dovegreyreader scribbles

Forty Autumns ~ Nina Willner

Well, how lucky was I when a book group in Berkshire sent me a copy of Forty Autumns by Nina Willner. The group had read and discussed this 'family's story of courage and survival on both sides of the Berlin Wall', were recommending it far and wide and thought I might like to read it too. One of their number had met the author at the school gates whilst living in Prague, and Nina Willner had done a Facetime session with the reading group during their meeting.

It was a Saturday morning, and a leisurely breakfast when the arrival of a new book always demands an immediate peruse. I read solidly until Sunday evening, hard pushed to put the book down for any but the most essential tasks. The clincher in the book for me was that this was written by a woman who knew first hand, and from several very different perspectives, what life was really like behind the Berlin Wall. Not only had her mother Hanna fled the divide as a young adult, succeeding after several attempts, but Nina Willner had worked for US Intelligence in Germany during the years of the Cold War. 

Hanna's decision and eventual escape from East Germany in 1949 is real edge-of-the-seat reading...

'She was young and deserving of a future. Hadn't Opa always inspired her to have big dreams and seek adventure?...and so she had made up her mind. With no way of knowing what impact her escape would have on her family and believing that somehow their separation would only be temporary...she was choosing to escape...'

What follows is an intimate and gripping account of a grey and colourless country, because Hanna left behind a large family who would have to surrender to the demands of the communist regime. It would be forty years before she would see her family again, but Nina Willner paints a vivid picture of life in post-war Germany for her own grandparents and myriad aunts, uncles and cousins and the impact on ordinary lives. It is sobering to read of the indoctrination, the need to 'embed orthodox communist doctrine' in a nation who had previously been trained to despise it. The manipulation of the people through oppression, brutality and disproportionate punishment via the Stasi makes for chilling but compelling reading, as does the indoctrination of the children via compulsory membership of youth organisations, simultaneously creating a climate of fear, suspicion and spying, often on your own family.

Except...

'Informing on your parents and one another simply will not happen in this family.' says Opa Karl, Hanna's father, to her remaining eight siblings. Nevertheless there will be constant anxiety and deep mistrust of the wider community  along with a heightened awareness of potential traps...even something as simple as being offered extra eggs in a shop could be a trap that would result in arrest and persecution. Hanna's parents, Oma and Opa (Erna and Karl) will eventually be exiled after Opa, a teacher, finally cracks and challenges the authorities, but in a strange way they are suited to remote isolation and make the best of it whilst the support from their children is unwavering.

Nina meanwhile, trained by U.S. Intelligence services, has been deployed to West Berlin in 1983, at that time 'the spy capital of the world',  and her account of the work is both fascinating and at times terrifying. It was fraught with danger as the death of colleagues revealed and, unable to make contact with her extended family, at times must have been incredibly frustrating.

Despite the hardships, powerless and oppressed, and with rebellion futile, the family stick together, weathering the onslaughts and finding ways to support each other, giving the reader of Forty Autumns a poignant and moving insight into the human aspects of these years, and the wider social and cultural impacts of the repression. An entire population silenced and submissive and being fed a distorted world view... hard to believe such places still exist today. The loss and separation are profound for a family who 'lose' forty years of togetherness and freedom until the day, that most memorable day, when the wall, built in 1961, falls in November 1989.

The end, when it came, was like toppling dominoes. A combination of people in power (Reagan and Gorbachov) determined to breach this divide, and a people starting to rebel and defy the authorities in subtle ways (listening to radio broadcasts from the West) and in increasing numbers. I defy anyone not to well up at that moment in the book. It is intensely emotional and beautifully portrayed and I certainly had a tear in my eye, and at the prospect of subsequent family reunions. 

Given that all this happened in my lifetime and its existence spans the first thirty-five years of my life, my recollections of it are typically 'western'. Perhaps most vivid are those memories of the athletes, a sphere covered in some detail in the book because Nina's cousin Cordula would become a world class cyclist for East Germany. It is the Olympics I remember, though with little awareness of Erich Honecher's mission to achieve sporting superiority for his small nation.

Forty Autumns all makes for fascinating reading and again, how grateful I am to Judith and her book group for sending this to me. So much I didn't know and if you are looking for an excellent book group selection you couldn't go wrong with this one. Plenty to discuss that will keep you going long after the biscuits have run out.

Meanwhile there's this, perhaps one of the most moving moments of that time. Russian musician Mstislav Rostropóvich, one of the best cellists of the 20th century, performing as people were destroying the Berlin Wall on November 11, 1989....

Easter Recess

It's time for my annual Easter Recess, a legacy of never being allowed out to play on Good Friday and now using Easter weekend as a chance to switch off the internet and enjoy the peace.

And for those that have enquired... thank you and yes the excitement continues, the barn owls seem to have moved in properly and we watch them every evening. 

On the dot of dusky twilight which we call the dimpsey in these parts, (their clever clocks seem to move it on a minute or two each day, currently 8.36 pm) a head will pop out of the front door and survey the valley. Eventually that one will hop onto the ledge, and another head appears. They sit and stare for ages before one takes flight and goes off hunting and the other one pops back in...we are hoping for owlets...

Throughout the evening we see it gliding around the fields and back and forth to the box, with the occasional call, but much quieter now. I have had a long and very helpful conversation with The Barn Owl Trust who sited the box all those years ago and am pleased to report that these boxes are considered much safer for owlets because of their depth. By the time any owlets are able to get out they will almost be able to fly. 

In other news, I stood underneath the sleeping owls with the now completed Liberty nine patch scrap quilt for a photograph. Worked on slowly through the winter, and needed dreckly for one of the beds in Tinker's Cott, I was very grateful to a friend who helped me layer it and then whisked it off to machine quilt. Searching for a name Bookhound won the contest with Libertyto Alba...Tyto alba being the proper name for a barn owl. Clever eh, he was rightly very pleased with himself.

Anyway here's wishing you all a happy and blessed Easter with just the right amount of whatever you love and some good books too.

I am deep into Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly which I have agreed to 'champion' for this year's Rathbone Folio Prize for which it has been shortlisted. 

All I can say at this halfway point is hie thee to library reservations and Please Read This Book so that we can talk about it here eventually. I am astonished by it. For my non-fiction read I am loving The Greedy Queen - Eating With Victoria by Annie Gray, and my thanks as always to whoever recommended it in comments a while back. Our next Village Book Group theme is 'Food' and this is perfect.

I'll be back later next week, but meanwhile how about you...I hope you have some good holiday reads lined up ...

 

 

The Poetry Haul

After all that talk of poetry a few days ago I had an astonishing stroke of luck this weekend.

You know, the one where the planets align and you happen to wander into a charity shop just as they have put out a shelf holding someone’s complete and mostly new and unread collection of poetry books.

Can I say that this charity shop luck thing NEVER happens to me.

My Walking Friend ALWAYS walks into a charity shop at the exact moment the Laura Ashley curtains (full length £12) are about to be hung up (but obviously get no further than her waving hands), or the brand new  Berghaus gilet (£3) is about to go on the rail. I meanwhile have had no such luck, until last Saturday.

The book that caught my eye was  Selected Poems of W.S. Merwin. No copies available anywhere, not even second- hand on You Know Where, yet there it was standing on the top of the shelf for £1. That would have been bounty enough but as it was I put my glasses on and didn’t stop there...

Black Cat Bone - John Burnside

As Though We Were Flying - Andrew Greig

Fire Songs - David Harsent

A Hundred Doors - Michael Longley

Walking Papers - Thomas Lynch

New and Selected Poems Vol 1 - Mary Oliver

Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke

The Wrecking Light - Robin Robertson

Hill of Doors - Robin Robertson

On Mutability - Jo Shapcott

Drysalter - Michael Simmons Roberts

Poems - Edith Södergram

Collected Later Poems - R.S. Thomas

The Remedies - Katharine Towers

 

And the sum total...

£14.

It might have felt like robbery had I not, in the past, donated a lot of new books to this very same charity shop, doubtless giving someone else the thrill of the surprise find. So many charity shops across the town have increased their prices and I suspect might sell less as a conseqeunce, whilst I know this one works on a different principle. Price it low and move it on quickly. 

Some of the books are duplicates and they will head onto the shelves in Tinker’s Cott...Mary Oliver, Jo Shapcott, Michael Simmons Roberts...

I’ve been working very hard on these shelves for several months now and they are starting to ‘feel’ nicely balanced...

An eclectic mix is developing, fiction and non-fiction and another section (not shown) of books I have written about here so they all come recommended. I’ll do you a proper guided tour soon, but our first guests arrive in May and we’ll be ready.

I’m thinking that I will pick up and read one of these new poetry collections a month for the foreseeable and get to know some poets I have been meaning to read...John Burnside, Rilke, Robin Robertson (since I read The Long Take) Andrew Greig (since I read At the Loch of the Green Corrie) R.S. Thomas,  and others who will be completely new to me. And then of course Bill Merwin is already on my radar. I've made a very promising start with The Remedies by Katharine Towers.

Meanwhile if you know any of these poets please do share your thoughts...

And how about your charity shop moments...any Ming vases, or Lalique glass, Dior dresses or Mulberry bags, or maybe just finding the very thing you have been looking for for ages...

Reading Gallimaufry

Firstly a huge thank you to those of you who reminded me (on the scribbles about Time Song by Julia Blackburn) that Seamus Heaney had written several 'bog body' poems. I had completely forgotten about them, but there he was, Tollund Man..

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach...

And quite by chance someone had recommended Meet me at the Museum by Anne Youngson, whose debut novel at the age of seventy is getting good reviews. A quick glance reveals the museum in question is Silkeborg in Denmark, home of Tollund Man

'When Tina Hopgood writes a letter of regret to a man she has never met, she doesn’t expect a reply.
When Anders Larsen, a lonely museum curator, answers it, nor does he.
They’re both searching for something, they just don’t know it yet. 
Anders has lost his wife, along with his hopes and dreams for the future. Tina is trapped in a marriage she doesn’t remember choosing.
Slowly their correspondence blossoms as they bare their souls to each other with stories of joy, anguish and discovery. But then Tina’s letters suddenly cease, and Anders is thrown into despair.
Can their unexpected friendship survive?'

I love it when reading trails connect in this way.

In other poetry news several good collections have found favour in recent weeks including No Map Could Show Them by Helen Mort. 

"The poems of Helen Mort's second collection offer an unforgettable perspective on the heights we scale and the distances we run, the routes we follow and the paths we make for ourselves.

Here are odes to the women who dared to break new ground – from Miss Jemima Morrell, a young Victorian woman from Yorkshire who hiked the Swiss Peaks in her skirts and petticoats, to the modern British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, who died descending from the summit of K2.

Distinctive and courageous, these are poems of passion and precipices, of edges and extremes...'

A climber herself Helen Mort's voice is distinct and immediate. There is no obscurity here and as it happens I've been thinking about Alison Hargreaves again recently. The climber who, in 1988, scaled the North Wall of the Eiger whilst pregnant and who eventually would lose her life on K2 in 1995. Back then the world was torn about it...young mother selfishly taking risks v brave and courageous woman conquering new summits etc. because here was a young woman who had conquered Everest unaided by either Sherpas or oxygen. Anyone who watched Ben Fogle's recent summit attempt will know that this is no mean feat for anyone, yet I wondered whether the focus of the debate might have shifted in 2019...or not. Sadly Alison's son Tom Ballard died recently whilst also climbing in the Himalayas. Tom had been born in 1988 so I'm assuming he had been the unborn baby wonderfully thirled to the mountain by his mum during that ascent of the Norwand. Helen Mort's poem Norwand now holds something very special in the light of recent events, as does the entire sequence of poems about Alison...

'Below The White Spider
you clench yourself into a ball
your unborn child held deep inside.

You wish that you could reach
beneath your skin
and hold the baby's fist in yours...

And then I was reminded of Climbing Days by Dan Richards, the story of his great-great-aunt, Dorothea Pilley ' a prominent and pioneering mountaineer of the early twentieth century and which I wrote about back in 2016.

"What emerges is a beautiful portrait of a trailblazing woman, up to now lost to history - but also a book about that eternal question : why do people climb mountains?"

I waxed lyrical about Climbing Days in my usual fashion and am really looking forward to travelling with Dan and his latest book Outpost - a Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth.

'There are still wild places out there on our crowded planet. Through a series of personal journeys, Dan Richards explores the appeal of far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts. These are landscapes that speak of deep time, whose scale can knock us down to size. Their untamed nature is part of their beauty and such places have long drawn the adventurous, the spiritual and the artistic.

For those who go in search of the silence, isolation and adventure of wilderness it is - perhaps ironically - to man-made shelters that they often need to head; to bothies, bivouacs, camps and sheds. Part of the allure of such refuges is their simplicity: enough architecture to keep the weather at bay but not so much as to distract from the natural world.

Following a route from the Cairngorms of Scotland to the fire-watch lookouts of Washington State, from Iceland's 'Houses of Joy' to the Utah desert; frozen ghost towns in Svalbard to shrines in Japan; Roald Dahl's Metro-land writing hut to a lighthouse in the North Atlantic, Richards explores landscapes which have inspired writers, artists and musicians, and asks: why are we drawn to wilderness? What can we do to protect them? And what does the future hold for outposts on the edge?'

I have a few more impressive poetry collections to share with you dreckly including Girl by Rebecca Goss and The Rain in the Trees by the late W.S.Merwin but I'll save those for the next gallimaufry.

Meanwhile how about you...any poets warming your heart at the moment...

Any good travels from the armchair...

 

And the winners are...

Thank you to everyone who entered, copies of The Gentle Art of Tramping will be strolling along to these six luck winners

Elizabeth

Niall

Pat Blakey

Cathy

Jennifer Logan

Dale Jackson

You should each have received an email.

The Artificial Silk Girl ~ Irmgard Keun

At last someone (Penguin) is bringing The Artificial Silk Girl (Das kunstseiden Mädchen) by Irmgard Keun back into print, and I for one couldn't be more delighted. I'm sure I have suggested it hither and yon, especially to publishers of 'forgotten women's fiction', all to no avail down the years.

I first read the book in 2006 having acquired this exquisite hardback edition and wrote this about it...

.'...but here at last is Irmgard Keun's The Artificial Silk Girl, she who lived for some time in exile with Joseph Roth.

Born in Berlin in 1905, Irmgard Keun's second novel was published in 1932 and became an instant best seller. Her writing was banned in 1933 and all remaining copies of this book were destroyed.'

I had decided to track down and read some of the authors who had been banned or exiled and this was how I stumbled across Irmgard Keun's writing and this astonishing book.

Fleeing Germany in 1936 and joining a circle of exiles that included Joseph Roth with whom she had an affair, 'who is writing the great book about now?' asks Irmgard Keun of her peers. Michael Hofmann argues that whilst in many ways she was right perhaps the 'now' was just too much for the readership to stomach, perhaps they 'craved respite and escape.' Irmgard Keun would eventually return to Germany illegally under the name of Charlotte Tralow thanks to false reports about her death. Who can know the trauma and fear of those years in a writer's life. 

Irmgard Keun gives us material girl Doris's view of life in Berlin in the 1920's as Doris attempts to script her life along the lines of a glamorous movie star. Believing that respect comes from glamour not knowledge, and stupidity and dumbness are seen as cute, Doris sets out in the protective pelt of her stolen fur coat to find fame and fortune in the city. It all goes hopelessly wrong in both funny/sad ways as reality hits the beguiling and amazingly perceptive but ultimately dizzy Doris. 

'I constantly find myself in situations where I don't know something and I have to pretend that I do...'

Poor Doris. Whilst her innate sense of goodness and innocence shine through, it is unlikely to get her far.

There is plenty of foreshadowing of what was to come and of course none of it could be known by Irmgard Keun in 1931, yet, as with so many writers of the time, she sensed it and noted it. Doris is the original non-political girl caught up in it all and like many others only realising when it was far too late to do anything about it.  It could be argued that The Artificial Silk Girl is one of the last accounts of everyday life in Germany before the Nazis came to power, as Kathy von Ankum elaborates in my edition of the book,

'Doris becomes a camera, recording the sights and sounds of city life....but Doris's power of vision, despite its relentless focus on surfaces, ends by penetrating to what lies beneath the surface entertainments.'

My perfectly presented little hardback book, binding, paper quality, dusky power-pink cover, all gorgeous. An American translation, and inevitably a few colloquialisms creep into what is essentially a beautiful mid-European text. A minor detail though, I'm just grateful that Kathie von Ankum has translated a book that had not been available in English since 1933, and that Penguin have republished that translation.

Other books on my shelves by Irmgard Keun include Child of All Nations and After Midnight and as Michael Hofmann suggests...

'Keun has few rivals - I can think of none - as a chronicler of the ambience (in After Midnight, which is set in Frankfurt on the day Hitler comes to town) or the consequences (in Child of All Nations) of the rise of Nazism.'

Whilst Child of All Nations is readily available After Midnight is not, so let's hope Penguin have plans for more by Irmgard Keun,  and I have plans for a redux here of my thoughts about both books dreckly.

Meanwhile, welcome back into print Irmgard Keun and if you decide to read The Artificial Silk Girl and meet Doris and her fur coat, please do come back and share your thoughts. I can't wait for you to make her acquaintance. I have craved people to talk to about this book for years...

The Gentle Art of Tramping ~ Stephen Graham

'The adventure is not the getting there, it is the on-the-way. It is not the expected; it is the surprise; not the fulfilment of prophecy but the providence of something better than prophesied.'

Sometimes a book arrives and I can barely contain the excitement, and even though I had read The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham in a proof copy I was still delighted when this arrived...

A brown paper package tied up with string á la Sound of Music, to reveal...

The book and some Kendal Mint Cake. Sustenance of the gods when out walking, and a bar carried in my emergency kit at all times.

This is little gem of a pocket-sized book, originally published in 1926 and now republished by Bloomsbury, in a beautiful hardback edition that slots neatly into a rucksack and warrants reading whilst out on the hill. I came back from New Zealand full of the joys of 'tramping', (because they don't hike, or walk, they 'tramp') only to find that it sounded strange to say it here in the UK, so  I  was soon back to walking, plodding, or bimbling as usual. But 'tramping' I like.

Born in Edinburgh in 1884, a son of the editor of Country Life, journalist and writer Stephen Graham's long-standing love affair with Russia saw him walking through the country in the years before 1914 in the belief that life viewed through the eyes of a wanderer might give him a truer account of the people....

'He was from his arrival fascinated by the Russian Orthodox church, but he was even more struck by the spirituality of the people, which he believed was an instrumental force in shaping Russian society.'

They all have that 'look' from this era don't they...

As his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography attests of course events in Russia would all go slightly pear-shaped for Stephen Graham, who having been the government's preferred expert would eventually become something of an embarrassment, but he would continue his career as a travel writer and clearly it was these wanderings and observations that underpinned The Gentle Art of Tramping.

With its original artwork cover from a wood engraving by Norman James,  and written, as it was, in those years after the First World War, I am thinking too about the numbers of homeless, wandering soldiers who tramped the countryside in search of healing and solace ( think A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr). Those men who had fought for their country, many of them outcasts from a society they no longer recognised and arguably classed as vagrants. Class an issue addressed in the early pages of the book and with it maybe a concealed warning in the tramp's defence not to judge them by appearances...

'Class is the most disgusting institution of civilisation, because it puts barriers between man and man...but in the tramp's motley you can say what you like, ask what you like, free from the taint of class. It also puts you right with regard to yourself...'

Suggesting that it also offers freedom of speech action and judgement and then this...

'All that highfalutin advice which Kipling wrote in 'If' may be left in its glum, red lettering pasted on your bedroom wall, if you will only put on your tramp's motley.'

'Tramps' were still much in evidence when working in casualty at the London Hospital in the East End in the 1970s. The men (for they were mostly men) would do anything to get a bed for the night, often throwing themselves down the front steps of the hospital, and many's the head wound we were allowed to stitch as students because the men didn't mind, declining local anaesthetic on the basis they had drunk enough to be beyond feeling. One in particular, known to us as Henry Sunshine, was rumoured to have been a professor at Cambridge, and talking to him I had no reason to disbelieve it.

With its chapters on Boots, The Knapsack, Clothes, Carrying Money, The Companion, The Fire, The Bed, Drying After Rain, Books, Notebooks and so much more, there is plenty to find here. Though the reading suggestions to take on the road with you might be a little outdated, the idea that the 'tramper' should 'take a book that you do not quite understand, one that you have nibbled at but have found difficult' is an interesting one...

'I do not mean an abstruse work, but one you are on the verge of understanding and making your own...'

And maybe some of us would concur with this...

'It is better, therefore to take one a whole-time book. It is good to have a book that is full of meat, one with broad margins for scribbling and extra pages for thoughts, poems, thumbnail sketches. After a long tramp it is nice to see a book which has been clothed with pencillings.'

For our 25th wedding anniversary, and long before the Kindle solved the problem by allowing me to carry 300 books with me at all times, what terrible choices I made for our three weeks wandering around Europe with rail passes and our lives in rucksacks. The journey all seems a bit daring and adventurous looking back, and was largely determined by the fact that on the date of our actual anniversary September 11th 2001, horrible things had happened so in 2002 we decided on an adventure. But Volume One of Lord of the Rings (abandoned in Bilbao) The Secret History (deserted in Barcelona) and two more long gone from memory but similarly discarded around the continent proved to be poor choices . In desperation I bought The Awakening by Kate Chopin (from a very limited selection) just as we were about to board the ferry across the Mediterranean to Genoa and there followed one of the most memorable reading experiences of my life. 

The Gentle Art of Tramping is replete with moments that had me nodding my head in agreement, crystallising thoughts that frequently occur to me...

'Beware of going to Jerusalem in order that you may come back and tell the world you have been. It spoils all you found on the way...'

How relevant this is in these days of social media and Instagram, and something I had been unwittingly aware of as I write the scribbles. It's very easy to set off on a day's adventure thinking to myself, 'What can I write about this...' 'Which pictures would be best', whilst missing being in the moment and the pleasure of it. Please be assured that I do go to a lot of places that don't get written about or photographed, because as Stephen Graham would agree it's a question of balance.

'The less you carry the more you will see, the less you spend the more you will experience...'

An added delight are the book's endpapers...

Facsimiles of walking notes from 1932; the book itself and these notes especially, bringing Edward Thomas to mind. 

Someone has planned their journeys carefully...

Route III - Lake District and the 1932 walker plans to stay at  Fell Foot Farm, Brothers Waters Inn (both still in existence) whilst another, recommended by the guide, The Dun Bell Inn which I discover was subsequently flooded in the creation of Haweswater Reservoir in 1940 to provide water for Manchester. 

Route IV - Round the World. This an even more ambitious journey with "Beaucoup Zigzag'' estimates 113,900 miles on foot across Europe to Romania and the Carpathians to Constantinople, through Persia to Afghanistan, N. India, Burma, Siam, Saigon and onwards taking a boat to Vancouver walking to St Johns, Newfoundland (say 3500 m 12mths) and thence sailing back to Liverpool.

I think you can probably tell that The Gentle Art of Tramping has found its niche in a corner of my rucksack and Offspringette's too, a spare copy travelling back to New Zealand with her. Mine is already covered in pencillings and doubtless more to follow.

Meanwhile how about you...walk...hike...tramp...plod...bimble ?

And about the one book to take with you...which would it be...

Oh yes, and please do scroll down for gifts, Magnus awaits...