dovegreyreader scribbles

'An invasion of light...' ~ Kathleen Jamie

Every mid-February
those first days arrive
when the sun rises
higher than the Black
Hill at last. Brightness
and a crazy breeze
course from the same airt-

This quote from a poem entitled The Dash, from Kathleen Jamie's latest collection The Overhaul reminded me.

I had read Kathleen Jamie's book Sightlines last March. If I was on a desert island Sightlines is one of the books I would want to hand for the way it makes me notice things I never have before, and in there a piece entitled Light also about those February days...

Every year, in the third week of February, there is a day, or, more usually, a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached, and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky.

It was March and I had missed the day for 2012, but I wrote this on the page...

It has now been confirmed that in 2012 the UK had something like 172 days when more than 1mm of rain fell. We could barely remember a dry day, and Nell and Magnus, now both eight months old, had known no other than wet. Day after day we have traipsed around after muddy paws, Magnus, eighteen years younger and more sprightly than the Dowagers, showing us exactly how high and across what an agile cat can climb. Nell meanwhile acquiring a plimsoll line of mud around her middle and needing a daily hose down before coming back indoors, and our boots likewise hosed off and lined up to dry every day in front of the Aga.

Frankly it has been relentless, and with an energetic puppy to house-train and walk regularly, a very hard winter of work after enjoying those few rare days of summer we had...oh for some dry.

We have been all eyes for those days of Light.

Slowly the evenings draw out and it is possible to walk dogs at 5pm...then 5.30, but still it rained and the sky glowered down on us.

And then suddenly, on February 14th, no sooner wished for than granted..

and we walked to the woods with the sun on our backs and it felt warm... almost hot...

and Magnus spotted it too, eschewing the basket for the sun puddle on his little mat on the kitchen table...

'...and though scalding
to our wintered eyes
look, we cry, it's here.'

I'm sure we still have days of cold and wet to come but have those days arrived your way too...

And if you are in the Southern Hemisphere does something different happen, but still you sense that change... 

 

Hilary Mantel

I had written this post before last week's Hilary Mantel kerfuffle, which if you were on Mars and missed you can catch up with the definitive version here, and thence everywhere else you can possibly think of.

It has been fascinating to watch the debate rage, see opinions divided, judgements passed and generally much foaming at the mouth. Those in support post links to favourable commentary, whilst those agin fire of a salvo of links to all the agin pieces, and it's been a bit like watching a long rally from the baseline at Wimbers, or perhaps Royal Tennis would be more apt. Anyway, our 'ilary served the ball and went home and we have had all that slugging of shots back and forth with the occasional person (the Prime Minister... I ask you) running to the net for a poorly-timed volley. 

Just for the record and if, just supposing, I was Kate Middleton, I'd get HM onto my team instantly for more wise counsel and sage non-sycophantic, honest base-line-serving opinion and guidance. More likely, judging by the reaction, I suspect our 'ilary has said farewell to her Dame-hood and will be cast into the metaphorical dungeons of the Tower. But there are silver linings, can you think of more authentic mental territory from which to write the final book for which we are all agog.

In the end my own opinion matters not a jot, I'm just a little ball-girl of no consequence in the match because, as you will see, my bias in favour of Hilary Mantel is entrenched, immoveable and utterly pig-headedly stuck on the Adulation/Can Do No Wrong setting.

So here's what I wrote and I promise you I haven't changed a word...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is no secret that when it comes to Hilary Mantel, that any objective critical faculties in my possession swiftly depart these shores, in fact I think I might be enjoying the rising tide of our 'ilary's success as much as I hope she is. A word-grafter and a word-crafter at the top of her game, this is absolutely her moment and I for one am revelling in each success.

I have had to check back in my hand-written reading journal to see when I first encountered the name and the writing. It wasn't until 1996 and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, read inbetween Moo by Jane Smiley and Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson I discover. These were the days of a rather erudite monthly book group that I had been invited to, I hardly knew anyone there and Hilary Mantel had been suggested by one very well-read member when none of the rest of us had even heard of her....so I didn't feel quite so daft. I knew instantly that I was reading something very different, something very new to me and that I couldn't quite grasp in the way that I usually understood a book. I knew I wanted to read much more like this for the challenges it offered. That difference perhaps confirmed by Hilary Mantel's response to the question 'What, or who, made you a writer?'

'Circumstance and chance; poor health, unfitting me for more active trades; the desire to read books that didn't seem to exist, unless I wrote them.'

I see that later that same year I read A Change of Climate and Fludd but for some reason I didn't go back to the beginning and seek out any of the earlier novels, though I have bought every one subsequently and you don't need to ask...of course our 'ilary has her own shelf.

Seventeen years on and I decided it was about time I did go back to the beginning. I am sated with current contemporary fiction with the Fiction Uncovered judging at the moment, and whilst I am enjoying the process enormously I am currently having to seek fiction reading for pleasure that diverts from the very immediate present. Zola is filling one slot very nicely, but I have space for something more recent, I needed another.

So wouldn't it be interesting, I decided, to do what I had done some years ago with Margaret Atwood and go right back to the beginning and read Hilary Mantel's books through in chronological order.

Every Day is Mother's Day (1985)
Vacant Possession (1986)
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988)
Fludd (1989)
A Place of Greater Safety (1992)
A Change of Climate (1994)
An Experiment in Love (1995)
The Giant, O'Brien (1998)
Learning to Talk (2003)
Giving Up the Ghost - a memoir (2003)
Beyond Black (2005)
Wolf Hall (2009)
Ink in the Blood - A Hospital Diary (2010 - digital only)
Bring Up the Bodies (2012)

Those highlighted in red I have read, most recently Every Day is Mother's Day, and I clearly remember giving up on Beyond Black, so that will be an interesting revisit given my current state of unbridled adulation.

I have been trying to decide why I enjoy Hilary Mantel and her writing so much, and not just her fiction but also her pieces for the London Review of Books and the newspapers, as well as essays I catch hither and yon and on that subject might it be too much to ask for a book of Collected Writings??

I am far too devoted to be critical and that was all defined and affirmed a little by the fiesty speech our 'ilary gave after winning the Costa Prize recently... and the way she came out and faced up to those who said it wasn't fair, she was winning too much (can you believe it) and that she would not say 'sorry' she would say 'thank you.'

And this Guardian podcast interview...'There isn't a quota system for winning prizes,' 

But also in that interview some wonderful insights into how she not only writes history, but I think I am seeing now, having made a start on the early novels, how Hilary Mantel approaches any writing. To see what they saw, wear what they wore...not costumes, these were their everyday clothes, eat what they ate....just to 'be' there where they are.

The key to reading success likewise perhaps to be found in that total immersion rather than detachment. I know I felt part of the furniture as I read both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, whilst Every Day is Mother's Day has been a real revelation. I had no idea that Hilary Mantel had been a social work assistant in a previous life, bringing that experience to bear most fruitfully in her first two novels and I will write more about them soon.

But perhaps too it was reading this recently republished extract from Giving up the Ghost - A Memoir, about body image..

'When I was thin I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like. When you sell clothes, you get very good at sizing people, but I had sized my customers as if they were fridge-freezers, or some other unnegotiable object, solid and with a height, width and depth. Fat is not like this. It is insidious and creepy.'

and for this...

'I am a shabby old building in an area of heavy shelling which the inhabitants have vacated years ago...spriit needs a house and lodges where it can, you don't kill yourself just because you need loose covers rather than frocks.'

What is not to love about someone who has the courage to think and then to say that about themselves, and though it may be simplistic thinking, but what depth of understanding and compassion are they perhaps subsequently more likely to bring to their characters, even their least likeable ones, and as a result write brilliant and insightful books??

So things are starting to add up for me now. Every Day is Mother's Day has I think proved me right in my own mind on all fronts so far, more about it soon, and had I nursed any doubts then Vacant Possession would have dispelled them in an instant.

Anyone else in my Hilary Mantel Fan Club then??

 

 

On This Day ~ Irène Némirovsky

I don't often post about a book on a Sunday having decided long ago that weekend posts are for playtime, and book thoughts are for weekdays. But now that I am no longer working, and since my weeks are no longer defined by that divide, and given that I hardly seem to know which day of the week it is anyway, and as many people visit here on a Sunday as do on a Monday...well, who needs rules and routine.

Besides which today is an On This Day... event which I have really been looking forward to, so Happy Birthday to Irene Nemirovksy.

Despite all this lovely time I have I still rarely read a book in a single day, but at 160 pages there is always the possibility, and when that book is The Misunderstanding by Irène Némirovsky I defy anyone to put it down unfinished and sleep.

I find I still need to psyche myself up to read anything by Irene but I am pleased to have written about several of her books all tagged here including Jezebel, Le Bal, Suite Francaise,and The Courilof Affair, 

I keep all books by and about her on a shelf of their own, The Irène Shelf sits near the Edith Shelf (Wharton) not far from the Margaret Shelf (Atwood) and in close proximity to the Joseph (Roth) and Max (Sebald) shelves. I frequently pick up a book I haven't read, think I will read it and then find myself overcome by an inexpressible wave of sadness and put it back for another day. So much sorrowful baggage to contemplate when I consider the circumstances of her life and death in a concentration camp, and her children carrying that 'baggage' to safety in the shape of that beautiful portmanteau with their mother's writing inside...and surely no case can have been a more awkward shape for a child to hold.

Needless to say I haven't been able to read the biograpy either, but dipping into it I discover that one of the last books that Irène  was reading before she was 'taken' was Katherine Mansfield's Journal, and the biographer's quote this extract...who knows, perhaps Irène did read this...

'Just when one thinks: "Now I've touched the bottom of the sea - now I can't go down any lower", one sinks deeper still. And so on for ever.'

Anyway I decided to woman up and picked up The Misunderstanding, the most recent of Sandra Smith's English translations of Irène Némirovsky's novels to come into print. La Malentendu the first of Irene's novels, written in 1924 and published in 1926.

That alone was enough to make me think.

1924...

Born in 1903 Irène  would have been twenty-one. George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Bing Crosby (bet they don't often make it into the same sentence) would have been twenty-one too. I looked it up in order to try and get some context, to know of Irène's contemporaries, people who may have been alive in my lifetime.

Then I wondered quite how a reasonably privileged twenty-one year old, living in France having fled the Russian revolution of 1918, might convey a perspective of the Great War. Would she even have a view on a world that has been torn apart and is discovering a new social and emotional order, a new license to love with gaping chasms between rich and poor, those fatally damaged by the war and those who seem to have remained untouched by it.

Then another obstacle loomed.

There is something about reading, in hindsight, the words of a naive, joyful twenty-one year old, revelling in her burgeoning talent as a wordsmith, full of anticipation for the the future as she explores what words and fiction can accomplish, and on the brink of what was surely to be a brillaint writing career.

We know what happens and it makes me feel indescribably sad.

Gosh I really do put myself through the wringer with Irène, but, having talked myself round, the moment I started to read The Misunderstanding I was spellbound and somehow all those factors that I had thought would be obstacles suddenly became catalysts.

Yves Harteloup, a veteran of the trenches, is making a living for himself in Paris after the war. He is from good stock but like many his family fortune has been lost during the conflict and he must accept a lower station in life. Office work and impecunious living do not come naturally for Yves who consistently lives beyond his means; somehow the nice things in life are still a fundamental requirement for his survival. If Yves thinks day to day life on his own is expensive then things are about to take a turn for the wallet-emptying when he meets Denise. 

The fortunes of war are vastly different for Family Jaissant. Jacques' engineering invention has made him a wealthy man and with his wife Denise and their child Francette, life really couldn't be better....until they meet Yves on the beach that is. 

Instantly smitten with each other Denise and Yves embark on a holiday affair which they propose to keep going on their return to Paris, and they do, though Yves' day job and lack of wealth are a major hindrance, but for the war they would have shared that common ground of leisured wealth.

Slowly and insidiously an imbalance creeps in, and with too much time on her hands Denise becomes increasingly obsessive and gradually Yves realises he has taken on one very emotionally high-maintenance lover. Lust and forbidden desire may now be acceptable and de rigueur in this post war climate but it turns to a muddled mix of  'pity, tenderness and scorn' for Yves, a burden of entrapment for both, and it is Denise's very helpful mother who suggests a course of action for her that...well you just know it's going to end in tears. 

But the brilliance of Irène Némirovsky's writing glistens on every single page (and gratitude must be owed to translator Sandra Smith for this too) and to read this book alone is to be assured of Irène's future as a successful author. A powerful sense of place acts like background scenery for the ebbs and flows of the love affair... hot, sensuous and languid on the beach (which always but always reminds of Grand Isle and Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening). Then steamy and claustrophobically airless back in Paris as Denise's neediness starts to suffocate Yves, becoming scorched, stormy and oppressive, with the leaves 'curling up and cracking' as Denise's plan goes hopelessly awry. 

Oddly my sympathies rested firmly and entirely with Yves rather than Denise and I am not sure they should have done given the circumstances and the pitiful suffering she endured...

'Her entire life now consisted of waiting. Waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for his visit, waiting for their rendezvous ... Ah! Love meant such horrible suffering.'

... but a little voice in me, which got steadily stronger, was urging Yves to jump ship at the earliest opportunity. I may need to read it again, and with more of a sympathetic understanding towards the plight of women, but it is not something  Irène insists upon.

Nothing disappointed about The Misunderstanding, even down to the title which, as Sandra Smith points out, is open to multiple interpretations. What a blessing it is indeed to have Irène Némirovsky's legacy alive and well on the bookshelves.

Keep an eye out for this one, I have yet to read a book by Irène Némirovsky  that hasn't repaid every single second I have spent reading it. 

There must be legions of Irène Némirovsky fans out there...please do declare yourselves now and your favourite of her books.

And if you haven't read any don't be daunted, declare yourselves too, and perhaps we can offer you some ideas about which of  Irène's books to read first. Given my early failure with Suite Francaise that might not be my first suggestion.

(and please note, no time or expense spared in getting this è and this é in place, it doesn't come naturally to Typepad.)

 

 

 

Taps...

Thank you so much for coming to Thinking Day Brownie Revels everyone, what a lovely day we had.

Erika, have you cracked that reef knot yet??

And after all that excitement, and with an 'On This Day..'. to come tomorrow, most unusually for a Sunday but these birthdays must needs be remembered, well I think we'd all better get our breath back, look at this nice February sunset in the Shire and sing Taps around the campfire...


Day is done, gone the sun

From the sea, from the hills, from the sky

All is well, safely rest

God is nigh.

 

Happy Thinking Day ...

It's Thinking Day all my fellow Brownies, Guides et al. I haven't marked it for a few years but I thought we could all wear our Brownie uniforms in spirit today.

Now designated World Thinking Day, and though I knew it was the Baden-Powell birthdays, I'm not sure I ever really know exactly what I was supposed to be thinking about.

If you fancy going on Pack Revels perhaps hop across to Milady's Boudoir where Milady has just returned from a visit to Our Chalet in Adelboden, and whilst there have a sing of the song...

High up, high on the mountain,
We’ve founded our Chalet,
Its sloping roof and wide
Shall shelter us without a care.
And each Girl Scout and Guide Shall find a welcome there.

I knew not of its existence but Barbara was fortunate enough to pay a visit as a young Girl Guide and her return trip has revived some wonderful memories.

Time for me to uniform up (my head and ears are not really that shape, I am wearing the beret) and I can assure you that in my pockets are my test card, my Brownie diary with pencil inserted into the spine, a piece of string and a clean hankie. My tie is tied behind my neck with a reef knot (never a Granny knot) and my badge polished to within an inch of its life with messy old Brasso. How I loved it all...

Now settle down everyone, it's time to begin.

I'll sing the song I do know whilst leading any fellow Gnomes (I am being Sixer today as I still have my stripes) out from our corner around the toadstool circle.

Fairies, Elves, Pixies, Leprechauns etc you will just have to sort yourselves out and follow your Sixer when they make themselves known. If we have any Brown Owls, Tawny Owls or Snowy Owls they'll take charge, but us Gnomes are good to go, we have it sussed here.

Now Six, if you could all join hands and follow me. We'll be going clockwise around the toadstools ...or is it anti-clockwise.. and starting with the left foot..or maybe it should be the right..

This may be why my Six always spoilt the effect and had to do a double turn to join the big Brownie Circle.

Ready (just wing it troops)...

"Here we come the laughing Gnomes
Helping mothers in our homes."

Now I think we'll salute and say our motto, LAH LAH LAH which is a secret word and only us Brownies know what it means.

Right now it's time for inspection... see I told you I had all the right things in my pockets.

Oh alright, as it's a special day we'll have a game of Ladders.... who wants a broken leg first??

And we'll finish with a GRAND HOWL with extra points for the Six that does the best Tu- Whoo, and for anyone who has forgotten it here you are, but don't put your back out or hurt your knees will you...

Gather in the Brownie Ring.

Squat down, knees bent, arms between your legs with two fingers of each hand touching the floor.

Say “Tu-whit, tu-whit, tu-whoo” softly. Rise a little and then return to the squatting position.

Rise again a little higher and repeat, “Tu-whit, tu-whit, tu-whoo,” a little louder.

Rise a third time, even higher. Say only “Tu-whit, tu-whit,” but louder.

Then leap in the air and clap your hand above your head as you yell, “Tu-whoo”!

Oh well done Gnomes, I think we bagged that one.... anyone need an ambulance??

OK time for Brownie Taps and home.

Right, your turn...

Which Pack...

Which Six ... 

Do we have some Sixers...

Beating the Bounds... the Churchyard

There are several churchyards I can draw into my Beating the Bounds Parish walkabout and  I have posted pictures of this one before, St Mary's Church, Sydenham Damerel. A tiny Adam-Bede-like church that we can see from our kitchen window, the church rebuilt after a catastrophic fire in 1953, and even on the dullest grey day still bathed in reflected light inside as I walked across to it recently.

With a beautiful yew avenue through which I can look across to home, and a churchyard steeped in history and back-story it is a truly atmospheric place. 


Yew incidentally I gather (from the book about hedges I have borrowed from the library) was often planted in churchyards because it was thought to keep out the plague.

I usually invent the back-story as the fancy takes me but for the purposes of Beating the Bounds I am hoping to find out something much more accurate, and as I walked around the churchyard in the rain on a quiet Sunday morning, I spotted something I hadn't noticed before.

How I had missed this war grave right by the path in the past I really don't know, or perhaps it is just that after all that Edward Thomas reading I am more keenly tuned into it all...

27th January 1944 and of course, in this case, I don't need to invent a back story because sites like this one make it very easy to find out ...

RAF Bomber Command sends 515 aircraft to attack Berlin overnight

Perhaps J.F. Richards was on one of those sorties, but delving a little further I find connections to Shropshire, a full name of John Francis (via that service number) and a war record I can't access without joining something and paying a fee, so at that point my inquisitiveness for what really may have happened grinds to a halt.

But I will pursue it with the microfiche for the local paper in the library and see what more I can discover because I suddenly feel the enormity of it all...that I can stand in a tiny Devon churchyard and make that connection with history, and a young pilot who lost his life in the same week that Mathilde Wolff-Monckeberg wrote this from Germany...

'Thousands sleep in the bunkers every night, not having a roof over their heads. It is amazing how these poor human beings manage to create something, some kind of homestead, out of the rawest materials...the siren starts its howling and now everybody is pushing, stumbling, squeezing through the narrow entrance into the bunker...'

And that could have been written from anywhere...Coventry, Cologne, Exeter, Liverpool, Berlin or in Mathilde's case Hamburg in On the Other Side : Letters to my Children From Germany 1940-1946 published by Persephone Books.

As Peter Beacham suggests in Down the Deep Lanes, (the book I borrowed from the library and then had to buy) the churchyard so often taken for granted as the space to pass through on the way to the church, but dealing with continuity as much as finality...

'Left to their own devices older headstones come to rest at various improbable angles, cocking a snook at the last enemy but also nicely mirroring life's relationships...some headstones even look like families or groups of friends talking to each other... they look miserable when forced to stand to attention in ordered ranks...left alone they testify to the diversity of the human spirit.'

So true, and I reckon this little huddle are having themselves a really good yarn.

 

Related articles

Down the Deep Lanes ~ Peter Beacham with photographs by James Ravilious.

Beating the Bounds.

The Sweet Girl ~ Annabel Lyon

It is fairly safe to say that my knowledge of anything Aristotlean is of the could-be-written-on-a-postage-stamp quantity, Greek philosopher and something about Poetics would be about it. So when I was browsing the shelves for something to read during my week of the Buprawnic plague attack I'm not sure why I thought The Sweet Girl, by Canadian author Annabel Lyon, would be sufficient to distract me from it all.

I had by-passed Annabel Lyon's first novel The Golden Mean some years ago, also about Aristotle and as I recalled with a cover depicting a naked god-like man draped rather oddly over a horse in the middle of a pond, which didn't look like my sort of thing at all. But suddenly BC Greece was just where I fancied going.

'Pythias is her father's child, right down to her hard intelligent, slate-grey eyes. Aristotle has never been able to resist a keen mind in another, even in his own daughter - a young girl who should be content with the kitchen, the loom and a life of childbearing... but hers is a privileged position a woman who moves in a man's world, protected by the reputation of her philosopher father.'

That privileged position enjoyed by Pythias and Family Aristotle is soon to become precarious with the death in battle of the great warrior-king Alexander.

I'm not proud if it but I seemed to know even less about Alexander.... a horse called Bucephalus rose up from a childhood memory of a classroom story, but that was about it.

Forced to flee Athens now that his pupil is dead, Aristotle and co. head for Chalcis, a garrison town where it is hoped they will be offered some protection, though it becomes clear when they arrive that the revered philosopher is increasingly less revered and the family's well-being is under serious threat.

 

I was reading a piece about publishing by Danuta Keane entitled What Agents Want...and amongst other things, apparently this is what they want...

Of course everyone in publishing would say ‘voice’, by which they mean the character and personality of the writing. Agents want a voice that is unique, fresh and engaging....The narration – whether first or third person – will have a unique and distinct feel. From the opening paragraph it will engage you in a way that makes you want to read on and respond to the story and characters.

I thought hard about what I have read recently... actually a vast number of openings (and middles and ends) of books for the Fiction Uncovered judging (though not this one) and some more succesful than others. I realised that, from that opening paragraph of The Sweet Girl, Annabel Lyon's totally unique voice had wrapped itself around me from the off and insisted that I carry on..

The first time I ask to carry a knife to the temple, Daddy tells me I'm not allowed to because we're Macedonian. Here in Athens, you have to be born an Athenian girl to carry the basket with the knife, to lead the procession to the sacrifice. The Athenians can be awfully snotty, even all these years after our army defeated their army.

"I want to see, though," I say. I have seven summers. "If you carry the basket, you get to watch from right up front." "I know, pet." The next morning he takes me to the market. Crowds part for him respectfully; Macedonian or not, he's famous, my daddy.

Precociously advanced, linguistically and emotionally confident and seemingly wise beyond her years...and yes, I suspect the sort of child you might not take a shine to should you meet her, Pythias will need all those skills and more when her famous father eventually dies, his spirit broken and his resources depleted. There is no protection for the family from a reputation that is already history, and Pythias will face plenty of challenges before she reaches safe harbour.

I'm afraid much of the actual detail is shrouded in the mists of anti-histamines, that's the best I can do, yet I do know that I found myself strangely beguiled by The Sweet Girl, by the voice and the story and with a wish to know what would happen to Pythias, now a young woman seeking refuge and a new life in a world less than amenable to a woman on her own. When she tries her hand at midwifery I was especially interested, I mean who knew the Greeks had ..well, had instruments like that. I was almost grateful when Pythea's promised suitor Nicanor returned from the wars to claim her and she was spared any further bother. Well almost spared, no man returning from twelve years of Greek war is going to come home unscathed and without a bit of baggage that needs sorting.

So all in all The Sweet Girl a really successful book for me and enough to have me turning the house upside down looking for my copy of The Golden Mean, a prequel of sorts I think, which I now have to read because I love Annabel Lyon's style. I found it eventually, though I half thought after the recent purge that I would have to go and buy it back from somewhere, and I will just have to cope with the cover....somehow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Devon and more drifting snow...

...drops. 

With thanks to Curzon for such a clever idea...

Snowdrops in a vase standing on a mirror ...

Sewing machines...

The day they got the Singer
my grandmother wouldn't touch it.
The clacking of its single tooth 
terrified her, and the way it opened,
tipping over its hinge
so the bobbins, spikes and belts
of the gold and black carapace
almost fell into her lap...

The Singer ~ Henry Shukman

Just occasionally a new poetry collection arrives and I am enchanted from the moment I open the book. Others take time for me to 'know' them, but when Archangel by Henry Shukman arrived, The Singer was the first poem I read and I knew I was in the door. 

Archangel (to be published on March 7th by Jonathan Cape) is an exploration of Henry Shukman's heritage and family history charting something of which I knew nothing.... 

'In 1917 several thousand Jewish tailors were deported  from London and shipped back to Archangel and the Russian Empire they had recently fled, ostensibly to fight on the Eastern Front. They arrived just as the Revolution was unfolding and the old regime was collapsing into chaos. Among them were Shukman's grandfather and great-uncle, and these poems chronicle their four-year struggle to return to their wives and children in London.'

More about the collection when I have come to know it better I feel sure, but in the meantime it jogged a big memory and this weekend in particular, feels like a very good time to write about sewing machines, specifically my mum's Singer 201K ....why ever not, and the Tinker will understand why too.

I have recently discovered a blog I am loving, and if you don't know TomofHolland, and you are interested in tradition and sewing and knitting, then you might like to pay a visit. Tom van Deijnen knits and stitches and darns and is reviving long-forgotten skills from the days when make-do-and-mend were the norm. He loves 'doing things that take forever, and technical detail, tradition and narrative' inform many of his projects. 

You have to see them to believe Tom's home made and beautifully tailored woollen trousers or his rescued darning machine or his invisible tailor's patch on the vintage Aquascutum coat.

Singer Sewing Machine 201K © TomofHolland

It was whilst I was browsing Tom's blog that I came upon this post...My Singer 201K Treadle Sewing Machine and there it was, my mum's sewing machine in the exact same cabinet that I still use, the original machine long gone from mine which now homes my lovely Bernina.

But how well I remember the gold and black Singer, and its underbelly that so frightened Henry Shukman's grandmother, and the noise it made and my mum powering away on it as she made all our curtains and clothes.

And the day, home alone with my brother, I sat down at it and thought I'd have a go while the grown-ups were out at Evensong. I have never forgotten the panic when just a few treadles later the whole thing seemed to have unthreaded itself, tangled the bobbin and made a complete mess of the cotton.

It was this very instruction book, which I still have, that an eight-year old (ish) me then turned to in an effort to try and put this thing to rights, and in the hope my mum wouldn't notice. Can you imagine the panic...

Nothing was ever said, and I doubt I would have been in trouble, but I can't believe my mum missed it. I was soon initiated into the ways of the sewing machine, cutting, patterns, darts, setting in sleeves, collars, hemming, button-holes, zips, you name it my mum showed me. The first thing I ever made, a tiny teddy bear's romper suit with a collar, the pattern in a book I had borrowed from the library. Let's not mess about with a handkerchief or something simple, no let's start as we mean to go on.

Suddenly fabric and paper patterns all made sense, Simplicity, Weldons, Butterick, McCalls and encounters of my own with the well-thumbed catalogues in Allders in Croydon, and the rather stern-looking women who commandeered the pattern drawers and would mark the purchase with that 'Patterns Cannot be Exchanged' stamp, simultaneously flashing you a glance that said 'Don't even think about it.' I was soon off into the land of making things, blouses with puffed sleeves out of Rose & Hubble fabrics and flared skirts to match come to mind, and falling with joy upon an electric Singer Merrit sewing machine of my own for my eighteenth birthday as if I had been given a car.

I eventually replaced that with a New Home swing needle and my mum did likewise. Hers fitted perfectly onto the hinges of the Singer 201K cabinet as if made for it, and heaven knows where the old machine ended up, it weighed a ton ... the Tinker will probably tell us. After my mum died (sixteen years ago this weekend) the Tinker gave me the cabinet and I slotted my own machine into the self-same hinges as if to carry on where my mum left off.

And from the New Home (some years ago given to a new home with someone who reads here) I upgraded (thanks to Father Christmas) to the all-singing, all-dancing Bernina Quilter's Edition, which truth be told I have been a little lazy with and only really ever asked to dance one dance... the backwards and forwards in a straight line one. I will have time to properly extend its repertoire now I think.

I am, I discover, most resolutely attached to the modern when it comes to sewing machines, but I will always treasure the Singer cabinet which sits primed and ready for use in the corner of the kitchen. I decided some time ago that a sewing machine needs to be out all the time if space allows, and it is now a lovely juxtaposition of the old and the new.  

And talking of song, the tiniest detail... the metal ball-catch on the door, which closes with a ring that resonates, perfectly pitched to an E (I reckon), a sound that  I would recognise anywhere.

With its original rubber mat making an ideal non-slip surface for my pedal..

...and the two-tiered, swivel opening work-box on the inside of the door..

...and the way that the lower tray holds some of my mum's sewing notions (such a lovely word for all those bits and bobs) which rest in perfect and comfortable harmony with my new ones and more of hers...the beeswax, the thimblebox on the top layer... as if we are still sewing together.

 

 

 

 

 

Down the Deep Lanes ~ Peter Beacham with photographs by James Ravilious.

What eventually happens here, by the end of this blog post, isn't really supposed to happen, but this is me, it was bound to.

I have started dropping into the library regularly in pursuit of more local knowledge for my Beating the Bounds project. The local history shelves are well-stocked with a folder of information for each village, Parish records, old tithe maps, mine surveys and countless reference books plus there is a little table over in the corner by the microfiche machine that fits me perfectly. I can also access vast online newspaper archives including The Times, from home and using my library card number, so I am in clover with it all right now.

As you would expect, there is also a jolly good shelf of borrowings on the Shire, so I carted home this great big book entitled Down the Deep Lanes by Peter Beacham, who has provided a commentary to the photographs taken by James Ravilious 1939-1999 (son of Eric).

 
Back in February 2010, Bookhound and I stumbled upon an exhibition at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro... James Ravilious - An English Eye, Photographic Images of West Country Life and we were entranced.

Many of the pictures have become iconic as in this one which also sits as a gift card on my shelf ...

Apropos of a minimal connection, but in the interests of full disclosure because  I have found the photos in the same batch...we ate this at Charlotte's Tea Rooms in Truro on that day...

and we bought some of these on the way home...

So anyway I saw Down the Deep Lanes and remembered the exhibition, and I borrowed it before Christmas, quickly realising what a completely 'me' sort of book it is.

The book is a journey down the deep lanes of Devon, taking its title from the final line of Last Load, a poem by Ted Hughes from the Moortown Diary collection which I am also reading through this year...

... And you go, and over the whole land 
Like singing heard across evening water 
The tall loads are swaying towards their barns 
Down the deep lanes. 

This is off the beaten track Devon, not the part we live in, this is the Taw and Torridge end of the Shire, but very like it for its hidden beauty and everyday-ness.

'A single lane is a nature reserve,' intones Peter Beacham as he draws in all that is lovely, but also much that may be perceived as less so in his opening chapter. John Betjeman bemoaned the encroaching presence of the telegraph and electricity poles back in the 1930s, Peter Beacham sees them, much as we now do, as wonderful perches for birds of prey, and I am instantly reminded of my daily three mile drive with the little Gamekeeper up to the village school. We would always take bets on whether we would see a buzzard perched on the fourth, or would it be the fifth pole along as we drove up the hill, but we always saw one, every day. I am quite pleased about the poles for the broadband too; we are the furthest from the village exchange, right on the furthest boundary of the Parish, and as we follow the poles along the lane and the 'gently looping wires' that keep me in touch with all of you, we turn into our gate at the very last one and know that the signal stops here....and we also know it can all go horribly wrong if a cow decides to use a pole as a scratching post in the middle of a field.

I can't tell you how delighted I was to see a chapters entitled Lane, Farmstead, Field, Orchard, Cob, Corrugated Iron, Chapel, Churchyard, Belfry and more... a celebration of the uncelebrated aspects of ordinary life. The persistent face of rural England that remains timeless and untainted in the face of radical change. It's not about wallowing in nostalgia either, it's about what is still existing and functioning as well as it ever did, pragmatism overruling progress, and so much I recognised as I read and looked carefully at James Ravilious's beautiful black and white photographs.

So I read it twice and then the email reminder came asking for me to renew the book or take it back.

So I renewed it online and read it for a third time and dreaded the moment...

Then the next email came asking for the book back...

It was no good, I couldn't bear to part with it, so in the end I have had to buy one of my own, and I am grateful that the Beaford Arts Centre, which holds the James Ravilious archive, had some for sale, and in a sightly cheaper paperback edition.

As I said, this is not what is supposed to happen at all, I am clearly a hopeless borrower, but I will be Beating the Bounds with my own perambulations to my Wild Places alongside the inspiration that Down the Deep Lanes offers in the months to come...plenty to think about there.

 

 

Ted and I: A Brother's Memoir ~ Gerald Hughes

It hadn't escaped my attention, and several of you mentioned it in comments on The Winter of 1963 post, that February 11th was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath. I am remembering birthdays rather than deathdays in my 'On This Day...' feature on here through the year so I plumped for a Roger Deakin celebration of life instead, whilst never forgetting Sylvia too of course.

The Canadian author Margaret Laurence also found herself exiled and alone with young children, living in Hampstead in London in that February of 1963. Rewriting The Stone Angel and walking children to and fro to school for fear they would get lost in the fog, Margaret Laurence is stunned by the news and recalls her reaction in her memoir Dance on the Earth...

'It was not a terribly pleasant time, particularly since the English are totally unprepared for large quantities of snow... it took me a while to discover that if you lit the gas oven and opened the oven door, you could at least be warm in the kitchen. One cold day I went down to the local shop to buy the Hampstead and Highgate Express. I took the paper home and was stunned by what I saw. Sylvia Plath, the poet, who had been living in Primrose Grove in Hampstead... had killed herself. I read it but could hardly believe it, I was living in the same area, also in a crummy flat, also separated from my husband... I had never met Sylvia Plath, but I could only mourn for her and for her children...'

Ted and I - A Brother's Memoir by Gerald Hughes was my Boxing Day reading, a Christmas gift from Bookhound. It was pure luck that I even knew of the book's existence, a chance glance at a mention in the press perhaps, or maybe a comment on the radio, I'm not sure, but I have a shelf groaning under the weight of all books Ted and Sylvia and I am always keen to read new perspectives.

In many ways the quiet arrival of Ted and I here, published by The Robson Press who would probably be wanting to hear that I had picked it up via a blaze of publicity, is entirely suited to the quiet and reflective nature of the book. Readers seeking sensational insider gossip or scandal about Ted and Sylvia will be disappointed; that is not within the remit of a loving and caring brother, and those are the powerful sentiments that came across as I read. The book is clearly a venture that has received the family's blessing too. Carol Hughes helped willingly and provided extra material, Ted and Gerald's sister Olwyn jogged memories and offered encouragement, and Frieda, Ted and Sylvia's daughter, not only suggested the book but has also written the foreword...

' He [Gerald] has always been an important figure in my life because he was a hugely important figure on the life of my father...'

In her foreword Frieda pinpoints the importance of recording information like this within any family...

'I only wish that I remembered more, but children rarely think of asking their older family members about their lives and experiences because they believe there is always tomorrow and that their parents will somehow always be there.'

Growing up together in Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, it is their mother Edith who ensures that her sons both embrace her love of walking and the countryside around their moorland home. The boys would go camping together, and out on early morning hunting trips in the Calder valley before school, and Gerald recounts some wonderful personal memories of the sort that only brothers can remember, and indeed over which the two of them would often reminisce in later years.

Cousin Glenys however probably never forgot the day Ted dropped a mouse down the back of her dress.

Shooting rabbits, fishing and keeping the tiddlers in a jar only for them to die (we lived on the banks of the River Wandle and our sticklebacks always did likewise), kite-flying, sledging in the snow, sketching, and piano lessons. The latter probably a mother's attempt to civilize her lads and embed a little culture in amongst the obsession with the BSA air rifle and skinning moles, and looking back I can see I did something similar by sending a seven-year old Gamekeeper off to violin lessons.

This after I tracked the odd smell in his bedroom down to a mouse skin cured and pinned out on a board. Dont ask, just blame the SAS Handbook which he had read cover to cover, and be thankful it wasn't a cat.

Gerald, now ninety-two and older than Ted by ten years, is tactful and circumspect about his brother's marriages, relationships and personal tragedies, never passing judgement on events which came as a 'terrible shock'  to an extended family who knew little of Sylvia's 'emotional struggles', focusing instead on their life as siblings, and the close connections they maintained throughout Ted's life.

When Gerald emigrated to Australia in 1948 the plan was for Ted to follow once he had finished his degree at Cambridge. All that would change of course once Ted had met and married Sylvia Plath in 1956, but the brothers kept in close contact and it is clear that though they never met, Gerald 'knew' Sylvia through the letters that she wrote to him too...

'Two stags leaving gold footprints and gold sky of snowflakes to say our Merry Christmas to you. My teaching takes up most of my time sof far - keeping a week ahead of my seventy grils like a fox eluding panting hounds..'

The closeness of the brothers perhaps shared and embraced by Sylvia and reflected in her eagerness to be included...

'Ted had already sealed up your letter in his secretive way, but I made him open it again to let me gossip for a bit...'

and there follows a lovely chatty letter with news of baby Frieda, and her eyes of 'astounding blue', on a trip to feed the camels at the zoo...

'I think she thought it was Ted in an overcoat.'

When the brothers are finally able to meet again in 1964, and Ted talks about the tragic events of the previous year, Gerald is the perfect listener that in some circumstances only a sibling can be, with that shared understanding and familiarity with each other's emotional territory born of a shared childhood. I was incredibly moved by Ted's heartfelt pleas to Gerald now back in Australia in 1970, asking him to come home to England and join him in his farming venture in Devon, followed by Ted's acceptance that it was never going to happen...

'...the final realisation that you will never come and live over here was probably what knocked me out - it was a big station in my life's journey to realise the emptiness of that dream. Part of the general stripping away of everything, lately drastic...'

...and that disappointment encapsulated by Ted in his poem Brother Peartree

'I send you fewer letters - fewer and thinner
Year by year. Can I really be thinking
It's just not worth it anymore?
What was it I once hoped for?

Gerald is very much the proud observer, noting frequently Ted's loving and close relationship with his children, Ted so admiring of their achievements and travelling the world to see them and to be part of their lives, and also sharing in this book Ted's wonderful letter concerning his Laureateship..

'The 60 million who would never know the difference between what I write & 3 blind mice are ready to extend me every possible kind of credit. So it becomes quite a problem - not to blow it...'

So all in all a really special book. In amongst so much that has been written by and about Ted Hughes, Ted and I feels hugely important, a unique and personal view that adds much to any understanding of the man and his life. Bookhound and I have both enjoyed this one immensely

Final words must go to Frieda Hughes...

'In April 1997 I got the devastating news that my father was seriously ill and in hospital with cancer. I arrived in the UK...stayed two weeks and only returned to Australia to pack up my home and...return to the UK that July. I wanted to be on the same land mass as my father and spend more time with him. He died on 28 October 1998 aged sixty-eight.

My father's love for his brother ensured that Gerald was part of my life as I grew up, despite the separating miles, and Gerald's love for my father has resulted in this moving tribute, which is a joy for me to read.'

On second thoughts, perhaps final words to Ted, those which surround his ledger stone in Poet's Corner, the same words with which Gerald ends this heartwarming and very affirming book...

'So we found the end of our journey.

So we stood, alive in the river of light
Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.' 

 

 

More winners...

Hello chums, Magnus again and thank you to Liz at Harper Collins for offering four more proof copies of The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier.

So four more lucky winners...

130 52 17 81 
Random numbers generated Feb 11 2013 at 18:57:19 by www.psychicscience.org  

 

17 ~ Miriam

52 ~ Mary

81 ~ Tina J

130 ~ Emptynester

Send addresses to dovegreyreader at gmail dot com and nice things will happen soon.

Thank you to those who have sent addresses already, and to update, still waiting to hear from

4 ~ Nancy 

20 ~ Sarah L

58 ~ Linda W 

 

 

 

On This Day... Roger Deakin

The late Roger Deakin, who died far too young in 2006, would have been seventy today, and in his honour we are going to talk hedging, a subject of which Roger would most certainly have approved and on which he most certainly has something to say.

A small group of writers of Roger Deakin's ilk, with their keen eye and astute observations of so much that I hitherto seem scarcely to have noticed, let alone understood more deeply, are proving more influential to my reading than I could ever have imagined. I would place Roger's book Wildwood, which I have finally finished after a six month very slow meander through it, near the top of the list. These books are opening my eyes to what is in front of them and when I read the chapter entitled A New-laid Hedge in Wildwood recently it all chimed... I know of what he speaks...

'I know of nothing more saddening than a machine-flailed hedge. It speaks of the disdain of nature and a craft that still dominates our agriculture. Even after years of benign neglect, plashed hedges stand as monuments to the best traditions of good husbandry.'

We do love the hedgerows along our lane with a passion, to the point of feeling a little possessive and protective of them, ours is the only house you come to as you drive along that first mile and you will only pass one more by the time you reach the little row of cottages at the other end.

That makes it all ours really doesn't it.

I can't pretend to know much about hedge-laying, or how-to, though I discover there is a National Hedgelaying Society devoted to the preservation of the craft. It's all about keeping the stock in the fields, providing shelter for them and supporting the healthy growth of the hedge, which if left untended will eventually revert to a row of trees.

I do know a little more now thanks to Roger...

'I began at the left-hand end, working along the hedge to my right and laying the cut trees and hazel stems to my left. I cut through each stem as close as possible to the ground with a diagonal stroke of the billhook that severed the stem almost right through, but left the bark and enough connective tissue to allow the sap to flow. Once cut in this way, the stems or trees are called pleachers....'

 

And we screeched the car to a halt driving home from town last week at the sight of this newly laid hedge, a rare sight indeed.

This is winter work to be done when the architecture of the hedge is most clearly visible; labour for a waning moon when the tide of the sap is low apparently. And who knew that there were differing styles of hedge-laying across the country. Sadly our hedges are now the victims of the regular massacre that Roger speaks of. Expediency and a different form of land stewardship and conservation being the main aim, whilst time and labour spent making hedges look nice and traditional would hardly be a priority on a busy farm nowadays. We stay indoors whilst it is being done or risk losing an eye as the branches become lethal shrapnel, jettisoned in all directions, and when we walk out afterwards the lane is a carpet of razor sharp splinters, death to bicycle tyres and the hedge itself a mess of sharp, jagged ends.

All a far cry from the swish of the billhook.

But there has been progress and the cutting is regulated to avoid crucial phases in the life of the hedge, which is resilient and somehow seems to recover quickly, and once done and repaired it has to be said the lane look very neat and tidy from afar. This is how it is looking at the moment, and perhaps thanks in some part to some meticulous hedge-laying many moons ago.

Imagine then, if you will, our horror when the council turned up to do their once a decade resurfacing of 'our' lane a few years ago, and started the project with a massacre of the hedges at the beginning of June when they were looking like this...

...just as the birds were nesting, and the wild flowers were approaching their full glory and would then set seed for the next year ...well we nearly cried, and in the name of all that is Roger Deakin we did our level best.

It was all about having access for the tarmacing machine apparently, and though we made many desperate phone calls to the county highways department, the RSPB and the environment agency... you name it we tried, it was all to no avail.

I suspect Roger would have gone and camped on the steps of the council offices or something.

In fact it was more than a massacre because the contractors were brought in from outside, so not the farmer who usually does the work and does at least understand the nuances of the growth. We watched in despair as the hedge was flailed back to the soil and the foundation stones in places, and started to disintegrate before our eyes; the birds disappeared for the remainder of the summer and we can still see the spots where the hedge has never properly recovered. This being us we did keep on...and on...and on... out of principle and until the council reluctantly sent a solitary worker in for about an hour to rebuild the parts that were collapsing.

But as we walk in the winter, when the skeletons of the hedgerows along our lane and around the fields are laid bare, and seeing through to the bones of the hedge, it is if we are granted a little window onto a visible social history, and easy to spot where the hedge-layers of old may have been at work.

'Very old laid hedges can be works of the hedgers art: a kind of tree jazz, improvised down the generations..' says Roger, and I would most definitely agree. I almost want to sit at this one and play a tune..

 ...and spot the stock peering through at us...

So there you have it, a quick Monday morning session on hedge-laying... bet you weren't expecting that, and here's remembering the inimitable one and only Roger Deakin on his seventieth ...and with much gratitude for my eyes now wide open. 

Any more Roger Deakin fans out there??

 

And the winners are...

Hello chums... blue basket today, and this one has certainly been very exciting. Here are the twelve winners of a proof copy of The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier.

59 7 22 42 58 147 78 63 104 67 4 20 
Random numbers generated Feb 10 2013 at 19:33:20 by www.psychicscience.org 

4 ~ Nancy

7 ~ Erika

20 ~ Sarah L

22 ~ kristieinbc

42 ~ Claire

58 ~ Linda W

59 ~ Linda J

63 ~ SusanDW

67 ~ Carol S

78 ~ Connie Franks

104 ~ Ann Swinfen

147 ~ Heather

Check it is really you here and then if you could send your address to dovegreyreader at gmail.com and mark the subject line 'RUNAWAY WINNER' or similar the book will arrive very soon. 

Note to Zola winners last week - Your books are on their way.

In Devon... drifting snow...

...drops.

 

The Winter of 1963 - what do you remember ?

Through this week fifty years ago, the winter of 1963, and the Big Freeze continued. With snow forecast in the next few days across the UK, and the country doubtless grinding to a halt, and news people standing out in flurries trying to make out its really deep and chaotic and there's no grit etc....well it's all enough to make me cast my mind back. The snow had started on Boxing Day and apparently we didn't have another frost-free day in the entire country until March 5th

On February 4th fifty people spent the night stuck in a train on the edge of Dartmoor, and forty lorry drivers had to take refuge in a school near Okehampton.

We weren't living in Devon then. Though I was born here we had moved to Mitcham in Surrey in 1957, by 1963 I was nine and I have been trying to remember that winter, and the cold and just how did we manage??

We didn't have central heating or double glazing for a start, and I am sure it was paraffin heaters or freeze, and there was definitely ice on the inside of the windows. We must surely have had power cuts and candles??

I can clearly remember the snow compacted on the pavements for weeks on end.

I remember that school rarely closed, and if it did we had no idea it had until we got there because very few people had phones. We would just find the school gates locked. This would be after waiting ages for a bus, so we would turn round, wait ages for a bus home and ... well we would think nothing of it as far as I can recall.

I am almost certain this might have been the year my mum bought me a pair of these new inventions called 'tights'. Mine were Brettles royal blue, very thick and the boys at school immediately called my 'inky legs.' 

If this wasn't the year I got the tights, then I was definitely standing waiting for the bus for hours in sub-zero temperatures wearing knee length fawn socks.

Oh yes, and I remember milk frozen in the bottles on the doorstep and pushing the lid off.

And that us about all I can recall, so now I am intrigued, can you jog my memory ... what do any of you (and you'll have to be over a certain age) remember about the winter of 1963??

And while you are remembering here's a very clever little film about the railways through that winter...

The Last Runaway ~ @Tracy_Chevalier

Once the Fiction Uncovered judging is completed the plan is that I will be taking a rest from all things 'Public Literary World' and commitments beyond reading what I want and writing dovegreyreader this year.

Much as I enjoy it all and never say never of course,  but for a while no taking part in literary festivals, no speaking appearances, no cross-country blogger meet-ups, no interviews, no panel discussions, no written pieces for anything but here, no publisher parties (where may lurk a rogue prawn tucked up in a canape ...the blood results are back, it wasn't my imagination, I am highly allergic to the critters)  no book launches, no doing a week of Thought for the Day for local radio...

It was very kind of them and I was very flattered and honoured to be asked... but what on earth would I have to say that might uplift the Shire as it embarks on its daily toil. My polite refusal was nothing to do with the fact that I needed to submit scripts well in advance, and would have had to be in the studio twenty miles away for 6am every morning for a week through an icy January either ...no honestly, it really wasn't.

But I did do some very exciting things last year, enough lovely memories to keep me going through this one for sure, and one of those was the opportunity to meet and talk with Tracy Chevalier at Port Eliot Festival.

After some apprehension following Vermeer discussions here I had been nervous about reading Tracy's novel Girl With a Pearl Earring. I needn't have worried, it suited my reading mood perfectly, my sort of book and I loved it, so I have really been looking forward to the arrival of Tracy's new novel The Last Runaway.

'There's slave hunters all over Ohio. See, we got a lot of runaways through here. East to west you got settlers moving for more land. South to north you got runaway slaves looking for freedom. Funny how nobody wants to go south or east. It's north or west that hold out some kind of promise.'

When a proof copy arrived during that week of the Buprawnic plague backalong I was cheered and delighted.

This was the book that Tracy had talked about and read extracts from in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot, as well as showing us the quilt that she had made, both as research for the book but also for the inspiration and for the love it. Tracy now has the quilting bug and we talked and looked at quilts for ages.

In fact we started the event with a Show & Tell. Any quilters out there will be very familiar with this process, (as will any school teachers) and I started things off by way of introduction with the Kayaker's baby quilt...

Unfinished as you can see and there was the 8lb 3oz baby, now large as life twenty eight years later, sitting in front of us taking this photograph, cue much laughter. But I love this piece for its history and what I stitched into it back in 1983, which quilting tradition suggests will be what is happening in your life at the time. Isn't it so of the 1980s moment, Tumbling Blocks, a homage to the fabric of Laura Ashley and English pieced-over-papers hand stitchery. I only need to look at it and I am thinking towelling nappies and two babies under two and no sleep, little wonder I never finished it. By way of mitigating circumstances I can confirm that a friend and I did complete an identical one for another baby born in our midst at the time.

However unwittingly I had segued right into a theme in The Last Runaway which features much about both English and American quilting and their differences, as Quaker Honor Bright sails from Bristol to a new life in Ohio in the 1850s.

Tracy followed my offering with her own very first quilt in progress also hand stitched.

As I am reading the book I can see that something I asked Tracy at Port Eliot will indeed be possible...

"Will quilters be able to make the quilts in the book...in the way that Margaret Atwood Alias Grace quilts abound?" 

Tracy hesitated for a moment, confessing that this hadn't occurred to her .. "Yes.. I think they will," came the reply, and I confirm that this is indeed the case.

'... a patchwork of brown, yellow and cream diamonds pieced into an eight-point Star of Bethlehem, then quilted with harps and the running feather border she was known for...'

'The community has given her a signature quilt - each square made and signed by a different friend or family member...'

There are Grandmother's Flower Gardens and whole-cloth quilts and I am only half way through the book, I feel sure there will be more, but all adding to the plot as Tracy explores the last days of slavery through the eyes of a woman who must decide how far she can compromise her beliefs and defy the law.

If you enjoy Tracy's writing I feel sure you will love The Last Runaway as much as I am, and if you are a quilter you absolutely will want to read it. If you are not a quilter this book may just make you want to have a go.

The book will be published on March 14th but twelve of you lucky readers won't have to wait that long... scroll down where Magnus, who may or may not be awake, awaits with gifts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prize Draw copies of The Last Runaway by @Tracy_Chevalier

Greetings chums, Magnus here and is there no end to my feline generosity.

I have recovered from all that French last week and have been resting after exertions with the language... and you all know how much I love a nice quilt in progress...


Harper Fiction have offered TWELVE ....yes that's TWELVE proof copies of Tracy Chevalier's new novel The Last Runaway to lucky winners here a month ahead of publication.

They are happy to send the books worldwide so come on Outer Mongolia, that's you too.

Names in comments as usual and I will piece together the winners when I wake up...probably on Sunday evening. 

 

Beating the Bounds.

Bear with me today, this is going somewhere and we should get to the point eventually, I promise, but I wonder if you remember a scenario a bit like this from your schooldays...

You'd be tucked up in the warmth of the Sixth Form Common Room at break time having just come out of an A Level English lesson, and in would troop a group of red-nosed, wet and dripping A Level Biologists...

'Oh what have you been up to?' we'd ask as we looked up from strumming our guitars, possibly still trying to perfect that opening twiddly bit from April Come She Will, or perhaps we had moved onto Anji by then.

'We've been making squares out of wire coat hangers and throwing them on the ground, and then we have to log every thing we can see in the square.'

'Right...lovely ...you're on your own with that one' we'd say, thanking our lucky stars that we'd opted for Arts subjects and thus stayed dry, and we'd strum on.

It wasn't all C F Dm G7 though because I had stupidly opted for A Level Geography too, so the Easter Field Trip to Bude and the Raised Beach Incident was probably looming.

This was the Geography teacher setting us the million dollar question standing with her back to the sea on the cliff edge at Bude..

'So who can name this geographical feature??'

Expecting silence she was rewarded with an entire chorus..

'It's a raised beach,' we all chimed in harmony.

The look of shock on her face at our translation of classroom learning into actual topographical identification was nothing short of profound as she moved on, shaking her head in disbelief and thus failing to notice the sign behind her (and facing us) that read ..

Raised Beach...BEWARE cliff edge unstable.

But anyway, it was the looking closely at maps and what may lie in a boundaried space that made me think of the whole coat hanger thing. Roger Deakin mentions something similar in Wildwood and it all segued nicely with an idea that had shaped up after my reading of Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, and then The Wild Places.

We are so very fortunate here in the Shire. We can travel a short distance by car and see so much, but how well do I really know what is close to me. I walk it all the time but how much history am I missing, and Monday's post about the mine at Wheal Concord was a case in point.

So I decided last summer that I would throw a big coat hanger of a square mile around our home and look closely, very closely and see what I found.

Please do not ask me the original dimensions of the coat hanger that then became one that covered a square mile will you. It is for virtual demonstration purposes only, and in any case when I copied and then laminated the map (we are on the edge so I needed two) before carefully drawing on my dotted line square mile, Bookhound spotted instantly that I had actually gone a mile in each direction when I should only have gone half a mile. 

Then I have hardly had a minute to think about it until now.

Anyway, some latitude to my boundaries may be permitted to extend across the Parish a little further because I was delighted that my erroneous lines incorporated the Tamar, and Georgina Duchess of Bedford's carriage drive, and the Duke's stew ponds for his trout, and a bit of Endsleigh, and mines and quarries and woods and churchyards. Suddenly that A Level Geography is coming in handy... remember the exams, and the unseen bit of an Ordnance Survey map from which you had to extrapolate what the local population had eaten for breakfast (or similar) well now I am properly interested in the map and the green dotted lines and the contours and everything else.

I have a facsimile of the original Ordnance survey map too, a thing of beauty in its own way....

Beating the Bounds, as I have titled this close-to-home project, a Parish activity more traditionally reserved for Rogationtide, the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday immediately preceding Ascension Day, the fortieth day after Easter Sunday (thank you Steve Roud and The English Year) a time for the faithful to process around and give thanks for and to bless the crops, the fields and the animals.

Well I do that all the time really, so I will be beating my bounds and heading for the library to do some ferreting out of information too. Already I discover, apropos of Jude's comment on Monday about the Cornish miners heading to Australia in the 19th century, that from the bedroom window (and within my coat hanger square) we look across the fields to the location of the Devon Kapunda, a copper mine opened in 1852 and named after a much more famous one in South Australia. 

But I wonder too about your doorsteps...

Something interesting very nearby??

 

 

 

The Potter's Hand ~ A.N.Wilson

One of the books I finished before the descent of Christmas...

Poor old Josiah Wedgwood...clumsy, bluff, blinkered, tactless, oblivious to his family's emotions and capable of showing more tenderness towards a lump of clay on the potter's wheel than to his long-suffering wife Sal, yet how much I ended up admiring the man by the time I had finished A.N.Wilson's novel The Potter's Hand.

It is 1774 and Josiah, whose Etruria pottery works lead the way around the world, has been commissioned to produce a thousand piece dinner service for Catherine the Great. But first find your ingredients, and with the U.K.'s prime source of china clay in Cornwall impounded by a rival, it is to the New World and the Americas that Wedgwood must turn, sending his nephew Tom to buy clay from the Cherokee.

If the Cherokee are tribal, the same can be said for the Wedgwood clan, and I had not realised quite what an influential dynasty they were until enlightened by A.N.Wilson. Darwins abound and some Vaughan- Williamses creep in too but this is the latter part of the eighteenth century and there is plenty of history going on around them. The American War of Independence and the Boston Tea Party, major industrial progress with Richard Arkwright and the Spinning Jenny, James Watt and the steam engine and Joseph Priestley and his discovery of  'dephlogisticated air'...oxygen to the rest of us, and I know I always moan that 'We never did that in history at school' when I read books like this, but we most certainly did all of that.

The canvas is vast, the brush strokes various as A.N.Wilson weaves in that history along with the cultural world of art and music and alongside family life, and the entrepreneurial skills of Josiah Wedgwood, a man with the broadest of visions not only for production but for the marketing skills on which he founds his empire... 

'But none of them seemed to have any instinctual sense, as he. Josiah possessed, of the business. By this word Wedgwood meant not simply the making of pots, the transport of pots, the sale of pots. He meant everything! He meant the part which his own activities, both as a potter and as a merchant and as a citizen and as a man of science, played in the face of the changing world.'

The name Wedgwood remains synonymous with the matte finish blue and white Jasperware with the applied white relief decoration that Josiah perfected. Our vase has been around for years, and I'll bet some of you may have a piece here and there too. A little bit of digging suggests that the company name is apparently still going strong under the umbrella of Waterford Crystal, now the home of Royal Doulton as well.

Josiah's piece de resistance would surely be his replica of the Roman Portland Vase...

The original now displayed in the British Museum ...

...and yes, I do recall being a bit unimpressed with it as a schoolchild on a museum expedition, and yes, I do promise to be much more interested the next time I see it, which I will make a point of doing on my next London trip whenever that may be. Then I will have to whizz across to the V&A because that is apparently the home of the Wedgwood replica, painstakingly copied by our man over a period of four years before he had perfected the technique required to reproduce that original, which 'had worked an enchantment on his heart' and which he had been loaned for the purpose.

It's all in the novel, as is Josiah Wedgwood's family excursion to Cornwall at which my ears pricked up.

A few weeks after I had finished The Potter's Hand I was nosing around the library here in Tavistock when I came across a book on the mines of South Devon. Mines have a particular interest for me at the moment as I continue my thinking about The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane, and giving some consideration to what may lie beneath my feet as a I walk here in the Tamar Valley.

How many time have I driven or walked past this unassuming little 'mountain' in the middle of a fenced off field without appreciating that is was once known as Wheal Concord... mining copper etc

....and that verified by the old tithe map displayed in the village church.

As I flicked through the pages of the book and saw so many familar place names, and whilst realising that our local area owes so much of  its mapped and named identity to the long-vanished mining industry hereabouts, the name Willsworthy and then Wedgwood jumped out at me...

'The earlist reference to Willsworthy Mine...a copper lode on an estate belonging to Mr Tolcher of Plymouth..from this copper mine at Sampford Spiney four tons at least of cobalt was taken, of which 1700lbs was sent to London and sold...the cobalt was impregnated with hairs and tresses of the purest silver...'

Sampford Spiney a small village on the Dartmoor outskirts of Tavistock, the mine itself at nearby Huckworthy Bridge, and Josiah was there...

'In 1775 Josiah Wedgwood, the potter visited the mine on his way to Cornwall, being accompanied by Mr Tolcher, then a lively, if somewhat querulous, old gentleman of ninety years of age. The mine was idle at this time but Wedgwood obtained from Mr Tolcher several specimens of 'what he called cobalt - but I could never bring any colour out of it.'

It sounds as if Josiah may have thought he had been 'had' but I doubt locals would have risked reputations with someone quite so famous, and the presence of cobalt was apparently an established fact. Its presence had caused quite a stir in the scientific world of the day and who can imagine what that lode of 'rich arsenical cobalt ore combined with native capillary silver...alongside a rich yellow copper ore...' may have looked like.

Can't you just see those colours in your mind's eye... I want to make a quilt, or knit some Concord gauntlets immediately.

And so The Potter's Hand has taken me on some fascinating diversions all tempered by A.N.Wilson's afterword wherin he explains and justifies the liberties he has taken with history and dates, facts and characters. This a necessity, he suggests, in order to create a prism through which to view 'Wedgwood's attitude to the convulsions in the world.' In other words, this isn't gospel, it is fiction, yet it does indeed emerge as a wonderful 'act of homage to one of the great men of our history.'

 

 

 

 

And the winners are...

15 3 42 19 54

Random numbers generated Feb 3 2013 at 18:55:11 by www.psychicscience.org  

Bonjour chums, aujourd hui je suis dans mon basket bleu, and congratulations ici voila the Zola winners ...

3 ~ Jude McBain

15 ~ Iris

19 ~ Annie Val

42 ~ Paul Jeorrett

54 ~ Joyce Workman

Check it is really you and send your address to dovegreyreader at gmail.com and a copy of Zola's The Fortune of the Rougons will be winging your way very soon.

 

Standing and staring...

Nowhere to go, nowhere I'd rather be
than here fulfilling my daily rituals.
                                        Why would one want
to absent oneself, when one's commute

is a lonely hillside by-way, high
above the river?

From 'Doing Away' by Kathleen Jamie (The Overhaul)

There are several paths that wind around 'our' Beechwood, mostly made by us I suspect, and one leads to a small clearing on the southern edge of the wood, a natural proscenium arch framed by branches rather than curtains and raised about four feet from the field below. It always feels as if I am standing on the edge of a stage looking out and should perhaps rattle off a soliloquy, but instead of an audience, there it is, just masses of endless open space echoing back at me.

I'm hoping you will all share some 'stand and stare' moments from recent weeks too... this was most definitely one of mine.