dovegreyreader scribbles

Alice ~ Judith Hermann

There are many ways to die, that much becomes clear as Judith Hermann's novel Alice unfolds and five separate but interconnected stories about five men in Alice's life who do so.

It sounds like a dreadful premise for a book and not one you would want to pick up any day soon, so I am not sure what tempted me in, but I'm not too proud to admit that it might have all been helped by the cover. Exquisite shades of teal and green, and there bobbing on the surface of the lake and looking out towards mountains and islands is a young woman, whilst gliding in her direction, towards the spine on the back cover is a swan. The pair of them seem to be creating the same ripples and it is hard not to think of the analogy of what lies beneath for both... for the swan doing all that work below the surface, and for the woman perhaps what lies beneath the surface of her life.

On the other hand perhaps I have just made that up and the book designer and the publishers might be guffawing into their coffee thinking 'Hell no, we just liked the picture...'

Whatever, I was seduced into Alice's life and the deaths various by the beguiling nature of the writing which most certainly demands that a reader searches for what lies beneath too. There is much that is unsayable about grief and the temptation would be for a writer to try and say it all, Judith Hermann doesn't which meant this reader had to work.

In which case perhaps the online day job helped.

I work with people's reactions to death and serious illness for fifteen hours a week (it may not sound like much, though it feels like many more for the concentration I need) and have done for the last three and a half years. I read what people write, I reply to them. I never see them so have to listen intently for all the nuances of distress and pain and anguish, and I only have words to work with as a response, one reply can sometimes take me an hour, so I think I might be particularly well tuned into the wavelength of the Valley of the Shadow of... and anyone else's words about death and dying.

First Misha, the ex-lover, and Alice has been invited by Misha's wife and child to bid her farewells as Misha lays dying in hospital.

The setting is not Berlin, which is home for Alice, the place is strange and the events seem dislocated and disorientating for both Alice and the reader trying to get a foothold in the book.

Then Conrad, an old friend who dies very unexpectedly in Italy while Alice is visiting with friends. The setting is warm whilst still distant and unknowable 

Friend Richard's death is anticipated and discussed openly, funeral plans are made by him and everything is known and under control.

Malte's death, (Alice's uncle) has been by his own hand as a young man just a month before Alice's birth. Eventually Alice, feeling a desperate need to make a connection and know more, contacts Malte's lover Frederick, now an old man and this story highlights so clearly the legacy of suicide.... the territory in which it unwittingly places those left behind, and the unexpected courses that may have to be navigated as a direct consequence.

The first three are deaths that Alice can meet with a degree of detachment, the fourth feels much nearer to home, all offering small cumulative lessons in coping that may prepare her for the big one. With it will come enlightenment for Alice, about what death really means, and what grief truly feels like, this is far deeper than process and impact, legacy and aftermath... this is excruciating pain and the question is, with that pain, will the resilience that she has built up through life see her through. 

When dealing with the memories..

'It occurred to Alice that she apparently couldn't choose the memories; they came of their own accord...'

and the possessions...

'There seemed to be a structure to these actions, time that had to pass. First find it, then comprehend, then throw it away. Achieve a certain distance. Take your time...'

Alice's vulnerability and loneliness after her loss understated but ever-present, and didn't Joni Mitchell find the very best lines to express that ...' the bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide', that line always flies unbidden into my mind.

Perhaps there can be no right and no wrong order for these things, but if there has to be one it seems infinitely preferable to build that resilience to loss, as Alice does, through lesser emotional connections than to have to take the big whammy on the chin first. It's why children have pet hamsters after all isn't it, to learn to love, to care for and to lose, and to discover an emotional language in order to deal with it. Oh the vale of tears chez dovegrey after Chippy the First and Chippy the Second shuffled off their respective mortal coils.

Judith Hermann's writing, in Margot Dembo's translation, felt graceful and compelling, quietly understated and frequently resembling those shortened thought patterns that accompany grief. It can be hard to string a sentence together when you are mourning and pre-occupied by loss, and I somehow felt that emanating from the characters as I read and was thus drawn deeper and deeper into the settings and the lives. In searching around for opinions on this book I came across Philip Hensher's here...one of the few (and don't miss the single very Guardianesque comment that follows it) 

I like the thought of, and hadn't made the connection to the origins of the novel of the separate narrative, but of course now that  Philip Hensher mentions it...

Over the last 40 years, novelists have begun to explore ways in which the old formal bonds may be shed, too. The old formal constraints, in which all the characters somehow know each other and in which their motives lead to some kind of mutual solution have started to seem unnecessary. After VS Naipaul's magisterial In a Free State , all sorts of parallel narratives, thematically collected stories, "linked collections" of short stories and other still more unexpected intermediate forms have emerged.

... well it's as plain as a pikestaff.

It is years since I read In a Free State but I remember being bowled over by it. Now  I'm trying to think of more novels that are written in this way, those with very slight connections between each narrative and quite a few come to mind...Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell...would that count??

How well I recall a Cloud Atlas cynic suggesting to me that actually this was really a collection of short stories and all the author had to do was add in a tiny connection and hey presto a novel. That conversation took place at a book group, with a very astute reading man called Richard, long dead, and it has bemused and kept me thinking for years. Alice is quite different, one life many narratives and obvious threads of connection throughout. A book that I am very pleased to have read, and not only because that teal cover looks nice against the yellow ochre colour scheme in the kitchen.

I quite like the way they make books like this make me seek out the connections, so do any more separate narrative novels come to mind??

POSTSCRIPT :: Since writing these thoughts Alice by Judith Hermann has been short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It would seem I am not alone in my admiration.

 

Messing about by the river...

Offspringette has been home for a few days and in training for a big distance long-boarding event in the US, so out doing some walking. This is not namby pamby walking like mine which seeks out the flat in preference to the hill, and the dry in preference to the wet, slowing to a snail's pace under the pretence of 'looking at flowers' when in fact I'm needing oxygen...no indeed because Offspringette had headed for the summit of Kit Hill yesterday, that peak that we can see from the window. We now know this is a round trip of twelve miles on foot, and up some of the steepest hills around here ... I expect... because I chickened out and agreed to meet her on the homeward trail.

In the meantime Bookhound and I had been out for coffee and cake and arrived home again before the call came in and off I went.

'Why don't you use the green lane,' suggested a helpful Bookhound.

'Won't it be a bit wet,' I replied.

'Well no point in those boots...'

The boots do not look quite like this today but I can now definitely confirm that these Scarpa ZG 65 Goretex lined women's walking boots do exactly what they say on the tin...

 This Vibram sole unit used on the ZG Models, is incredibly light, yet unlike others who have tried to lighten soles by lowering the profile, it retains deep cleating that gives outstanding grip. Based on a Megabyte trekking mix, it gives great adhesion with easy self cleaning action during use. The combination of rubber outsole and ultra-Lite PU wedge gives great underfoot shock absorption and firm stability for technical terrain.... the ZG 65, in our opinion, has to be a serious contender for one of the best all-round lightweight walking boots this side of the Ural Mountains! 

Like everyone else we too have had torrential rain ever since the words 'drought' and 'hosepipe ban' hit the headlines, and green lanes are notorious for becoming only passable on horseback at the first hint of wet. They are lovely though, little marked tracks, bigger than footpaths and supposedly the places were you can drive off-road, though always best to check first because we have seen many a vehicle get stuck. But the green lane would indeed be a good idea because it would effectively cut three sides off my walking square.

I am not sure whether this picture shows clearly enough that green lanes which slope downhill also resemble river beds, especially in times of drought which have become flood...

and the mud to either side is slippery, viscous and generally unfavourable.

By the time I had realised the folly of Bookhound's suggestion turning round and walking back up hill was not an option, so I soldiered on (you will see how appropriate this verb is in a minute) traversing mud plains...

...until I suddenly came upon some pretty baa lambs ...don't you just love that painting...

But these were naughty ones, escapees from the flock. The flock was going bananas calling them back in to the fold and they were going bananas trying to get back in...

This being the Law of the Sheep, the more I walked towards them the further ahead they ran until I could see them ending up in Cornwall, so I had a very bright idea. I would do that neighbourly and helpful rural thing and I would heave the gate open to the field and coax them back in.

This idea was just about commensurate for common sense with Bookhound's suggestion that I walk down here in the first place, because I should have realised that a gate that is incredibly heavy and difficult to open, and which has then half came off its hinges and sunk into the mud, is going to be equally tricky to shut. That is without giving thought to how I am going to persuade these lambs back into the field.

Think One Man and His Dog...

Now think One Woman and No Dog.

Bit of a stand off, lot of staring, some chirping noises from me, more staring from them ...some slightly irate 'come on don't be a sheep all your life' from me at which they took grave offence and shot off along the green lane, leaving me standing with an open and stuck gate and a lot of sheep smelling freedom. 

Brute force and panic and much mud above the ankles did the trick with the gate, and by the time I caught up with the stupid baa lambs I really couldn't have cared less...could have happily walked them all into the freezer as chops. If they are still running up and down that green lane good riddance I say.

But listen, I reached Horsebridge, the River Tamar going down at a fair old lick,  the Devon - Cornwall border and my rendezvous with Offspringette,

...only to find there was a war on.

The Sealed Knot doing a re-enactment of an English Civil War battle for a television programme for the BBC.

It all looked deadly serious. No camaraderie between the warring factions and even the babies were taking sides from their 17th century cots...

Offspringette pondered the merits of a re-enactment childhood and thanked me profusely for not having joined, though they all looked to be having a grand if very chilly day out.

We did ask and apparently the Parliamentarians were going to win, and thankfully the barracks weren't too far away..

And if you have ever asked yourself the perennial question about 17th century toilet facilities on the field of battle may your research stop right now, because I have the definitive answer...

 

 

 

 

 

A colourboration...

I hope you see what I did there, all will be explained.

In amongst all the other books I am still reading Colour - Travels Through the Paintbox by Victoria Finlay, albeit at the speed of a snail, and you are probably all so fed up with me mentioning it that you'll be glad when I creep to the final page, but with the Red chapter pending I had an idea.

I have a very lovely friend who is doing a very lovely thing right now. Ellie and her partner Adrian have set off on their journey of a lifetime and this is really serious travelling, no messing, because Ellie has put all her books in storage.

Thus far they have driven across Europe, through Italy down to Sicily, across to Africa, back to Sicily, Italy again (they like Italy) and now Albania, Macedonia eventually heading east, and they have very kindly taken me along with them. I have been no bother at all, I have a little virtual seat in the back of the camper van thanks to their blog Wherever the Road Goes which I have been following with much pleasure and enthusiasm. They have promised to be ready for visitors and there's loads of room on the roof rack if anyone wants to tag along. Inbetween visiting every ruin between here and Albania (they research diligently and miss nothing) we have had one or two dodgy moments with the old camper van, but Adrian is Mr Spark Plug and seems able to right most wrongs, while Ellie goes out shopping for local food. 

En route the photos have been tremendous as I knew they would be. Ellie has been to stay chez dovegrey and took some beautiful pictures while she was here, so I had this idea that perhaps Ellie and I could do a collaboration colourboration (new word) on the subject of Red. Ellie knew of Victoria Finlay's book, she owned a copy and in fact even knew of its approximate whereabouts in a blue box in a yellow warehouse in England, which I thought was impressive. But I also thought that whilst I scrabble around here seeing Red and thus far my imagination has only noticed the pillar box along the lane, Ellie could be doing likewise on her travels, and we would sort of bridge the geographical divide between us thanks to the internet (which they find on intermittent campsites) and with the inspiration of the paintbox and a collage each.

So Red will be our next challenge and I suspect Ellie's pictures will be a darn sight more exciting than mine if these are anything to go by.

Seen any nice patterns I asked...Cue a bridge in Porto, shadows and arches in Segovia, a gas shop in Tunisia, octopus pots in Tunisia, salt piles in Sicily, dried mud in Vulcanelli, salt pans in France, Porto again ...

Chillies in Sicily,  a bread stall in Kairouane, pears in Palermo, vines on Etna ,sundried tomatoes in Sicily, a roof in Monreale...

We will be simultaneously posting our Seeing Red collages soon and I hear Macedonia has already been fruitful so I had better get my skates on.

 

If you go down to the woods today you're sure of a big surprise...

Well we go up to the woods actually, but it was a 'beauteous evening calm and free' and Offspringette is working locally and staying for a few days, so we set off for a walk this evening to see if the bluebells were ready yet...On the way we met  Alexander the Second..

Diagnosis confirms that this might be an Oil Beetle...special features...

The female oil beetle lays thousands of eggs into holes in the ground, and these hatch into larvae which sit around on flowers waiting to jump on board a passing bee. They then get a lift back to the bees nest where they feed on the bee larvae.

When alarmed, the adult oil beetles can release a foul smelling oil - hence the name.

And it would seem we can now take part in a national Oil Beetle survey complete with identification chart. I'm veering towards a female Violet Oil Beetle...or perhaps a Black Oil Beetle, what do you think... are those antennae kinked, or very kinked??

The bluebells are not quite at their peak but we crunched on through the woods, completely at peace and then jumped a mile at what sounded like a machine gun overhead but was in fact a solitary and very echoey woodpecker, and then jumped another mile when we heard a thundering of hooves.
And there was Bambi...

and we all sat and stared at each other for about half an hour which is unheard of as a deer usually disappears as fast as a fox.




Another very magical moment we both agreed as we walked on home for a pot of tea.





 

Human Voices ~ Penelope Fitzgerald

Being the book group with a difference, and one that reads to themes rather than the same book, Endsleigh Salon had pondered the idea of One Author, One Book for some time, eventually deciding to give it a go. We would choose one author and we could each read whatever we fancied by said author for our March meeting....well, such a resounding success we plan to make it an annual event.

Now I can promise faithfully that it was not me who uttered the name first, but I was delighted when someone else did, and even more delighted when the rest of the group agreed, so that was settled... Penelope Fitzgerald.

I have read all the books bar Innocence which I am keeping back safe in the knowledge that for one last time, on one special day I know not when, I will read and savour that feeling I get on reading one of Penelope Fitzgerald's novels for the very first time. It is inexplicable and ridiculous I know, but it feels like walking on virgin snow, and once I start those footprints in the book there is no going back, the read cannot be undone and what we have is all there is. Subsequent reads will reveal layer after layer, but that first read creates a unique feeling of immediacy, a sense of really 'being' wherever I have been taken, something that feels so special to Penelope Fitzgerald's writing and which I think we all struggled to find the words to describe last Tuesday evening.

In the end I chose Human Voices because I remember it being very funny, and very sad by turns as Penelope Fitzgerald describes life inside the BBC during the Second World War and in House of Air and a piece called Curriculum Vitae, Penelope Fitzgerald's credentila for writing this book become evident...

'I left Oxford with an honours degree and might perhaps have stayed there, but it was 1938 and it hardly seemed like the right thing to do at the time. In 1939 I took a job at Broadcasting House...designed to look, and does look, like a great ship headed south, and in 1939, 'with the best engineers in the world, and acrew varying between the intensely respectable and the barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster of less than Titanic scale...'

A string of young girls make up what is known in-house as the Seraglio and it is clear that the sexist atmosphere is very much the norm for BBC 1941, and Penelope Fitzgerald, writing from her 1988 vantage point has a feminist perspective on it all. She knows exactly the moments to emphasise in order to make her point but in that discreet and unshowy way that she has.

'Inside Broadcasting House, the Department of Recorded Programmes was sometimes called the Seraglio, because its Director found that he could work better when surrounded by young women...'

Broadcasting House immediately becomes BH and remains so throughout the book, the director becomes the RPD and thus I was admitted behind the scenes and into the closed shop that was the wartime BBC.

Recent court cases and accusations of ageism against some of the women presenters at the BBC makes me think plus ca change since 1941 etc, and if I'm honest I do look at some of today's male presenters and wonder whether women of the equivalent age, and shall we say of similarly 'weatherbeaten' countenance, would be found acceptable. If only the women had the chance to stay long enough to look weatherbeaten we might find out, but I sense most of them dispatched long before anno domini makes itself apparent... and I had written this before A.A.Gill's personal onslaught on Mary Beard, declaring her 'too ugly for television.'

Mary Beard is currently doing a fabulous and far more capable job of presenting the Romans to us on TV than I suspect A.A.Gill or anyone else could, and don't miss Mary's response. It is gracious and deliciously laced with intelligent and Romanesque revenge and I'm really hoping the contest can be staged in a sort of huge gladiatorial arena and with Clare Balding commentating of course. Interestingly I had only recently been thinking, in Team Middlemarch mode, about the personal slurs on George Eliot's looks, and the inevitable hurt it must have caused, and telling myself thank goodness that wouldn't happen nowadays...

Penelope Fitzgerald would have much to say about it all I feel sure, but meanwhile she keeps her focus firmly on wartime as Lise and Vi settle into the Seraglio in 1940, scurrying around the the flagship building designed to resemble a great liner, which makes the Eric Gill (sorry, we are a bit over Gill-ed today) figurehead of Ariel and Prospero even more significant. I couldn't help thinking of The Tempest, and storms and shipwrecks and this disparate group of castaways as the Corporation lurched from one hilarious moment to the next amid a sort of low-key atmosphere of chaos..

'The corridors were full of talks producers without speakers, speakers without scripts, scripts which by clerical error containd the wrong words or no words at all. The air seemed alive with urgency and worry.'

And as if broadcasting during a war wasn't difficult enough..

'Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is telling the truth. Without prompting the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and in the long run would be more effective..droning quietly on, at intervals from dawn to midnight, telling, as far as possible, exactly what happened...'

That truth began with Big Ben, which must always be relayed from Westminster and chime live on the radio...'the real thing, never from a disc'. It's absence would be a sign to the public..'that the war has taken a seriously unpleasant turn.'

The fact that the mechanism froze in cold weather was neither here not there, a problem to be passed to the Ministry of Works.

And the BBC has power..

'As a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn't too sure where next week's money was coming from, they had several different kinds of language and could guarantee to come out best from almost any discussion.'

As I have grown to appreciate with Penelope Fitzgerald's writing, the focus is often on lived lives rather than a linear plot and her uncanny ability to take me where she wants me to be, to watch it as it might really have been.

I think this might be what I mean by immediacy, others may interpret it differently. This feels like fiction at its best for me these days. A.S. Byatt and Elizabeth Taylor are spoiling me for anything less,

In fact plenty of note does happen in Human Voices too, some of it utterly hilarious.

The French General's live broadcast to the nation, as funny on my second reading as my first, the hunt for authentic sound effects during the Blitz feels so very ridiculously 1940s BBC, and all contrasted with moments of acute sadness. Meanwhile expect Penelope Fitzgerald's consummate wordsmithery, of the subtlest but most exquisitely simple and highly effective variety to stop you in your tracks.

... the typewriter slumbered.

And I think about it, those big old Remingtons, and yes they do.

Philip Hensher summarized like this...

“Fitzgerald has been widely and justifiably praised for the excellence, discretion and solidity of her historical imagination, which brings unlikely periods of history to life with unarguable, strange rightness.”

And it is that 'strange rightness' that I think many of us at the Endsleigh Salon were struggling to describe. Between us we had read Innocence, Offshore, The Beginning of Spring, The Blue Flower, The Gate of Angels, The Bookshop, The House of Air, The Means of Escape, and bar one dissenter who had dipped into the Collected Letters rather than the fiction and hadn't warmed, we were all of one accord.

A brilliant writer, and thanks to my fellow salonistas a brilliant and inspiring evening, and should your own book group be feeling a little stuck or stale I can highly recommend this approach.

And for anyone twiddling their thumbs today and wishing to brush up on their Latin, I took a picture of this plaque the last time I was at the BBC (ahem) and though I think I may have asked you before I have forgotten what you said, so any ideas?? 

I can see something about beauty in there...and possibly truth and wisdom... and Miss Vanstone from Nonsuch Girls, if you are reading this (very possible), I know I know, you tried your best, I should have paid attention.

 

 

Field Studies

For the eighteen years that we have been fortunate enough to live in this heavenly little corner of the Tamar Valley, as you know by now I think, we have looked out from the bedroom windows across fields as far as the eye can see, and on down into Cornwall. 

It is like looking at familiar exterior wallpaper, a living patchwork which conveniently and very attractively changes with the seasons, subtle little shifts that we rarely miss...perhaps a distant field will sport a different crop or a new herd of something, but in the fields around the house everything has always stayed the same.

Grass and even more grass.

The front field which you see in my window shot over here <<<<< has only ever been ploughed once that we can recall, and then quickly re-grassed. In the summer it is a lush sea of clover and usually grazed by very grateful cattle. It is heaven to walk through and this is my prime blackberry-picking territory, one circuit yielding twenty pounds of jam and five pounds of spiced bramble jelly last year.

But we knew things were about to change when the shoot that surrounds us came under new and bigger ownership recently. It would seem we might just be able to open the window and drag in a pheasant for dinner there will be so many of them.

Firstly the field was sprayed and whilst I optimistically hoped for something to keep it nice and green and the same, our own Gamekeeper knew different and warned us that this was the kiss of death for the grass and that we may be looking at cover crops soon ...curly kale or maize.

I mean who needs a veg box.

So, day by day we have watched our euthanased field die a very sad, slow and deliberate death...

and it was only going to be a matter of time before our wallpaper was stripped off.

I hung out of the bedroom window watching the birds swoop low behind the plough as it gouged its way through resistant earth that put up a bit of a fight, and my mind turned to pots of gold.

Eventually (and in the absence of pots of gold) I felt quite sad, and then wondered, in that impractical and sentimental way that often accompanies change we aren't quite prepeared for, about the days when that would have been man and horse. Then it was only a small hop to remembering Edward Thomas and As the Team's Head Brass, knowing as we do that the three sons of the farm all died in the Great War.

I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock...

The change feels so profound, the lost colours of that view and the character of the field so deeply embedded in my mind's eye (it is me after all who may spend the most time sitting up in bed nursing a cup of tea and just staring out) to the point where I almost feel I may need to make new curtains to match this new and rather bold decorative statement.

The new colour scheme is growing on us though, something mesmerising about those ploughed furrows and the way the light and shade move across them.

We await whatever may be coming next with interest.


 

The Life of Rebecca Jones ~ Angharad Price

Happy St George's Day, Happy Shakespeare's Birthday and Happy World Book Night, little of which may be relevant to today's post given I am writing about a Welsh book, but all worth a little jig in celebration. To be honest, after last week, I barely know which day it is anyway. I am safely home after five nights away and five different train journeys in a week, I have had an inspiring bookish foray out of the Shire with much to share in the coming weeks. But I am now very pleased to be home, back to the day job today and that's quite enough wandering around the country for now, time to get back to books.

'It was a gusty afternoon in late autumn in the year 1792. In those days the west coast of Wales was even wilder that it is today, and the mountains more rugged and uncultivated. Clouds swept about the craggy summit of Cader Idris, while the wind rushed down towards the sea.
    A little girl, bare-footed, but with a shawl wrapped about her shoulders, ran out of a small cottage and crossed the plot of garden to the henhouse....'

Not an extract from The Life of Rebecca Jones but the opening lines of a book that for some reason captured my imagination as a child and which I know I may have mentioned here before...Mary Jones and Her Bible. I still have the floppy little paperback edition published in 1960 which my brother had been given, quickly decided was definitely not his sort of thing and had passed onto a seven-year old me. Looking back I am trying to work out why the book made such an impact on me that I read it over and over again. I don't think it was necessarily the Biblical content, more the idea of this young girl who was desperate to learn to read, saving money in a money-box, which was something I did diligently, but perhaps also the thought that whilst I was roller-skating three miles to the joke shop at Amen Corner, here was a girl walking twenty-five miles barefoot to buy a book.

But perhaps too it was the place names...Cader Idris, Llanfihangel, Abergynolwyn, Llanegryn, Bala, Bettws-y-coed

Someone had bought me a pencil with the great long place name on it too. With sharpening the Llanfairpwll gwyngyll gogery chwyrndrobwll llantysiliogogogoch was slowly reducing to  Llanfairpwll gwyngyllgogery chwyrndrobw until eventually all I probably had to show for it was Llanf. But I had inherited my mum's childhood postcard collection too, my grandfather was a Liverpool-based Griffiths and some of my most prized pictures were these.

As far as I was concerned, if ever I went to Wales everyone would be dressed like this, so there was plenty of Welsh-ness settling in my mind along the way.

All ably assisted by this really evocative cover, The Convalescent by Gwen John. Apart from the fact it is a beautiful, impressionist portrait, this cover took on a much deeper significance for me once I had turned the final page. It then becomes a masterly choice by MacLehose, who publish this book

As I opened the first pages of Angharad Price's novel The Life of Rebecca Jones I suspect that little vein of childhood Welshness all joined up with books I have read since (more of those in a minute) as I started to read...

'I see my mother beside her husband in the cart, a handsome couple on their way to their new home at Tynybraich. They have just left the chapel at Dinas Mawddwy, a small village in Merioneth which lies between two mountain passes...'

This is Mary Jones and Her Bible territory, and slowly Rebecca's life in Cwm Maesglasau, a place her family have farmed since 1012 comes to life. The names recorded for posterity in the family bible... Gethin, Gruffydd, Llywelyn, Evan. Rebecca, the eldest child in the family followed by five brothers three of whom are born or become blind and two more siblings who die young. Interestingly it is the blind brothers, Gruffyd, William and Lewis who leave the valley and travel the furthest in order to be educated, whilst Rebecca and her brother Bob stifle any ambitions they may have held in order to keep the family farm and the tradition alive.

When lived within the confines of a vast but relatively small geographical area Rebecca's powers of observation become acute and perfectly in tune with her surroundings...even I am finding that, though on a much smaller scale, living here in this quiet little corner of the Tamar Valley. I walk the footpaths out and around each day and have grown to really appreciate the simplicity of those same walks, and the way they make me look at everything so much more closely.

As Rebecca's life spanning the century unfolds, this little book unfolded with it in my mind, becoming many things, and any confusion and questioning that I may have had was answered on the final page, making this one of those books that had me sitting and staring into space as I read Angharad Price's final words.

Is it fiction??

Is it autobiography??

My need for certainty and clarity confounded but eventually assuaged as I realised it can be all these things, as well as a beautifully poetic elegy for a fast-disappearing way of life.

The Life of Rebecca Jones was initially published in Welsh as O! Tyn y Gorchudd (O! Pull Aside the Veil) and there was much consternation that it would never work in translation, and Jane Aaron, in her introduction to this translation by Lloyd Jones, makes some very interesting points about the significance of twentieth century Welsh rural culture, both precious and vulnerable and with it the deeper significance of the blindness of Rebecca's brothers. My only quibble would be that the introduction would have worked so much better as an afterword. I am never sure how these things are decided, though I feel sure it involves a raft of meetings and minutes and emails etc, but nor can I stop myself reading an introduction if it is there, and on the assumption that the publishers will have taken my personal reading experience into consideration. In fact it just left me completely confused, wrong-footed and slightly uneasy all the way through and I wish I hadn't then had to read this book with those qualms in my mind.

I'm being cagey because I don't want to give anything away, nor can I unread the order that I have read and imagine how it might work differently, but my suggestion would be that if you decide to read The Life of Rebecca Jones, perhaps consider immersing yourself in its exquisite and beautiful prose and story first, and then read the introduction before you read the book for a second time...because you will want to read it again.

And as for the other books that came to mind as I read... plenty tapping into that seam of Welsh reading and enough to make me realise I now need a Welsh shelf in my bookroom and a Welsh tag for posts on here. It has all left me wondering why I haven't created one sooner...

Resistance by Owen Sheers

The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

A Woman's Work is Never Done by Elizabeth Andrews 

The Small Mine by Mena Gallie  

The Dew on the Grass by Eiluned Lewis

My Father's Places by Aeronwy Thomas

Eunice Fleet by Lily Tobias

The Triple Echo by H.E.Bates (this might not be set in Wales, I can't remember... but if not it could be)

Any more suggestions?? 

 

A Nature Walk...

The Kayaker was home over Easter so he and I went for a long walk, he took his camera and I introduced him to some of the friends I usually meet along the way, we soon drift back into that mother-son When We Were Six thing...

"....We went to all the places which a beetle might be near,
And we made the sort of noises which a beetle likes to hear,
And I saw a kind of something, and I gave a sort of shout:
"A beetle-house and Alexander Beetle coming out!"

and Alexander waved as he wandered on.

Credits ::
The Kayaker for the pics. 
A.A.Milne for Now We Are Six.  
Alexander. 
Me for not treading on Alexander (those are my lovely, well-worn Scarpa ZG boots )

Happiness ...

 

At the Jerusalem ~ Paul Bailey redux

I am taking the liberty of dusting off a post from the dovegreyreader 2007 basement today.

This afternoon I will be en route to Reading for the Elizabeth Taylor centenary day (and I must remember to get off the train at Reading and not sail on to Paddington) but I learned last night that Paul Bailey has confirmed he will be attending the event on Saturday.

Paul Bailey wrote a wonderful book, At the Jerusalem, and knowing that I will be leading the session on Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, read on and I think you can see why I am thrilled to know that Paul will be there...

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

I've had a very welcome and perfect introduction to the writing of Paul Bailey thanks to a regular reader of this blog who kindly sent me a parcel of Paul's books.

Old Soldiers was one of my choices for our War Reading themed evening at Endsleigh last week and my thoughts on the book are here. The novel still resonates in my mind now, its depth took me completely by surprise and I think that makes it an excellent introduction to Paul Bailey's gentle but deeply perceptive writing. 

Now I've read Paul's first novel At the Jerusalem in this handsome little Bloomsbury Classics edition, very must-have. First published in 1967 when Paul was actually thirty, but written when he was twenty-eight. This makes it a very remarkable book indeed.

 Anyone who has read Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont but who hasn't read this one may want to do so quite quickly. It was the reviews of At the Jerusalem that prompted Elizabeth Taylor to write her own book, and the character of Ludovic Myers is based on her observations of Paul working in Harrods. Elizabeth had expected to find someone a "trifle wizened" and must have been bemused and surprised when she realised how young he was.

Deposited by her family in a nursing home, Faith Gadny struggles to come to terms with this slow and steady decline towards the end of her life. The affinity with a prison is not lost on Paul Bailey and he points up so much that is institutional about The Jerusalem that you begin to think prison might be the better option. There are certain periods in a person's life when they seem to become open territory for anyone to make a comment which they may otherwise keep to themselves.

I think pregnancy is one for sure. Suddenly everyone has the inalienable right to tell a woman she looks well / tired / huge / unrecognisable / pale and poor Mrs Gadny at the opposite end of the spectrum suffers deeply humiliating moments when her privacy is invaded mercilessly because the system demands it. Her fellow detainees are equally beautifully drawn making this another of those books that stays in the mind long after the final page, I can visualise every one of the characters from Paul Bailey's fine attention to detail drawn up in so few words.

It's quite an unnerving book to read in many respects, because for someone so young Paul Bailey's powers of observation are acutely and uncannily mature and unremittingly accurate. Bearing in mind that this was written in the pre does-he-take-sugar era he has homed in on on the saddest aspects of the care of the elderly and, though I'm sure times have changed, the book still has huge relevance. Paul must have watched and listened very carefully because the dialogue in At the Jerusalem is peerless, even down to the episodes of rambling thought which I was about to accredit to the elderly per se, but actually, as if it isn't obvious, I'm a rambling thought person and it won't be that long before I start recounting it all out loud I'm sure.

Faith Gadney must join the ranks of fictional old ladies who matter and deserve to be remembered along with Laura Palfrey and Hagar Shipley, in fact, put the three of them in a home together and expect a hunger strike over the diet of chewy meat and junket quickly followed by a break out, possibly along a tunnel they've been digging with their crochet hooks.

Perhaps a dash too much Count of Monte Cristo for me of late? (this was 2007, I'm over that now)

 

 

 

 

 

Home and away...

Home after a hectic few days in London, and the first thing I did was get my thermal vest back on plus more layers, on with the walking boots and out around the field. It is freezing here and was unusually cold and wet in drought-riven London too.

A couple of days spent at the London Book Fair and how fascinating to see behind the scenes of the publishing industry and hear the conversations that are taking place. This is where all the business is done, acres and acres of publishers and agents from around the world converging on Earls Court to do the deals.

I had a few appointments and had also been invited to take part in a seminar on Social Reading by The Reading Agency. It is always a pleasure to talk about the way that we are able to share the inspiration of books and reading here. I told them about you ...all of you, and how much I value the discussions we have about each book, and how your comments are the oxygen that keeps it all alive here, and someone put that quote out on twitter, so you have all been tweeted and are all very famous now. It was good to meet everyone there as well, fellow panelists, people in the audience who I knew and plenty that I didn't but who came and said hello afterwards. Stewart, of the legendary Orkney Library, also on the panel, confirmed that I can join the library for a week when we are up there in the summer, so I plan to stock up on local books for us to read inbetween eating, mountaineering, eating, sleeping, sea-watching, eating, abseiling, cycling the islands, eating, wild swimming, sea-kayaking,  sleeping  base-jumping off Hoy and all the other things we plan to watch the Tinker do.

I went to some excellent seminars including one on Apps given by, amongst others, the developer of Faber's The Waste Land. We had a sneak preview of the next one due very soon, Shakespeare's Sonnets, very covetable, 154 readings to camera, it will fly off the .... the.. through the ether. And wait until you see Leonardo da Vinci - Anatomy, also coming soon and quite quite stunning, the Queen's collection as an App, with commentary and overlays which show the accuracy of Leonardo's findings, together with a spyglass facility which allows for close-up examination of the drawings.

Earls Court exhibition space is the size of a small continent and I must have walked miles, so I was very happy to park myself in a chair on the Book Guild Publishing stand, publishers of Effie A Victorian Scandal, and had a lovely catch up with Laura Lockington. If you have been reading here an awfully long time you may recall Laura's must-read book Cupboard Love which I wrote about eons ago. It was so good to meet Laura at last, and to continue our ongoing debate about the whys and wherefores of bubble and squeak, Laura would live on it, personally I think it should be a banned substance.

You will all have an opinion I feel sure so please state it in comments and we can have a Bubble and Squeak poll.

I took you all on some fabulous visits away from the book fair too which I hope you will all be enjoying on here soon once I have had a chance to ruminate over them.

The twilight visit to Dennis Severs' House in Spitalfields was everything I had expected and much much more besides. Please book and go if ever you are in London. I was swept away by the intensity of it and only wished I'd had my artist with me (who was at home building a garden wall.) I will write much more about the experience when I can find the right way to describe something that in a way resists being put into words.

Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields was a perfect follow on because having been encouraged to use my imagination by Dennis Severs I carried on the trend as I wandered around this most intimate and amazing house. 

My visit to the Hunterian Museum across the way at The Royal College of Surgeons (now I know where all those doctors get their F.R.C.S. from) was, on the other hand, an exercise in leaving my imagination sitting on the seat outside, even with my strong nurse's stomach. Though it was lunchtime when I emerged I was relieved that there was no cafe on the premises, half of me could have murdered a nice big slice of coffee and walnut cake, the other half of me was ever so slightly queasy after the sight of so much pickling.

By the time the No 19 bus had delivered me to the King's Road I had recovered sufficiently unto a lunch, and after a wander and some shopping I headed back to The London Library where Elena very kindly gave me a personal guided tour and let me take lots of pictures for you... you'll love them.. books on shelves and more books on more shelves, our very favourite subject. I had my imagination back in full working order and feel sure I saw George Eliot in the stacks. Oh Oh Oh, what an incredible place, if we lived in London I'd find a way to afford membership somehow.

So plenty to look forward to here, but in the meantime I have to do a very swift turnaround (I knew this week was going to be like this) get the frocks in the wash and off to Reading on Friday bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the Elizabeth Taylor centenary day on Saturday, and then on my way home I am stopping off at Bath on Sunday to talk at the West Country Writer's Association's Annual Congress. My subject is Blogging to the World, so I fully expect you will all get another very huge mention, and I will send them your regards too.

In readiness for the Elizabeth Taylor day I have read A Game of Hide and Seek, a new one for me and an experiment to see if one book would allow me to pull out all the strengths of Elizabeth Taylor's writing that I have come to value ...it did and more. I have also re-read At Mrs Lippincote's and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (I am facilitating the reading group discussion about Mrs P on Saturday) and can report the books get better and better with each read. One of the highlights for me will be to meet and talk with Elizabeth Taylor's son and daughter, I know some of you will be there in person, but don't worry I'll sneak the rest of you in vicariously to share the day and will report back.

Now please can we just sort out this bubble squeak thing once and for all...I'm right aren't I...it's a crime...

 

The Light of Amsterdam ~ David Park

'George Best's autograph. Where did it go? Where was it now? On a Saturday morning, a ligetime later, he stood waiting at the top of Cregagh Road close to the estate and wondered how you always lost the things over which you should have taken more care...'

I had turned back to the beginning after reading the final page of David Park's latest novel, The Light of Amsterdam published by Bloomsbury, and was sitting surrounded by that indescribable glow of a book finished, and a book truly enjoyed. I felt I had come to know Alan after 371 pages and I wanted to revisit that moment when we had first met, as he waits, under lowering Belfast skies and 'insistent and indifferent rain' for George Best's funeral cortege to pass.

Do you know that moment??

Not the cortege, although there could be some tenuous and clever analogy about that sense of bereavement over the final page of a good book that you don't really want to end... but what I really meant was the end of the book moment??

There is something very special about it, as important a part of the experience of the book as the reading the book itself. Part of the whole, those moments which can become embedded in the hours, days and weeks to come when a book will slip back into my mind, and with it some new thought...or perhaps a different perspective, or a completely revised understanding of what I have read.

It is why book posts rarely make it onto here the minute a book is finished. I may start drafting some immediate thoughts, but they will then sit and simmer for a while because that becomes an indication of a book's deeper power..

... how long does it stay with me...

... what does it leave in its wake...

... what questions does it make me ask...

I found a quote from Milan Kundera about the novel recently, and which I made a note of

“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude."

I'm not sure I would concur with the vehemence of 'stupidity' but I would agree with the idea that a novel that makes me question and think more, rather than trimming and tidying up the ends and providing all the answers, is one to treasure.

Three separate 'couples' are heading to Amsterdam for the weekend.

Alan, the art teacher, destined for the realms of the dinosaur, on the skids in the changing environment of the college in which he works, is divorced after a meaningless fling which he then confessed to his wife Susan. Susan it seems didn't need much of a reason and has hot-footed it out of the marriage and into life with Gordon the builder, taking teenage son Jack with her. 

Alan, at great expense, has booked a ticket to relive a moment of his youth and see Bob Dylan in concert in Amsterdam, a city he last visited as a hippy, and at the last minute and at even greater expense finds that Jack, troubled and angst-filled must go with him.

Karen, a single parent who is working all the hours god sends cleaning offices at dawn and care homes at dusk in order to pay for the wedding that her Barbie-glam daughter Shannon is busy ordering and organising... flowers, dresses, cars, photographer the works, and of course the hen weekend in Amsterdam.

Thus does poor forty-year old Karen find herself dressed as an Indian squaw as she boards the plane for a weekend she can't afford and has joined only with reluctance.

And then there is fifty-four year old Marian, of that certain age and taking a weekend break from the family-owned garden centre business with map-toting husband Richard. Richard has just bought her a gym subscription as a surprise for her birthday, a gift freighted with more than Marian, beset by doubts and a lessening confidence, cares to consider, and as if in response she has a very unusual gift lined up for Richard in Amsterdam.

And so the novel pans out over the weekend ahead, a strange city the perfect setting for sweeping away the props of day to day life and home, replacing them with disconcerting unknowns. It's a bit like putting everyone's life map back in their hands, but upsidedown and back to front making new routes a distinct possibility.

There will be revelations and heartache, misunderstandings and assumptions, people's lives balanced on emotional precipices and reaching tipping points where they can jump to a new future or stay safely, but unadventurously where they are. Waiting to be exposed, the seemingly safe barricades that people build around the messes in their lives, and which seem impenetrable and under control were it not for the unpredictable actions of others, the barricades are there to be breached if not quietly stormed in Amsterdam. 

New memories overlay the old for some, with all their power to haunt and ambush, to console and to change, whilst for others these are the memories in the making for the future. There will be impulse and consequences, and moments when as a reader I started to visualise possible futures for all the characters... to me the sign of a very clever book if it gives me enough to be able to do that ...and to want to.

The Light of Amsterdam, and now the title becomes clear, is beautifully paced and structured, lives glance across each other, touch briefly usually at moments of reflection when people have time to notice those around them, and all those human responses to transition, change, threats and getting older, as well as the fragility yet corresponding robustness of family, are perfectly and seamlessly addressed. David Parks writes with enormous sensitivity and emotional acuity, this is proper storytelling at its very best.

So I had turned back to the beginning of The Light of Amsterdam and I re-read the first few pages. That quote about George Best's autograph not only reminded me that I probably shouldn't have sold my Dusty Springfield autograph on eBay, but that the notion of lost things over which one should take more care somehow underpinned the meaning of the book I had just read.

It was a realisation eventually arrived at by each character, and it is a book that makes you ask those questions of yourself too... about taking care of the things we love, and of ourselves in the midst of it all.

 

 

 

 

 

London Under ~ Peter Ackroyd

I am currently in London for the three days of the London Book Fair, still in touch here thanks to the technology, and will be speaking on Wednesday as part of a panel on the subject of Social Reading. My sincere thanks to The Reading Agency for the invitation as well as the opportunity to be sitting on a panel with the legendary tweeter who is Orkney Library.

I love going to the smoke because, though I was born in Exeter, I grew up on the very outskirts of London which, cost permitting, made it readily accessible to us as children, and for school trips, and whilst I may feel my heart has been in rural Devon for a long time now, there is always a bit of me that thrives on the London buzz....and then the coming home. 

So in amongst all the Nature Table reading I am keeping my eye on the city life too, and when Peter Ackroyd's book London Under arrived I was intrigued. Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways (update on Team Old Ways very soon) is already making me acutely aware of what may be beneath my feet as I walk, whilst Bookhound's recent DIY redistribution of the garden, in the final landscaping after all the building work, is making us both acutely aware of what lies beneath our feet.

A shed-load of earth is what...

It is only when we (as in the Royal we) do a job like this that we sit in the midst of the gigantic molehills during Bookhound's alloted tea break and ponder firstly why we are never the lucky people to find the cracked pot yielding so many Roman coins that it takes two of you to lift it out of the ground. Like this one we saw at Bristol Museum, and which a man found whilst digging a fishpond... a fishpond I ask you ...we've gone half way to Australia and found one bit of a broken plate, a doll's arm and a teapot spout.

I am so disappointed in the ancestors.

Peter Ackroyd suggests that

' the temptation to bury precious objects is very strong especially in times of danger.' 

Clearly not enough of that around these parts.... have you ever found anything interesting??

I'd be really happy to know at least one of you had.

Anyway, once we get over that let-down we sit and wonder about the hand labour that would have been involved in the fields around us in years gone by, and having now read London Under I am marvelling at the idea that there really can't be much earth left to dig out beneath the metropolis and so much of it done pre-JCB.

I am afraid this is one of those books that is chock full of 'Did-You-Know...' moments and I have regaled Bookhound with a bevvy of those followed by plenty of 'Guess-How-Much...' 

It had just never occurred to me that whilst London sits on a bed of sand, gravel, clay and chalk making it eminently possible to dig down, Manhattan is established on layers of hard rock meaning the only way is up. And it would seem that London has never been able to stop itself digging down even further; vast sprawling networks of tunnels, chambers, catacombs, rivers, sewers (I'll come back to those) vaults (the Bank of England vaults hold the second biggest horde of gold bullion on the planet) command spaces and complete subterranean worlds.

Secret London accessed by invisible, unnoticed portals.

Who knew that 100ft below High Holborn there is a vast underground structure accessed via a very insignificant door at No.31. A lift will take you eight floors down to a network of tunnels, rooms, dining rooms, communal living areas and private cubicles... and that all connects via more tunnels to Covent Garden and thence to Trafalgar Square, a 'miniature city' according to Peter Ackroyd. I feel like I may be giving out classified informaion, but it is all in the book so fair game.

Each successive digging reveals more history too, a Roman Baptistry discovered underneath Oxford Street in 1865, a flight of sixteen steps down to a room with red brick walls and arches, a pool with spring-fed water in it to a depth of six feet... all destroyed and probably now the site of Top Shop or something.

And all far more than just the London Underground network and a few Cabinet war rooms as I had imagined. The Underground itself a very chaotic mess of obsolete tunnels too, I didnt know there used to be a tube station called The British Museum for example, and apparently if you look carefully as you leave Holborn Station travelling west you may catch a glimpse of the old tiled walls. The iconic tube map meanwhile a designer's effort to make some sense of it all, as you will know it you have ever tried to walk what looks like that short hop from Earls Court to Olympia because there are no trains running.  

I love the idea that a man with a wooden leg was employed to ride up and down the first escalator in 1911 because everyone was too scared to use it... such a good advert. Yet each tube line has its own identity, almost a personality, and this made for fascinating reading... did you know that the Bakerloo line is 'disconsolate and brooding' and now I consider it, yes it is, and the Northern Line is 'intense and moody'.

But it was all the connotations of the underworld that Peter Ackroyd brings to life here that held my attention too. The way that life heads into the ground any way it can when it feels threatened and needs to feel safe, thus the war bunkers and the rush for the tube stations during the Blitz. The sense of foreboding attached to any notion of 'being underground' coupled with the sense of foreboding I felt as I read that London is slowly sinking into its foundations as the groundwater rises. I don't want to worry anyone living there, especially ahead of London 2012, but 15,400,000 gallons is being pumped out daily.

And then there are the sewers.

Living as we do without mains drainage and courting our close companion the septic tank, and with my background in ghastly diseases, I am always interested in sewers.

Did you know that London has Mr Bazalgette to thank for its 82 miles of main sewers and 1000 miles of minor ones built in the 1860s and still intact ??

And did you know that the deposits of fat gripping the sides are, in places, 40 inches thick??

And that picture at the beginning is after the cleaning...

Here's the before...

You learn things here.

 

In Memory of Harry Rogers ... a life lost on the Titanic

'...the presence of bergs was being reported by almost every ship that crossed the Atlantic since April 1st.'

The Tavistock Gazette of April 19th 1912 has a long account of the sinking of the Titanic so Bookhound and I took ourselves down to the library this week to tame the microfich machine and read it, and how fascinating it was...

'There is much conflict between official and unofficial statements, but it seems that the Titanic struck an iceberg at 10.25pm on Sunday night and foundered at 2.20am... one of the captains of the Allan liners which run between Glasgow and New York recently passed a berg fully 200ft high and nearly a quarter of a mile long... the proximity of the bergs is usually indicated by a sudden lowering of temperature of the air and water. Now and then a ship's crew, passing close have seen a Polar bear stranded on the floe...the largest recorded berg is estimated to have been nearly 900ft high; this would mean that there would be over 8000ft that could not be seen...'

In other local news the same week...

'The cuckoo was heard in Grammarby Wood on Wednesday afternoon...'

'Swallows have been seen in the neighbourhood of Brentor during the past week...'

'Tavistock bachelors gave an invitation whist drive and dance in the Town Hall...'

'We regret to announce that Mrs Hayne, wife of the Vicar, died on Tuesday evening at Buckland Monachorum Vicarage. She was 92 last May...'

Nationally meanwhile...

'The entire electricity supply of Liverpool failed without the slightest warning shortly before nine o'clock on Monday night...exciting scenes were witnessed in the theatres..the darkness and gloom sent many women into hysterics. It was some time before normal conditions were restored.'

Whilst internationally ...

'Chicago mothers, anxious for the welfare of their daughters, have decided to form a 'card index' of eligible bachelors.'

'The whale is doomed and is becoming scarcer and scarcer every year. Unless man desists from hunting these marine monsters they will soon be nothing but a dim memory...'

'The world's largest cheese, 8ft in diameter and weighing slightly over 12,000lb was recently manufactured at Appleton, Wisconsin..'

And then more temptations to emigrate if anyone could now face an Atlantic crossing..

By April 19th latest reports suggested that only 675 passengers from the Titanic had survived, leaving 1635 unaccounted for, this after early reports had stated that everyone had been saved. In fact the final death toll was 1514.

We had heard it was the grandest memorial in Tavistock cemetery, distinctive white marble that would stand out amongst the slate and granite headstones we are more accustomed to down here, so as Bookhound and I walked through we decided that scanning the horizon across the graves might do the trick.

It wasn't difficult to spot, and eerily almost iceberg white against a backdrop of the neat avenue of well-manicured yew trees.

Eighteen year old Harry Rogers had been born into the family of the town's leading stonemason's J.S. Rogers and Son Ltd in July 1893 so a special memorial was well within the family's capabilities. Harry's grandparents lived at 25 Westbridge Cottages where they raised ten children including Harry's father John Giles Rogers who worked in the family business. These were the riverside Duke of Bedford cottages I mentioned recently in connection with Team Middlemarch, and Dorothea's philanthropic venture into worker's cottages.

As you can see each cottage is compact and tiny. I have visited families of four in these and the seams are bursting, so it is hard to visualize twelve people living in one, and even harder to imagine what the area may have looked like in the late 1800s, surrounded as they are now by new housing, a Texaco garage opposite and a Morrison's supermarket down the road, to say nothing of Tavistock College campus on the other side of the river.

Harry's father John and his mother Emma lived just up the road in Ford Street where the houses and the width of the street probably do resemble of old, and with only a Spar shop to spoil the illusion, but John had died at the age of thirty-one in 1903, when Harry was ten and Harry's mother re-married two years later.

Harry, educated at the local school, worked for a while at the town's Bedford Hotel, a favourite newspaper and coffee sojourn for Bookhound and I these days. There seem to be conflicting stories about why Harry chose to go to America and how he managed to pay the fare, but what is certain is that he was heading for the city of Wilkes Barre in Pennsylvania where an Uncle and Aunt were going to look after him while he searched for work.

Who can imagine the farewells or how Harry's mother may have felt... Harry's return seems unlikely in the short term at least, so it would have been a real goodbye.

Like many of the Titanic's passengers, Harry had originally booked his passage on another ship affected by the coal strike, and so the Titanic, at a cost of ten guineas, was not his first choice, but he does seem to have been able to afford to travel second class, so considerably more comfortable than steerage. It all seems like a very big adventurous thing for a Tavy lad to do in 1912.

And who knows perhaps he came home before he set off and dropped into W.E.Baker & Co to buy  a trunk for the voyage...

And there in the top left corner of that same front page an advert for the family business, The Tavistock Marble and Monumental Works at 14 Ford Street, in amongst the other day to day wants of rural life...ploughs and manure, best raw Peruvian guano, realiable rat poison that cats and dogs will not touch, Harrison's Nursery Pomade...kills all Nits and Vermin whilst beautifying and strengthening the hair.

Harry's letter sent home to his mother from Queenstown suggest  all was well and they were living like gentlemen. Doubtless all very exciting for an impressionable eighteen year old on his way to a new life after the constraints of a life lived on the edge of sleepy old Dartmoor, and for some time in Cornwall where Harry had also worked as a waiter.

It is clear that though a third of the male passengers from first class did survive, less than a tenth of those from second class were so fortunate and Harry one of those whose remains were never found. Obviously young single men would be the sacrifice when it came to places in lifeboats.

It is hard to imagine the impact of such a loss on a local family, even trying to imagine the enormity of the ship seems impossible. Who can know, perhaps they had at some time travelled the fifteen miles into Plymouth and seen the ocean-going liners docked there, but that may only have made trying to understand what had befallen this huge 'unsinkable' ship even more impossible.

As rumour and uncertainty stalked the newspapers of the day, accurate and reliable news would have been very slow in reaching the backwoods of rural Devon, so it becomes even harder to imagine how long Harry's mother may have clung onto the hope that her son would have survived, perhaps he'd suddenly arrive back in town on a train one day having travelled up on the Great Western Railway from Plymouth. He'd walk down through town from the station and appear at the front door.

Emma must have hoped for a long time before the truth finally became a reality for her. 

The 3000th blog post :: Beer Trip to Llandudno ~ Kevin Barry

'Oh don't worry, I'll only do it for about a week then the novelty will wear off,'

That was me back in 2006, when the family looked at me aghast at the idea that I was starting a blog.

So here I am six years and bit later, six years and a bit older, and this week we have passed the 3000th blog post.

I'd been having a low-key celebration with myself to mark the occasion with a week of daily posts which I have loved writing, and about books I have loved reading... and I wasn't going to say anything because it all seems a bit brag and boast...but in the end... well here we go onwards, and though I can't stand the stuff please do share a toast with me in real ale today, and let's all go to Llandudno with Kevin Barry.

I am always ready to buy into the short story.

If I embark on a collection I tend to keep the book to hand and read one every so often. This probably makes sharing my thoughts on the whole collection almost impossible as the book can be 'around' for months waiting for me to finish it. This happened with Julian Barnes's collection Pulse which I really enjoyed, but after about six months of dipping in I really had lost any connecting thread if there was one.

This is probably not the way to do this.

I doubtless miss all the subtle nuances, and links between stories and then there's the order. I feel sure collections are put together with great deliberations over the sequence, and there's me reading them on a whim and completely out of order....do you do this with a short story collection, or are you all more disciplined than I am??

When I heard that Kevin Barry had recently won the prestigious Sunday Times Short Story Award with Beer Trip to Llandudno, I was delighted to find it was in his latest collection Dark Lies the Island, and a proof copy from Jonathan Cape sitting on my shelf filed under month of publication, April. Incidentally, if anyone has ever wondered (as if you haven't got anything else to wonder about) whether I have any sort of system for Books In, the answer is yes, and that is it.

But bearing in mind it might be Christmas before I finish every story in Dark Lies the Island, or it might be next week, I never can tell, I thought I would leap in and read Beer Trip to Llandudno and of course, though I haven't read the other shortlisters, I can see exactly why this won.

We've all seen them, perhaps we know some of them, and perhaps we may all have made some sort of judgements based just on looking, finding appearance and behaviour that makes them fit the stereotype. Bring on the 'biggish lads' taking off on a Real Ale Club outing on a sweltering hot day in July. Travelling by train from Lime Street, Liverpool to Llandudno via Rhyl, with a crate of Marston's Old Familiar (3.9 per cent to volume) to see them on their way, and a quick hop off the train at Flint for some 'beef n'gravies from the Pie-O-Matic'

Mo, Everett, Tom, Big John, Billy and the narrator, also in charge of 'publications and outings both', are already 'hot as pigs' and stripped off down to their tee-shirts as they arrive in Llandudno...

'Billy Stroud sadly raised his T-shirt above his man boobs. He put his arms above his head and gyrated slowly his vast belly and danced his way off the train...'

I love the word order. It makes me stop dead and think, and then stay in the sentence long enough to visualise. You see you can picture it already can't you...


Kevin Barry perfectly captures the vernacular, the phrasing, the lingo and along with it the camaraderie, the male bonding and the sensitivities...

'Mo was down a testicle since the spring. We'd called in at the Royal the night of his operation. We'd stopped at the Ship and Mitre on the way - they'd a handsome bitter from Clitheroe on guest tap. We needed the fortification : when Real Ale Club boys parade down hospital wards, we tend to draw worried glances from the whitecoats. We are shaped like those chaps in the warning illustrations on cardiac charts...'

and the humour..

'... we joshed him but gently.

    'Sounding a little high-pitched, Mo?'

    'Other lad's going to be working overtime.'

Those sensitivities and tenderness creep in around the edges of the macho as it becomes clear these men, whilst not using the word willingly,

'Love is a strong word, but.'

most definitely share the nearest they will allow themselves to get to it. Bromance seems to be the word for it these days though I suspect our lads would be having no truck with that idea, this is good old-fashioned male-bonding over booze, full stop. Five or six nights a week, 'hobbyists' not 'a bunch of sots'...and this being me, well of course I'm worried for their fibrosing livers.

By the time they board the train back to Liverpool the lads have sampled and scored pints of everything from Phoenix Tram Driver, Cornish Lightning and Lancaster Bomber through to Miner's Slattern. An old flame has surfaced for one of them and they have set foot in The Heron, The Otter, The Crippled Ox and heaven knows where else. And they still seem to be standing.


Civilised, never aggressive, tender and funny.. as the men watch Billy's gyrating stomach they unite, and Kevin Barry seems to surround him with something invisible, perhaps to protect him from the judgements that you and I may have been making as we looked on. Impervious and oblivious to others and to any opprobrium headed their way,

'We lost weight in tears as we tumbled onto the platform...'

Outward impressions of having a good time need to be upheld, yet at the end of day, and home, the mood will often be maudlin...

' It has this effect, Liverpool. You're not back in the place five minutes and you go sentimental as a famine ship.'

Loyalty is examined and tested, life's hardships and mistakes exposed, but in their All For One and One For All way the lads stick together until it slowly becomes clear to the reader that all these 'six big blokes' have is each other, and they know it.

Meanwhile Jonathan Cape have made Beer Trip to Llandudno  available as a free download for the next seven days. It is poignant, sad and funny by turns and I am so glad to have read it, congratulations to Kevin Barry on winning the award, and I promise I will read the rest now....eventually.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sightlines ~ Kathleen Jamie ...The Hvalsalen

' So how far is a blue whale do you think?'

I had asked Bookhound this simple question.

We were on our way to Bristol to see the Eric Ravilious exhibition. It's a two hour journey so we chat for a while as we get on the road and then settle into that companionable silence. One of us might flick the car radio on, the other will flick it off after a few minutes saying 'No the quiet is better' and we motor on.

At some point Bookhound usually says..

'He'll get done for that...'

as someone unwittingly steams past us on the A30 towards Tedburn St Mary, where of course us as lives y'ere know there is a speed camera around the next bend, but not everyone does.

In answer to my whale question Bookhound was bemused until I clarified,

'How many paces...'

'Oh that's easy, about a hundred and ten.'

Kathleen Jamie's writing, though offering the occasional greyscale photograph, is all about the mind's eye and imagining. Conjuring up the scene that is being set through quietly vivid description, and to which there is little sentimentality attached. It is writing that gently insists that a reader bring all their senses into play, sight, smell, touch, taste ...listen carefully and then make connections.

So Bookhound, admittedly at a bit of a disadvantage because he hasn't read the book... and he is concentrating on the road as one would wish him to, suggests in answer to my question that a blue whale is 'about a hundred and ten.'

Don't you just hate it when someone does that?? 

Because thanks to Sightlines, and Kathleen Jamie writing about her visit to the Hvalsalen (the Whale Hall) in the Natural History Museum in the Norwegian city of Bergen, and taking the trouble to pace out the length of a blue whale, I had this amazing figure in my head, which seemed massive and impossible and unthinkable, of fifty-seven.

Fifty seven.

'Don't be daft I said...that would be about a hundred metres...think about it, and that would mean Usain Bolt could run a blue whale in 9.58 seconds....'

Suddenly my really huge and exciting piece of Did-You-Know has shrunk to about 4.79 seconds of Usain Bolt's running time and I feel a bit deflated.

We motor on doing our usual ridiculous salute to the Willowman as we go past near Bridgewater, and I tell myself to remember to walk a blue whale along the lane when I get home.

I am definitely last across the finishing line with Kathleen Jamie's writing and have only myself to blame. Countless people were recommending Findings, the first book of essays, to me years ago and before I had even started writing dovegreyreader. And I kept meaning to but had never quite managed it, so when Sightlines, the latest collection, arrived I decided I would be on the case.

In fact I immediately realised I was reading something special so I went into rationing mode and in some cases have read a piece very slowly, and taken several days to allow for thinking time... as in The Hvalsalen.

The Hvalsalen houses twenty-four whale skeletons, each held aloft on chains, and, during Kathleen Jamie's visits, all in the midst of a two year programme of cleaning and refurbishment. When it becomes apparent that the treacle-brown residue on the bones is the oil still seeping out, and that the bones have been there since the 1860s, I felt something akin to a sadness of my own in the way that Kathleen Jamie expressed the single word..

'Still?'

It might be at this moment that every reader would bring something different to Sightlines, make different connections. I had read, who knows where, but I had definitely read something somewhere recently, about research that demonstrated whales were capable of forgiveness. It was a startling and humbling insight that had almost reduced me to tears.

And on top of that came the memory of the Kayaker's wonderful whale-watching job in New Zealand a few years ago and where, some of you may recall, he snapped this picture...

And I think this may be one of the purposes of a book like Sightlines.

Kathleen Jamie refers to 'connective leaps' and I felt so many throughout the book. There is a delicacy and a lightness of touch in the writing that belies the deep and lasting footprints that it has left in my mind, and each time a whale surfaces occasionally again in the book, as they do at sea, and I got another excited glimpse, or I cast my mind back to the first picture in the book of the eardrum of a whale in the museum at Stromness, I felt a real sense of anticipation and privilege, as if this was happening for real.

The eardrum seems no coincidence to me now. No chance picture that would make me think 'Huh, what's all this about'.. maybe instead it was telling me to listen carefully.

Themes brush against each other gently and unobtrusively and again I suspect every reader will spot different ones. The collection has been put together with great sensitivity and I will write more about it because I am still listening, and every so often another glimmer of light seeps through in my mind.  It is a book that illuminates around the edges, the aurora, moonlight, the day in February when the light seems to 'come back'...

'...the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky...an invasion of light and air out of a sky of swiftly moving clouds.'

I know this day and I must look out for it next year.

 

 

Eric Ravilious at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol

'A Ravilious does not jump off the wall to greet you. But pause a moment to reflect - resist the impulse to rush from one picture to the next - and you may find the way you see the world, in all its everday glory, subtly and irrevocably changed.... James Russell 

It was Mothering Sunday and the plan was to meet up with the Kayaker, now working in Bristol, and head to the Royal West of England Academy for the Eric Ravilious exhibition which had been pencilled in my diary as must see for weeks. On the way into the city, the Clifton Suspension Bridge against leaden skies always makes quite a sight.

The RWA is something to see in its own right too if only for the intriguing statue outside, and as we approached the main entrance we kept coming across these strange coins on the ground...

Except not ones you could exactly pick up and spit on for luck...

In fact you were more likely to trip over them if you didn't watch your step because they were scattered everywhere, old fashioned money and the significance was lost on me. Even when I saw this statue, it still didn't dawn...

Then, as we went up the staircase towards the main gallery suddenly the penny dropped..

En route to Eric Ravilious we meandered through the exhibition celebrating the Penguin books archive, so by the time we arrived at Eric, what with the coins and quick run through the book covers that seemed to span my life to date, I was nicely in tune for some quintessential English artwork.

Except to label Eric Ravilious 'quintessential' is somehow to diminish and categorize an artist whose work somehow defies all that in my mind, demanding to be seen and interpreted differently.

Entitled Going Modern / Being British the exhibition of paintings by Eric Ravilious (1903 - 42) was a revelation. The work of a once marginalised artist as he attempted to paint modernity, whilst retaining the essence of English life, and how wonderful it was to just sit and stare and 'be' in a room full of this. 

Enough to make Bookhound snaffle my notebook and capture the moment as the Kayaker and I sat and stared...

Our visit was ably fortified by an infusion of coffee and cake first, and a read of an article by James Russell on Eric Ravilious in the RWA magazine. You may have seen James Russell's books, I know they are looking very temptingly at me in just about every bookshop I go in at the moment.

And if you too are stymied by the cost and like me have them on your Christmas list, then you could do no better than head to James Russell's blog here for a regular fix in the meantime.

I have also just finished reading The England of Eric Ravilious by Freda Constable and was struck by her observation that his working life was spent between the two world wars - Eliot's 'twenty years largely wasted', and at a time when the mood of the era contained both extremes of  gaiety and its accompanying melancholy. And in retrospect I see too something I had noticed but not fully realised... the way that Eric Ravilious often pitches his paintings above ground and normal eye level, but not 'so divorced from it as to be flying over the landscape.'

As James Russell points out, Eric Ravilious was always looking for 'a good place' and I can see that his choices, often unshowy and ordinary, become something else at his hand. I hadn't realised quite what an impact the arrival of the car had made on the art world in particular either. Suddenly previously inaccessible locations, perhaps no train route nearby, became explorable and paintable, and topographical painting in watercolours became the fashion once again. With no need to follow a timetable the freedom of movement seems to have translated into a strangely contradictory sense of control but with freedom of expression too, and we all spent an age looking at each picture closely and several times over.

In many ways that freedom a victim of its own popularity perhaps, because the nations artists pretty soon had the country covered, thus finding new and even more unusual locations became essential. But Ravilious by all accounts was not a showy man, definitely one who ploughed his own furrow, refused to join groups or movements or really publicise himself, and though his subjects may have been timeless and old-fashioned, as James Russell elaborates, Eric Ravilious's approach most certainly was not.

Committed to the war effort as a war artist, and tragically a passenger on a plane lost without trace in 1942, Eric Ravilious's war paintings were fascinating. The distinctive style translated into something so time-relevant and of the moment when he painted them in those early years of the war, and capturing a unique essence of the conflict. Bookhound was that child of the 1950s whose bedroom ceiling was draped with airfix models of Lancasters and Spitfires, so he was as happy as larry in the war painting corner.

I can't remember if we saw this one, and I shall probably be hung, drawn and quartered for putting it here, but how could I not. We are returning to Orkney with the Tinker this summer and Scapa Flow will be on our list of places to visit, because how many times did the Tinker do this during the war too... so a little glimpse of what he may have seen for the rest of us as well.

Leaving Scapa Flow 44.4 x 57.2cms c. 1940. Bradford Art Galleries and Museums

Going Modern / Being British - Eric Ravilious is open at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol until April 29th 2012.

 

 

 

Titanic reflections

So I must own up that we did all joke about it...icebergs and lifeboats and things, yet the cruise ship disaster earlier this year confirms that there is no room for complacency on board a ship.

But joke we did, when I accompanied the Tinker and friends on that Caribbean cruise a few years ago, when the cabin became vacant at the last minute, and it seemed a pity to waste it, and the very first thing you have to do when you step on board is lifeboat drill.

And really all I wanted to do was sit out on the balcony of my Junior Stateroom (because the Tinker had treated me to an upgrade) and take it all in, instead of which, as we sailed out of Galveston, I had to don the gear and find my lifeboat station,

I quickly realised that if this ever did happen for real the first problem is that I have to find my way back to my cabin to get my life-jacket and if the electricity has gone surely the key pad won't unlock, secondly once I have the fetching garment on I can't see my feet, and thirdly people wearing life-jackets take up twice the space so it's going to a be a real Michelin-Man affair.

Add in the fact that the ship is huge and the corridors all look the same and I can now see why they say it would have taken people two weeks to learn their way around the Titanic, sadly they only had a matter of days.

Meanwhile I also feel sorry for all the museum curators this spring.

Having barely got Scott out of the way, there's Titanic waiting to sink, and in fact in Plymouth it's all happening at the same time, and how easy it could be to get into Titanic overload right now, what with Drownton, and then all the information to know about things like sub-standard rivets, and James Cameron's pictures of the inside of the ship in National Geographic, and Kate and Leonardo in just about every advert there is right now. I expect Prof Brian's on somewhere talking about icebergs too and how they, like me and Brian and you, may all have been particles in the same dinosaur once upon a time. But in fact I never weary of a historical moment like this because it really is a great opportunity to revisit something I think I might know all I need or want to, but actually there is always something new.

The Plymouth City Museum had a modest Titanic display, I should imagine Southampton and Belfast are the ones pushing the boat out (sorry) though, and I hadn't realised until Mr Overton the curator told us, the Titanic would have been due to dock in Plymouth in April 2012 on her return journey across the Atlantic. A wall on board the Titanic apparently home to a huge painting of the return into Plymouth of which, like so much else, there seems to be no photographic record.
In honour of the centenary I have been reading Titanic, The Last Night of a Small Town by John Welshman, recently published by Oxford University Press, and it has been an enlightening journey through the tragedy, taking a closer look at the lives of a small group of people on board. John Welshman has selected from across the social classes as well as the crew in order to give a broader picture of the inhabitants of this 'town'.

It is well-known that ten millionaires went down with the ship, among them Astor, Guggenheim and Straus with computed wealth of £60 million between just the three of them, and much is known and written about that, so it has been interesting to read of the journeys of some of the passengers lower down the decks too. Eva Hart, one of those featured in the book and a survivor, demonstrating the celebrity status accorded to the lucky ones....as you can see above, someone has her signature on the book. 

It has all led me into the world of what I understand is called the Titanorak, and little did I know of the existence of the website Encyclopaedia Titanica until I looked.

Heavens, who knew so much work had been done to trace and write a biography of every single passenger on the ship.

John Welshman, a historian, issues caveats about the use of the twelve available and well-known autobiographical accounts from which he has sourced some of his material. It becomes clear that legend may have become myth, all compounded by various film versions, whilst confusion, contradiction and misinformation abound, so it has been fascinating to read this account and do some fact-straightening of my own.

Alongside this I have been reading of James Cameron's trip around the ship on a submersible, all recounted in this month's National Geographic, the pictures are quite breathtaking, though now I think I'd like to see the wreck left in peace. It is effectively a grave after all.

The Titanic fervour doesn't stop there though, increasinlgy innovative projects abound and if you like sewing be sure to visit chopkins. Chopkins is taking part in the Vintage Pattern Lending Library 1912 Sewing Project . You can check out the library itself here but the plan is for legions of people to make the garments from the magazines of 1912 using the original patterns, thus creating the fashions that may have walked the decks of Titanic.

Today the centenary of the Titanic's departure from Southampton, heading for Cherbourg and then Queenstown before striking out across the Atlantic. Coming up on here at the approximate time of the sinking on April 15th, Tavistock gets in on the story with an interesting grave in the local cemetery. 

 

Ochre and Ochre again ...

Ochre again...

Ochre...

Easter Greetings...

In keeping with the tradition of not being allowed to play out on Good Friday as a child, and though I am lapsed in the Anglican tradition, I always try to give dovegreyreader, and all of you, some peace and quiet over the Easter weekend.

That doesn't mean I don't sneak back when no one's looking, so never say never etc, and now that I am moving on from the Ochre chapter in Colour - Travels Through the Paintbox by Victoria Finlay I plan to flood your eyes with colour instead of words.

You might want to seek out your Raybans in readiness.

The book is a real exercise in keeping a colour in my mind's eye and then keeping that mind's eye on the lookout for it, and the consequence is that I have nearly tripped over and gone flat on my face several times, and have been known to whip the camera out and take pictures of the oddest things.

The best moment might have be in Cornelissen's the fabulous artist's shop in Bloomsbury where I was drooling over the jars of pigment and of course did ask permission, but I'm not sure they fully grasped the importance of my mission to bring you Ochre wherever I found it. 

Meanwhile the Ochre patchwork block for the 'Colour' wallhanging that might will look like a paintbox when it is done is finished. Hand pieced, one row sewn on upsidedown and unpicked because I was watching that very scary series Whitechapel and not really concentrating, and then I 'lost' it in the big furniture shuffle round we have had lately. Then, as you do, I suddenly had one of those 3am lightbulb moments when it occurred to me that I might, for once, have been eminently sensible and tucked the block in the page of the book.

Even better I remembered that 3am lightbulb moment the next day...

Meanwhile I hope the Easter Bunny comes to visit where you are if you are expecting them to ...this another of Dorothy CP Ward's lovely paintings... 

Or you have a lovely Easter Egg Hunt or whatever other traditions you share.

We may be eating our way through a tray of these freshly-baked from Ellis's Bakery, and the Tinker may have been up bright and early to get them and bring them over to us in time for coffee, because he lives a few doors up from the Bakery, and he is only eighty-seven after all...or he may be watching the Test Match instead.


And we wish you all a happy, restful and peaceful weekend, though I know that might all be relative to whatever is going on in your home, I think ours might be full too ...but have a good one.

I shall be reading more from The Nature Table, immersing myself in the writing of Elizabeth Taylor in readiness for the event at Battle Library in Reading, and I may make a start on my next A.S.Byatt, Babel Tower too...or perhaps I fancy another Elizabeth Bowen...or there is...or maybe...

How about you?? 

Some good holiday reads lined up??

I'll see you rested, read-up and raring to go on the other side of Bank Holiday Monday.

 

The Tinker's Day

Thank you for all your good wishes, the Tinker has been very thrilled to hear from you all and we have had a lovely day.

Took him on the Park-and-Ride to Plymouth Museum...but didn't leave him there.

In fact when Bookhound and I were in the Museum on Saturday, and browsing around the Maritime Gallery, we came to a standstill next to this display...

This is a model of the Iron Duke, the Tinker's first ship as a fourteen-year old boy bugler in 1939.

On Monday we contacted the curator of the Museum to tell him we had an artefact of our own who knew the ship intimately, and perhaps the Museum might like to meet him, and if so could we bring him in on his birthday, and would the Museum like a copy of the Tinker's book Bugle Boy.

Well it all went swimmingly well.

Our thanks to Mr Overton and his staff for making us so welcome. Offspringette joined us and we had a grand time, and the Tinker, of course very well up on his dates, bombings and sinkings, proved to be a sparkling primary historical source...

as well as being able to point out that this picture in the book...
...was taken standing next to that black door there ..

We had ourselves another photo shoot too. It's hard to imagine that the boy standing next to that door on board that ship at Scapa Flow could ever have believed that all those years later he'd be standing here next to a model of it isn't it 

Then off to find some lunch and back in the afternoon for another visit to the Scott Centenary exhibition. Mr Overton gave us some fascinating background information about it all and I had blurted out about the blog post before I realised this would also mean fessing up to the photos. In the absence of anyone to ask I usually snap away without flash until someone stops me, or snatches my camera off me, or marches me away to the cells and no one had. It was fine.

It is rare that we manage to visit any exhibition twice but I am so glad we did because who knew that I had missed so much first time round.

How on earth did I miss the knitting and the clothes...

Or the fact that the expedition set off laden with baby milk..

It was good to have another really close look and proper read of all the exhibits. I come over all wobbly at the idea that it may be some time, if ever, before something like this is gathered in one place at the same time again.
Congratulations to Mr Overton and his team at Plymouth City Museum for a job well done, and even better, the cheeky chappy who had been a victim of my flat camera battery last Saturday, now preserved for all time on dovegreyreader, especially for you..

 

 

This morning I have but one very important thing to say...

 

Happy Birthday to
 

The Tinker
 

87 today.

and here he is, about 83 years ago, perched outside his grandad's pigeon loft.

The Nature Table

I hope and feel sure that classrooms still have Nature Tables.

Ours was a place to deposit all those things we had found on the way to school...nothing very exciting in the grand scheme of things but treasures all the same to us...pristine conkers, or some shells from a hatched bird's egg. One poor soul had kept a bird's nest warm and watered and ended up with a house overrun with fleas that then had to be fumigated, so bird's nests were banned.

My Nature Table now of the bookish variety, and thanks to all your suggestions and a few additions of mine own I am building up a wonderful selection of books I can't wait to read. Notes From Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin is now in its third year of reading so I probably do need to visit somewhere else. 

There was precariousness involved in taking this picture, and a pile of very soggy mud beneath just waiting to receive, but it seemed worth the risk...

Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways is starting to make me aware in ways I wouldn't have thought possible. Suddenly I have the urge to know more about the actual land beneath my feet, and I have had The Hidden Landscape by Richard Fortey biding its time for ages.

'...this enthralling exploration of time and place....peels away the top layer of the land to reveal he hidden landscape - the rock which contains the story of distant events, which dictate not only the personality of the landscape, but the nature of the soil, the plants that grown in it and the regional characteristics of the buildings....'

Here in the Tamar Valley the ground is oozing with minerals, copper and tine, arsenic, wolfram...an entire Periodic Table beneath the soles of my boots; mine surveys were compulsory when we bought this house (which wasn't the case everywhere then.) Now I am not sure whether I am likely to get bogged down (sorry) in the Palaeozoic and the Jurassic, and whether this book will be accessible enough for me, but I am going to dip in and have a dig around... I'll stop now before I start on about 'mining rich seams of writing'...it can only get worse.

Robert Macfarlane quotes Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran as one of those seminal books which kicked off the whole psycho-geography, 'looking at landscape differently' trend in writing, and thanks too to John Self's prompt in comments I immediately ordered a copy. This is one man's fifteen year epic work on the exploration of the islands of Aran, off the west coast of Ireland... I've owned up already to being the embarrassed numpty who had somehow assumed they were off Scotland, though I'm not sure where 'off Scotland'  I thought they might be.

In this seemingly small world of landscape writing it is Robert Macfarlane who has written the introduction, firmly locating the islands thirty miles offshore from Connemara, where big Atlantic storms prevail, and Tim Robinson immediately comes across as pretty keen to do his work. Circumnavigating the island and in bad weather (of which there must have been plenty) apparently holding his book and pencil inside a clear plastic bag tied shut at his wrists, I am immediately worried about what happens if he trips and falls. I expect to find out and I also expect I shall want to visit Aran once I've read it and it will be but a short hop from there to wanting to knit something.

I haven't worn an Aran jumper for years...since 1977 when my mum knitted me one actually, and I mistakenly wore it to do a video assessment of my teaching skills on my health visitor training course. Please don't do this unless you want the whole class to fall off their chairs laughing on playback, because you will fill the screen and resemble a well-cabled polar bear....and if proof were needed...

Oh alright here it is...


OK...now just get back on your chairs...that'll do.

A Wilder Vein and In Her Element are anthologies of women's writing on landscape. In Her Element, published by Honno, has 'mountaineers, amblers, star-gazers, river-watchers, cavers, climbers, farmers, artists, sailors and ecologists' all contributing their thoughts on the Welsh landscapes that have shaped their lives, whilst A Wilder Vein (with another introduction by Robert Mac) 'focuses on relationships between the people and the wild places of Britain and Ireland.' Dipping in I spy Ardnamurchan, Skokholm, the Yorkshire Dales, Humber and the Highlands to name a few.

I wonder how women may see and write this differently, in a genre that seems to be well-populated by men??

I am new to the writing of Richard Mabey but my thanks to Profile Books who wrote to me about something else but responded to my pleas with a parcel of books which included The Perfumier and the Stinkhorn, a series of meditations on sensory responses and how they influence our interactions and attitudes towards nature. It is a small book which I suspect contains far more than one reading will reveal, and will doubtless have me going around sniffing things next. I will have no trouble finding specimens to relate to when I have read Weeds The Story of Outlaw Plants. We have long given up the battle and instead learned to live alongside and amongst weeds as a 'flower by any other name' ...you cannot fight nature when you live slap bang in the middle of it as we do, and nor would an immaculately manicured garden look real in the middle of that environment...or so we tell ourselves in its absence, especially after the recent landscaping escapade. I love the idea of this book, a cultural history of weeds, these 'indomitable, opportunist plants which thrive best where we may want them least.'

I had snuck back to Notes From Walnut Tree Farm one night last week, it is a book which feels like an old friend now and came across a quote that I immediately had to write down.

'I want all my friends to come up like weeds, and I want to be a weed myself, spontaneous and unstoppable. I don't want the kind of friends I have to cultivate...'

Doesn't Roger Deakin have a wonderfully direct and uncompromising way of saying what he means.

And finally several of you mentioned The Sea Room by Adam Nicolson and you are in great company because our friend Robert mentions it too in The Old Ways. One of the ancient routes he travels is by sea from Lewis to the Shiants, (pronounced Shants)  the three islands inherited by Adam Nicholson at the age of twenty-one.

Described as 'one of the most beautiful places on the planet' I can't disagree having found this picture, and as a celebration of island life the book will apparently fill me with homesickness for a place I have never been to.

It might be the one I read next after Kathleen Jamie's Sightlines, which currently has my undivided attention and I will have much to say about it.

And bookmarks...I almost forgot.

I ordered some cards from Janis Goodman a regular commenter here and Janis kindly included some postcards of her etchings...what's not to love.

We expect our own Happy Returners very soon.


 

 

 

 

 

 

Port Eliot Festival 2012

It is official, summer will definitely be happening eventually because the Port Eliot Festival line-up is starting to take shape.

Fortuitously the KnitAngel and the Weatherman came over for lunch yesterday, and having sent the chaps out to the kitchen to sort the lunch and discuss last year's Port Eliot festival two-man tea-making record , the Knitangel and I had an inspirational team talk about plans for the apparel in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot Festival 2012 and possible knitsuke for this year.

I have a welcome two month break from the day job planned for this summer through July and August, so am very much looking forward to enjoying the planning as much as the festival itself , and then a week later surrendering to my inner Olympian for London 2012.

I'm not sure who we will be welcoming to the canvas salon yet, but the first wave 2012 line-up is announced and there are some great names on the Festival bill already... Matthew Hollis, Robert Macfarlane, Tracy Chevalier, William Fiennes, Susie Parr, Kate Summerscale., Jackie Kay and Ali Smith.

I will be laying a tempting trail of cake crumbs and knitting in our direction.

And just look who will be performing in the Flower Show tent where we not only have to uphold the dovegreyreader flower show entry tradition but... well just LOOK...

Curated by acclaimed Ballet Rambert production designer Michael Howells in the beautiful Orangery garden, the Port Eliot Flower Show gives a nod to the traditional village show, while staking out its own territory with a whole series of distinctive classes, as well as music, performances, gardening discussions and a chance for festivalgoers to scoop the Best-in-Show title. This year’s line-up will include poet and artist Sean Borodale; Anna Pavord, author of The Tulip and The Curious Gardener; organic gardener Val Bourne; new media pioneer and investigator of plants, Jonathan Drori; singer and actress Issy Van Randwyck; and 70-piece choir, Vocal Harem.

I've been sitting on that all winter because as you can imagine sorting out the logistics with seventy women who might be going on holiday takes some doing, but it is now all confirmed. For the first time ever Vocal Harem won't go into mothballs after our May Gala Concert until the autumn...no, this year we will continue rehearsing through the summer to be ready for our performance at 2pm on Saturday July 21st on the Port Eliot Festival Flower Show stage.

 

Scott of AntPlymouthArctic...

So many anniversaries this year it is hard to keep up, Titanic will be upon us any day, but we were also feeling honour-bound to do something in recognition of the centenary of Robert Falcon Scott's fated expedition to the Antarctic.

We can claim Scott as a local hero after all.

So taking into account my aversion to camping, and in the absence of a sledge or a team of huskies and any urge to do a re-enactment, Bookhound and I took the Park-and-Ride into Plymouth and headed for the exhibition at the city museum instead.

We are mad keen on the Park-and-Ride for city visits these days, we'll be getting our bus passes next, but why flog into a city centre anywhere and time-limit parking, (that's if you can find a space) when you can let the bus make the fuss. We whizz upstairs, shotgun the front seat and spot all the things that we might miss from the car...

Plymouth Museum is within walking distance of the Art College where Bookhound was a mature student (i.e. an old codger of twenty-three when everyone else was sixteen) back in the 1970s. Sandwiched inbetween, and opposite the new space age Levinsky wing of the university, is a  row of old buildings which I love.

Plymouth so severely bombed during the war that very little of the old city centre exists, just little pockets of real character preserved here and there that may give a clue to how the city of old would have looked, and you want to cry for what must have been destroyed. 

Bookhound would often wander up to the museum for some sketching practise. Indeed we still have his watercolour of the stuffed squirrel on our staircase, and which I just managed to stop him from screwing up and binning and to his embarrassment had framed instead. We lived in Plymouth then and he would spend hours in the museum and knew it inside out, whilst I didn't because I was out around the city on health visitor training, so everytime we walked past I would say..

'Shall we go in the musuem?'

and he would say...

'No there's nothing new in there...'

Well, very true, and for the thirty five years since, every time we pass a museum, I say that, and he says that, and we laugh, as you do.

Robert Falcon Scott was a son of Plymouth, born and bred in the city and you would know it if you came to visit. Pride in the expeditionary team well-recognised around the city ...Scott Hospital, Scott Road, Wilson Crescent, Bowers Road, Oates Road, Evans Place and Terra Nova Green to name but a few, along with the Scott Memorial in Devonport. The memorial re-dedicated in a ceremony attended by Princess Anne last week.

I am always reduced to jelly when I read those last pages of Scott's diary in the permanent exhibition at the British Library...

We had heard that the Plymouth exhibition 'wasn't up to much' but can only imagine whoever told us that had looked at the small display in the library next door and missed the main gallery in the museum, because we spent a long time, looking, watching and reading everything, and we will certainly go back for another visit before it closes on April 14th if we can....especially as my camera battery died so no picture of the obligatory stuffed penguin who had the cheekiest look on his face.

Who can know when history is in the making, though early Arctic exploration has to be a safe bet, but thank heavens so many interesting artefacts and letters from the time survive, and what fascinating reading they make. Bookhound and I had a little fret about it all as we leant over the glass cabinets reading everyone's letters home ...the fact that now it will soon cost 60p to send a letter here in the UK, well really...is anyone going to bother any more when an e mail goes for free??

I was quite taken aback when I first set eyes on that sledge... from across the gallery it looked like an elongated bed and I thought it must be a mock-up of a cabin interior. As I looked more closely the sheer weight of it became very apparent.

I have been dipping into An Empire of Ice - Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science by Edward J. Larson,published by Yale University Press, and can see there is so much that I don't know that I now need to read the book. It is eminently readable and has grabbed my attention in the way that Thomas Kessner's book about Charles Lindbergh did a while back. I read about half of The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry Garrard years ago but surrendered because it just made me feel constantly freezing cold, and it didn't look as if things were going to warm up any time soon. I might light the fire and stick with this one.

I get a bit confused about where Shackelton comes into all this but at least now I know that it was Shackleton's humilation after the earlier HMS Discovery expedition that had led him to mount that expediton of his own to restore his pride, and which led to deep rivalry between the two men. Meanwhile Scott's fund-raising drives for sponsorship of his own projects preyed on a sense of national derring do and 'British pluck and endurance', along with the need to prove that 'the manhood of the nation is not dead.'

The final expediton seems to have relied on man-hauling rather than the use of dogs after a previous venture had witnessed acute problems with the dogs, who as they had died were fed to the remainder. This had apparently upset Scott terribly and Edward Larson confirms this, but weaving through Scott's decision was also something of an Edwardian need for manliness and 'competitive demonstrations of fitness.' Scott's decision has been called into question ever since but it would seem his men were destined to 'pull their sledges to the pole and back or die trying.'

Little wonder then, with such sentiments abounding, that the nation found itself in such a mess just two years later in 1914, yet who can question the courage of Scott and his men in the face of the inevitable miserable denouement.

One name that really interested me and whose life featured large in the Plymouth exhibition was Thomas Vere Hodgson. A marine biologist from the city who went on the expedition, but who was also, it seemed, an early curator of the Plymouth Museum collections. All I could think of was the Persephone book Few Eggs and No Oranges, and the valiant Vere Hodgson clearing rubble through the Blitz, and such an unusual name I felt sure there had to be a connection. I was pleased to discover that there was, Vere had been named after her famous uncle who went on Scott's expeditions. Thomas Hodgson brought back quantities of pickled creatures which were discovered more recently in the museum's vast marine archives, so we gazed at perfectly preserved crustaceous things, and seal embryos in rusted Kilner jars, and wondered how on earth these had come home in one piece rattling around on a sledge, and whether anyone had taken the lid off since.

Isn't it amazing what I don't really think I am interested in, until a moment in history like this comes along and suddenly I want to know all there is.

Expect Titanic something or other to follow any day soon.

 

 

 

 

 

A surprise harbinger...

I had a 'moment' whilst walking along the lane this week.

Messing about taking shots like this where, with the sun behind me, I look about ten feet tall and as if I'm on stilts...

I am standing completely still and wishing my legs really were this long when I looked up and glimpsed something ahead of me  in the lane..

Now the times this happens and I don't have the camera with me/ switched on / pointing in the right direction are too numerous to mention, because there is a point in the lane just up ahead which I call Foxgate (where I showed you the sheep on Friday) and where, if I am going to see a fox dash across, this spot is most likely.

We stood and stared at each other for a few very long seconds before he realised I was the foe and took off, but to get this close to a rural fox is very unusual...

and of course the perfect excuse, if I needed one, for this...

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: 
Something else is alive 
Beside the clock’s loneliness 
And this blank page where my fingers move. 

Through the window I see no star: 
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness 
Is entering the loneliness: 

Cold, delicately as the dark snow, 
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf; 
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now 

Sets neat prints into the snow 
Between trees, and warily a lame 
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow 
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness, 
Brilliantly, concentratedly, 
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed. 

Ted Hughes