dovegreyreader scribbles

Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile ~ Alice Jolly

Imbecile - A stupid person.

Mid 16th century (as an adjective in the sense ‘physically weak’): via French from Latin imbecillus, literally ‘without a supporting staff’, from in- (expressing negation) + baculum ‘stick, staff’. The current sense dates from the early 19th century.

I thought I'd better look up the meaning and origins of the word 'imbecile' because its one of those words that has floated along and possibly changed its inference down the years. I'd suggest used mostly as a form of friendly mockery or intense frustration of or with a. n. other person these days, but used quite seriously in Mary Ann Sate's day. Turning to Wikipaedia ...

The term imbecile was once used by psychiatrists to denote a category of people with moderate to severe intellectual disability, as well as a type of criminal.... It included people with an IQ of 26–50, between "idiot" (IQ of 0–25) and "moron" (IQ of 51–70).

What became clear as I read my way into this fictional 'found memoir' of the life and times of Mary Ann Sate was that she was none of these.

It was my pleasure to be invited to 'champion' a book from the current Rathbones Folio Prize short list prior to the announcement of the winner on May 20th, and I was delighted when my plea for Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile was granted. The book had crept quietly onto my radar not via the review pages because none had reviewed it, but via a couple of prize lists thus confirming the importance of their existence. Published by Unbound and therefore crowd sourced, Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly has been long-listed not only for the this prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize but also commended by  the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Yet no press reviews (until very recently) and its absence from the Women's Prize long list will remain a mystery to me, but then perhaps being passed over in this way segues well with the narrative of Mary Ann's life, because here is a book that gives a voice to the 'unheard' as the elderly maidservant Mary Ann Sate writes the  story of her life throughout the nineteenth century.

In 2008, in the very early days of the scribbles, I was invited by Oxford University Press to share a platform at the Oxford Literary Festival with Mark Thwaite and Professors John Mullen and John Carey. It was one of those nerve-wracking (for me)  'Bloggers v Critics' events when comparisons and inevitably criticisms of the latter day amateurs were being made and I was braced for the onslaught. We were seen to be scaling the ivory towers and it was all very contentious, however John Carey saw all this very differently (as you might expect from the author of  The Intellectuals and the Masses Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939)). He had read here extensively and was very complimentary about the way that the voice of the people was now becoming a matter of record. 'What we would give to hear the voices of the ordinary people from earlier centuries.. ' he said. At the time the scribbles were being digitally archived by The British Library as a social record for the future (they may still be, I gave permission).

Back in harness to a member of the family she has served in the past and who is now dying (painfully) Mary Ann Sate writes her own story alongside that of her 'master', though his takes second place to hers. Mary Ann privileges her own experiences, looking back on her life and creating tantalising shadows of events yet unknown and still to be explained. Set in the valleys around Stroud in Gloucestershire it quickly becomes clear that facial disfigurement is the cause of much misjudgement of Mary Ann's abilities and prejudice against her; she has been born with a cleft lip...

'A Devil Hare did cross your mothers' path...'

Destined to a live a life of struggle and servitude, first at The Heavens and then at Stocton Hall, where her employer Mr Harland Cottrell has taken her in as more of an interesting and useful oddity, there is little doubt that Mary Ann is in firm possession of all her faculties and no slouch at using them. Cottrell , a man of kind heart but uneven temper and possibly even more 'uneven' medical practice, employs Mary Ann as an unpaid servant and, against a backdrop of social change and civic unrest (Chartist riots, the 1832 Reform Act ) life in the mill town through Mary Ann's eyes is slowly but steadily revealed. Cottrell gives Mary Ann the opportunity of an education as well as repairing her cleft lip, and written in short stanzas the book  creates a vivid picture of the traumas and threats of change, and the dangers of the nineteenth century, especially for those living in poverty.  I was reminded of Hilary Mantel's words at Budleigh Literary Festival a few years ago...

'My greatest joy is to take a name and give them person-hood...a particle of being...doing honour to what is lost...'

Don't be phased by the size of the book at 600 pages, nor the vernacular which soon becomes familiar, nor the versified layout, but this was a book that required my full attention while I was reading it. I ended up setting everything else aside to concentrate on this one life, paying time to check into the spaces, the gaps that Alice Jolly creates in which to visualise the characters, the landscape, the work, the trials and the challenges, the smells and tastes too. And relishing the opportunity to get to know the indomitable and pragmatic Mary Ann.

The narrative is a tour-de-force, a stunning achievement, beautifully paced and measured, often as slow as the times, but how often have I looked at the tithe map and wondered about the people...seen the names in the village churchyard and conjured up the people here ...their life in this house, and yes, their deaths too. 

This is a book that transported me there and more.

There is a wonderful moment when Mary Ann realises she can read...

'Sudden it all clear as drops of dancing water
The words flow away from me
I know them all
My eyes fly down the lines
Inside I am leaping
For I can read

I leapt with Mary Ann because I wonder if you can remember the moment you knew you could read...I can. Literacy, never to be taken for granted in the nineteenth century, will be Mary Ann's shining glory and her greatest asset.

The impact of industrialisation and the threat it created for the workers is profound. There are no safety nets, life is precarious for many and punishment for protest and dissent is severe. Looking through the archives for our local press there are plenty of notices of transportation for poaching on the Duke of Bedford's land here too, as in Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile, many a villager dispatched to Van Diemen's Land. There is scorn for the lower orders and a mocking of new ideas, but Mary Ann is made of strong stuff. The poor woman's lot is not a happy one; powerless and subservient and at the mercy of one and all, but what she may initially lack in self-confidence Mary Ann makes up for in resilience and resourcefulness and most importantly survival.

Arguably there are parallels here with modern times, the impact of change, and progress in its name, on ordinary working people, on minorities (and majorities) and attitudes towards them, about giving them a voice and listening to it, about respecting their choices and decisions. It all made for a fruitful read as I made the comparisons with our Hour of Turmoil, and by the time I turned the final page I knew I had read something of a masterpiece. An epic six hundred pages of punctuation-less, sort-of-verse with beguiling rhythms and cadences that left me marvelling at Alice Jolly's skill and imagination and staying power. This is diligent, careful writing with astute attention to details, it has a sustained rhythm and flow which doesn't falter and must have required complete immersion and vision to write, and several years of it too.

In the end the book is written, Mary Ann has used her voice and recounted her life in her own way and knowing that it will soon be over...

'For we are but tenants here
A wind that passeth doth not return'

Except Mary Ann Sate and all those lost voices she represents have returned, in the pages of this book. In the immortal words of Hilary Mantel ' you are not dead if someone still talks about you.'

I wish Mary Ann (and Alice Jolly) much good fortune at the announcement of the prize winner on Monday.

 

 

The English Patient ~ Michael Ondaatje

Twenty-seven years since it won the Booker Prize in 1992 (maybe check my maths as usual) twenty-two years since I read The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje in 1997, a lot happened that year, more or less in this order from January...

I started six years of an OU degree in English Literature...

My mum died...

I had a full-time health visiting caseload of about 400 children...

I was sub-poenaed to give evidence in court in a child protection case concerning a family the multi-agency services had been working to bring back together for two years. It wasn't going to happen. It was awful...

Our own children were sixteen, fourteen and twelve...

We had moved house three years previously and it was a renovation work-in-progress...

I've checked my reading journal. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy won the Booker prize and though I didn't read it, I did read sixteen others in that year.

Just sixteen books, how different my life was then to now. 

Amongst the books I read that year were The Crow Road by Iain Banks, Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks, The Magus by John Fowles, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood and of course The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

Truth be told I really didn't quite follow or understand The English Patient in 1997, though seeing the film helped, and looking back I think this is hardly surprising because, having just read it for a second time, I can see it is a book that demands peace and quiet and above all thinking space. It's a book to put down and carry on sitting and pondering, not grabbing a chapter in my car in my lunch break whilst out on my visits and then rushing back for a baby clinic. 

Four war-damaged people holed up in a villa, once a nunnery, near Florence towards the end of the war. The German retreat has been considered and brutal. The countryside is laced with landmines and booby traps at every turn and whilst Sikh sapper Kip ('the warrior saint')  sets about defusing more of them each day back in the villa Hana cares for 'the English Patient'. The anonymous man so badly burned that he is unrecognisable and clearly dying. Into the mix comes David Caravaggio (thief, drug addict and now thumbless after Nazi torture) a character along with Hana who both first appeared in Michael Ondaatje's 1987 novel In the Skin of a Lion.

What I may have missed first time around I gleaned by the shovel-full this time. 

Hana, the young nurse traumatised by what she has witnessed and grieving for the loss of her father epitomises so much else that has been lost through war...trust, faith, love, home, safety, security and more.

Slowly the story of the English patient emerges, and here I really don't want to spoil the book in case you haven't read it, but whilst I missed the nuances and maybe even the plot last time, this time I was right on it. And thinking too about how cultish elements of this book became...

Wasn't it fashionable to clutch a copy of Herodotus and stick ephemera in amongst its pages...

Maybe Michael Ondaatje, along with Bruce Chatwin and his Moleskine notebooks, were partly responsible for a resurgence in popularity of  the commonplace book, the journal...

'And in his commonplace book, his 1890 edition of Herodotus's Histories are other fragments - maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books. All that is missing is his own name.'

This time around The English Patient has stunned me, been welded to my hands for two days. It's a truly timeless classic. Michael Ondaatje creates a living and visible tableau in a place once given to devotion, silence and prayer, and something of its essence hangs in the air. For all its slow revelation of traumas there is a quietness to the book that soaks them up, absorbing the pain.

There were moments of deep peace too. Moments that surprised me...

When the gramophone is brought into the room, the music plays and the four have an impromptu party. I played some of the tracks...Solitude by Duke Ellington and Honeysuckle Rose by Django Reinhardt and Stefan Grappelli, doubling down into the atmosphere of the book and the moment like no other.

And thinking too how the internet has made all this possible. How much enjoyment it can add to a book to be able to play the music, or track down a poetic account of the stars and discover that it is from Paradise Lost...

These then, though unbeheld in deep of night
Shine not in vain, nor think, though men were none
That Heav'n would want spectators, God want praise
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the Earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.

Fewer people might have known that when the book was published.

And then the war must end with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Kip, the disposer of bombs, is undone and with it came a sudden and profound awareness of that August day. 

So there you have it. The English Patient a book that has read differently as the cadence of my life has changed, and finally I understand what the rest of the world has been going on about all this time.

I'd love to know your memories, experiences and thoughts about reading this book...

 

 

 

 

Girl ~ Rebecca Goss - Poet

The Certificates

Mothers were not given space to write their occupations on UK
birth certificates until 1984. Source : General Register Office

The registrar takes his pen, tips its freight
of permanent ink to write Poet in the space
that did not exist beside my mother's name.

or my grandmother's name. Those bloody
sweat-drenched women sent back to hearth
and cradle, their skills cancelled, never known...

 

I have been reading Rebecca Goss's new collection Girl, (following on from the post about Her Birth earlier in the week) is from the cover information...

'In Girl, Rebecca Goss considers the emotional and physical connections women make to the world around them. The poems interrogate and celebrate female identity and experience, and the dynamics of family and friendship. From a woman struck by lightning to a baby who understands shadows, Goss navigates the real and the imagined with equal flair. At the heart of the collection is a distinctive, sensual series of poems responding to the work of the artist Alison Watt: the result is a fearless exploration of the female body and female desire. '

The collection is still very new to me and it will be a while before I can absorb it, but I'm sensing that affinity with a poet who has already made an impression. I'm thinking how new collections from the likes of Jean Sprackland and Alice Oswald quickly make their mark. The range and scope of Girl still feels vast and untamed to me at the moment, still unfamiliar as do all new collections, but poems are starting to impress and stay with me just as Her Birth did.

If you have ever had pleurisy then reading the series on pleurisy might resonate. Pleurisy 1 reminded me quite how awful it was...

At its most acute
she pictured an orb

phosphorescent
in a snare of a rib.

It eased to the pressure 
of a handstand,

executed
by someone fully grown

on her chest
and every cough

discharged small bombs
across her back....

I succumbed to pleurisy out of nowhere one fine day in August back in 1986 standing in a friend's kitchen. One breath fine, the next agony. I eventually went to the doctor with my 'pulled muscle' and emerged with antibiotics the size of torpedoes and had to set a timer to make myself cough every thirty minutes because it was so painful. I'd been walking round with three small children and pneumonia and had no idea, because aren't you always a bit tired and under the weather with three of them under school age. The pain, those 'small bombs' across the back, lasted for months. Rebecca Goss describes it all in five exquisite poems spaced throughout the collection.

And then that poem The Certificates I have quoted at the beginning...

My mother had four children in a decade,
each certificate proving nothing but birth.
My lineage? Patriarchal : father/farmer...

I don't want to spoil it because there is a delicious twist in the next few lines, but had I ever noticed that only one of our children's birth certificates has my occupation written in. The one born in 1985...

We keep the full copies here. I dig them all out to check and I am utterly astonished.

Did I think to consider it an injustice at the time.

These are definitely poems to make me think.

 

 

Barn Owl ~ Jim Crumley (and meet ours)

Let's be honest, I was duty-bound to do some pleasurable barn owl homework, and this little beauty, Barn Owl one of the 'Encounters in the Wild' series by Jim Crumley, published by Saraband Books, was a very happy find and a very enjoyable read.

Some time ago I wrote about The Company of Swans by the same author, a book that deservedly sits on my Best Books About Nature shelf and Barn Owl will join it.

Just to update...

Having seen two owls in the pole box we have only been seeing one for a few weeks now. By all accounts this is a 'Good Sign' suggesting that Mr is doing the foraging whilst Mrs sits on a clutch of eggs. Out he pops at about 9pm, and sits and ponders for a while. I walked up the field behind the house and the box just to get an idea of his view ...

Not bad...

Then he takes to the wing. We walk out along the lane and he flies over and around us, and back and forth to the nest box. As the light fades everything everyone writes about barn owls happens. Jim Crumley calls them 'ambassadors for life on the edge...the silent flier...'

They look so small and compact perched on their veranda...

and then she pops back in and he lifts off, and we see these huge wings.

Everything else that flies around us here has an audible flutter or beat to its wings, but not the barn owl, completely silent as it glides. And yes, he does turn his head around 180 degrees.

Watching barn owls on the Isle of Skye, Jim Crumley doesn't quite enjoy the luxury of the warmth of the bathroom vantage point that we do, which makes me realise that it might be quite unusual to sit and watch barn owls in such comfort (the Kayaker did a shift with his camera over Easter). But likewise, on a moonlit night, Jim is transfixed by his 'rarefied barn owl watching' as the owl ...

'flew around two sides of the cottage ...and burst with devastating slowness and silence into that tingling airspace...'

Wondering where ours was one evening last week I nipped across from the bathroom to look from a bedroom window at the front of the house. Acres of beautiful barn-owl friendly fields and I was hoping for a glimpse of him flying.

Nothing...

I opened the bedroom window to lean out a bit and he took off from the roof above my head. I didn't quite fall out with the excitement of the moment, but he'd obviously been perched there and me oblivious.

Jim Crumley recounts many-an astonishing encounter with Tyto alba, summoning up the most vivid impressions of a bird once met never forgotten. Bookhound and I have become complete Barn Owl Bores, except people around us here seem to be pleased and interested and more boxes will be going up I'm sure. We all thought they had long deserted this patch of the Tamar Valley so to see them back is heartening, but the book explains the cycle, the field vole 'crash' and 'plague' population phenomenon and the barn owls dependence on this food source. In a vole 'plague' year the owls will start breeding early and lay big clutches (oh please), maybe even try for several broods, whilst in the 'crash' years they decide not to breed. It will be too much like hard work finding food and they know it. The figures are startling, the barn owl's intelligence and resilience incredible.

So far we have only found one pellet. Barn owls cough up the undigestible left-overs from a meal in pellet form and make their nest from them, Jim calls it 'architectural recycling'. We suspect Mrs Barn Owl might be sitting on a veritable mattress of them up in that there pole box. And yes of course we dissected it...

I was intrigued by Jim Crumley's suggestion that badgers and barn owls are 'kindred spirits of the half-light and the half-dark, we'd call it the dimpsey, but of course they are. Nor did I know that badgers 'insist on the proximity of water' which explains the location of the setts around us here. We often see one lumbering along the lane at night, but Jim's account of the badger cub and the barn owl wins the day...maybe the barn owl is an unearthly sight even for a badger, they know to keep their distance.

But the modern world is fraught with dangers and hazards and Jim Crumley's elaboration of those had me wincing. HS2 the new high speed rail link from London to Birmingham...

'predicts the loss of the entire barn owl breeding population within 1.5km of the entire length of the route'.

The population is further decimated by rat poison, all of which makes doing our best by our pair even more important. In any case we've limited our own use of poisons and pesticide for a while now, and there will be no slug pellets this year either (I'm currently experimenting with coffee grounds), but we can't control what happens beyond our boundaries. Having spoken to the Barn Owl Trust to ask how we could help create optimum barn owl habitat, we then contacted the land agent (who agreed it was a good idea) and the farmer who rents the grassland around us (who hasn't replied) to ask if he would consider leaving a margin around the field behind the pole box when he cuts the grass. If we are here on the day they do it I'll go out and lie down in front of it or something.

Jim Crumley highlights the good conservation work being done by many of the organisations, and how grateful we are to the Barn Owl Trust for their endeavours with the Westmoor project here nine years ago. They are hoping to come and open the inspection hatch and look inside the box in June...if there are owlets apparently they are 'pretty bomb proof' by then. Fingers crossed, and meanwhile for the nearest next best thing to actually watching them, Jim Crumley's book is a winner...oh yes and then there's this (with thanks to Tommy Hatwell)

Her Birth ~ Rebecca Goss

Reading the new collection Girl by Rebecca Goss (my thoughts coming up later this week) has taken me back to the first collection 'Her Birth' which wowed me back in 2013.  I was just going to link to it, then I thought I'd just pull out an extract, but in the end I've almost made myself cry remembering how moved I was by this book, so with no apology, here's the whole lot; here are my thoughts from five years ago..

'In 2007 Rebecca Goss’s newborn daughter Ella was diagnosed with Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly, a rare and incurable heart condition. She lived for sixteen months. Her Birth is a book-length sequence of poems beginning with Ella’s birth, her short life and her death, and ending with the joys and complexities that come with the birth of another child. Goss navigates the difficult territory of grief and loss in poems that are spare, tender and haunting: ‘Going home, back down / the river road, will be a foreign route without her’.

Now when you learn of the subject matter you might think this collection would be far too sad to read and maybe pass it by for those reasons ..

...and I'll admit that reluctance was my first thought, quickly followed by my second thought. After my release from thirty years on the health visiting front line, followed by four years of working across the loss and bereavement forums as on online health visitor for Netmums and having only just emerged from the stresses and demands of all that, well did I really want to read more of the same??

And during my first golden summer of not working might this be a little too much like work...

All this until I opened and started reading what I think maybe one of the most beautiful, tender and lovingly written poetry collections I have read in a very long time.

Though unflinching and courageously honest in her observations, Rebecca Goss never slips into self-pity. As a reader I was alongside her but still watching from afar...somehow she created that distance for me, or maybe I am too well practised at boundaries. This wasn't my grief or my sadness it was Rebecca's, but I was witness to it, every facet and nuance shared and revealed, the unsayable frequently voiced, but often in a very new way.

Who ever gives any thought to the hospital room where the bad news is broken...

'No tabloids, no vending cups, no debris
of the bored and hungry, Instead
carpet, fireplace, neat homely items. 

'This is not the room where you wait for news,
this is the room where you are told it.'

And instantly, after all those years of nursing, I saw something about that room which I had never noticed before either.

There are fresh new interpretations of the familiar, the happy things, but expressed in terms of loss rather than the more customary joy and frivolity. The moment when, during an echocardiogram bubbles are wafted around the room to distract Ella...

'.................Keep clear spheres

coming around her head, wanting them to last,
each pop a small, inexplicable loss.'

...and with those few lines I felt I understood something of the desperation of a parent willing the results to be optimistic, willing their child to live.

Rebecca is no stranger to denial. The bare facts have been explained, spelt out, drawn in diagrams, cannot be avoided, but that won't stop a mother swathing herself in hope, reading meaning into the words in the dictionary, turning to the word 'palliative' and then shaping that meaning into something she would prefer to hear. 

And then the dreams, I defy anyone not to be moved or comforted by Rebecca's A Dream of Heart Babies ( a poem for their mothers)  as gathered on the deck of a ship 'a shoal of heart babies' slip into the sea

'in a search for chambers more complex than coral.'

Hauled back into the ship, the catch, the babies,

'Each one cups a new heart...'

I gasped and blinked back tears and knew that Her Birth is a poetry collection freighted with riches; insight and understanding to those of us who may not have been through this experience, congruence and comfort to those who have, but ultimately I suspect every reader will also emerge uplifted, lighter of step and filled with bright hope for tomorrow. This is not a book that weighs you down.

Rebecca Goss makes sure of that with her final section entitled Welcome. It begins with a poem that explains why she and her husband decide to try for another baby, before going on to catalogue the realities of the next pregnancy with all its memories of the past...

'The midwife holds a file, the sad biography
of my procreative life. My ability to bear 
the unhealthy means the doctor must locate
a lump of thumping muscle...' 

Along with the fears that I remember so many mothers expressing so often after the loss of a baby, there is another one, of how to love the next baby as much..

'I am hoping I will love you
each time I find you, usurping another's cot.'

The clothes, the birth, the shadows of Ella as Rebecca cradles Molly, how to eventually tell Molly about her sister. the true pleasures and delights of a child who is well, the pilgrimage to the seashore, wading into the sea where Ella's ashes were scattered, but ultimately how time, though it's considered the worst thing to say to anyone, does do its work, and heals..

'Come and hold my hand, little one,
stand beside me in your small shoes,

let's head for your undiscovered life,
your mother's ready now, let's run.'

 

Milton Place ~ Elisabeth de Waal

Of Persephone's 132 books, I counted over 100 that take as their foundation England and English-ness. It has been a fruitful source for Persephone over the last twenty years. Reclaiming forgotten writing by women and bringing it back into print; reminders of fascinating periods in our country's history when women's lives and voices were frequently subsumed by the clamour, whilst at the same time exposing the struggles and challenges in the light of our twenty-first century English sensibilities. There's plenty of harmless nostalgia for those that seek it too and me, I do love a book about a country house.

So when the latest Biannually arrived, and I saw that the two new books were a second volume of short stories and Milton Place by Elisabeth de Waal, a previously unpublished novel about a large house in the country in the 1950s.  I ordered a copy of each immediately because I had read and loved The Exiles Return and will bring that post back up into the light soon whilst I have Elisabeth de Waal in mind. More about the book of short stories soon too.

Critiques quoted in the magazine included this from Elisabeth de Waal's friend the philosopher Eric Voegelin, to whom she had sent the unnamed manuscript for Milton Place and in whose archive it was discovered...

'In brief, you are in love with England - the England that is dying. In sum, this novel is a fine piece of work.'

Milton Place with its themes of...

'the decaying country house with rooms shut up and faithful retainers, the newcomer, the two terrible daughters, the echoes of The Go-Between ...

and a novel that has lain unnoticed in that archive in California since 1967.

My introduction to Elisabeth de Waal first came whilst reading The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (Elisabeth's grandson) and I have returned to that memorable book to reacquaint myself with her early life.

Born in 1900 and the eldest of four children of Viktor and Emmi  von Ephrussi and one of Vienna's foremost Jewish banking families, the descriptions of Elisabeth's privileged childhood in the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna are fascinating.

'The children are driven in the carriage for a daily walk with the English nannies in the Prater, where the air is less dusty than the Ringstrasse. A footman comes too, walking behind in a fawn greatcoat and wearing a top hat with an Ephrussi badge stuck on it...'

The prettier sister (Gisela) always preferred as a sitter for a portrait or a photograph, Elisabeth's prescribed time with her mother, being read to, being allowed to play with the netsuke. At fourteen Elisabeth is described as 'a serious young girl who is allowed to sit at dinner with the grown-ups.' She listens to politicians and bankers, she builds up her own library, she desperately wants to go to university and works hard to achieve an education thanks to the help of a private tutor. With the family's wealth decimated by the First World War there is, in the words of Edmund de Waal, a 'huge falling away' and he senses 'intimations of nostalgia' that surround the keeping of things...

'You keep this silver snuff box...you keep the bracelet given by a lover. Viktor and Emmy kept everything - all these possessions...but they lost their sense of a future of manifold possibilities. This is how they were diminished.'

Elisabeth, in 1919 now studying philosophy, law and economics at Vienna University, strikes up a correspondence with one her poetic heroes, Rainer Maria Rilke, sending him some of her own poetry and receiving constructive ideas in response. Eventually graduating and moving to America and meeting and marrying a young dutchman Hendrik de Waal, the new family will settle in Paris between the wars and later in Switzerland, from where Elisabeth has to watch traumatic events unfold at home. At the end of the war the family will move to England and settle in Tunbridge Wells. These chapters in The Hare With Amber Eyes still bring tears to my eyes along with memories of the tears we all shed when Edmund de Wall read from them (at my request) when I interviewed him at Port Eliot Festival.

I'm re-reading them now to get a fuller picture of the author of Milton Place and with it comes a deeper understanding of her life, and quite how she might have been able to tune herself so harmoniously into the nuances of an English country house.

I'm hoping I've brought us back to where we started 600 hundred or so words ago because Milton Place, among the best of Persephone's books that I have read, held me in its thrall over a weekend of uninterrupted reading.

Mr Barlow, lives a quiet and undemanding life in this big old house with the support of staff...the butler, the housekeeper, the gardener and chauffeur, and two married daughters hovering like helicopters stage left ready to step in and organise his life for him whenever the opportunity arises. Milton Place is a house with a personality, a character in the book..

'The great house hung like a vast garment many times too big for the shrunken stature of its diminished inhabitants...'

When a letter arrives from Vienna, from the daughter of an old flame, and memories of unrequited love are rekindled, Mr Barlow has no hesitation in granting Anita Seiler's request to come and stay for while in order to recover from the traumas of her war experiences. 

Elisabeth de Waal creates such astute and observant portrayals of character that I can't help but feel those skills had their origins at the dining table of Palais Ephrussi; so much so that she made it possible for this reader to slip into the shoes of each of them in turn...

Mr Barlow, who resists all interference from his daughters responding to any attempts at change with a firm and quiet resolve...

Anita who equally quietly invests her time and love into bringing Milton Place back to life....

Daughters Emily and Cecilia, both threatened in different ways by this interloper...

Cecilia's eighteen-year-old son Tony who has spent much of his life at Milton Place in the school holidays and with the arrival of Anita...

Anita, grateful for a place of quiet refuge and keen to offer something in return, sets about opening up each room in the house. Dusting off and reinstating the many possessions, displaying them to their best, and I couldn't help but think about Viktor and Emmy and the moment when the Gestapo take over and ransack Palais Ephrussi...

'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.'

It is Mr Barlow's 'stuff' that Anita reinstates...is it too far-fetched to invest Elisabeth de Waal's imagined restoration of that beloved house in Vienna into her fictional account of the restoration to life of a house in the English countryside?

Released from the dust sheets and a state of benign neglect, the house breathes and the heart of Milton Place starts to beat again, becoming a gentle and therapeutic restorative, a place of renewal and rejuvenation for both Anita and Mr Barlow, and a period of intense calm and happiness will follow. And not forgetting young Tony who completes this triangle of affection, though a truly tangled web of emotions will ensue. When outspoken and controlling daughter Emily decides its time for things to change, and puts her plan into action (no spoilers but a truly 1950's 'English' method and solution) it is clear that there will some unravelling for all concerned. When her sister Cecilia, abused cowed and coerced by her  domineering GP husband, comes to stay, well, expect fireworks.

For all Elisabeth de Waal's European origins Milton Place is quintessentially and quirkily English and I loved it all the more for that. Many of our country houses have been demolished, and those that remain in family ownership often require good stewardship and lateral thinking in order to survive. Peter Stansky, writing in the afterword to the book suggests this...

'What also means a lot is the sense of position, responsibility and moral values that are often embodied in an English estate - if it is well run. Mr Barlow is a good man and his house is part of that equation.'

And at one point this from Elisabeth de Waal, about the weather, seemed to sum our nation up quite well...

'Its vagaries may possibly have some part in fostering the innate love of a gamble so characteristic of these islanders, making them a nation of happy winners and philosophical losers...'

Persephone Books suggest of Milton Place, that just as it was turned down by three publishers in the 1960s, so they will 'struggle to get its excellence recognised' in 2019.  I honestly can't think why because to my mind it's up there with the best they have published in twenty years, and I doubt I'll be the only one to think that.

Thoughts from Team Underland...

I thought we'd stay with Underland for a while longer, especially as Robert Macfarlane is reading it for Book of the Week on Radio 4 at the moment.

I made contact with Team Underland, the small group who helped me through those years of doing Port Eliot Festival, and who have all been reading the book. We keep in touch and meet up several times a year and many of you might remember the Knit Angel. Liz made all those wonderful 'knitsuke' that we gave to all the authors who came to the dovegreyreader tent...who can ever forget Edmund de Waal and the very first one, a knitted hare with amber eyes..

 

or William Fiennes and his knitted snow geese.

Photographer Martin Parr took home a knitted camera, Brian Selznick a knitted 'Brian', a version of himself and there were countless other wonderful things. Robert Macfarlane actually took home a 'quiltsuke' after we had talked about The Old Ways in 2012...

I had made him a little quilted map of Lewes and the Shiants (quilted with glow-in-the-dark thread).

Though I think my favourite picture might be of Robert's well-worn boots..

I had asked Robert, during our conversation, about his next book and now here we are, seven years later, reading it

Liz can't be with us when Team Underland meet in Hay in May, but sent us her thoughts on the book. Like me she had done a slow reading and kept notes, allowing her mind to wander off wherever the book may lead, and it has been fascinating to read the impact of the book on another reader who is also a good friend. I will catch up with her in Exeter very soon for a proper conversation about it, but meanwhile (with her permission) I thought I would share Liz's thoughts here...

Thank you for the blog Lynne, what a wonderful book, I had been expecting a dark , dour looking volume, that somehow reflected the lack of light, dampness, cold and claustrophobia.

However, to my delight I received this bright, joyous, inferno coloured book, skeletal branches through which the bright blue sky is tantalisingly visible. I am now aware of the meaning of the picture and it does colour my first impressions but I still love it!!!

The "first chamber" echoed Dylan Thomas, the Summer Bright "Bees browsing, drowsy over meadow grass" was the antithesis  to "Coal Black".

I have loved Dylan Thomas since childhood so I knew I would be in safe hands here - I just had to trust!!!!

I suffer terribly from claustrophobia and worried that I might find the book too hard to bear. There were many times during the reading that I was breathless, but any struggles to read on were put aside because for me this was a fantastic page turner, I wanted to find out and to know what happened. The beauty and the horror, the awe, the thrill of the adventure,

Amongst the horror though he described such gut wrenching beauty too - the red ochre hands and the burial of the young woman and her child, doubly cradled by mother and swan feathers!!!!!!!

I had absolutely no idea the extent of what we have been shoving into the ground, or the ongoing space science - any of it, so for a dark world it's certainly opened my eyes to the clandestine activities and the carelessness that we have shown our planet and the mess we are leaving for the future - I am so happy that we are now thinking there is a future and we can influence that - trying to devise signage to warn future peoples of potential hazards is so tricky though.

I wrote notes during my reading though, so I can refer back to things and like Lynne I did follow up some things - for instance, the music mentioned in various chapters - generally not my taste but probably when you are terrified and submerged they take on a whole new meaning.

It has been such a gorgeous privilege that I wanted to say something as I won't be with you all at Hay.

Please thank Robert for letting us have this opportunity and opening my eyes in such a lyrical manner.

As I was reading words beginning with the letter 'T' kept popping into my head and so I wrote them down and feel I want to share them with you....

Tingling, Tight, Taut, Terrifying, Thrill, Tick-Tock-Time, Twist, Turn, Tempt, Thoughts, Trust, Tension, Tied, Tides, Tether, Tremble, Tremor, Trip, Tilt, Tunnels, Turquoise, Tumbling, Terrorism, Tolerance.

From these words I can just about relate them back to the chapters.

Oh well sorry if it's all a messy ramble that doesn't make sense - in essence I thought it was a b****y good read.

Lots of love to you all...

 

And Fran, another Team Underland-er (who always organised our flower show entry at Port Eliot Festival with much laughter and vast amounts of imaginative flair), left this wonderful comment on Monday's post so I'm cut and pasting her thoughts here too, and my thanks to Fran as always for her support and perceptive insights...

When my copy of Underland arrived I too set it aside until the New Year was well over, yet winter still had some way to go. The orange cover glowed like a beacon as it sat atop a bookstack drawing me in, asking to be opened. Anything by Robert Macfarlane was going to be a joy, [although I did have some initial doubts about going underground, not a place which in all honesty appeals to me] but it was something to anticipate, and also to savour the first read of, not gulp it down as I am want to do when I enjoy a writer. I was determined to take this one slowly, one chapter at a sitting. So I worked my way through each extraordinary journey RM takes, going into places I am sure most of us were not even aware of...until now, and this book.

"The underland keeps it's secrets well." We so often look up; trees, stars, birds, clouds. We rarely look down, then only as far as our feet and the ground, do we ever consider what lies beneath?

This is a genre of book I love, as it sends me off in so many different directions. Linking up with things I have already read, reading on and around. Writing lists of new-to me -words, looking up photos of the places mentioned. This was so much more; the descriptions of places RM walked, climbed, slithered and slid into was beyond all expectations. With each chapter whole new worlds and ideas were opened up to me with the vivid and descriptive prose. It is well known that RM is a wonderful wordsmith; his ability to describe a place totally foreign to the reader yet they can 'see' it as they read is something I try not to take for granted. What a gift it is. Yet this is far, far more than another book of landscape writing. It has it all; daring do and adventure, profound thought and reflection on what we as a human race have created, what we need to do to preserve and protect, resilience, memory, the past, the present and the future. It's all there and more.

I had an instance of synchronicity whilst reading. Just the day before starting chapter 4, The Understory I had listened to a radio programme about the 'wood wide web'. And there I find him discussing the very same thing with Merlin Sheldrake, a phrase used by his old friend Roger Deakin as well. Reading on about trees which fused together I recalled a passage relating to intertwined tree roots from Captain Correlli's Mandolin sometimes used in marriage ceremonies. A few pages on and there is RM using the very same quote.

Just trying to distil my thoughts into this comment has taken awhile. It will take a lot longer to fully comprehend all the facets of taking a journey into deep time. But it is one I am profoundly grateful to have been taken on, and hopefully will be returning to further explore along with others very soon.