dovegreyreader scribbles

Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) - A memoir of love, exile and crosswords ~ Sandy Balfour

'Like a crossword clue, history never makes sense at first reading. The surface is plausible, but discordant. We need a second reading to impose order.'

I honestly don't know what I'd without you all.

How would I find books like this if one of you didn't email and suggest I read it.

It was one of those mornings when I was in need of 'different' then in whizzed an email from one of you suggesting I read Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) - A memoir of love, exile and crosswords by Sandy Balfour. It took me less than a nano-second to be convinced and order a copy...perhaps a sort of reverse version of what I do to some of you sometimes...maybe.

Here's the blurb...

Half a million people a day do it in the Telegraph. The Times claims almost as many, and the Guardian 300,000. Most people remember their first time, and everyone has a favourite. You can do it in bed, standing up, or on a train. You can do it alone, with a loved one or in groups. The Queen does it in the bath. It is not illegal, immoral or fattening. In fact it tops the Home Office list of approved entertainments for prison inmates. Crosswords are a very British obsession.

Crosswords are a very British obsession. Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose is a personal reminiscence and a guide to solving crossword puzzles. But it is much, much more than a 'how-to' book. Each chapter starts with a clue, and uses anecdote, history and autobiography to solve it, in the process describing something of what it means to love England. In the process, we encounter The Best Crossword Clue Ever, The Most Beautiful Clue in the World 'Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose' and the eccentric personalities behind such legendary compilers as the Guardian's Araucaria and The Times'Ximenes.

The Queen does the crossword in the bath??

I can't pretend to be an expert, nor obsessed, but crosswords do fascinate me whilst also making me feel that there's a whole world of knowing that I am excluded from. It is this knowing when you are looking at an anagram, when you are not, when the word is hidden in plain sight in the clue, or when you've got to really stand on your head and turn your logical and ordered world a little upside-down, and think way beyond the box. Sometimes I get into the mindset, sometimes I don't, so it was good to read that it took Sandy Balfour years and years before he felt at ease in the world of the crossword.

I hadn't realised how traditional the whole thing is either. Famous compilers who garner a reputation and a following, one of  earliest of whom was the nature writer Adrian Bell (Corduroy, Silver Ley, The Cherry Tree, Men and the Fields)

One of the lasting memories I have of sitting as an observer in a workshop on memoir writing with Julia Blackburn and Penelope Lively, was their suggestion that all memoir needs a scaffolding. Once you've found it the book takes shape around it and Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose is that clever memoir that has used its scaffolding well. 

Born and raised in South Africa Sandy Balfour's journey begins in 1983 when he and his girlfriend leave Cape Town, avoiding army conscription and apartheid, and with a plan to hitchhike to London. The journey takes him around the world but effectively into exile, in search of a place he can belong and which he would like to call home...

'I have only a desire to be on the move. I have cut myself off from friends and family. I have discarded my past. It feels like a kind of death. All that is left is myself.
I am not sure that is enough.'

Weaving through the quest are the crosswords, a quest in themselves, and if I could remember all the details I think I could probably smash out the Times crossword in hours rather than the days it would take me if I stuck at it, rather than surrendering. It felt as if I'd stumbled into a new world that has always been a mystery to me...

That each newspaper has its own style...

This whole network of compilers who go by pseudonyms like Rufus, Araucaria (a Monkey Puzzle tree) Bunthorne, Hendra, Custos, Logodaedulus. Gemini, Quantum...

That the editor has the final say if they feel a clue doesn't play by the unspoken rules...if it isn't 'cricket'...

And that cricket itself is a compilers dream providing a plethora of clues and solutions...

Sandy Balfour's journey woven around the crossword clues, of which there are plenty to solve, was indeed a great read and highly recommended if you fancy not only a  life-journey but also a glimpse into this mysterious world of wordplay.

So tell me...are you a crossword guru who knows all the tricks...

Or, like me, have you spent your life in the half-light not quite understanding the rules of the game...

Do you ever cheat and look up the answers online...

 

PS Thank you again to the recommender and what about the answer to the clue which is the title of the book... shall I spoil it...no maybe not just yet...

And what about these...

'The real reason for the meeting of Volkswagen and Daimler (6, 6)'

And this apparently one of the best clues ever set...

'Amundsen's forwarding address (4)'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Masks...

I’d put it off and put if off but to no avail, I’ve had to sit down and make some masks.

The Kayaker had sent me patterns and must have been on his tenth request for a mask, made with the fabric he had brought back from Africa in early March, before I capitulated.

Does that return from Africa seem like half a lifetime ago now...yes it does.

’Hold your breath when you land in Brussels,’ I had said...

‘ Why?’

I hadn’t liked to bother him with the finer details of what was heading our way, and after that initial visit on arriving back on March 6th we didn't see him for another twelve weeks.

For years he kayaked the White Nile in Uganda and had made many lifelong friends along the way. The village by the river is his second home, the people know and trust him, he knows and trusts them, all of which puts him in an ideal position to give something back and to know what might help them most. He’d been in Uganda for two months rolling out the project he’d been single-handedly raising money for over the last year. The Sleepwell Project had been a resounding success in the Acholi Quarters in Kampala and it really didn’t seem fair to taint the moment.

Here's the family that we supported by contributing a mattress, blanket and mosquito net. 

Reality soon hit home after landing at Heathrow, and I’m pleased to say the Kayaker took it very seriously and played by all the rules from his shared house in Plymouth, whilst raising more money to buy food for the people he'd just said goodbye to.and who were now in lockdown.  Lockdown in Uganda means something very different to lockdown here, and without work families simply can’t earn money to buy food. They have no savings, no back up, no NHS, no safety net. Watching this project unfold has given us a much-needed sense of perspective over the last few months.

The Kayaker also raised funds to pay one of the village seamstresses to make masks and they were beautiful.

Honestly, just look at them all...

Anyway, I pulled myself together and set to, and it's true, African fabric makes beautiful cheerful colourful masks and I could feel my spirits life as I matched the patterns and stitched.

Did anyone see Nicole’s incredible flamenco skirt on The Great British Sewing Bee a while back?

Wasn't it the most joyous and celebratory thing you have ever seen. I recognised the vibrant African waxed fabric designs instantly.

I was trying to think where this mask aversion might have originated, apart from the recent events that make them a necessity in certain places and situations now,  and I’ve traced it back to theatres as a student nurse. 

I did a theatre placement as a student nurse at Queen Elizabeth Children’s Hospital in Hackney and apart from the mask-wearing I loved it. It was smaller than Gt Ormond Street and more intimate. One surgeon and lots of opportunities to scrub for some really interesting operations. We would do on call which involved sleeping in a chintzy little bedroom next to the theatres and would be woken up at 3am to prepare for a baby in need of emergency surgery. We all knew our General Set of instruments by heart and would fire up the autoclave and have everything sterilised and ready, and it was all actually very exciting, but oh oh oh how we hated the masks.

I’m trying to think were they disposable or fabric tied on back in the 1970s?

I know just about everything in theatres was fabric and reusable, from our dresses and gowns to all the cloths used in surgery. Scrubs, as in trousers, were for surgeons not us and I'm sure we were all bare-legged because didn't tights risk a static spark...or have I made that up.

Whatever, the masks were awful, gave us spotty chins and we suffered. Why I then eventually decided to do my last three months at GOS in the main theatres, after qualifying as a staff nurse, remains an unfathomable mystery to this day. After a week, and having a top ENT surgeon throw a set of tonsils at me (my fault too slow), I bailed out and transferred to a ward, the metabolic unit, proper uniform, no masks, patients who were awake and the happiest few weeks of my hospital life.

The summer of 1976 and remember that tap dancing song Lullaby of Broadway?

It would start playing on the ward radio and we’d all grab a child and dance with them.

So anyway, that's me and masks and I'm just going to have to embrace it like everyone else.

Are you all masked up and ready too...

And what about The Great British Sewing Bee...

Hasn’t it been a cheery weekly feast for the eyes, and for me a very worthy winner took the trophy.

 

handiwork ~ Sara Baume

"In this contemplative short narrative, artist and acclaimed writer Sara Baume charts the daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to live as an artist. Elegantly encompassing images and in itself a significant artefact, handiwork offers observations that are at once gentle and devastating on the nature of art, grief and a life lived well."

What a beautiful and thoughtful book this was. Sent as a gift from a friend via Much Ado Books in Alfriston, Sussex, and arriving gift-wrapped and clearly much-loved before it even fell into my hands. I read a few pages a day through May, feeling not only the creativity and that flow which comes with an engrossing and all-consuming craft project, but woven in alongside was Sara Baume's grief at the death of her father. It inevitably reminded me of that summer after the Tinker journeyed on, the six weeks I spent finishing a quilt whose making had spanned some twenty years. I'd started it soon after we moved here, three children living here, my mum and dad regular visitors. Somehow it joined up all the dots that I held dear and needed to stitch into one. I took that quilt to New Zealand and gave it to our farthest-flung family member to somehow bridge the miles and keep the dots joined up.

There is much to cheer here. Sara Baume quoting Stephen Knott for example...

'Modellers often have a variety of different projects that are left half-finished or are completed at different speeds: it is not always a case of finishing one thing and going onto the next...'

'Oh good' I wrote in the margin.

There was so much that I understood and acknowledged about handiwork (the lower case is deliberate) and the book jogged many lovely memories too...

'What we all shared - me, my dad, his dad - was a suspicion of modern life, a loathing of fashion, a disappointment with the new technologies and a preference for the ad-hoc contraptions of the past - anything that can be disassembled and reassembled with hands and tools, based upon the principles of common sense.

Each in our own time, we lived and live in consonance with nostalgia for a former one...'

The importance of, and inspiration from a book like this for me, whilst acknowledging the author's life as portrayed, is also its ability to segue into my own memories and experience. I think that's true for just about every book I read, and this one was no exception.

One memory in particular about the Tinker's dad, my granddad...there's me in the smocked frock sitting on the wall with him, my brother too and my dad (in his reindeer jumper).

My granddad joined the police force after the First World War until eventually, retiring from a life doing point duty on Tooting Broadway in the mid 1950s, he and my grandmother moved from the London suburbs to a cottage built into the hillside in a little village just outside Crediton in Devon. The stairs were carved out of the rock and there was no mains drainage or indoor facilities. it was jugs and ewers and an Elsan up the garden. Milk had to be collected in a jug from the local farm... everyone thought they were crazy. But they loved it and so did we.

We would all travel on the steam train to Bow for our own  'fortnight in September' where we would be met by the Austin A30 and don't ask me how we all fitted in. I'd sit on my dad's lap in the front seat and 'do' the indicators (the switch on the dashboard that sent the little pointed arm out of the side of the car). It would be a very sedate drive because my grandfather was of the opinion that anything over 30mph and you were aiming a car, not driving it. We'd all settle in, visit the Elsan up the garden, smell the familiar scent of the geraniums in the conservatory and then head to my granddad's workshop to look at the brass microscope in the wooden box (I have it now) and where he'd always be making something out of something else. It was at this point that I obviously told him that the latest school craze was the hula hoop but I didn't have one. 'Hang on a minute,' he said, and before you knew it he'd found and coiled a piece of polythene pipe into a circle, joined it with a wooden stopper and I spent the next two weeks doing nothing else but hula hooping.

I was also extremely disappointed not to be allowed to take it home with me on the train. I couldn't see what the problem was.

Sara Baume's memories are intertwined with the making of a series of carved and painted birds and I used the book like a journal, writing in my own thoughts and recollections, prompted by Sara's, through that strange and surreal month of May 2020 that we have all just travelled through. The book is beautifully sized at 5" x 7" and well-spaced, often just a paragraph on a single page, almost begging me to add something of my own while giving me permission to use that blank space to think.

If you have read handiwork please do share your thoughts in comments..

And now I'm reminded of The Repair Shop...does anyone else watch it...and think the chap who does the clocks is a dead ringer for Steve Redgrave...

And though I understand it might not have been the case for everyone, I hope plenty of you have good memories of granddads too...please do share them.

 

 

Hamnet ~ Maggie O'Farrell

Did anyone else 'do' any of the Hay Festival online a few weeks ago?

I booked a few things though wasn't really sure what to expect but was pleasantly surprised at how lovely it was not to have to drive 185 miles, try and park the car, find the venue, queue, pile in, try and stay awake in a hot and crowded tent after lunch, fight my way out and drive home again and take days to recover.

I caught an interesting talk by Rhidian Brook about his book Godbothering, a compilation of his Thought for the Day broadcasts on Radio 4, and was impressed with his combination of assurance and humility as he talked about his faith, about what mattered to him and to the many millions who must have listened to him over the years. I knew the name rang a bell, I wrote about Rhidian's novel The Aftermath back in 2013.

And I also 'went' to Maggie O'Farrell's event.

I know, I know, it's all about being sociable and being there and soaking up the atmosphere, but as I sat on my sofa listening I'm afraid I realised that this is the litfest of the future for me. You know, that falling asleep thing in the midst of the crowd...where you allow yourself a very long blink...just the one and before you know it your head slumps forward and you wake with a jump and hope no one has noticed. Well I sat on my sofa, may have closed my eyes as I listened, but Maggie O'Farrell's warm and engaging voice was all enough to confirm what my partial listening of Hamnet had already confirmed, that here was a book I needed in my hand.

I 'visited' the bookshop and the book arrived the next day.

It is 1596 and while the reader is never told this is Shakespeare's family, and the playwright is never named, it is quite clear that here is an aspect of his life told from an entirely different angle and giving centre stage to Anne, or Agnes as she is named in the book, and their children, Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Given that we were also mid-plague it was fascinating to read of the bubonic version arriving in Stratford and its detailed journey there via a single flea.

Family relationships are fraught and complex in the feverish atmosphere of Stratford and there is only one way that the couple know they will get permission to marry. Months later their first child Susanna is born, followed in a few years by the twins. There will be a terrible death that leaves Agnes undone, unravelled, dismantled and utterly changed and the book gives an incredibly moving account of the impact of that grief. The burial is both powerful and visceral while the aftermath sees the couple take diverging paths, thinking that neither really understands how the other is feeling. It is the writing and production of Hamlet the play that holds the key, and has the power to bridge the couple's divide, the question is will they meet in the middle and understand.

Expect more tears...

In fact maybe expect to feel like a wrung-out dishcloth by the time you turn the final page, but in the best possible way.

Along the way I was regularly stopped in my tracks by the imagery, and it was listening to the audio that made me realise I needed to read the words and let that happen...

'The fireplace, which is filled only with ashes, held in the fragile shape of the log they once were...'

Taken out of context that line may not seem particularly powerful, read in the narrative moment for which Maggie O' Farrell intended it and my breath was well and truly taken away.

And also perhaps expect to have your interest in Hamlet revived a little. If it is a play you know you might find that Maggie O'Farrell has invested it with a new significance, around themes of eternal life and remembrance. If it is a play you are less familiar with you might at least feel tempted to explore it with Hamnet in mind.

If you have read Hamnet please do add your thoughts in comments.

And talking of Shakespeare does anyone have a favourite play...

It is a long time since I have read any, probably too much studying and essay-writing in a previous life, but I do feel the urge to go back, and there are plenty of the plays that I don't know at all.

And other fiction based on Shakespeare plays...heavens there must be hundreds..

 

 

 

 

 

Hamnet alert...

A post coming up about Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell in a few days' time, but a heads up that it is 99p on Kindle today, and I'd hate you to miss it if it's a book you've been thinking about reading.

Books & Friendship...

Now don’t get me wrong...Bookhound has been wonderful company through these weeks of staying out of the way and not becoming a liability to the NHS or our family. We’ve rubbed along well enough for over forty-five years so that’s plenty of time for our annoying habits to be acknowledged and then ignored (if only he could hang a towel up after he’s used it, not leave his wellies in the doorway where I trip over them..if only I could shut the kitchen door...major issues I’m sure you will agree) but I have to say I have really missed my friends.

We’ve talked and emailed and kept in touch but nothing beats a face-to-face gathering, and once the guidance allowed for garden gatherings I was in contact with the Happy Campers like a shot. We have met for coffee together every few weeks for years now and it turns out that they had missed our meet-ups too. And so on a rather damp and chilly day they arrived in separate cars (despite living a few hundred yards from each other in town) bearing their own food and drink, anoraks, blankets and with special instructions to bring their own scissors if they wanted a bunch of sweet peas.

After a quick walk around the fields so that we could then justify sitting down, we each collected our gravity recliner from the summer house and set ourselves up two metres apart, swaddled like patients in a TB sanitarium, and proceeded to talk. Five hours later we’d just about covered all the ground we’d missed, eaten our own food, managed to safely share a full box of Lindor, they picked their flowers and I waved them off. Despite the near Arctic temperatures (felt like) our first socially-distanced gathering felt like a huge and normalising success. I actually felt as if I’d done something that I used to do but took for granted in that previous life.

One of our topics for discussion was obviously books and one of our number had come with a list of books that had felt important at seminal moments in her life. We all threw out author names from the past...Jean Plaidy, Norah Lofts, Anya Seton and what on earth had become of Susan Howatch we wondered. Cashelmara, Penmarric. The joys of the internet in the hand meant we could find out immediately and I recalled reading  The Wheel of Fortune back in September 1985. I know it was then because I’d bought it as my book to read whilst languishing in the local maternity home for ten days having giving birth to the baby Gamekeeper (weren’t those the days).  I’d thought it would be a good idea to make a start before I went into labour but hadn’t bargained on him being two weeks late, or the book being so compelling that I must have let a four-year old and a two-year old do their own thing while I sat and read. I’d finished the book long before the first contraction. The copy long gone but suddenly we all had the urge to read it...

"Robert Godwin's tumultuous ride on the Wheel of Fortune begins with his passion for his sensual cousin Ginevra, as they waltz to "The Blue Danube" beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon, his beloved family home in Wales. As Robert discovers, his rational, well-ordered mind will be forever altered by his obsession for Ginevra, and his destiny will be forever linked to Oxmoon by the skeletons that lurk in the family closet.
For fifty years, from the sinister summer afternoon of 1913 to the 1960s, the Godwin family is sucked into a maelstrom of passion, disorder, madness, and murder. Fortunes rise and fall in this sweeping, compulsive tale, until the Wheel of Fortune finally comes full circle."

This, however, was the theme that I had no knowledge of back in 1985...

"Susan Howatch acknowledges that this novel is in fact a re-creation in a modern form of the story of the Plantagenet family of Edward III of England, the modern characters being created from those of his eldest son Edward of Woodstock (The Black Prince) and his wife Joan of Kent, John of Gaunt and his mistress, later wife, Katherine Swynford, Richard II (son of Edward of Woodstock), Henry IV (son of John of Gaunt) and Henry IV's eldest son King Henry V."

Anyway by the miraculous powers of 4G we were able to find three cheap copies on eBay which were duly purchased from our reclining pose, and we are all looking forward to jumping back into to this whopping great big book. I'm fortunate that I will be reading alongside two Plantagenet experts because it might still pass me by thirty-five years later. Incidentally I did eventually give birth to my whopping-est baby at 8lbs 6ozs, sans pain relief and about two hours after consuming a huge hospital dinner and a Mars bar. You get the hang of it by number three, but I have always associated The Wheel of Fortune with that moment in my life.

In other news, I found Avalon by Anya Seton for £2.99 on Kindle so I made a start. Could I ever have known, back when I was reading it as a fifteen-year old, that the action and the plot would walk right past my front door fifty plus years later.  

I’m wondering if you have books that hold similar memories for you...

A memorable book from a memorable life-moment...

And were you a Susan Howatch fan...did anyone read the Glittering Images and the rest of the Starbridge series... I'm really hoping these books stand the test of time

Allegation ~ R.G.Adams

A few books find their way onto my Kindle via Netgalley, a site where publishers make titles available pre-publication for reviewers. I particularly enjoy page-turning crime and thrillers on Kindle so I always have a handy supply ready, either via Netgalley or the 99p Daily Deal. It was whilst the nights seemed rather long, in the early days of the pandemic, that I started Allegation by R.G.Adams published by Quercus and found myself quite pleased that I was awake at 4am.

Kit Goddard is a rookie social worker nursing her own experiences of the care system, and  freshly principled in a way that can often fade as the rigours of the work take their toll. When allegations of historic sexual abuse of  young teenagers are made against Matthew Cooper, a pillar of the local community and the father of three children, one of them disabled , the family is allocated to Kit to investigate. 

I slotted right back into this scenario as a professional. It's one of the worst dilemmas imaginable (and one I was occasionally involved in as a health visitor in that previous life ) and whoever R.G.Adams is they really know their stuff

Some of you might recall how I berated (something I so rarely do on here that it might have been a once in fourteen years one-off) a certain famous children's author on her first foray into adult fiction...for slack research, and for misrepresenting professionals and the difficult work they do, well top marks to R.G.Adams because Allegation was factually accurate to the nth degree. I know it's fiction, and they 'make it up' but there's really no excuse for a 'casual' approach to research. 

Here is someone who truly understands the stomach-churning meetings and the high profile case,

The well-to-do parents and the threats they make...

The potential for false compliance...

The doubt and uncertainty that pervade and challenge the professional instinct...

The fear of misreading it, of missing the obvious, those home visits and the antennae waving...

The fear of being on what the legal advisers used to warn us was a 'frolic of your own'...

The paradigm shift from proactive to reactive practice where you decide you have to cover your back..

The antagonistic new manager full of ambition for spicing up their CV who swoops in and changes everything before moving on and up the pay scale...

And throughout all this the anxiety like a knot in your stomach that never quite goes away, pops back into your thinking at the weekends or the evenings.

Kit goes through all of this and more as she tests the limits of the system and her own expertise.

I tell you it takes nerves of steel to do it and R.G.Adams has either done it themselves, or knows someone else who has, because Allegation is gripping, well-researched and well worth a read if you fancy a jolly good page-turner. I think publication of the hardback edition may have been held over until next year, but the Kindle edition seems to be available this month and my hope is that this may be the first of a series. Kit is an endearing and interesting character and it would be a shame to lose such a promising theme.

Meanwhile your suggestions for page-turners if you have any...

I'm sure they will have helped some of you through recent months too...

And while we're on the subject of series, any suggestions about those too...

 

And if you have half a day spare here's a link to the one of the few public book beratings I think I have ever done on here. I've quite amused myself reading it again...it was eight years ago, I was very cross and I did go on a bit (apologies). Ah, our younger passionate selves.

Footnote : In case you look for anything connected to dovegreyreader on Twitter this is to let you know that I have deactivated my account on there as of this week. Though I had 5500 followers built up over thirteen years, and who I valued enormously, I’m afraid it is not the place it once was. It is now a forum I no longer wish dovegreyreader to be a part of, it is not a place I wish to look at, or where I want my writing to be featured or linked.