dovegreyreader scribbles

Gifford's Circus do War & Peace and Curzon pays a visit...

My thanks to Curzon who knew better than to pay a visit to Gifford's Circus do War and Peace and not come back with a report and pictures....

 
On Marlborough Common stood this sign, but in fact all that was needed to be transported to 19c Russia was to pass through the doors into the tent, where the clown Tweedy morphed into the Russian soldier Tikhon, acting as the MC and link between scenes from the book and the interspliced circus acts. The War and Peace action was reduced to the Rostov family, and how the war against France affected them: Prince Andrei, Pierre, Helene and Napoleon were mere walk-on parts. Around the tent were hung canvases on which were sketches and also quotes from the book, and there was a band, mostly brass and percussion, with keyboards.

 
The lyrics were written by Kit Hesketh-Harvey (of “Kit and the Widow”) but sadly not all were truly audible despite the cast wearing head mikes.

  Brian the goose struts his stuff with Toti Gifford and one of the shire horses.

In Natasha’s Dream, Natasha performed a wonderful aerial routine on silks, and yes, she is playing the violin as well in this photo. Women make the best multi-taskers!

  Here is Nell Gifford (as Helene) on her horse Red and flying Storm, the Harris hawk.

Nell read English literature at New College, Oxford. She is a published author: of “Josser”, about her life in the circus, and also a biography of Phillip Astley, inventor of the circus. “Red” is a 9-year-old Welsh cob who has enjoyed a season’s hunting.

In the interval, I accidentally turned my camera from ‘colour’ to ‘colour accent’ and so the rest of my photos are, in effect, black and white. Here’s the death of Petya; his loose mount walked slowly forward and dropped its head over Petya’s inert body. I hope you can see the snow falling.

It was a hugely enjoyable performance loosely based on War and Peace and even the small children seemed to love every minute. Gifford’s Circus is enchanting and well worth attending when they come to your part of the country.

 

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The Lore of the Playground ~ Steve Roud

One of the books I keep at my right hand is The English Year by Steve Roud. A month-by-month guide to the nation's customs and festivals from May Day to Mischief Night.

How else would I be able to wish you all a Happy Plague Sunday today, or suggest you start sourcing your mangold-wurzels for Punkie Night which is fast approaching, and you know you'll wish you'd bothered when you see the rest of us with ours.

So I was thrilled skinny when Steve Roud's latest book The Lore of the Playground arrived.


Fainites??

Did you used to say that when it was time for a truce... when you wanted temporary immunity??

We did and who knew why or where it came from, but when the book fell open at the fainites pages I was intrigued. It's a word with ancient origins, possibly derived from the French 'defendre', or possibly 'fain', perhaps 'feign' and if you lived further north you may have said 'barley' or 'keys' instead apparently.

Then I quickly found just about every other game we had played and I'm afraid I was wallowing, and wondering whether I might still be capable of juggling two balls against a wall whilst chanting a version of

Each peach pear plum
I spy Tom Thumb
Tom Thumb in the wood
I spy Robin Hood
Robin Hood in the cellar
I spy Cinderella
Cinderella in the stable
I spy Betty Grable
Betty Grable is a star
S T A R.

and then you'd try and hand over to someone else without dropping the balls.

That rhyme typical of 1950's London (Steve Roud offers clear regional variations and specific eras for many games and sayings) so slap bang in the middle of my days at Sherwood County Primary in Mitcham.

I started in the infants in 1958 in something called The Wooden Building, now explained as I read this from the school website..

The school opened as a nursery in temporary wooden buildings during the 1930s. The present main building was begun in 1948 as a junior school with an age range between 5 and 11 years for 500 pupils

Which also explains the huge class sizes, only eight classes as I remember for 500 of us it seems, crikey, it was a much bigger school than I realised and the main school only ten years old when I arrived...it seemed battered and ancient then.

Now quite spookily having discovered the school is still very much there, it would seem it remains in the same incarnation because those are the very same windows, and as I'm typing this I think I can almost smell the wax crayons and Miss Butteriss's store cupboard in Blue Class.

There's every chance that window looks out onto what would have been called the Girl's Grass back in the 1950s. This was our segregated safe haven from the boys and the British Bulldog that would have been going on illegally in the playground for as long as they could get away with it, because as Steve Roud confirms it was banned in just about every playground in the land. Bookhound of course now tells me it was his favourite game with his gang at Potter Street Juniors. A lot of running full pelt, chasing, catching, lifting off the ground and fighting whilst we would sit demurely in our smocked frocks playing Cat's Cradle very nicely on our own very nice, lush green grass. Steve Roud mentions Cat's Cradle and I am reminded of its limitations. I'm not sure I ever learned more than about four 'moves' ...tramlines, diamonds and getting the cradle upsidedown, and I was the one who usually messed up and got the long bit of string back again.

The boys did have their own grass at Sherwood lest anyone fear us girls were favoured, and where we weren't allowed to tread either, but 'grass' is a bit of an exaggeration for the dusty patch of earth which contained barely a blade of grass and but one very dead but well-climbed tree as I recall. Now where did I read recently that a high percentage of today's children have never climbed a tree.

I'm wondering if I'd be any good at skipping now, remembering waiting my turn and running in and out of the twisting rope, except we always but always used a length of washing line; rope far too expensive and seemingly unavailable to us. I'm delighted to see French skipping get a mention too and the fact that we would all make up our elastic by knotting together a packet of rubber bands... and then the craze would pass and we'd be onto the next thing.

At 500 pages you can guess there is an awful lot I haven't mentioned but that's intentional because I'd love to know what you can all remember.

Any games or rhymes??

Any more playground crazes??

How did you decide who would be 'it'??

What did you collect and swap??

What about 'making up'??

I'll look them up and see what Steve Roud has to say and report back in comments ... perhaps let's see what we come up with between us.

 

 

 

Finishingitis...

Happy Bank Holiday weekend to everyone here in the UK, and I hope any of you in the path of hurricane Irene are safe and well.

Offspringette rang from the U.S. last week and was extolling the virtues of not worrying about an earthquake, this after several months in Christchurch when she thought of little else, only for there to be a serious quake in the US the next day, so I hope anyone who was caught in that is fine too.

The swallows gathered yesterday morning and we think they have made their farewell, two new broods raised this year and now on their way to sunny Africa. Cue torrential rain and cold enough for us to light the fire, though we live in hope of our usual fair spell in September and October.

This is the best holiday I've had at least since the last one, and whilst a prolonged bout of startitis is all well and good, and so far I have succumbed to four new episodes, it has to be matched with some much-needed finishingitis too. So in between new things I have been working away on my entry for Class 73 Any item of patchwork, and this has been sitting unfinished for so long I can't actually remember when I started it.


These things always look a mess while I am working on them, creased and crumpled and tacking threads everywhere but all will be perfectly lovely gorgeous in the end. I have a feeling the blocks all had bookish associations via their names, and in connection with books I was reading at the time, so thank heavens for the search box on here because eventually I found its inception and...

Shock!

Horror!

It was 2006... and here I am making some blocks

Anyway look, no matter, there's nothing like a deadline and the secret is to parcel it into bite-sized chunks; quilt one block a day and some border marked up with air-soluble pen, so I know if I don't do it I'll only have to re-draw it all next time. Then I have to be ready for the final push on the big border design so it doesn't ambush me, and I then waste a day trying to decide what to do, so I have settled on this cable...


It will be finished this time around I promise because I have already paid my 20p entry fee.

 

 

April 27th

'I-have-to-make-things' fortnight continues and is now blended with Whim-is-me, Not-a-lot-of-internet and Listen-to-the-radio, so having staked my claim on the kitchen table there's no telling where the creative muse will lead.

In fact it took me back through all my old class folders from the days when I taught patchwork and quilting, and specifically thinking Village Show entries I suddenly had the urge to do some stained glass patchwork....as you do.

For those who aren't familiar with it this involves replacing what would be glass with fabric, and using bias strips for the lead work. It's a bit fiddly but if you make the bias strip properly (I have a Clover gizmo thingy, you feed it in one end and it shoots it out the other end folded and straight under the iron) all will be well and the results are always very satisfying, though the amount of mess scattered around the kitchen belies the size of the finished thing (about 9.5" diameter)

Cutting mat, iron, fabric stash all over the place just looking for exactly the right colours, then making the very tiny bias strip, next cheating with the spray mount to hold the pieces in place on the backing to save the bother of tacking, you know the sort of thing. Then appliqueing the bias strip around the pieces before adding some wadding and backing and doing the quilting. Final touch a bias strip around the edge.

All this while listening to everything from Woman's Hour to The Archers and some Proms thrown in until eventually..

The theme for this year's Village Show just two weeks away, is the Tamar Valley and there is one single day in the spring when the sun, on its annual return journey across the sky, sets in the 'V' of the valley that we can see from the house, so this piece is called April 27th, and will do a turn in Class 74 'A Hand Sewn Article.'

 

Lazarus is Dead ~ Richard Beard

Amongst the poems in Carol Ann Duffy's collection The World's Wife, one of my favourites (except they are all my favourites) is Mrs Lazarus as she grieves for the loss of her husband, rents the garments, howls at the moon, clears out the clothes, does the 'Stations of Bereavement' and remains

'faithful for as long as it took. Until he was a memory.'

So Mrs Lazarus is over it only to have Mr come back again and she is not pleased to see him.

So this was ringing around in my head as I picked up Richard Beard's novel Lazarus is Dead, The greatest story about second chances ever told and I had no idea what was in store, the first sentence gave me a clue

'Lazarus is dead.
    There is no room for doubt. He died, he came back to life, but then he died again. If he were alive today, we would know, I think.'

I was also to be pitched into a triumverate of coincidental confusion because you wouldn't have thought there were that many books with the names Cassius and Absalom in them, but if you happen to be reading The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje and Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton at the same time which I was, then you will find one of them in each, and both in Lazarus is Dead.

Religion would not be my normal fare in reading so I'm a bit wary here, this is the story of Lazarus, but is it?

Because if we are honest just how much do we really know of this man apparently living with his sisters Mary and Martha in Bethany (expect some minor Mary confusion too) yet great credence is placed on the raising of Lazarus. 

In Richard Beard's fiction Lazarus a rather dodgy salesman of lambs for slaughter in the temple and a childhood friend of Jesus; a childhood and an adult life for both which Richard Beard builds from the smallest biblical quotes supplemented by literary and artistic references into a 'genre-bending' combination of fact and fiction, and it's not even faction, because the cast-iron facts seem so scant when presented like this.

All of which leads on to this amazingly witty and for me clever interpretation, perhaps a presentation of an alternative truth, and all told in rather clever way that utilises the number seven intriguingly too. Oddly, the best comparison I can make regarding the structure of the book is to that same sense you have when reading Cloud Atlas...that you are drawn in and along as David Mitchell takes you to the summit of a mountain and down the other side with his novel; Richard Beard, creates the same sense of expectation starting with chapter seven, moving down to chapter zero and then back up to seven again, and of course you know exactly what's coming next.

The novel is woven around the lives and stories we think we know, but cannily and imaginatively from a very different perspective. Not unlike Carol Ann Duffy's approach in fact and this may be what made this book so clever for me.

Slowly and inexorably Lazarus's symptoms gather and propel him towards his first death... his eyes are pink and watering, he has a cough and headaches, there is a fetid odour to his skin that can clear the room, he has fatigue and night sweats, a raging thirst and a rash. It was all enough to get the nurse in me busy, diagnoses flitting in and out of my mind to the point where I was half-tempted to betray my SRN.RSCN.RHV and type it all into wrongdiagnosis.com to see what differentials it came up with.

Except wrongdiagnosis.com always tells you you have systemic lupus erythematosus no matter what symptoms you type in.

I hovered around diabetes for a while ... so supposing he wasn't dead, just in a coma, and then I bought into Richard Beard's hints about the most prevalent diseases in Israel at the time, TB, smallpox, shigella and malaria and then there was the rash, well there is little doubt that was .... I won't spoil it for you.

There are really interesting moments here too, the suggestion that the reknown of Lazarus had been obscured by 2000 years of Jesus, but in fact the resurrection of Lazarus had preceded that of Jesus as had the resurrection of Jairus's daughter.

Hints at the denial within the church of the reach of Lazarus for fear it would distract from  the 'more important resurrection'.

The people who I may have expected to be kind and caring are quite the opposite in Richard Beard's fiction. Joseph and Mary not at all likeable and Richard Beard makes use of biblical quotations to extrapolate this, all sufficient to make me rethink some assumptions, and then to think about how I had reached them in the first place. All of which made the book doubly fascinating for me as I pondered the 'truth' versus the 'storytelling' within this book and the wider sphere.

A moment for thought about storytelling and authorship...

'Remember that a parable is fiction, and Jesus can determine every element in his story.'

Richard Beard, popping in and out of his fictional narrative, offers occasional moments of seemingly non-fictional suggestion too, a new approach, imaginative representations as a source of data, trusting the historical human imagination and the patterns that emerge, and with reference to paintings and other sources.

Back to the fiction and Cassius, the Roman spy wants to create a new religion around Lazarus and his resurrection, to manage religion rather than repress it in order to

'distract the people from rebellion, keep the children out of trouble and men in bed with their wives.
    Lazarus will be the son of god, and Lazarus will belong to Rome.'

But of course unbeknown to them both something is about to happen that will thwart those plans.

This most certainly is a genre-bending book and an exciting one too. For me it was about the boundaries of fiction and storytelling and how far they can be stretched in every direction rather than about questions of faith or theological argument, but I can only guess at some of the questions Richard Beard is likely to be asked in the weeks after publication, and I think he knows it too as he says here

I am sure that a re-imagined bible story is difficult to classify, and can engender a kind of panic. The default assumption is that if a modern novelist re-writes a Christian story he must be mostly against... Everyone should get to the stage of not believing in god. That’s the easy part, and also not the end of it.

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Knitspiration

Sorry if you were expecting books as it's Monday but FibreFest was predictably inspiring yesterday and I've lived off that sense of new inspiration all day.

There was an amazing knitted installation...

Absolutely every single thing knitted including the Devon coastline...

I have no plans to knit a beach but I do seem to have come home with half a sheep in various guises on the basis that there's no point in taking along a large Orla Kiely bag if you don't put it through its paces.

 I resisted most of this ...

...in favour of things called 'tops' and 'rovings' in an attempt to further my felt-making career. This is the wool in its pre-spun phase, a whole new world for someone who has always neatly sidestepped the world of spinning on the basis that it's quicker to buy the finished thing... but I can see the allure.

I picked up some Wensleydale and Shetland, some Merino, some Alpaca bits and various dyed odds and ends.

So with two weeks off work and time to indulge my inner person-who-has-to-make-things I am planning to teach myself some new skills. I have spent the day wet-felting and I think I am going to like this, it's like painting with wool and I can think of a thousand and one things to make.

Softest of soft wool with that faint but pleasant scent of sheep, and the special accessories of soapy water, bubble wrap and a rolling pin and I have managed to go from this...

to this, now about 12" square but only after a great deal of rolling, mashing, beating and general rough treatment.

Then  a little polka-dot sample to try and gauge the thickness you need to start with and then how much it will shrink by, and what a blessing an Aga is at times like this. It's August and it's supposed to be switched off but we only lasted a week.

Meanwhile the second slipper is in progress and I am also knitting one of these..

What do you mean you don't know what it is..

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BO all sole sts with I-cord BO??

I love blogweekends because we can have a rest from books and talk about knitting and things and I have been a woolly cordwainer this week making felted slippers. I know it's not as if I don't have enough to do, but this being the start of a week or two of WhimIsMe after a heavy few weeks at work, well I just saw the pattern as I was doing that fatal thing of browsing on Ravelry, and had to make them.

This is what the finished articles may or may not look like.

In fact the pattern isn't a free one, it has to be ordered from Blue Moon (Felted Kicks) and be advised it won't open in Vista PDF but it will open in Adobe and I'm very happy to pay from something as good as this.

I'm trying new and different with my knitting this year and am consistently amazed at how daunting something can look until you break it down, row by row and then *ping* suddenly it starts to take shape in your hands, and subsequently in your mind, and hats off to Marilyn Kaleikilo for designing these, they really are lovely..hopefully.

I've had to master 3-needle BO which was a new one on me and then each slipper involves knitting two identical pieces for each which then have to be slotted inside each other and knitted together around the upper. This proved to be a fiendish tussle which I only just survived, feeling as if I'd done ten rounds with Henry Cooper when I'd finished, and then there was the I-cord BO to come.

I think you can see this does have the look of a slipper about it but we have a way to go.

Isn't the interknit internet amazing.

I mean how on earth would I have figured out this...

Using backward loop method, CO 3 I-cord stitches. Turn work so yarn is attached to needle in left hand. BO all sole sts with I-cord BO

My thanks to Judy's knitting tips on youtube for the I-cord BO assistance because I think she knew I was sitting there with my eyes tight shut saying 'Can't...can't...can't' and when she held up her needles and in her calm and dulcet tones said

'Now what you are going to do...'

Well funnily enough my anxiety was contained and I immediately could.

It looks a right pig's ear now I've cast it off to be honest with you and I can't wait for the transfomation to occur.

Once I've finished the other one we move to the ruining felting process and I'm in two minds about this.

So all you felting experts... should I try and 'agitate' these by hand in very very hot water or use the machine for ten minutes at a time as the pattern suggests??

Because I'm not sure how you can do this controlled felting in a front-loading machine when the door stays locked because it has water in it, am I being stupid or do I need to go out and find an old twin tub?

Or do I just throw it in with the Lakeland dolly balls that I am assured work like magic, pace around for a while and hope for the best??

Talking of which excitement of the week, it's FibreFest this weekend, Devon's own woolly gathering at Bicton College. I'm going to be meeting the KnitAngel there today and we plan to talk wool and slippers all the day long.

 

 

 

At last I've got an Orla Kiely bag...

It is no secret in this house that I have been coveting Orla Kiely anything for quite a while.

I've got the pencils and the notebook, and think this is all because the designs just connect the 1970s me with the 2011 me, but £170 for a bag... and let us be honest, are they not made of...well...um... plastic??

And with ceilings to be bought (remind me to update you on How to Build an Extension ot Your Home soon) £170 for a bag I don't really 'need' is off the agenda.

So imagine my delight when Bookhound returned from shopping with this today...

Make no mistake, it's the real deal, an Orla Kiely bag alright..

Tescos...in aid of CLIC Sargent for children with cancer... and the price a staggering £4.

Clever Bookhound.

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On collections...

Sometimes a collection of books arrive and I feel a trifle spoiled.

Collections are not something I could ever hope to afford or even justify the expense of these days, though I am trying to gather in really good editions of favourite books.

But I feel sure I might have been seriously tempted by one or two of these from Virago even though I have the originals

And given my penchant for anything by Angie Lewin I am particularly smitten with the cover design for Elizabeth von Arnim's  The Enchanted April..

But love these as I do there is something about my 'old' collections that still hold enormous appeal, something about the memories the books evoke, and thinking so much about that past 'me' after reading The Sense of An Ending, I can almost imagine walking along with the 'me' (in my Size 10 loon pants...yes really) that bought and read this collection of H.E.Bates back in the 1970s.

I remembered that I had said this about these very books, (which set me back £3.45 back in about 1973  and the loon pants were £1) in that essay She is too Fond of Books which I wrote for The Reader recently...

You could read in quiet moments on night duty too, if you sat in the line of greatest visibility through the ward, you could easily tuck a book inside the bib of your apron when Night Sister came round. Curiously the books that provided a welcome relief or distraction then, now seem to call back those times, full of what I thought I was escaping. As William Hazlitt said of favourite books:

‘They are the pegs and loop on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours... they give us the best riches... and transport us, not over half the globe but over half our lives, at a word’s notice.’

As I gaze at the cracked spines of the 30p Penguins, the Francoise Sagans, the Margaret Drabbles and the H.E.Bates, I am back there in a heartbeat, my older feet aching in sympathy with my younger ones...

I was sent scurrying to H.E. Bates corner by the arrival of another book, also by Herbert Ernest B and part of another growing and very precious collection, Through the Woods published by Little Toller Books, an imprint of The Dovecote Press.

French flaps for a start and you know how we all love a French flap,  and a gorgeous cover illustration by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson which he can only have painted in 'our woods' just twenty minutes walk up through the fields behind the house.

This is a beautiful collection of writing about a woodland, accompanied by some exquisite woodcuts by Agnes Miller Parker (1895-1980). The pieces span April to April following the wood through the year, so perfect to read in the way that I read Roger Deakin's Notes From Walnut Tree Farm, seasonally and with relevance to what is happening outside the window.

The book has a really fine introduction by Laura Beatty (who I think I met at Port Eliot, more about her book Pollard eventually) and some interesting thoughts on nostalgia...

'We have a horror of nostalgia now. We think it better to concentrate on the concrete rather than the emotional or the purely aesthetic... But if we called nostalgia 'home sickness which is what it really is (nostos, a return home; algos. pain or grief) would we be less ashamed to confess it? Home is where we grew up and where we belong. Home is what produces us. It is ourselves in the end.'

I like that... so 'our woods' (they are not exactly 'ours' I should add) will be the place that I go to as I follow H.E.Bates and his woodland year...

and this will be the view when I turn around and look back the way I have walked...


It's all enough to make me go the whole nostalgia hog and revisit H.E.Bates again having only re-read The Triple Echo in recent years, so I am planning a re-read of these old Penguins if the glue will hold, but I'm wondering about your 'collections' too... do you have any precious accumulations of special books that seem to hold a bit of your DNA between the pages??

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The Sense of an Ending ~ Julian Barnes

'It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old we invent different pasts for others.'

So having declared on Monday that I had read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, and that I had enjoyed it so much I now didn't want to read another book on the Booker longlist in case I found one I liked more, I have probably created a ridiculously impossible situation for myself.

Perhaps it was because I was sitting under the shade of the apple trees on a soporifically warm sunny day in that relaxed week after Port Eliot Festival and I was just ready for a book like this, who can know why it had such an impact.

It is another of those novels so chock-full of 'moments' of real poignancy and profundity that to take them out of the context of the whole, to mine the book for pithy quotes as above, is somehow to do it a terrible disservice. Except I know I won't be able to stop myself because my annotating 3B pencil (always a 3B) was willingly working overtime, and with a consequence that I feel sure Alan Jacobs would only applaud; my reading slowed to the pace that this book asked for.... and nor did I notice the horsefly biting my arm to bits for which I paid the price for days afterwards.

Tony Webster is in his sixties and in reflective mood as he looks back on the life events that seem to have resulted in an unexplained legacy of £500 from a woman he hardly knows, and it is his schooldays that provide a first port of call as he interrogates his own history looking back and trying to make adult sense of his adolescent friendships and actions.

With seemingly remarkably lucid recall, which Tony soon confesses is his 'best memory of their exchange', he recounts his final history lesson of the year...

'We could start perhaps with the seemingly simple question. What is History? Any thoughts, Webster?'

History is the lies of the victors,' I replied a little too quickly.

'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated...'

and somehow that little classroom moment stayed with me as I read on, whilst constantly trying to decide what was truth and what may be false memory, what had really happened in Tony's life given that for much of the book we only ever get Tony's version, and wondering too whether in the end Tony would see himself as victor or vanquished.

It was Tony's classmate Finn who perhaps offered a further clue a few sentences later ...

'History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation,'

It sounds highly pretentious taken out of context...I knew it would, but trust me it won't if you read the book. And somehow that established a base line to keep in mind as I read this beautifully wry, poignant and at times profound novel about a re-examining of the younger self, and the influence of memory with its tricks, and the imperfections and inadequacies it can reveal about a self we think we know.

As Tony reflects he wonders who said,

'That memory is what we thought we'd forgotten.'

and as new memories surface to challenge his certainties it as if

'...for that moment the river ran upstream.'

and Tony's older self is compromised and confronted by the potential for other versions and with it eventually perhaps will come re-evaluation and remorse.

I had to stop and think each time I came across one of these 'moments' in the book, sometimes just a beautifully constructed sentence of but a few words, because if I'm honest, I might still feel like twenty in my head but everything else tells me I'm a lot nearer Tony's age, and with that realisation came a much deeper reflection on everything Julian Barnes may have been doing here.

Drat the man for reminding that there is yet another birthday looming and surely only five minutes since the last.

For making me think about my younger self in the light of my older self.

And oh dear, oh dear, how those impetuous actions of youth can return to haunt that older self, in Tony's case the letter he has written to a friend and with far-reaching and tragic consequences, and when he finally makes contact with the person who may hold the key to the accuracy of all these memories, yet another version of the truth will hit him over the head like a shovel.

Poor old Tony who just doesn't get it, and it seems no one is going to tell him, he's going to have to figure all this out for himself, just as we probably all have to in the end.

I haven't lingered over plot because this is a book that engaged me at such an emotional level it could have been about... well about anything and the overlaying of those themes of memory and ageing would still have sufficed because at the pen of Julian Barnes they are wonderfully wrought.

The word is that I may have benefited from a serious gap in my reading of Julian Barnes to date, some are saying 'same old same old' of this novel, but that's a call I can't make because, but for Arthur & George, I have nothing else on my shelves except a volume of short stories still unread. I did make an instant purchase of Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes's 'fun and funny, painful and witty dissection of the awesome inevitability of death and its impact on the human psyche.'

It is part memoir, part meditation and makes an exceptionally good companion read to The Sense of an Ending.

As always and thanks to such a pedestrican read, I came across those even tinier moments of description in the novel that made me smile, reminding me of so much more...

'The heavy shine on the leaves of an extravagant pot plant...'

This is the late 1960s early 1970s and do you remember how no 'lounge' was complete without a Swiss Cheese plant or a Rubber plant and how we would diligently polish the leaves to a highly artificial gloss with some milky liquid from Baby Bio??

Oh it was only me? Never mind, it conjured up in an instant for me a house, a room, its furniture, its decor and colours, its mood, everything....and also me. The me that was then.

So The Sense of An Ending, for me 150 pages of incrediby valuable writing, less is more, the writer who trusts the reader to 'get it' even if poor Tony can't; an elegiac
novel about ageing and time, and the cover with its slightly rain-washed look, the feel of an over-exposed photograph and the dandelion head with the drifting seeds somehow all felt right too ... didn't we as children  blow the seeds away as a means of telling the time?

For me a book about life's expectations and definitions of happiness, about nostalgia and Tony's take on it...

'But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions - and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives - then I plead guilty.'

So I hope I have gone some way to explaining why I really don't want to find a book better than this on the Booker longlist. Yes I know it's all very muddled thinking indeed, but if I was a Booker judge I would actually be excited at the thought of this making the short list and having to read it again.

And now I'm in a real mess because I still have to read On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry.

 

Whim is me...

I'm trying hard with the Booker longlist reading this year I really am, and it is no reflection on the quality of the list, which after all I can't comment on until I have read in its entirety, but I was suddenly drowned by a huge wave of ennui at more reading to prescription.

Sometimes I love directed reading, sometimes not, and I can see that I may have shot myself in the foot here because there we are about to finish a shared year of reading War & Peace together and before that we conquered Ulysses. It could be argued all prescriptive enough reading processes in their own way.

But I've done a lot of that day-to-day directed reading as well recently, and most willingly before meeting and talking to the authors at Port Eliot Festival, but I was dipping into a book that had arrived from OUP, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs (who writes a blog Text Patterns here) and suddenly I found myself very comfortably esconced on Planet Jacobs with Alan's idea...

'....my commitment to one dominant, overarching, nearly definitive principle for reading: Read at Whim.'

There's a great deal more to Professor Jacob's arguments, this is an OUP book after all, and having decided that I absolutely did need to read at Whim that very minute I didn't really want to read this one cover to cover either (sorry Alan) though I will eventually. So what follows is is in no way a definitive representation of the arguments, more a sifted version that held relevance for me at that particular moment, ideas that gave me pause for thought.

I browsed Alan Jacobs's dissection of some of the books out there which go for the prescriptive angle, most of which I have on my shelves.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die gets short shrift from Alan

'...dreadful...violation of the sovereignty of Whim'

and I've always felt the same, love the pictures but the book has felt wrong from the start...not a single book by Penelope Fitzgerald in there. How to Read Like a Professor comes under much scrutiny too and Jacobs argues both the fors (the promise of expertise may be attractive to some) and the againsts (reading = drudgery).

For a marginalia-ist like me there is an interesting section about writing in books and with reference to library books. A heinous crime to many including me, a sort of looting of the future reader's mind in a way, which is why I always have to have my own copy of a book and which, once written in I never lend out... it would feel like lending out my diary. Alan Jacobs and I are kindred spirits, no good putting a question mark in the margin for me and Alan, the question and the thought needs to be written down, a chance to recapture what you were experiencing when you first read the passage, and from which your future self may benefit. If I do that it needs to be somewhere in the book itself.

The reader of the library book is 'not allowed' to write in the book but the fact that they do, far from being seen as loutish book behaviour could be seen as an indication of the

'admirably irrepressible and responsive readers who can't afford their own books.'

And for those who may be squinting to see what that card says, it came from Slightly Foxed some years ago and yes, you need to have due regard for your viscera if you stealeth a book from my library.

Balancing that process of marginalia for Alan Jacobs is the suggestion that this can all be overdone, the continuity of reading interrupted and to the detriment of the reader. Uninterrupted flow might be an essential aspect of the book, in Alan's words

'I was blaming the road for my own riding of the brakes.'

Some books may require a lot of commentary, others only a little and ..

'Lord help the person who annotates a Harry Potter book or the latest John Grisham. In books of that kind momentum is not to be squandered.'

There is what looks like a really interesting section on e reading and in particular the Kindle, and it's not all bad news, plus some commentary on the current fashion for sharing your progress with a book page by page online as if in a race, which just might be. However by now I am so overcome by Whim that I am done with the distraction of Alan Jacobs's book (a sentiment which I have a feeling Alan would understand and even applaud ) because I now want the pleasures of reading back.

The extreme reader, to coin a phrase, is a rare bird indeed. ("I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing," Lynne Sharon Schwartz writes. "Can I go back to my books now?") Such people are born, not made, I think; or mostly born and only a little made. They take care of themselves; they always do go back to their books.

Yes indeed, Whim was me so I settled down with a huge pile of books to pay attention to my Inner Whim and settled on three that I really did want to read now and I am right back in my reading groove with each of them.

Fortunately for me I was not overcome with paying attention to my Inner Whim before I had made a start on the Booker longlist with The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes, and the book already a victim of the pencil. However I can now see that reading this novel may just have contributed to my increased susceptibility to all this, because I'm not sure I'm going to read anything else on the list that will match up to it.

The truth is actually that I love it so much I don't want to risk finding something on the list I might like more.

Rubbish thinking isn't it.

I'm wondering what you may be reading now and why, and how's your Inner Reading Whim faring today??

 

Lamerton Village Show

So I'm sitting up in bed reading and drinking a cup of tea at 9.15am yesterday, my mind is in that strange place between dream-filled sleep and wondering what to do on a no-work day... coffee and papers at Jericho's perhaps... head further afield for a mooch around Topsham, except it's August and it will be heaving... when I suddenly remember it is the Lamerton Village Show (the first for fifty years) and all exhibits have to be staged by 10am.

Why wasn't I dreaming about that all night instead of the stupid dream I keep having year on year that I'm about to go on duty and I have no clean uniform and I don't know which ward I'm on. One morning I'm going to wake up so relieved when this all goes right, instead of being momentarily riven with anxieties about missing laundry.

Anyway Bookhound is out hunting in our little orchard for decent apples to exhibit and we make it in the doors in the nick of time... and they were very strict, unlike our own village show where we allow until 12md for staging and then some.

We were so relieved to have made it under the wire that we then did take ourselves off to Jericho's in Launceston for coffee and walnut cake and an hour with the papers. Sitting there I saw this quote from an Emily Dickinson poem on a plaque on the wall,

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

It was new to me, I loved it instantly and very much, and now envisage (one day) another Emily piece to match The Inundation of the Spring Enlarges Every Soul, (perhaps bird fabrics through the windows instead of flowers) This piece of course has never graced a village show because it has its home in Canada.  

I found this picture of me working on that quilt last summer and it is so true, I only have to look at that picture to remember that time, the friendship stitched into that piece and just look who's at my feet, and the other two on the cushion...

We went back at 3pm to discover that the apples had held their own against stiff competition considering we didn't have time to take the Windolene to them and had to make do with a spit and polish in the car on the way.

The Tinker's Elizabeth Bradley tapestry scooped a...

and we were wondering if the tapestry might get Best Exhibit in Show but that went to a sponge cake... never mind, he took it like a pro and went home to cook himself liver and onions.

Much to my surprise my luck was in too with my Liberty Tana Lawn colourwash wall-hanging in the Hand-Quilted item class, and no it wasn't the only entry this time (best of six) and grabbed off the wall as we dashed out of the house...

and what would a village show be without a pair of the dovegreysocks, the Colinette Jitterbug (Blue Parrot) ones (again six or so entries)

Much to my surprise those two were enough to win me the trophy for Most Points in Arts & Crafts, so having taken the prize outside the parish I can doubtless expect a concerted challenge from all-comers  at our own village show in four weeks time. I need to get busy if I'm to be in with a chance of the double.

And my planets were even more aligned because I scooped a raffle prize too, a big box of very nice assorted notelets, and I am indeed partial to a nice notelet.

Meanwhile there was the most wonderful riot (wrong word this week) of colour and scent going on around the village hall and to the backdrop of chatterbuzz.

I met someone who recognised me but couldn't remember why.

I knew her straight away remembering that her husband had had to leave her half way through labour to go and milk the cows, so I asked how old the baby was now.

Her face was a picture... as was mine when she said the baby was now thirty.

The sweetpeas were exquisite, oh for scratch and sniff computer screens, can't be far off.

and the vegetable classes all benefiting from a new community allotment scheme in the village. A fallow field made available and now thriving.

plus usual refreshments out in the tea tent

A really lovely and much-needed afternoon of rural peace and catching up with old friends after what has been a really strange week here in old Blighty, so I hope these pictures send some of that atmosphere your way too if you need it.... please help yourself to a scone.

Thanks Kath & Gillian...

Making a start on a tapestry by me, is I can see not like starting a tapestry for the Tinker.

Me - see in book start an hour later with little or no preparation...it goes wrong... I stop

The Tinker - studies the chart for several days... gets it enlarged... marks it up as a grid...gets the right sized canvas (13 to the inch) ... does a lot of counting and transfers his grid to his canvas ... orders the right wool...  switches off the TV and swaps to radio and audio books... sorts out his light and his magnifyer... settles into a daily routine of so many inches done per day... something most worthy of village show entry follows.

In fact we have several to choose from so this is not the one that has been entered today.

So although I have gone for very easy mickey mouse tapestry by numbers I have taken the sage advice on preparation offered by my guru and spent an afternoon at the kitchen table getting this Ehrman kit thing properly set up.

I wonder if Kath and Gillian really do pack the wool or is this a ploy to give it all the personal touch and make you feel a little more involved in the whole thing?

Because really I'll be letting Kath and Gillian down if I get this next bit wrong, to say nothing of the Spirit of Rocky who can't wait to be immortalized in a cushion, so I have made up my shade card as instructed and it took me ages.

Who knew beige and khaki came in quite so many shades? But thanks Kath and Gillian, it was all there, no queries or discrepancies so I shouldn't need to contact you at this early stage but please do stay on the end of the phone in case I need you at a later date.

Then came the stitching to the frame and I'll admit in the past I may just have hoped that one edge would stay in place with a prayer and some judicious rolling, but not this time because this has to see me through an entire series of Strictly. I sat and diligently stitched both ends to the rollers whilst listening to that nice little afternoon play on Radio 4 yesterday, about Sherlock Holmes and starring Richard Briers and Stanley Baxter.

So now I'm framed...

...and wondering if I dare do as Erika suggested in comments yesterday and go off-piste with the white to make it more Rocky-like??

But best not to run before I can walk because rather embarrassingly I had completely forgotten how to do tent stitch, or petit point as I think it might be known. I worked a row that looked really flimsy and according to the  instructions was half cross-stitch and not to be recommended if one requires substance. For the life of me I couldn't make sense of the picture of the stitch and I don't know who packed that so I can't ring them to ask, and short of getting in the car and going to see my guru I have resorted to a book and now have it sorted.

So I'm launched, may god save this tapestry and all who work on it.

 

The Tinker's Tapestries...almost

The plan was to do a post on the Tinker's Tapestries, and I promise you it is on its way, but when I nipped over to see him for a cup of tea yesterday, and to take some pictures of them all, it would really have helped if I had taken my camera with me.

Suffice to say he is busy tapestrying again, two beautiful panels from the Ehrman book and I will update you soon.

Meanwhile I was idly looking on the Ehrman website and noticed they had a sale...

and a bit of me thought how nice it might be to have some tapestry on the go through the winter...along with the knitting knitsuke and the endless quilts, so I was talking myself out of it but kept browsing because they really are so lovely.

Have you had a look yet??

I don't see why I should keep this den of temptation to myself.

And then I saw this...

My heart melted as I thought of the dear old fella sitting quite illegally on the kitchen table as if he owned it..

And what a lovely way to immortalize him, so only a couple of clicks before all this arrives...

I have received much encouragement and advice from the octogenarian expert given that this is pre-school level to his phD standard, and I also think he took one look and thought

'Bet I know who ends up finishing that..'

No, no no, I really am going to do this one.

Lamerton Produce and Craft Show this weekend. Not our village but the one right next door who are resurrecting their village show after many lapsed years, we have defected and have entries, well we can just enter all the stuff we've been exhibiting in our own for years can't we, just a shame we've eaten every last scraping of Bookhound's Champion Chutney.

Book coherence returns here next week. I have already read one off the Booker longlist that I would love to win.

 

 

 

Team Tolstoy Troika Stop ...penultimate

I must stop making excuses but I have been all set to settle down and finish this month's War & Peace instalment every day for the last week. Every day I'd say 'Right I'm just going to read War and Peace' and something would happen.

Being duty on-call manager for work, through what turned out to be the busiest week all year for the things I was on-call for, is mostly what happened. Clearly August the season of discontent.

But no worries, one evening left and I can do this and I have read it, but then we watched the news live from London and I don't know about you but seeing this sort of thing knocks the stuffing out of me. Riots and unpredictable civic unrest, Croydon in flames, poor old Reeves Corner that landmark for over 150 years ablaze and for what reason??

I can quite fathom it, all this twenty-first century War and not much Peace right in our own backyard and I hope anyone reading here who lives in London or has friends and family who do, well I really hope you are all safe and that this thing stops very soon.

2012 only a year away and a bit of me wants to see Twitter closed down in the interests of national safety and the army on the streets, or a battalion of Royal Marines, and of course that's about containing my own anxieties by control, a huge step, but talking of armies here we are War and Peace and Tolstoy's brilliant dissection of the aftermath of a conflict.

So now it's 10.30pm and I must write something for tomorrow (now today) so can you believe it we are nearly there??

I can't think were the year has gone so I finally settled down to this month's instalment, which would take me to the final chapter with just the epilogues for September and what do I find?

Algebra

Algebra??

I never could see the point of algebra and for that reason alone the scales never fell from my eyes, understanding just never arrived, why not just say the numbers in the first place and avoid all that messing about guessing.

Dark Puss...are you there?? This is your chance:-)

So Tolstoyian applied mathematics, and suddenly I can feel my heart rate rising, I'm back in Miss Collins Maths Group 4 (out of a possible 5, 1 being the best so you see my worry) and I am lost, totally lost and praying for the peace of the drawing room again..

Imagine a situation in which ten men, battalions or divisions take on and defeat fifteen men, battalions or divisions, killing or capturing everybody while sustaining only four losses themselves; they have lost four to the other side's fifteen.

Are you still in?

Now concentrate hard...

The ratio, four to fifteen, may be expressed as: 4x = 15y.

Yes, of course..

In other words: x:y = 15: 4

Well quite..

This equation may not give us the value of an unknown factor , but it does give the ratio between two unknowns. And by expressing a whole range of historical data (battles, campaigns, periods of war) in equations like these, we can obtain sets of figures that must contain laws, and these laws should be discoverable.

Moving swiftly on I was even less impressed with the thought of people having their nostrils split as punishment and wasted half an hour wondering quite what anatomical difficulties that threw up, before concentrating on the job in hand which was Tolstoy's dismemberment, limb by limb of the supposed greatness of Napoleon.

And the numbness of acute grief as news of the death of young Petya reaches Family Rostov, and as I had read of Petya's death to the distant tones of rioting coming from the TV in the other room. I realised perhaps 'twas ever thus, the impetuous invincibility of youth spoiling for a fight, that same bravado that took so many young men off to the trenches so willingly... and who knows perhaps a variation of that same restless disaffected spirit left unharnessed that fuels the torching of London...

But there's hope because out of the conflict come so many forms of bonding...

...of remnants of the army, the scrag end of war, destitute and demoralised and exisiting in the direst of conditions but pulling together to make the best of a bad lot. The Russian and the French soldiers sharing what they have left, man's humanity to man self-evident.

...of Natasha and Maria who comfort each other through their grief.

...of Pierre who finally bonds with ...well himself first of all, finding an inner peace out of adversity that had always eluded him

...and secondly with Natasha as Pierre realises how much he loves her

...then there is the strange bonding of a community as Moscow, burned to the ground starts to rise from the ashes and rebuild iself as its people return. And the realisation that a community is about its people not just its fabric, one can be replaced and remade the other can't.

There has always been wisdom but now there is optimism in Tolstoy's novel at last. I had the reassuring sense that all would be well and all manner of things would be well, and suddenly that realisation that the messages and the themes and the outcomes are timeless to every age.

We all think we only have to be knocked a little bit off course and we've lost everything, but it's only the start of something new and good. Where there is life there is happiness.'

says Pierre.

Onwards and upwards dear old London, but onwards and almost at the end Team Tolstoy, over to you, anyone still on board??

 

 

 

 

Raising bunting awareness...

I promised we would slow the pace down a little over the next few weeks on here so the day before we leap on the Team Tolstoy troika tomorrow I thought some 'looking' would be nice.

I take my camera everywhere these days and have been known to make Bookhound turn round at the end of the lane and drive back home if I have forgotten it.

Beyond the end of the lane I have discovered I am onto a loser, past the point of no return and wasting my time asking.

But it's always good to slot the memory card into the computer and see where I've been because I've usually forgotten, and this weekend I have had a lovely revisit of our trip across to The Devon Guild of Craftsman for a relaxing lunch (and trip to the wool shop of course) in that week after Port Eliot.

I have become increasingly bunting-aware since we spent a day making about three miles of our own for the dovegreyreader tent, recycling a huge stack of fabric samples which came from who-knows-where and who-knows-when but have been in my stash for years. So my eye immediately noticed the bunting decorating the Devon Guild in celebration of their 25th anniversary year.

This has all been made as part of a community project in Bovey Tracey and just look how much effort has gone into this, knitted and attached to the tape with buttons...

The summer exhibition was perfection as always and the favourite thing to catch my eye this year was this lace pillow with some very dovegreyreader-appropriate work in progress, and with a wonderful collection of lace bobbins.

Any lacemakers out there??

Yes I have tried lacemaking, and yes I do have all the gear and yes I will return to it, because once you have the knack it is incredibly soothing to do. My entire output to date is a bookmark so I have a way to go, but give me time and I have promised that I will pick this hobby up again properly.

There's always a feast of colour to be gorged on around the Guild of Craftsmen, gluttony is permitted and I can never ever resist drinking in the display of Penny Simpson's pottery. No purchases on this day but I do still have my three treasured pieces..

and more colour...

And after a bit of a busy week at work last week, and another one pending, here's some advice I might have tattoed on my forehead, or perhaps my arm because I do need to be able to remind myself of it on a regular basis.

We had lunch in the Guild cafe and as we looked out of the window this little chap sat like this for the entire time, he didn't move a muscle, so clearly it's etched on his memory too, unless he's stuffed of course in which case he forgot.

And the winners are...

Thank you to everyone who entered the Edward Thomas prize draw, all 112 of you and look who's here... we've just had a very exciting moment with the Spirit of Rocky watching over us (yes we still miss the old fella) as we asked the random number generator to do his work for him, and here are the results. Best check your name against the number of your comment on the original post here and then you can jump up and down...

The bag with books goes to....drum rrrrrrrrroooooooooooool

81 Wendy

(Random number generated Aug 7 2011 at 22:50:50 by www.psychicscience.org)

and the other nine winners are...another drum rrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooooooool

21 ~ Janet Drinkwater

69 ~ Blithe Sprit

97 ~ Emma

36 ~ Mystica

64 ~ Nova

77 ~ Niall

74 ~ Donna Foster

35 ~ Diana

106  ~ Alison Gorman

(Random numbers generated Aug 7 2011 at 22:41:17 by www.psychicscience.org)

Congratulations everyone, if you could send your addresses to me at dovegreyreader@gmail dot com, and put EDWARD THOMAS BAG in the subject line then I stand a chance of finding it, and I will let Faber (& Faber) know to send nice things to plop on your doormat eventually.

And my apologies to anyone who waited so long for the books from the Captain Emmett draw, staff changes at the publisher, lost emails, lost addresses and a lot of trawling back through my 'discarded' bin involved.

If anyone still hasn't received their book could they please let me know.

The Birthday Tree...

One of the worst things about moving house, apart from the fact that you arrive at the new one and find the view might be nice but the house isn't actually as big as it first seemed,

...and the water supply's a bit dodgy,

...and the boiler has to be condemned,

...and you throw out the resident curtains you've paid for because they bear no resemblance to the ones you agreed to buy,

...and it's darker at night than you ever thought possible and the electricity goes off and you can't even remember where the stairs are let alone find the candles and a box of matches,

...and you've a inherited stupid burglar alarm that goes off at every whit and twit and calls the police and you don't know how to stop it,

... and it all needs far more work than you first thought,

well all these things are bad enough, but worse it turned out was what we had to leave behind at the old house.

Our first home, a gorgeous little end of terrace cottage bought mostly by the Halifax Building Society for the princely sum of £12,300 in 1980, perfect for babies and small children but not perfect for teenagers, and so we moved here seventeen years ago and if there was one thing we would have brought with us had we been able to it was our neighbour's tree.

Actually there were several things because after watching The Victorian Kitchen Garden Bookhound had built us an exquisite little traditional brick-based Victorian greenhouse which couldn't come with us either, and come to think of it the kitchen was really nice too... and we had an en suite bathroom which I've never had since, but anyway, no regrets.

The tree we discovered was a Eucryphia, always clotted with masses of beautiful white flowers in early August, and therefore resplendent on the day that I came home from hospital with a tiny little firstborn, Offspringette.

So we called it the Birthday Tree and we loved it.

And each year we'd have the birthday party out in the garden underneath the gaze of the Birthday Tree and its gorgeous white flowers.

I wouldn't have thought it possible to grieve for a tree when I should have been more worried about the fact we were having to pipe water from a cattle trough and there were bits of dead 'things' coming out of the taps, but grieve I did. It was a connection none of us could bear to lose and we quickly realised we would need a Eucryphia of our own in our garden here, so we bought one straight away and had a little planting ceremony.

Then it was in the wrong place so we had to move it which set it back a little, and we waited in vain for flowers.

Then we had a huge and terrible disaster with a chain saw in the wrong place at the wrong time and five foot was accidentally lopped off  what was by now a six foot tall tree, which didn't do it much good either.

There were real tears and Bookhound hid in the shed for a while.

I would drive past the old house and covet the house that had proper water coming out of the taps, and covet the Birthday Tree. We would make a point of passing by each August just to enjoy the towering mass of flowers. Then horror of horrors a few years ago the tree was chopped down.... no I'll bet it was 'hacked down mercilessly while people stood around saying, great, look at all the light we can have now' or something. It disappeared without trace and a horrible new fence appeared around our lovely old home and we went into mourning for the Birthday Tree, all the while looking at our own rather stunted and withered version.

Our version is a funny shape because we have been too scared to touch it since its accidental amputation, let alone prune it, and after two frozen winters, the leaves were looking patchy and brown and things were not looking hopeful.

So there we were, sitting out on the garden seat this week and lo verily what did we see...

 

Happy Birthday today Offspringette, who has travelled from Christchurch to Chicago via Los Angeles this week, and here at last are some flowers for you on our own Birthday Tree.

 

Prize draw :: Edward Thomas book bags and books

I promised a very lovely prize draw today and that's exactly what we have...

From the good people of Faber (not forgetting & Faber) nine perfectly lovely gorgeous canvas Edward Thomas book bags, and a signed copy of Matthew Hollis's own poetry collection Ground Water

And for one lucky person a bag containing signed copies of Ground Water, and Now All Roads Lead to France and a copy of Edward Thomas Selected Poems... which might not be signed.

Names in comments and these can go worldwide... oh ye very lucky people.

Now All Roads Lead to France - The Last Years of Edward Thomas ~ Matthew Hollis

Edward Thomas left the dugout behind his post and leaned into the opening a moment to fill his pipe. A shell passed so close that the blast of air stopped his heart. He fell without a mark on his body.

So Matthew Hollis recounts on the first page of Now All Roads Lead to France and I'll admit to being stunned. I had no idea of the circumstances of Edward Thomas's death and being 'stunned' can be quite a good way to start a book I think. So through all my recent reading there has been a steady bass note pulsing along in the background, and that is the Team Edward Thomas shared pre-publication read of Now All Roads Lead to France by Matthew Hollis which is published today, ninety seven years to the day since the United Kingdom declared war on Germany.

I managed to squeeze in a trip to Dartington a few weeks ago to hear Matthew Hollis talk about the book, and if you find him speaking at an event near you I can highly recommend it. Somehow the use of the solid stone wall of the ancient Great Hall as a screen for Matthew's pictorial presentation seemed entirely appropriate when talking about a poet whose quintessential Englishness was being discussed.

The presentation also included a poignant moment when we listened to a recording of Helen Thomas reading Adlestrop to a backdrop of pictures.

Helen Thomas.... dear Helen and how we have all pondered Helen's life and the rather sunny account she gives in her own autobiographical writing Under Storm's Wing. Edward Thomas a depressive man who most certainly needed the freedom which Helen gave him, and how often I have pulled myself up sharp as I read of Edward's travels and sojourns with other poets and thought about Helen and her life alone with the children.

Whilst on August 4th 1914 Edward Thomas and his close friend the poet Robert Frost seemed little exercised by events in Europe, it would be Frost's poem The Road Not Taken, and Edward Thomas's interpretation of it as a serious and moral tale about taking responsibility for one's own destiny, that would eventually tip the balance of his indecision and compel him to enlist. Matthew Hollis's book takes the reader on that journey too and I have been spellbound by my very slow-paced read of Now All Roads Lead to France.

I think Team Edward Thomas have enjoyed it too and my thanks to them for sharing a flavour of their thoughts today. We have more to follow from what has been a fascinating project and I think we will have plenty of questions to ask Matthew Hollis when he stops by here to talk with us in early September.

Come back tomorrow for a really very lovely prize draw.

Hilary...

Edward Thomas’s transformation from a journeyman writer into a late-flowering poet is fascinating, but two other things stay with me after reading Matthew Hollis’s book and refuse to go away. One is the extraordinary length of the shadow cast by the First World War and our continuing feeling that what happened a hundred years ago is still relevant and still shaping us. How do we account for the extraordinary popularity of, say, Downton Abbey? It’s tempting to dismiss this as nostalgia, but there is surely more going on than that.

The second is the sexual politics of Edward Thomas’s life, which seems to have been so irrevocably determined by getting his girlfriend pregnant when he was still at university. All his subsequent decisions were influenced by his need to support a family, and it seems to me that while we are used to talking about the impact of children on women’s lives and choices, we should not forget its impact on men.  

Jeannette...

I discovered Edward Thomas by accident, while doing research on an unrelated subject. I had read an account of his interest in the young, vulnerable daughter of family friends and I saw the saddest photograph of a child --his son -- and wasn’t able to put it out of my mind.  His wife’s very frank memoir told me more than I needed to know about his unkindness toward his family and his persistent reluctance to provide for them properly.

So I had developed a strong dislike for him before I’d read anything that he’d written.

Now All Roads Lead to France is a detailed account of the redeeming choices that Edward Thomas made in what were to be the last 4 years of his life and the book has offered me a chance to give Edward Thomas the benefit of the doubt. It was a fascinating read about his extraordinary creative process and his belief in the choices he made.

Cheryl...

...As the book began to focus on the friendship with Frost and the theory and practice of Thomas’s poetry I was totally engrossed. It helps so much that this was written by a poet. I’m now looking forward to reading all of Thomas’s poetry and the poems which he influenced in Branch Lines. I want to understand more about poetic influences and the history of poetic development.

Fran H-B...

From my reading of All Roads I have discovered the childhood haunts and adult homes of E T. Standing by his memorial stone looking out over a favourite view I thought how hard it was for him to decide to enlist and leave England behind.
Yet being in uniform and the prospect of fighting in France seems to have developed his growing ability to write poetry. Did it lift his depressions despite him never seeing all the poems published? Did enforced separation from his family rather than leaving them of his own will heighten his poetic skills? Two questions I am still asking myself.

Bet...

I have to confess that before I learned about this book I had never heard of Edward Thomas, though I am very familiar with the poetry of Robert Frost and have read an anthology of WWI poets. While I was waiting for the book to make its way across the pond I found some of ET's prose and poetry at various local libraries and read Helen's memoir. I was impressed with some of the poetry and found the prose rough going. And I must also confess that I found myself thinking that ET was... a jerk! Perhaps Helen was portraying herself as more patient than she really was, but I thought it was wonderful of her to be so supportive of his living by his writing and not getting a "real" job, as his father was pressuring him to do. I doubt if very many wives, even in those days, would have been so willing to live in such poverty with a man who could have been earning so much more. I know he might have been depressed, but he seems to  have had more control over his moods when he was with those other than his family (as most of us do), so I felt he was being self-indulgent at home.

 

 Kate...

In 1914 Edward Thomas had to decide which road to take , the road to France and war or the road to America and farming with his friend Robert Frost. The latter choice seemed to be  more alarming, it would mean transporting his family and starting a new life and a new career.
Edward Thomas  had an indecisive nature, prone to depression; and he was also sensitive about his physical and moral courage. His friendship with Frost provided the encouragement and stimulus to try verse,  Hollis writes of the friendship and  the outpouring of poetry that began in November 1914. It continued to flow and he achieved much, even if not publishing success at that time. Thomas must have felt positive about this decision.
Positive too were his experiences of war, his diary shows him to have been a committed officer. The young soldiers with him must have been aware that he could have chosen a safer posting  and perhaps admired his courage.   His wife Helen* in a letter to Frost says, 'Oh, he's just fine and full of satisfaction in his work'. There appeared to be no trace of his persistent bouts of depression whilst in France.
I sense that Edward Thomas was convinced of the rightness of his choice of roads and that in the months before he died he was happier and more fulfilled than at any time in his life.

Bill and Nancy...

       Matthew Hollis ends the "Autumn - Dymock 1914" section with the sentence "Edward Thomas was about to become a poet."  In the following section, Hollis presents a detailed description of Thomas's initial efforts to write a poem that culminated in the typing of  "Up in the Wind" on Thursday, 3 December 1914.  He was 36 years old which is not too late to start writing poetry, except in Thomas's case he had only three years left to live and write. He had been encouraged to write poems by his wife Helen before he met Robert Frost in
1913.  He had been writing reviews of poetry for a number of years, he was in the company of poets and other writers many times, and discussed the writing of poetry with numerous poets, but the development of his close friendship with Robert Frost and their discussion of the language of poetry gave him the impetus to write his first poem.  Hollis's discussion of this poetic relationship is exciting to read and leads me to wonder about other such relationships that have resulted in a poet's first poem.  That Thomas did not write poems before this first poem is the real mystery here.

Thank you @PortEliotFest

 

 



 

Carol's experience @PortEliotFest

I asked those who were there to send me their festival thoughts if they wanted to and I would post them on here for others to share... I'm blushing now but it was really lovely to meet up with Carol again. We bump into each other at all sorts of literary events and you have to know that Carol came on her own, pitched her tent and got stuck in to the whole festival mood. For anyone pondering a visit next year be reassurred that Port Eliot is a very warm and friendly festival so coming alone is no deterrent to enjoying it all and you'll always have somewhere to come and sit and get a cup of tea!

So over to Carol and my thanks to her for lugging that promised copy of Fame is the Spur by Howard Spring all the way up to the tent to give to me.

I've waited a few days to write this after returning from Port Eliot  to give time to let the whole wonderful weekend settle. I had planned all sorts of of things over the three days – authors first and foremeost, but also gardeners (Dan Pearson and Noel Kingsbuury), musicians (Bellowhead, Fisherman's Friends) poets (Luke Wright). The list goes on, because Port Eliot is that sort of festival, something for everyone and always something going on. And sometimes it's the unexpected which has the most impact – but more of that later.

At the top of my list was spending time in the DGR tent – I'd followed Lynne's preparations on the blog and knew this would be a major part of my weekend. And from my first sight of the tent, I knew this was going to be something special. Truly, this was the blog brought to life. There were the quilts, the Tinker's amazing tapestries, knitted socks along the front of the table, pictures of Rocky and the baby birds pinned to a quilt, lovely Bookhound welcoming us all with cups of tea ('very good quality tea – you don't get this everywhere' as one chap behind me remarked), and the basket of knitting for us all to dip into and add a few rows of our own.

I met Rev Cheryl and Fran HB, blog commenters and fellow Team Edward Thomas members, and very unusually for me (I'm the sort of person who puts her bag on the other seat in a train to avoid having to make conversation) I exchanged email addresses with a lovely lady called Jackie from Warrington who seemed to be in the same place as me for much of the weekend.

My list of events went completely out of the window, as once I'd heard Lynne's first session (with Katie Kitamura and Hari Kunzru) I was hooked. This was book talk as it should always be – relaxed and informal, people joining in when they had something to say, knitting and drinking tea in Lynne's sitting room tent.

I spent the rest of the weekend listening to all of Lynne's sessions (particularly loved the reveal of the Mrs Cash illuminations for Daisy Goodwin) and was increasingly impressed by Lynne's management of the sessions. It looked effortless, but I know it took a lot of research, confidence and nerve to achieve. All the authors responded to the informality and it felt like sharing a private chat, rather than attending a formal session. Even I, who despite going to lots of festivals and bookshop sessions, rarely ask a question, was moved to speak several times over the course of the weekend.

My personal favourite, as I knew he would be, was the lovely Will Fiennes. I've heard him speak four times now and he always captures the audience with his almost mesmerising blend of humility and reverence for words.

All in all, as I said to Lynne afterwards, the whole thing was a complete triumph and if ever  there was a way to present a TV book programme, this would be it. I'm so glad to hear it's all going to happen again next year. It's certainly been the highlight of my reading year so far.

PS: I referred to the unexpected above – this was an hour listening to Kate Winslet (mystery guest) read Mr Gum in the Bowling Green tent on Sunday morning, doing all the voices and giggling herself silly at times. A classic Port Eliot moment!

A Happy Camper finds out how it's really done @PortEliotFest with Emma Kennedy

We nearly be done, it'll be all over bar the washing-up by the end of this evening so my grateful thanks to the intrepid Happy Campers who have done Team DGR proud with their tireless efforts in the tea room eating almond torte flying all over the festival on our behalf, and my thanks to them both for some wonderful event reports. Here's Angela's final offering for this year...

My last festival action before the promised cream tea back in the DGR tent.  As I was preparing to hear Emma Kennedy’s talk on her latest book ‘ I left my tent in San Francisco’, Bookhound was assembling plateloads of scones and setting out ranks of cups and saucers as the DGR faithful listened rapt to William Fiennes. So I was alone for the first time because Linda was in the land of the Snow Geese.

The floor at the front of the Bowling Green tent was looking a bit worse for wear.  There was that detritus that arises from large groups of people gathering and then dispersing after eating sweeties while listening to Kate Winslet and Lauren Child (in my case wuffling a bacon buttie for a very late breakfast).

Emma Kennedy -  sporting a broken elbow -  started off by reading us an amusing extract which explains why the book has the title it does and as the story unfolded I felt grateful that the trials of the Happy Campers had only really amounted to some forgotten cooking utensils. Compared with skunks, agonising walks in searing heat, and a dwarf called Samson in a red Ferrari (whose strength was not in his hair but somewhere else) our mundane little under canvas challenges were never going to provide material for a best seller.  Questions from the audience revealed that surprisingly, Emma Kennedy is still friends with her long suffering travelling companion and the pair of them did go on to lead useful lives……..hope then for all those parents of gap year students.

A trip back to the 1970s again, (do I deliberately seek out the decade of my childhood?), this time when Emma Kennedy read from her other book, ‘The Tent, the Bucket and Me’.  I was looking at the cover of this in the book tent.  You would know it was a 1970s memoir from the font used for the title; Simon Garfield would be able to tell you instantly which one it was.  Sort of bubbly, a cross between The Goodies and an Egon Ronay cookery book.   Kate Winslet might need to watch her position of ‘best reader using funny voices ‘. Emma Kennedy’s Welsh dad came to glorious life, if Linda had been with me she might have dumped Ivan (for elucidation refer to Harmony Hairspray moment) there and then. There was even another Old Granny in there too.

Thanks, Emma for a really upbeat end to my Port Eliot experiences.

 

 

 

 

William Fiennes visits the dovegreyreader tent @PortEliotFest

Oh my what a wonderful Festival weekend we have had, it's our final day of reports today and I can think of no better note to end a festival on than a conversation with author William Fiennes talking about his writing life and his books, The Snow Geese and The Music Room.

I've heard William talk before and we've met at several literary events in the last few years so I was really looking forward to this and after a quick introduction from me I settled back along with a full tent to listen and to be entranced. I think we'd all agree that some authors, no matter their brilliance on the page just can't do the live event platform thing and I wonder why we expect so much of them these days, but I knew we were in for a treat with William Fiennes, and I think we had yet another hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck hear-a-pin-drop moment as he recounted the history behind the The Snow Geese, the illness, the need for travel and freedom, the subsequent journey, an odyssey of sorts, a migration following a migration, those moments when home seemed so very far away. moments of homesickness and nostalgia, and at the book's centre the steady beat of their wings and the direction that the snow geese provided.

Talking about The Music Room William highlighted the realisation that his older brother Richard, who died some years ago from the consquences of his epilepsy, was not the sort of man to receive an obituary but what a wonderful tribute William has created for him. The exploration of William's childlike acceptance of Richard's problems that slowly develops into an adult understanding of a brother for whom others would need 'to slacken the strings of expectation' but who, for the family, was a cherished and much-loved person in his own right. And underneath this story the steady bass note that tracks the history of brain research.

After lots of questions and discussion amongst the audience we were in for another unexpected but very welcome treat as William read us his latest short story, a fable, 'Why the Ash Tree Has Black Buds' to be published in an anthology this autumn.

One of the traditions that we have established at this festival is our Guest Book. We asked each author to sign it before they left and they all did. I love this picture of William thinking so carefully about what to write... and can you see Rocky looking over his right shoulder from his festival perch...

and I can tell you William wrote something really lovely, and drew us not one but three snow geese in keeping with the knitsuke ones we gave him and which he has told us he will treasure.

Well I think we will all treasure that final event too, so my grateful thanks to William Fiennes for visiting the dovegreyreader tent and to everyone who came to listen.

 

 

The Happy Campers Magic Moments ~ Part Two @PortEliotFest

Handbag Moment

Picture this – a van is driving along a track.  On the bonnet sits a girl wearing a tutu and with a large black moustache pencilled across her face.  She is telling everyone to follow the van until it stops.  We do.  It stops.  The back doors open and...... it’s the 1 Minute Disco!  Just enough time to put your handbag down and dance round it until the minute is up, when the doors close again and the van drives off.  What a brilliant idea.

Missed Moment

Us Happy Campers saw everyone and everything we wanted to, and a few more besides, but missed our opportunity to see a now famous group of friends who sing sea shanties.  Unfortunately, the programme in their venue was obviously running late – we really wanted Fishermen’s Friends but could only find Hot Brew, which was not our cup of tea.

DGR interrupts to say we saw them!

Miracle Moment

When we went to bed the portaloos were white and when we woke up in the morning they were green – the Toilet Fairy had been in the night and replaced them all!

Hollywood Moment

Kate Winslet!  Kate Winslet!!!  The Hollywood star herself was on stage Sunday morning reading her childrens’ favourite book, Mr Gum and the Power Crystals by Andy Stanton.  She read the whole thing in one and a half hours, acting it out, doing all the different voices and thoroughly enjoying herself.  Before she started, she suggested that any children who wanted to could join her on stage to listen and there was a susurration as all the men in the audience involuntarily rose from their seats and then settled down again with a wistful sigh.  An hour and a half is a bit long for the littlest little ‘uns and there was further consternation from some of the dads when they had to leave temporarily to take their offspring for a toilet break.  Would they miss anything?  Would it all be over when they got back?  Andy Stanton has a wonderful way with words.  Phrases such as “silent as a carpet”, or “like a piece of old cheese nobody wants to dance with”, and our favourite, the famous breakfast cereal Baron von Tubbleworth’s Crunchy Little Leopards – I bet Burt Lancaster eats those!  Not forgetting “the past has a way of repeating itself”.  (The past has a way of repeating itself.)  (The past has a way of repeating itself.)  We rocked with laughter at the description of Old Granny in her rocking chair, surreptitiously slurping sherry, rocking and farting at the same time.  I also particularly enjoyed Nicholas de Twinklecakes, a villainous 16^th century Hooray Henry and, my favourite, little Alan Taylor, the mechanical-limbed gingerbread superhero, one of whose raisin eyes was once eaten by a cat and replaced from the bag in the kitchen.  And a final quote: stories are like rivers – they keep on flowing and they sometimes have fish in them.  Andy Stanton is my new superhero.  There are 8 or 9 books in the Mr Gum series definitely seek them out.

 

Patrick Barkham flits into the dovegreyreader tent @PortEliotFest

So there we were sitting in the dovegreyreader tent awaiting the arrival of Patrick Barkham when a blur, followed by a crowd of blurs, shot across in front of us screeching to a halt at a nearby herbaceous border. I wandered across to get a sighting of our next guest because yes, it was Patrick Barkham concluding his Butterfly Walk around Port Eliot before coming in to see us.

If anyone was feeling a bit sleepy they soon woke up because I doubt anyone can top Patrick for energy and enthusiasm for his subject as he talked us through his butterfly year as recounted in The Butterfly Isles and his search for all fifty-nine species of British butterflies. And we promised not to breath a word about the day he pulled a sicky to notch up another rarity.

At times hilarious... as in the moment when his girlfriend rang him whilst he was halfway up a mountain in search of a rarity to tell him it was all over, she couldn't cope with all the lepidoptery a minute longer. Thankfully they are now back together and with a baby on the way (currently pupating)

At times serious as Patrick recounted the threats to the butterfly population and how intensive farming methods some years ago had caused a serious decline...

'Yes but it kept you all fed,' replied a farmer in the audience and a moment that could have gone either way but handled with supreme tact by Patrick as he talked about the improvements that were made through stewardship schemes when the damage became evident. We live in the midst of a stewardship scheme here; the farm around us now leaves plough margins and hedges are trimmed at appropriate times only, whilst our garden is a haven of neglect this year (building project priority) so we are claiming stewardship and barn owl habitat as our excuse though sadly with no EU subsidy.

We asked what we could do to encourage the butterfly population and apparently you need to prune your buddleias early so that they flower late...or do you prune them late so they flower early...oh help me out someone, I didn't take notes.

Two very delightful small children sat on the floor and knitted their way through Patrick's talk and then told us about the butterfly kit they had bought online which inluded caterpillars, and how they had fed them and watched them hatch and then released them, and we all wanted one. I think it might have been from here.

Knowing that we had captured a rare knitted large blue from Site X ' somewhere in Devon I steered the conversation in that direction and who knew that the real Large Blue has such a precarious existence, relying on a prolonged and parasitic sojourn in the nest of a very particular sort of red ant before emerging resplendent after about ten months (I think).

Anyway Patrick was delighted with his Knitted Large Blue knitsuke and we are delighted it has gone to such a good home.

and we quizzed him about his next book too which will be about badgers.

My thanks to Patrick Barkham for a memorable event and to everyone who came and listened.

 

 

Happy Campers Magic Moments ~ Part One @PortEliotFest

So once more please welcome the Happy Campers who enjoyed the rest of the festival on our behalf and are now wearing badges that say 'We sat through three hours of...' oh well you'll find out, part two to follow.

Notes from a Festival Virgin

At the grand old age of 55 I’ve finally made it to my first ever festival.  Accompanied by Best Book Buddy, the plan was to have a structured timetable so we didn’t miss anyone we specifically wanted to see, with plenty of gaps for wandering around taking in the atmosphere.  So, here are a few of my Memorable Moments, in no particular order.  Many thanks to BBB for her wonderful company as always, in this and all our other escapades to all things literary.

Luvvie Moment

Relaxing in the Dovegreyreader tent listening to Joanna Briscoe talking about her new book You, we were interrupted by a visit from Christopher Biggins.  Our first celebrity!  (No offence, Joanna.) He chatted for a while, then left again, leaving us all suffused in a warm Christopher Biggins-y glow.

DGR butts in to say look, loooook...

Tea Moment

What a joy to find the Tented Tearoom.  Proper cups and saucers and old-fashioned teapots, all in mismatched china; staff dressed in period costumes; music on vinyl records; a chandelier; and almond torte to die for.

Movie Moment

Last year, BBB and I read The Leopard by Tomasi di Lampedusa for our book group, and Martin Scorsese had very kindly chosen the film version as one to be shown at the Cinema Paradiso.  The setting was magical, sloping down to the river with a picturesque Victorian railway viaduct in the background (still used, and we were amazed at the number of trains and how late in the night they ran).  Armed with Pimms and popcorn, we settled down for a treat.  We knew the film is considered a classic, that it was made in 1963, directed by Visconti and starred Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon.  What we didn’t know was that it is in Italian with subtitles, and that it lasts for THREE HOURS!  Determined to stick it out to the end in order to report back to book group, we were soon swathed in the hats, gloves, scarves, fleeces, down jackets and blankets that we’d taken “just in case”, and still our extremities were frozen.  If you ever get the chance to see this film, in much warmer circumstances, hmm think carefully because unless you’ve read the book you might not have a clue what it’s about.
Anyway we've got the badges now.

Sleep (lack of) Moment

I’m no stranger to camping so I was expecting (a) a crying baby, (b) at least one snorer (c) a car alarm in the early hours, and I was rewarded with all three.  What I didn’t expect was the pounding boom from the disco until the wee small hours.  I can’t get on with earplugs, so I suffer, then I’m grouchy, and that means everyone else suffers.  Bearing all this in mind, I was remarkably restrained the next morning when BBB, in charge of catering, confessed that she’d brought camping stove, gas cylinders, teabags, mugs and milk, but had forgotten to bring a pan to boil the water in.......

Mosh Pit Moment

I’m not very good at standing events because lack of height means I can’t see anything.  Every time I manoeuvre myself into a good position, someone taller and/or broader manages to stand in front of me.  With Bellowhead, however, seeing them doesn’t matter so much.  For those who don't know them, I wouldn’t recommend buying a CD and listening to it while reading a book – they need to be experienced live.  Their set was one and a half hours of pure energy and the audience packed into the Big Top had just enough room to jump up and down on the spot.  In front of me was Mr Dreadlocks-and-grass-skirt; next to him was Swaying Man, working on the principle that if he concentrated very, very hard on sending a text message, he might manage to stay upright; and next to me was Get-A-Room couple, who thankfully disappeared early in the gig, presumably to do just that.

Parody Moment

We were in our favourite oasis of calm, the Tented Tearoom, when the three people opposite us struck up conversation and told us in no uncertain terms that we must not miss Mark Crick, soon to be performing at a venue nearby.  We had time to spare before our next event, so thought we’d look in.  Surprise, surprise, one of the three was Mark Crick, whose speciality is writing “instruction manuals” in the style of other authors.  We forgot all about our next event and stayed on to the end, crying with laughter.  Something I will never forget, and nor will the hapless female member of the audience who ended up on stage helping Mark to read “How to Paint a Door” in the style of Anaïs Nin (think stiff bristles and firm strokes and you’ll get the general idea).  Definitely seek out his books – Kafka’s Soup (recipes), Sartre’s Sink (DIY) and Machiavelli’s Lawn (garden maintenance).

To be continued .... you will absolutely want to know about the Happy Campers Kate Winslet magic moment

 

 

Gillian Slovo visits the dovegreyreader tent @PortEliotFest

So it's still last Saturday I think, and having nipped across to the Five Dials stage on the other side of the Walled Garden at 3.30pm to do an interview with Helen Walsh and Eleanor Birne, by now it's almost 5pm and there can be no slacking in the concentration department because I have to prepare for the arrival of Gillian Slovo.

I have a page of notes and some questions in the trusty notebook and if I'd had time to be nervous I might have been, because I have this image of Gillian Slovo, and based on nothing definite beyond my assumptions about her childhood lived in the shadow and fear of anti-apartheid activism, and perhaps what you take from this into adulthood and ...well perhaps she'll be a bit severe and robust in her arguments and certainly won't suffer fools gladly.

In fact Gillian was warm and friendly and talked engagingly about her life and her writing to a fascinated and engrossed audience who asked plenty of insightful and interesting questions, and several shared their own experiences of growing up in South Africa ...so the conversation happened with ease and candour.

We talked about her life as the daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, fiesty parents who kept a great deal of their anti-apartheid activities secret from their children. There was a moment recounted by Gillian when she had eavesdropped on a conversation and discovered the identity of the get-away driver in a jail break, the burden of that knowledge for her perhaps a vindication of her parents' decision to keep those secrets from their children. Interestingly we talked about the current practice to be completely honest and up front with children and to tell them the truth, but it was not ever thus and certainly in the 1950's era of children being 'seen and not heard' perhaps that secrecy not as unusual as it may now seem. That said it is clear Joe Slovo and Ruth First were protecting their children in the best way they knew how, what the children didn't know they couldn't disclose to anyone.

We moved onto Every Secret Thing, Gillian's memoir and having been brought up not to ask questions, writing this book gave Gillian the chance to do just that, having been given the best advice by a colleague to go everywhere, search into every corner and do that asking, and then write what you like.

I asked Gillian whether there had a been a 'right' moment to write the book and we had an interesting discussion about the fact that history was at the right moment for it to be written. The world had been changed and it was a time for people to sit and reflect. The reality too is that to write about a moment in time also solidifies it, history frozen ...then after a time you can challenge it, talk about it more and Gillian agreed she would perhaps write it completely differently now given the chance. Time alters perceptions.

Moving onto Gillian's fiction I gathered up a thread and a common theme that I felt had been woven through our talks through the day, that of assimilation. Don't ask where that came from after so many hours of talking but it did suddenly dawn on me that from Justine talking about Coco Chanel's need to fit in, to Daisy Goodwin's American heiresses trying to blend into the English aristocracy, and then Edmund de Waal's themes of Jewish persecution and his family's assimilation into the UK we had ourselves a common denominator. That led seamlessly (I hoped) into a discussion about Gillian's most recent novel Black Orchids. The wealthy mixed race couple Emil and Evelyn who find themselves struggling to integrate into 1950's Britain.

The novel led us into some wonderful discussion on writing about place and geographical location, about using 'word pictures' to take a reader where you want them to go, about what makes a place home and the moment when Gillian Slovo knew that her home was here in England ... actually a wet day up on Hampstead Heath, a shaft of sunlight 'then I was gone'. South Africa is now the foreign country to her, the place where she meets a part of herself that doesn't exist now.

We talked about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission too, the amnesty given to the South African policemen who had murdered Gillian's mother, how it felt to be on the receiving end of that much hatred and how it feels to be part of a family who had to give up their right to legal justice on behalf of the victims. Interestingly a process that haunted Gillian with terrible nightmares for about six months afterwards until one day she realised that, though it may sound like a cliche, the truth had finally set her free.

Gillian ended with a little anecdote about the 1988 film A World Apart, written by Gillian's sister Shawn in tribute to their parents and in which Barbara Hershey plays Diana Roth the character modelled on Ruth First. On first encounter Gillian was strangely relieved to find that Barbara looked nothing like her mother. Fast forward ten years and Gillian spots a movie poster on the escalator on the underground and does a double take...

'There's my mother.'

It wasn't of course, it was an actor but the impact was profound as Gillian shared with us her sense that her parents were human, had normal failings but she believed and knew that they had done something magnificent, and of that she and her sisters are immensely proud.

Asked about her next book we all had our appeties whetted for the publication of An Honourable Man in January 2012 and when asked for her book recommendations Gillian praised War and Peace but revealed that she had read Anna Karenina in every decade of her life and commended it to us along with..

Life and Fate ~ Vasily Grossman,
Lost Colours of the Chameleon ~ Mandla Langa
Crossing to Safety ~  Wallace Stegner (hooray)

I hope you can tell from this account that this was an incredibly moving and thought-provoking conversation with which to end our second day, and I think we all felt incredibly privileged to have been part of it all, so my very sincere thanks to Gillian Slovo for visiting the dovegreyreader tent and to all those who came to listen and chat.