It's that time again and now forty years on we will all be gathering at Great Ormond Street today for the October 1972 set reunion, and to celebrate forty years as nurses. No matter what any of us may have done since, once you have trained as a Great Ormond Street nurse you stay as one for ever, and for those who may have missed the posts on dovegreyreader down the years, well... if you have a few hours to spare you will find them all here under The Sufferings of a Student Nurse.
Here we were, one day into uniform, rookies all and probably with little idea of what lay ahead once the days of Preliminary Training School were completed six weeks later ready to be sent off to our first ward allocations.
I was sent to do twelve weeks on Private Patients, which gave me a completely unrealistic expectation about the standard of snacks that might be available in a ward fridge at any one time.
By the time we were released onto the wards we had learned amongst other things...
How to do temperature, pulse and respirations whilst staring at the fob watch,
How to take blood pressures on tiny people,
How to test urine,
How to collect a stool sample,
How to fold and change towelling nappies, bath a baby and dress them appropriately,
How to feed a baby,
How to put on a gown and wash our hands and remove several layers of skin in the process,
How to make up a Milton sterilising tank
How not to put dirty flower water down any other sink but the sluice (pseudomonas aeruginosa)
How to work a sluice and a steriliser,
How not to touch a door to go through it but to nudge it with your shoulder (still do it now going into shops)
How to make a cot so that the nursery rhyme pictures on the counterpane faced the child (blue for boys, pink for girls)
How to wear a cape with panache (easy)
How to wear a navy gaberdine rain coat and storm cap with panache (more challenging)
How to fold those hats and keep them on our heads (one lean into the steriliser and all starch gone)
How to button the collar to the dress and then cope with blisters on the neck from the starch,
How to ditch the recommended K skip shoes and replace them with something slightly more becoming,
How to get out of bed the minute the alarm went and be on duty for 7.45 am,
But above all we learnt how to laugh and I am sure there will be a great deal of that today.
We also all quickly accumulated the GOS student nurse's badge of office, a clutch of nappy pins fixed just above the bib of the apron next to the fob watch, and to be worn with pride for the next four years and this being me of course I still have mine, in my little nursing memory box... Imagine my surprise when I wound up that forty-year old Sekonda watch this week and that tiny second hand started ticking.
At which point I realised that were I ever to go back into uniform and have do this again my fob watch would need to be pinned to the hem of my apron, not the bib.
Random Numbers generated on September 28th at 19.36
Magnus here. Right I have roused myself from post-surgical slumber...something funny seems to have 'been done' but I am not really sure what. I am supposed to be staying indoors for 24 hours but I nipped out for a bit of voleing when they weren't looking ....and by the time you read this I will be asleep again and there is the 'big fuss guilt' thing going on so a LOT OF FOOD. Congratulations to the winners of a copy of The Ladies Paradise by Emile Zola, if you could check it is really you here, and then send your addresses to herself at dovegreyreader at gmail.com and put something like ZOLA WINNER in the subject line, the books will wend their way eventually.
You can't say the word Potter without meaning Harry and thinking J.K.Rowling these days can you, and in the week when J.K.R.'s first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, hits the shelves I will forgive you for thinking I am about to write more on that subject. Sorry, but I'm not, even though I do have the book ready and waiting on my Kindle because I like the sound of it, but no this is all about Otters, and that was the nearest pun I could come up with at 8pm on a Sunday evening with Episode Two of Downton Abbey only an hour away.
And in fact I had actually been thinking about Terry Nutkins...sorry this is getting more confusing by the minute, I can see that.
Whenever I hear the name Terry Nutkins I think of dolphins, whilst everyone else, including Miriam Darlington in her wonderfully restorative book Otter Country, is probably thinking about otters, because Terry Nutkins was the young lad who helped care for Gavin Maxwell's otters,
'Nutkins himself lost two fingers, caught a gangrene infection and was hospitalised due to the savage and unpredictable side of Edal's nature...'
The life of Gavin Maxwell and the otters is recounted in Gavin Maxwell's memoir Ring of Bright Water, and in a week when I kept on thinking about Terry Nutkins (and the dolphins) how coincidentally strange and sad when news came of Terry's death from leukaemia at the age of sixty-six, and this when I really hadn't thought or heard a word about him for goodness knows how long.
And in a week when I and the rest of the Great Ormond Street October 1972 set will be meeting in London from all corners of the world to celebrate forty years in nursing, I had this dim flicker of a recollection that many years ago (1972-73 to be almost exact) my student nurse room mate knew someone who knew someone (etc) who knew Terry Nutkins, and in my mind was lodged this idea that she had gone to meet him at a dolphinarium in London's Oxford Street. And surely I remember walking past it...
But I must have dreamt this... a dolphinarium in Oxford Street?
How can this be??
How on earth would you get dolphins to Central London and Oxford Street in the first place??
What about the water??
I kept rejecting the whole notion as a moment of bizarre and misplaced recall until I settled it once and for all and googled it..
Not a dream then. Does anyone else remember it??
'London Dolphinarium was located at number 65 Oxford Street on the corner of Great Portland Street and Oxford Street. It was owned by a company called Pleasurama. It opened in 1971 and closed in 1973. The tank was 3m deep, 14m long and 5m wide. The star attractions were Bonnie and Clyde, two dolphins. They were also joined by sea lions and penguins. A man called Terry Nutkins was the Assistant General Manager of the dolphinarium (who helped found it) and David Taylor was the original "Zoovet".'
Good, that's sorted then and I am sure you will be delighted that I am now resting easy about my potentially faulty recall, whilst never ceasing to be amazed at the chain reaction of memories triggered by one line in one book.
More thoughts, slightly less tangental and hopefully less confused, about Otter Country by Miriam Darlington coming soon.
It was the Open University that turned me into an Emile Zola fan. I had always avoided the books as 'probably not my thing' or 'impenetrable' until I read Germinal. Zola's expose of the inhumane conditions faced by the French miners in the 1860s, was part of the Nineteenth Century Novel course and to my surprise I zipped through the book with real reading pleasure and anticipation and knew I would read more by Zola.
'Why read Emile Zola?' asks Sandy Petrey in my Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola...
'Because his representation of society's impact on the individuals within it memorably depicts what it means to be human in the modern world.'
And in doing so Emile Zola covered a huge amount of ground. His novels don't focus solely on the industrial workers, he ranges across the spectrum of French life, the rural population, the theatre, the stock exchange and perhaps my favourite of all the books I have read so far, the department store... The Ladies Paradise.
We have treats in store here in the UK, and doubtless everywhere else, eventually because an eight week BBC serialised adaptation The Paradise will be hitting our screens soon. I had no idea and just happened to see a trailer and thought out loud 'That has to be Ladies Paradise' which really impressed Bookhound when the announcer confirmed it in the next breath. Then a lovely moment of pure serendipity when OUP wrote to let me know about a new edition of the book which will coincide.
I wrote about Au Bonheur des Dames, The Ladies Paradise back in the very early days of dovegreyreader so I have nipped down to the basement and dusted off that post and here are my thoughts from way back in 2006...
I've emerged feeling quite Parisian and very bedraggled from Emile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise. That last sale was a corker. My hat's all askew, I've lost a glove and heaven alone knows what my bustle looks likebut I can highly recommend this one.It deserves a place along with the regular classics in any bookshop.
Here's the nineteenth century version of "does my bum look big in this" meets "shop 'til you drop" and it's an absolute joy of a read. We can all heave a sigh, because Emile Zola, according to Brian Nelson's excellent introduction (I always read these at the end) had apparently decided on a break from pessimism and the stupidity and sadness of life and wanted to express some of the optimism and progress of the times.That's not to say he couldn't resist a good bit of dramatic death in The Ladies' Paradise but it's death from the killing of the spirit rather than a collapsing mine roof.
Octave Mouret, the owner of the store, is certainly a man with vision and power and though he has little trouble conquering just about every other woman in Paris with his magical kingdom..
"Mouret's sole passion was the conquest of Woman.He wanted her to be queen in his shop; he had built this temple for her in order to hold her at his mercy"
...it is Denise, the lowly shop girl who proves to be his biggest challenge.
Good old Denise for keeping Mouret slathering on a leash, some sort of redemption for womankind in a novel where the rest of them are scheming, spending and shoplifting for La Republique.
I'm an accomplished flaneur but this book drives along at that frenetic shopping pace that leaves you gasping and before you know it you're out of the door at the end of the day with sore feet and laden with enough baggage to need a hansom cab to get you home.Sales tactics have changed little since 1883, just substitute Amazon for Ladies' Paradise and read on.
There were countless aspects to the arrival of the department store that I had never really considered not least the fact that, until its inception, the only haven available to women outside the home had been the Church. Nor did you now have to go shopping with a list and the specific purpose of buying something (silly idea) it was fine to browse, browsing was original and caught on fast.The theory behind the department store was that it supplied a desire you didn't know you had until you set foot in the door and Zola's imagery creates a sub-text of desire to beat them all in this book. This perhaps (or perhaps not) explains the behaviour of a family friend years ago who went out to buy some of these
and came back with one of these.
It's easy to sympathise once you've read The Ladies' Paradise.
Please scroll down for gifts because you will be pleased to know the NITS are trained and ready to do their first prize draw.
Magnus here, it's prize draw time and as.... shhhh, she said not to say... it's her cake and candles day... not quite a Very Big One but almost, they've gone off out and I am in charge here OK.
Thank you for your concern about my tail the other week, and then I have that operation thing on Friday ... how could they do that?? I didn't agree to any of it so they'll have to catch me first, and just as my purr was dropping nicely into a bass, and I suppose I'll be a soprano any day now...rats.
Anyhow, in the interests of safety and as I am home alone with 'it', I am indulging in some covert CCTV surveillance from the safety of the desk. I am by far the the most sensible of the two of us so this choosing a winner thing is safe with me, just add your name in comments to be in with a chance of winning one of five copies of The Ladies Paradise by Emile Zola and I'll do the rest, alright chums, and the books can go worldwide, so go on that person in Ulan Bator, this means you as well.
And a big thank you to Oxford University Purrress, the books will be ready in a week or so and they will post them out to the winners drekkly.
Right, while they are out I'm just off to sharpen my claws on that nice sofa over there and then I'll probably go out and find a few voles to bring indoors for a play.
So I had met Hannah Rothschild very briefly at Port Eliot festival, and then made the Rothschild-Waddesdon Manor connection, but beyond that nada, so I opened The Baroness- The search for Nica, the rebellious Rothschild with favourable endorsements ringing in my ears but not knowing what to expect.
I am always amazed (though shouldn't be) at the way that a book about a life unknown to me, and a world that hither to may have been of little interest to me, are both brought so dazzlingly to life that I am seeking out more of the same. I also defy anyone reading this book to not seek out a soundtrack for themselves and want to listen to the music of Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker, Miles Davies and Dizzy Gillespie. Even if you are not a jazz fan I suspect, like me, you may want to at least try and understand exactly what was the magic that caused a woman, with as much money and comfort as the world could buy, to desert her family for a life in New York where she became the patron of many-a drug fuelled, penniless, frequently homeless and down-and-out jazz musician.
'I'd never heard anything remotely like it. I must have played it twenty times in a row. Missed my plane. In fact I never went home. I got the message I belonged where that music was. I was supposed to be involved in some way.'
Pannonica (Nica) Rothschild born in 1913, the fourth child of Nathaniel and Rozsika Rothschild, aptly named after an elusive moth, and a direct descendant of Mayer Amchsel Rothschild who had founded the family banking dynasty in the Frankfurt ghetto, the Judengasse, during the eighteenth century, and very much against all the odds..
' a place of such indescribable squalor that Europeans, including George Eliot, made it a 'must-see' attraction as part of their grand tour.'
Goethe, also visited and wrote...
'The lack of space, the dirt, the throng of people, the disagreeable accents of the voice, altogether it made the most unpleasant impression, even upon the passer-by who merely looked through the gate.'
To his complete surprise, when he plucked up the courage to enter the gates of the Judengasse, the inhabitants were...
' human beings after all, industrious and obliging, and one could not help but admie even the obstinacy with which they adhered to their traditional ways.'
It was Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who in this unlikely setting, established his small coin business using his wife's dowry, eventually becoming one of the richest men in the Judengasse and the father of nineteen children, ten of whom survived childhood, so plenty to carry on the dynasty that the Rothschild banking empire was to become. As Hannah Rothschild points out, centuries of persecution has made the family 'secretive and inward facing' with little trust for outsiders, coupled with the belief that 'only money and power would protect them from anti-Semetism and a return to that early life of misery.' Marriage had to be within the Jewish faith and increasingly within the family. But as far as the bank was concerned it was only men allowed, the women were completely disempowered. Only Rothschild men could inherit and run the business, a principle still in practice today, whilst the women of the family were barred from working or setting foot in the bank, or inheriting shares, which reverted to surviving fathers and brothers in the event of a death. When the Y chromosome starts to diminish within the family and a succession of girls are born it heralds interesting times ahead.
But alongside all this came great business acumen and complete discretion for clients, an ingrained trait that, even today, made the writing of this book something of a challenge within the family for Hannah Rothschild as she attempted to uncover the life of her great-aunt Nica.
And so to Nica, the wonderful, free-spirited rebellious Nica and with a tension built up by Hannah Rothschild as the fate of the women within this patriarchally dominant family is gradually revealed, and to the point where I would have been seriously disappointed if Nica hadn't done a runner, because in the end I was willing her to escape. Suffering a form of de-oxygenated entrapment from real life, and of the highest order, Nica was never cut out for the rarifed atmosphere in which she found herself, something had to give.
It was the Second World War that did it. Nica's life until that one of dependence and moneyed privilege, pampered to the point of infantilism within a rule-bound, class-obsessed society, but with the war came Nica's chance. She took it and capitalised on it, dutifully travelling to the U.S. for the safety of herself and her children, as instructed by her French husband Jules, but then leaving to return to Europe to join the Free French Army. Nica had a busy and exciting war and as I read of her exploits it became obvious that she would never settle back into life as Rothschild woman... there to 'entertain, inform and breed.'
War decimated the family's fortunes and this makes for sombre reading, not only for the stupendous wealth that one family can amass in the shape of no less than forty stately homes across Europe (including Waddesdon Manor), but also for a family's persecution and demise at the hands of the Nazis when houses were ransacked and a known 3978 paintings seized.
It was 1948, perhaps 1949, no one is really sure, when Nica, stopping off on her way to the airport in New York to fly back to her family, hears the music of Thelonious Monk for the first time and changes the course of her life for ever. New York the 'post-war crucible of innovation' and it is to the jazz clubs of 52nd Street that Nica migrates in preference to the rarified world of European aristocracy. That doesn't stop her driving a blue Bentley convertible around the city and taking a suite in a top class hotel from which she organises and frequently bails out the jazz musicians.
Hannah Rothschild achieves a remarkable even-handedness as she writes of these tumultuous years in Nica's life, at times uncomfortable with Nica's behaviour, frequently suspending disbelief in order to try and understand her great aunt...how could she leave her children as she did... what about the 360 cats that shared the home that Nica was eventually forced to buy when no hotel would accommodate her.
And what of Nica??
Well I loved Nica. Setting aside the qualms I would share with Hannah Rothschild about the children (though they sought their mother out and Nica seems to have been close to some of them), in her New York life here was a woman who was selfless and generously committed to her cause, yes eccentric but accepting of others unconditionally and regardless of race, unflinching in the face of adversity of which there was a great deal. When Nica risks prison by taking the drugs-bust rap for Thelonious Monk in the hope that he will keep his perfoming licence... only to find that he loses it anyway, you want to weep for her. It all seemed a far cry, a complete repudiation of the social mores instilled in her as a child...or was it. Surely Nica reshaped those values of family loyalty and used them differently, and for the good of others above self and family.
And so the music. Who would have thought I would be seeking out and listening to the music that Nica loved, and then on tenterhooks waiting for the DVD, The Jazz Baroness, to arrive from Lovefilm (don't miss this film if you decide to read the book)
'The music is what moves me. It has something I also hear in the playing of the Hungarian gypsies, something very sad and beautiful. It's everything that really matters, everything worth digging. It's a desire for freedom. And all my life, I've never known any people who have warmed me as much by their friendship as the Jazz musicians I've come to know.'
As Hannah Rothschild suggests in her response to these words of Nica's ...
'Nica had found her calling, her version of paradise.'
and towards the end of the book...
'She made her sliver of a great fortune go a little further. She made a difference. In return she received the one thing she lacked and desperately missed during her childhood: friendship.'
As Ellie heads north and homeward from her travels around the far reaches of Europe we decided on Green for our next Colourboration... Clockwise from top left...
The wheat has been a constant source of interest for us this year as we have walked up through the fields, along the pathways made by the tractors. We have watched it sprout and then grow and green up until it has finally ripened and been harvested in the last few weeks. I think I like the lush green phase of its youth best, but also the massive straw bales which the machine ejected with a sort of methodical thud as it progressed around the field. They have all been collected up now and the field is ready for ploughing so we had to time our post-harvest gleaning just right as it yields bags and bags of straw for the dog kennels through the winter. The gleaning felt quite biblical as we gathered up some left-overs on a balmy evening and carried them along the lane to home as the sunset.
Last year I decided to over-winter the geraniums and was delighted with myself, not only for getting them in before the first frost but also for keeping them watered and thus flowering right through to spring. It's been a rubbish year for them outside but I will hack them back and try again this winter too. It was all welcome greenery and kitchen window-sill colour when we appreciated it the most. And don't geranium plants have that lovely scent.
These are the knitted and felted Milagros hearts that the Knit Angel made as gifts for Team dovegrey at Port Eliot Festival. I have since been initiated in the art of making them and very satisfying they are to knit and then ruin on a hot wash/fast spin too.
I had to include a picture of the eschallonia hedge if we are talking 'Green' because after those two years of dead twiggy scaffolding with ne're a leaf in sight, this year it has thrived. We have been frightened to cut it for fear of killing it again, but it is going to need some trimming soon.
That little in-between picture is Rocky's Field behind the garden, now under new farm management and so left for grass and silage in the summer, and for homing cattle from high Dartmoor in the winter. Watching the cutting and baling and then being able to walk through it again easily for a while is always a pleasure. This is currently one of Nell's favourite 'fetching' fields.
Lichen apparently grows best where the air is cleanest and clearest and we have a profusion.
I couldn't mention 'Green' without sneaking in a little picture of our Green lane. These are marked on OS maps with large green dots about a centimetre apart, and this one is lovely to walk up in the pouring rain because in the summer it has its own green roof.
I love the commemorative plaque to The Pilgrim Fathers on the Mayflower Steps on Plymouth's Barbican. The salt-laden sea air has given the brass a rich patina of oceanic green. Every time we visit we promise ourselves that next time we will have some paper and the brass rubbing crayons with us...and we always forget.
And now I can't wait to see what Greenery Ellie has been looking at on wherevertheroadgoes and how interesting that Ellie sent me this message too...
Was just looking at your blog and saw the post about the Anouk Markovits book and thought aha! Here we are tucked up close to the Ukrainian border in northern Romania - an area which used to belong to Hungary and we've been to two Jewish/holocaust related museums today - very poignant. I know what you mean about avoiding violence in one's reading too.
Pleasings... that might not be a word, but Friday always feels like a good day to think about things I have been pleased about this week, and they are numerous and not necessarily in order of pleasingness and this first picture is not exactly riveting, but my joy is unconfined on all counts...
Bookhound and the Kayaker have sanded and re-varnished the Book Room windows outside before the winter... And they have swept the chimney to my woodburner and cleaned the flue, so it is all ready for ignition... It has been The Kayaker's turn to be Best Man at a friend's wedding. He apparently 'nailed' his speech and the bride very kindly sent him back with one of the table arrangements for me. The scents have been wafting across my desk all week... Someone who reads here very kindly sent me an Orla Kiely scarf because they saw them and remembered how much I loved Orla Kiely. This arrived in the post when I was a few hours into a long session of my online day job on the Cancer & Serious Illness morning. Opening this package was a very big pleasing indeed. I realised, thanks to Clare Balding, that I might like reading autobiographies after all, so when Dreaming in Colour by Kaffe Fassett arrived, and on the day I finished My Animals and Other Family, I moved seamlessly from horses to knitting, simple as that. My lasting recollection of Caitlin (apparently pronounced Catlin) Moran was the fact that she had written one of Offspringette's very most favourite books The Chronicles of Narmo, a book that Offspringette would never part with. I somehow by-passed How to be a Woman, and will catch up with it when I feel the need, but I was pleasingly pleased with the arrival of Moranthology, some collected and very funny writings by Caitlin 'Catlin' Moran. I have made a start and am chuckling merrily. I had an e mail from a psychologist by the name of Miles Richardson who asked if I would be interested in reading his book Needwood..a simple journey into the local countryside which pulls out a universal story about out connection to nature and the landscape. The book is ringingly endorsed by Professor Paul Gilbert, author of The Compassionate Mind, of which I am a huge fan, so of course I said yes please and thank you very much. And my final pleasing, and remember I said in no particular order. The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane , a book we have loved and championed here, has been long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. I said, in front of Robert and an audience, as I introduced him atPort Eliot Festival, that if the book didn't win prizes I would eat my walking boots, so I am delighted that I have now taken the first step along the way to not having to munch my Scarpas. And as I think about my Pleasings and record them here it has been to a background of Rhosymedre by Vaughan Williams playing on the radio. It is the music I walked down the aisle to thirty-six years ago last week and I still love to hear it. I remember wanting a gentle entrance rather than a fanfare.
The Tinker has had his day surgery on his outer ear, plus a bit of plastic surgery reconstruction on it too, and he is thankfully recovering well, albeit bemoaning that his profile is now ruined and he might have to have the other one done to match etc. I also want to send our good wishes for a speedy recovery to Erika, a regular here, who has had surgery this week too.
Oh yes, and one more late entry for this week's Pleasings... Offspringette, now settled in her first teaching job, heard that she has the funding, via her school, to finish the dissertation element of her Masters degree in Education. Hooray.
So how about you...any Pleasings for you this week?? No matter how seemingly small it would be very pleasing to hear about them.
I can think of a million and one reasons why I should not have enjoyed Clare Balding's recently published autobiography, My Animals and Other Family and yes, it is a deliberate play (with the family's permission) on Gerald Durrell's book My Family and Other Animals.
But firstly, and for those who have been on Mars through the summer, Clare Balding is the national treasure who guided the TV ship through the vast oceans of Olympic and Paralympic coverage and basically left many of the other anchors dead in the water...oooh I didn't realise where that analogy was going... I'll quit while I'm winning, but anyway, our Clare was just brill. Never knowingly under-prepped, and with highlighter pen, swathes of paper and all the right info at her fingertips, Clare Balding has been crowned the new Des Lynham (he was the last one who had the gift of the perfect sports anchor) Plenty of us who may never have watched horse racing in our lives may well switch onto it now because Clare will be doing that next.
But I generally don't enjoy autobiographies.
And I generally don't enjoy celebrity autobiographies.
And despite my best efforts and all that ancestral ostling, I have never been that keen on horses either since that one in Horseguards, Whitehall, sneezed on my new ankle socks when I was about six. If I am honest horses scare me a little too.
I mean they are big, right??
I was walking back down the field with the dogs the other day and suddenly sensed something at my shoulder... in fact it was two 'somethings', riderless horses that had appeared silently out of nowhere, and I jumped at least a furlong. Little Nell couldn't be seen for dust and Barney the Brave squared up to take them out, and I just looked a complete idiot and yelled 'Go away' very unhelpfully when they started a bit of a charge. Clare would have gone and stroked their noses, produced sugar cubes out of her pocket, whispered soothing words in their pricked ears and probably ridden them bareback from whence they had strayed.
And My Animals and Other Family is horses and dogs, Clare's best friends all, front cover to back cover... Valkyrie, Volcano, Frank, Hattie, Ellie May, Lily, Quirk, Stuart, Henry et al and Clare's equine heritage clearly far stronger than mine, her father Ian Balding champion horse trainer to Royalty and also the trainer of the famous Mill Reef. Though not trained by Ian Balding Shergar gets a mention in passing too. I now feel I must own up that we've always made awful (really awful) jokes about Shergar here (he was the prize racer who was horse-napped and never heard of again) and tried to work out how many tins of priceless dog food a horse that size might equate too, and I feel a bit bad about that now.
I hope I can be forgiven because I am warming to horses now that everything has been explained, and you have no idea of the mysteries that needed unravelling. I have several horse-loving friends and have always dozed off when the conversation comes around to laminitis and colic.
But I now know about laminitis (too much grass eating = nitrogen-compound overload = poorly feet) and hoof oil, and riding short and upsides. I know you must keep your line and kick on and take a pull now and then, and above all you need a strong, steady lower leg for dressage.
Then there are the bits. Not to be confused with what we euphemistically call Magnus's feline manhood, and his bits which are for surgical intervention and removal next Friday, but I mean who knew there were that many bits, as in the things that go in a horse's mouth... Pelhams, Kimblewicks, Dr Bristols and Waterfords, even a Balding.
I know officially that a furlong is 220 yards whilst a hand is about four inches, as in the span of a flat hand, and it was Henry VIII who standardized that measurement in 1541 having ordered the destruction of all stallions below fifteen hands, and all mares below thirteen hands because Britain's war horses were getting a bit puny. Horses won't stand still to be measured with a tape so hands are quicker and easier. Clare's desk is ten hands wide (Shetland pony sized), mine is seventeen (probably big enough for the Grand National my desk) ... my computer screen is six hands (no messing with tiddly screens here)... my chair is five hands off the ground, yes I like this. I might start measuring babies and toddlers in hands in future, instead of all that fuss pinning them down on a measuring mat ... a newborn baby would be about five hands, so much easier, surely parents wouldn't mind.
The intricacies of polo are also explained, and though I didn't think I really wanted to know this I was actually very interested, because it might all come in useful when I meet up with my student nursing best friend at our Great Ormond Street forty year reunion next weekend. She has just taken up polo ( Wiz, if you are reading this...why?? Wasn't the competitive rowing arduous enough??) so I can ask her what her handicap is and ensure that she knows to be decisive and strong and 'ride off each other' and never to yank her pony's mouth. She has just bought a mallet so I can be interested in that too.
But Clare Balding's humour, and there is plenty of it and all charmingly self-deprecating, is leavened with some harsh reality.
Clare's father, and to some extent her mother, and most definitely her grandmother, are so deeply involved with their horses that Clare and her brother must just get on with life, be self-contained and put up or shut up. Family holidays are a rarity, though horse riding opportunities are plentiful, and Clare was up on Mill Reef almost before she could walk by the looks of it, and even I can tell that is one fine horse... ...but it would have been no good fancying a turn at BMX racing or ballet or violin lessons or something, it would have to be horses or nothing. When Clare arrives at Downe House school as a boarder (the writer Elizabeth Bowen was an alumna) and sans pets and horses, she feels completely out of her depth, both socially and academically and the harsh realities of life start to take their toll with events taking several desperate turns as Clare tries hard to fit in and be one of the gang. In fact when she stops doing that and decides to be herself it's all a whole lot easier, but to this day her father remains notoriously difficult to impress and more especially if you are a woman.
Surely he loved that interview with Chad's dad??
Surely he was overflowing with pride when Clare presented the flowers at an Olympic medal ceremony in front of 80,000 cheering fans who were actually cheering for her??
In fact there is one very touching moment of redemption in the book when Clare's father does recognise her achievements, whilst along the way Clare recounts, self-effacingly as always, her successful years as a jockey and the trials of making the weight, a near mash-up in the last furlongs of a race with Princess Anne, breakfast with the Queen chez Balding and plenty more. The book ends with Clare's acceptance to read English at Newnham in Cambridge, though she will need time off in the first week to race at Chepstow, and for which she will have to ask Director of Studies, Mrs Gooder...
'You would like to go where?' asked Mrs Gooder ...You and I shall make a deal. There is one page in the newspaper that I do not understand and, if you promise that you will explain this to me, you may ride at Chepstow.' She opened a copy of the Guardian to the racing page and gestured. 'Might as well be gobbledegook. I do not like to feel ignorant.'
I feel much less ignorant now too and have really enjoyed my canter through My Animals and Other Family in the company of Clare Balding, and so did Little Nell who one minute was sitting quite peacably on my lap as I read and the next thing had chunked a complete corner off the book (witness that picture above) which sort of felt forgiveable in the end, because Clare's dogs would probably have done that too, and she wouldn't have got cross either.
All this talk of family and animals feels like a good excuse, if ever I needed one, so here is the latest Nell and Magnus Do Battle clip, and as you can see the rate the non-identical twins are going Magnus might not be needing that trip to the vets next Friday...
Bit of a cheat there on the tail grab but two falls and a submission seems to clinch it. Magnus never uses his claws and always comes back for more, and aren't those Sprocker ears coming along gorgeously too, Little Nell now all of three hands. Magnus possibly two.
Don't miss My Animals and Other Family, it really is a treat of a read.
For some reason I missed reading Jane's first book The Book of Fires, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers a few years ago, but no worries I have it off the shelf and waiting now that I have finished The Knot.
Jane wrote a lovely few words in our Visitor's Book at Port Eliot Festival when I placed it in front of her, remarking that life was short and the book was long so she would quite understand if time constraints got in the way of my reading it. And yes I would agree, at 420 pages, The Knot is a long book, and reading time is precious and at a premium for me and for many of you I feel sure, but time flew as I was transported back to the Somerset Levels in the mid-sixteenth century, and then slowed to the pace of life as it was at Lytes Cary Manor.
I haven't been too sure which sort of reading world I am ready to enter after a long and very different summer of less work and more play for me (I use the word 'summer' advisedly to mean the months of June/July/August, not the weather...sorry UK-relevant whinge only). As the leaves start to turn and the mist rises up over the Tamar at dawn and dusk it always feels like an important reading moment, time to look ahead and be ready with some winter reading projects to immerse myself in, shelve some of the familar and unearth some of the writers and the books I may have neglected or forgotten about.
The Knot has been a perfect start with its fabulous descriptions of nature and the land throughout the year as Henry Lyte, master of the Manor, widowed and re-married following the death of his first wife, father to four daughters works to translate the 'impossible manuscript', a Herbal to better all Herbals. Henry's mission, to flout the true evil which he sees as the purposeful withholding of knowledge ... 'he has finished butterbur and begun bistort today'..
Of BORAGE. Which endureth the winter like to the common Buglosse. The stalke is rough and rude, of the height of a foote and halfe, parting it selfe at the top into divers small branches, bearing faire and pleasant flowers in fashion like starres of colour blewe or Azure and sometimes white.
Each chapter begins in this way, with an extract from the Herbal and I wondered whether the ordering of these perhaps concealed some secret key to what I was reading...or perhaps there was relevance buried deep within each chapter. If so I failed to find it and may have missed the obvious so engrossed was I.
But it was all sufficient for me to go dashing out to find our surprise clump of borage. Nothing like a complete upheaval of the garden as has engaged Bookhound this year, to wake up long lost seeds. I must now confess that the borage seeds originally came from some plants on Sylvia Plath's grave in Heptonstall, flowering around here for years and then seeming to disappear, and I quite thought they were lost until now.. and the same for the poppies... Henry is also creating a Knot Garden for Lytes Cary Manor the significance of which waxes and wanes throughout the book, frequently reflecting Henry's need for order and control when life starts to spiral in the opposite direction. When plagued with anxieties and nursing the knot in his stomach it is to his Knot
Garden that Henry retreats, to dig and feel at one with the earth. Except coming between him and the satisfaction all this might offer is his rather sour, yet wise old gardener Tobias Motes....bit of a misery-on-legs truth be told, but Tobias knows his ways, and they is right ways.
The chapters are short and there are many unknowns; guilt and mysteries touched on, and incipient madness occasionally beckoning. Just how has Henry's first wife Anys died, and what is the sense of unease that pervades his life.
Why the bad dreams that leave him with a
'dirty, uncomfortable feeling in his chest, like a tidemark inside his flesh where a surge of something has receded.'
Then the question of his father's will and the inheritance Henry must battle for with his step-mother.
And through it all Jane Borodale exhibits a breathtaking knowledge of all things rural and horticultural a la sixteenth century, as well as embedding history within her narrative. The Great Comet of 1577 must have been a spectacular sight and one ripe for so much wild interpretation coupled with a deep sense of foreboding
'He turns suddenly and what he sees fills him with dread and realization that some part of the world, possibly his, is on the cusp of something very bad. A monstrous light, its head half as wide as the moon. has risen above the south-western horizon. Blue-white, trailing an arc of brightness. It can only be a comet...'
There are great swathes of beautiful description here too. When Henry and Frances's first born son is dying, and husband and wife experiencing grief out of tandem, and which for each 'has a different taste,' Jane Borodale creates an analogy for that moment of death using butterflies that can't fail to move and comfort. I don't want to dissect this pitch-perfect page of writing for a few suitable lines because it was written as a whole and should be read as such, but as you can imagine, following recent experience, it struck a truly harmonious chord with me.
I went to a celebration of Jeannie's life on Friday afternoon. It was a beautiful and moving service, her husband's eulogy delivered with a wit and composure of which Jeannie would have been proud. We cried and we sang and never have the words of I Vow to Thee My Country embraced me in quite the way they did on Friday...
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase, And her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace.
In the front row Jeannie's newest grandson, just a few months old, in the row behind another grandson, about eight years old and lifting his glasses to wipe the tears from his eyes, and as I looked around the church at us all wearing the bright colours that Jeannie had requested, I thought of Jane Borodale's butterflies,
'...a host of flickering colours bearing one soul away.'
and of a lovely friend whose spirit will live on, and who I will never forget.
I have managed two cheering chapters of Clare Balding's My Animals and Other Family and that's it, but I know the feeling... animals everywhere.
I have done nothing but tug my wellies on and off and do field circuits with the dogs while Bookhound has been away, in between trying to sit at my desk and get my online work hours done... I should be on Puppyternity Leave I think.
And then there is the sort of relay of feeding in order to get the Dowagers and their bowls together without canine interference. One Dowager is fine, having lamped Nell a corker on the nose, embedded a claw and set clear no-nonsense boundaries, Muffy now sits bolt upright assuming the role of a very strict governess and Nell is a completely different puppy, quiet, well-behaved, crawls along on her tummy, no messing.
The other Dowager is most definitely not impressed.
Tess was just coming round to the idea of a Magnus-sized third cat when Nell arrived and that was that. Once the gentlest of cats she has undergone a complete personality transplant and now sits imperiously on the verandah, scowling and most unforgiving, and prefers her food to be brought to her. She has that 'How could you do this to me.. I shall just sit here and starve myself to death' look in her narrowed eyes, and laden with guilt I scurry back and forth with Go Cat and tempting bowls of succulent Felix Tuna in Jelly all the day long. Tess will be the size of a barrage balloon by Christmas.
And historically something ALWAYS goes wrong with major systems when Bookhound is away...always. This time it is the electricity. Off went the trip switch late one evening, pitch black and I trip and stumble my way to the torch and the candles, and then who's moved the matches (me probably).
Then I have to find a chair and peer into the fuse cupboard and decide what's gone wrong where, out of twelve fuses and four big switches.
Huh, no hope.
Out had gone a selection of plug sockets when I finally switched it back on, including the washing machine in mid-cycle, so there is a fault somewhere and we are just going to have to be the great unwashed until Bookhound's return, because I am not messing with any of it. And I am now walking around with a torch in my pocket because I am not going through that again.
But the upside is all this lovely walking around Rocky's field behind the house. Views across the Tamar Valley that take my breath away every single day, and for one circuit we were joined by the gathering swallows dipping and swerving around us as if scoping the lie of the land ready for their return before making their farewells and the off. By the time I had found my camera and dashed back out to capture the fleeting moment, with dozens of them queuing up on the telephone wires, they were gone.
Cue melancholy.
Cue Autumn.
Meanwhile the grass in the field has just been cut for silage so it is now very walkable through and Nell is having a fine time doing Fetch.
Having had working gun dogs for the last fifteen years, throwing anything for the puppies has been absolutely forbidden until they are ready for training, and then you have to throw a special thing a certain way and distance and insist they do it properly. Bah to all that, Nell is a pet so we are allowed, and if she happens to figure out how to chase a pheasant good on her ... just don't tell the Gamekeeper will you, and that pink ball on a bit of rope the best £3 I have ever spent at Tesco's.
Then of course, being a girl, she knows her own mind... and notice sage old Barney, who has always refused to demean himself by fetching anything or bringing it back and now well beyond all this playing stuff.
The first thing to note about I am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits is the publisher, Hogarth, and a little bit of digging reveals this...
The spirit of Virginia and Leonard Woolf's literary imprint the Hogarth Press will be revived on both sides of the Atlantic after Random House announced the launch of a new fiction imprint. Hogarth will launch in summer 2012 and will focus on "contemporary, character rich" publishing. It will publish between eight and 10 books a year in the United States. The UK wing of the imprint will publish a smaller number of titles each year, with the list comprising exclusively of titles published by its US sister.
I certainly didn't know where Hogarth Press had gone, or that it had gone at all and was in need of a revival. The publishing world feels like a very complex mix these days, each publishing house seems to subsume or begat others anew, and it can be hard to know what sits where. But if 'character rich' and 'contemporary' are part of the remit then I am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits fulfils on both counts.
After a long summer (well sort of summer, more of the torrential in progress as I write) through which I have rested my reading eyes a little in the face of countless other happy distractions, I was at a bit of a loss as to where to get stuck in agai with new fiction. My finger combed the 'Books In' shelves for something that would spark the enthusiasm and settled on this with words like 'late 1930s'... 'ultra-orthodox Jewish sect' ...'two baby girls adopted'...'quash individuality'...'consumed by questions'. Enough buttons pressed and that cover which it transpires does eventually encompass a significant and very moving moment in the book.
The story begins during the Second World War and in, for me, the more unfamiliar territory of the border between Hungary and Romania. Here lives the persecuted community of insular and profoundly orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews of whom I knew nothing. The concentration camps are a mere sixty miles away and when young Josef's family are brutally murdered while he hides under the table, and this on page ten, I had serious misgivings about whether I really wanted to read on.
Did I have the stomach for more brutality if that might be in store ...I sometimes need to brace myself and be in the rightest of reading moods to cope with atrocities, and countless books seem to arrive these days heralding likewise.
I wonder whether any of you know this sort of reading-sinking-stomach feeling, or whether perhaps it is an age thing. I never used to be like this, but I do find myself evading it rather than confronting it these days.
In fact any subsequent brutality in the book, though equally harrowing to read, is brief, not Nazi-related and nor is it gratuitous, rather adding to the impact of the religious zeal within a family and community setting that I think Anouk Markovits is keen to delineate.
Josef will reappear in the story at a later stage but meanwhile Atara and her adopted sister Mila are the daughters of this particular house, a house ruled by the zealously orthodox Jewish father Zalman Stern whose wife Hannah finds herself consistently pregnant or nursing an ever-increasing family. Constantly in exile and seemingly happy to be so as a necessary aspect of their particular religious heritage, the family eventually settle in Paris whilst others migrate to New York, and it will be the brutality that eventually sows the seed of discontent and rebellion in Atara. Mila meanwhile will pursue the path of dutiful daughter, haunted by the death of her own parents, and the dogmatic insistence of Zalman that she is honour-bound to adhere to the edicts of the religion in order to save their souls.
For me the most revealing aspects of the book were the insights into the world of the Satmar Hasidic Jews. the cleansing rituals, the arranged marriages, the pre-nuptial process, life at the synagogue, the restrictions, and the seemingly over-bearing and frequently blind adherence to their religion. But above all the disturbing and far-reaching impact of the patriarchal dominance that leaves the women disempowered and controlled, and completely dependent on their fertility for acceptance. When Mila's eventual marriage proves barren and the reasons for it eventually become clear, her impulsive solution will have a profound impact down the generations, slowly weakening many apsects of that blind adherence.
A book to home alongside My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok if this subject is of interest to you and a good read even if it isn't.
But tell me...do you struggle with violence in your fiction these days??
I've been there and read it all in my time but suddenly I don't want to any more. I can't believe I might be sanitising and unwittingly censoring my reading in this way... perhaps it will pass.
You will be pleased to know that, although I am really looking forward to the new Virago editions of Rumer Godden's books, a little forage around the shelves revealed some more I knew I had but couldn't quite place, so the pile is looking a little more respectable and includes these with very enticing covers, Kingfishers Catch Fire and China Court.
And a much less exciting, dare I even suggest non-descript and decidedly unappetising cover for This Far and No Further, Rumer Godden's description of the wartime winter months spent below the Lama's temple on a tea estate north of Darjeeling..
I still haven't figured out what it is supposed to be... tea infusing into water perhaps, but this is clearly what sold books in 1968 with its hints of psychedelia and lava lamp.
How little I know about Rumer Godden too and, to my surprise, how little is written about her. My shelf of reference books on fiction by women shows glaring omissions, Rumer Godden rarely included in any overview of twentieth century writing by women. A brief mention in The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English suggests that her life in India (where she was taken soon after her birth in 1907) culminated 'in an incident in Kashmir where a servant tried to poison her and her children, forcing her to leave the country.' But her writing career, before her death in 1998, spanned sixty years with over fifty books for adults and children along with twenty volumes of non-fiction and autobiography. That surely sounds like enough to merit inclusion.
But as to The River, published in 1946 ...isn't this just the most delectable book, such a perfect surprise given that I have known of it for years yet there it has sat until this new edition arrived.
Harriet and her brother Bogie and sisters Bea and Victoria live in a 'house beside the river, in a jute-pressing works near a little Indian town.'
'Harriet's river was a great, slowly flowing mile-wide river between banks of mud and white sand, with fields flat to the horizon, jute fields and rice fields under a blue weight of sky.'
Bea is the oldest, on the cusp of adolescence and her changing relationship with her younger sister Harriet was one of the highlights of the books for me. Poor Harriet rooted firmly in the middle (because toddler Victoria doesn't really count after all) and one minute trying to move up to Bea's level the next down to Bogie's and never quite sure where she belongs. Acutely sensitive not only to the world of the child, but the world surrounding that child, Rumer Godden seems completely at ease with it all. I felt
Harriet's dilemmas, and I knew her world. I smelt the flowers in the garden as she did...the hibiscus, the jasmine, the quisqualis (had to look it up, that's it over here <<<<) the passion flowers and plumbago, and I sensed the beauty that her young eyes were drinking in ...
'How beautiful it is,' said Harriet. Its beauty penetrated into the heat and the ache of the hollowness inside her. It had a quiet unhurriedness, a time beat that was infinitely soothing to Harriet, 'You can't stop days or rivers,' not stop them and not hurry them.'
And the house, Harriet's home 'a peculiarly pleasant place' and so well described I could almost have drawn it as Rumer Godden walks the reader through it room by room.
And as the festival of Diwali, with its light and dark and shade, unfolded it occured to me that the writerly equivalent of the artist's chirascuro was entirely possible on the pages of a book, especially in the imaginative hands of a writer like Rumer Godden. It's a word far too useful to leave in the art world surely...
'It was almost spring. In the fields the early sowing was finished and the young jute made dark-green and light-green patches over the land. The yellowness of the mustard had dimmed and the first great red pods of the simul, the wild cotton trees, had opened their colour.... The sky itself had altered. This was the time of its deepest blue; later the heat took its colour, and lter still the monsoon broke and turned it heavy and grey, with intervals that were pale and washed out.'
If I have one qualm it is the old why-oh-why chestnut about the introduction coming at the beginning of the book again. I know it's an Introduction (or in this case a Preface, written by Rumer Godden retrospectively) and that's where it is supposed to be if it is called an Introduction, and whilst it sets the scene for the circumstances in which the book was written very informatively it also indirectly gives away a corker of a spoiler in the second paragraph, and one of which I had no inkling. Perhaps the assumption is that a book and a film are so well known by now that everyone knows the ending so it doesn't really matter...well I didn't and it did.
Once known I couldn't unknow that thing and it changed the whole complexion of the read. The impact of that spoiler when it finally happened was more about fulfilled dread and foreboding anticipated on every page, rather than any sense of shock and surprise. I felt momentarily flat and a bit disappointed if not a little relieved, none of which a book like this should make me feel on a first read... if you haven't read The River perhaps remember that and read the Introduction as an Afterword.
I don't even want to go near the spoiler, but there is much I could elaborate on with reference to it, but I won't. Suffice to say more of Rumer Godden's canny insight into the mind and the reactions of a child, and of the adults towards that child. Say no more.
The book is full of special writerly moments, perhaps this one that touched me more than most..
Every family has something, when it has left home, that is for it a symbol of home, that, for it, for ever afterwards, brings home back.'
It may be a glimpse of something, or a saying, or perhaps a song or a sound, a taste or a scent, a smell but how true that is.
In fact it was 'truth' that struck me most about The River, Harriet's beguiling 'truth', an honesty as yet untarnished by the inhibitions of beckoning adulthood, and one which somehow all matched the integrity of the landscape and the house as portrayed by Rumer Godden.
And from the Preface, (which I wanted as an Afterword,) Rumer Godden talks movingly about how the book came into being..
There is a vast difference between a book that is vouchsafed, its idea or theme coming of itself into your mind and a book that comes from searching for a story or a plot that fits the idea that is in your mind.The River was one of those rare books that are given to you...'
A gift all round in that case, and how pleased and grateful I am to have finally read it.
The Knit Angel calls these Appraisals not Anniversaries, and I have very generously let Bookhound off the hook and away at 6.30 am this morning for his annual week of salmon fishing on the river somethingorother in Scotland with his Norwegian buddies.
It's been a terrible year for bees here in the UK. I know this, firstly because there was a news report last week on the impact of our very wet summer on the poor little drenched bees who just couldn't get out and about to collect the pollen, so the keepers are having to feed them sugar supplements already. That's a winter task, virtually unheard of in summer, yet the bees are starving, but it was the local vicar who imparted worse news back in May.
The parish vicar has been the main beekeeper in these parts for years, and when I pitched up at the village church to catch sight of the Gamekeeper who was on Best Man duties ...and I just wanted to see how well the GK had scrubbed up and to take some pics... you can see for yourself, the boy done good and quite different to his usual attire... Well the vicar and I got talking while we waited for the bride to arrive, and my first question whenever I see him is always 'How are the bees doing?' . Now that our nearest neighbour has had to give up beekeeping after a massive anaphylactic reaction to stings, the Vicar's are almost certainly the bees that pollinate our middle-of-nowhere garden. But, remember that unseasonally hot spell back in March which brought all the bees out early and was then quickly followed by the prolonged cold spell... well the bees didn't survive, every colony lost, at which point the vicar finally decided to give up his hives and call it a day.
Very few bees sighted in our garden all summer apart from one sweltering day back in July when a huge black buzzing fast-moving cloud swept across the garden; a swarm on the loose, and the classic time of year for them to be so, but heaven knows where they ended up.
So all that is by way of a bit of a protracted introduction (with extraneous context) to Bee Journal by Sean Borodale.
It is a while since I have read 'His' and 'Hers' books but I happen to have done so at the moment. Sean and his wife Jane stopped by to say hello at the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot Festival, and we had a great chat. All enough to prompt me to open Jane's latest novel The Knot which had been sitting here unread and waiting and which I have just finished (more of which soon but I highly recommend) and also to revisit Bee Journal in its new paperback edition.
Sean sent me Pages From Bee Journal last autumn and I wrote about it here. A hand stitched (he did 400 of them) pamphlet sized collection of poems begun two years previously when Sean took up beekeeping for the first time, chronicling the life and work of the bees along with the relationship between 'keeper' and 'kept'. In his letter Sean wrote that the writing had become an intrinsic part of the keeping of the bees and I was bowled over by it and said so... and apparently we might have done our little bit to help the pamphlet on its way, and into the publication of this new and expanded volume from Jonathan Cape.
Having loved the first batch of poems I was delighted to find more, and also in sufficient number that Bee Journal can be read chronologically, almost like a seasonal diary (my favourite format) through the year. This makes it a book to savour and reserve for treat reading, a bit like the best honey (which will be scarce this year) ..so on 27th August this...
The spider's season opens, rat tooth-marks appear;
almost just a tempering of vision.
So, in a coat I go up to the ochre house of you in there.
How bees touch and re-align their touch.
Light in migration; noise of a body in continual repair ...
The next poem is dated 29th September and I won't read it until then because I want to be seeing and feeling that day as it happens in the book, but sneaking a preview and glancing ahead I see the first lines...
Archangel sunlight held to a flower's remnant
And oh, oh, oh I can't wait...after that 7th October...11th October...16th October... 17th October and I can go on and on keeping bees vicariously without having to bother with the suit, the smoker, the veil. It's several years since I did the bee-keeping course and got that certificate to prove it, but I have never forgotten how fascinating it all was, or how much I enjoyed it.
Alice Oswald has this to say about Bee Journal...
The book is a kind of uncut home-movie of bees. I like it oddness and hurriedness, its way of catching thw world exactly as it happens in the split-second before it sets into poetry. These are pre-poems, note-poems dictated by phenomena. Their context is bees, but their subject (intriguingly) is Time.
That in itself is like having a poem on the cover of a book, this one really is a word-filled jar of golden treasure.
Nell is growing legs and suddenly that little plump puppy tummy is much further off the ground than it was, and she is also sprouting the most delectable set of ears. The inseperable terrible two get up to all manner of mischief in the garden... Magnus meanwhile has brought in his first livestock, a tiny vole which may or may not still be behind the freezer. He is slowly growing into his ears and also learning the gentle art of the verandah repose...
Despite all the Limpic shenanigans I have of course still been reading through the summer, though a bit haphazardly, but I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Hannah Rothschild at Port Eliot this year, and with it came some sincere and genuine encouragement from Cathy St Germans to seek out Hannah's new book The Baroness, The search for Nica, the rebellious Rothschild. Yes it is the banking family, and yes, it is a very good read so more on that to come.
I was immediately interested when Cathy mentioned the book because buried deep in family folklore is the notion that my Great Grandfather (or possibly a Great Great) had been an ostler at the Rothschild family seat of Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The house is now in the care of the National Trust
The Orchard-Chester family seat, in contrast, had been a two-up-two-down with outside privy in the nearby village of Nether Winchendon and may not be in the care of the National Trust, but we have always understood that this picture of my five greats Grandmother, known to all and sundry as Granny Orchard, was taken outside her cottage there.
In order to walk and feel this heritage and just say I had been there, Bookhound and I diverted to Nether Winchendon when we had been up near Aylesbury a couple of years ago. It is a beautiful little village and we found much evidence of Orchards past in the churchyard and inside the church too. They certainly dominated the bell-ringing notice board, in fact it would seem that on Christmas Eve 1944 no other campanologist got a look in. The Orchards baggsed all the bells...
and with a few on the Roll of Honour too...
We wandered around the village and decided that this cottage would do as a designated residence for Five Greats Granny Orchard, though unlikely... It was only a mile or so to Waddesdon Manor so I pressed my case for at least laying eyes on the stables and imagining where Grandad might have ostled. Bookhound was more in the mood to head home so a bit of a reluctant visitor, especially as, even though I had a streaming cold and was feeling a bit death's door, and we had been up since dawn and to an investiture in Aylesbury already, he knew full well I would actually be insisting on seeing far more than the stables. That is paying the entrance fee, spending hours looking round, would want a cup of tea and cake in the National Trust tea room and then most definitely have to do postcards in the shop and would probably sneak the guide book into the basket.
Here is some video footage of our visit, you will need your sound on for the full effect...
Do you have visits like this??
The same thing happened when we pitched up at Fontainebleau near Paris on a Tuesday many years ago, long before the internet had been invented and we might just have checked first. Don't go to Fontainebleau on a Tuesday, it's closed.
But did you detect that barely concealed note of triumph in Bookhound's voice??
And the sort of veiled relief in mine, because you suggest these things and push them through to fruition when really, on reflection, you'd rather be heading for home several hundred miles away, the bath and the Lemsip.
So I still haven't been to Waddesdon Manor and now of course I want to go even more. Meanwhile, my thoughts on The Baroness any day soon.
There has been a theme doing the rounds of Twitter recently under the hash tag of #thingsnottosaytoawriter.
For anyone who is not conversant with Twitter foibles, a hash tag plus a phrasewithnospaces is something that everyone talking about the same subject adds to the end of their tweet so that all the relevant tweets are collated together. In fact that's probably a rubbish explanation that makes no sense unless you do it...but anyway, there was this hashtag doing the rounds and all the writers were busy telling us what not to say to them.
Things like...
'I'd write books too if I didn't have a proper job...'
'So when are you going to write something good. Something I've heard of...'
I'm not sure if anyone had quoted 'I've always meant to read your books...' but I decided, in the interests of transparency, to confess to Michèle Roberts, as we met to discuss the Remembering Angelaevent at Port Eliot, that this was indeed the case between her books and me. And it was true, I had always meant to read Michèle's books and somehow never quite got around to it, and imagine how embarrassing it could have been had Michèle perhaps mentioned something about her own writing and looked to me for elaboration or confirmation.
So I picked up Daughters of the House with my mind focused because I could see there would be a whole line of debate I would be unable to pursue with any honesty until I had at least started to get a feel for Michèle's own writing.
How might Angela Carter have influenced your own writing??
Do you feel indebted to her in any way??
I had read that Michèle Roberts not only loved literary tradition and reading herself back into it, but that she loved inventing new forms too...that writing was about voyaging into the unknown and having adventures, surely a vision shared with Angela Carter. I kept looking up every so often as I read Daughters of the House, just long enough to call myself a dork for having had such a brilliant book sitting on the shelf unread for so long, before quickly checking which other ones I have and ordering those I didn't, and then popping Michèle's oeuvre into the women writers' cabinet which is at my right hand this year.
Out of the questioning mouths of babes, the daughters of the house, come the pieces of the secrets as teenage step-sisters Leonie and Therese, living in France, piece together, jigsaw fashion, quite what the scandal might be...what does the past hold that the adults around them are so keen to keep firmly in the past. Unlike Angela Carter's patchwork imagery about moving from the middle towards the edges, and in keeping with the best way to do a jigsaw, Leonie and Therese find their edges first as they work towards the shame and the betrayal that lies at the heart of this little French community.
The story is told in flashback as Therese, returning from some form of exile, seeks out her cousin Leonie. The exact nature of that absence is slowly revealed but meanwhile had conjured up all sorts of wonderful ambiguities in my mind. There is discomfort and strangeness and all manner of uncertainty as Michèle Roberts slowly and very deliberately unfolds this beautifully constructed novel, keeping me completely immersed in the lives of two young girls whose discoveries about life, death and all that comes in between will not be without a price to be paid. Plenty of secrets and shame but all mediated to the young girls in an oblique way, at a slant and sniffed out by them in the discomfort and strangeness and voices that surround them. There is ambiguity and uncertainty which draws the reader in and with a view from both sides, as the adults try desperately to maintain their control over the past, limiting its infiltration into the present, whilst the girls pick away at the scabs and scars. And when Therese and Leonie realise they may have picked a little too deeply they then somehow try to protect the adults, and you learn a little more about how secrets might be perpetuated by collusion and fear.
The house features large too, cellars storing secrets of their own and bedrooms too terrifying to enter (reminiscent of Bluebeard perhaps) and alongside all this, and in complete contrast, a sheer revelling in colour that I haven't come across in a novel for a long time. Time and again Michèle Roberts conjures up a scene with colour... the tablecloth with a thin turquoise line through blue checks...brown pottery and its silvery glaze, next to red wine, primrose soup plates, shining red pot of soup, the golden glow of candles and I am sitting there waiting to start that meal too. All enough for me to know that Michèle would probably appreciate the little quiltsuke I had made for her, and I think you can see that she did. Daughters of the House is somehow about the inevitability of history too, and its need to be known, about war time atrocities, and the truth will out... except does it?? A book which, once I knew the ending, I felt I wanted to make time to re-read to spot the clues, tiny little significances that gain importance but which may be glossed over first time around, but which I knew Michèle Robert's had placed in there with care and precision.
I often find there is one line in a book that seems to encapsulate the whole for me and this was it...
'Somewhere a dog was asleep, must not be disturbed...'
As we are finding now with Little Nell, wake the sleeping puppy and that's the next few hours spoken for, but in the case of Daughters of the House, this is about a lifetime. Loved it, and as I said to Michèle, having confessed my late start, be very afraid because now I'm on the case, lots more of Michèle Roberts's writing for me.
'Is there a story that takes you back, that has a permanent place in your heart? One you would wish to pass on to the next generation, and would yourself happily read again now?'
That is the question now being asked by Virago books, and I had no idea I even wanted an armchair trip to India until a divine new hardback series arrived with six books under the heading of A Coming of Age Collection.
'Each has been selected for its striking description of a time, a place, and of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood...'
Included in this first batch Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue, Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehman, My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin, Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Walters, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. But it was going to have to be an exceptional book that could claim my attention after so much diversion in recent weeks, and the one that lifted me so unexpectedly (and perhaps in that way only a book can) from the midst of London 2012 right into the heart of India, sixth in the series, The River by Rumer Godden. Once opened impossible to close and more about it soon.
It is some years since I have read anything by Rumer Godden but I knew in an instant I had found an author I wanted to catch up with again through this autumn and coming winter. I love being able to choose a writer and then really get stuck in and share the reading here ...last year Elizabeth Taylor, and still in progress A.S.Byatt and Elizabeth Bowen, down the years Virginia Woolf,Daphne du Maurier, Janet Frame,Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Pym, Irene Nemirovksy, Penelope Fitzgerald to name a few. I have Iris Murdoch in my sights for 2013 but meanwhile plenty of Rumer Godden to come, and so it was then off to the shelves to do a quick inventory.
Bit of a patchy collection, I seem to have several duplicates and some glaring omissions, having felt sure I had a copy of When Kingfishers Catch Fire somewhere. It may yet turn up (it has now) but the good news is that Virago will be publishing many acclaimed novels by Rumer Godden in the months to come, a new and very worthy addition to the Virago Modern Classics list.
I know I have read In This House of Brede and The Black Narcissus, so those will be re-reads, but I'll put money on some of you having Rumer Godden favourites to recommend so please fire away.
And what about the question I started with... is there a story by any author that takes you back??
I have had a hankering to re-read National Velvet by Enid Bagnold of late, since finding the copy my brother gave me for one of those early teens birthdays...
As a novice lino-cutter, i.e. one done at the age of seven and another done last week, I am not yet aspiring to wallpaper but that doesn't stop me dreaming and drooling over everyone else's, so I was delighted to read this email from St Jude's. If any of you felt moved to vote, please do...
Based on an original linocut print by Mark, Harvest Hare is a single colour wallpaper, printed in the UK using water-based inks and paper from sustained forests. Available in 3 colourways: blue slate, corn and chalk white. The awards take on a slightly different format this year with no specific categories - the six nominees with the most votes will be announced as winners at the end of October.
And as this has been virtual Orkney week here, I have to share this picture of the very first hare I have EVER seen, they just don't happen here in the Tamar Valley ...
And apropos of no connection whatsoever...is anyone else watching and coming over all emotional at the Paralympics??
I have stayed on Orkney for this months colourboration on the theme of stones, given that we saw so many, and if you click on this picture I think you may get a slightly larger one to see more clearly... Working clockwise from top left...
The Neolithic equivalent of a Bank Holiday weekend trip to Ikea, and the dresser built with probably the odd nut and bolt missing, doubtless buried in the sand....and Mr Neolithic saying to Mrs Neolithic 'Do you really have to buy this stuff...what was wrong with the old one.' This part of the furnishing of a Skara Brae household.
Plenty of Celtic carving, and inspiration for quilts and lino cuts galore in my photo album.
A tiny shot of The Old Man of Hoy (better picture here) but truly symbolic as we both approached and departed the islands.
When you get close up to those stones on the Ring of Brodgar you can see aeons-worth of Kilroy Was Here markings engraved on them, everyone it seems needed to leave their mark here down the ages. We very respectfully touched and stroked, but no gouging of 'dovegreyreader was here' took place.
Many of the memorial stones in St Magnus Cathedral which bore this ancient, runic-like script.
The swirls and whorls on the beachside cliffs were a little thing of beauty to stop and stare at on our beachcombing expeditions.
We went to the Kirkwall churchyard where it all ended for these Norwegian wartime casualties, but where it all began for a fourteen-year old Tinker in 1940 who was summoned to play Last Post at the big military funeral held for these men...and then burst into tears when he got a few notes in. You can read the full story in his little memoir Bugle Boy and of his return journey to Orkney sixty years later to finally finish what he had started, though this time not on a bugle but whistled.
Runes are it in Orkney, very much the logo of the island's giftware, and those carved on the side of this stone some of the earliest discovered and now in Kirkwall Museum.
And talking of runes and slightly to do with stones, the Tinker bought me a really special necklace while we were there. A piece of Ola Gorie jewellery. Everything by Ola Gorie is beautiful and I have a few pieces bought here in Tavistock years ago. Given free range I was hard pushed to choose but in the end settled for the Ingibiorg necklet, the design a derivation of the runic script engraved on the walls of Maeshowe, the burial tomb through which the sun shines on the shortest day. 'Ingibiorg is the most beautiful of all women' wrote the lonely Viking as he took shelter from a terrible snowstorm in 1153, so exactly 800 years before I was born.
I love it.
Oh yes and one more final stone. A little sketch that Bookhound did on one of our beachcombing expeditions, picking up a piece of slate and using a piece of tide-smoothed glass as a pencil... Clever Bookhound.
Now I wonder what Ellie has been looking at on Wherevertheroadgoes... and I happen to know it is Ellie's birthday today... 'the big roundieth scary half a century one' so here's wishing her a very happy day, been there Ellie, it's not so bad :-)
Gillian Clarke: At the Source: A Writer's Year 'On the first day of January I open a new journal and mark the clean page with a date, location, a first sentence...it is always an unlined, hardback black book, three inches by five..The first words print the field of snow...'
Robert Macfarlane: Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination 'Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage...'
Tony Judt: The Memory Chalet 'Thus I realize that as a child I was observing far more than understood. Perhaps all children do this, in which case what distinguishes me is only the opportunity that catastrophic ill-health has afforded me to retrieve those observations in a consistent manner... I have a variety of uses to which I can put them. For this alone I consider myself a very lucky man.'
Inspiring...
Text by Simon Martin: Mark Hearld's Work Book 'The artist Mark Hearld takes his inspiration from nature, creating bold, enchanting visions of the landscapes, plants and animals that surround us...'
Listening...
Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse “Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.
To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch...
Team Tolstoy A year-long shared read of War & Peace through the centenary year of Count Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's death, starting on his birthday, September 9th 2010.
Everyone is welcome to board the troika and read along, meeting here on the 9th of every month to chat in comments about the book.
Team Tolstoy Bookmark Don't know your Bolkonskys from your Rostovs?
An aide memoire that can be niftily printed and laminated into a double-sided bookmark.
I try to be extremely careful about any images used on this blog, most of them are my own and if not I check permissions for use very carefully.
If you think I have breached copyright rules in any way please let me know.
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