dovegreyreader scribbles

On the shelf...

I think it is fair to say that those of us who love books also probably love the shelves they go on.

Our shelves here are fairly standard, some match, some don't, and inbetween we have an accumulation of oddities picked up by Bookhound in sale rooms, markets and probably off the back of skips. In fact now that the nest is empty we have spent the last week or more changing the use of various rooms, shifting furniture and engineering a major re-shuffle of books around the house.

Bookhound has been blessed with a much roomier study because, over a pot ot tea we debated... did we really need a huge family-sized sitting room with a lovely woodburner but barely used for weeks on end?? No was the swift answer and though it all took us days and days to empty and shift it has left us with a perfect little sitting room ...now called the Cosy, which houses a sofa and all my wool and fabrics and art and craft books and tapestries on the walls and we love it already.

We also looked at our sixteen-year old TV, an average sized- screen nowadays but state-of-the-art when we bought it, and the rest of it the size of a block of flats and decided that had to go too, and we would manage with a much smaller flat-screen thing, and once we'd made that decision everything else fell into place...isn't it amazing how entire rooms can revolve around the god in the corner.

At one point the house really did look like Tutankhamun's tomb as we stacked things up and shuffled piano and sofas and tables and desks and stuffed cased fish and hundreds of books from A to B to C to B to D to A to E to B to F to C... do you get the idea, and even then we made a mistake with the piano moved to G, when really we should have opted for H, and moving it again was no laughing matter because that involved shifting around almost an entire wall of books until it eventually looked like this by midnight...

And yes, even though it was midnight of course I alpabeticized them. 

Bookshelf by Alex Johnson is inspiring ...well it inspires covetousness if I'm honest, and you wonder how on earth a book with 305 illustrations of bookshelves could be of the least interest to many... but you and I know different don't we.

There is some anxiety that e books may finally chase the bookshelf out of existence and Alex Johnson suggests that this is why bookshelf design needs to be so innovative, perhaps too we will all be housing fewer books in the future making the book case something of a trophy cabinet. I'm in the 'shelves as important as the books' camp so in my lifetime I can't see me whittling this houseful down into a trophy cabinet's worth any time soon.

Alex Johnson blogs here and be warned it is all a bit addictive. I have a few favourites and in particular, after a week of shifting shelves and re-drilling walls to re-hang them I am quite taken with the whole idea of these bookshelves which just sort of lean...

Libri designed by Michael Bihain.

and surprisingly, in the right surroundings, nor would I be averse to these, Cell designed by Peter Cohen...

and I think the Levitate book staircase is now legendary amongst the book-loving fraternity..

But perhaps what we all really need is one of these...

Bless Ljubodrag Andric for coming to our rescue.

Do you all love your shelves this much too??




 

 

 

 

Tinkers ~ Paul Harding

I'd actually bought this sweet-looking little novel and had it waiting on the shelf for its very right moment. There is something I like very much about a book that measures up at a very compact 7.5" x 5...Crown Octavo perhaps, and with just 192 pages it is already promising an intense,condensed but hopefully fulfilling reading experience.

Oddly I still can't decide whether Tinkers by Paul Harding lived up to those expectations or not, and that's not to damn the Pulitzer prizewinner with faint praise either. I'm just thinking that perhaps, like Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, and from whom this book gets a ringing endorsement, I need to choose the right reading moment for books like this, and perhaps I didn't.

I do also notice that the other 'ringing endorsements come from Barry Unsworth( 'a work of great power and originality') and Elizabeth McCracken ('read this book and marvel') who in this interview are revealed to be Paul Harding's teachers...I assume of creative writing, along with Marilynne Robinson ('truly remarkable'). Can I say I really wish publishers wouldn't do that... surely better to seek out some disinterested voices??

Or perhaps the book didn't bowl me over because I spent too long trying to decide where I'd seen those dandelion seeds before...

 
and eventually remembered it was here...

Or perhaps this was about not being sufficiently up on my US literature to make productive comparisons to William Faulkner??

Critic Peter Scott finds the book astounding for all its foibles...

'This is a difficult novel; narrators and narrative are unreliable, the syntax is complicated, while the plot, such as it is, jumps around so much as to elude any easy attempts at identifying a temporal progression of events.'

Tinkers consists of the observations and recollections of a dying man, George, a watch and clock-repairer, and it's hard not to sink into every cliche going here as I try and describe the book ...about time standing still... about the last hours of a life ticking away, about rewinding time in order to reflect on the past, all of which does actually seem to happen.

There is much for George to recall, the life of his father, 'an itinerant peddler' who, suffering from epilepsy, walks out on his family and starts a new life elsewhere.

Any sense of plot is largely absent and that's all fine, I like the challenge of what Peter Scott calls a 'difficult novel', where what happens is not all that happens if that makes any sense, books that meander like this...and indeed there is purpose in George's meanderings and Paul Harding has done something very clever in imagining the fragmented nature of the mind of a dying person and also in his descriptions of epileptic seizures.

But like Gilead which I think, after early misgivings, in the end I was persuaded into liking by many of you who argued so powerfully for the elements I had missed, well I'm now going to ask for your help withTinkers.

What have I missed here??

Why am I not looking at the book a few months after I've read it and thinking 'wow' that was extraordinary??

Why didn't I rush it onto my shelf for special books about death and dying??

It's sad I know but I do have one, it's my day job after all, and glancing across now I can see a range of books on there that have left me moved and with the certainty I will read them over and again...

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Held by the Sea by Jane Darke, Meghan O'Rourke's deeply moving The Long Goodbye or Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. And now I see that these are all memoirs, the real and excruciating pain of loss and so perhaps I am expecting the wrong emotional things entirely of this book.

You know how unsettled I feel when a book that has received such wide acclaim just won't tick the boxes for me, especially when I have given it time and read slowly, so I'm really hoping any of you who may have read it can shed some light.

I'd love to know how this worked for you... where did its brilliance shine through for you ... if you were 'astounded' like Peter Scott, why??

And if you haven't read it perhaps you might one day, and if so please come back and let us know what you think.

 

 

 

 

Our nest...

....has, for thirty of the thirty-five and a bit years that Bookhound and I have been married, mostly looked like this...

The nest is plenty big enough for five of us and at various times in recent years occupancy has been variable, with college and university and travelling, or those moments when children go off somewhere and we home the goods and chattels and the kayaks and the kettles and the cutlery and the bedding and the beds and the ...and the ...and the. 

Then they come back and go off somewhere else and take some of it, but leave another lot in its place, and somehow we have been used to this odd traffic, and, whilst Offspringette (now teaching) and the Kayaker (now land-based and working for a big UK outdoor equipment company) have been off and settled in their homes elsewhere, we have always had one permanent fixture called the Gamekeeper, who since college has worked very very hard at learning his trade in order to build up the experience and the countryside wisdom that his job requires.

It seems a very long time since this picture was taken and published in the Shooting Times... a young lad desperate to work at the job he loves...

And I'll own up...at times it hasn't been easy for him or us to keep that dream alive, but for the last two years he has had a permanent keeper's job, and this coming week our last fledgling is leaving the nest as the Gamekeeper, and the very lovely Girlfriend of the Gamekeeper move into his Gamekeeper's cottage. Cue excursions up into the loft all weekend as we search out kettle and plates and cutlery and saucepans and curtains ...and...and etc

He will only be about two miles up the road, which feels like near enough for his two dogs to find their way back home to the third who is staying if they so choose, but hopefully not the washing. And we will have to call him back when we need to move furniture because he can do most of it with one hand.

But Bookhound and I are looking at each other and feeling slightly incredulous that we have really only ever had five years on our own together, and wondering quite what life will be like now...

...with no Size 12s to trip over as we come in the door

...no smelly wellies

...no weaponry

...no larder full of energy-laden carbs

...no fifty-four sludge green, muddy coats in the boot room

...no cartridge cases/squirrel tails/other things in the washing machine

...no dead things hanging on the verandah

...no ferrets to escape

...no doors shutting and trucks going out at 5am

...no trucks coming in and doors shutting at 2am

I don't want to say it too loudly but we think our nest might finally be empty and it could be time to get on with the next bit of our lives. We have had some very exciting plans in the offing for quite a while, and though we still have a lot of work to do we are hoping they can now come to fruition...remember the extension that Bookhound was building??

And I never actually said what it was for... well it will be a very nice kitchen ...another one, so watch this space and think..

...book-lined holiday cottage sleeps four or more

...woodburning stove

...open fields as far as the eye can see

...'that' view from the bedroom windows

...miles and miles of fantastic walking on the doorstep

...new-laid eggs (our chickens are making a comeback)

...resident dowager cats

...bimbling old dog to borrow

...empty bran wolery to watch which might just fill the day someone is looking

...Bookhound's legendary cream teas

...nice hotel up the road for a posh evening

...peace perfect peace 

...and all in the splendid area of outstanding natural beauty that is the Tamar Valley. 

 

 

Dickens and I...Helen Rappaport

A warm welcome to author Helen Rappaport and my thanks to Helen for today's Dickens and I...contribution. It is no secret that I have been a great fan of Helen's writing since the day I first read and wrote here back in 2007 about No Place for Ladies, her book on the women of the Crimea, and I have written about several of Helen's books since...Dark Hearts in Chicago followed by EkaterinburgThe Last Days of the Romanovs and most recently of course Magnificent Obsession. I will be on the very edge of my seat for the next book about the four Romanov sisters, and for a change US readers will get their hands on that one first.

I suspect Helen's recollections will chime for many of us...

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This may sound like heresy coming from a writer, but I’m going to start by coming clean and admitting that my earliest recall of Dickens is a very vivid, visual one.  I fell in love with him not on the page – but on the screen. When I was a child and we had our first black and white TV the one thing we all enjoyed as a family was sitting down for the Sunday afternoon teatime serial at 5.30.  It was usually Dickens, or one of the Brontes or Jane Austen. I’m not ashamed to admit that it was the truncated TV versions that first captured my imagination; I did of course read the books, first in abridged form in school and then later in their full version.  I loved them with a passion and, ever since, I have re-read them on a regular basis.

But Dickens, in the first instance for me, was seared on my brain not just by those wonderful tea-time serials, but also by the now familiar, iconic film versions. Every Christmas, regular as clockwork, there was a re-run of Alastair Sim in Christmas Carol, as well as endless showings of George Cukor’s 1935 David Copperfield....

....and David Lean’s inimitable Great Expectations made in 1946 with, for me one of the defining sequences not just of English literature but also English cinema: the unforgettable opening scene where Pip encounters Magwitch by the row of little graves in that bleak, windswept churchyard.

How could I ever forget that seminal cinematic moment, growing up as I did in sight of the mud flats and marshes of north-east Kent where the story is set?

It is for me an image that encapsulates my childhood and the birth of my love affair not just with Dickens but, as a historian, with the Victorian period.

My first attempts at the novels ended in abject failure. I tried to read them too soon – as I suspect many people do – before I could fully understand the great flights of the language and Dickens’s quirky humour. Nor could I at first appreciate their supreme grasp on the life, times and landscape of mid-Victorian Britain. By the time I had studied O-level history at school and fallen in love with the Victorians with a venegeance. the novels began to speak to me in a way that no other author did or still does, except perhaps for George Eliot.  They have the power to transport me within minutes across time into a world that my imagination recognizes and feeds on creatively.

I still enjoy Dickens on the screen – and one dramatization remains supreme – the glorious, kaleidoscopic and frenetic RSC marathon version of  Nicholas Nickleby of 1980.  It wasn’t just a thrilling piece of theatre, it was Dickens’s world brought vividly to life in all its poignancy, its humour, its visceral pain and passion.  And, more importantly, it made people want to read the original. Perhaps coming to literature the wrong way round, via dramatisations first, is not such a bad thing.

 

 

My "Colour, Travels Through the Paintbox" challenge...

All that talk of colour, and fabrics and quilts we shared last week was inspiring and bound to end up in me having to make something. I haven't made anything for at least a week after all, in fact since the Debbie Bliss baby boots went off to their new home...

Miraculous that I only made one mistake given that I was watching Call the Midwife at the same time, talking of which brilliant news that there is to be a second series, it's official Miranda Hart helping to deliver babies as popular as James Herriot doing an All Creatures Great and Small calving. For anyone who is interested in the pattern for the baby boots by the way, it appears in several of Debbie Bliss's books and magazines, I used a variation of the one in The Knitter's Year and Baby Cashmerino wool which is heaven to knit.

So our conversation in comments here on Sunday was all sufficient to kindle that little flame telling me to make something, because go on you know you want to... even though you have plenty of things waiting to be finished. Nothing like succumbing to a bout of Startitis, and Harriet's mention (thank you Harriet) of the Kaffe Fasset quilt design Indigo Points was all it took. Out came Kaffe's book (thank you for the gift of it last summer Cheryl) Simple Shapes, Spectacular Quilts and my imagination was on its way.

I am having to stop myself racing through Victoria Finlay's book Colour, Travels Through the Paintbox. It is a perfect February read, many journeys in search of colour history and natural sources, but I have decided to linger a while and let the colour of each chapter filter through my mind and my eyes and look around me for traces. So I am currently on the lookout with camera to hand, for Ochre, wherever I can find it.

The first port of call whenever I am feeling colour-full and creative is my fabric stash because embarrassingly it is now so extensive after about forty years of quiltng that I know I will find whatever I am looking for there, and of course I wasn't disappointed...

The Indigo Points design is simple enough not to detract from the effect I want. A 6" square nine-patch block of half triangles with careful postioning of light, medium and dark fabrics using a different colour range in each, which could be hand pieced if I felt that way inclined.

and the design reminds me of the cubes of paint in a paintbox ..this is Bookhound's.

So perhaps my wallhanging will be paintbox-shaped.

But what a nice time I have had drawing around my template, leaving a seam allowance, then careful pinning and some precision hand-piecing after so many years of rotary cut machine-piecing. So relaxing as I sat and watched the most perfectly themed film as I stitched..at last I have seen Girl With a Pearl Earring.

Am I allowed to say that though I loved the music, and the colours, and the paint-mixing, and Colin Firth and the perfection of Scarlett Johansson's bone structure... yet I didn't think it was a patch on the book. So little dialogue and everything achieved by gazing and pouting, most of which I probably missed as I was trying to keep my stitches straight.

 

 

Plants and Places ~ Angie Lewin

I discover we are having ourselves an arty week this week...sometimes it works like this, posts that have been under construction for a few weeks as I gather my thoughts and think about pictures are then ready to go 'live', and suddenly seem to fit like a nicely themed jigsaw.

Do you find an artist’s work can creep up on you almost subliminally??

Out of the corner of my eye I kept seeing a style I loved, which slowly became recognisable and increasingly familiar. Then I would seek it out, spot it a mile way and home in. It’s happened with Orla Kiely and now, over the last year or so, it has happened with Angie Lewin’s distinctive and much-loved images of plants and grasses, leaves and seed heads.

Initially a couple of book jackets…

Some notelets spotted in the Tate Gallery shop…

A small piece of Liberty Tana Lawn from Erika in Delaware which said Angie Lewin to us both but some investigation proved perhaps not…but still that distinctive style. Then the armchair (which I no longer covet because....) upholstered in Mark Hearld’s fabric design, but which led me to the St Jude’s website,

Then that discovery about Random Spectacular which brought the designs and my love for them sharply into focus in a journal which I have read and studied cover to cover and will continue to do so…

And now the book…Plants and Places which in the end I just had to buy, and how inspiring it is proving to be.

I have always felt that I am rubbish at drawing. This goes back to school art lessons and those days when an accurate reproduction on the paper of a vase or a cup was the bench mark. If you couldn’t crack that first you were sunk and you sank quickly, right to the bottom of the class (because you were going to be a nurse so art didn’t matter) while the art college potential rightfully took their place on the display boards around the room, in the school magazine and through the corridors of the school. There was little manoeuvre for offering something impressionist, or cubist or Mondrianish until you had passed that first hurdle of proving you could draw, and I never surmounted that one.

Victoria Finlay touches on something similar in my other very inspiring book of the moment Colour...

'...my school did not offer the kind of creative environment where children without drawing skills were encouraged...' 

And I couldn’t and still don’t think I can draw… ‘not for toffee’ as we would have said, and then we’d add ‘can’t be good at everything’ and go and get changed for hockey.

And perhaps that’s a fine example of how a door closes on an un-nurtured skill very early in life that you never quite have the courage to open again.

But what to do with all that creativity??

I think my mum sorted me out with sewing, embroidery and knitting so I have probably poured it all into being creative in other ways, textiles and wool as my mediums and generally making things just because…  because something is begging to be adorned. Witness my £1 book-sized hot water bottle received as my Christmas gift from Offspringette, in line with the Simple Gifts Christmas we have just enjoyed. Well it had a cover on it by Boxing Day and it is wonderful for keeping hands warm..

But I have browsed and read and browsed and re-read and studied Angie Lewin’s book very carefully, and I can feel the stirrings of some art coming on. Now Bookhound will tell you this is a very dangerous time because I tend not to do these things by halves and will want a set of Cotman Water Colours and some sable brushes of my own before the week is out...

In fact, as you can see, it didn't take a week.  

But I love the lines and the shape of the drawings, seemingly simple but of course detailed and complex in their own way. In Angie Lewin’s words the focus is on ‘plants that are often considered weeds’ so I’m onto a winner with our garden for a start, and the plant’s depiction…

‘not with botanical accuracy but by capturing its distinctive characteristics… scale is not important. I rarely draw plants in flower, but instead look at the framework of the stems and shapes of seedheads and buds…concentrate on the features that I see as unique…’

Now that really cheers me up, because this accuracy thing has kept my artistic hands firmly tied and dormant. And perhaps it is that uniqueness that Angie Lewin talks about that has quietly filtered into my consciousness and made this seem possible, representation of so much that I see around us here as I walk and as I look closely… the umbrels of the cow parsley as it fades into autumn, the oak leaves, the curled ferns…well I could have a go.

And then there’s the wood engraving.

I was sensibly talked out of that after I had read Frances Spalding’s wonderful biography of Gwen Raverat, so I haven’t gone there, but I’m looking at Angie Lewin’s lino cuts and thinking… yes, did that at primary school, surely I could have another stab at it?? Somewhere there must be a copy of my legendary scarecrow. Remember how we’d sit there with a piece of brown lino… remember the smell, and we’d be armed with a selection of weaponry that would be banned for health and safety reasons now, and we’d carve out our pictures. Then there’d be all the ink and the roller palava, heaven knows what sort of a mess was waiting for my mum at the school gates.

And of course I am never going to produce anything that will remotely worry Angie Lewin’s reputation, but aren’t books like this about being inspired to have a go; perhaps about seeing something with your mind’s eye that you recognise as ‘very you’, and that you would like to try for yourself??

Don’t watch this space because this isn't about display, I doubt I’d have the courage to put anything on here… blame Miss Richardson the art teacher for that and laughing at my attempt at a picture drawn according to the laws of Golden Section (remember that) but I think I am going to have go, just for me.

 

 

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes ~ Mary M.Talbot & Bryan Talbot

A good graphic novel hasn't crossed my path in a while, and I don't think we've had a conversation about them on here in ages, but as it is a genre I love I was delighted when Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Mary Talbot arrived from publisher Jonathan Cape. The book is illustrated by Mary Talbot's comic artist and illustrator husband Bryan who also features as a character in this beautifully presented part-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative.

As always it can be too easy for me to read these as fast as I used to read Judy on a Wednesday and then be on the doorstep of my friend Anne waiting to swap it for her copy of Bunty. That fast scan of words and pictures in one greedy reading feast makes me feel seven again so I applied the speed limiter in order to act my age and fully take in all the nuances here.

The narrative is an account of Mary Talbot's childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 60s as the daughter of the eminent Joycean scholar James S. Atherton, and juxtaposed alongside is the life of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's daughter.

As an insight into life with a very pre-occupied father the book illustrates Mary's perceptions of her childhood with stark and, at times, incredibly sad clarity. Her father, shut away in his study, is short tempered and occasionally violent, lashing out at Mary when frustrations overflow. He seems to have few if any redeeming features, selfish and self-absorbed, over-bearing and controlling and hard to tell how much love, if any, he ever imparted, and all whilst Mary's mother looks on helplessly.The pictures of Mary's face and clenched fists as her father 'smacks' her for moments of disobedience...or more often because she just failed to please him make for profound 'looking' and add depth to words which could never convey such emotion alone. And the abuse, through an older Mary's eyes, becomes emotional too; compliments edged with sarcasm pierce the flimsy barrier that she had always understood to be caring.

If there are glimpses of colour in Bryan Talbot's illustrations they are evident in moments of fun such as childhood dressing up, or happiness such as books or meeting Bryan, otherwise the overall wash is a sepia effect.

Lucia Joyce's story in contrast is depicted in greyscale but also with the splashes of colour suggestive of moments of joy. Lucia's life is also at the mercy of a writing father, and though it would seem there is more evidence of love, it is of a rather erratic, off-hand variety and with the same lack of understanding that
Mary would experience thirty years later.

Lucia, a talented dancer, is desperately trying to carve out a promising career  for herself whilst being constantly dragged from pillar to post by James Joyce's peripatetic life style, a few months in Paris, then London, back to Paris, then a long holiday. Eventually Lucia succumbs to the mental illness that will dog her for the rest of her life, much of it spent in clinics, under house arrest, sedated and eventually incarcerated in an institution where she will see out her days. Joyce's double standards, nowhere more evident than in his animosity towards Lucia 'waving her arms and legs about' in an unseemly manner on a public stage, when he had just surely written the most famous banned book of all time.

What emerges are parallel lives lived a generation apart but both connected by the life and writing of James Joyce, and Mary Talbot's sympathies towards Lucia's plight are much in evidence. All enough to remind me of that quote of George Eliot's

'Things which have a constant relation to the same thing have a constant relation to each other'

And Mary Talbot explores those connections with great insight.

Both her parents have since died which perhaps liberated Mary to tell her story in the way in which she has done, with great honesty and candour and no doubt some moments of real soul-searching as she relived past traumas. The good news is that this was a husband and wife collaboration, Brian seems to be the same Brian that Mary met and married all those years ago...which feels really cheery and enduring in terms of resilience, survival and long-term happiness factors.

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes has all been enough to send me back to the Graphic Novels shelf and wonder what I may have missed recently. I have the staples... Maus and Persepolis. Tamara Drewe and Cancer Vixen,  a smattering of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, 99 Ways to Tell a Story by Matt Madden,  Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (thank you Erika) ... but any more suggestions??

 

Amen Corner

For fairly obvious reasons, as I was reading Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop recently I kept on thinking about toyshops I have known. Trips to Hamley's in Regent Street at Christmas of course, but mostly those childhood forays on roller skates to the outer reaches of our territory from the Cricket Green side of Mitcham (in Surrey then, might be in Greater London now) as far as the joke shop at Amen Corner in Tooting. The Cricket Green I now discover reportedly the oldest still in use having been played on since 1685, but the Amen Corner joke shop held much greater appeal.... and such a good title for a Sunday post.

Angela Carter grew up in neighbouring Streatham, she would have known it I'm sure; a 1950s emporium of toys and jokes to which the promise of a window full of manna from heaven would lure us, and at the age of about eight or nine sent 'out to play' and free as birds.

I was trying to visualise the route and to my surprise that wasn't hard. Down to the Fair Green from home in Russell Road, then up towards Bond Road School, Mitcham Swimming Baths and the Library an on towards Mr Yee Chong's dental surgery.

Now isn't google an amazing thing... I idly type in the name as I recall it, Harris Yee Chong, to find this from 2009...

A dentist who has worked in Mitcham for more than half a century has hung up his mask and retired at the age of 77.
Dr Harris Yee-Chong from Queensmere Road, Wimbledon, has worked in the same Streatham Road surgery since 1958.
In the time he has treated everyone from dovegreyreader to cabinet ministers and TV personalities to oral cancer patients.

Well I felt I should add me to the list given the hours I spent in there, especially as I can remember very clearly the day his new high speed whistling drill arrived, prior to which the instrument of torture was a thing that seemed to run on a system of archaic droning pulleys, and to think he only retired a few years ago.

But our journey to Amen Corner took us way past his surgery, or so it seemed in my imagination.

So because I then had nothing better to do I decided to check how far it was on google maps and I wasn't wrong... 

I mean just look how far it was and all along main roads. So I now know that at the age of eight my best friend Ann (of the Bunty-Judy comic swap)  and I would willingly skate a four mile round trip in order to buy some fake dog poo or a whoopee cushion at her brother's request...because us girls were far too sensible to waste our own pocket money on such things.

On the way we would help ourselves to free sustenance because remember when those mini boxes of breakfast cereal were very new indeed, a real novelty and far too expensive to buy, but our local supermarket was giving away free packets all heaped in a bin outside. We'd swipe an armful of sugar-coated Ricicles as we shot past and eat them dry from the packet on the way.. little wonder I spent so many hours in the dentist really.

But tell me, do books take you off on frolics like this as well ??

Can you trace those childhood journeys in your memory too??

And more importantly, did you 'go out to play' as we did, and with such freedom to sort out for yourselves things like crossing roads, and keeping safe, and getting into and out of trouble, and taking a few risks??

Come on own up... what was the worst thing you did...time to confess, and as it's Sunday and this post is called Amen Corner, we can do absolution.

 

Dickens and I... Bill Rogers

Please welcome Bill Rogers to Dickens and I... today and my thanks to him for a really heartfelt contribution.

I first met Bill's writing whilst helping to judge the LongBarn debut novel award, and my fellow judges and I had no doubt about short listing his book The Cleansing.

Bill's first career encompassed roles as a teacher, Principal Inspector of Schools & Head of the Manchester School Improvement Service, Lead Network Facilitator with the National College for School Leadership, and Fellow of the Teaching Awards.  He is currently the author of seven novels – including the DCI Tom Caton Manchester Crime Series and that debut novel, The Cleansing,  which also earned him the ePublishing Consortium Writers Award in 2011.

 

               ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My story begins on a cold January night, on the northern edge of London’s East End.   Bursts of orange and red punctuate the sulphurous London smog.   The cry of a newborn baby echoes the wail of sirens, as agents of death fall from an ink black sky.  It was a Dickensian beginning.   And so the story progressed.

 During my seventh year my mother, my father, sister, and I were relocated to South Oxhey - made famous last year by Gareth Malone’s TV programme The Choir - a sprawling council estate built to re-house victims of the Blitz.  My parents were already terminally ill; my mother with leukaemia, my father with TB.   Mum died the following Christmas, Dad, shortly before I sat the 11 plus.  My sister and I were alone in the world.

I was sent to a Boarding School in Hitchin, which now has a website devoted to the harsh regime inflicted on us pupils.   Before I left home, our neighbours, Phyllis & Lew Isaacs, gave me a boxed, polished Morocco, hard backed copy of Great Expectations. 

It was my first introduction to the rich and fascinating world of Charles Dickens, and became a lifeline.  Already in trauma, I found it impossible to concentrate during the three hour study sessions every evening.  Instead, I made up stories in my head.  At night I read one Dickens’ novel after another, beneath the blankets, with the aid of a torch.  Each morning brought a caning for homework neglected.

My adolescent mind found resonance with Pip, Oliver Twist, Mr Squeers, and Dotheboys Hall.   I moved on to Thomas Hardy, Steinbeck, and D.H. Lawrence.  But it was Dickens who propelled me to study English, Drama and History at St Mary’s College.

Nobody has captured Victorian London as effectively as Dickens.   The serial nature of his work made it the archetype of the page-turner novel.   Master of the social novel, he seamlessly intertwined mystery, romance, crime, class, psychology, and politics.   I know he has influenced my writing, for better, and for worse.  Great Expectations remains my favourite.  It fed my thirst for reading, fired my imagination, and was instrumental in my desire to become a writer.  It gave me hope when I most needed it. 

Like most of Dickens’ novels my story has a happy ending.  I met and married my Estelle.  Set about helping to change schools for the better.   Found a second career as an author.  I can’t pretend I owe it all to Dickens, but the day that I was handed Great Expectations set me on a never ending journey of self-discovery.

“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me... Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”  

Chapter 9.  Great Expectations. 

Website:  www.billrogers.co.uk

Twitter:  @RogersBill

 

 

 

A Bloomsbury Day

A funny thing happened on the train to London this morning.

Usual thing of having a reserved seat but no sight nor sound of seat 53A nor one with a ticket in it saying Plymouth to London, I'm not sure how this works at all. So then the search begins for an empty seat with a reservation ticket that precedes Plymouth so I know I won't face the humiliation of a turf out when the rightful owner, who somehow does have a ticket with the right number on it, suddenly appears. So I settled into a Par to Reading seat and decided I could immediately check out this 3G connectivity on the iPad. Hey presto it worked and there was Linda Grant tweeting that she was on the Par to London train and wished the buffet was open. 'Me too in coach D' I tweeted back 'I'm in A & there is an empty seat next to me' came the reply.

So my journey to London whizzed by as we talked about Linda's next book, writing in general, a bit of litgoss and books we've both been enjoying, namely Pilcrow by Adam Mars Jones. This seemed very apt as we sped through Taplow and I reminded myself to check whether there ever had been a Red Cross Hospital there. I have never really wanted to read Adam Mars Jones because he writes some really waspish reviews, has trashed a few books I have loved and I had decided I just wouldn't like his books. I am eventually going to have to take it all back, eat humble pie and eulogise because I am captivated by PIlcrow. If you like books set in the 1950s, if you quite like children in novels and especially if you are a nurse, but even if not, you might want to check it out.

Then a lovely walk into Bloomsbury, Bedford Square and the home of Bloomsbury publishers who had laid on a wonderful afternoon for a bevy of book bloggers. First and most importantly there was cake and conversation as we all caught up with each other and chatted with the publicists who are better known to me as names on the end of emails, so it's lovely to add faces to them all. Piles of books around the room...perhaps I should have made that most important thing, and then authors dropping in to talk about their books ( very important) followed by editors ( ever so important) to tell us what is coming up this year and safe to say a good time was had by me at least, and I am sure everyone else.

Of interest to me because I really did enjoy Kate Summerscale's last book, is her follow up to Mr Witcher...hmm exact title eludes me (can't multi task and look things up and be sure I'll find my way back here yet) but it's about a Mrs Robinson and we can expect a similar true tale of Victorian intrigue, but this time think along the lines of Madame Bovary. Kate had us on the edge of our seats and very much looking forward to the book later this year.

Suzanne Joinson talked about her debut novel A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar , and it sounds very tempting. A dual narrative set in both present day London and the 1920's world of the female Christian missionary to be published in July. The Bloomsbury gals had been cycling around the metropolis, in appropriate Edwardian gear, delivering proofs this morning apparently.

More later about the evening event which featured Susannah Clapp in conversation with Christopher Frayling and a fascinating discussion about Angela Carter.

Meanwhile it's 10pm and I am sitting on the train home, surrounded by a great huge pile of books and a table to myself because who in their right mind travels on a train that gets them in at 1am and with an hour's drive home to follow. I have just had kittens and then puppies as the train manager announced the stations...Weston Super Mare?? Nailsea?? Eventually Exeter did come up on the list but we would seem to be getting there via an extended tour of off the beaten track Devon railways.

Linda Grant says I have to buy the Faber app of The Wasteland and gave me a quick demo of it this morning. I was convinced once I discovered that it had a recording of Ted Hughes reading so now here I am, just pulled into Reading and headed who knows where in a westerly direction so I'm going app shopping as a souvenir of a lovely London day.

I do have some photos of the day of course but I had better not run before I can walk with my Blogsy app. I am now going to press the button and see what happens...

Update at Swindon : Courage mon brave...a photo added perhaps?? 

 

Angela Carter redux

'She had an intelligence that radiated for twenty-five metres around her...a way of looking whihc made you feel that whatever you were going to say nexy had better be interesting...'

Terry Pratchett on Angela Carter.

It is twenty years today since the untimely death of Angela Carter, from lung cancer at the age of fifty-one and now that I have passed that age (and some) I can see real meaning to that word 'untimely'.

I would never have embarked on dovegreyreader scribbles for a start, and whilst you wouldn't have missed what you hadn't known I look back and think how much richer my life has been for the opportunities that my fifties are bringing, how much has been added that was so unexpected. So who can even begin to know what might still have been to come from Angela Carter... Margaret Atwood thinks she would have gone on from fiction 'to become one of our foremost cultural, social and political commentators.'

And today I am on a bit of an adventurous day trip to London meeting with other bloggers for tea at Bloomsbury, followed by a celebration of Angela Carter's life this evening with Susannah Clapp, author of A Card From Angela Carter, in conversation with Liz Calder. I loved Susannah's book so I am looking forward to the day very much and thanks to my new iPad technology I will hope to bring you some of the highlights as I go along, though you'll have to bear with me as I'm new to the contraption. It will hopefully include a round-up of the day, written as I travel back West on the last train before the sleeper, and bless Bookhound for driving fifty miles to the station to meet me at 1am tomorrow morning.

Dickens and I... will be on Saturday this week to give Angela some space.

I had been lax about reading Angela Carter properly until now, so she has been upgraded to the 'Going to Read More of These in 2012' cabinet (Bowen, Byatt, Carter, Drabble, Fitzgerald, Hart, Mantel, Murdoch, Taylor) ) and having just finished The Magic Toyshop I am all agog to read more.

What a strangely disconcerting book, one to really shift the reading foundations and plop you in another world, but a new and very exciting one... and I guess that might be exactly what Angela Carter wanted me to feel, as Melanie and her brother and sister, orphaned and ejected from their comfortable home and lifestyle, find themselves on the train and en route to being plopped in a strange world of their own where adoption by Uncle Philip and his mute wife Aunt Margaret awaits.

'The train was a kind of purgatory, a waiting time, between the known and completed past and the unguessable future which had not yet begun...' 

As the children settle into their new life living above Uncle Philip's toyshop with Margaret's sons Francie and Finn Jowle ...

'They were an entity, the Jowles, warm as wool...'

...well by fairy-tale standards I was expecting a fairy-tale existence. I mean all toymakers are lovely old men with round spectacles, white beards, braces, aprons and crinkly eye-smiles aren't they. 

Not Uncle Philip who fits the bill of the ogre in the fairytale and acts like one too, and life is about to become odder and stranger for Melanie by turns. Trust Angela Carter to turn it all on its head.

Reading the work of an 'audacious imagination', as Carmen Calill describes Angela Carter's in her introduction to my Virago designer volume, was always going to be a rollercoaster ride, and The Magic Toyshop most certainly proved to be that, compelling reading that immersed me in an alien world filled with those glimmers of the surreal mixed with normality, an impossible book to explain, you just need to go and live in it for yourself to know. I think I emerged blinking into the daylight at the other end knowing I had finally been properly initiated into the world according to Angela.

In her introduction to Essays on the Art of Angela Carter published by Virago, Ali Smith says it like this...

'...a voice which in the span of one writing life reintroduced buoyancy, thought, shape-shift, unselfishness, politics, richness, risk, originality, timeless new-found story to English writing and made a whole new sense out of the act of writing fiction. Go out tomorrow and get Carter. Get all her fiction, all her fact, read it from its beginning all the way to its glorious open end. Then go down into the wine cellar and smash open a few of those dusty old bottles.
The world will be the same, yet absolutely altered.'

Expect some very funny moments too.. turns of phrase within the context of the book that just made me laugh aloud, astute and clever, wry and funny...

Take Mrs Rundle's cat. Mrs Rundle the children's 'nanny'..

'Mrs Rundle's cat was an obese, nose-in-the-air Tom. Seated, it was the size and shape of a fur coffee table, a round one...'

Or Melanie's recollection of her mother...

'Melanie remembered that, when she was a little girl her mother cuddled her, the embraces were always thickly muffled in cloth - wool, cotton or linen, according to the season of the year. Her mother must have been born dressed, perhaps in an elegant well-fitting caul selected from a feature in a glossy magazine, 'what the well-dressed embryo is wearing this year'.

There were plenty of references that transported me back in time as well. Toy shops almost as much a thing of past as A.S.Byatt's sawdust-strewn butcher's shops, and you might want the Noah's Ark when you read the description...

'The flat-bottomed ark itself had a sea-scape on its side, painted up to the plimsoll line, a dimensionless vision of the remote deeps full of strawberry-coloured fish and forests of weds and barnacled rocks, with here and there, a plump mermaid of the kind sailors have tattooed on their arms. Either the mermaid was energetically breasting the waves or she sat on the upturned keel of a drowned vessel and combed out long and improbably yellow hair...'

Sadly there was never a Paris Review Interview with Angela Carter, but that doesn't mean she wasn't mentioned in others...

A.S.Byatt speaking in 1998.... I remember my first meeting with Angela Carter, with whom I became great friends later. We all went to hear Stevie Smith reading her poetry—lots of writers around her, rather like a bullring—and she stood in the middle and read. On the way out this very disagreeable woman stomped up to me, and she said, My name’s Angela Carter. I recognized you and I wanted to stop and tell you that the sort of thing you’re doing is no good at all, no good at all. There’s nothing in it—that’s not where literature is going. That sort of thing. And off she stomped. Then about five years ago she said that she had realized that she was a writer because of fairy tales, because she was hooked on narrative as a child, not by realist novels about social behavior or how to be a good girl, but by these very primitive stories that go I think a lot deeper. It wasn’t until she said it that I felt empowered, which is why I have to acknowledge that she said it....

More joined-up thinking to inform my current reading.

iPad willing I will be back later today, but meanwhile please scroll down for gifts....

Prize draw copies of A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp

My thanks to Bloomsbury for sharing the love today, and three copies of A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp are there for the winning and they can go worldwide.

And now, having come over all wistful at the mention of cats like furry coffee tables in The Magic Toyshop, I couldn't resist wheeling out the late very great Rocky to help us today... he would have been large enough to support a good-sized tray most willingly I'm sure.

A brief reminder of Angela Carter's place in the literary firmament from my thoughts on the book here on January 30th  ...

Susannah Clapp positions Angela Carter within a literary timeline and context that perhaps explains why her writing went largely unacknowledged during her lifetime...

''...ten years too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as being a youg pillar of British fiction...twenty years too young to belong to what she considered the 'alternate pantheon' of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark. in the forties, when 'in a curious way, women formed the ascendancy'..."

Names in comments as usual, and we will draw the lucky recipients at the weekend.

Sin ~ Josephine Hart

We've been having an interesting conversation about Josephine Hart's novel Damage here recently,and coming up next, what I hope will be a grand hour with the Virago Book Club on Twitter at 2.30 pm today, when all thoughts will have to be condensed into the tweet limit of 140 characters. Meanwhile I have also been reading Sin, and what a great addition these books make to the Virago Modern Classics list.

Sin like Damage, is narrated in the first person though this time through a woman's voice, that of Ruth. A short name, that by her own admission bursts out and in sharp contrast to that of her adopted sister Elizabeth, all together a much gentler, more soothing sound. Ruth's jealousy and hatred of Elizabeth can be traced back to childhood. Elizabeth, meek,compliant, conciliatory in the face of conflict and seemingly subservient to Ruth in all she says and does...'seemingly' is the important word here, expect moments of quiet revelation towards the end.

Ruth meanwhile may be the vilest most hateful woman you are ever likely to trip over in fiction. Cool, calculating, dominant, bullish and malevolant, antagonistic and if evil is to be personified, Ruth's portrayal of herself is it. No shirking on Josephine Hart's part here, she really does go to the edge and look down at the drop with her fiction.

'I believe now that I was exposed too early to goodness and that I never recovered.
    Trapped in the fierce grasp of Elizabeth's kindness, aware constantly of the truthfulness of her gaze, I suffocated on the high thinness of the air around her. The corrosive power of her generosity killed, as they rose in me, my own small instincts towards goodness.' 

Think of the definition of a sociopath (there's a good resume here) and Ruth seems to fit the bill, and that feels like unusual territory for any writer, let alone a woman...to portray another woman in such extremis of personality disorder.

Widowed young it is Elizabeth's second husband Sir Charles Harding who eventually proves to be Ruth's nemesis as the balance of power shifts in the affair that Ruth purposefully steers herself towards. The carefully balanced scales of power find themselves weighted first this way and then that by packages of anger, or conscience, or even hints of remorse. A huge double family tragedy throws the spotlight on every relationship and the fall-out will be...well it will be... I'll say no more.

I am learning that one of the many gifts of Josephine Hart's writing is what she does to the reader.

In a similar way minus the sex, didn't George Eliot do likewise??

Present a character in a certain light...lull the reader into making harsh judgements...and then turn the tables on the reader's own prejudices..

And as Sin progressed, and I loathed Ruth more on every page, I could predict no way that Josephine Hart could possibly pull this round for me, nothing she could write in, no personal tragedy great enough that might redeem Ruth the Rotten in my eyes. All I was hoping for was a hang-drawing and quartering scene that took Ruth to four seperate corners of the world.

Nothing but nothing that Ruth could or might experience in her life would ever make me feel one single ounce of sympathy for her. No way.

Except it suddenly dawns on me that it is Ruth who has been telling me about herself, almost like a confessional....tRuth in other words but Ruthless too...it's all in the name. Deepest feelings and emotions concealed from those around her but her soul bared for me the reader.

So what right do any of us have to judge others at such a personal level??

When the devastation happens I think I was too far gone along the road of hatred to find my way back, virtually impossible to find that ounce of sympathy...much more likely to be heard muttering 'you deserved that' ... and then berating myself for thinking in that way, and contemplating the whole notion of forgiveness and at what point is that merited for one's own salvation.

And then, as if I'm not already done in and feeling wretched, Ruth has the audacity to turn the tables on me her really nice reader in her final summing up...

'We are here to add to the sum of human goodness. To prove the thing exists. And however futile each individual act of courage or generosity, self-sacrifice or grace - it still proves the thing exists. Each act adds to the fund. It needs replenishment. Not only because evil flourishes, and is most indefensibly defended, But because goodness is no longer a respectable aim in life, The hound of hell, envy, has driven it from the house.'

Yes, well Ruth if only you'd listened to what I was trying to tell you...

I suspect Sin is an object lesson in exactly that, sin and all its consequences, and a very powerful one it is too.

I had initially thought that Sin didn't pack quite the punch that Damage had??

Now that I've written this I take it all back.

 

 

 

The House in Paris ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I think I may have rather indiscreetly and perhaps inappropriately punched the air when I turned the final page of The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen. I'm not sure the ending merited such cheery celebrations but I don't know how many times I may have tried to read a book by this great Anglo-Irish novelist and failed, so I felt I could treat myself to that little glow of final success and sense of achievement. This time round I had sat down, determined to crack it and all I can say is that success seems to be about a mixture of intense concentration and an eye for every word, along with the commitment of time.

Do you find as I do that some books just don't lend themselves to short, snatched bursts of reading??

I needed to set aside long-enough reading slots to enable me to really pick up the threads and totally immerse, there is so much here to miss.

In her introduction A.S.Byatt recalls being bought The House in Paris in error at about the age of eleven, her father having mistaken Elizabeth Bowen for Marjorie Bowen the historical novelist. Undeterred the young ASB ploughed on and with interesting results. Her final observation made in this introduction, uses a quote made by Elizabeth Bowen about Ivy Compton Burnett, but citing a quality that in the eyes of ASB is no less applicable to the work of Elizabeth Bowen herself...

'...this is the time for hard writers, and here is one.'

I think my determination may also have been down to reading this in the introduction to Victoria Glendinning's biography of Elizabeth Bowen,

'She is what happened after Bloomsbury; she is the link which connects Virginia Woolf with Muriel Spark. She changed with the century in approach and technique without losing her original inimitable voice...'

and that premise intrigued me. Two writers I love and here is a writer who bridges them both, to not read would be to leave a gap I could never know about. I couldn't quite bear the thought of that.

Two unconnected children meet by chance at the home of Mme Fisher in Paris. Little ships that pass in the night, eleven-year old Henrietta  en route to her grandmother's home in the south of France from London, and nine-year old Leopold, having travelled to Paris from the Italian home of his adoptive parents. Leopold's journey (and how far must that have been for a child)  made at the specific request of his mother, Karen, who he has never met and knows very little about. Karen has decided she finally wants to meet her child and the mysteries of that situation hover like a cloud of unknowing over the action until finally explained.

The children are introduced and conversation skirts around each other as children who are strangers to each other are sometimes wont to do. This one of the early moments, repeated so astutely throughout the book when Elizabeth Bowen captures the essence of a child-centred world,...

'With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children quietly talking alone.'

The atmosphere in the Parisian house is close and airless and claustrophobic. Mme Fisher seems to be 'off her legs' (sorry, 1970's nursing parlance) and bedridden and is being cared for by her spinster daughter Naomi, and the children are parked in the house whilst events play out, namely the devastating news that Leopold's mother will now not be able to see him.

There are moments in the book when the airlessness of the house extended to me as a reader, this one of those devastatingly portrayed moments in fiction when there doesn't seem to be enough oxygen to go round us all...Henrietta, Leopold, and me eavesdropping on the moment when Leopold, strong for so long and not a moment longer eventually  breaks down and weeps with disappointment in Henrietta's arms. Both children cry uncontrollably for a few long, inconsolable minutes, and a more heart-wrenching scene cannot have been written in any other book ever... well apart from that scene in A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry when Willie Dunne's father dons the apron and bathes his son in the bath in the kitchen on his unexpected return from the trenches of France.

But this is children, and they are alone in the room and the impact is profoundly moving..

'He wept like someone alone against his will. someone shut up alone for a punishment : you only weep like that when only a room hears...His undeniable tears were more than his own, they seemed to be all the tears that had ever been denied, that dryness of body, age, ungreatness or anger ever had made impossible...arrears of tears starting up at one moment's unobscured view of grief.'

I read that over and again...'arrears of tears'... perfect and when I reached this sentence, I think I knew I really had discovered a brilliant writer indeed..

'He is weeping because this is the end of imagination - imagination fails when there is no now. Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.'

When I read this a few lines later I was done for...

'Henrietta let her forehead rest on the marble too: her face bent forward, so that the tears she began shedding fell on the front of her dress. An angel stood up inside her with its hands to its lips, and Henrieatta did not attempt to speak.'

And time and again it became apparent that Elizabeth Bowen is a true wordsmith, quietly perceptive, astute and awake to a sentence's every possibility, moulding and shaping each word with immaculate care and attention until she has forged something fluid and molten into something solid, and cool, and permanent. So much from this book is now etched in my mind and I have been thinking about it for days since. Moments when I could still smell the foetid air of sickness in the house, or hear the clatter when Henrietta spills some things from her bag into the silence and onto the parquet flooring, or see the expressions of disappointment on the faces of the children and the embarrassment on Naomi's. When Mme Fisher is described as 'corrosive' no other words were required, one word did the work of many more as it fizzed away in my mind with all its acidic connotations and actions.

All is not completely lost as Elizabeth Bowen presents Mother of Leopold's side of the story, thankfully re-balancing my rather soggy emotions, though not completely, and redemption of sorts may or may not be available for Leopold. It is no spoiler to say the ending left me with uncomfortable uncertainties about the lives of the children which I feel sure was Elizabeth Bowen's intention, but I feel am 'into' her books now. I have a handle on Elizabeth Bowen's writing, her style and her range and I have been stock-piling in anticipation of this day, so any recommends about which next from this stack??

Perhaps last words of wisdom to Leopold...out of the mouths of babes etc..

'Some other day I know you will see your mother!'
'I don't see why', said Leopold.
Something unforeseen must have happened. You know even grown-up people cannot always do what they want most.'
'Oh! Then why grow up?'

 

 

 

 

Liberty of London

I don't know about you but, though I don't suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder beyond craving warmth and sun, by the time we hit February my eyes are in need of colour. If it's a sunny day I get out and stare at the sky but we have had plenty of pewter skies of late so I am prescribing a nice visual dose for today, and after several weeks of reading A.S.Byatt and all those luscious descriptions I am very colour-minded right now.

I wonder if that is that happy factor element of my current ASB winter reading roll, the wealth of colour and the visual cues that trigger my imagination off on a frolic of its own perhaps... and talking of imagination how interesting to read ASB somewhere saying how much she hated the covers of her books to have photos of actual people on them, to the potential detriment of the reader's imagination....which might explain the aversion many of us have to film and TV tie-in editions.

There is a nicely romantic scene towards the end of Possession when two characters are sitting in a restaurant... he is wearing a dark peacock cashmere and wool jacket (which I'm not sure Bookhound would be seen dead in actually) whilst she is wearing an ivory silk shirt with an amethyst necklace on a 'smooth throat' and a purple skirt (none of which is me either come to think of it) but I did have a wonderful bask as I imagined that colour combination, and I am very much looking forward to reading Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox by Victoria Finlay which is already feeding my mental palette nicely....

'The first challenge in writing about colours is that they don't really exist. Or rather they do exist, but only because our minds create them as an interpretation of vibrations that are happening around us...'

Currently we are on the trail of Ochre in Australia.

When in London I often try and schedule in an hour at Liberty of London in Regent Street for a tread on the Ianthe rug...

before making a beeline for the fabrics and a wander along the bolts of cloth, especially the Tana Lawns.

Designs that seem to have been around forever and are part of my visual memory leap out and remind me of projects past.

I'll bet you a whole bolt, that fabric might do this for you too...

I can be transported back years by the sight of some of these.

Then I do a quick appraisal of the latest ones. 

I could actually be tempted by this, it's just begging to be made into something...

And I have really been playing far too long with Picasa Collage creating this little e quilt, but the colours are too gorgeous not to...

But I really do have enough to be going with.

Every so often I get the Liberty box out...

and have a play...

This is one of the many legacies of running a little quilt shop (The Quilt Loft) for a few years and having the Liberty account for the area. I was blessed with my own set of Liberty sample books from which to choose the fabrics we would stock.

I have already made several colourwash wallhangings a la Deirdre Amsden out of these, this one about 18" square, machine pieced and hand quilted...

And so I play some more...

...but now, some twenty years on, they are a little archive of Liberty designs and getting more precious as the years go by. So much so that I end up spreading them out like this (these are some of the Tana Lawns) thinking of a hundred projects, none of which feels quite worthy of such an incredible range of fabrics...

...and so I put them all away again.

Daft isn't it...any creative suggestions, or do I just horde them??

 

dovegreyreader takes over Virago Twitter

Well, not for ever, only for an hour this coming Tuesday afternoon, February 14th at 2.30pm, but I am delighted to have been asked to be a guest of @ViragoBooks this month, and to join in with Twitter discussions about the Virago Book Club current reading choice, Damage by Josephine Hart.

Just to recap here's an extract from my thoughts here earlier this month...

'....A man possessed and consumed by obsessive love, the boundaries of power and control blurred and behaviour distorted by a potent and slavish love affair. Lashings (sorry) of rivalry and jealousy and plenty of self-delusion that somehow those involved and bound to be hurt by this will accept and understand when they eventually find out....'

For anyone who tweets there is still plenty of time to read the book if you have it handy, 230 pages of un-put-down-able well-spaced type though do remember to have the de-fib handy for 'that moment'.

In order to be in the zone, and now that I have finished Possession and have that swirling around in my mind waiting for thoughts to gather and surface, I will be doing some more Damage this weekend (re-reading) and have been reading another novel by Josephine Hart. Sin is also republished as a Virago Modern Classic... a woman possessed by an obsessive envy who will stop at nothing to get what she wants and the NY Times blurb is spot on, I am indeed looking on ' with mingled shock and fascination.'

So if you can join us it would be great to see you there, I'll be making a pot of twittertea naturally, there will be virtual tweetcake and the Virago team will be joining in too, just head for @ViragoBooks and use the #VBC hash tag. Now this may make no sense whatsoever to non-twits, so please do e mail me if you'd like me to decipher that for you and do a quick tweetorial.

I'm wondering if anyone has read Damage since I posted about it... if so I'd love to know what you thought.

 

Dickens and I... Susan Hill

A warm welcome to Susan Hill, author, publisher and all round very generous and tell-it-like-it-is person, and my thanks to Susan for her thoughts on 'Dickens and I' today.

If you have perhaps been in a coma for the last few weeks... and if so I hope you are better now:-) you may have missed the current box office storm that is The Woman in Black starring Daniel Radcliffe and which opens in UK cinemas today. Daniel's first film without that zigzag mark on his forehead and Voldemort on his trail, but I doubt things could have taken a much more frightening turn than they have with his role as Arthur Kipps in that god-forsaken Eel Marsh House. I hear the film is causing normally quiet people to shout out in cinemas and grab whoever is sitting next to them, and is apparently the first British film in twenty-five years to take the number one slot in the US box office rankings, and you can read Susan's personal thoughts on all that excitement on her website, but for now Susan Hill on Charles Dickens...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

No greater influence, no greater source of reading enrichment and pleasure – Dickens.

My Great Aunt had one of those glass fronted bookcases containing, besides an English Dictionary and a medical ditto, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Scott and Dickens. I was 9 when I first opened the glass doors and browsed, first enjoying the old line illustrations by Boz, but then, attracted by the chapter titles, starting to read Great Expectations. Still fed by Enid Blyton, I didn’t know what to expect. How could I possibly have foreseen that Dickens would have such an effect on me, or understood how his novels would help shape every future one of my own ?

What was it  about him ?

Yes, the stories, yes, the characters, but before those it was his places that enthralled me and I have always started a book with a strong vision of its setting ever since. Dickens’s London. Ancient dark houses. Dank courtyards. Slums. Counting houses. Shops. The Marshalsea prison. The law courts and the inky offices of the lawyers. The wet grey flat Wolds of Lincolnshire. The Kentish Marshes. The river. The wharves and warehouses.   I lived in those places, I smelled them. I wanted to make my own fictional worlds as exciting, dramatic, palpable.

Dickens, like Thomas Hardy, writes in great scenes and set-pieces, and both writers have a theatrical or painterly way of lighting those scenes, from within or without, by candlelight, lamplight, gaslight, firelight, moonlight – the sun seems to feature little.  I read leaning against the back of my great aunt’s moquette sofa, not  understanding some things but never less than absorbed – and at that age, what puzzles you in a book you skim quickly over. The nuances, the subtleties, the adult take on life and death, the social minutiae, all of these pass a young reader by. It is the broad brushstrokes, the excitement of the plot, the larger-than-lifeness of the characters, their grotesqueness, weird appearance, that impresses. The rest comes later, which is why Dickens is both for young readers and for adults.

Every decade, I have discovered more in him as I have experienced more myself. Nine year old tears were wept over the death of Joe the crossing-sweeper but the tragedy and loneliness and innocence of Miss Flite requires a more mature reader to understand fully. As a teenager I was full of righteous indignation over the social injustices Dickens highlights, the poverty, oppression, suffering, misery, lack of decent housing and medicine. Those still matter but after many years of reading him you come to see how balanced Dickens is, how the political and humanitarian issues are offset by family happiness, requited love, and above all, by humour. The irony and bleakness are countered by the sweetness, and yes, the sentimentality, of the love affairs. There is nothing, nothing that he does not know about, understand and explain by presenting it in fiction. Domestic violence, the betrayal of children’s innocence, ‘the insolence of office and the law’s delays,’ pomposity and self-regard, pride, humility, self-sacrifice, altruism, greed….it is all, all in Dickens. I often wonder if I need any other writer.

The Virgin in the Garden ~ A.S. Byatt

My quest for complete Byattification through 2012 is progressing nicely.

In fact I can't quite believe how this year's reading has launched itself. The chance arrival of Still Life  and the the ' aaaaah....I get it' moment as I read the book, which was all enough to make me pick up The Virgin in the Garden, immediately I had finished. This the first in the quartet of books about life from the 1950s to the 1970s, and a book I had failed with miserably in the past. So I have now read over 1000 1300 1500 pages of A.S. Byatt in the last month despite planning a break, I mean surely this could get monotonous. I picked up number three, Babel Tower and thought I'd just read a few pages to see and quickly realised that I did need a break, but only from the quartet and some time to let two layers bed in before I added a third, so I picked up Possession instead ... 50 pages to go and savouring every word.

Reading out of sequence as I have said before has been fine in this instance, even perhaps to my advantage, and though it might be completely contrary to the orderly linear progress that my brain usually insists on. Knowing the future somehow made reading the past increasingly poignant, and of course I have to be careful not to give anything away here, but 'somehow' a young and naive Frederica has grief beyond her wildest nightmares coming her way, and as she lives the life of a clever, ebullient, superficially confident teenager in The Virgin in the Garden I couldn't help but wonder how 'what happens next' in Still Life is going to affect her in Babel Tower.

I've encountered a loss akin to Frederica's at that age too, and almost thirty-seven years on I can look back and know that I could never have anticipated when and how that loss might surface in my life, or ambush me unexpectedly, or identify the life course it may have unwittingly set me on, all of which I can see with greater clarity now, so I am always intrigued to see what a writer does with such a situation.    

So The Virgin in the Garden is set in the 1950s. Post-war England is about to crown a new monarch, and with much celebration after the austerity of the 1940s, all eagerly embraced by a nation 'starved of colour'.

Young Frederica Potter, in her final year at school and awaiting exam results that may or may not take her to Cambridge, is busy vying for a leading role in Alexander Wedderburn's Elizabethan play Astraea to be performed as part of the shenanigans. Whilst Frederica's intellect suggests learning and knowledge beyond her years, her emotional maturity is age-appropriate making life confusing when you think you know it all, but actually you know very little. ASB explores every avenue as Frederica works hard to make sense of her world.

Meanwhile older sister Stephanie is considering marriage to the curate Daniel Orton, offering a perfect opportunity for some literary exploration of faith. Daniel, lumbering, clumsy in both action and word, a blunt Yorkshireman... 'a heavy shepherd in a surplice' who has developed for himself a variety of a workable faith that does not quite sit comfortably with the church that employs him... but it helps him survive and fulfill the role as he sees it of a 'glorified social worker.' It also makes his marriage to a non-believing Stephanie entirely feasible, the Bishop gives his permission and they plight their trothes. With the confirmation of a pregancy in the fullness of time and propriety there comes plenty of scope for Madonna and Annunciation analogies which ASB again explores to the full.

And troubled Potter brother Marcus, shadowy and mentally fragile in Still Life, well all is explained here along with some vivid descriptions of his mental aberrations and their possible causes. Talking of 'causes' there have to be culpable parents in the blame frame, and the bloody-minded Bill Potter and his timid wife Winifred carry the load.

Naturally a great deal more than that happens in the 566 pages and once again I surfed along, and frequently precariously balanced on a wave of unknowing. Mythology and Elizabethan allegory abound here along with a fine juxtaposition of the two Elizabethan eras, and I can't go on blaming my education for the gaping lacuna in my knowledge. I'm sure some poor teacher somewhere tried very hard and doubtless I just wasn't paying attention, and I have had enough time since to fill it after all.

I wonder sometimes whether it is too late for me to start with mythology , and if not with which book? Do you have any suggestions??

But I also wonder whether mythology is still best discovered as a child when a readily triggered sense of wonder, along with a vivid imagination and suspended belief are unwittingly on your team. A.S.Byatt, prefers to be seen as a writer who happens to have been an academic (rather than the other way around) and has an authorial imagination that takes her off on all manner of connections and tangents, gathered and gleaned I sense from a lifetime of reading for pleasure as much as from that acadaemia, and I skipped along in her wake making the most of them and occasionally creating my own, which I think is definitely allowed and encouraged in a book like this.

With her happy knack of taking the reader into a room, locating them within the surroundings with some lush description, lashings of colour and touchable textiles, the reader can expect ASB to settle them unobtrusively on the sofa (because it really does feel as if you are there) and then to sit and observe for themselves whilst  attention is paid to her characters and their lives. For room, also read shop, church, school laboratory, bedsit, stately pile, just about anywhere becomes familiar.

Take the the butcher's shop for example. Three pages of the most vivid description that had me smelling the shop and remembering being six years old, my shoes messing about and making swirly patterns with the sawdust on the floor while the butcher wrapped things like liver and hearts in that white paper which we could have for drawing on later if it wasn't too messy, and my mum paid over at the till window (because the butcher never touched the money)..

'...the display counter was lined and fringed with emerald green artificial grass. On this miniature meadow capered various folklorique figures and mythical creatures. A grinning cardboard pig, poised on one trotter, bore on its forelegs a platter of steaming sausages. It was covered, possibly for decency's sake with a blue and white striped apron, and wore a tall, white three-dimensional chef's cap, at a rakish angle...'

Bookhound on the other hand, when asked, can only remember going into the butcher's shop and asking for the eyes which they would then throw against the tiled walls to make them stick and slide down... what is it they say little boys are made of ??

But this is the writer who observes on the reader's behalf allowing the reader to become alive to the detail... at minimum it's like being an invisible house guest or a shopping companion, at full tilt it's nothing short of incredible and I am emerging from each book with my head awash with ideas and connections and things I want to know much more about.

Then there are the words, plenty of them that yet again, as in Still Life, I don't quite know the meaning of and have to look up immediately...pusillanimous (lacking courage)  and eidetic...

'of, pertaining to, or constituting visual imagery vividly experienced and readily reproducible with great accuracy and in great detail.'

Perfect word to describe this book as an experience.

And what about grutching ... seldom used word derived from grudging, to look upon with desire to possess, and how about steatopygus ... an extreme accumulation of fat on the buttocks, see you learn things here.

But now I have been devouring Possession and wondering quite how and why I had failed with it before, yet I know it was because I baulked at the italics and the poetry, took the book on a long-haul flight at p127 when all that begins and just couldn't make it work at altitude or floating around in the heat of the Caribbean sun. Sitting in front of my fire on a cold, grey winter's afternoon and it is almost perfection, so much so that I can't bear it to end and have made the last hundred pages last for days... do you know that feeling with a book??

I think I'm just going to tag these posts The Byattitudes and be done with it, supreme blessedness indeed these books are.

 

Dickens and me...

Well after toasting the Queen it's now time to charge the glasses again and let's hear it for dear old Charles, two hundred today and doesn't look a day older for all the love he's getting right now....

and I'll be shot for this desecration of the sacred image, but something tells me that the Charles Dickens I am getting to know quite well this year might just have smiled and quite enjoyed a bit of merriment amidst all the serious eulogizing... before writing me a stinker of a letter about the visual humiliation to which his attention has been drawn.

Except I hope he might have read the rest of the post and felt the respect, because, having asked lots of people to write about their own experience of Dickens I have been wondering, and pondering and thinking... what does Dickens really mean to me. Surfacing unbidden every time and before any thoughts of the books, is his Great Ormond Street connection and now well-documented on here, my nurse-training at the alma mater. That hospital connection will see me in London for the October 1972 set's fortieth reunion later this year, and I hear friends are travelling from America and Australia to be there so I'd better hie me to London for that weekend.

I never cease to be amazed by the circularity of reading either because my attentions are also currently guided in the direction of sick children thanks to Linda Grant's recommendation on Twitter at about 7am one morning last week that I read Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones. The joy of the Kindle is the instant gratification of the downloadable sample, swiftly followed by the book in this case, because it makes such compelling reading from the off. It's the 1950s and a late diagnosis for little John Cromer of Still's Disease starts yet another Great Ormond Street train of thought, Sir George Frederic Still, a clinical assistant there in 1894 and eventually to become one of London's most popular paediatricians.

I also buy every book I see and hear of about Great Ormond Street, but my favourite remains a slim volume published in celebration of the hospital's centenary in 1952, an apposite year for us on here this week, and written by Senior Surgeon, Thomas Twistington Higgins. Mr T-H makes a very prescient observation in 1952 that seems no less relevant now...

'There is a remarkable parallel so far as the hospital is concerned between 1852 and 1952. Then as now, the national environment was charged with revolutionary change. Our forbears had to plan their new hospital venture in a changing world in which the tumultuous developments must have made it exceptionally difficult for them to look ahead...'

I find it harder and harder to imagine, given twenty-first century communications, the constraints of effective information sharing back in the nineteenth century, and how great must have been the impact of having a figure like Charles Dickens on your side if you were a small, impecunious team setting up such a mammoth venture as London's first proper hospital for children. Not unlike asking Stephen Fry (almost four million followers) or Neil Gaiman (lagging behind with only a million and a half) to re-tweet something for you on Twitter these days perhaps, and requests to do so apparently come back with warnings about making sure your own website can cope with the potential volume of traffic.

So when Charles Dickens made his legendary speech in April 1852 at the first Great Ormond Street Festival Dinner, a fund-raiser to acquire further premises in Gt Ormond Street , and then published his article Drooping Buds in Household Words, news spread fast, and to many who hadn't even know of the existence of the hospital. The dinner alone raised enough to buy the premises and with plenty left over.

In searching online for this I made a very fortunate discovery, has anyone else come across the Dickens Journals Online Project??

A team of volunteers have scanned and transcribed every edition of each of Dickens's journals and after a quick registration process they are accessible free online. I was staggered at the scope of the undertaking and apparently the plan is that every one will be completed by today...98% there on Saturday, so congratulations to them for a fantastic endeavour and the provision of a brilliant resource. I have already been sidetracked into reading other articles so beware, it is slightly addictive.

Jenny Hartley's recent volume of The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, published by OUP, also reveals that in March 1852 Dickens had written to his closest friend John Forster ...

'...My Highgate journey yesterday was a sad one. Sad to think how all journeys tend that way. I went up to the cemetery to look for a piece of ground...in a foolish dislike to leaving the little child shut up in a vault there, I think of pitching a tent under the sky...Nothing has taken place here: but I believe, every hour that it must the next hour...'

Charles and Catherine's eight-month old daughter Dora had died the previous year and the birth of their next baby is imminent. Of all men Dickens knew that his family would not 'be exempt, as to our many children, from the afflictions of other parents,' and it is not difficult to imagine how acutely this may have focused his attentions on his speech on that April evening or the article that followed.

But those famously melodramatic lines had the desired effect on the public consciousness...

'Oh! Baby's dead and will be never, never, never seen among us any more!'

along with the news that one in three coffins made in London is for a child, and with some religious overtones added in, Dickens, who surely never lost touch with his own 'inner child', cleverly appealed to all the right people and the donations poured in.

Just looking at the infant mortality rates gleans a perspective, currently standing at 4.6/1000 live births per year here in the UK in children under a year old, and though Dickens quotes the figures for children up to the age of two, the figures in 1852 add up to 240/1000.

As a cause the Hospital for Sick Children, as it was known until very recently, rapidly captured the hearts and souls of the wealthier Victorians for whom philanthropy and religion were comfortable soulmates, whilst there is much evidence that the Anglican church also benefited from an alliance of opposing high and low church factions, offering good opportunities for some extra displays of holiness and moral earnestness and a chance to pull together.

But the motives for giving were genuine too,

'...it is above all things the charity which, in the old scriptural words, beareth much and is kind. Children cannot repay.'

said the London Journal in 1875, and the plight of London's children, whose health had been sorely neglected for too long suddenly achieved much greater prominence.

Working as one of the first doctors at the hospital with Charles West was Queen Victoria's physician William Jenner, and surely it is no coincidence that Queen Victoria announced royal patronage within two weeks. Dickens's fund-raising legacy continued apace and by 1868 the endowment of cots had became an established money-maker; for £2000 wealthy Victorians or collaborative groups could see their names in perpetuity over the head of a sick child, and by 1880 120 beds were thus favoured.

I have dragged countless friends through Great Ormond Street to look at the hospital chapel whenever we are in London and passing. It is a dazzling microcosm of Victorian ecclesiastical decoration... even Oscar Wilde moved to acknowledge its beauty and spirituality.

Tiny child-sized pews and astonishingly intricate and colourful frescoes, stained glass and a rich and elaborately painted dome depicting the pelican in her piety, an image of self-sacrifice, surrounded by the angel choir peering down on the little people below.

And there, to one side of the chapel, a plaque dedicated to the man who surely helped give the hospital the financial start it needed...

Charles Dickens1812-1870
Honorary Governor
Inspirer and Champion of the Hospital for Sick Children
"Charles Dickens the children's friend, firstly fairly set her
on her legs and in a few eloquent words which none who heard can
ever forget, gave her the gift that she should win love and
 favour everywhere."

 

 

 

 

 

The Queen

We have a special guest writing today and to celebrate this day, the sixtieth anniversary of the accession of the Queen to the throne, there was really only one person I could ask to write this.

Prince Philip was busy, but that didn't matter because I have drafted in Sheila O'Brien instead, perhaps known to some of you as Mrs KevinFromCanada, but very much a voice in her own right. Sheila's past associations in the areas of women’s issues, human rights, education and health and welfare have been recognized through her receipt of the Women of Distinction Award in the category of “Advancement of Women”, and a Citation for Citizenship - Government of Canada Award for Community Leadership.  In February 1999, she was invested as a member of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest honor.

Sheila is currently President of Belvedere1 Investments, and a corporate director and business consultant with over 30 years of experience in the oil and gas, pipeline and petrochemical sectors in Canada, USA, South America and Europe and her achievements would take up a blog post of their own, so I'll stop there and spare her blushes.

Having met Sheila twice now (you may recall I sent her home with the Emily Quilt) I can tell you that for all those gongs she is very unassuming, has a wicked sense of humour and is extremely inspirational company. Sheila is a keen follower and staunch supporter of the monarchy, respectful where it is due, honest where it is not and knows more about our Royal Family than the Royals know themselves. There is no Royal book written that Sheila hasn't devoured, absolutely nothing she doesn't have thoughts about and it was very refreshing to hear her take on it all when we met. Us Brits just pussyfoot around it all a bit here sometimes don't we... think privately but rarely declare, but not so our Canadian guest today. I hope you will enjoy this refreshingly honest take on the reign of Queen Elizabeth the Second and with some reading suggestions for this Jubilee year if you are interested, and all as viewed from Calgary, Alberta.

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February 6^th, 2012 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the ascension of her majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second to the throne.  She has reigned as Queen for longer than the majority of the population of the world has been alive. Although she was not born to the line of accession, she has been the Queen longer than her father, George the Sixth, lived.

The airwaves are overloaded  with comparisons of her Majesty to her famous ancestor, Queen Victoria, the only other monarch in history to pass the 60 year mark on the throne.  Would everyone please stop making those comparisons right now?  The only thing these two women have in common is that they were crowned heads for over 60 years.   Of Queen Victoria’s 63 years on the throne, she served  for only 20 of them.  When her beloved husband Albert died, she donned her widow’s weeds (which she never doffed), took to her bed and lived a self-absorbed and self-indulgent life at the taxpayers’ expense for the next 43 years.  She was a recluse, poking out of her isolation hole only when she needed to ask Parliament for a raise, or when the drumbeat of Republicanism grew so loud that she was embarrassed into making a very brief appearance.

Queen Elizabeth, on the other hand, has lived a life defined by duty.  In the 60 years she has been Queen, she has done her job every single day. Whether she is at her office in Buckingham Palace, at one of her country houses, or travelling the world, not a day goes by when she does not read the dispatch boxes sent to her by the government.  She has not had a gap year, sick days, maternity leave (although she did limit her public engagements during the latter stages of her 4 pregnancies), mid-life crisis time off, mental health days, or just a plain old goofing off day. The burden of the office never leaves her – uneasy lies the head indeed.

To understand this phenomenal devotion to duty, it is necessary to understand the circumstances of her destiny.  When her father became King upon the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII, the monarchy was in a precarious state.  A handsome and charismatic young Prince of Wales had abdicated in favor of the glamorous woman he loved (the twice divorced American, Wallis Simpson), and was replaced by an ill-prepared, nervous, stuttering Duke of York, with a distinctly unglamorous  wife. The whole family was traumatized by this seismic shift in their lives, and understood they had to gain the confidence and respect of the people.  “Elizabeth:  the Queen Mother” by Hugo Vickers, is the definitive biography of the Queen’s mother (also known as The Queen Mother), and her seminal role in redefining the monarchy.

Understanding that she had to re-frame the institution in the minds of the people, she created the concept of The Royal Family, as a counter vale to the great love story which had resulted in the abdication. So, from the age of ten, the future Queen was immersed in her duty as part of The Family, and through enduring the privations of World War II, and, remaining in London  with her parents and younger sister Margaret  during the Blitz, gained  a visceral understanding of the essential qualities of the British people – the notion of Keep Calm and Carry On.  This is a bit of a cliché now, but with bombs raining down on the capital, it is indeed a remarkable  testament to a nation, and their collective resolve.

In spite of the fact that it was well know that the young Elizabeth would one day be Queen, she received no formal education.  While she had many tutors over the years, she was home-schooled, first by well-meaning nannies, and later by constitutional and historical scholars. .  Her early life was one of lonely preparation for her destiny, although she could never have imagined it would come to her so young. She was a 25 year old navy wife with two toddlers when she became Queen upon the death of her father.

She stepped off the plane on that cold February day in 1952, and had already begun to assume the dignity and majesty of her role. Although she was devastated by the loss of her beloved father, she rose to the height of her new status, and, clear-eyed and strong, she shook the hand of her prime minister, Winston Churchill, and never looked back.  Her story is the story of modern Great Britain, and is brilliantly told by Sarah Bradford in her biography “Elizabeth”.  It is the life and times of the Queen, and details all the societal, political and family changes  that Her Majesty was at the centre of for all these many years.

While it is interesting to chronicle the events of the last 60 years, it is more important now to pause and consider the impact of the remarkable reign.

In her role of head of state, she has watched  a major transformation of her country and the Commonwealth.  In Great Britain, there have been race riots, the miners strikes, The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the shift in the class system and the impact of the immigration flood of the ‘80’s and Simon Cowell. By far the most significant issue for the Commonwealth over the last 60 years has been the issue of apartheid in South Africa.  While Her Majesty was at the apex of the system regarding all these issues, as Head of State, she was constitutionally required to keep a neutral position and try to influence through her relationship with the Prime Minister of the day. We can’t know what she said, or how she said it in her weekly meetings with each of the 12 Prime ministers she advised, but what we do know is that she has never put a foot wrong constitutionally.  If she had overstepped, even once, the role of Head of State would have been compromised and the legitimacy of the monarchy could have been in question. It is hard to imagine doing any job for 60 years and not making even one mistake, but there we are – she has done it.

Sadly, the Queen’s role as head of her family has not met with the same success. None of her four children is her equal – each of them has “issues”. Prince Charles  made a disastrous first marriage,a controversial  second marriage, and routinely interferes with matters of state. Princess  Anne dropped the first ever Royal F-bomb (well done!). Prince Andrew is by all accounts a boor,and married a yob (and then it really went downhill). And  Prince Edward is just there.  The good news is that Prince William appears to have all the class and statesmanship required to be a successful monarch. This is undoubtedly the result of the loving mentoring the Queen has provided him, a luxury she did not have time for  with her own children as they were growing up.

When we are in full throated anthem mode and are asking God to save our Gracious Queen, and grant long life to our Noble Queen, these are not idle words. Unless the monarch maintains grace and nobility, there is little use for the institution.  During the thousands of public events she has attended (and let’s face it, many of them could be very boring), she has never failed to appear engaged and genuinely  interested in the goings on. She dresses for the occasion and has never made a sartorial mistake.  When people show up to see the Queen, they expect to see someone who looks like a Queen.

She has been a role model for women leaders, and has certainly, albeit quietly, advanced the standing of women in the world. When all is said and done (hopefully in a very long time) and we pause to reflect on the reign of Queen Elizabeth the Second, it may be more appropriate to compare her to her other famous ancestor, Elizabeth the First. In one of her greatest speeches to the Parliament of the day she said:  “I count the glory of my crown that I have reigned with your love”.  This is as relevant today as it was when it was uttered in the 17^th century by the other Great Elizabethan.   

Additional Jubilee reading recommendations:

The Queen, by Ben Pimlott

Elizabeth and Phillip, by Charles Higham and Roy Moseley

Young Prince Phillip, by Philip Eade

Jubilee Video Watching:

The King’s Speech, a film by Tom Hooper

The Queen, a film by Stephen Frears

The Queen, Acorn Media Miniseries

Bertie and Elizabeth, a Masterpiece Theatre series

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My thanks again to Sheila for this piece, and whether we are in favour of the monarchy or 'agin, perhaps we could all raise a glass (or a cup of tea, because apparently protocol allows a glass of any beverage barring a cocktail) in Loyal toast to Her Majesty the person today. If you are in the Royal Navy and at sea you don't have to stand up because it's too difficult, and nor apparently do the lawyers of Lincoln's Inn, this in commemoration of an occasion when Charles II dined with them and they were all too drunk to rise to their feet...

"Ladies and Gentleman, The Queen"

Call the Midwife ~ Jennifer Worth

I'm wondering whether anyone else is watching and enjoying Call the Midwife (8pm BBC One, Sunday) as much as we are at the moment??

For those who don't have access to it, the series is set in Nonnatus House, a working convent of midwifing nuns who train student midwives in the East End of London in the 1950s. In the days when, for the working class woman, hospital admission for delivery remained a rarity, when families were huge, all the washing was done by hand, the man's working day if he could get employment was long, the matricarchy ruled the roost as best it could, and within its bounds a high sense of sexual morality verging on prudery prevailed. Meanwhile out on the streets life inevitably told a very different story. It's a bit like a vintage One Born Every Minute meets The Sound of Music.

I'm hearing that lots of men are squeamishly crying off watching the series but Bookhound has stalwartly sat riveted through every episode with me, saying things like 'Tell me that baby doesn't die...'. This resilience might be down to his East End heritage all enhanced with an immunity gained after thirty five years of living with me being professionally connected to the real thing, and thus he's heard it all before.

Sunday nights won't be quite the same once the series has finished. I read Jennifer Worth's book when it was first published by Merton Books in 2002 because I can buy into nursing reminiscence at the first hint of starch and dressings, and this series has portrayed the East End brilliantly. Bookhound was born there in the 1950s before being moved out to a new town, but there is a landscape that seems familiar about childhood visits back to his own extended family.

And is not Miranda Hart quite perfect as the gung-ho though ever-so slightly gauche and accident-prone 'just call me Chummy' Camilla Fortescue-Cholmeley-Browne ...??

Not easy and rarely succesful for those we know as comedians to make the transition into serious drama (I could list a few disasters ...er Lark Rise anyone) but Miranda Hart has taken her comic timing, her body language, innate sensitivity, and the power of the hesitant and rather uncertain 'look' with her into Chummy's character, and it works. Chummy always the odd one out, sent to boarding school at the age of six, finished in Switzerland and then to the Lucy Clayton Charm School to prepare for presentation at Court as a debutante. Thence to Cordon Bleu followed by Needlework school and all was deemed ready for wife-dom until Chummy finds God and decides to be a missionary. It was in nurse training that Chummy finally found her metier, taking top honours at St Thomas's before arriving at Nonnatus House in the heart of the London Docklands for her Midwifery training.

And what about those gorgeous babies, apparently a slew of newborns required for filming, twins very handy and all helped by some extras, a few very lifelike and appropriately weighted dolls for use during delivery scenes. Filming had to revolve around the babies, if they were asleep and needed to be awake the crew would have to go and do something else.

The series is thankfully holding very true to the book too, written when midwife Terri Coates published an article bemoaning the absence of the midwife in literature and the gauntlet was thrown down...

'Maybe there is a midwife somewhere who can do for midwifery what James Herriot did for veterinary practice..'

and Jennifer Worth, who sadly died recently, thankfully rose to the challenge. If you haven't read the book I can heartily recommend it. We might have thought 'kangaroo care' (skin to skin contact for premature babies) had originated in Colombia in the 1970s but it is clear the women of the East End got there first

And talking of babies, I'm going to slip in some congratulations here... to Kirsty from Oxford University Press who has been a faithful friend of dovegreyreader scribbles from the very early days, (if you have ever won an OUP book in a draw here it is thanks to Kirsty that it was given in the first place, and that it then arrived with you)... so huge congratulations to Kirsty and John on the month-early (caught us knitters napping) but safe arrival of a very beautiful daughter Olivia. I've sent the hat but am still working on the boots, one more episode of Call the Midwife should see them almost ready for delivery.

 

The Chair...

You might recall that I have been searching for the perfect reading chair for years and to no avail.

It needed to be comfortable and low, easy to move up near the fire in the Bookroom when the wind is whistling, nice enough colour, so a deep red or blue or green would be fine, nothing complicated in that.

The best I could do was covet the one at Charleston until the chair with my name on it made itself known to us in that case.

So last Saturday morning Bookhound started the day with...

'Have we got any plans for today...'

I did a bit of a shrug and said

'Probably not, we'll only spend money we don't need to...'

'Right,' he said, 'I'll go into town, get the papers and we'll light fires and laze...'

A perfect sort of Saturday after a busy week, so I pottered around folding washing and emptying the dishwasher, doing the ironing... no right, you've seen through that, it was a freezing cold morning, I stayed in bed and read some more of Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris, just managing to get out and into the shower when I heard the car coming back.

'I've bought you a present,' he said when I finally put in an appearance.

Frantic questioning usually follows a statement like this...

'What....where... will I like it...is it something I wanted....'

All I get is a wry smile by which time I am approaching fever pitch because I love presents, who doesn't and Bookhound is very good at them. Anyway we had to go through the 'You go and put the kettle on while I bring it in' thing...and then the 'close your eyes and don't open them until I say,' thing...

Until there it was..

The Reading Chair of My Dreams found on a stall in Tavistock Market, and look carefully.... LOOK a built-in book stand.

It was a freezing cold but beautifully sunny day, so we upended it out on the verandah, treated a few stray worm holes, hoovered it, gave the upholstery a quick damp clean, polished the wood, gave it an airing and then proceeded to move the entire Bookroom around again to accommodate it.

The more I look at it, and the more I sit in it, and the more I prop a book up and read it on that lovely wooden stand which is at the most perfect height for my eyes, the more I love it, and the more I think we would probably have paid a lot more than the £50 we did.

And I am to be found in it at every available moment doing hands-free reading, though I don't always wrap up quite this extensively and sit there in my boots, I'd just come in from choir practice.

And who on earth would have thought I have anything in common with Thomas Carlyle, but I do, even down to our castors.

Clever Bookhound, by jove I think he's cracked it

Prize Draw ~ Two unabridged audio versions of Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig

As a delightful and very generous addition to today's wonderful post from Amanda Craig, Amanda has very kindly offered two signed boxed sets (twelve CDs in each) of the unabridged audio version of Hearts and Minds read by Sian Thomas.

They are here safely stowed chez dovegrey and my apologies, but because of postage costs, we will have to limit this to UK entries only. 

Amanda has suggested that it would be nice to know that, after listening, the winners might be able to pass these on to someone who was perhaps dyslexic, or partially sighted, or to a local 'talking books' or library service so that the books benefited as many listeners as possible.

So names in comments with your 'plan' and I will ask Amanda to choose the winners for us (Amanda doesn't know that bit yet!)

Update:: Amanda thanks everyone for their entries and has asked that the copies go to Heather and Margaret. They have both been notified by email and the audio books will be in the post to them asap.

Dickens and I... Amanda Craig

Please extend a very warm welcome to Dickens and I... for Amanda Craig, writer and journalist and great encourager of all things dovegreyreader. Amanda's most recent novel, the hugely successful Hearts and Minds is currently optioned for development as a TV series and for the novel's all-seeing eye over 21st century London, it is surely covering territory that Mr Dickens would find very intriguing were he to walk back into our lives today. Another of Amanda's novels, A Private Place has just been re-published in Kindle format, and with its themes of life at a boarding school I think our man would have been fascinated by that one too.

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When I was 21, I discovered Our Mutual Friend, and it was like getting an electric shock.  I’d read several other Dickens novels (David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby as a child, Great Expectations and Bleak House as a teenager) but I read them too young, without understanding, and with a good deal of resentment in the case of the last because it was a set text for English. I found his style and his characters grotesque. But one day I found nothing but Our Mutual Friend to read on a long hot summer abroad, and it pretty much turned me into a novelist.

What thrilled me wasn’t the obvious things – the exuberant language, the fantastic characters, the suppurating gloom – but the way that Dickens combined so many genres of story.
Our Mutual Friend (or OMF) is at once a murder mystery, a thriller, a romance, a social satire, social realism and a contemporary literary novel of its time. From the very first chapter when we realise the figures we see floating on the Thames are towing the body of a dead man,

 to the second with its exquisitely funny description of the Veneerings’ dinner party, to the third with its three lawyers describing their frustration, loneliness and boredom  – it was like moving through a succession of brightly-lit railway carriages, and living with each of the passengers. Each carriage was different, but all were connected.  

It had never occurred to me that a big, serious novel about contemporary life could have a detective story as its engine, and of course I copied it years later. But Dickens did it first, and best. If a few modern novelists are rediscovering his panoptic technical genius, it’s because he understood so clearly how to make us understand that life isn’t all written in the same key. The very aspect of his work that makes refined critical sensibilities recoil in horror is the source of his greatness,  because he shows how our existence can seem tragic one moment and wildly farcical the next.

I love his vulgarity, his energy, his passion and his compassion.  Who hasn’t met people like the Veneerings, with their “bran-new house in a bran new quarter”, immensely pleased with themselves and mindful at all times of social advancement? But then, who hasn’t walked quickly past people like the Hexams? Going into their miserable, decomposing home after the Veneering mansion is a classic Dickens manoeuvre: you are made to shiver, then laugh, then find yourself moved to tears. He’s the only writer besides Shakespeare whose imagination contains a whole world.

Of course, if you’re looking for the perfect Dickens novel, you turn to Great Expectations. Unlike the “baggy monsters” it never wastes a word, and the tightness of its construction is in contrast to OMF, Dickens’s last completed novel. Nor does OMF have the gorgeous squalor and oracular passion of Bleak House. Yet to me it’s the most fascinating, and in a way the most topical of his works, equating the worship of money with filth, and dismantling the heavy materialism that corrupted both the Victorians and present day society. It has an exceptionally moving heroine in Jenny Wren, a disabled child who transforms her pain and poverty and shame by becoming a dolls dressmaker; the whole novel is shot through with the spirit of fairytales. The lovely, kindly Boffins may not be able to rescue us from the world of the Veneerings (Mr Veneering, inevitably, becomes an MP) but to encounter them as characters always puts a smile on my face.

 

White Crosses ~ Larry Watson

Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive...'

Thank you to Walter Scott, Marmion Canto vi, for the now rather hackneyed yet perfect quote ( and don't worry, I didn't know either and had to look it up) to describe White Crosses by Larry Watson.

So about a week to go before Christmas, all my festive reading sorted, trees to decorate and hand-made presents still to be finished and I am idly wandering around the blogs for a catch-up, when I head to Canada where Kevin has written about White Crosses.

Now I have no plans to head to 1957 and small town America over Christmas, my reading is chosen and is unashamedly parochial. Bleak House, Miss Brooke, some Dorothy Whipple and the lengthy novel by A.S.Byatt. I've got a lovely pile of Slightly Foxed at my right hand and a stack of new books for January which look very enticing... no I am very alright for reading thank you.

Perhaps it happens to you when you visit here, but the minute I read Kevin's review I knew I had to read the book....

"Anyone who has driven the rural highways of Prairie Canada or the United States has experienced the phenomenon: the white crosses, often with a bunch of very weathered plastic flowers tied to them, by the side of the road to mark and commemorate the site of a fatal accident. They supply the title for Larry Watson’s novel and come to Bentrock, Montana Sheriff Jack Nevelsen’s mind as he is heading out of town to a fatal accident in response to a call from his deputy..."

Bit cheeky pilfering someone else's blog post (sorry Kevin!) but the roadside shrines are a feature in this country too, and in this local area where we often knew the person whose life has been so tragically lost and exactly when and how. I tend to drive past and find the person darting into my thoughts unbidden... perhaps wondering how the family are now... how old might the person have been now. Always recalling the tragedy of the young lad from the village as I pass that fateful bend on the way home and whose gravestone reads 'Sadly not invincible' , and any mother of sons will understand the import of those words, and so I was intrigued by the premise of White Crosses.

A Kindle sample confirmed what I already knew ( and I do like these, often a real deal breaker either way) my sort of writing and reading, and with apologies to authors, publishers et al I summoned up a 1p proper copy which arrived in time for a bit of greedy  pre-Christmas consumption.

So there has been a road accident on the night of the high school graduation celebrations, two dead and chances are they might be teenagers. When Jack Nevelson arrives at the carnage, to his confusion and dismay it is indeed one teenager June Moss, but the other victim is the head teacher of the local junior school, and supposed happy family man Leo Bauer... and there are suitcases. The potential repercussions are too great for Jack to contemplate but sufficient for him to make the decision that he must concoct an alternative version in order to protect the reputation of... well who exactly??

Leo Bauer.. not a particularly close friend of Jack's with little cause for loyalty or fidelity to his memory

Leo's family?

June, or June's family?

In fact, taking the National Sheriff's Association handbook that sits on his desk at its word, Jack decides it is the town he must protect, the entire community..

'The sheriff is required to protect the person, property, health and morals of every citizen in the county and these rights and possessions must not only be protected, they must be made continuosly safe.'

And so Jack Nevelson starts to weave a version of a possible truth that will be, in his eyes, for the good of the town.

The far-reaching consequences lay to one side, ready to make an entrance at specific points in the book, and I wonder whether any reader of White Crosses will be able to anticipate them. I certainly didn't as Larry Watson carried me headlong into Jack's plan alongside him, I didn't think ahead for one minute and when the various pitfalls appeared I was as surprised and as unprepared as Jack. The hole Jack digs for himself becomes deeper and deeper, more and more lies and manipulation are required to shore up the deep and grave-like sides of his story.

Jack Nevelson a man deeply aware of his own flaws and shortcomings, a harsh self-critic, unforgiving and increasingly deluded and obsessive, and cleverly delineated by Larry Watson who delves deep below the surface in his expose of a misguided but ultimately well-meaning man. The satellites in Jack's life, his wife Nora and daughter Angela, pose increasing difficulties for a man torn between duty and home, and a recurring image of  throwing stones struck me (sorry!) as a significant metaphor with its connotations of pain and punishment, and damage and humiliation.

The ending when I arrived there, rather breathless because I'll admit I steamed through this book knowing I couldn't put it down to go and decorate things and wrap presents without knowing the outcome, well that left me gasping a bit too. So all in all a surprising and brilliant read, another writer to add to the list of 'must-read-more' and having ordered a copy of Larry Watson's Montana 1948 I have only just stopped myself opening it immediately... I need White Crosses to do its stuff first because  weeks after finishing it I am still thinking about it a lot.

Any other Larry Watson readers out there??

Any recommends of similar gratefully received.