dovegreyreader scribbles

Invitation to the Waltz ~ Rosamond Lehmann

Susan Hill has been urging me to read Rosamond Lehmann for months now and I can't quite believe that I had never read her before when I finally picked up Invitation to the Waltz. Published in 1932 but set in 1920 it has been a hugely enjoyable read, the perfect foil to some uber modern novels of late.

It is her birthday and seventeen-year-old Olivia, woken by her sister Kate the svelte natural beauty, prepares for her day...the family breakfast at The Lodge with her parents, her sister and her young brother James. The table, the presents, the good wishes, the slight self-consciousness about opening gifts and appearing delighted with them even if not,  and all set against the backdrop of the house so perfectly described by Rosamond Lehmann.

Olivia's parents give her a length of startling red dress fabric (chosen by Kate) which she takes round to Miss Robinson the dress maker to be made into something suitable for the dance. Both sisters have been invited to the evening at the Spencer's grand neighbouring estate. Themes of class, the vulnerability of women and the instability of their lives quickly become apparent, and with it the unspoken sequelae of the war... a dire shortage of available men. In contrast there is a surfeit of grieving needy women along with gentlewomen; spinsters living in reduced circumstances and scraping a living. Everyone is struggling in their own way, especially the mothers who are frequently portrayed as both selfish and possessive, controlling their daughters by various means, whether through illness or emotional blackmail, in order to keep at least one of them nearby. Yet still no mention of the war.

There are splendid contrasts between the social classes. Olivia's family have clearly fallen on harder times and a rather creepy uncle lives with them which adds to the difficulties, whilst nearby live the happy-go-lucky Wainwright family, the chimney sweep and his wife with eight children and counting. And then I remembered that I had read another book by Rosamond Lehmann, a novella entitled The Gypsy's Baby because the Wainwrights are surely the trial run for the Wyatt family.

The dance becomes the focal point for Olivia and Kate and it becomes apparent it is one of the few social opportunities for the girls to meet and socialise with men, but with it comes the trauma of Olivia's unfilled dance card and the misunderstandings with the men. It begs the thought that those men who have survived the war are damaged both emotionally and physically, and as this becomes increasingly apparent through the evening so Rosamond Lehmann slowly filters in the details about the war. Allowances are made for the men's unusual and exuberant behaviour whilst the women must adhere to the rules. Suddenly the unspoken is unleashed as Olivia remembers her own version of the war.

I knew very little about Rosamond Lehmann but more urging from Susan and I ordered the biography by Selina Hastings which I can't wait to read.  Born in 1901, the Oxford DNB has Rosamond down as tall, beautiful with almond-shaped eyes, a firm mouth and a warm impulsive manner, which all sounds like a green light for trials and tribulations to come. A lengthy affair with C.Day Lewis, who then goes off and marries Jill Balcon leaving Rosamond deeply traumatised, suggests I am not wrong.

Lots more about Rosamond Lehmann to come but if you have read her books, which I feel sure some of you have, please do share thoughts in comments.

I'm very late to this particular party but what a fine discovery. 

 

Sisters

I'd have loved a sister and spent a good proportion of my childhood praying/begging for at least one. I grew up with a brother, male cousins, male sons of my parents' friends and had to go out and find a girl-friend to swap Judy and Bunty comics with. That said, if there was a single upside to losing my brother when I was twenty-one it was that I gained a very lovely and special sister-in-law who I am still very lucky to have in my life. Mind you, I'm sure there are plenty of people who may not be as close to their sisters as they would wish, or as the rest of us sister-less folk might assume happens naturally.

But a new book came my way via the Literary Review and a trip to Waterstones and it's all made me think how many books I have on my shelves about famous sisters. The book in question is Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters, Four Lives in Seven Fragments by Sarah Watling. This from the 'blurb'...

'From the beginning of their lives, the Olivier sisters stood out: surprisingly emancipated, strikingly beautiful, markedly determined, and alarmingly 'wild'. Rupert Brooke was said to be in love with all four of them; D. H. Lawrence thought they were frankly 'wrong'; Virginia Woolf found them curiously difficult to read.

The sisters seemed always to be one step ahead of their time. Margery and Daphne studied at Cambridge when education was still thought by some to be damaging to ovaries. Noel became a doctor; Daphne a pioneering teacher; Margery's promising trajectory was shot down by mental illness; Brynhild, the great beauty of the four, excelled as a Bloomsbury hostess yet gave it up for love and a life of uncertainty.

In this intimate, sweeping biography, Sarah Watling brings the sisters in from the margins, tracing lives that span colonial Jamaica, the bucolic life of Victorian progressives, the frantic optimism of Edwardian Cambridge, the bleakness of two world wars, and a host of evolving philosophies for life over the course of the twentieth century.

Noble Savages is a compelling portrait of sisterhood in all its complexities, which rediscovers the lives of four extraordinary women within the varied fortunes of the feminism of their times, while illuminating the battles and ethics of biography itself.

I've finished the book (splendid, more thoughts soon but I definitely commend it to the house) and it has all got me thinking just what a fruitful source sisters are for biographies. A quick run around my shelves and I'd found these without really trying and I'm sure there are more because I haven't even gone near Bloomsbury Corner or the Bronte Shelf...

A Circle of Sisters by Judith Flanders : The Macdonald sisters ...Alice (Kipling) Georgiana (Burne- Jones) Agnes (Poynter) and Louisa (Baldwin) who all started life among the ranks of the lower middle classes but would marry a poet, a painter, the President of the Royal Academy and a Prime Minister. I haven't read this but I will soon.

The Sisters - The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary Lovell. Jessica, Debo, Nancy, Diana and Unity.

Four Sisters - The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses by Helen Rappaport. Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia and Helen's book breathes light and voices into their world. 

The Wild Wyndhams - Three Sisters at the Heart of Power by Claudia Renton. Mary, Madeleine and Pamela, surrounded by the work of the Pre-Raphaelities, a family famed for its 'Bohemian closeness and whose lives 'were intertwined with some of the most celebrated and scandalous figures of their day.

If I looked harder I could probably find more but I'm going to leave further 'sisterly' reading suggestions to you...

Meanwhile just to balance things up I thought I'd put together a pile of books off my shelves about brothers...

Perhaps you have some suggestions there too...

 

 

 

Gallimaufry of life (mostly)

I don't know where to start...cricket...tennis...Grand Prix, but wasn't Super Sunday just what the doctor ordered if you are lovers of sport, as we both are. We've only just recovered having not watched cricket since it went to pay-per-view. My Dad taught me all I ever needed to know to get by at a cricket match but this was something else.

I'm not that into the car whizzing around the circuit however many times but Bookhound is. We had two TVs going and I kept guard over the tennis while he did the Grand Prix and the cricket and we just kept shouting 'Come and watch this...' or ' It's all going Pete Tong' in here'. There were probably easier ways to do all this, like the Kayaker who had all the screens open on his computer at once, but we don't have neighbours so shouting is fine. Anyway, by the end of the cricket we were both chewing the kitchen table and congratulations to England for that win and huge commiserations to New Zealand.  Offspringette was watching in Christchurch too so it felt like the olden days when we'd put the tele in the garden on a summer's day and all sit and watch some great sporting event as a family, except on Super Sunday we were about 40 miles and 12,000 miles apart. 

To cope with the stress through the afternoon I set up an indigo vat...as you do. It's a fair-weather, outdoor occupation and the day was too good to miss. 

I set one up last week and had a lovely time exhausting the blue with some Japanese Shibori and, having since found some good-enough quality cotton in Ikea (54" wide £3 a metre) I was keen to see how it performed. I donned the mask and gloves, measured my five litres of water (three cold, two hot is roughly the right temperature) mixed in the soda ash and the hydros and then sprinkled on the indigo granules and watched the magic happen. The secret to indigo is agitating as little as possible because oxygen is the enemy of the vat, so stirring very gently with a stick and then quickly covering the surface with cling film to let it stew in the sun for an hour before running in to see how Roger and Novak were doing. I think I was rooting for Roger because I wanted to see his two sets of ecstatic twins at the end, but all hail to Novak.

Doesn't that shade of blue make your heart sing, so the answer I think is that the vat and fabric performed splendidly and was well worth the blue grass and the blue hands. Mind you, this is the joy of spring water and garden space I thought as I spread the dripping dippings across the grass to oxidise from green to blue.

I now have a lovely stash to see me into winter projects and lots of ideas as to how I will use the pieces.

On the owlet front all I have to report is that they wake up at about 9.30 pm and start their wheezy calls for food. The parents start to fly in at about 10pm, winging back and forth with delicacies and savoury morsels which ups the noise levels considerably. If this routine holds up we reckon we might see an owlet emerge in a couple of weeks, but meanwhile it has been perfect barn owl weather (warm and dry) and the grass fields have just been cut, so lots of varmints on the loose.

On the garden front it's all gone berserk and we are loving it...

We decided no more weedkillers on the gravel and no more slug pellets and the result is beds of clover buzzing with happy bees and poppies everywhere. We're having some success with coffee grounds on the slug front, which is probably because they don't get a wink of sleep and are too tired to eat anything. The Bee Friendly Meadow seeds from Higgledy Gardens are the success story of the summer, especially now the cornflowers have appeared, along with the 'Solstice' variety sweet peas from The English Sweet Pea Company which I've been picking daily since April, and the dahlia bed with the new Peter Nyssen additions, and the sunflowers, and the ...oh it's all a glorious riotous muddle of flowers.

This is 'Genova', a new and particularly pleasing pom-pom..

On the cat front. I made a 'thing' for the sofa...a sort of log cabin 'thing', out of some Jinny Beyer fabric strips I had cut out about thirty years ago, and spent the years ever since wondering what to do with them. I machine quilted the 'thing' onto a fleece backing and we had bets on how long before Magnus claimed it as home territory.

It was about an hour...

Now I need news from you...what happenings and occurrences do you have to report...

 

 

 

 

 

The Easternmost House ~ Juliet Blaxland

The shortlist for the 2019 Wainwright Prize was announced last week. This the book prize which celebrates the best books about nature, the outdoors and UK travel 

 

Time Song by  Julia Blackburn
The Easternmost House by  Juliet Blaxland

Our Place by  Mark Cocker

Thinking On My Feet by Kate Humble

Underland by Robert Macfarlane
Wilding by Isabella Tree

Out of the Woods by Luke Turner

 

It's a list I always look forward to not least because it's my favourite genre, so perhaps there's a chance I'll be ahead of the game on the reading...I never am. With Time Song by Julia Blackburn and Underland by Robert Macfarlane under my belt, but none of the other five, I turned to The Easternmost House by Juliet Blaxland. In a way it connected seamlessly with Julia Blackburn's book, set as they are on the East Anglian coast and concerned as they both are with land disappearing under the sea.

 

By rights it has to be a source of great anxiety when you know your house is on the brink of disappearing into the North Sea, but Juliet Blaxland quickly puts this into the wider perspective of a husband serving in Afghanistan and I would also suggest the fact that the house is rented not owned. The financial loss of the house will ultimately be someone else's burden which perhaps allows Juliet Baxland to focus more on the spatial and emotional losses instead.

 

'The portrait of a place that soon will no longer exist. It is a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has gone.' 

 

It's as if the house has been fostered until of an age. This felt like a studied emotional attachment that knows its bounds, will know when to let go and thus comes with less baggage, anxiety, worry or fear allowing for a clearer-eyed look at it all.

 

And I loved it for that.

 

Living as we do in the countryside, away from mains drainage and water, in the middle of farmland and a lot of wildlife, and with a son who is a gamekeeper, we have also come to learn, as has Juliet Blaxland, that it is all a question of balance requiring a breadth of understanding, pragmatism, compromise and common sense along with a realistic outlook, and The Easternmost House has it by the shovel-full. Juliet and I agreed on just about everything from living with inclement weather...you just have to accept and brace for it which we do. From foxes to pheasants, from restrictive diets  to hay-fever, the impact of 'ecological bad news', the sirens of doom and the vested interests involved in its dissemination, just how useful rural skills might be one day and what we would be both do when confronted by mile after mile of sawn timber 'unloaded' from a cargo ship and washed ashore on the beach as far as the eye could see... Juliet and I were in complete and generally optimistic and hopeful accord.  

 

Each month begins with a poem, each a perfect choice, some I knew, some I didn't and one in particular that I didn't know and now love, an extract from God of the Open Air by Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933)...

 

These are the things I prize
       And hold of dearest worth:
       Light of the sapphire skies,
       Peace of the silent hills,
 Shelter of forests, comfort of the grass,
 Music of birds, murmur of little rills,
 Shadow of clouds that swiftly pass,
       And, after showers,
       The smell of flowers
   And of the good brown earth,—
And best of all, along the way, friendship and mirth.

 

 

Month by month the bounty of the land is recorded...the wildlife, the natural resources, the weather, the local traditions and way of life, and the practicalities, of which there are many. And also recorded the measurement of cliff loss. Both elegy and eulogy, Juliet suggests that living with erosion has been a life-changing experience. As the land shifts so do perspectives, tolerance increases and what rises to the surface are the things that really matter and, in a less urgent way, I can understand that.

 

It's been an interesting year for us with our resident barn owls. Suddenly no spraying of weeds on the path, not even an organic slug pellet in sight. This year, thanks to a local establishment I have used buckets of coffee grounds. It smells like Costa around the garden and the slugs seem to hate it. Either that or they can't sleep a wink and are too tired to even bother with my dahlias. We've allowed much more of the garden to go semi-wild rather than flogging ourselves over immaculate edges and 24/7 weeding (this is harder than you might think) mowing a path through the grass and daisies in the orchard,  keeping the lawns in shape and leaving the rest. We have been rewarded with the sight of the owls swooping from the nest box into the long grass and returning with dinner and one less creature for Magnus to catch. Poppies, borage, nigella and aquilegia are springing up on the paths along with islands of clover that the bees adore. Juliet Blaxland sees something similar on the cliff edges, as once ploughed land is allowed to naturalise, and in doing so ably achieves her aim of making the cottage on the cliff and its surroundings as familiar to the reader as it is to her. 

 

I understood this conclusion exactly...

 

'This place has quietly taught us how to carry its still small voice of calm within us, always and wherever we go...'

The Easternmost House an excellent read and one most deserving of its Wainwright Prize short listing.

 

And oh alright, here's another picture for you...one very clever Mrs Barn Owl. Wild and free and very busy feeding her noisy brood.

 

 

 

 

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

Further to my discovery of Backlisted Pod I followed up with a read of The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller, one of the hosts. Famed on Twitter for his skyscraper stack of books read each month which is often followed by some heated trolling about whether he has a life, or a job or a family, nevertheless his reading prowess (it's his job) is extraordinary and his choices fascinating. The Year of Reading Dangerously is about one man's attempt to up his reading game by filling in the gaps, exploring how and what we read and 'why we should make time to do so.' There's something of the mid-life-oh-my-god-I'm-almost-forty to the premise and with a sense of renewed enthusiasm and some urgency Andy sets about a chosen list of titles to read in the year. Time must be carved out of seemingly non-existent hours and it is surprising how it mounts up into a good chunk of reading time per day. 

One early saviour, when the project looks doomed to failure at the second hurdle known as Middlemarch, is for Andy to set himself a set number of pages in a day. Now I'm remembering our year long read of Middlemarch on here a few years ago, when Bookhound carved a spare copy into eight equal segments to mirror the instalments that the Victorians had read and we were up and away.

If you love other people's reading journeys then this is the book for you. If you don't then I'm sure Andy Miller (who has a very self-effacing sense of humour) would say just get on and read the books you do want to read and pass this one by...except you'll miss...oh well, never mind.

 

Spring by Ali Smith

I really feel I should devote a whole blog post to Spring but to be honest, much as I enjoyed reading it, I'm not sure I've really grasped the nettle and fully embraced the project. This might be sacrilege, and I may be cast out, but perhaps I should have read Autumn and Winter, the first two in this seasonal quartet first. I'm a devotee of some but not all of Ali Smith's writing and suspect this might be more about whether my reading mood is ready to be challenged by the post-post modern approach or whether it just needs a jolly good story. How clever am I feeling in other words, because I think Spring is a  very clever book that requires some application. Nevertheless, returning to Backlisted Pod (who aren't sending me cheques in the post or anything, but are informing my reading a little right now) there is a brilliant episode where Andy Miller (see above, he's not sending me cheques either) reads out the first few pages and I was transfixed among my 150 dahlia seedlings in the greenhouse as I listened. If you have read Hard Times by Charles Dickens then you will get the Gradgrindian gist of Ali Smith's opening pages and perhaps proceed to relate the book to our own times.

 

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

This might be another book that left me feeling slightly bemused. Not for the quality of the writing but for what was actually going on, but Heavens has garnered some good reviews so what do I know.

Set in New York in 2000 and London in 1598 time travel is my first potential for confusion, which is not helped by the intentional incongruences...a flag has been planted on Mars, there is no war anywhere and a Green Party senator is about to become the first female president of the United States. 

Kate seems to live both in the present and via her dreams in the past, frequently 'waking' as Emilia, 'the mistress of a nobleman and surrounded by the plague. My recent plague and pestilence affinity helped, as did the occasional location of Nonsuch Palace for the action. The Palace long gone but replaced by a girls' school in the 1930s, and of course my alma mater in the 1960s. I'm not sure we gave much thought to the fact that Henry VIII might have galloped over our hockey pitch, but anyway the slightest mention in any book and I'm right back there bullying off. 

It is  certainly a story of love and madness  and I begged my Reading Friend to read it too (especially  given her workaday psychiatric experience) in the hope that we might figure it out between us. To be honest we didn't so if you have read The Heavens and have some thoughts to offer about this, or any of the other books, please do.

Meanwhile, what have you all been reading?

Let’s have ourselves a list of good suggestions for the summer holidays....

 

The Owlets...

I'm not sure I can accurately convey the excitement that was Tuesday.

The Barn Owl Trust came to visit, to have a look in the pole box and if they found any owlets they would be weighed, measured, ringed and put back. Assuring us that the owlets were 'bomb-proof we were on the proverbial tenterhooks as Rick, having quietly blocked the entrance way, climbed the ladder and very carefully opened the inspection hatch. 

We were fairly sure that the mother was still roosting in the box by day because we see her coming out each evening, but our estimates about owlets varied. Some evenings all was quiet, certainly no noise by day.

Did this mean they were well-fed and happy...

Or perhaps god-forbid they were fading away.

I seek regular reassurance from Elaine, 'the Owl Whistler' over on Twitter, who has been a constant source of advice and encouragement since the barn owls first arrived back in March.

Except our nightly Barn Owl Watch suggested regular incoming flights with food and a chorus of little wheezy thank-yous...but all the same, no way of knowing.

'The female's in here...'

'How many babies Rick...'

'Two...'

'Yes two...'

'No THREE.'

TRIPLETS...we have triplets.

We all held our breath as very slowly and very quietly (and skilfully) the owl and then the owlets were put into cloth bags and brought down and, for the owlets, outside into the world for the first time. 

Little Owlet - the smallest of the three

Perfect little owlets, impeccably behaved, not in the least bit bothered by this bit of excitement

Middle Owlet

Rick weighed each owlet in turn, smallest first, measured the wings, checked them over and estimated they were about 4-5 weeks old. Eggs are laid at intervals and thus hatch every few days.

Black eyes  and little beaks stared out at us from miniature, perfectly formed heart-shaped faces. 

Large Owlet

Surprisingly large claws  with growing talons...

Downy feathers...

Middle Owlet

Wing feathers, proper flying gear, starting to form...

Seeing the female close-up, she who we have stared at day in day out, was a real privilege. I'm amazed at how docile they all were though Rick says it's not always like that.

Who could argue with the sheer beauty of this from afar, but then when you can look closely...

Weighed, wings measured, ringed and put back, the box was left with the entrance still blocked for ten minutes to let them all settle down. We went into the kitchen for a cup of tea, and so, with two barn owl experts trapped at our kitchen table, we asked countless questions and got loads of invaluable information.

The next key stage, probably towards the end of July will be the Flying Lessons. The depth of the box is designed to keep the owlets safely inside until they have to be able to semi-fly to get out, but we could have a dodgy few days when they might hit the ground before mastering the art, so we will need to be very vigilant.

But for now much joy about July 2nd 2019, Owlet Day, a day we will never forget, and as for this moment, well how special was this... me and Middle Owlet saying hello briefly before it went back in the box. It's still too soon to tell whether male or female, but the memory of that handful of plump breathing baby owl and warm downy feathers will stay with me from now until forever 

And with thanks as always to Tommy Hatwell for the beautiful images

 

 

 

 

De Profundis: Robert Macfarlane talks to Horatio Clare at the Hay Festival

I'd bought the tickets in December and there they'd sat on the kitchen shelf ever since, but in the end time was against us in the run up to the opening of Tinker's Cott a few weeks ago. Bookhound and I agreed that a long day trip to Hay-on-Wye to hear Robert Macfarlane in conversation with Horatio Clare was just not feasible, so, knowing the event was a sell-out, I offered the tickets free via Twitter. I was delighted to hear from Gail Simmons because by coincidence Gail's book has been to hand recently. 

The Country of Larks - A Chiltern Journey. Subtitled In the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson and the footprint of HS2, Gail takes to the roads and countryside of her childhood almost 150 years after Stevenson to 'peel back the layers of history, recording forever a world destined for change.'  The Chilterns is not an area I know particularly well but I will be reading the journey alongside Gail once I've got Odysseus safely into port with my month-of-June read of Homer. It's a beautiful little pocket-sized book too. 

Anyway I posted the Hay tickets off to Gail and asked (cheekily)  if she would mind writing a blog post about the event for us here, and I am really grateful because she has...

De Profundis: Robert Macfarlane talks to Horatio Clare at the Hay Festival

Writers are solitary creatures. Reading is a solitary activity. So should I be surprised that book festivals are today such popular and gregarious experiences?

Bill Clinton may have described Hay as ‘the Woodstock of the mind’ but my first experience of the festival last month reminded me of Wimbledon - all deckchairs, picnics and Pimm’s.  A uniquely British gathering, with books instead of tennis. And like those for Wimbledon’s Centre Court, the queue for Robert Macfarlane’s fixture with Horatio Clare at the Baillie Gifford stage was long, patient and good humoured.

Macfarlane has an almost rock-star following, with over 150,000 devotees on Twitter alone. So it was no marvel that all 1,700 seats in the marquee were taken. Some fans had even brought along their copies of Underland, the author and academic’s latest bestseller.

Still, the two authors managed a relaxed conversation, seated in front of changing images accompanying Underland’s theme. Short questions were followed by full answers. Macfarlane thinks clearly, and possesses the exceptional (and enviable) gift of speaking in fully-formed paragraphs. 

Many reviewers have highlighted the author’s visits to potholes, mines and catacombs, but Underland is a book about time rather than place. And not just regular human time, but deep geological time. Underland is profound in more than one sense. Macfarlane has explored the earth’s deepest, darkest places and he’s emerged a troubled man. As he commented, ’we are shallowing deep time with our actions.’ There’s now even a term for humanity’s geological impact: the anthropocene.

Macfarlane is no pulpit-thumping, evangelical preacher. Rather, he reminded me of a benevolent Anglican vicar trying to deliver a message of hope while gently urging us to repent. Speculating about the future, he asked the audience ‘will we be good ancestors?’ He’s plainly frustrated with politics, and with politicians who have no incentive to consider future generations, invoking the example of schoolchildren like Greta Thunberg who show no such constraints. They have little interest in the past - only concern for the future.

I’ve not yet read Underland. But like his other books, it’s clearly an intellectual journey full of word-wizardry, dizzying knowledge and classical allusions. At one point during the talk, Macfarlane even joked about the inclusion of a rare joke. But then anxiety about our fate is no laughing matter.

The book’s themes may be complex, but Horatio Clare – himself a distinguished author - posed lucid, concise questions, prompting Macfarlane’s anecdotes and reflections. I wonder how many other authors might have tried to make this more about themselves, but Clare left his ego at home and handed the spotlight to the star of the show.

While the event felt like a fireside chat the staging matched a rock concert, complete with a live piece of Underland-themed music by The Bookshop Band which charmingly concluded the conversation. Then, after a few audience questions, it was back out into the evening sunshine for a final glass of Pimm’s.

I know some of you were there too so please do add your thoughts in comments if you want to, and perhaps some of you have encountered a Robert Macfarlane event during his current US tour so we'd love to hear from you too.

Maybe you have read Underland by now, if so please do leave a comment with your thoughts...

Meanwhile my thanks to Gail for this post and for giving our tickets a good home.