dovegreyreader scribbles

The Exiles Return ~ Elisabeth de Waal

One of the many memorable highlights of Port Eliot Festivals past for me has to be the event in 2011 with Edmund de Waal, talking about his book The Hare With Amber Eyes in the dovegreyreader tent. It was also the inaugural presentation of the first Knitsuke, a knitted hare with amber eyes (obviously) which eventually found its way into Edmund de Waal's studio. We all laughed and cried in equal measure on that hot summer's day because just occasionally everything aligns, a memorable event emerges and this was one of them.

I know I will never forget it.

If you follow that link above you will see that the book had left an enormous impression on me earlier in the year. I had been happily reading and following all the fascinating trails that the book opened up when suddenly this happened...

So, there I am having a lovely frolic of my own with this incredible book and I love that real sense of bonding when a book like this comes along, and I had picked it up again as usual when my leisurely rather languid and relaxed approach dissipated in an instant at this moment...

    'The last door they reach is Emmy's dressing-room in the corner, the room with the vitrine containing the netsuke, and they sweep everything off the desk she uses as a dressing table...and they drag the desk out into the corridor.
    They push Emmy and Viktor and Rudolph against the wall, and three of them heave the desk and send it crashing over the handrail until, with the sound of splintering wood and gilt and marquetry, it hits the stone flags of the courtyard below.
    The desk... takes a long time to fall. The sounds ricochet off the glass roof. The broken drawers scatter letters across the courtyard.'

It was late at night as I was reading and I was stunned into a state of wakefulness that lasted well into the early hours...

The Nazis have arrived in Vienna and the persecution of the Jews is reaching its zenith. Frozen and rife with indecision about whether to flee and if so where to, Viktor and Emmy can only stand by and watch as Palais Ephrussi, the opulent family home on Vienna's grand and wealthy Ringstrasse is about to be ransacked. Except the Nazis know the value of this home when they see it, the contents will be catalogued and removed whilst Hitler decides which items he would like in his personal collection and which will go to museums.

'This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.'

Prior to the talk I had asked Edmund de Waal if he would mind reading this episode aloud to the audience. We only had forty-five minutes and I wanted to start at the heart of the book and work around what I had seen as a pivotal moment in both the family's history, but also in Edmund de Waal's exploration of his family's past...

He has remained remarkable objective in my eyes as I've read, far more objective than I have felt but gradually words like 'terribly' and 'calumnies' and 'venemous diatribes' and 'appalling' seep into the narrative and at this point the book seems to enter a new and extremely moving final phase.

'I knew the story. I didn't feel the story until my third visit to Vienna when I was standing in the courtyard of the Palais...'

'Here in this house I am wrong-footed... I can't make people and places and things fit together any more. These stories unravel me....' 

As Edmund finished reading there was a silence that didn't need to be filled. We all sat and choked back tears (well I did) as the full impact of that moment of crisis for his family descended on us, and astonishing and very moving discussions followed. Edmund had admitted us into the heart of his family's wartime plight and we trod gently and carefully with our questions which he answered with heartfelt emotion and honesty.

I make no apology for the repetition of the essence of that original post, mainly because I also wanted to remind myself of it, but also because, in the same way that we set the scene on that sweltering summer's day in 2011 for Edmund de Waal to talk about The Hare With Amber Eyes, it also sets the scene, albeit at a slant, for any reading of The Exiles Return. 

The novel, having emerged from family archives and recently published for the first time by Persephone Books (I bought my copy) was written by Viktor and Emmy's daughter Elisabeth (Edmund de Waal's grandmother) who had grown up in the 'exceptionally privileged' world of Vienna and the Palais Ephrussi, studying philosophy, law and economics in the early 1920s before moving to Paris in the 1930s. 

As Edmund de Waal explains in his introduction to the novel, Elisabeth returned to Vienna weeks after the Anschluss in 1938 in order to rescue her parents, managing to get her father to England in 1939 and returning after the war to trace the rest of her family. I doubt any greater life-experience could better inform a book like The Exiles Return.

Professor Kuno Adler decides to leave his safe job, and his brittle, brusque corsetier wife Melanie, along with the relative comfort and affluence of their life in the United States, to take up life again in his home city of Vienna.

Wealthy Greek entrepreneur and business man Theophile Kanakis heads for the broken city for his first visit soon after the end of the war seeking lucrative business opportunities. A descendant of the Greek community in Vienna, the city initially seems to be viewed through detached and dispassionate eyes. It requires rebuilding and he has the resources. But slowly the inner businessman is overtaken by the inner exile and gradually that need for 'belonging' emerges.
 
Prince Lorenzo Grein-Lauterbach (Bimbo to his friends) and his sister Nina, their aristocratic anti-Nazi parents murdered by the Germans, return from exile. Like chalk and cheese, one the playboy the other hard-working and self-effacing and both seeking their place in the new order.

Disaffected teenager Resi, the daughter of a refugee mother who had married an American and emigrated to the US, is sent to Vienna to stay with her aunt. This daughter of an exile experiences a return based on impressions mediated by her mother...'affinities she had inherited', and Resi must work out for herself her relationship to the city and its history.

These are the exiles of the title and the novel homes in with pinpoint accuracy on the loss of homeland and identity, the pain of departure and in many ways the greater pain of return, examining every aspect of what it means to lose, to remember, to 'belong', and to 're-belong'. Maybe the aim of the returner is to become anonymous, inconspicuous and unselfconscious, to blend and thus finally achieve assimiliation and as Professor Adler discovers to be...

'physically exhausted but spiritually free, lonely but at peace.'

Plenty happens and Elisabeth de Waal eventually weaves the plots together, cleverly offering stark contrasts between her characters, their lives and the receptions they receive. The irony of Professor Adler's luke-warm welcome, laced with resentment and obligation by those he approaches for reinstatement of his employment, compared to the effusive and sycophantic welcome proffered to the wealthy incomer Kanakis, make for fascinating compare-and-contrast reading.

No reading of a Persephone book is complete without paying close attention to the textile endpapers, this a furnishing fabric designed by Jacqueline Groag (1953)

I find I use them as an integral part of the read because I know they are chosen with great care to be both contemporaneous, but, I feel sure, also expressive of the book itself. This one is spiky and disjointed, in some places the colours blend whilst in others they offer stark contrast. There are arcs and geometric connections and juxtapositions...round pegs in square holes, arrows pointing this way and that. I could see rail tracks and compartments and so many other nuances that spoke of the book to me as I read, and I spent a lot of time doing my thinking as I gazed at them. 

More soon about a story from the Persephone Book of Short Stories that I happened to reach in the volume during my read of The Exiles Return, and which arced across to the novel with ease, The Exile by Betty Miller (1935) and I have also retraced my steps to the W.G.Sebald shelf to revisit The Emigrants.

I have never forgotten the impact of The Emigrants either, and that resonated as I read The Exiles Return, the grainy pictures so intrinsic to Sebald's writing, coupled with that acute sense of loss and deprivation I experienced as I turned the final page following a detailed description of a photograph, and fully expecting to turn the page and see it..

'I frantically turn the page, desperate to see this picture, and it's not there.
 
I feel slightly cheated out of something that should have been mine, taunted by the blank pages and suddenly I am left with a strange mood that descends unbidden, a yearning for something denied, and in that instant I understand, completely and utterly, exactly what the emigrants themselves and this book have been trying to tell me.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Persephone Book of Short Stories progress..

My stately progress through The Persephone Book of Short Stories continues, and with a degree of lasting short-story-reading pleasure that I can't recall experiencing for a very long time.

Reflecting on why that may be, it occurred to me that anthologies like this, ones that showcase so many different authors, are not my usual fare. Most volumes I pick up are by a single author, and for all their capabilities and skill with the craft. that remains a solo voice; this collection is like meeting a lovely group of people, in this case women, all singing in harmony, but in their different parts and I am loving it.

You can perhaps see the path my reading is taking from this picture...

Two contrasting endpapers, two bookmarks to match, stories ranging from 1909 to 1986 and the suggestion from Nicola Beauman that readers do a compare and contrast with the first and the last. Once I had done that, and I think as I mentioned before, I decided that an interesting way to read this collection would be to alternate...one from the front, one from the back until I met myself in the middle and that gap of seventy-seven years had closed. That was the plan though I didn't know if it would work, but to my surprise very satisfying it is proving to be.

I ration strictly and only allow myself a single story at each sitting because I am enjoying these so much I want the book to last ... a sitting can be while the bath is running..or even just perched somewhere and in the midst of something else, when I suddenly get the urge to read one. 

I wonder if any of you have similar methods for short story reading??

With any collection I like to make a note of the date I have read each story alongside the title too, it gives some perspective to the timespan that I have spent with the book, and when I look back in the future reminds me of the time of year... what was happening...was I in a gravity recliner sipping cool drinks or wrapped up warm.

Each story in the Persephone book has a delicious kernel of quiet truth at its centre, as well as a good crunchy bite at the end, and I would be hard pushed to choose a favourite to date, but along the way I am meeting some authors whose voices resonate and I will seek out more short stories by them for sure...to be honest, forget the 100th book, I'd love Persephone to publish a volume like this every year. There can be no shortage of stories and the collective approach makes for fascinating contrasts whilst, for all the years that pass, the concerns and themes surrounding the constraints and pleasures of women's lives seem timeless and unchanging.

From the back end of the book I have loved the humour of Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1948 story, A View of Exmoor. It is hilarious and eccentric, and of such moments are short stories made... a speculative back story must be invented by the Finch family on their way home from a family wedding...

'Gazing at the view, Mrs Finch said that looking at Exmoor always reminded her of Aunt Harriet's inexplicable boots....the man was pale and sulky and the woman was rating him and crying her eyes out, but the most remarkable thing of all...was that the woman wasn't wearing a hat...and on the ground was a pair of boots'

Well a story like that has to go somewhere, but who can imagine where.

Bookhound and I saw a funny thing the other day...a man scouring the top of a farm track with a metal detector and looking everso slightly self-conscious as he did so; a moment that needed a back story if ever there was one in my opinion because it is not a common occurence in these parts. 

'Oh that's interesting,' said Bookhound, 'because I saw a woman parked up there the other day frantically combing the grass on hands and knees and I wondered what she was doing.'

By the time we had driven the six miles into town I had of course invented the unimaginative obvious, a huge row and a priceless ring tossed out of a car window in a fit of temper. Thus do I discover it's not that easy to make an interesting story out of an ordinary moment, but Sylvia Townsend Warner has no such trouble....and doubtless would have done something far more interesting with my metal detector moment.

Also from the back end of the book so one of the more recent stories (as in 1967), Elizabeth Spencer's A Bad Cold might now be called Man Flu as the insecure and insanely jealous husband wilts (temp probably 37.2 or so)  whilst the multi-tasking wife keeps the ship afloat, running a home and holding down a job as a writer.

Nearer the front,1933 and a wonderful introduction to the perceptive and gentle yet probing writing of Dorothy Whipple as she explores all the pretentions of a gauche, lonely and unsophisticated girl going on a blind date in A Lovely Time. I defy any reader not to feel the unbearable sadness of Alice's situation.

Finally, for this post, because I feel sure I will write more about these when I have finished the book, my introduction to Shirley Jackson's story The Lottery. Published in 1948 amidst huge controversy I was ... *forgive the vernacular* ...as gob-smacked as those early readers. I won't reveal, but suspect I experienced every single same emotion that they did, a rising sense of foreboding that surely this wasn't what this story was really about, and the complete shock, incredulity and revulsion when I realised it was. 

I doubt I have read a more powerful and shock-inducing short story, and its inclusion in this collection, buried deep in amongst the rest, is an editorial master stroke.

I suppose I should of course be urging you to read The Lottery in the context of the whole collection if it is a story you don't know, but this isn't about selling books, so you can read it here if you want to... brace yourself if you decide to read it, and then please do come back and share your immediate reactions.

 

 

 

 

Women in War ~ Persephone

In the same way that Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without any presents, it is now safe to say that a week spent talking of books about Women in War wouldn't be quite right without some Persephone titles...that's two mentions in as many weeks, and there will be more because I am hugely impressed with the new short story collection, but I make no apology. Persephone have carved out their own very particular niche with these, so two of my favourites on the Women in War theme today and please do add more of yours (by any publisher) in comments.

I expect some of you downloaded Eva Ibbotson's Madensky Square on the Kindle Daily Deal on Monday (what a good run we have had with these recently) and of course she was the daughter of Viennese-born Anna Gmeyner, who was the author of Manja. The family exiled in London in 1935 having fled the rising anti-semitism and persecution in Germany.

Naturally the first thing I have to pay attention to is the fabric endpaper, a Wiener Werkstatte fabric called 'Paul' and designed in 1927 by Clara Posnanksi, beautiful and subtle colours.

I have no idea where Manja might rank in the Persephone sales list, nor how many of their devoted fans will have read it. To my mind it is one of the toughest, most challenging books that Nicola Beauman has published, and one that completely blows out of the water assumptions (should there be any) that Persephone might be a publisher welded to a comfort zone of cosy, old fashioned hot-water bottle reading. Recalling the book many years after that first reading its impact for me has never lessened. 

First published in 1938, Manja recounts the lives of five children born in the same hospital and their fates decided by the families into which they are born. Fascinatingly the births are preceded by five very different conception scenes which give some clues to the future awaiting each child. From Heine and his liberal apolitical parents, a doctor and a music teacher, to Franz and a family still smarting from the defeat in World War One. Then there is Harry born to a father who hardly feels like a Jew any more and a German mother, and Karl the son of an active communist and his wife. Finally Manja the result of a fling between her feckless mother and a Jewish composer, but a conception scene of such rare beauty that it transcends all others. Each child well-placed in a different but recognisable milieu and representing the elements of 1920s and 30s German society

It is a fascinating, original and highly courageous foundation for a novel given this is the 1930s, but most astonishing is the crystal clarity of foresight exercised by Anna Gmeyner, and as outlined by Eva Ibbotson in her excellent introduction to her mother's book...

'The war had not yet come but these refugees saw its necessity as the English could not yet do.'

The book is laden with passages of beautiful lyrical prose and deeply symbolic imagery which elevate it into something much more than a gentle polemic on the inexorable rise of Nazism as witnessed and experienced through the lives of once-innocent children. As the rising anti-semitism takes its toll, and thus Manja's position as the only Jewish girl in the group becomes increasinlgy precarious, the book offers a more universal perspective on human frailties and the resilience of the human spirit.

This is 500 pages of exquisite reading that will repay that heavy investment of time required handsomely.

Another favourite of mine, and I am sure of many of you too... Few Eggs and No Oranges : The Diaries of Vere Hodgson 1940-45. and this fabric endpaper one that I have seen for myself in the Imperial War Museum, a printed rayon headscarf called 'London Wall' and produced by Jacqmar in 1942.

To my mind diaries are best read slowly in instalments on a day by day basis, and whilst many volumes might understandably achieve a degree of self-centred monotony, not so with Vere. Her life is whirl of sleepless night during bombing raids, mass clearance of rubble the next day and interspersed with the actual events of the war as they are happening, and as seen through the eyes of one in the midst of the carnage. As in Manja, there is resilience here too, occasionally bowed but never broken, Vere rolls up her sleeves and sets to, horrors are invested with the perspective necessary to make them tolerable... because after all what else is there to do but cope and carry on.

'November 1940 - Friday, 1st ~ Warnings at 6.45pm and soon two bombs came down fairly near here. Near enough for me to dive under the table. Very nasty. More down later. Planes zooming near. Have been working hard all the evening addressing envelopes for the Christmas Fair. Felt rather tired.'

Wednesday 6th ~ Slept in my own bed, but it was far from being a quiet night. In fact it was awful. At about 3am was awakened by two screaming bombs coming down not far away. Others followed. Gunfire terrific. I slept and dreamed all about bombs until I could not tell which was dream and which reality. Then I plunged into a nightmare - in which I was in a long room, a German and an Italian soldier walked in and said: 'I must inform you that England has lost the war.' I think I spat at them, but cannot be sure.'

Priceless, don't you just love Vere, and mention of that visit to the Imperial War Museum reminds me how much I enjoyed it. I was moved and engrossed in equal measure, and how familiar scenes like this might have been to Vere...




 

 

The Persephone 100

I can't tell you how thrilled I was when an unexpected package arrived from Persephone Books last week.

Tucked up inside I found a copy of the one hundredth Persephone book, The Persephone Book of Short Stories complete with two bookmarks, the Biannually, a catalogue and a lovely note from Nicola Beauman.

I have spent a happy hour browsing the catalogue again, remembering the books I have read and recalling the huge amount of reading pleasure that these books have given me over the years, and though I didn't discover Persephone until they were up to number thirty-six or so, as soon as I did I wasted no time in ordering up the ones I had missed.

Forgive the repetition but I have never forgotten this moment...

I had finished my OU English Literature degree in 2002 and, as is customary with the OU, the results had arrived about a week before Christmas. I had a quick gnash of the teeth over missing a First by a whisker, but was delighted with my 2:1 considering I had done all the studying over the previous six years, and whilst working a full time health visitor caseload and raising teenagers. No I don't know how I managed it either beyond picking up the derisory gauntlet thrown down by a very cynical GP I was working with at the time who said, when I mentioned that I was doing it...

'Oh that's one of those things everyone starts and no one ever finishes.'

In a way I think the whole family earned that degree with me because they all helped and supported me enormously, but the upshot was that I just couldn't pick up a book and read it for pleasure.

Unbeknown to me Bookhound had seen an article about Persephone Books in the newspaper. He phoned and spoke to Nicola Beauman and asked her to choose six books and gift wrap them for me for Christmas. Then he put them on my desk on Christmas morning...where I was supposed to find them...except I didn't go near my desk until eventually, at about 3pm, Bookhound suggested I did.

I was beside myself, as you can well imagine, as I opened my first read, Fidelity by Susan Glaspell... and possibly chosen above the others for the endpaper. It is that wonderful log cabin quilt, and I had studied Susan Glaspell's short story A Jury of Her Peers and made much of the log cabin quilt being stitched in that story for an exam question... well I knew instantly that I was back into me real reading life again. 

The next ten books I read in succession (because I quickly sent for more) were...

Lettice Delmer by Susan Miles
The Far Cry by Emma Smith
The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski
The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson-Burnett
Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy
A Woman's Place by Ruth Adam
The Montana Stories by Katherine Mansfield
Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day by Winifred Watson
A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair

After a short rest when I see from my reading journal that I read We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates and Embers by Sandor Marai, I was back with Persephone again..

The Homemaker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Mariana by Monica Dickens
Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
Saplings by Noel Streatfeild

Before the year was out I had also read

The Carlyles at Home by Thea Holome
The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay-Holding
Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge
Tell it to a Stranger by Elizabeth Berridge
The Priory by Dorthy Whipple
William - An Engishman by Cicely Hamilton
Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell
Family Roundabout by Richmal Crompton
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Stracehy
They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple 

I don't think that year's glut and gorge has ever been repeated, but I have read a Persephone book regularly ever since, not only for the pleasure and the memories of that Christmas day discovery, but also because the books will always fit the moment and when perhaps nothing else does. Links to those I have written about can be found here. I nip into the shop when I am in London (I was there on Monday and did so) and may buy a book or two I have missed (not this time). I often associate them with that train journey back to Devon too because I can never resist a read on the way home.

The book of thirty short stories, the hundredth book and a landmark, is billed as a celebration of the diversity of the writers that Persephone publish, and the list is certainly stellar... Katherine Mansfield, Irene Nemirovsky, Mollie Panter-Downes, Dorothy Whipple, Edith Wharton, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Penelope Fitzgerald to name but a few. With the dates of the stories ranging from 1909 to 1986 and in order of publication date within this volume, a really clever touch is the different endpapers; the front a fabric dating from 1911 whilst the one at the back dates from 1983. I have decided to alternate, reading one story from the beginning and one from the end until I meet myself in the middle, and four stories in I am loving the way the old and the newer do 'compare and contrast' as suggested by Nicola in her write-up of the book.

For those who loved the Persephone Diary of a few years ago there will be another one for 2013 so that's one for the Christmas list too, and if you are a fan and don't already subscribe to the daily Persephone Post hie there over to the new website now and be ready for a wonderful weekday fillip of something special.

So it's a great big THANK YOU from me to Nicola Beauman and Persephone Books for all the reading pleasure they have given me in the last nine years, and for bringing forgotten fiction by women right back into a spotlight of its own. 

So how about you...

Do you have a favourite Persephone book and why...

A favourite endpaper...

Do you keep the books together on one shelf or all over the place...for a while some of mine were in this cabinet, now I'm a bit hither and thither with them...

And what about a book or author you wish Persephone would publish...

 

 

 

 

Dear Diary...The Persephone Lecture 2010 ~ David Kynaston

So how many times have you started writing a diary in your life?
Do you still write it or have you stopped?

Yet another start made earlier this year here and sat looking out on the gorgeous view from this little table in the window in the hope that I might succeed if I had a special place to sit, so why do I drift and eventually forget to write it?

Perhaps because for me it always seems like a load of uninteresting, unnecessary trivia and tosh with a tendency towards the mawkish that I and the world, (though heaven forfend the world ever saw it)  can manage without, far too embarrassing for its seeming mundanity even if I am the only person to read it.

However I left the Persephone Lecture given by David Kynaston recently completely inspired to take it all up again... properly...for the 105th time. Whilst all diaries are a valuable historical resource it would seem women's diaries are especially so, and for exactly those reasons that I have given up on so many occasions, women bother to record the trivial events that are the bread and butter of the social historians of the future.

David Kynaston the author of Austerity Britain and Family Britain, recounted a moment of epiphany when it dawned on him just how important a woman's diary was as a historical source; that each person's life was of equal validity and worthy of inclusion in any account of the history of an era and this the moment that caused him to re-think the type of history he wished to take into account.

The diarists he mentioned were Jenny Hill whose 1950's diary is kept at Winchester County Records Office,  Judy Haynes of Chingford whose diary opened a door onto Middle Englandand whose daughter Pamela was in the audience, Gladys Langford, born in 1890, Vere Hodgson of Few Eggs and No Oranges fame and of course perhaps the most well known, Nella Last who compiled hers as part of the Mass Observation programme.

David Kynaston proceeded to elaborate on the historical value of the diaries, how representative or not they may be in the face of far fewer working class diarists and the bias of those in existence to the south of the country, but nevertheless the diaries were contemporaneous, autobiographical and undistorted and predominantly by woman, thus giving a female point of view to domestic, local and occasionally national events. I sat and looked around the elegant room at the Art Worker's Guild in Queen's Square, as the portraits of the great and eminent (and mostly men) peered down at me and had a little revelation of my own, all fuelled by David Kynaston's insistence, about the importance of everyone's offerings not just the seemingly great and the good.

On my return, Bookhound, a prolific diarist himself for the last five years or so and always nagging me to start one, produced as if by magic a blank Moleskinne notebook and I'm back in the groove, writing it all down because who knows how useful it may be for the historians of the future to know that last week a Barn Owl circled the Branwolery (yes really) or that I personally am very happy about the Royal Wedding and wish Wills and Kate much happiness, or that we've had an unusually early and rather challenging cold snap this week. And apparently, if you write about similar national events from your own perspective that is even more useful because then comparisons can be made and different points of view explored.

Currently I have written amongst other things for the last four days 'Must read War & Peace' and now I really must.

So do you or don't you keep a diary?

 

 

Still Missing ~ Beth Gutcheon

'These long empty days now, she rarely felt anger or fear or sadness. What she felt, with simplicity too profound to express, was a brimming love for him and no way to give it. There was a dim sense memory that haunted her nights, of flesh on flesh, the intense multiple impact of the smell of his skin, and the sight of his head pressed against her cheek so close that its outline became the curve of the earth, and the angular feel of limbs, all knees and elbows - that gave a pleasure too complex to recover or yet ever to give up, the deep unremarkable joy of hugging a child.'

So now I've read a trilogy of books, and in quick succession too, where for reasons various a child is lost.
The most recent Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon, first published in 1981, a best seller made into the film, Without a Trace and recently published by Persephone Books.
Beth my best patchworking friend back in the 1970s (though she doesn't know this) and I gather this is but one of a slew of good novels that she presumably wrote in between the piecing. A lost opportunity for some eighties patchwork on the Persephone endpapers, probably deemed too obvious, and my disappointment  slightly assuaged by the late 1970s ribbed knit fabric.
Anyway, today I've used a Baltimore block called Divine Guidance, (cut and sew applique in Liberty Tana Lawn) which seems about right for the subject matter.
Susan Selky, a professor in English at Harvard,(I'd love to read her book on Willa Cather) refuses to believe the worst when her nearly seven year-old son Alex goes missing on his way to school in Boston on May 15th 1980. Susan's marriage to Graham, Alex's father has recently broken down and Graham has left, so perhaps it becomes increasingly imperative that Alex...

'a small sturdy child with a two-hundred watt smile and a giggle like falling water, a child who saw Star Wars once with Mommy, twice with Daddy, and once again with TJ. Owner-trainer of Taxi, an oversized Shetland sheepdog'

...grows up a little faster. But for whatever reason, Susan and Alex have agreed that he is old enough and sensible enough to be left at the corner to walk the last two blocks to the New Boston School of Back Bay on his own.
On the day that Alex disappears, in fact never makes it to school, Susan doesn't discover his absence until that evening. The police hunt is slow to gain momentum, then massive and the publicity machine cranks into action, then, as time drags on, slowly scales down leaving Susan to function as a mother, with empty arms, without a child but always nurturing hope and often against all the odds.
Assigned to the case the hard-working, very human and long-suffering father of seven, Detective Menetti.
I don't want to linger over the plot a minute longer because there is far too much to give away here, and though there is much to discuss that would be fascinating, to do so would be to forewarn and to reveal the crucial clues to some very surprising twists and turns which Beth Gutcheon keeps very close to her chest . There are some shocks in store too, fairly explicit ones which all made me wonder how this book will be perceived by those perhaps expecting a more traditional and comfortable Persephone read.
Still Missing is much more challenging, courageously out of the ordinary and to be applauded for that. Persephone do this perhaps unnoticed from time to time, subvert expectations and bowl an un-nostalgic googlie to make everyone sit up and pay attention; Manja by Anna Gmeyner comes to mind as another challenging yet brilliant read from them. Still Missing, again unusually for Persephone, comes without the usual introduction or afterword and I suspect it's best left for each reader to write their own.
This book is however about much more than a missing child and I couldn't help but make comparisons to the disappearance of  Madeleine McCann three years ago, and which so dominated the news here in the UK.
With the missing child go those hopes and dreams for the future, put on hold yet somehow to be steadily kindled and kept alive, the pain of not knowing barely describable. Madeleine is still missing, her name mentioned much less and yet deeply embedded in the national consciousness, and I don't doubt the steadfastness with which the family trust that she will be found.
Suddenly everyone seems to have a right to the most intimate details of private lives, in Susan Selky's case the lies, the secrets, the uncertainties, the infidelities and Jo Public is suddenly permitted to make judgements and does. God knows for the McCanns it was and still is hideous, blatantly hurtful and frequently incomprehensible.
The depth of public sympathy sadly often rests on the circumstances of the disappearance, the slightest hint of parental culpability perhaps leading to a measuring and rationing of that sympathy. As if any parent ever needs to be told they may have made a wrong call, as if they won't have asked themselves those questions a million times over, and how Susan anguishes over that decision to let Alex walk to school, and suffers, whether real or imagined, the approbation of those around her. How the McCanns must have anguished over their own circumstances.
I'm not sure I understood that pain with quite such a piercing and crystal clarity as I do now. 
Susan suffers accordingly when she senses Alex's face may be disappearing from the public eye and her reactions and often desperate coping strategies are both brave and surprising... you might find yourself wincing and doubting, and yes judging on many occasions through this one before you reach the final page, and what a final page.
Still Missing reads like a thriller and I had no idea how Beth Gutcheon was going to bring it to a conclusion that would satisfy. When I got there it left me speechless, so my best advice is allow yourself time to read those final fifty pages in a single sitting; pointless to have anything urgent on the agenda, you'll just forget to do it and you won't be able to say anything coherent afterwards anyway.
The tension builds and builds, layer on layer, often imperceptibly but the psychological pressure is relentless and I hadn't realised quite how closely my breathing must have been mirroring Susan's until the end when I'd almost expired with anxiety and could have used some oxygen.
There are some wonderful touches that locate this book so beautifully in its pre-iPod era, people listening to disco music through transistors strapped to their backs, but much more importantly, to read Beth Gutcheon's book is to understand in some small part, the pain of a parent in this situation, and to a depth that you couldn't possibly come close to knowing unless you had suffered your own version of this anguish.
That's a huge achievement for any book.

Beth Gutcheon & I reacquaint...

A little bird had tipped me off  that one of the new offerings from Persephone Books is quite a good read, and so when I heard that Persephone were currently giving away a free copy of one of their Classics (apologies, I think the offer may have ended) with each purchase, my copy of Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon was quickly ordered along with a copy of Saplings by Noel Streatfeild, which I've actually read twice but who can resist a free book?
It'll make a lovely gift for someone someday.
The name Beth Gutcheon is forever associated with my earliest days of patchwork back in the 1970s, when scrap bags of fabric from Laura Ashley inspired us, though with a caveat that none of us knew then but may have since discovered; that if we were planning to make an heirloom from them we might come unstuck. The cotton and the dyes were reputed not to be of the finest quality and unlikely to stand the test of time... though I couldn't possibly comment.
In fact people say the same now about some of the modern and very pricey 'celebrity fabrics' and naming no names I can see which ones they mean...hankie-thin and dyes just waiting to fade.
Packs of pre-cut hexagons quickly followed from Laura Ashley and we all slavishly chopped up our bits of card and stitched English-style over papers little suspecting that there might be this great big universe of American patchwork out there waiting for us.

Beth Gutcheon set us on course with The Perfect Patchwork Primer, first published in the UK by Penguin in 1974 and I think perhaps one of the few books out there on the subject at the time. I loved Beth Gutcheon's take on it all, an attempt to preserve the traditions whilst dragging them kicking and screaming into the modern era.

'We can enjoy tradition without getting downright hokey...People talk a surprising amount of twaddle about the romance of patchwork, especially lately. ( "My don't you wish some fairy would set those patches talkin' - what a tale they could tell!") My foot. They could tell a tale of days and months of mindless, thankless tedium, cooking food of a depressing sameness...'

Meanwhile any early notions I may have been harbouring about perfection were also neatly side-stepped and consigned to history, I have been happy with the odd mis-matched corner ever since

'Neither are we going to have any elitist hokum about its taking 70 years to learn to quilt well, or how you have to have 12 stitches to the inch, absolutely even on both sides of the quilt...the only essential criterion should be what will satisfy you.'

For years this was the only patchwork book I ever owned.
Clear guidance on 'how to', a plentiful supply of patterns and I'm not quite sure why I now have shelves of books on the subject, because on revisiting Beth Gutcheon's Primer this week I can see it's still the only book I would ever have needed...but knowing me and books are you surprised.
I took it with me into the 1980s and those childbearing years and was comforted.

'Working with your hands gives you a chance not only to restore an object, but also to restore and re-create yourself, for when you've finished you are not just the person who endlessly makes the coffee or treks to the laundromat...or buys the baby's shoes - you are also the person who made the thing. You have added something new, something possibly beautiful to the world, and to your life. You are what you do.'

Well yes, of course the babies were little creations of beauty that we had added to the world, but there was some succour to be had from the Dresden Plate quilt I made in those spare, sticky-finger-free moments through their babyhood as we approached our tenth 'tin' wedding anniversary and aptly named Tin Plate.

This one looks a little dated now and has been through the wash that many times its voice perhaps a little rinsed out, but if this quilt could talk it would probably scream shout whisper something highly embarrassing like 'I told you not to do that...now you can all go to your bedrooms and don't come down until you can say sorry to each other.'

Or the Mackenzie Star which never seems to date and is still in constant use, made from fabrics given to me by a visitor from the US in the days when different US fabrics were still quite hard to find over here.
 
This one likely to say ad nauseum 'You can go out on your bike when you've cleared up your room.'

Strawberry Fayre, the Chagford-based mail order company perhaps the first to bring us the US fabrics here in the UK, and still up there with the best. I have found nothing to surpass their finest US Muslin when a plain cream fabric is required and their sample packs still delight.
Beth Gutcheon meanwhile kept me on song and sewing and I look back fondly on those years when I used to meet weekly with two friends to quilt and chat.
Tuesday nights were sacrosanct.
The chaps took over the babies and we escaped from our nappy buckets and relished the chance of several hours of uninterrupted creating. A lesser known fact that the now very well-known local quilting group, the Goosey Quilters was set up by the three of us on the basis that there might be more people out there who'd enjoy doing this too. I'm no longer a member but the group is still going strong some 25 years later, still has an annual exhibition and a little bit of that is down to Beth Gutcheon's Primer and its influence on me.
And Beth's influence lived on in this wall hanging which I made for Persephone Books on the occasion of their fifth birthday, and which perhaps still hangs in the Lamb's Conduit Street shop somewhere. The names of the 6" quilt blocks all relate to Persephone book titles somehow.

And I think that might bring us full circle and back to where we started.
It's been delightful to touch base with Beth Gutcheon again, I had no idea she'd written novels so I am indebted to 'the little bird' because Still Missing is indeed proving to be an excellent read, much more about it soon.
 

The Children Who Lived in a Barn ~ Eleanor Graham

Sunday dawned hot and cloudless and with it the realisation that we had a Persephone tea with Cornflower organised for May 26th and suddenly it's May 23rd and I hadn't read the book. I was already on the naughty step for failing with the NTTVBG book and couldn't face two fails in a week, so I had to 'force' myself to take a chair into a shady corner of the garden (torture) and settle down to read a book I probably last read when I was about eight.
The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham first published in 1938 and this edition graced with perhaps one of my favourite Persephone endpapers, 'Arrowhead' taken from a contemporaneous fabric designed by New York-based John Little.

The design considerably scaled down for the endpaper, but timeless (I'd buy yards of it even now) and a perfect choice for a book with such a rural setting.
I can only begin to imagine how completely I would have escaped into this book as a child, and though my original copy is lost I remember the cover very clearly indeed and I probably wanted my mum to cook something in a hay box, just to see, in fact I have an urge to stick a rabbit casserole in one right now and see if it works.
Hay mark 5 and recheck in twelve hours.
So the Dunnet parents fly off at a moment's notice to see to the ailing grandmother somewhere in Europe, telling the children that they are perfectly old enough to look after themselves, or rather that thirteen-year old Susan and eleven-year old Bob are quite capable of looking after nine year-old twins Joseph and Samuel and baby of the family six-year old Alice. I've specified the ages because what happens next would make any parent's hair stand on end but clearly more pressing issues grabbing the headlines in 1938 when the book was written.
Quickly evicted from their rented cottage the children set up home in a nearby barn where the adventure rapidly becomes a saga of survival against starvation and the attentions of the deeply unpleasant and disparaging district visitor (to uncomfortably akin to my own profession for my liking) and the local busybodies who threaten children's homes and adoptions every time they spot a dirty hankie.
Yes clean hankies, clothes, faces, hands and nails feature strongly as an outward indicator of well-being and poor Susan, readily slipping into the maternal role, has her work cut out keeping on top of it all, getting up at 4am to do the washing before getting everyone up and ready for school.
Bob settles into the requisite fatherly shoes, collecting wood and expecting a meal on the table and suggesting that Susan darns his socks.
And bless Susan, with the patience of Mother Teresa and the qualities of a well-trodden door mat does the whole lot with a constant and cheery smile though thankfully the occasional moment of rebellion and acerbic comment is allowed to poke through.
The adults who should know better are mostly vile and uncaring towards the children who seem to take all the punches on the chin and come out fighting in order to stay together, even the twins pledging saintly behaviour in their quest to become choir boys and earn 5s a month.
Jacqueline Wilson's preface rightly flags up the bizarre nature of the parental strand of the plot. Out of the country by page six, Bob attacking the cold cuts by page seven because 'men always carve' and the children not unduly concerned by their parents' disappearance when the flight seems to go missing. Something of a weak and feeble reunion occurs at the end of the book (sorry to spoil but yes the parents are found) but I would think that matters little to young readers. The best books as I recall seemed to remove the parents from the equation any which way to give the children a free run at life.
Eleanor Graham interestingly the founding editor at Puffin books prior to Kaye Webb reissuing The Children Who Lived in the Barn under the Puffin name in 1955 but also instrumental in establishing literature for children as a genre in its own right.

'Very little critical or scholarly attention was paid to children's books before the 1930s, much rubbish was sold for children, and the good that came their way did so unheralded and often by chance. Graham was one of the first to see that a critical apparatus was needed for the evaluation of children's books... During the late 1920s the first children's rooms in public libraries were established and Graham learned a great deal from watching children and librarians select books. She was convinced that children deserved books of the highest quality, and was ahead of her time in believing that any child was capable of responding to great writing, no matter how underprivileged his or her background.'

(Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry)

It occurred to me that, with its original 1938 publication, I could easily be reading a book written as the portents of war loomed overhead and here was a fine example of resilience in adversity and children taking responsibility for their own welfare that may well be needed in the months and years to come.

So it's off to Cornflower for tea now and I can't wait to find out whether it's been prepared in a haybox cooker or not and just in case you feel the urge, here's a favourite website of mine and the instructions for one someone has very kindly made earlier.
Karen and I are clearing the book commitment decks and taking an extended tea break for the summer but will be back with our shared teas in September when we will be very appropriately reading and eating our way through A Fortnight in September by R.C.Sherriff.

Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy

It's Persephone tea with Cornflower today, my turn to choose the book and I'll confess to allowing my hand to stray towards rather a slender tome and one I had read in that first Flush (sorry couldn't resist) of Persephone enthusiasm back in 2003.
The tale now legendary, Bookhound had seen an article about the shop in a national paper, hid it from me and then rang Nicola Beauman and asked her to choose six books that I would enjoy and there they were, gift wrapped on my desk on Christmas Day 2002.
Like a lemon I didn't go near my desk until after lunch and nor did Bookhound give me the first clue, so I quite thought my only gift had been a thing for washing the windows and I'd feigned gratitude...as you try to, whilst inwardly thinking huh...great.
Rereading Reuben Sachs first published in 1888, and possibly reading it more carefully than last time, has been pure pleasure because in the interim Amy Levy has been on my radar, so I've picked up those references to a writer I had previously never heard of. When Lily Tobias author of Eunice Fleet was declared to be responding consciously to the Anglo-Jewish literary tradition of the nineteenth century novels of  Amy Levy I was able to nod sagely, if with little recall of what that might be.
Judith Quixano's elite Sephardi family, 'the vieille noblesse of the Jewish community', have fallen on hard times and Judith has been welcomed into the arms of her mother's extended family, the Leunigers and their Bayswater home. As the Quixanos had grown poorer so the Leunigers have prospered and all offers from rich uncles to adopt impoverished neices were to be gratefully accepted. Judith has in fact been happily settled with the family since the age of fifteen but it becomes clear that her double descent ( via birth and poverty) from the upper echelons of Jewish society will all be insufficient to secure her a 'good' marriage.
Slowly it becomes clear to Judith, who reads the poetry of Swinburne, that her long-term friendship with Reuben Sachs has turned to a deep love

' The twin halves of a perfect heart, made fast
Soul to soul while the years fell past.'

But Reuben's career as a lawyer is in the ascent and when he is then considered as a Parliamentary candidate it is evident he will need to seek a wife concomitant with his social standing, Judith won't do at all.
Apparently written as a 'riposte to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda' this and other useful information about Reuben Sachs is revealed in Julia Neuberger's preface to the Persephone edition. More valuable insights into Amy Levy's life and her writing, and something else of which I had been slightly unaware; namely the hierarchy that existed within the Jewish community, in the words of Amy Levy

'Jews belonging to varying shades of caste and clique in that socially sensitive community.'

Not an unusual characteristic of any community but not one I had given much thought to in this context, nor had I realised how exercised those of Amy Levy's more established English background were about the vast influx of poor eastern European Jews following the Tsarist pogroms of 1881. In a country where the Jewish community's security was often fragile and shaky, anything likely to tip the balance was unwelcome in their midst.
Searching online for more detail about Amy Levy, because by now I want to know everything, I stumbled across the Orlando site and you only have to imagine how many bones I was spitting on discovering that it is subscription only and I can't read any further. Of course they have to make money from it, I know that, but just how tantalizing are all those links.
Never mind, there's more here and I'm interested to read this by Linda Hunt Beckman about the reception of Reuben Sachs.

"Reuben Sachs was mistakenly perceived by the Jewish press as an attack on Jewish life, and this cannot have pleased its author, but Levy may have been more uncomfortable with its reception by gentile reviewers, who mostly read it as a corroboration of longstanding stereotypes about Jews. Few, if any, readers recognized its experimentation with methods that departed from realism or understood that the narrative voices making unpleasant generalizations about Jewish character and life are unreliable; and few noted the longing Judith feels for the warmth and family love of the Jewish community when she is removed from it at the end. Nor did the public grasp that while Jewish life in this novel is materialistic and competitive, Levy’s many allusions to the “gentile” plot in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda suggest that in regard to its worldly values the Anglo-Jewish community is a microcosm of the larger society."

Sadly Amy Levy took her own life at the age of  twenty-seven at her Bloomsbury family home, perhaps in a fit of depression about the book's reception, but Julia Neuberger suggests perhaps also because of problems of increasing deafness. Perhaps no coincidence that her home was in Endsleigh Gardens in Bloomsbury either, much of the wealth of the Bedford family evident  both here in our corner of Devon and that area of London too, witness Russell and Tavistock Square.
It's all added to a really rounded appreciation of Reuben Sachs for me, this a book to recommend and a book of current relevance with Jewish Book Week happening in London from February 27th.
And now that Karen and I are in our stride with our regular Persephone tea venture, we thought it might be good to let you know about the next book each time so that you can read along with us if you want to.
Our next gathering will be on Wednesday March 31st when we'll be reading and eating our way through The New House by Lettice Cooper, and I've now put Persephone reads to date, with links, in a list over here somewhere >>>>>>>>.
On the subject of housekeeping you may also see that I've threaded the comments from today. When you reply to someone's comment, it should now leave that reply below theirs.
Meanwhile it's time for a calming visit to Cornflower for tea and perhaps consider yourselves fortunate we're not calling in on the Leunigers where it might be stewed fish ... I happen to know that Karen has baked us a much more sumptuous treat and I just hope there's some left when I get there.

Happy Birthday to...

A slightly different Monday post, but as it's Virginia Woolf's birthday today, her 128th, I decided I could be a little self-indulgent. I have no idea why I remember it year on year but I do. I like to pause and mark time with a return to Woolf and thought it might be nice to award myself a reading set aside day, which all feels a bit decadent on a Monday. However once I've finished my day job, and done whatever else needs to be done, I'm going to settle down and read Flush and raise a pot of Earl Grey in memory of dear old Ginnie.

The canine theme feels pertinent given our own current state of canine discombobulation. Rusty, the cocker spaniel puppy, the Gamekeeper's new gun dog in training, having outgrown his indoor nursery has been promoted to primary school and one of the two adjoining outdoor kennels and runs, and therein begins the dilemma. It's like Malory Towers out there, swapping the dorms, new room mates to be accommodated...

'That's my door old chap, don't think you can walk in there whenever you feel like it...'

'Oi sonny, get your snout out of my feed bowl,'

Thus far it's involved some middle of the night howling and the judicious use of a saw but I'll explain more another day. Strangely the new arrival has settled in fine because he took his blanket and his cuddly sock with him; he's in the kennel with the heat lamp, and sharing with Sticks the dog he will be working with eventually. Prefect Ben (also a Cocker) and recently retired due to his Queen Ann shaped legs and feet (poor Queen Ann) that give him a bit of bother now and again, has moved in with head boy Barney (Labrador) and they are both slightly disconcerted at this influx of youthful energy. Barney in true Virginia Woolf style is holding out for a kennel of his own again soon.

Having just lived through it  heaven only knows what happened at Wimpole Street with the arrival of one of these because he doesn't sit still for a minute.

So I have little idea what to expect from Flush, but skimming (for fear of spoilers and ideas) Sally Beauman's excellent and lengthy introduction to the Persephone edition gives me something of a clue; a pedigree gundog puppy is to be tamed into city life much to the horror of his breeder, a Miss Mitford. Flush, a 'real old cocking spaniel' now to be the companion of the sofa-bound Elizabeth Barrett Browning and about to become the very fussy and particular Flushie, the lapdog who will eat partridge from a silver fork.

I don't want to know too much more before I read because I understand there are layers to unearth here, as Virginia Woolf suggests in a letter to Sybil Colefax

'...it was all a matter of hints and shades and practically no one has seen what I was after.'

But Happy Virginia's birthday to all you Woolf fans out there, let's raise a cup of tea to her today.

Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary by Ruby Ferguson

It's Persephone tea with Cornflower today but before we get onto that I must say that I'm following Karen's exquisite Alice Starmore knitting with much reverence, it's quite beautiful.
Karen's Persephone selection for this month and she has chosen Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary by Ruby Ferguson.
How interesting it is that I can have a book on the shelf for several years and not have read it, mainly because a member of an online list had declared it slight and of little merit. Sufficiently scathing in their opinion for me to pass it over when so much else was clamouring for my reading time, so my thanks to Karen for suggesting this one because it really is a little royal diadem of a read.

I have feeling my encounter with Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary, written in 1937, was also governed by the knowledge that the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother admired the book so much that she had invited Ruby Ferguson to dine at Buckingham Palace. Read this book and imagine royalty with all their privileges, but likewise all their social constraints, sitting reading in the throne chair opposite you and it somehow offers a much deeper dimension to the book. In fact I quite wished I'd had some royal company to be able to ask 'Was it really like that?' every so often, but had to make do with Rocky snoring by the fire as usual.

Firstly, yes it's that Ruby Ferguson all you Jill and the Pony Club fans.
Oh how I tried to love ponies, it seemed like the right gang to be in with, except I didn't have a pony, but everyone was reading Jill books and I couldn't be left out. I did give up quickly and for those that don't know, the reason that horses and I don't get on is oft mentioned on here; one of the horses at Horseguard's Parade in London sneezed very messily on my new white ankle socks and sandals when I was standing nearby, I was about seven and I've been right off horses from that day to this. Can't be helped but good to see Fidra books are keeping the Jill books in print.

Described, like Winifred Watson's Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day, as a fairytale for grown-ups I was instantly smitten by the Scottish setting of Keepsfield, the sprawling fictional country estate into which Lady Victoria Elspeth Rose Graham-Rooth-Targanet is born.
Silver ladles rather than silver spoons in the mouth, this is a life of prestige and privilege rivaled only by Royalty, yet Rose is a child of many delights. By rights her garrulous, precocious exuberance should have rankled and had me very irked but you can't help but love her, a little heart of pure and innocent gold beating 'neath that

'new frock of soft grey merino with a wide-coloured sash and a rose-coloured ribbon round her dark hair, brushed back from her brow'

as the happiest girl in all Scotland dresses (or is dressed) on the morning of her sixth birthday in 1861.

The story is being told in flashback by an old retainer who has been discovered at the house many years later by a group of tourists who, noticing the To Let signs outside the wrought iron gates, make their way down the mile-long carriage drive and pitch up at the stately pillared front door of the late eighteenth century classic mansion to look around.

Rose's life one of pure happiness, the freedom of the Estate, audiences with her mother at 5pm which is enough to satisfy everyone's requirements, life at school, being presented to Queen Victoria at Court and the debutantes ball, plenty of Highland flings with marriage as the ultimate aim and achieved to the leaden Sir Hector Galowrie. A marriage of convenience and social propriety that will entwine Keepsfield with Sir Hector's neigbouring estate of Redlace, but one that will also trap Rose in a loveless state with her three children, the heir, the spare and the daughter.

I won't dwell a minute longer on the plot but expect trouble, Rose was not blessed with that excessively exuberant, free-spirited nature to allow life to get the better of her, but expect sadness too. These are class-ridden times when to cross social boundaries was deemed too shocking for words.

Little wonder that it all touched a chord with the Queen Mother  with its frequent mentions of Balmoral and perhaps a nerve too; the 1936 fall from grace of Edward VIII and the abdication doubtless still an open wound when this book was published.
But I have loved it for its characterisation of Rose, for its themes of women's lives, class and the burdens of wealth and title, not always the blessings they were perceived to be in the 1930s, and of course with hindsight we know just how much was about to crumble into dust and ashes.
Right time for tea, head to Cornflower where I'm sure a regal spread awaits.

The Man Who Never Was

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

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

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

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

Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper

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

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

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

***

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

On W.G.Sebald

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

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

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

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

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

'To resurrect a memory he never experienced.'

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

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

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

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

Ed Murrow Buchenwald 1945

High Wages by Dorothy Whipple

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

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

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

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

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

The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picture of Hilda and Rusty Bernstein

© www.rustybernstein.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minnie's Room by Mollie Panter-Downes

Prompted by Julia Blackburn's mention of Minnie's Room : The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes I headed for the Persephone shelves to find my copy and I'm very grateful to Julia for the reminder.
I flitter and flutter about with Persephone books. Some times they are all in the same place, sometimes that looks like too much grey in one place and I mix them in with everything else. But at the moment they are still nicely housed on the octagonal book table with a few exceptions, war diaries on the war shelf, Flush by Virginia Woolf over in the Bloomsbury department, cookery in the kitchen.
I hadn't read Minnie's Room before but a story a day over the last ten days has become a ritual and one I'm feeling quite bereft of now that I've read them all. Short stories like this work for me because they do what they say; they are properly short and can easily be carefully read in a slow-taps-bath-running interlude, ten or so pages, not half-novellas pretending to be short which have flood potential.
But even better, Minnie's Room complemented my recent read of The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters perfectly because these stories cover that same immediate post-war era.
Being born in 1953 I'm a bit blind about this period of time and it's been interesting to focus some attention on it. All those things you take for granted as a child just because they 'are', that's just the way it was and then eventually you reluctantly become a primary historical source yourself as you start to re-examine that time in your life.
The introduction to Minnie's Room sets these ten stories in their post-war context well. All previously published in the New Yorker and edited in chronological order from 1947 through to 1954 with the final one leaping ahead to 1965 and a most felicitous and uplifting last story of moving on to a new life whilst preserving what mattered from the old, it's so very cleverly done.
This timescale offers a measured narrative progression through all that post-war disquiet and uncertainty after those years which had spelled death, destruction and deprivation for so many; all those entrenched habits exposed as they try to nestle down and survive in this hiatus whilst the old order shrivels and the new one emerges.
Think of even more alliteration, more heavy and leaden D-words, depleted, depressed, demoralized, downcast and you can almost hear the nail being driven into the coffin, feel the weight of this disappearing world on those shoulders (can you tell I've been reading Gerard Manley Hopkins alongside Ulysses...does it show?)
Though the upper classes were struggling to come to terms with the new social order and managing on much less money than they had been used to, it was the middle classes who were hit hardest by the burden of income tax at 9/- (shillings) in the £, almost 50% in old money, which on reflection seems quite staggering. They are all represented in various guises in Mollie Panter-Downes's book and please forgive the indiscretion, I never give away this much plot, but the title story sets the scene on this world perfectly and I couldn't resist it.
Skip from * to ** if you want to.
*
Minnie, 'an ugly little Londoner', the housemaid who came to the family as 'a raw girl' twenty-five years ago, has saved up enough money to leave the family she has lived with and worked for and, moving into a little rented room of her own, will finally achieve independence.
A first step up that ladder now becoming accessible to all.
Helplessly incapable of caring for themselves, the Sothern family suddenly find great stores of previously unspoken gratitude for Minnie which quickly turns into a barely-concealed resentment and anger as they realize they will be utterly useless without her. Suddenly it is Minnie who is free and spinster-daughter of the family, Norah, who will be trapped into cooking, keeping house and caring for her parents, whilst her footloose brother Maurice can move out and venture off on his own.
Even Maurice's supposed powers of irresistible male persuasion, brought in as a final and desperate weapon in the family's arsenal of bullying and coercion, can't prevail over the 'ugly little devil'.
As the family look out of their Bayswater window, with its 'muffling plush curtains' and onto the square as dusk falls, the sweet-scented lilacs hold no magic. It's clear the sun is setting on a way of life for the Sothern family and countless others like them, whilst a new dawn is rising for legions of Minnies and as she gazes out of her window her gratitude and humility is immeasurable,

'There was a big lime tree growing in the street, just opposite the window, 'In the hot weather I shall get the smell lovely.'

**
All clear, you can look again now.
Those who had the power find it eroded, find themselves out of step with the world they thought they knew whilst the dis-empowered suddenly find they have the resolve, the means and the courage to change it.
I didn't know much about Mollie Panter-Downes but having read the publisher's note and then Minnie's Room it's of little surprise to discover that the New Yorker published 852 pieces by her between 1938 and 1984.
Here are the widows, the spinsters, the memories, the holidays, the weddings, the bereavements and all perfectly captured in microscopic detail. I have been beyond impressed with the delicate and intense perception of that oft ignored detail, those little moments that can so easily slip through a writer's fingers or when added clumsily become superfluous moments which draw too much attention to themselves.
Somehow Mollie Panter-Downes captures the essence of the moment and conveys it with a delicacy and an immediacy, coupled with that elusive ease and necessity all making these stories a complete pleasure to read in the midst of far too much pre-Booker contemporary fiction than is good for me right now.
More of similar to follow very soon and not in the usual gorge that leaves me over-sated, because from August I'm planning a Middlebrow-a-Month to keep this flame flickering gently in amongst all my other reading.
I'll post about it on the last day each month and then announce the next one so if you want to join in the reading and then chat about it over a tray of virtual tea and scones in comments, you'd be very welcome.
Here's advance notice of the first one for August 31st.