laughing out loud every time I pick it up and which I now think should be issued free to every new parent in the country when they apply for Child Benefit or something...

'Congratulations, you've been born! But don't just lie there gurgling. You've got lots to do before you turn five and are packed off to school.

You're only little now but in the blink of an eye you'll be walking through the gates of academia. You'll be someone who has redefined the word 'holiday' for their parents, and a highly evolved human being who can win an argument simply by saying three words - 'no', 'no' and 'no'.'

The book is packed with sage advice for the new arrival...

' You'll start your first year unable to support your own head or tell the difference between daddy and a hat stand. But that's no excuse for just lazing around blowing milky bubbles. If you don't get on with things, you'll find you're one year old and full of regrets for what might have been...so come on, you've got to get through twelve clean babygros a day, regurgitate at least a dozen feeds a week...'

and then the 101 suggestions start...

Here's an extract from 5 ~ Sleep Like a Baby Stay Up All Night

Lull your parents into a false sense of security in the first three days after you you're born by sleeping soundly 99 per cent of the time...clearly you're a very very easy baby.
Once the friends have drifted away and granny's gone home safe in the knowledge she's not needed, it's time to wake up and stay awake.

It'll now take you around six months to work out the difference between night and day. But don't worry because there's loads you can do. Why not stay up all night...

• Crying because you're hungry?
• Crying because you've got wind?
• Crying because you don't want to be picked up?
• Crying because you want to be picked up?
• Crying because you're tired?

or what about 16 ~ Eat Out of the Dog's Bowl

The world really opens up once you start crawling. It gives you the chance to check out hitherto unseen areas of the house. You'll soon discover that chicken-flavoured dog food's nice...once you get started there are plenty of other ways to tickle your tastebuds and enhance the weaning experience...

• Lick the railings at the zoo?
• Suck the edge of a greasy tablecloth in a cafe?
• Swap dummies with that runny-nosed baby in the doctor's surgery?
• Suck the bristles of the big brush that's kept by the toilet?

Which reminded me that all toilet brushes become brushes non gratae the day that I found a little Offspringette brushing a baby Kayaker's hair with one.

I could quote from this little book all day and can't recommend it highly enough as a gift for yourself if you have small children or know anyone who has just had a baby, or for those of you who are grandparents to chuckle over first and then pass on down the line.... oh alright then one more...

46 ~ Like the Rabbits Best at the Zoo

Mummy and Daddy love the idea of exposing you to nature. And nothing makes them laugh more after spending £36 on tickets to the zoo than your favourite animal being something you could see in next door's hutch...

    Them: But didn't you like the cheetahs? They can run at 70mph

    You: Rabbits

    Them: What about the elephants? They weigh 8 tonnes.

    You: Rabbits

    Them: You must have liked giraffes? They can be 22ft tall.

    You: Rabbits

 

Nourishment ~ Gerard Woodward

I'm very late reaching the finishing tape with Nourishment. A book published so long ago it must be almost due in paperback any day now, and has had everything written about it than can possibly be thought of, but this was one of those posts that had disappeared down the list behind the scenes last year.

At thois point I have to be very honest and say that when a book arrives and the blurb is as follows

'...when Tory Pace's prisoner-of-war husband, Donald, makes an outrageous demand for sexual gratification. He wants a dirty letter by return of post!....she begins a quest to master the language of carnal desire'

well, I heave a bit of a sigh.

But the proof copy of Nourishment by Gerard Woodward arrived, with its look of the facsimile ration book about it and some clever little details added in and I was suddenly really desperate to buy into the whole nostalgic look of the thing. This appealing livery surely an instance when the proof far excelled the look of the real thing to my eye and when you compare the two I think it's clear this book was aiming for a particular audience and perhaps not us nostalging types.

 

 
Sometimes a book comes with the most perfect title, one that allows for multiple interpretations of the story, and Nourishment, just that single word, had the potential to assume many guises and so I waded in.

The theme of rationing both relevant to the wartime setting and likely to induce waves of nostalgia but also an ironic twist on Donald's sex-starved predicament in StalagLuft which ever. Ultimately the sensational element of the letters, though central to the plot, proved not to be the 'be all and end all' of a novel which, to my surprise, I did enjoy.

Tory Pace lives with her mother Mrs Head in war-torn London, working in Farraway's Gelatin Factory and scraping an existence whilst her mother shops and cooks. With the children safely evacuated to the Cotswolds and husband Donald missing presumed dead, life settles into a predictable round of unsavoury work and much queuing for food. More irony with much rendering down of cows going on but precious little of them to eat, so when Mrs Head snaffles a juicy looking joint from the bombed-out butcher's shop there is much rejoicing in the kitchen that evening as the succulent-looking limb is carved... except... no I can't say but ...well the butcher himself is missing and it's black-humourously funny. And this all sets the tenor of much of this book which is frequently oddly funny, black humour abounding, whilst also being deadly serious, and while food may be scarce in wartime there is no rationing of fears and desires.

So Donald rises from the supposed dead as a POW and requests the letters which in the end Tory takes very seriously and obliges with, doing her research slightly above and beyond the call of duty, and not without its consequences so there is a rising sense of dread and anticipation when Donald finally returns home unannounced, damaged and deranged by his incarceration.

The impact of war and its aftermath is crafted from new and unusual angles by Gerard Woodward. Tory's grief at the absence of her evacuated children balanced with an honesty about the pleasures of solitude; her altered position within the family, now the wartime worker and the wage-earner but, in the presence of her mother, condemned to remain a child, still not allowed to be the head of the family... just a few of the more unusual takes on a seemingly familiar theme that populate this novel.

Meanwhile the post-war period as families try to reconstruct themselves in this new image is fascinatingly laid out by Gerard Woodward, the nourishment required to sustain this life is cleverly woven into the lives of Family Pace; from the ointment that Tory massages into Donald's burned and dehydrated scalp (don't ask how he did that but I did mention he was deranged) to the food reduced to its basic components in vitamin tablet form being promoted by Farraway's.... from Tory's new job cleaning the public toilets, to the book that Donald decides to write. Gerard Woodward ranges far and wide across the post-war spectrum and cleverly drew me into a novel which months later I can remember in the clearest detail.

So in the end I did enjoy Nourishment tremendously and having missed I'll Go to Bed at Noon when it did the rounds of the Booker a few years ago, I am impressed enough with this one to give more of Gerard Woodward's novels a try.