dovegreyreader scribbles

Questions From the Potting Shed ~ Roses

After Port Eliot Festival last summer, and the dovegreyreader tent, Cathy St Germans came to visit and bought me three beautiful Peter Beales' roses as a thank you.

What a wonderful gift, I was thrilled and terrified in one breath because as you now know I had a bit of bother with the last rose garden. Having gone through that we had branded ourselves as kiss-of-death to posh roses and given up.

Anyway, just look at them now...

 

NOOOOOOOOOO..... I am fibbing, that is not they, that is someone else's who is clearly God's gift to roses, and I am green with green-fingered envy, so I will welcome all rose advice.

We planted the gifts somewhere sheltered and safe and nursed them through the winter and here's what we have...



They were fine, then I looked and they were less fine verging on sad, and though sheltered they weren't going to get the requisite six hours of sun a day so we moved them.

Rambling Rector is now in and settled with trellis north-ish facing, by my Book Room French windows, and he's up and away with no problem. I fed him some bone meal, mulched him up a bit, tied him up and he seems quite happy. He's budding up nicely and may be about to bring forth flowers any day.

Jacques Cartier and Beatrix Potter are sharing a bed round the front (which I hope Beatrix doesn't mind)  facing south where they will get as much sun as shines. But here's the thing... I forgot all about pruning.

Well, no I didn't forget, I just didn't know I was supposed to.

So Jacques is quite tall and to my delight has buds, we may get our first flower any day now.

So what do I do next??

When do I prune him??

And what else does he need beyond bone meal, mulch and a regular feed??

Is horse manure really helpful??

And what about aphids??

They have all had a bad bout of black fly which I have sprayed to oblivion with something ghastly which I would prefer not to use, but do aphids actually do harm or can you really do as Monty Don (BBC Gardener's World) suggests and leave them alone.

I read somewhere that a solution of tobacco water sprayed on will sort the blighters out... presumably they start coughing and fall off or something, does anyone have any other magic methods??

Now Beatrix, poor love, was looking veeeeery peaky indeed and I panicked. Not a lot going on up top, barren of foliage and not a hint of flower would sum it up, so I fed her up, mulched her up and...eeeekk took a risk and pruned. Beyond sleeping out there with her there didn't seem much more I could do, so I told her she was on her own and to pull herself together etc. This seems to have done the trick and she's throwing out some new growth, so at least alive but not out of intensive care yet.

So all your rose experts out there... could you just give me the low down on basic rose care??

And if I were to plant more roses (all depends on passing the test and keeping these three ) I would choose them for their names but this might not be the best idea, so which would you suggest??

And I thank you all in anticipation as do the Reverend, Jacques and Beatrix xx

 

 

Tales from the Potting Shed ~ Garden Plans

I can only apologise that weekends are likely to involve garden-related posts for a while, though rest-assured books will be involved too, because having found my way around the garden again, it was obvious I would head to the shelves and see just what was there and of relevance. It was en route to the Gardening Shelf that I remembered I had given it a serious prune in the recent clearout. Geoff Hamilton's Cottage Gardens seems to have survived, along with the huge RHS Encyclopaedia of Plants and Flowers, Hardy Geraniums, The Lost Gardens of Heligan and The Victorian Kitchen Garden. Thankfully I had kept Katherine Swift's Morville books too.

I have therefore been forced to add in a few new titles including diaries from Christopher Lloyd and Anna Pavord, Four Hedges by Clare Leighton and a lovely copy of Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey found in the Oxfam shop. I am currently reading A Gentle Plea for Chaos - Reflections from an English Garden by Mirabel Osler. More of all this soon, the garden reading is chiming very harmoniously with me right now.

But remember The Victorian Kitchen Garden TV series back in the 1980s?

We were acutely addicted and videoed every single one before attempting to grow cardoons and realising we didn't have the Victorian manpower required to pick off the slugs one at a time, or the kittens tied to string and encouraged to play up and down the rows to keep the birds at bay.

And what exactly do you use cardoons for anyway.

Tucked inside the RHS book I came across my planting plan (implemented) for this garden when we moved here nineteen years ago. We had left behind our first 'bought' home with a beautiful little cottage garden containing an even more beautiful greenhouse that Bookhound had built...

...and if I am honest, though the move was the right one, it is little wonder I grieved for so much about that cottage and its environs, though I hadn't expected to.  

It therefore seemed like a plan when we arrived here, and finding not a single plant growing in the garden bar a solitary Lenten Rose (still going strong) and a whole lot of grass, to quickly re-create what we had left behind. Silly me because I know now that it was an impulse reaction and the need for colour and replacing what was 'lost', rather than taking the sensible route and biding time. 

I had completely forgotten in the mists of time that I had planted a rose garden back in 1995, now long gone.

Knowing nothing about the soil, or the weather conditions, or what happens when a sou'westerly hits, or giving any thought to the destruction a new puppy might wreak, or how busy we would be with building works and the damage they would do , I set about planting this lot as well. I don't know when I thought I was going to have time to tend it either, we were both working full time and ferrying children hither and thither every evening.

As far as I can tell all that remains is the Spirea 'Bridal Wreath' and one or two of the more prolific geraniums (now acres of them) which just drowned the more delicate ones. As for the herb garden, it was where my new seed bed is and we came across one or two of the bricks as we dug, but no sign of anything but the comfrey, which, with a ten foot tap root is going nowhere. 

As I plan the garden's renaissance I have given a lot of thought, sitting in my potting shed, to what happened to it all, and how not to make the same expensive mistakes again.

For a start we think we have slightly acidic soil (one day we'll test it...have you all tested yours?) 

After nineteen years we think we know our garden enemies... mostly weeds, weather, wind and wildlife and must work around them rather than hope they won't happen, because they will.

No throwing money at uber-expensive plants and then weeping when the dog mows them down or the frost demolishes them, or a herd of sheep invade, start small and see what happens. To this end Morrisons (supermarket) have supplied an amazing selection of young shrubs at 2 for £3, their pop-up outside nursery is good value for money. I have done this before, a £1 wisteria from Woolworths was covering the front of our little cottage and blooming for England by the time we moved. The £16 one we put in here has never thrived in quite the same way. Mind you that might be because I have only just read how to prune it properly (thank you Katherine Swift The Morville Year) ...whippy bits back to five buds in August and then back to two buds in February. Watch this space.

I have added in a few special purchases like lavender and am building up the herbs again... a little Physic Garden in the making.

I am thinking ahead, long term and sowing lots of seeds to create more seeds for collection, as well as bringing on plants for next spring.

I am taking cuttings.

I am raiding the hedgerows for supporting sticks. They look like mini sculptures but offer scaffolding against the wind, and the plants are starting to weave around them.

I have so much to learn it actually feels quite exciting, and I am realising that as I empty the space in my head that had to be kept topped up with work-related information, (please don't ask me how much milk to feed a baby ...haven't the first clue any more) there is now space for something new. I will be teaching myself as usual, and have a pile of books to hand (more of which soon)  but I have all of you to call on too... that is if you wouldn't mind sharing your wisdom now and again.

In fact first question tomorrow and it will be about ...oh let's keep it a surprise. 

And if anyone has any more gardening reading to recommend please do. 

 

 

 

 

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Gardenitis...

Tales From the Potting Shed... or Girls Need Sheds Too.

Borough Market

It was a medium-length stride from the Fashion and Textile Museum and Kaffe Fassett's exhibition, past Guy's Hospital towards the station at London Bridge, and where directly opposite, whilst I might have missed the Shard, I couldn't miss Borough Market. One of London's oldest markets, historically selling fruit and vegetables but now a microcosm of specialist artisan food suppliers too, and perhaps another example of up-marketing in a previously run-down area of London.

From one palette of colour and patterns ...

 to another...

...and from Kaffe Fassett's vegetable designs...

...to the real thing, and with little doubt in my mind that it was all art in its own right...


...and some it quite mouthwatering.
Piles of cheese, some of which came home with me for Bookhound...

and one of these for the Gamekeeper to crunch as he... well, as he goes deer stalking I suppose.

This next came as quite a surprise. 

I have missed a very big trick, we have traipsed through acres of wild garlic this Spring... £1 per 50g, I am clearly as green as I am cabbage looking not to have set up stall somewhere.

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Kaffe Fassett - A Life in Colour 50 years of Textile Art

Beating the Bounds ~ Rogation Perambulation 2013

Well how wise I was to get out for my Beating the Bounds walk a few weeks ago (six or seven I now realise) before the weather changed for the considerably worse (and we have had better-worse-hot-worse since) and I had forgotten to post this so please bear with me. I need it on here for posterity or I am going to be all out of synch and meeting myself coming back.

Glorious sunshine was replaced by plummeting temperatures, howling gales and torrential rain, a reminder that we were not quite there yet, though I was so fed up with my winter clothes I did the change-over a little early for me...before the May is out, but did keep a few clouts (thermals) to hand just in case.

This, you can be forgiven for having forgotten, was my planned route... left out of the gate, along the lane, hop over the stile, walk up that Parish boundary, nip across to the woods, down the Holloway, nice and tidy should be back for an early lunch.

This is what I eventually walked...

All went well as I skipped down the lane with a bit of a spring in my step, though sadly minus Little Nell who was seasonal for the first time and thus attracted by and irresistible to anything on four legs. What a palava all that is. Rusty had to go back to the Gamekeeper's kennel for the duration and there will be surgical intervention in two months time for Little Nell. There will be no Little Little Nells, one is plenty.

 
I headed towards my ingress point down in what we, with some originality, call The Dip, at this stile...

 before making my way along the boundary line marked by those trees.

Unfortunately progess was then thwarted by barbed wire and bullocks so I had to do a few detours...
I also came across a bridle path within my square mile (ish) that I had always wondered about so I followed that for a while before getting my bearings and looping back through the farm, along to the woods and down the green lane towards home.

It was steep uphill walking for a while but along the way the views were even more stunning than I am used to, and easy to see that the earth is definitely round as I turned through 180 degrees on this spot.

Isn't it amazing how appealing everything can look on a sunny day, even the thistles, the curse of our own garden, had a shape and symmetry that it would be churlish not to admire.

I did a short detour along the edge of the woods on my way down to say thank you to our spring water supply, bubbling merrily out of the overflow pipe. This can be routed into the house in an emergency should the bore hole and the pump be in trouble, but we have it piped to various taps around the garden for copious lovely cool, fresh, un-chemical watering, and we never take its presence for granted.

and how welcoming the re-greening Holloway looked...

I didn't see another soul all the way round, but then that's usually the case, and so by this time I'm singing Joni Mitchell's Little Green, because why ever not...

Just a little green
Like the color when the spring is born
There'll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow
Just a little green
Like the nights when the Northern lights perform
There'll be icicles and birthday clothes
And sometimes there'll be sorrow...

Except no sorrow today as I made my way down, just aching feet..

A last look back at the woods also greening nicely back on that May day...

and then home to a cool drink and a Rammalation biscuit...or two... or three because lunch had been and gone.

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Beating the Bounds... standing and staring.

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On this day.... A Suitable Cat..

Hello chums, Magnus here.

Now I know this slot is supposed to be about famous literary people and their birthdays, but can you believe it is a year to the day since I decided to come and live here, so it's my Sort-Of-Birthday ...and I'm sort-of- famous because you all know me ...and sort-of-literary because you can't move here for books.

She said I couldn't because you'd all be champing at the bit for news of a good book, and I said rubbish, they've all got plenty to read for now.

Anyway it's a year today since I found Bookhound on the lane, in the pouring rain, wet through as I was so what was the first thing he did... yes a bath.

I was a lovely baby wasn't I...


Those were the days when an egg box and a mushroom brush would keep me amused for hours. 

I've taught that dog a lesson or two for using my cat flap, and who's out in a kennel now eh...
 
And I have generally made myself at home, now choosing the Book Room sofa for my summer repose.

I'm amazed I am allowed free rein here today to be honest because I am in the dog cat house over mice. Who knew there was a difference between a bog-standard mouse and a dormouse.

Look at its Beseeching Little Eyes...

Don't you know it's an Endangered Species...

Bad Cat how could you...

I've had the works this week I can tell you, so I am having to go the extra mile to appear cute and endearing before disappearing off on another secret killing spree. Nothing for it but to jump in and out of the library book bag to work the magic...

Oh look Magnus is Going to the Library..

Oh doesn't he look Sweet in There, quick where's my camera... 

And then...oh the ignominy, they brought out the party hat...

Which I gather my revered brother forecat also wore on high days and holidays.....

Frankly I've gone along with it all for some peace and quiet and some food, because there's another thing...

Oh NO you don't Need Any Food, you've just eaten three mice and half a rabbit.

Anyway I'm quite pleased to be here. Rocky prepared the way well. Plenty of adequate sleeping places, good hunting grounds and a nice standard of take-aways, and I do like chatting to all of you, so I'll stay for now.

Meanwhile back to business, here are the lucky winners of a copy of The Potter's Hand ....

16 32 38 

Random numbers generated Jun 25 2013 at 17:11:28 by www.psychicscience.org  

16 Liz F

32 Jill Hodgson

38 Rosie H

Check it's really you here and send addresses to dovegreyreader at gmail.com,

It may be wise of me to suggest that if you win a book you suspend excitement and anticipation for a couple of weeks. They will arrive but sometimes the publicists are on holiday... or books have to be ordered from the warehouse. If no sign after a month then please do send along an e mail and her indoors (actually more outdoors these days) will politely chase the book on your behalf.

Me, I don't chase anything politely, and just to prove how literaryraryrary I really am, here's a poem (slightly amended by me) for all of you on my special Sort-Of-Birthday ...

The Cat of Cats

I am the cat of cats. I am
The everlasting cat!
Cunning, and old young, and sleek as jam,
The everlasting cat!
I hunt vermin in the night-
The everlasting cat!
For I see best without the light-
The everlasting cat! 

William Brighty Rands (1823 - 1882)

 

A Suitable Book...

I have been giving some thought to our next year-long read in the wake of successful and enjoyable rambles with Teams Ulysses (2009-2010)  War and Peace  (2010-2011) and Middlemarch  (2011-2012-2013)

Lots of thought...

Do I want to do another one and commit to having to read a book for a year..

Should I give it a rest...

More importantly do you want to do another one...

I know it's not possible to please everyone with a choice, but I know how much pleasure a leisurely shared read of a big fat book we have always meant to read gives so many of us.

So I have wandered up and down the shelves, pulling out the chunksters.

I have considered The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, even sent for a good hardback copy, and then thought again, brilliant though I feel sure the book is, do we really want a year of illness and being blanketed on balconies, even if the view is nice.

I have wondered about Moby Dick, and am grateful to the Tinker who read it for me and thought maybe not, he now knows a lot about whales but kept wanting more story. Could we talk about whales for a whole year...I'm not sure I could.

Perhaps a big fat Dickens...

Perhaps not, because in order to enthuse you I need to feel enthused myself, and sadly I'm uncertain whether Dickens would sustain me for a year at the moment

And then I read an article by Peter Kemp, published in The Sunday Times 21 March 1993, and which I had tucked inside my as yet unread copy of the book I have in mind....

'Struck by the novel's amplitude, its publishers invoke comparisons with Tolstoy and George Eliot. Instead of seeming, as you might expect, embarrassingly over-large, these come to look more and more fitting as the book expands. Conceived on the grand scale of the great nineteenth-century novels - War and Peace and Middlemarch - A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth grows to match them in its breadth and depth. Spreading spaciously outwards to encompass an entire society, it simultaneously sinks inwards into the private worlds of its multifarious inhabitants.'

Having heaved my copy of A Suitable Boy off the shelf I have spent some time with it since, and I got that buzz of enthusiasm, enough to convince me that it is the 'right' book and very excited I am at the prospect of reading it. Apart from An Equal Music (which I have now read three times, as well as buying a CD of the music that features in the book) I am new to the writing of Vikram Seth, whilst India will be relatively fresh reading territory for me, and I suspect plenty of other reading trails will open up along the way.

'The time is the early 1950s. India is approaching its first general election, the largest ever held on earth, involving a sixth of the planet's population and, concurrently, a bill is being argued through parliament to wrest feudal power from landowners by breaking up their estates. Against this double test of democracy. Seth silhouettes an immense range of minutely depicted domestic and emotional circumstances.'

Professor John Carey, who chose A Suitable Boy as one of his books of the last century, suggests that this is the real India. The savagery and injustice of the times are not down-played, there will be the ferocity of a massacre, brutalised communities and 'city slums oozing black filth', there will be the 'sickening cruelties visited on outcastes' to deal with, but balanced with, as Peter Kemp suggests..

'...a seemingly endless pouring out of characters composed of different energies and appetites, needs, attachments, foibles, fallibilities and skills; a genius for mathematics or music, literary gifts, wit, the ability to create a beautiful garden or make a fine pair of shoes.
    This human abundance, prodigally scattered across India's vastness, is unobtrusively arranged into fiction of meticulous, quiet artistry.'

Meanwhile John Carey reassures that the overwhelming sense is one of buoyancy..

'People are courteous, playful and enlivened by contrast...we are engulfed by Seth's India, its vastness and endless variety, its temples, hovels and rambling ancestral palaces, its jacaranda, jasmine and bougainvillea, its naked pilgrims and diamond-studded rajahs with rose petals strewn before their feet, its smells of incense, marijuana and sweat. Through it all flows the sun-burnished holy Ganges, bearing away the ashes of the dead.'

Won't it be interesting to read a 'living' author I thought, and even better the thought of the tantalising sequel, A Suitable Girl, scheduled for publication in 2014. Speaking last year at the Hay Dhaka Festival this is what Vikram Seth had to say about the book...

The line that sparked A Suitable Boy, said Seth, was the one that became the opening: ‘You too will marry a boy I choose’. From that sentence the whole world of 1950s India unfurled. An audience member tried to tease out of him details of the sort-of sequel he is writing called A Suitable Girl. “The characters are shy,” said Seth. “If I call them out now they will fly away.” 

When submitted to publishers the first draft of A Suitable Boy was even longer than the (say it quickly) 1474 page book I have in front of me. The second draft was apparently read by about forty editors as it did the rounds, accumulating ever-increasing bids, each one raving about it and as Vikram Seth's agent said at the time...

'People smile when they talk about the experience.'

I think I'd like to share that reading experience too.

A Suitable Boy, would seem to divide readily into a year-longish read consisting of approximately 100-150 pages a month. It is written in nineteen parts and I have planned a schedule, some months two parts ocasionally one, beginning with first discussions in September, on Part One and Part Two (some lovely summer reading) and finishing in June 2014. As usual my brief thoughts would appear here on or about the same date each month, more to create the space for your comments than for me to spout forth, and as always it is your invaluable contributions that keep me going, creating the oxygen and sustaining the interest for this type of read.

I think there is a new paperback edition of A Suitable Boy due for publication in September, marking the book's twentieth anniversary, so availability is no problem, though no Kindle edition to date that I have found. So there it is... I am up for the challenge, and will be reading and writing about the book here anyway, but it would be great as always to have plenty of you along for the ride. I think it promises to be a good one.

So what do you think??

Shall we??

 

 

 

Tales From the Potting Shed... or Girls Need Sheds Too.

Sheds have always been a boy thing here, especially when, like the young Gamekeeper, they take up carp fishing and tell you they have to cook up something called 'boilies' on the Aga. If you haven't heard of or smelt boilies then trust me, you have led a charmed and blessed life, and if your next of kin do decide to make them you too will dispatch them outdoors to do it.

Then the Gamekeeper took up skinning and gutting things... 

So Bookhound has a shed of course, with several shedxtensions built on, and all manner of benches and plugs and socketry and every household repairing thing you could ever hope to need, and right next door to it was the smaller Gamekeeper's shed. This latter was not a place for the faint-hearted, so I barely knew it. The Gamekeeper then needed bigger premises so he took over the summerhouse, and the Kayaker took over his shed...are you keeping up.

Meanwhile Offspringette escaped off to university, and I just stayed in the warmth of the kitchen, told them to wash their hands the minute they came in the door and let them get on with it.

But that was all years ago and with my emptied nest, the arrival of the Tinker, my re-discovered love of the garden, and our slow but steady ingress into the resurrection of long-lost flower beds I started to accumulate 'things'. So I am carting round spade and fork and slug weaponry and string and gloves and trowel and secateurs and dibbers and seeds and sticks and plant pots and bone meal and compost and... and...

Then I suddenly remembered the little shed, up in the corner of the garden. It's right next to the gates to Rocky's Field, nestled under the boughs of the elderflower tree and all kitted out with shelves and benches.

I did a tentative survey, having been told (I suspect to scare me off from Boy's Corner) that rats had chewed their way in, and indeed there were two large rat-shaped entrances (now blocked) at ground level and the shed was chock full of outdoor gear hanging from the ceiling in an attempt to fool the vermin. But it is in a lovely corner of the garden that I barely knew existed, and who knew there was an oak tree behind it. I certainly didn't, though Bookhound tells me, with that air of possession and authority granted to he who does all the strimming and clearing, that it 'has always been there.' 

The nettles surrounding the shed were four foot deep and above my head, but undeterred I put in a claim, was granted the freehold and the clearance began. I should have done a 'before' and 'after' picture but in my haste to own my property I got stuck in. You leave these things five minutes and someone else thinks up a use for it. I might have pulled up three hundred nettles, or maybe it was three thousand who can know, but it took me all afternoon. Slowly the ivy-clad bank emerged, so did the windows, and eventually I found my way round to the back. I didn't even know there was a 'back' but there it was, a lovely shady, sheltered storage area, and the oak tree.

I was digging by Longest Day moonlight in the end (and Happy Midsummer Day everyone in the Northern Hemisphere) but had re-established the path, dug up the bed alongside and could hardly move the next day. This an unimpressive early 'after' picture which looks overgrown enough, so gives you some idea of how bad it was before.

Bookhound, now my shed neighbour, emptied and kindly received all the contents into his tardis-like property, and I swiftly moved in with mine. Again this is a critical moment when someone is likely to say 

'Gosh, didn't know there was so much space in there, it's perfect for the...'

and before you know it your claim is ruled null and void and the shed full of something else.

It's very much a clean, tidy and organised girl's shed, though I have stopped short of curtains, and half killed Rusty when he marched in and cocked a leg over my bag of seed compost.

'Oh yes, he always does that,' I am told.

Well, excuse me but I don't think so. That might be the done thing in boy's sheds, but Nell and I were not impressed by this show of male territorial marking and took some disinfectant to it immediately.

Only members are allowed in, but that's all of you so expect more Tales From the Potting Shed and a lot more digging by moonlight as my renaissance gardening year progresses.

So tell me...have you got a potting shed...

 

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The Arctic Star Medal Ceremony...

In the absence of an invitation to Downing Street, or an official reception anywhere, we have had a little ceremony this morning, because the Tinker's Arctic Convoy medal has been delivered into his possession by Jim the Postie rather than the Prime Minister.

So we quickly put that right with coffee and a presentation and I stood in for Royalty ...


Officially known as The Arctic Star, and to be worn third along on the bar, the whole lot will now have to be sent off to be sorted because the bar isn't long enough, and is probably going to be a hazard when The Tinker tries to get through a door..

But never mind, it's the taking part that counts.

Prize Draw copies of The Potter's Hand by A.N.Wilson

Hello Chums, Magnus here.
I am still giving some thought to this stupid death trap over the seed bed, but seem to be on my own with this one. The crochety Dowagers took one look and muttered something about fractured necks of feline femurs and hobbled off to be old biddies resting on plumped up cushions, leaving me to figure it out.

Right, now then... I am a bit nervous about setting up another prize draw because while I have been off catching slow worms (I'm over rabbits for now, so last year ) there seem to have been glitches and a batch of books have gone astray. Hopefully all now happily resolved, thank you for your patience and who dares wins etc so here goes.

So do you remember that lovely book The Potter's Hand by A.N.Wilson that her indoors loved a while back??

'Poor old Josiah Wedgwood...clumsy, bluff, blinkered, tactless, oblivious to his family's emotions and capable of showing more tenderness towards a lump of clay on the potter's wheel than to his long-suffering wife Sal, yet how much I ended up admiring the man by the time I had finished A.N.Wilson's novel The Potter's Hand.

It is 1774 and Josiah, whose Etruria pottery works lead the way around the world, has been commissioned to produce a thousand piece dinner service for Catherine the Great. But first find your ingredients, and with the U.K.'s prime source of china clay in Cornwall impounded by a rival, it is to the New World and the Americas that Wedgwood must turn, sending his nephew Tom to buy clay from the Cherokee....

Well many thanks to Atlantic Books who have offered three paperback copies to lucky winners here.

Sadly the books can't cross the Atlantic so this one is for the U.K. only.

Names in comments and I'll spin the old wheel and slip some winning numbers on here next time I'm around.

 

Kaffe Fassett - A Life in Colour 50 years of Textile Art

A host of colour to feast the eye upon today.

I had some unexpected free time whilst I was in London recently, so I did a Zadie and sped around the city pavements in order to tick off three places on my To Do Next Time in London list.

The first was the exhibition, Kaffe Fassett - A Life in Colour 50 years of Textile Art, at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey. The exhibition is on until June 29th and I was delighted to use my free-from-the Daily-Telegraph three month Art Pass and get in half price. The free passes are still available here though with slightly different terms and conditions, but worth it if you have a list of exhibitions to see.

I still find it oddly unsettling that these areas of London, like Bermondsey, run-down and derelict for much of my London life in the 1960s and 70s, are now very fashionable and upmarket. Affordable though they may have been, we would no more have gone for a student nursing flat in Bermondsey than we would have done in Whitechapel where we were working, choosing instead to live in the comparitive safety of a nurses home. Now we should be so lucky, we couldn't afford any of it.

Look for the Shard I had decided, but obvious though it should be I was a while finding it around London Bridge thanks to roadworks and pavement diversions, but when you do spot it expect to put your neck out trying to see the top...

The exhibition was predictably superb and the first time that I have seen Kaffe's own work in close-up. Photography without flash was permitted so the pictures may not be as clear as I would like, the ones that are were a consequence of my flash going off on a frolic of its own (and yes, I did get 'told') but in a way the less distinct represents quite accurately the blur of colour compressed into a confined space. It was so spectacular there were times when I had to stop and draw breath...
Clever exhibiting did things like wrapping quilts around pillars to best utilise the space..

Others were hung more traditionally...

The light here seeming to emphasise the use of light and shade in the quilt, fabric chiaroscuro, whilst cushions and small artefacts were set off to great effect in these cubby holes.

Plenty of work heaped around in seeming nonchalent fashion too, yet obviously placed with care.

It was good to see things in close-up too..

Are you all coloured out yet??

Sorry, it's a bit like it though isn't it, almost too much to take in, and just the chairs to go in that case...


Next stop - Borough Market 

Hay Festival again...

Ellie's second report from the Hay Fesitival is crammed with amazing events, so if it's raining where you are perhaps just pretend you are in a deckchair and why not tag along. My thanks to Ellie again for doing this and with apologies for the belated posting (where do the weeks go?)

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Blusteryness gave way to warm sunshine for a couple of days, before bad weather returned and it has rained heavily on and off for several days and been cold. It was quite noisy at times if you happened to be in an event tent during a shower. Thank heavens for the covered walk-ways!

After a couple of days we soon learned the ropes of Hay. When and where to queue for the different venues, and which area of seating to aim for. Most of the events start and end at the same time to avoid overlaps, which means that there's a crowd surge when all the venues empty. Picking the right exit to your venue can help avoid the worst bottle necks!

Comedian Marcus Brigstocke played the largest venue on the first Sunday night introducing his own version of the 'Big Society' with his sharp satire. He also poked fun at festival goers who like to be seen reading a certain book but are actually peering over the top to check that people have noticed them! Our sides ached from over an hour of solid laughter!

Monday morning saw politician Jack Straw getting a grilling from the festival's interviewer, Peter Florence. A fascinating figure whose humble beginnings set him apart from many of his political contempories, and an unhappy childhood that sent him to seek comfort from books, Straw was Foreign Secretary at the time of the war in Iraq. The subject of the 'dodgy dossier' about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction came up several times. Hans Blix, who had headed up the UN weapons monitoring and inspection body at that time had been at Hay the day before, and many members of the audience had seen him so questions kept coming back to that subject. As Peter Florence said to Straw "this was never going to be an easy book tour for you".

Such was the popularity of American writer Barbara Kingsolver that she got bumped up to a bigger venue.
She has long been one of my favourite authors, and I have returned to her novel Bean Trees many times, and enjoyed her subsequent books. She was a delight - warm and funny, elegant and charming she spoke about the climate change theme of her current novel Flight Behaviour. She uses her background as a scientist to inform the novel and believes we are all in denial (she quoted country singer Pam Tillis's hit 'Cleopatra, Queen of Denial') about climate change, and are in danger of throwing our good life away through our abuse of our planet. She spoke about how the first sentence of the novel is important and makes a promise that the rest of the novel must keep. By reading a novel you remove yourself from your everyday life and experience life in a different way - through another's eyes. Most sessions at Hay are followed by a book signing. I had been anxious not only to buy the novel, but also to get my old battered copy of Bean Trees signed. My books are still packed so that meant going through several boxes of 'US female fiction' frantically trying to find it. I was booked to see Roger McGough immediately after the session though and I had to make a choice - whether to combat massive signing queues myself and miss the first part of the next session, or to send Adrian to meet Barbara. As it turned out he had come with me to the event and was happy to meet her and get both books signed.

It was a tough call as I would have loved to have met her too, but Roger McGough's performance was incredible. His voice is so familiar from Radio 4's 'Poetry Please' programme and of course poetry is best served out loud so to hear him read his own work was a joy. He has a very entertaining way of turning words and meanings around to capture the essence of an everyday truth. Adrian doesn't particularly 'do' poetry so wasn't joining me for this one, but I know he would have enjoyed it if he had.

I enjoyed a joint session with Maggie O'Farrell, another favourite writer, who appeared alongside Rupert Thompson, who I knew nothing about, but to whom I warmed immediately. I'm now itching to read his novel 'Secrecy' set in post-Renaissance Florence. The interviewer was scarcely needed as there was a good rapport between the two writers with some insights into their process aired. No neatly planned plotlines here, both writers shared what Maggie described as her very organic approach... well actually chaotic. The works evolve gradually almost as a sculptor creates from a piece of stone, but with many redrafts. Maggie O'Farrell held up her reading copy of her new novel 'Instructions for a Heatwave' and showed all her annotations. Words and phrases she wished she'd used, and those she wished she hadn't. No novel was ever perfect, otherwise you wouldn't need to write the next one.

Paul Roberts is the force behind the new blockbuster exhibition at the British Museum on Pompeii and Herculaneum. We visited both of these sites in the shadow of Vesuvius on our travels and were looking forward to rekindling our memories and finding out more. It was a fascinating illustrated account including behind the scenes views of the huge store rooms of artefacts in Naples he accessed for exhibits and how they were transported to London. The focus is on the ordinary people who were caught up in the aftermath of this devastating eruption and what has been discovered about their lives, and he really brought this to life in a very entertaining and easy to understand way, warning the audience to 'brace, brace' whenever he was about to show a slide of one of the more explicit objects of Roman life. He struck a chord with us when he was asked about the effects of mass-tourism. It is the cruise groups that have the greatest negative effects - so many people passing so quickly through, but it's the tourist euros that help fund further excavations and maintenance of the sites. And although he couldn't answer the little boy's question about exactly when Vesuvius would erupt again, a major eruption is apparently long long overdue.

I'm in awe of speakers like Paul Roberts who can entertain and inform holding their audience for a whole hour without a script, make perfect sense and not lose their thread. Linguistics guru David Crystal was another one. His new book is about the history of English spelling, very much my area of interest (yet another of them!). He looked at how our words have evolved to be spelled as they are today, the influences and the way the language is continuing to evolve.

There's so much to report on and I don't want to invade Lynne's blog indefinitely so I'll quickly mention that Ruby Wax, who completed a Masters in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy last year spoke inspiringly and with her trademark humour about her own mental ill-health with Rosie Boycott. We also went to a panel session with war writers, most memorably Paul Conroy who was with Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times in a besieged town in Syria when Marie tragically lost her life. He spoke movingly of this experience and was obviously still recovering from being wounded himself. There was a wine tasting with Simon Hoggart - with anecdotes about life being too short to drink bad wine. Liebfraumilch was mentioned at least once! And the wines (not at all bad) we tasted were served to a large audience by the ever-efficient Hay volunteer stewards who contribute to all aspects of keeping the festival so slickly smooth-running.

After several days of bleak weather, and one day when some of the car parks were closed due to the rain, the weekend grew closer and promised a reprieve and we saw the sun again.

Umbrellas were exchanged for boaters and wellies for sandals as the temperatures and everyone's spirits rose again. The deckchairs had dried off and were in use again...

In danger of overload, so many events in a short period of time on top of a tiring move, we still had a session on green building, featuring among others Ben Law (he of the famous Grand Designs wooden house) and our last event - comedian Jo Brand to go. Then Adrian spotted a blackboard notice that Cerys Matthews would be doing an impromptu performance recording at The Daily Telegraph's stand the next day at noon. He asked about it, and no, no need to book, it wasn't ticketed. Just turn up. We arrived at five to noon expecting a crowd, but there were just a few people milling about and playing chess in the drawing room atmosphere of the stand. Yes, Cerys was coming and sure enough after a short wait she arrived and urged everyone present to make themselves at home on the sofas and comfy chairs, as she checked her guitar tuning.

What we didn't realise was that she has just brought out an anthology book of songs: nursery rhymes, childhood favourites, folk songs with a bit about their origins. She started by playing Baa baa black sheep urging old and young alike to sing along. She dipped into her book and played for us for about 40 minutes and we still can't quite get over that we were in on such a joyful interlude singing with a major star. A highlight of Hay!

Eventually it was time for us to drive back down to Hay festival one last time to see Jo Brand. A great end to a hectic ten days with lots of thoughts, ideas and impressions, chance conversations and catch ups with friends still whirring in our minds, and new books to read of course. And no longer any excuses keeping us from getting on with sorting out our new house and garden.

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A report from the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts 2013...

NW ~ Zadie Smith

'When Adam delved and Eve span,
   Who was then the gentleman?'

Those famous lines, written in the 14th century by John Ball, form the epigraph to Zadie Smith's most recent novel NW.

I knew of them and they had puzzled me for years so finally I look it all up and discover they were written during the Peasant's Revolt. Read with so many differing inflections and interpretations, the words can be made to say so much about gender and class distinctions and equality, that they do make the most perfect entry into a novel that really kept me very pleasurably on my toes and pounding the streets of London ... even if I was basking in the dappled sunlight of the Shire and gazing out on this view as I read. It was an incongruence that struck me with great regularity.

Ultimately so possessed was I by the mood and the spirit of the read that it had to be the book I took along to Endsleigh Salon last week for the reading theme of Fruit and Veg. This on the basis that I had meant to re-read Susan Hill's The Magic Apple Tree but hadn't, and really wanted to talk about NW anyway, so I winged it on the basis that Zadie's grandmother might have been called Granny Smith and thus had an apple named after her. It was tenuous but the salonistas let it pass, and my thanks to Simon Prosser, Zadie's publisher, who alerted me to the presence of the apple tree on page twenty-nine.

Thinking too of book as object. If you open out the French flaps on the cover of the new paperback edition of  NW, this is what you get..

It was a bit of a bookish origami moment, and I was quite pleased with that clever design effect as I occasionally dragged myself away from the pages to have a play with the book, and to think about what I had read, before diving back in. In fact I had wanted some latter-day contrast, some anti-nostalgia, some get-real-and-of-the-moment reading to balance out that week of Coronation musing and I couldn't have chosen a more perfect read.

NW is relentlessly and minutely about London and a group of four Londoners, all from the same housing estate in Kilburn, all going to the same school and now all leading very different lives. Often disillusioned, frequently challenged and compromised yet returning to their roots and their origins for explanations and answers, and somehow, as I read of them emerging from each scrap and scrape, I had an innate sense of optimism that mostly all would be well.

Mostly. 

There is no doubt that on paper it is Keisha Blake who has achieved the greatest success, changing her name to Natalie in order to fit into the world of the corporate lawyer for which she has qualified, but remaining inseparable from her Kilburn roots.

Perhaps it is Leah Hanwell, Keisha's best friend, who is overtly the one with potential and ambition the least fulfilled as she drifts into life as a council administrative assistant and grapples with her aversions to pregnancy and parenthood with her husband, hairdresser Michel.

Or maybe it is Felix with his ambitions to restore classic cars...and as you read you sort of know it's never going to happen.

And then there's Nathan...

Yet as the novel unfolds so do the surprises, contentment with life's pattern is hard won and not where you may always expect to find it. 

For me, the best part of the book came with the 185 numbered vignettes that take the story right back to the early days and the beginnings of Keisha/Natalie and Leah's friendship, finally converging with the present-day story as the reader already knows it. We had an interesting debate about this at the Endsleigh Salon. Someone who had read the book (and enjoyed it) suggested these short pieces conveniently reflected the fact that Zadie had perhaps written the book on and off through interrupted time post-childbirth... it hadn't occurred to me but we did just wonder all the same. If so it was a clever use of time leading to a brilliant outcome (all I had to show for that time was a patchwork quilt that took me five years to finish...oh yes, and three lovely children) and by coincidence a few days later some thoughts on motherhood and creativity from Zadie herself. 

The writing is so very clever but not too clever. The style, once I became accustomed to it, and to Zadie's omissions and inferences ...those tiny asides and hints that send the reader off to make some assumptions of their own, well it all felt astonishing, which may be why I had to keep calling a halt and taking stock. It is exactly like life, like being in a room and being part of the conversation. The way that not every single word needs to be said, that things are left unsaid because they can be, and that those present will cotton on to the meaning and go with the flow of the conversation and the situation regardless, and with what sleight of pen does Zadie Smith trap this on the page. I supect I'd be nervous should I ever (unlikely) find myself in the same room as Zadie when she is gathering book material, in fact I doubt she ever stops given her level of observation. 

That playing with the French flaps just one of the many things I discovered you can do with a book by Zadie Smith apart from sending it to the charity shop that is. I am now very ashamed to admit that, having failed with Zadie's fiction to date, that is exactly what I had done with a half-read copy of White Teeth, only a few months ago in the Big Purge, though thankfully I had kept the half-read copy of On Beauty because it was a hardback and I had paid good money for it, and with all these half-reads around I hadn't bothered with The Autograph Man. 

I had diagnosed myself as the wrong reader for Zadie Smith some years ago. Me old enough to be her mum, and I had declared this to be the writing of a younger generation that I just wasn't 'getting.' I can't decide if I feel happier to have discovered Zadie Smith will be thirty-eight this year, or mortifed because that makes me feel even older. 

But I did love Zadie's book of Occasional Essays Changing My Mind so all was not lost, here was the razor-sharp intellect of a young woman who by her own admission agrees...

'When you are first published at a young age, your writing grows with you - and in public...I'm forced to recognise that ideological consistency is, for me, practically an article of faith.'

Hence the title of the book of essays, and hence maybe why I have suddenly clicked with Zadie Smith's fiction in NW, her fourth outing, and I have to admit I have been swept up and along and away by a book that I felt certain I wouldn't want to read. 

NW is, amongst myriad themes, a book about class, and race, and prejudice (not necesarily racial) about ambition (or lack of it) and people doing the best they can with what they've got, or have inherited, or earned, or been given. Sometimes that 'best' is good enough, sometimes it falls short, but then who is anyone to judge. If you love the minutiae of ordinary people's lives then you might enjoy this one, and once you have settled into the narrative style will be pounding the streets of London with the best of them, 

The oddest yet most pleasurable reading week I have had in a long time. I even had £10 at 5:1 riding on NW to win the Women's (now Bailey's Women's) Prize for Fiction, which sadly for Zadie (and for me) it didn't, but Zadie I forgive you.

So any Zadie fans out there??

Do I go back to the beginning and try again??

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ The Belfry

Not quite either of the belfries within my Beating the Bounds square mile, (though I did sing in the choir there for a couple of years,) but St Andrew's Buckland Monachorum near enough, because all these local churches were being built at about the same time. It is said that if you travelled around these parts in the mid-15th century you would have tripped over a half-built church every few miles. A number of them have a similar tower design topped out with very distinctive pinnacles, the same team working round and adding the icing on the church cake.

Tower building was all about attracting the eye and announcing grandeur and importance, a way of providing the people with an experience of heaven on earth. It was about rivalry between villages too, and each tower an example of the care and expense lavished on their church by the community. Rarely did those communities number more than 200 people, and towers were expensive additions which according to John Scott must have eaten up a huge proportion of the local wealth.

I'm not sure I had ever given much thought to who would have paid for these, but as John Scott affirms the main motive was the glory of God and we do the builders and the benefactors a great injustice if we allow 21st century cynicism to doubt it. Look what a glorious legacy they have left us, and sadly what an endless struggle it can be to raise the funds to maintain them now.

I had found John Scott's book in the reference library a while back, entitled Towers and Bells of Devon. Two hefty volumes in fact, and my interest in all things bells piqued by the discovery of a book which should, if the title is anything to go by, have been enough to send me to sleep. Far from it, all utterly fascinating. A meticulous history of each church tower in the Shire with date, size, weight, note and name of each bell ... bit like a very great big baby, but with a note of dedications and inscriptions as well. I hadn't known about the inscriptions but I discovered that the bells in our village church bear little gems like...

'Prosperity to this Parish'

and

' Tenor I to the Church the Living Call and to the Grave I summon All' .

This latter I assume a reference to the tolling of the sonourous Passing Bell, the death knell that seems to be getting a good work out as I read The Nine Tailors. 

So at our allotted time there we were, first in the queue, Bookhound leading the way up the stone steps to the top of the seventy foot tower, built using local rubble and granite, and already we discover a design fault because though I could just about squeeze up the stairs, Bookhound found his top half was around the spiral with his legs still to waiting to catch up. If you look carefully you might just be able to see me 'going round the bend' this on the descent..

Tiny windows on the ascent giving a clue that we were rising higher, just in case the knees weren't telling us as much too..

and higher..

until eventually we emerged onto the roof, and what sights to behold..

...and a close up of one of those pinnacles.

On the way down (much quicker) we were able to stop and peek through the grill at the belfry itself,

From the church website I discover a little nugget of history.

The Buckland Monachorum tower design, with its high pinnacles at the limits of  practicability, sacrificed strength for elegance, though mercifully the first four bells hung all stayed put. However when two more were added in 1723, within ten years and with repeated ringing, the tower was seriously weakened necessitating major repairs. It would seem luck that the whole lot didn't come crashing down.

Now that all makes me want to read The Spire by William Golding and The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I have started both books and failed to finish them, but (sorry *SPOILER* alert) don't the towers collapse in both??

In 1858, it was discovered that the wooden bell cage had rotted and that someone had misguidedly driven wedges between the timbers and the walls of the tower.

Tsk, tsk.

This had caused fractures in the tower as a result of the constant vibration. More worryingly it was not until 1905 that the bells were re-hung in a new wood frame, before being re-cast in 1947 and situated in the metal frame visible, with two tenor bells added to make a glorious peal of eight bells.

Eight bells can ring 40,320 changes which would take eighteen hours. just saying in case you were wondering. I think the sum might 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 etc, someone will work it through.

It's hard to imagine how on earth any work is done in a belfry. The space is seriously limited and claustrophobic, to say nothing of dangerous, and I have yet to figure how you get a hefty bell in and out unless it is somehow lowered down through here, the chamber below housing the clock mechanism.

Unusually the ringers gallery below the clock chamber overlooks the nave of the church which I am not sure I had ever realised in those years that I occupied the choir stalls...

and like many such galleries has some wonderful signs and notices in place. This little warning from 1755... (if you click on these pictures they should enlarge)

and this more recent one...

Imagine the clock chiming in and messing up the changes. 

And so to the ringing, of which I know nothing beyond that which I have learned from the authorial campanology of Dorothy L.Sayers, so I am grateful to that Coronation edition of Picture Post for the low down.. or should that be the high down...or maybe the up down.

The ringers of St Paul's reveal the secrets for the man on the street down below in 1953. Basically you must learn how to pull on a rope to achieve certain results and without 'music' as it were, all has to be done from memory. You musn't move your feet while the rope's end is on the floor or you'll be swept off them and dumped back down with two broken ankles, and not surprisingly in this case the whole process requires absolute concentration. 

World records were few back then. I am not sure about now but the 1922 feat of 21,363 changes in twelve hours with not a single ringer taking a break (no, not even for 'that') seems remarkable and knocks Lord Peter Wimsey's meagre nine hours into touch. Apparently records were rare because no one wanted to listen to bells ringing for thirteen hours.

For anyone who hasn't read The Nine Tailors, the Picture Post piece ends with another spoiler so look away now...

'Disillusioning fact is that even the combined noise of St Paul's twelve bells at their loudest wouldn't really kill the victim of a detective story, locked up in the belfry. It might make his ears tingle - not more.'

 

 

 

On This Day.... Dorothy L. Sayers

On this day in 1893, Dorothy L. Sayers was born in Oxford, the only child of an Anglican vicar Henry and his wife Helen. I have chosen this picture of her in her younger days. There is an element of latent mischief in that face, almost ready to laugh; pictures of Dorothy in her later years reveal a sterner, more severe and matronly countenance.

By all accounts intelligent, precocious and much-loved and indulged by the various adults that surrounded her, Dorothy was heading for the Godolphin School in Salisbury and thence to Somerville College in Oxford, becoming one of the first women to receive a degree. A contemporary there of Vera Brittain and all a cue for me to dust off my copy Dangerous by Degrees by Susan Leonardi.

I'm sure some of you will know this book, an account of women at Oxford between 1912 and 1922 and six Somerville novelists, Dorothy L. Sayers and Vera Brittain as well as Murial Jaeger, Doreen Wallace, Margaret Kennedy and Winifred Holtby. I have only read Dorothy and Vera, have almost meant to read Winifred, have both Doreen and Margaret on the shelf and had never heard of Muriel. I have also been dipping into the biography Dorothy L. Sayers - Her Life and Soul by Barbara Reynolds.

All lives are fascinating but Dorothy's the more so for the fact that she bore an illegitimate son in 1924 whose existence was kept a well-guarded secret from the public until twenty years after her death. Fearing that the discovery would heap shame on her parents, Dorothy hid herself away, taking eight weeks leave of absence from her job with an advertising agency to give birth to John Anthony, who she then proceeded to breast feed for several weeks before appointing a distant relative as a guardian and handing him over; adoption was illegal until 1926 ( I didn't know that) and swearing the guardian to secrecy, a vow that Ivy Shrimpton appears to have kept faithfully, loving John Anthony as her own.

I had just one Dorothy L. Sayers novel on the Have Read list and that was Gaudy Night some years ago, at which point I did the usual and acquired a shelf full thinking how much I had enjoyed it and I must read more, and never quite got around to it, so this week I have been deep into campanology and The Nine Tailors.

It's all a tangled mass of sallies and clappers and Grand Sire Triples, and bodies in the wrong place, and poor old Peter Wimsey who finds himself stranded in the snow on New Year's Eve just as the village of Fenchurch St Paul is in crisis. A man down on the bell ringing team, and with fifteen thousand, eight hundred and forty celebratory Kent Treble Bob Majors to be rung for the next nine hours before morning. Obviously no one needs any sleep in Fenchurch St Paul, and as luck would have it Sir Peter is an accomplished campanologist, along with all his other competencies, and is ready (sort of) and able to slot into the team. 

'Nothing would please me more than to ring bells all day and all night. I am not tired at all. I really don't need rest. I would far rather ring bells...'

There may be trouble ahead.

I haven't finished it yet but I am loving it all which is more than can be said for Q.D.Leavis who clearly had the knives out for Dorothy's fiction in general...

'... but no novelist with such a parasitic, stale adulterated way of feeling and living could ever amount to anything. And Miss Sayers' fiction,when it isn't mere detective-story of an unimpressive kind, is exactly that : stale, second-hand, hollow...it is only the emanation of a 'social' mind wanting to raise a snigger...'

Goodness me Queenie, that's bulldog-chewing-a-wasp writing if ever I saw it.

But reading The Nine Tailors was all enough to have me first in the queue and jumping up and down (in my mind)  with excitement when we saw this at the summer fair in Buckland Monachorum last Saturday...

Chances to go up church towers are rare but there was the church dressed overall, not a cloud in the sky and trips up to the roof . More about our belfry experience to come, and how we squeezed up the ninety something steps and decided how very thin people must have been in them days and how on earth did they build this in 1490 ...

Buckland Monachorum village history reveals it was not just Fenchurch St Paul that was awake all night listening with copious joy to the music of the bells...

'Church bell ringers have always practised their art and skill with enthusiasm, but records reveal that in 1815, their fervour overcame their judgement and good sense. It seems that although forbidden to have the key to the belfry door by Mark Tucker, Clerk and Schoolmaster, they managed to enter the church late one evening and rang throughout the night. Understandably the village was not pleased, and for their "mutinous and riotous behaviour" they were dismissed. 

That music as Dorothy L. Sayers writes it..

'Tin tan din dan bim bam bom bo - tan tin din dan bam bim bo bam - tan tin dan din bam bim bo bom - tan dan tin bam din bo bim bom...'

Are you keeping up...have you got your bell competently up and set up at the backstroke and have you adjusted your tuckings, and are you ready for the hunting up, the hunting down, making the thirds and fourths and laying the blows behind before working down to lead the dance again. I do hope so. I think I am almost starting to understand it, and if I tell the musical amongst you that the notes for the Buckland Monachorum bells (smallest to largest) are as follows...

 E - D# - C# - B - A - G# - F# - E

Well look, you could almost sing it or replicate a Kent Treble Bob Major on the piano couldn't you.

But meanwhile Happy Birthday Dorothy... any fans out there?? 

Any bell-ringers who understand it all??

 

 

 

The Garden House, Buckland Monachorum

Back in the dim recesses of time, as an almost qualified health visitor, I was dispatched to Tavistock to do something called Supervised Practice. This used to happen after final written exams and would involve (and may still) three months based in an area that had to be in complete contrast to your previous nine month student placement (mine had been a baptism of fire on the naval estates of Plymouth City) You would be given a mini-caseload of a hundred families to practise on visit in that time, before heading back into college at the end of the stint for a rigorous viva voce and hopefully a Pass.

Thankfully I passed but I doubt I will ever forget that Summer of '78.

Fancy being paid to drive around these lanes, and up onto Dartmoor; fresh-faced and mustard-keen I really couldn't get enough of it, so when a health visitor post came up in Tavistock while I was there, and was offered to me, I snapped it up. No matter that I would have to drive out from our flat in the gloomy Dockyard end of Plymouth every day, it would be worth it.  Those were the days when you were given an NHS car, so I had an ex-Police Panda car cast-off (with the word POLICE barely sprayed over) sporting very random gears and the worrying number plate RTA, but about a month into the job I was offered an unfurnished 'Community Nurse' house too, in the village of Buckland Monachorum. 

It's odd when you look back and realise how so much of your life just slots into place by luck and happenstance isn't it, and I'm sure similar things will have happened to many of you. It only took about three trips to move our two years-worth of married belongings to our new home, included the mandatory Swiss Cheese plant sticking out of the back window. We furnished sparsely... minimalist was us, decorated appallingly remembering that this was the era of the two-toned emulsioned room (Cinnamon and Spice ...a whole lot too much of brown) and got a Border Collie puppy as we proceeded to see what it was like to really live in the country.

Returning to Buckland Monachorum last Saturday, and walking through those same fields we had walked with Ben, it dawned on us both that this was where it had all begun, our road to where we are now and our love of country life and splendid rural isolation. We loved Buckland and would have happily settled there had we been able to afford it, but cottages were going for about £15k and we had a mortgage maximum of £12-14k... laughable when you look back, won't even buy a car these days. We had driven the ten miles or so for the summer fair last week but on the way turned into The Garden House just outside the village.

Now we hadn't been to The Garden House for years. To be honest we couldn't remember there being much that was of interest to us back in the day when it was a five minute walk away, but we had followed its progress over the years. We knew that the garden had been extended and that innovative head gardener Keith Wiley had wrought miracles before moving onto his own nursery along the road, that the garden has featured on Gardener's World and presenters Alan Titchmarsh and Carol Klein both adore it, and that Sophie Wessex had paid a Royal visit recently

The house was originally the Rectory for the village church and is now the tea rooms, the whole plot bought and developed by Lionel (an ex-Eton schoolmaster) and Kathleen Fortescue in the 1960s, this much we had known before..

I was, as usual, much in need of a cream tea and having had my cholesterol done last week and not yet been in receipt of the phone call to tell me off, thought in for a penny etc before I'm back on porridge. A pile of egg sandwiches, scones, jam, clotted, Earl Grey etc later we stepped out to look at the gardens before walking along the footpath to the village, and thinking the garden would only take us take us twenty minutes or so on the way and we'd moan at having payed £7 something to get in.

Cue...HUGE SURPRISES around every corner.. breathtaking ones at that




Acres and acres of it. The wildflower meadows in full flight as were the rhododendrons, this beauty (Vanessa Pastel) in a shady glade but pickled with glorious flowers...

and perhaps my favourite, unbeatable, biggest-gasp moment...

The meconopsis bed ...plant envy doesn't come close... I WANT A LOT OF THESE...

Everything looks so natural, yet planting schemes worked out meticulously to capitalise on the setting, its possibilities and above all the long gaze of the beholder...

There in the distance the village church and beyond that Kit Hill which we look across to from home. The church tower a reminder that we had meant to go to the summer fair, but we still had so much to see. Reluctantly we slipped down onto the footpath, did the village in quick order but couldn't wait to get back to The Garden House.

Far from begrudging the entry fee we were almost the last ones out, but not before we threw more money at them and became Friends, buying a year-long double ticket so that we can go whenever. Monty Don suggested on last week's Gardener's World (now avid fan) how important it was to go and look at other gardens to get inspiration for your own, and I was reminded of so much, not least that this is the only garden where we have failed to establish a good show of Aquilegias/Columbines which I love, so that is one of my many tasks for next year.

God knows what else I'll be wanting to grow after a year of seeing all this, watch this space, plus all tips for growing meconopsis, and while we're about it poppies too, gratefully received

 

 

The Exile ~ Betty Miller

At last I am back with The Persephone Book of Short Stories and back too with my reading-a-story-from-each-end alternately method, the plan being that time will converge in on itself and eventually I will meet myself in the middle. The stories are arranged by date of publication so the time gap has shrunk from the original seventy-seven years when I started to a mere ten years now, 1937-1947, and with ten stories left to read the similarities of subject matter are becoming much more striking given the world events in that period.

I have said before how much I am loving this volume and would like a new one every year (please Persephone) and I am now quite pleased with myself for not gorging on it in two days, because so much thinking and revelation would have been lost. Witness the serendipitous way that reading connects with itself as I picked the book up again only to find that the next story to read (from the front end) happened to be The Exile by Betty Miller (1935). This just as I was reading The Exiles Return by Elisabeth de Waal.

I am new to Betty Miller but on the strength of this one story I will definitely read more. I have a copy of Farewell Leicester Square, and also the lovely old Virago edition of On

the Side of Angels with that fabulous cover. I did know that Betty Miller was the mother of Jonathan Miller but no more, so as always the Persephone website supplies the details...

'...was born in Ireland to a Lithuanian businessman and a Swedish teacher whose (Polish) family was distantly related to the philosopher Henri Bergson. She went to school in London and did a diploma in journalism at University College before publishing the first of her seven novels. In 1933 she married the psychiatrist Emanuel Miller (1892-1970)..'

It all sounds like ample experience to have grown up in the midst of (much like Resi in The Exiles Return) plenty to offer insights into the life of an exile there, and it was fascinating to read this story alongside Elisabeth de Waal's book to further understand the impact of the exile on those around them. There is much discomfort expressed in The Exiles Return which Betty Miller's story elaborates on with great insight.

Irina, the Russian emigree, works as a maid in 'this semi-suburban, semi-countrified village' but is mysteriously being passed around from one home to the next... 

'Irina is not the ordinary type of servant. Mrs Clark told me on the 'phone that she was really a very cultured person.'
    'Then why's she doing this sort of work?'
    'She's an emigre, dear. The revolution in Russia, you know. Why, in Paris there are grand-duchesses who are waitresses and chambermaids.'

An excellent cook, 'adept and thorough at the housework'. willing and very hard working, there seems no apparent reason why once captured this 'real treasure' should not be kept at all costs.

But no one has bargained for the impact of the emigre psyche on those around them...

'There was in their midst someone to whom life meant really nothing: measuring themselves, their joys, their pleasures, ambitions against that awoke on each of them something curiously restive, something that undermined with alarming ease all their ordinary standard of values.'

The guilt at having so much ...'unthinking fleshly profligacy,' when someone else has lost everything and now has so little...

The seeming 'plenty' and the shallowness of the lives that Irina serves discreetly yet very obviously delineated to the reader...

'...prosperous of paunch beneath his waistcoat,'

'..her perfume tantalised the air...'

And then the willing revelation about her husband's brutal demise rapidly dispelling any aura of mystery surrounding Irina's past and invoking even more discomfort in those around her.

Slowly but surely the unease pervades....

    'What sort of life are we living...what meaning, what spiritual value...just suffocating in day-to-day material things...doping ourselves comfortably, pretending we'll never die.'

It is clear that Irina is a painful reminder of so much that most would prefer to leave below the surface, and whilst the exile has developed survival and coping strategies borne out of extreme necessity, it is clear that those she serves can only fall back on the securities of home and castle, the exact same thing the exile has lost. 

Written in 1935 how prescient this story and that fragility is, given that we know with hindsight that every man's castle is about be threatened beyond anything he could ever have imagined. But the story still feels of relevance now. Those who have been exiled will understand, those of us who may not have been may well be able indentify with the discomfort as we watch a news bulletin these days.

Ultimately Irina is too much of a painful reminder of how quickly everything can be taken away and the answer to that is ...well, I won't spoil it, but if you read either one of these alone, Elisabeth de Waal's The Exiles Return, or Betty Miller's The Exile, definitely seek out the other.

 

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The Exiles Return ~ Elisabeth de Waal

Bluebells...

'And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes..' 

The May Magnificat - Gerard Manley Hopkins

They seem to have been with us for weeks and weeks this year, or maybe it seems like that because we now have time to go and look and walk through them most days, but the bluebells have been stunning, especially on our sundown walk as the sun seeps through from the west. Rivers of blue that defy words...and every so often we find a brave little hybrid in their midst.

Our eyes seem keenly attuned to blue at the moment with some glorious June evenings to enjoy as we walk up the fields towards the woods...

And then, as we step inside, we are transfixed and have to remember to lift our eyes upwards too, for more magnificence...

It's now hard to remember it looking like this back in January.
Enough words from me this week, Gerard Manley Hopkins has the edge on the fabulous sightings we have enjoyed up in Berry Wood of late...

From Notebooks - May 1871 

'But in the clough/ through the light/ they came in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with vein-blue, thickening at the double...It was a lovely sight -the bluebells in your hand baffle you with their inscape...the overhung necks - for growing they are little more than a staff with a simple crook... crisp, ruffled bells..'

And on the same theme, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Macfarlane ...

H.R.H....

As an important footnote at the the end of this week of Coronation revisited, which I have so enjoyed writing, and thank you to all of you for reading and commenting and sharing your own memories, our good wishes must go to H.R.H The Duke of Edinburgh who undergoes exploratory surgery today.

I suspect the Royal Family have been nursing this knowledge throughout the week but would let nothing stand in the way of such an auspicious celebration.

The Picture Post did a wonderful page on Prince Philip, capturing him to a tee with this cartoon by David Low back in 1953, and he doesn't seem to have changed a bit does he..

Everest...

' I looked at Tenzing and in spite of the balaclava, goggles and oxygen mask that concealed his face, there was no disguising his infectious grin of pure delight...'

No brief sojourn in Coronation week 1953 would be complete without a mention of the news that was broadcast around the streets of London in the midst of the celebrations... that Everest had been climbed by the British expedition and the summit reached by Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay.

'It was 11.30 a.m....we shook hands and then Tenzing threw his arms around my shoulders and we thumped each other on the back until we were almost breathless. I had carried my camera, loaded with colour film, inside my shirt to keep it warm, so now I produced it and got Tenzing to pose for me on the top, waving his ice axe on which was a string of flags - British, Nepalese, United Nations and Indian...'

I can only begin to imagine the excitement that announcment must have caused in an already hyper-excited crowd.

It all had me dashing off to the Climbing Shelf in the hope that we had the book I needed, in fact we had plenty but these two have made wonderful reading this week.

The Ascent of Everest and Our Everest Adventure, both books written by Brigadier John Hunt, the expedition leader, with extracts by Sir Edmund Hillary, and from what I can gather both genuine and honourable men. Hunt, with his military background, added planning and precision to the expedition. Hillary, a New Zealander from Auckland, a bee-keeper by profession, lanky and strong, abounding in a restless energy and  possessed of  'a thrusting mind which swept aside all unproved obstacles.'

Jude...if you are reading this I know you have mentioned Edmund Hillary came to talk to your school, I'd love to know more.

Then there was Sherpa Tenzing. A legend in Everest circles since the 1930s.

Tenzing's experience on Chomolungma exceptional, a mountaineer of world-class standing and with the infectious grin that must have cheered many an early morning freezing start. And all credit to the other less-mentioned team members too... George Band, Tom Bourdillon, Charles Evans, Alfred Gregory, George Lowe, Wilfrid Noyce, Griffith Pugh, Tom Stobart, Michael Ward, Michael Westmacott and Charles Wylie, along with Sherpa Annullu, who all played a crucial part in the expedition. And not least, Times Correspondent James Morris who accompanied the team and ensured that the news reached London in time for Big Day.

Always careful to applaud those who had gone before, and crediting the contribution made by their experience and knowledge for the ultimate success of the 1953 summit attempt, both books make for inspiring reading.

Now who can know whether any of this account may have since been discredited... some terrible revelation or scandal and screaming headlines, What Really Happened on Everest in 1953. I hope not, and if so I don't think I want to know so I haven't looked, because I have emerged from both these books with a sense of real wonder. Of courage and camaraderie, of meticulous planning and brilliant and skillful risk asessment where heart was not allowed to overrule head, and of some selfless actions in order for the objective to be achieved. This was team work as its finest... if they had an orgy at Base Camp I am not interested, I'll stay in 1953 with this one and listen to the words of John Hunt...

'What were the reasons for our success? To these factors the triumph should be attributed, it matters not in what proportion : to all who had climbed on Everest before; to our planning and other preparations; to the excellence of our equipment; to our Sherpas and ourselves; to the favour of the elements. And I would add one more factor, less easy to assess: the thoughts and prayers of all those who watched and waited and hoped for our success.'

This one of my favourites pictures in Our Everest Adventure. It speaks of care and attention and friendship, Hillary checking that all is well with Tenzing's equipment, and look at the wonderful high mountain footwear, specially designed and made for the expedition and to be worn above 20,000 feet.

The Appendices to The Ascent of Everest make for fascinating reading, every last detail of the planning and equipment, nothing but nothing left to chance. I love detail... things like those boots which had to be carefully made for the Sherpas from moulds sent to the UK. Their size 6 boots needed to be wider than Hillary's size 12s, and Tenzing added some Swiss gaiters to cope with the holes that developed in the thinner outer covers, and the boot design that incorporated rings rather than holes for the laces, the better for frozen fingers to cope.

Don't get me started on the tents or we'll be here until Christmas, but they had piano-wire stiffeners on the entrances for ease of access and closure...clever eh.

In his Foreword to The Ascent of Everest the Duke of Edinburgh (and good wishes for H.R.H., undergoing surgery today, will follow in a separate post this morning) declared his profound admiration, defining this as an achievement that, in human terms of physical effort and endurance alone, would live on in history as a shining example to all mankind.

As they lay in their mess tent (with its piano wire closures) after supper on June 2nd, the climbers turned on the wireless to listen to the Coronation news...

..and were dumbfounded to hear that the news of their success had reached London in time for the day. It was with enormous pride that they subsequently received their telegrams of congratulations from the Palace.

And how far off this other moment in history must have seemed when John Hunt wrote of it in 1953...

'There are many opportunities for adventure, whether they be sought among the hills, in the air, upon the sea, in the bowels of the earth, or on the ocean bed; and there is always the moon to reach...'

John Hunt lived to see Apollo 11 in 1969 and I'll bet he loved every single minute of it, and if anyone tells me these moon-landing-didn't-happen conspiracy theories are true... well I shall probably cry.

 

 

Coronation ~ Paul Gallico

Talking of knees-up as I have been, and at the opposite end of the social spectrum to Mrs Stamford in Morpeth Street, here's a knee-up of a different variety as Trooper Campbell of the Queen's Lifeguards hops up on his horse.

The Household Cavalry much in evidence throughout Coronation day, as the bodyguard of the sovereign and the mounted Escort throughout the ceremonial, so a revealing look behind the scenes at Knightsbridge Barracks is provided for the people by Picture Post. I'll admit to being sadly fascinated by the 1953 detail.

The helmets are made from thin German silver which will take a high polish but dent very easily..

The axe traditionally borne by the farrier was originally for killing the horse if wounded in battle.

The Life Guardsman's plume on the helmet is made of whalebone, experiments with nylon so far not entirely satisfactory because it blows about in the wind too much. Other regiments use yak's-hair 'but being from Tibet, this is no longer easily come by.'

Seven hours a day is devoted to kit-cleaning, three hours for the horse's and four hours for the man's own. Each jackboot can take an hour.

Officers are expected to wear dark suits and bowler hats and to carry a rolled umbrella when out in London by day...that's a bit of a relief, imagine getting that plume stuck in the doors of the tube train.

Then there is the 'social exclusiveness' of the Horse Guards. This is 'unashamedly a corps d'elite and its officers are drawn from the same social background that their predecessors have always been drawn from.

All this came to mind as I reached the end of a lovely novella by Paul Gallico fittingly entitled Coronation. I nipped it onto my Kindle and read it this week, and as I did I thought of these pictures, and the notion of the social exclusivity, as young Jonny Clagg whiles away his days wishing he could be an Officer. When he eventually meets and shares that dream with a retired officer it is little wonder that the old man thinks carefully before he replies... keeping the hopes of a schoolboy dreamer alive whilst knowing how impossible that dream may be for a working class lad from Sheffield.

The hard-working Clagg family have hit upon a bargain, five tickets for window seats in a house along the Coronation route, with a champagne lunch thrown in; a steal at £10 each instead of 50 guineas and the family are unanimous... they will happily forgo their two week beach holiday in Morecombe to be in London for the big day. Well almost unanimous, Granny is unlikely to agree to anything but happy to go along for the chance to moan and carp. You or I may happily have seen her off on the wrong train but this is the long-suffering, family-faithful Claggs, and they embark on their big adventure at crack of dawn in the days when trains really did go dickety-clack dickety-clack.

Surely eleven-year old Jonny will see for himself the military might of which he dreams, while his seven-year old sister Gwennie will see a real Princess in a golden carriage. For their mother the chance to have a day off and drink champagne, and for Mr Clagg the sheer pleasure of providing for his family and witnessing their joy. Of course it's all bound to go pear-shaped, even in 1953 there was still no such thing as a free lunch, and I wanted to weep at the successive disappointments that the family endure.

But I wanted to weep even more for their thankfulness at the tiniest of mercies. For their unbounded optimism and resilience in the face of defeat, and for their ability to look on the bright side. Above all for their resistance in not pushing Granny under the nearest London to Edinburgh express.

It's a lovely little story, though predictable and of its time, but a reminder of the respect and reverence for Royalty that existed then, and the resilience and perseverance in the face of adversity that still resonated in those years after the war. But it has plenty to say obliquely about class differences too, about obedience to authority and thwarted attempts to best it.

It was fascinating to watch the original Coronation procession this week and see Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister again in 1953, looking formidable and no less redoubtable as he swayed along the aisle of the Abbey, fixing that glare on all he saw. Who would dare be anything but courageous under such leadership, thank goodness history sometimes sends along the right people at the right time.

 

 

The Coronation ~ The Peeresses

The Coronation Souvenir number of Picture Post includes an interesting Behind-the-Scenes piece by Tom Driberg. A journalist and politician, Driberg cut quite a controversial figure in his day (though I hadn't known quite how controversial until I read this)  and I'll admit to gasping a little when I read his description of the serried ranks of Peeresses...

'It was the lowest tier, however, whose occupants held the eye the longest, not by diversity but by uniformity : for here was a solid phalanx of peeresses, hundreds of them, row upon row in flowing crimson robes and white ermine... when I saw the TV close-ups of these peeresses in the evening papers, I was shocked : some were beautiful such as the Duchess of Argyll (once Miss Margaret Whigham, then Mrs Charles Sweeny)  who had the best seat in the Abbey...others were gaunt or decayed, obese or scrawny...'

Checking out the Duchess of Argyll I discover yet another colourful character of whom I knew nothing but would now hope that someone somewhere has written the book (?) and if not someone should, but how times have changed. Such statements would be enough to make Tom Driberg the instant scourge of Twitter sixty years on, and I'm not sure if the Peeresses read Picture Post so who can know what they would have made of  the assessment. 

He does redeem himself everso slightly...

'But in the Abbey, from our eyrie, they looked collectively radiant; and when the Queen was crowned and they all lifted their white-gloved arms to form, for an exquisite moment, several hundred delicate Gothic arches above their heads and put on their coronets ...well I'm afraid, if it isn't irreverent to say so, that they nearly stole the show.'

Phew, almost rehabilitated, that's good, they look better from afar, but then Tom drops himself right back in the proverbial turtle soup...

'About 20 per cent of them had to go and spoil the effect a few moments later, by putting up cautious hands again in case the things weren't on straight.'

That's him done for.

But whilst the Peeresses were waiting for the ceremony to begin, and no doubt catching up on the society gossip, this had also happened just before the Queen's arrival ...

'A quaint incongruous incident - the sudden arrival in a gorgeous spruce Theatre, round which all the nobility and clergy were now disposed, of a team of energetic, white-clad women with brushes and vacuum cleaners, removing any slight speck of dust that less exalted feet might have carried in. In the acute expectancy of the moment - after hours of waiting - this excited a convulsive bursts of laughter; the formality of the ordered rows of peeresses was suddenly dissolved in heaving merriment; the organist tactfully played fortissimo.' 

Pulling themselves together when it mattered what a wonderfully affirming GOD SAVE QUEEN ELIZABETH didst the Peeresses render at the Recognition when their moment came, quite outdid their male counterparts.

To my astonishment, given that this is 1953 and the 1960s have yet to happen, A.L. Rowse then makes some amends over the page with his piece entitled Queens Made England Great, arguing that matriarchy is a very successful way of running a society...

'It seems that a woman at the head of our society, putting herself in touch with the spirit of an age, can express it more naturally and unaffectedly than a man. And people can express themselves more easily towards, and about, her than they can towards a man who happens to be King.'

I have only known a matriarchy in that case, and I'm not sure this was something I had even given much thought to before, having always taken it for granted that this is just the way it is. I have been trying to imagine how different the last sixty years may have been under a King... and somehow I can't.

According to Rowse who reflects in some depth on the reigns of both Elizabeth 1 and Victoria, people apparently 'respond with gallantry to the idea of a woman on the Throne', to her charm and good looks when younger and to the mother-figure as she ages. Female monarchs, he suggests, are more likely to accept the implications of the constitutional role whilst men are more tempted to out-step that role... 

'Europe is full of monarchs who have overplayed their hands and had to step down and every one of them is a man.'

In Rowse's summing up ...

'Certainly women throughout the world have reason to be pleased.'

And we can only hope the 'gaunt or decayed, obese or scrawny ' peeresses thought so too.

Being in Coronation-mode I watched the 60th Anniversary Service from Westminster Abbey yesterday.

A memorable hour-long celebration with some of the same music, including a repeated soaring rendition of I was Glad as the Queen stepped in to the Abbey. But as we caught the highlights later I am afraid I spluttered into my tea.

David Dimbleby, casually approaching and standing in front of the High Altar of the Abbey, as if he was out shopping and had happened upon something of interest, and then describing the objects thereon... the Imperial Crown, the ampulla that had held the anointing oil. It should have been a wonderful moment of family and filial continuity given that his father had done the original commentary in 1953, and done it with such respect and sincerity and gravitas, and it almost was, but for the fact that David was standing in one of the most sacred of Anglican spaces... and talking with his hand in his pocket.

May be it's just me, but lapsed Anglican even though I am I still feel some reverence and respect on behalf of others towards chuch altars. I'll bet his Dad would have clipped him around the ear for that.

 

 

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The Coronation according to Ruby Lennox.

Coronation Day...

The Coronation ~ The Knees-Up

The Coronation ~ The Knees-Up

Also in the Tinker's magical bag of Coronation memorabilia another little gem..

The Special Coronation Souvenir Number of Picture Post, the Hello magazine of its day, published on 13 June 1953, and obviously my mum was going to buy one of these and keep it. I'm thinking this was the magazine of the people, rather than the aristocracy who would doubtless have looked to Tatler for their account of the proceedings.

As you will see later this week this was probably a good thing.

Picture Post is full of pictures (obviously) of the Coronation ceremony and the procession, and the nation whooping it up in true eccentric knees-up fashion, something we are exceptionally good at given the occasion and some free ale and sandwiches.

This was Hinton St George in Somerset where the Queen was toasted in pints of rough cider laced with rum, apparently that is the 'Somerset way'...

'Usually slow of speech and action, they do not believe in doing things by halves when roused.'

Try writing that nowadays and getting out of Hinton St George alive.

Anyway the village population of 350 raised £200 and decided to celebrate for a full week with the Flower and Handicraft Show, the Veteran Car Club gathering, the Monster Whist Drive, the Bonfire and Fireworks, The Cabaret, the Fancy Dress and Square Dances, the village's own Coronation Revue 'Crowning Glory', the Children's Sports and the Carnival Procession. They even held a dress rehearsal for the service...

Lord Poulett threw open the grounds of the Big House and the day itself was heralded from the church tower with a peal of Grand Sire Doubles at 6.30am.

Doesn't it all make you proud to be British those that are... and I expect the rest of you feel a bit sorry for us:-)

Meanwhile Morpeth Street in the East End of London saved for ten months and by June 2 had raised £163 to give the children a day to remember. 'Cockneys don't read history - they live it' says the headline...

Mrs Stamford was having a good time too, here raising a glass to the Loyal Toast.

I love everything about this picture...the best skirt, perhaps home-made for the occasion, and not quite enough fabric in the length so is that a bit added onto the hem, and the crisp white blouse, then the little bolero cardigan, the height of fashion once more and which people would pay an arm and a leg for on eBay now, and the wrinkly stockings and the shoes polished to within an inch of their life for the big day.

Bless Mrs Stamford.

Morpeth Street in Bethnal Green once the heart of run-down, ramshackle London, the cheapest end of the Monopoly board, and from where many families were moved out to the new towns in the early 1950s (Bookhound's was one of them). How times have changed... a one-bedroomed flat in Morpeth Street would now set you back about £260K. 

Tomorrow : The Peeresses and the cleaning ladies

 

 

 

The Coronation according to Ruby Lennox.

'In her big, white dress the Queen looks like a balloon that's about to float up to the roof of Westminster Abbey and bob about up there amongst the gilded arches and roof bosses. To prevent this happening people keep weighing her down with cloaks and robes, orbs and sceptres, until she's so heavy that bishops and archbishops have to propel her around...'

I should really have started this post with something far more reverent and appropriate shouldn't I... perhaps a line or two from Zadok the Priest...

God save the king
Long live the king
May the king live forever
Amen, amen, alleluia, alleluia, amen, amen
May the king live
May the king live
For ever, for ever, for ever,
Amen, amen, alleluia, alleluia, amen, amen
Alleluia, alleluia, amen, amen, amen
Amen, amen, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, amen

You can see why I didn't.

That most magnificent of Handel's anthems, sung during the Anointing at every Coronation since that of George II, sadly looks decidely mundane when written down, besides which I have just finished my second read (first one in 1996) of Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson and I couldn't resist that first quote.

The book contains the most wonderful tableau as Family Lennox gather around the new TV set, with all the family and neighbours invited to their home, a flat above the shop, to watch the Coronation, and little Ruby Lennox is thoroughly bamboozled by it all, and not least the vast quantities of food when rationing was still the norm. Pork pies and fruit flans, sausage rolls and scones and endless pots of tea. Richard Dimbleby's 'reverent commentary' is being supplemented by sister Patricia's helpful snippets of information, and tension rises amongst the grown-ups over the chronological order of kings...

'George IV's position.. clearly he came after Georges One, Two and Three, but did anyone come before him? Someone proposes Queen Anne as the bolster between Georges Three and Four, but then a fresh argument brews up as to who exactly George IV was 'when he was at home' anyway. Uncle Bill claims he was 'the fat git that built Brighton,' while Uncle Clifford staunchly maintains that 'he was the one who lost America.'

It's all hilarious and I will write more about the book soon, but suffice to say that Patricia's snippets gleaned from the Daily Graphic Coronation Gift Book for Boys and Girls, were all enough to make me read up on it all too. As luck would have it, the bag containing the Radio Times of yesterday's post also held some more Coronation memorabilia including a very similar booklet, The Coronation - Its History and Meaning, published in 1937 for the National Union of Teachers, and therefore, just like Patricia's, our copy is also a Coronation out of date.

It's hard to imagine how important and uniting all this must have been in those austere post-war years, but you only have to look at the pictures of thousands of people camping out and lining the streets in the pouring rain to understand that this was one of the moments in history to 'be there.'

As regards the snippets, I found plenty of my own and didn't know this about the crown for starters...

"The St. Edward's Crown, made in 1661, was the crown placed on the head of The Queen during the Coronation service. It weighs 4 pounds and 12 ounces and is made of solid gold. The crown in its current form was first used by Charles II as it had to be redesigned after the Restoration. It was refurbished from an old crown and there is speculation that the lower part might be from Edward the Confessor's crown."

Nor this about the garments..

"During the investiture, The Queen first put on the newly-made Colobium Sindonis - a loose linen-lawn garment, and then a robe of cloth of gold - the Dalmatic or Supertunica, which was used by King George VI. The Lord Great Chamberlain presented the golden spurs, the symbol of chivalry, after which the Archbishop of Canterbury presented a jewelled sword, and then the armills, the golden bracelets of sincerity and wisdom. Finally, The Queen put on the stole and cloth of gold Robe Royal (Imperial Mantle) and received the orb, the coronation ring, the glove, which was newly made and presented by the Worshipful Company of Glovers, and the sceptre." 

And then there was the Anointing for which the Queen is robed in a plain white overdress and the gilded canopy held aloft...

'It's the anointing with holy oil!' Patricia's voice squeals excitedly from upstairs, and Auntie Babs manages to persuade Bunty to leave the sausage rolls unanointed and come upstairs for what is, in the Daily Graphic's words, 'really the most solemn and important part of the ceremony...'

'So solemn and important that the Queen disappears inside a scrum of bishops and her anointing is not witnessed,' says Kate Atkinson, and much to the disappointment of the Lennox family and their neighbours, but here's a little snippet that Patrica may not have been aware of ...

"The recipe for the Anointing Oil contains oils of orange, roses, cinnamon, musk and ambergris. Usually a batch is made to last a few Coronations. In May 1941, a bomb hit the Deanery destroying the phial containing the anointing oil so a new batch had to be made up. The pharmacy that had mixed the last anointing oil had gone out of business but the recipe was found and the oil made."

The loss of the oil in a bombing raid on Westminster Abbery was kept a secret, presumably seen as too much of a threat against the country's very existence to be revealed in such precarious times, but I was intrigued about the Anointing with its Biblical antecedents. Further research reveals that the freshly-made Anointing Oil also contained neroli, civet, jasmine and benzoin in a sesame oil base making a beautiful fragrance. Poor Queen Elizabeth I didn't fare so well, she was done with an ancient old batch which apparently smelt vile, 'the oil smelt ill' she was heard to exclaim afterwards. 

It wasn't only Family Lennox who were glued to their TV sets, the viewing figures for the day were staggering...

"An estimated 27 million people in Britain watched the ceremony on TV and 11 million listened on the radio. The Queen agreed that the Coronation be televised so that as many people as possible could observe the ceremony. (The population of Britain at the time was just over 36 million.)"

This and plenty more can all be found on the Official Website of the British Monarchy .

I had never watched the whole ceremony, but I did something quite unexpected yesterday, and my thanks to Hilary for flagging up that the BBC would be broadcasting their original footage and commentary of Coronation Day in real time on iPlayer. I had it running for most of the day so I have finally seen it, and have now seen this moment off the page and for real. The Recognition...

The Archbishop, together with the Lord Chancellor, Lord Great Chamberlain, Lord High Constable, and Earl Marshal (Garter King of Arms preceding them), shall then go to the East side of the Theatre, and after shall go to the other three sides in this order, South, West, and North, and at every of the four sides the Archbishop shall with a loud voice speak to the People: and the Queen in the mean while, standing up by King Edward's Chair, shall turn and show herself unto the People at every of the four sides of the Theatre as the Archbishop is at every of them, the Archbishop saying:

Sirs, I here present unto you
Queen ELIZABETH,
your undoubted Queen:
Wherefore all you who are come this day
to do your homage and service,
Are you willing to do the same?

The People signify their willingness and joy, by loud and repeated acclamations, all with one voice crying out,

GOD SAVE QUEEN ELIZABETH.

Then the trumpets shall sound.

Returning to Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and at the end of a very turbulent Coronation day involving arguments, accidents, the lewd attentions of Uncle Ted and the sight of their mother having drunk a little too deeply from the sherry barrel, Patricia and Ruby's 'blueprint for the future' is held within the pages of the Daily Graphic...

'You will have to grow up and when you have left childhood behind you must behave as a responsible man or woman. This may sound rather frightening, but you know as well as I do that although as a nation we have sometimes made mistakes we have never lacked courage.'

So whilst Zadok the Priest might look a little bland on the page, surely nothing can compare with the splendour of  'I Was Glad', Psalm 122 set to Charles Hubert Parry's music, and sung as the Queen entered Westminster Abbey sixty years ago yesterday, so I'll end today with that..

I was glad when they said unto me:
We will go into the house of the Lord.
Our feet shall stand in thy gates:
O Jerusalem.
Jerusalem is built as a city:
that is at unity in itself.
O pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
they shall prosper that love thee.
Peace be within thy walls:
and plenteousness within thy palaces.

Tomorrow... the Knees-Up. 

 

 

 

 

Coronation Day...

"In the Mall, heraldic beasts climb upon four blue and gilt arches, and swinging coronets glitter beneath. Gilt trumpets lean on the summer air.

Down by the river, white masts topped with plumed helmets soar above the pavements. Striped pavilions have sprung up in the parks, and the terraced stands stretch along the processional way amid a forest of waving banners. All over London, stone and brick have blossomed into a glory of rose and gold. After long months of preparation, everything is ready. The pageant is about to begin."

These are the opening words to the Coronation Number of the Radio Times dated May 31 - June 6 1953, priced at 3d, and with the number 69 pencilled on the cover...

That is because we lived at 69 Priory Road in Exeter, and this is the West of England edition of the Radio Times that was delivered that week of the Coronation, and which came to light in amongst the Tinker's treasures when he moved into Tinker's Cott here a while back. I say 'we' lived at number 69 but I was actually still sixteen weeks or so away from being born, however I was there in spirit and probably listening, so how could this Coronation Year Baby let the 60th anniversary of Coronation day pass without mentioning it.

The BBC expected to sell 9,000,000 copies of the special edition so this one is hardly rare, but it has been a treat to find it, and from its pages absorb a little of the excitement that engulfed a country ready for a new beginning back in 1953. The roll call of the broadcasters reads like a Who's Who of the BBC old guard... Richard Dimbleby of course, but strategically placed along the route would be Jean Metcalfe, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, John Arlott, John Snagge, Brian Johnston, Raymond Baxter et al.

Many of the regular weekly programmes ring distant but everso slightly familar bells. 

Children's TV knows its place, one hour between 5pm and 6pm, but I'd probably like to have watched 'Skippy Smith goes to the Circus'... a schoolboy adventure story be Vera Cook, or have Cliff Michelmore explain the story of Big Ben. On the radio the day before the Big Day, the Home Service has Alistair Cooke's Letter From America and Music While you Work with Tommy Kinsman and his Dance Orchestra, whilst over on the Light Programme it's Variety Playhouse with Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold, and of course Mrs Dale's Diary. This latter, presumably in an attempt to multi-culturalise the country in readiness for the gathering of world leaders, focuses on Mrs Dale's meeting with Mrs Ahmed from Pakistan, and having invited her to tea Mrs Dale then offers to show Mrs Ahmed some of the places of interest in London. At 9.15 pm John Gielgud stars in a radio production of The Tempest, seriously good radio in them days.

Then as now the BBC clearly had the naysayers to deal with, and Auntie took no prisoners when it came to putting them firmly in their place...

"There may be cynics here and those who will murmur that the glowing, brilliant backcloth that has been devised for the drama of the Queen's crowning is all antiquated mummery and foolishness. To such people there is an irrefutable answer. If this transformation scene be foolishness, so is all literature and painting, all sculpture and music, everything that brings mystery and poetry and colour into the life of a man."

There is a piece by the Archbishop of Canterbury outlining the solemnity of the ceremony...

'In one surpassing moment, the Coronation Service gathers together the continuity of our national life, the heritage we have received of Christian character and achievement, the sense of purpose, duty and aspiration to which we are called; and it links us all to one lovely, gracious, young figure dedicated to God's service and to ours."

And a piece by a historian (Lawrence Tanner)...

'It may be regarded as an intensely complex and difficult service. A kind of tapestry into which has been woven the threads of many centuries which cross and recross and are not always easy to disentangle. That is the point of view which appeals to the historian who finds embedded in the Service echoes of long past controversies and much of the history of our country both past and present..."

By its own admission the BBC was embarking on the  'most complicated and prolonged outdoor broadcast in television history' and events would start at 9.15 am with a tuning signal for one hour to allow for 'adjustment to receivers specially set up for the occasion in churches, shops, halls and homes.' Richard Dimbleby, perched high up in the Triforium of Westminster Abbey, would add the gravitas and depth to an already solemn occasion in our history with his commentary...

'The ceremonial pomp and pageantry of June 2 will furnish a theme for storytellers and balladmakers who are not yet born. How lucky are we who will be able to tell our children's children that we had a part in the events of the great day. Thanks to broadcasting none of us need be denied a share in them.'

So please forgive me if I take the BBC at its word this week and we stay awhile in 1953 and take a look around. I have no idea where we will end up, but tomorrow... one of the loveliest, funniest Coronation-watching scenes in fiction.

 

And the winners are...

Chums, chums I am so sorry. It's taken me an age to catch those five rabbits because I have been diverted by this...

I overheard... it's a contraption to keep me off the new seed bed.

Ha ha...

Anyway here are the five winners of a copy of Holloway by Robert Macfarlane... check it's really you here, send addresses to dovegreyreader at gmail dot com and the books will be with you drekkly.

23 40 35 08 56 

Random numbers generated Jun 1 2013 at 22:30:49 by www.psychicscience.org  

08 ~ Lynne

23 ~ Rebecca

35 ~ Pye

40 ~ Ann

56 ~ Hilary