dovegreyreader scribbles

The Patchworks of Lucy Boston at The Manor, Hemingford Grey

'His great-grandmother was sitting by the fire mending one of the old patchwork quilts. Tolly was familiar with the quilts, some of which were used as curtains for the living-room windows, hanging from ceiling to floor in bulgy folds against the stone walls... Mrs Oldknow had a basket beside her full of pieces of paper all cut the same size and shape, over which she had neatly tacked bright cotton materials...'

The Chimneys of Green Knowe ~ Lucy Boston 

I like to think I am no slouch when it comes to patchwork. Admittedly I have more UnFinishedObjects than might be good for me, but I am rarely without a project on the go, either embryonically in my head, or half machined, or tacked and ready to quilt, or half quilted, and I can't imagine life without the joy and frisson of that creativity. At the moment, as well as all the above, I am back with English piecing over papers, hexagon florets that will slowly stitch up into something bigger until I get fed up with it and call it a day at a wallhanging/tablecloth/single/double quilt...I don't know yet. 

There is no plan, no design, but English piecing over papers took on a whole new meaning when I saw Lucy Boston's quilts at the Manor at Hemingford Grey...this is most definitely 'a rare historical collection of textile art.'

'They ought to be almost like reading poetry, going from one word to the next and making a verse...'

said Lucy Boston of her quilt-making. 

I have read her book cover to cover several times over so I felt I knew the quilts, would be well-placed to admire them, to find those rhythms, but nothing quite prepared me for actually seeing them... stunningly original designs, cleverly matched fabrics utilising the patterns to their full extent, every piece hand-stitched...twenty stitches to the inch even when she was ninety.

The quilts were all spread on a bed, one on top of the other to be peeled back in layers for viewing, Diana Boston on one side of the bed, me white-gloved on the other and off we went.I am quite sure my pictures don't follow the order in which the quilts are displayed, but hopefully you can get the gist. 

Here is Diana pointing out the merits of the Mariner's Compass quilt. If you have ever tried to hand piece a Mariner's Compass you will know that things can get very ugly around those points, to say nothing of creating a perfect circle. Judy Mathieson perfected the art into a wonderful book with templates published in 1987 and we all had a go (yes of course I started one block...no of course I haven't finished it) Lucy was making this quilt in 1978...

This a quilt, from 1980, was full of fabrics I recognised...

This next quilt, Patchwork of the Crosses (88" x 99")  probably made in the late 1950s, uses long hexagons and squares and, like all the others, shows real care and attention to the detail. You can see that each piece of fabric is carefully cut to match (we know that as 'fussy cutting' these days) which adds immensely to the impact of the design, but Lucy was also quick to acknowledge the wastefulness of this in a craft borne of thrift. 

There are fifty-six blocks, no two the same...and remember all done by hand over papers.

It was so good to see some of my favourite quilts in close-up and High Magic is definitely one of them. Sir Martin Ryle, the Astronomer Royal was a very close friend of Lucy's and is considered the inspiration for this quilt, made while Lucy was writing An Enemy at Green Knowe.  

To look closely is to see all the detail to which a photograph can't possibly do justice...the perfect choice of mottled fabric for the night sky, the one hundred and thirty pieced stars that make the lattices, more points to weep over, and the phases of the moon making that outside border...

If any one quilt stands out for me, both for its design and its execution it has to be Kaleidoscope. Made in 1973-1974 . How complicated is this..


The patterns blend and meld drawing the eye along and round and across as, through half-closed eyes, the pattern seems to radiate and move just like a real kaleidoscope....and how excited was I to spot this white and turquoise fabric from which I made a sun dress back in 1970

Lucy didn't consider this quilt a classic despite its nightmarishly difficult design, but I do. This is all about tones and shades of colour and each has to be exactly right for the whole quilt to work in the way it does, with one 'block' incorporating overlapping tones with its neighbour. Fiendishly hard to pull off in the days before computer design which might now produce a numbered chart, and requiring 'the brains of a crystallographer and a contrapuntalist,' says Lucy in a letter to a friend. But she is in the flow, working at it from 5am on cold winter's mornings until late at night. Nothing else matters...just this quilt. We have probably all been there with creative projects of our own, when the world and its worries disappear, and all this at the age of eighty-one.

The layers of quilts seemed endless, and each one a piece of history that we felt privileged to see..

It takes real courage and imagination to sustain the interest in making a quilt in monotones, to say nothing of searching out the fabrics, and remembering this was made in 1967 when fabrics designed specifically for patchwork had yet to arrive. The plain joining blocks in the Keyboard Patchwork are made in embossed wedding dress fabric which gives the quilt real texture, whilst the monotones give it a timeless quality.

 

Kettle's Yard was another of our stopping places on our mini-tour (more of which soon) and I was intrigued to discover that Jim Ede, the founder of the Yard, had wanted this quilt for his Museum of Modern Art. Lucy declined...her work was for domestic use not exhibiting.

Last one...


A Double Irish Chain by hand... I try not to use exclamation marks on here, but I am afraid I now have to, just this once...

!!!!!!!!!

I have made an Irish Chain quilt by strip piecing the fabric on the machine, rotary cutting the strips and then rejoining, and I made it in a day. I can't begin to imagine how long it would take to do over papers and by hand.

Astonishing.

So there you have it, the end of a truly memorable visit. I do hope you have enjoyed the blog posts and pictures as much as we enjoyed our tour of The Manor, and my thanks again to Diana Boston for showing us around and for so generously allowing me to take the pictures of Lucy's quilts...it has all been a really inspirational treat and a visit that we will never forget.

Related articles

Channelling my inner Lucy...

Lucy M. Boston

The Manor at Hemingford Grey...

The Manor at Hemingford Grey, Lucy Boston and Vera Brittain..

The Patchworks of Lucy Boston

The Port Eliot Flower & Fodder Show @PortEliotFestival

One last request at the end of Port Eliot intro week...

If you will be at the Festival don't forget to check out the Flower and Fodder show schedule...this is the first year for food entries, and the winning jam will be made and sold in Fortnum & Mason's in London so this could be your chance to be a jam star...or a pasty champ. Everything will be exhibited in the quad in front of the house so it promises to be a real draw.

I hope the tea cosies are going well...and it isn't too late to enter and have your work of art displayed at Fortnum & Mason in London prior to the charity auction.

I hear the dovegreyreader entries have started to arrive at Port Eliot and they have been beyond excited to receive them, and meanwhile, as if I haven't given you all enough to do, could you also be thinking about our Flower Show entry.

The judges this year will be Jasper Conran, Candida Lycett-Green and Kitty Arden so if they happen to have found their names here via google alert please could they move along quickly and go and look somewhere else....thank you.

Right...carrying on..

Our entry is more of an installation than anything else...usually completely over the top, and we try and incorporate as many of your suggestions as we can no matter how whacky... as you can see with our winning Sound of Music entry...

Flowers are the least of it where we are concerned, the fun is putting the things together, it's hilarious and of course it's the taking part that counts, not the winning (not much it isn't) 

Fran H-B masterminds the whole thing with superb resourcefulness and imagination and assistance from other Team dgr members and this year I may actually have decent flowers in the garden to adorn our entry. I think we have decided that this will be the main class for our extravaganza entry this year and we have one or two ideas already but would welcome more suggestions...

MRS PEACOCK IN THE LIBRARY
An arrangement depicting a fictitious character.
24 inches by 24 inches. To be viewed from the front

and Fran may flaunt the oasis and the proper spiky things and enter this class for us too...

ONE LUMP OR TWO?
An arrangement in a tea pot for tea when the Vicar Calls.
12 inches by 12 inches. To be viewed from the front

So which fictitious character could we depict and how??

All suggestions very welcome in comments...and thank you, what would I do without you all.

@PortEliotFest ~ The dovegreyreader tent guest list ~ Part Three

I am beginning to think no Port Eliot Festival will ever be complete without my next guest. He was an absolute sensation at his last visit to the dovegreyreader tent, and to the festival at large...

...remember Brian Selznick..

author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck.

Brian is hugely entertaining, a vibrant (orange pants as I think you would say in America...we called them trousers of course) and gifted speaker who rolls with the crowd (not literally) and owns the floor (grass in this case) so we are all very excited that he agreed to come back for more....and just can't wait to hear his laugh, it is completely infectious.

Peter Beacham

Right, who is he I hear you all exclaiming...

Do you remember a book I wrote about last year called Down the Deep Lanes. I had borrowed it from the library and knowing I might never take it back I ordered my own copy. It is a wonderful evocation of many of the lesser seen aspects of Devon life and landscape.. things like cob and corrugated iron and chapels and belfrys, and the book has completely inspired my walking and my looking around me here in the Tamar Valley. When Cathy (St Germans) suggested that I might like to take a look at the new Pevsner Guide - The Buildings of England  - Cornwall and placed this most sumptuous little tome in my hands, a chunky book rich in geographic and historic detail about every building of historic interest in Cornwall, I was really hoping my hand would stick to it and I wouldnt have to give it back. Cathy then suggested that as I would already be across the border from my homeland, perhaps I could think Cornwall and talk to the book's author... Peter Beacham.

'What not the Down the Deep Lanes Peter Beacham??' I asked somewhat incredulously.

And we checked, 'twas the very same. Thank you to Yale University Press who kindly sent me my own copy so expect a few experimental trips to Kernow with the book as our guide.

 

I think that makes eight guests revealed, one more to go and I am going to write more about Louise Carpenter and her book An Unlikely Countess - Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway in a post of its own.

Louise will be part of the Women's Lives theme in the tent, and I should add that the book was actually first published ten years ago and might now be out of print. I don't know how I missed it back in 2004, or how I have missed it since, or why I have never heard it mentioned, but hopefully all that is about to be rectified because it is a brilliant read. I have plenty to say about it and endless questions for Louise on the day.

Copies are being sought for the festival, but there are second-hand copies readily available on You Know Where...just saying. I am also hearing news of a forthcoming Kindle edition (surely this book deserves a second wind I said...and thankfully everyone agrees) so much more about the incredible Lily Budge soon.

So there you have it. I hope you will agree that is one fabulous line-up over the three days of the Festival starting on July 25th, and my thanks to Cathy St Germans and her team for making it all happen. If you can be there even better, tickets are on sale here, but if not have no fear, team dovegreyreader will be out and about reporting on it all here and I will introduce them properly soon. I do hear the Happy Campers have already packed their tent and are busy planning their schedule, and the Knit Angel is busy making the knitsuke various, she is getting some very unusual requests from me.  To explain, the Knitsuke are the knitted or crocheted gifts of great relevance that we give to each speaker, here's the very first one we presented...Edmund de Waal's amber-eyed hare seen here making himself very at home in Edmund's studio.


So there you have it, that's us sorted.

 

 

 

 

 

@PortEliotFest 2014 ~ dovegreyreader tent guest list ~ Part Two

Continuing with news of the line up for the dovegreyreader tent at this year's Port Eliot Festival, we have been able to schedule in four events based on books about women's lives, all of which I have thoroughly enjoyed reading, and three of which have already written about on here (stand by for news of the fourth in the next post on Friday) all by authors I now can't wait to talk with...

Rachel Cooke

Her Brilliant Career, the book about ten women of the 1950s which I enjoyed so much and wrote about on here, and I am delighted that Rachel will be coming to the tent to talk about those lives which proved so enlightening to me and to many about the era in which we grew up and now available in paperback.

Of the cohort of notable women featured in Her Brilliant Career, eventually selected from a cast of many who all popped their heads up once Rachel Cooke started looking for them, I had heard of a few but knew very little about any of them...

Patience Gray, Nancy Spain, Joan Werner-Laurie, Sheila van Damm, Alison Smithson, Margery Fish, Muriel and Betty Box, Jacquetta Hawkes and Rose Heilbron.

Chefs, racing car drivers, architects, film directors, archaeologists, barristers all swimming against the tide of convention and assumption to achieve...

I can see we are going to have much to talk about.

 

Helen Rappaport

Helen needs no introduction here, I am delighted that she will be bringing Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia,  Four Sisters to the tent and I expect a wonderful event. The conversation should flow and we can all give these young women a breath of festival air (they would have loved it all) and expound our pet theories on Alexandra's debilitating health issues, you may remember mine...

'Girl upon girl born to a couple who had to produce a son, but that is giving birth to nigh on 52lb of baby in less than ten years, often with difficulty and all at the end of the nineteenth century when... well I will leave it to your imagination. Helen Rappaport is a historian, thus speculation is not the done thing, but I can speculate wildly, and I would hazard a guess that Alexandra was left with some fairly traumatic physical sequalae to all that....maybe even sufficient to limit her lifestyle, who can know.'

As the book is read by an increasingly wider audience around the world even more theories are coming to light so it all promises some great discussion. News of the documentary, not yet screened, is that the BBC don't want it so disappear amongst the summer sporting schedule (World Cup anyone...*sigh* ) so it is now set for the autumn.

Hannah Rothschild

It is almost two years since I met Hannah Rothschild very briefly at the last Port Eliot Festival before heading home to read The Baroness, Hannah's book about the search for her rebellious ancestor Nica, and another book now available in paperback.

Hearing 'Round Midnight' played by Thelonious Monk, Nica abandoned her marriage, her children and her home and headed to New York to find Monk, eventually caring for him until his death in 1982. In Nica's own words...

'I'd never heard anything remotely like it. I must have played it twenty times in a row. Missed my plane. In fact I never went home. I got the message I belonged where that music was. I was supposed to be involved in some way

A sign of a great book is always that much of the detail is still incredibly vivid in my mind, so yet another event that I am really looking forward to...here's a snippet of my thoughts at the time...

 

And so to Nica, the wonderful, free-spirited rebellious Nica and with a tension built up by Hannah Rothschild as the fate of the women within this patriarchally dominant family is gradually revealed, and to the point where I would have been seriously disappointed if Nica hadn't done a runner, because in the end I was willing her to escape. Suffering a form of de-oxygenated entrapment from real life, and of the highest order, Nica was never cut out for the rarifed atmosphere in which she found herself, something had to give.

It was the Second World War that did it. Nica's life until that one of dependence and moneyed privilege, pampered to the point of infantilism within a rule-bound, class-obsessed society, but with the war came Nica's chance. She took it and capitalised on it, dutifully travelling to the U.S. for the safety of herself and her children, as instructed by her French husband Jules, but then leaving to return to Europe to join the Free French Army. Nica had a busy and exciting war and as I read of her exploits it became obvious that she would never settle back into life as Rothschild woman... there to 'entertain, inform and breed.'

So how lucky is that; three books that I have invested a huge amount of pleasurable reading and writing time with, and now I am going to be able to chat with the authors on the sofa while the sun shines (it WILL) and Bookhound and the Weatherman make six hundred cups of tea, and everyone sits around on the grass knitting and listening and joining in with questions. 

And of course full reports and pictures for all of you festivalling away at home.

Now jazz might not be your thing but here's the music that captured Nica's heart and soul so completely, and maybe we'll have it playing softly in the background before Hannah's event..

 

 

Related articles

The Baroness... the search for Waddesdon Manor

Her Brilliant Career - Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties ~ Rachel Cooke

@PortEliotFest 2014 ~ The dovegreyreader tent guest list ~ Part One

My line-up in the dovegreyreader tent for Port Eliot Festival 2014 is confirmed, and though the running order may still need some last minute tweaking I think we are there with the final guest list of nine. Everyone who was approached gamely accepted the invitation to come and converse among the sofas, and the knitting, and the pots of tea over the weekend of July 25th/26th/27th and the more I delve into the books the more excited I am about sitting and talking with every one of them. As the guests are revealed through this week I will be adding their books to my Port Eliot Reading List in the sidebar >>>>> over here >>>

For those who may not have experienced this before you can check out more information about Port Eliot here, and the Festival here. For one glorious weekend and by kind invitation, we bring dovegreyreader scribbles to life and Team dovegreyreader (you will be meeting them soon) report back on here covering as much of the festival as they can (see 2009, 2010, when I went along on my own and blogged live, and 2011, 2012 when, like this year I had a tent of my own and a team, there was no festival last year...everyone had a break and the grass has recovered beautifully) This all means that if you can't be there you won't be left out.

So please meet my first three guests...

Martin Parr

Not wishing to cause a rift of envy in the Parr household, and having invited Susie Parr, wild swimmer and author of The History of Swimming to the tent at the last festival, we thought it would be nice to invite her husband, photographer Martin Parr, this year.

Seriously, I knew almost nothing about his work, but the joy of this festival is to be bowled a ball that I have to jump about a bit to catch and for which I have to knuckle down and do some homework.

First port of call the libraries, and my thanks to Cornwall who shipped up five enormously heavy books from the St Ives Art Collection free of charge to my nearest branch...and we took a lorry over to collect them.

Now, just two weeks on, there is no circulation getting past my knees but I think I probably know what colour socks he wears...
...well maybe not, but  I am completely engrossed in all things Martin Parr and nor did I realise that he was the instigator of the Boring Postcards books.

How many times have I picked those up in a bookshop and wonder what the point was. Well now I am beginning to understand.

Internationally acclaimed as one of our great social observers, with an eye and a lens that seek out the realities of English life in particular, but also taking that eye around the world and having a good look everywhere else too, Martin Parr sees it and tells it in a most unique and compelling way.

That little book (pictured above) Martin Parr, published by Phaidon is, in contrast to the mighty tomes, a pocket-sized retrospective of his work, and if you are the least bit interested it is an affordable must-have introduction to his photography. If you are English, maybe of a certain age, or know enough about us, you may feel as if you know the people and recognise the situations on every single page... and if you aren't and you don't, then many apologies but you might by the end of all this, because expect lots more about Martin Parr over the next few weeks. His pictures inspire and inform in equal measure, and often in very unexpected ways and we are loving them.

If you live near Bradford then lucky lucky you but you will have to be quick. Until June 29th there is an exhibition of Martin Parr's work at the National Media Museum along with that of the man he credits as an inspiration, Tony Ray-Jones. 

Richard Benson 

Richard Benson's first book The Farm was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in 2005 and tells the story of his family's struggle when it became clear that they would lose their farm. When his parents are forced to sell up, Richard, a journalist in London, returns home to Yorkshire to help his family make the transition from their birthright and a life on the land to something very different. 

Richard's latest book The Valley A Hundred Years in the Life of a Family currently has me in its clutches, it is beautifully written, flows like a river and I am deeply engrossed. The sort of book I love to read and I love to write about here; social history mediated through the lives of real people and all woven in with the impact of historical events along the way...

"The close-knit villages of the Dearne Valley were home to four generations of the Hollingworth family. Spanning Richard Benson’s great-grandmother Winnie’s ninety-two years in the valley, and drawing on years of historical research, interviews and anecdotes, The Valley lets us into generations of carousing and banter as the family’s attempts to build a better and fairer world for themselves meet sometimes with triumph, sometimes with bitter defeat. Against a backdrop of underground explosions, strikes and pit closures, these are unflinching, deeply personal stories of battles between the sexes in a man’s world sustained by strong women; of growing up, and the power of love and imagination to transform lives."

And starting to do my homework (it is like swotting for an exam) I discover this is not the Richard Benson who has written umpteen books on school howlers and How to Pass an Exam. Imagine that...

'So tell me Richard, Blackboard Slips and Homework Blunders...nice title...where did your inspiration come for this book...'

Benjamin Ranyard

Mr Higgledy Gardens himself...yes the real thing, not a pretend one, not a cardboard cut-out...no I am to meet the real Mr Higgledy.


Cornwall's very own cut flower genius and purveyor of seeds for so many of the lovely plants that are growing in our garden...

and drawing in the bees and butterflies from far and wide...

as well as being the author of the funniest horticultural website and twitter feed ever.

Ben has planted up a cut flower border in the walled garden at Port Eliot in readiness for the festival and will be doing talks there too, so there will be hordes of people crowding round to look at his mammoth zinnias and his cobaea scandens I am sure.

To be honest I'll be fine if no one else pitches up at the tent for my event because this means I can just sit Mr Higgledy on the sofa and get some advice about my ongoing nicotiana crowd crisis...

I am going to be in such trouble with Ben about these... but I have a feeling that likewise we will be packed out and also in need of thinning wherever Mr Higgledy goes.

I am hoping to redeem myself though, and that at least 'Something' Higgledy will be in flower and transportable to adorn the tent for the duration of the festival.

 

 

 

A Suitable Boy ~ Vikram Seth :: Parts 17, 18 &19 The End

It is 21.48 on Friday 20th June 2014 and at last I have turned the final page of A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth....isn't it the best feeling when we do that with these long shared reads. We started on September 14th 2013 and here we are on the Longest Day, the Summer Equinox which all feels nicely auspicious... and I took a picture of the book in the ten o'clock dimpsy Devon light with Munstead Wood hovering above to remind me of the moment...

I hope you have all experienced that real sense of achievement too.

I just wanted to record that, not only for posterity but also to let you know that I am writing this post just an hour or so before it must go online for our final weekend of discussions, so my apologies for the rather disjointed thoughts to start us off. It's been to the reading wire this month, but who was to know the weather would be so wonderful, that the garden needed planting up, that there has been watering to do and standing and staring to indulge in, and flowers to pick...

Cue picture of flowers ( sweet william, ammi majus and phacelia) a congratulatory and thank you nosegay to all of you for getting this far..


But neither could I have guessed that Vikram Seth was going to compress so much action and excitement into these last three parts, so much so that I had to keep stopping and thinking because I was in danger of rushing.

And how could I possibly rush the death of Mrs Mahesh Kapoor..

Or the hubris of her grieving husband...

Or Maan's terrible deed...

Or the dirty tricks of the election campaign...

Or Pran's interview...

Or Kabir's jealousy...

Or Amit's poetic proposal...

Or Arun's letter to Lata...

Or Firoz's about-turn in the courtroom...

And finally Lata's decision and the wedding...

A Suitable Boy is definitely the longest book I think I have ever read... and reading the titles of those apparently ahead of it in the word count stakes, it may well stay that way, yet I look back at my convoluted character page, with genograms and arrows hither and yon, and remember what a muddle it all felt last September, yet how well and clearly I feel I know them all now...

But setting all that aside I am wondering how I feel about Lata's decision...

I haven't had much time to think about it, and who knows, you may all make me change my mind by Sunday, but I am currently feeling that she has made a safe decision, a mature, sensible and informed one, and that Haresh will be a perfect husband.

But will he be too perfect...

Will he be interesting enough...

Do we already know that he might privilege his work above his marriage...

Has Lata settled for the predictable and rejected all else...

Did I expect more or differently of her...I'm not sure...

And the ending...what is the ending saying..

Needless to say I am now on the edge of my seat waiting for A Suitable Girl.

So that's a wrap everyone, I hope you have enjoyed the book as much as I have, and thank you so much for reading along with me. I would never have managed it on my own that's for sure, and now I can't wait to hear what you all think...

 

 

Related articles

A Suitable Boy ~ Vikram Seth :: Parts 9 & 10

A Suitable Boy ~ Vikram Seth :: Parts 11 & 12

A Suitable Boy ~ Vikram Seth :: Parts 15 & 16 - Sarah's thoughts

A Suitable Boy ~ Vikram Seth :: Parts 15 & 16 - Angela's thoughts

A Suitable Boy ~ Vikram Seth :: Parts 13 & 14

A Suitable Boy ~ Vikram Seth :: Parts One & Two

Jerwood Fiction uncovered Prize 2014

You might recall that one of the highlights of my year in 2013 was the invitation to be on the judging panel for the Fiction Uncovered Prize, the prize that..

'... helps develop wider audiences for emerging and deserving British writers via a major summer promotion supported by a wide network of partnerships. The initiative seeks to promote writers of outstanding work, looking beyond the debut novelists and the bestsellers.'

Delivered to my door last year box after box of books, submissions for the prize, and suddenly the dream of ever judging a literary prize became a reality...I would have to sit down and read them all.

Gulp.

And I wouldn't be able to write about many of them here if the tradition surrounding confidentiality of submissions was to be maintained...that might have been the hardest part. Writing about a book and then discussing it with all of you really consolidates the whole Book as Experience; it's like the final chapter of any read for me and I have to say I missed you all.

It was all very exciting though and exhilarating to be talking about books in this way, as well as seeing the decision-making process through from Non-Starters, to Maybes, to Possibles to Definites and with books swapping places all the time. One of us might suddenly see something special in a Maybe, flag it up to the others and it would move up to Possible, likewise others might move down the pack. E mails flew thick and fast until, at a certain point in the process, we deliberately all agreed to stop sharing views and settle down to do our own reading, to find our own stars in the mix before making final decisions.

Then cue over-excited behaviour from me in the middle of Charing Cross Road as our choice of books starred in the Foyles window on the day of the announcement...it was like seeing our very own babies on display...

The difference this year comes with the announcement of the winning books at the party in London this evening (really sorry I can't be there everyone)  because each chosen author will now receive prize money of £5000 sponsored by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.

This year's chair of judges and writer Matt Haig comments;

“We really didn't want a list full of compromise choices and I think that decision has paid off. I can safely say that every book on that list I could strongly recommend to someone, and everyone's favourites managed to make the final eight. We didn't want a list that had too much of an agenda, other than to highlight novels and writers that should be on even more people's bookshelves. I couldn't be happier with the final eight books and authors, some of whom were totally new to me and my fellow judges. These are all great books that can be enjoyed, and which are filled with humanity. I am so proud of the list.”               

Dedicated to helping British writers build their careers, this is the first time that the Fiction Uncovered prize has been able to offer prize money. The £40,000 fund makes the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize one of the biggest literary prize funds awarded solely to British writers. 

So without further ado here are the now un-embargoed winners and congratulations to each of them.

This is an incredibly diverse list, some you may fancy reading, others not, but it is clear the prize continues to ensure a selection of books that will appeal to a wide range of readers, and whether to your taste or not you can be sure each and every one will be a good read. Words are from the blurbs, whilst links are to reviews on the Fiction Uncovered website where available.

Lolito ~ Ben Brooks ( Canongate)

Lolito is a love story about a fifteen year-old boy who meets a middle-aged woman on the internet.
When his long-term girlfriend and first love Alice, betrays him at a house party, Etgar goes looking for cyber solace in the arms of Macy, a stunning but bored housewife he meets online. What could possibly go wrong...?

Hilarious, fearless and utterly outrageous, Lolito is a truly twenty-first century love story.

The Dig ~ Cynan Jones (Granta)

This is a searing short novel, built of the interlocking fates of a badger-baiter and a disconsolate farmer, unfolding in a stark rural setting where man, animal, land and weather are at loggerheads. Their two paths converge with tragic inevitability. Jones writes of the physiology of grief and the isolation of loss with brilliance, and about the simple rawness of animal existence with a naturalist's unblinking eye. His is a pared-down prose of resonant simplicity and occasional lushness. His writing about ducks and dogs and cows is axe-sharp. There is not a whiff of the bucolic pastoral or the romanticized sod here. This is a real rural ride. It is short, but crackles with latent compressed energy that makes it swell to fill more space than at first glance it occupies.

Whatever Happened to Billy Parks ~ Gareth R.Roberts (The Friday Project)

A vivid and engaging story of wasted talent, second chances, family, friendship, and, of course, the beautiful game.
October 17th 1973: the greatest disaster in the history of English football.
All England had to do was beat Poland to qualify for the World Cup.
They didn’t.
They could only draw.
Left on the bench that night was a now forgotten genius, West Ham’s Billy Parks: beautiful, gifted and totally flawed.
Fast-forward forty years, Billy’s life is a testament to wasted talent. His liver is failing and he earns his money selling football memories on the after-dinner circuit to anyone who’ll listen and buy him a drink. His family has deserted him and his friends are tired of his lies and excuses.
But what if he could be given a second chance? What if he could go back in time and win the game for England? What if he was able to undo the pain he’d caused his loved ones?
The Council of Football Immortals can give him that chance, just as long as he can justify himself, and his life, to them.
This is the story of Billy Parks: a man who bore his genius like a dead weight and who now craves that most precious of things – the chance to put things right.

Mrs Hemingway ~ Naomi Wood (Picador)

In the dazzling summer of 1926, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley travel from their home in Paris to a villa in the south of France. They swim, play bridge and drink gin. But wherever they go they are accompanied by the glamorous and irrepressible Fife. Fife is Hadley’s best friend. She is also Ernest’s lover. Hadley is the first Mrs. Hemingway, but neither she nor Fife will be the last. Over the ensuing decades, Ernest’s literary career will blaze a trail, but his marriages will be ignited by passion and deceit. Four extraordinary women will learn what it means to love the most famous writer of his generation, and each will be forced to ask herself how far she will go to remain his wife… Luminous and intoxicating, Mrs. Hemingway portrays real lives with rare intimacy and plumbs the depths of the human heart.

Vanishing ~ Gerard Woodward (Picador)

Towards the end of the Second World War a young British artist called Kenneth Brill is arrested for painting landscapes near the old village of Heathrow. The authorities suspect his paintings contain coded information about the new military airfield that is to be built there. Brill protests that he is merely recording a landscape that will soon disappear. Under interrogation a more complicated picture emerges as Brill tells the story of his life - of growing up among the market gardens of the Heath, of his life on the London art scene of the 1930s, and his brief spell as a master at a minor public school. But a darker picture also comes to light, of dealings with the prostitutes and pimps of the Soho underworld, of a break-in at a royal residence and of connections with well-known fascist sympathizers at home and abroad.

 So who is the real Kenneth Brill? The hero of El Alamein who, as a camouflage officer, helped pull off one of the greatest acts of military deception in the history of warfare, or the lover of Italian Futurist painter and fascist sympathizer Arturo Somarco? Why was he expelled from the Slade? And what was he doing at Hillmead, the rural community run by Rufus Quayle, friend of Hitler himself? Vanishing shows the world through the eyes of one of the forgotten geniuses of British art, a man whose artistic vision is so piercing he has trouble seeing what is right in front of him.

Mr Loverman ~ Bernadine Evaristo (Penguin)

Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant, wise-cracking local character with a dapper taste in retro suits and a fondness for quoting Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father and grandfather - but he is also secretly homosexual, lovers with his great childhood friend, Morris.

 His deeply religious and disappointed wife, Carmel, thinks he sleeps with other women. When their marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away?

 Mr Loverman is a ground-breaking exploration of Britain's older Caribbean community, which explodes cultural myths and fallacies and shows the extent of what can happen when people fear the consequences of being true to themselves.

Little Egypt ~ Lesley Glaister (Salt)

Little Egypt was once a well-to-do country house in the north of England. Now it’s derelict and trapped on a small island of land between a railway, a dual carriageway and a superstore, and although it looks deserted it isn’t. Nonagenarian twins, Isis and Osiris, still live in the home they were born in, and from which in the 1920s their obsessive Egyptologist parents left them to search for the fabled tomb of Herihor – a search from which they never returned. Isis and Osiris have stayed in the house, guarding a terrible secret, for all their long lives until chance meeting between Isis and young American anarchist Spike, sparks an unlikely friendship and proves a catalyst for change.

 

All the Birds Singing ~ Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape)

'Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It's just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep - every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.

It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake's unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.'

 

 

 

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It's @FictionUncovered Day

Here comes the judge...

The Manor at Hemingford Grey...

We had booked a tour of The Manor at Hemingford Grey  ( the Green Knowe of Lucy Boston's books) with Diana Boston months before our planned visit, and arriving early we wandered around the gardens...

The house immediately struck us as a magical hybrid; steep roof, attic windows which always suggest mystery and intrigue and forgotten treasures (love a good attic me) bits added on and all making the thought of what may lie within even more exciting. To walk around the grounds is to walk in Tolly's footsteps and around each corner wonderful, yet familiar surprises..

'Against the side of the house, immensely tall...was a stone figure. The first thing that drew his attention to it was, close to the ground, some stone fished swimming in what looked like stone water, as though the flood had left something behind...'



'Then he saw that behind the fishes were two huge bare stone feet that seemed to be paddling with stone ripples round the ankles ; above them legs and folds of clothing. High above that...among the twining strings of the creeper he saw the head of a giant stone man, carrying a child on his shoulders.'

Now I know it's only fiction, that moment in The Children of Green Knowe when Tolly first comes across this 'something so big that at first he had not seen it,' but for me there is still something other worldly and well... plain lovely about fiction coming to life, about seeing the real place that is real enough because it exists, but isn't really, because it is made up. That makes no sense at all but it's why I'd give anything to visit Prince Edward Island and do the whole  Anne of Green Gables thing...or why I did the Wuthering Heights walk back in the 1970s when my nursing flatmate's family lived in nearby Heptonstall, or why people flock to the Yorkshire dales on the trail of James Herriot and a sighting of Tricky Woo

I'm sure I am not alone in this...

And the sense of place could only intensify as we wandered around and saw the topiary...

and coveted this amount of Honesty (Lunaria annua) in one place...

My patch is in its first year and modest by comparison, but I did buy a Green Knowe Honesty plant to add to my own and thus far it thrives, so I will have a bit of Lucy Boston's garden in mine. 

It was mid-April and the garden was streets ahead of ours and looking beautiful, after our rather barren 3/4 acre of bare earth left behind it quite took us by surprise..

By the time Diana Boston welcomed Bookhound and I into the house (and very kindly encouraged me to take any photos that I wanted to share on here,) I was very far gone into Green Knowe-ness...

and both our imaginations absolutely captivated by the atmosphere, the welcome and Diana's wonderful commentary...

This is the staircase leading to the quilt room...

...its walls decorated with the original art work for many of Lucy Boston's books.

The quilts will come in the next post, but we stopped in this room while Diana and I very carefully folded each quilt back onto the bed, and I was able to look closely, take pictures and ask endless questions, before we moved on up to the music room where Lucy Boston held her wartime gramophone recitals for locally-based servicemen. My apologies...excitement and anticipation now so far advanced that checking the settings on my camera was the last thing on my mind so blurred and absent seem to be the order of things, but as you can see the word 'gramophone' really does mean what it says on the tin, and sitting next to it, Graham who also assists with house tours...

Having lived abroad was sufficient evidence for the locals to consider Lucy to be a German spy as the paranoia of war flourished, and she was most certainly viewed with great suspicion. As Diana pointed out, Lucy did little to help herself or her image, or attempt to quell these neighbourhood fears, in fact fuelling them by gardening in German costume; the dirndl was legendary apparently.

Then it was up that little staircase and I wonder, if you have read The Children of Green Knowe, whether this is how Tolly's bedroom looks in your imagination. It fitted mine like a perfectly cut visual template...

' At one side there was a beautiful old rocking horse - not a 'safety' rocking horse hanging on iron swings from a cntre shaft, but a horse whose legs were stretched to full gallop, fixed to long rockers so that it could, if you rode it violently, both rear and kick....he put his hand on the rocking-horse's mane which was real horse-hair. Its tail was real hair too, black and soft and long...'

'A wicker bird-cage hung from one of the beams...'

Linnet would always leave its door open for the chaffinches to come and go as they pleased...

...and of course we saw Toby's Japanese mouse... 'so cleverly carved you could see every hair...'

'Who's Toby?'
'Well, really another Toseland, Toby for short...

and so the mystery of the children from the past begins...

All too soon it was time for us to leave, but as we walked back along the drive we both agreed this had been the most incredible two hours and well worth the effort, the planning and the drive to get there. Looking back for a last glimpse of the house...

and spotting a peacock butterfly on the grass I was reminded of that nuisance of a peacock in the book, but also that moment when Linnet holds a partridge in her lap and the peacock nearby 'was looking beautiful and gracious'...

Can you tell how away with the fairies I am by this time...but don't we all need purple-prose days like this in which the world, even for the briefest of moments, feels like a perfect and innocent and magical place to be. 

And the next instalment...finally it is Diana Boston and the quilts..

Our thanks to Diana Boston, who works incredibly hard to keep Lucy's memory and her work both alive and vibrant, whilst maintaining and extending that warmth of welcome and sense of belonging to everyone who walks through the doors of The Manor at Hemingford Grey. You too can book a tour of 'Green Knowe'  details are here.

 

 

 

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Channelling my inner Lucy...

The Manor at Hemingford Grey, Lucy Boston and Vera Brittain..

Happy Bloomsday/ Blogsday...

It seems light years since I was there, but what wonderful memories I have of that visit to Dublin for Bloomsday 2011 and all thanks to writing this here thing called a blog which led to an invitation from the Irish Tourist Board.

In fact I feel like calling it Happy Blogsday because I have been in London this weekend talking about dovegreyreader and blogs and book 'reviewing' in the digital age et al for The Literary Consultancy. I was part of a fascinating discussion panel chaired by Paul Blezard, with Mark Thwaite (of Ready Steady Book and Quercus) and Sam Leith (one time lit.ed of the Daily Telegraph, now a freelance journalist) and it was good to be able to think about all that in the run up, practise a few mental moves etc and also get out of my gardening clothes for a day...oh yes, and be awake all night on Friday wondering if I would wake up in time for the early train..

Of course this being the digital age everything you say is being live tweeted and with pictures too ...how terrifying is that, and, having left all technology at home, I had to hold my breath until we walked back in the door at midnight to see what faux pas may have slipped through. In the end all seemed to have gone well and so chirping through the ether came all the values I hold dear about all this...

Hearing from @dovegreyreader and @questingvole on the questions of objectivity and authority in book blogging and newspaper reviews #TLC14

Sam Leith offered a brilliant introduction to the world of journalist/newspaper reviewers and dispelled any claims that may be made for their literary superiority. Mark Thwaite followed with his assessment of the blogosphere from both a personal and a professional point of view

@dovegreyreader provides a wonderful example of clear aims & motivations: no game plan, won't monetise, won't work for a paper. #TLC14

I did say that, I remember now... however...if the offer for £million comes in I may eat my words...

@dovegreyreader Loved your talk at TLC (don't monetise blog, don't give in to big media). Inspiring! 

Oh ...alright then.

@dovegreyreader blogging is a conversation. And manners are very important

Yes, this was my line about creating a welcoming online space in response to a thread about what makes a successful blog. Well succesful or not, and apart from attempting to offer interesting content, I feel that replying in comments is a common courtesy that I would offer if we met and conversed anywhere else, so why not on here, and I talked about us as an inclusive welcoming community (and no one seemed to be sick in a bucket at the suggestion) and long may it last.

@dovegreyreader writes for the pleasure of sharing a good book with people...

But of course and here the freedom of the blogger became clear. Freedom to chose what we read, what we write about, and I would add how much space it takes up, all severe constraints on the lit pages reviewer to say nothing of doing a job to earn a living versus doing something for pleasure.

.@dovegreyreader on not reviewing bad books: "I can't bring myself to carry on with a book I'm not enjoying" #TLC14

Well except for that one...you know that one and I also explained how clever you are at spotting the books that start off on the Now Reading sidebar and then mysteriously disappear. 

Book reading is an experience. My reviews are how I relay that experience, which is an emotional engagement. @dovegreyreader #TLC14

Yes, subjective and how we all read a book and the complete freedom that allows.

As an aside my thanks to Nancy who unwittingly sent me this very relevant link to an article in Vanity Fair the day before, Why are Literary Critics so dismayed by Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and its success. There is another whole debate to be had around that piece, but suffice to say I did make it plain that this wasn't a sycophantic community where everyone had to agree with me about the books I have enjoyed and choose to write about... that we could debate and discuss and disagree in comments without spilling blood...but that where The Goldfinch was concerned I had enough love for the book to cope with any amount of naysaying.

And brace yourselves because I am about to do a Goldfinch with The Paying Guests, the new novel by Sarah Waters to be published on August 28.

There was lots more discussion but hopefully you get the gist, and know that I took you all with me in my mind as I spoke, but it also reminded me how innovative we can be here too, and as we come to our final week of reading this year's chunkster (Final part of A Suitable Boy on Saturday) I thought of 2009-10 that amazing first year of the Big Team Read...and me stupidly eagerly saying on Bloomsday, 'How hard can it be to read sixty pages a month for a year, let's do it and I'll post about it on the 16th of every month and we'll finish on Bloomsday a year hence,' and so lots of us did and Team Ulysses was born. 

And then a year later we did turn the final page of the book with that HUGE sense of achievement. I actually went shopping in Launceston that same afternoon and no one seemed in the least bit interested when I approached them in the street to tell them I had read Ulysses, (no of course I didn't really, I'm English) so how good that so many of you were and still are out there reading here and contributing.

So Bloomsday/Blogsday feels like a good day to celebrate the reach and the innovation that the blogosphere allows (and not just on here but on millions of other blogs too) and which perhaps James Joyce might have raised a glass to as well.

Happy Bloomsday/Blogsday to one and all, and now let's all down a handful of statins and head for O'Connell Street to eat lamb's kidneys and cholesterol on a plate at Gresham's Hotel.

 

 

 

 

Howards End ~ E.M.Forster

'We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story only deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk...'

I mentioned a while ago that finally I had succeeded in reading Howards End, a book with which I had notched up at least six previous failures. It was a failure that mystified me, firstly loved and lauded by so many, and secondly with such a beautifully enticing cover. I would stare through that door, onto that garden and desperately want to know what was happening within, but to no avail.

Maybe I was misinterpreting E.M.Forster's intentions with that quote... I was missing the fact that beneath that seemingly genteel exterior of Howards End lies an excoriating critique of money and class, and women's lives along with a dazzlingly brilliant overview of the era. Written in 1910 the 'social, economic and philosophical forces at play' make for a very revealing read which shines a piercing spotlight on pre-First World War England, thus adding much to my Crisis of Brilliance reading trail and attempts to read of all this at a slant.

It all appears to be a paeon to the virtues of England...rural and timeless 'lying as a jewel in a silver sea,' as E.M. Forster looks down over his country and sees an island 'sailing as a ship of souls,' before separating those 'souls' into three distinct classes for his dissection.

There will be the Schlegels, the literary, cultural, idealistic upper class intellectuals of independent means.

There will be the Wilcoxs, the materialistic, pragmatic family imbued with the work ethic, who assume the right to judge but prefer not to be judged themselves

And then there will be the Basts, the lower middle class couple, and between all these E.M.Forster's famous words 'Only Connect' must resonate as he starts to spin his clever and intricate web of connections.

I started reading Howards End by E.M.Forster (yet again) on my Kindle one day... just like that, and before I knew it I was beyond the whole umbrella fiasco and into new and previously unconquered territory.

The umbrella thing had driven me mad becoming a real hurdle which somehow lost me every time in the past...

'Oh God , it's that umbrella again...'

The novel doesn't start with the umbrella though, it starts helpfully and interestingly enough with Helen's letters.

Sisters Helen and Margaret Schlegel and their brother Tibby, have been left to fend for themselves in early twentieth century London following the death of their parents. Mrs Schlegel has died in childbirth following Tibby's arrival, the girls aged five and thirteen respectively, and with Mr Schlegel dying five years later they are, by then, all just old enough to be their own parent-free family.

It is whilst visiting the Wilcox's, friends met on holiday, at their country retreat Howards End, that Helen believes she has fallen in love with a Wilcox son and writes to tell her sister as much, at which point action must be taken to avert a potentially disastrous engagement. Aunt Juley, always desperate to be of use to the family but invariably not required, is dispatched to deal with it all, and still not an umbrella in sight which means I have read this much at least six times before and never quite got into it.

Why ever not...I have no idea because this time I was completely hooked and was soon sailing past the mix up with Leonard Bast and the wrong umbrella

Maybe it was the cover picture on my copy of the book lingering in my mind..

Maybe it was the trip to Charleston while Bookhound and I were on our mini-tour that reminded me of the very obvious similarities to the real-life scenario faced by Vanessa (Bell) Virginia (Woolf)  and brothers Thoby and Adrian Stephen, also left to 'raise themselves' in early twentieth-century Bloomsbury. 

With one disaster successfully averted more potential disasters follow, and it is the savvy older sister Margaret who proves herself to be the assertive,canny and capable one when more complex relationships play out. Ultimately Howards End (the house) becomes a refuge, a welcome port in a storm and a sanctuary as E.M.Forster explores the notions of social class and its foibles through his characters, and especially through the lives of women. It struck me that Forster challenges the constraints in the most feminist of traditions, and with wry humour too, surely way ahead of his time and deeply and astutely perceptive.

Although Howards End was written long before Vanessa Bell moved to Charleston I had a bit of deja-vue, life-joining-up-with-fiction moment as the guide took us around the house which was looking as lovely as ever...



There is a moment in Howards End when mention is made of Margaret and Helen's sentimental attachment to a chiffonier of their mother's, and as we stepped into one of the bedrooms at Charleston the guide pointed out one of the few pre-Bloomsbury pieces of furniture in the house...a dressing table that had belonged to Vanessa and Virginia's mother, and which according to Virginia's diary had been in the room when their mother had died.

'We can only surmise that they kept it for sentimental reasons,' suggested our guide, and I had an Only Connect moment of my own with that description in Howards End as I stared at it. By comparison to the other furniture in the house it really was a rather ugly thing, with its mottled mirror and overstated proportions...the sunken recess on the top and the deep drawers each side. It seemed slightly clumsy and out of place, the sort of thing that the Omega Workshops were challenging with their avant garde prices, but then don't so many things invested with sentimental value declare their beauty only to the eye of the original beholder. 

E.M. Forster was certainly part of the Bloomsbury milieu...might he have 'borrowed' this little cameo I wonder, someone will know. And perhaps someone else will know where the reference is in Virginia Woolf's diaries, it's like looking for a chiffonier in a very large haystack.

And interesting questions of inheritance are writ large over Howards End (the house) too, and ultimately over the heritage of England destined to be placed under such serious threat in the years to come and with its class structure exposed and thwarted.

So there you have it. Finally I understand and love Howards End, that perseverance rewarded because it is a book I know I will treausure and read again...and maybe again, and one that now earns its place on my Best Books shelf.

All in good time etc. do these good things reveal themselves, so how about you and Howards End... have you read it...is it a favourite, or are you still trying to get beyond the brolly episode, and while you are thinking here are some nice Charleston tulips for your delectation...

 

 

 

 

Sunset...

We had sung John Rutter's Gaelic Blessing at choir practice tonight, and as I drove home into this sunset there seemed to be enough 'deep peace of the quiet earth to you'  and even more of 'the gentle night to you' to go round so I thought I would share some...

The Manor at Hemingford Grey, Lucy Boston and Vera Brittain..

'I first visited Hemingford Grey in 1915, when it seemed to my eyes the most forgotten bit of rural England, wonderfully left behind...wrapped in the primeval quietness...it appeared a semi-derelict Georgian farmhouse, lived in joylessly if at all. Yet it held its position in space with dignity...I was not to know it was waiting for me, but as I punted past I gave it a friendly thought. If I lived there I would at least give it sweet briar.'

Whilst Lucy Boston caught her first glimpse of her future home in 1915, Bookhound and I caught our first glimpse of the house just a few weeks ago, late one evening having arrived at our B&B in Hemingford Grey and strolling out to see where we needed to be for our tour of The Manor (Green Knowe in Lucy Boston's books) scheduled for the following day....

It was approaching dusk as we walked through the village and spotted this cheeky little thatcher's folly on a cottage roof...

and marvelled at how imperceptibly the river flowed (we are so used to our fast flowing Dartmoor torrents) as we strolled along the banks of the Great Ouse...

...before stealing (well it felt a bit like that) our first glimpse of the house, the Green Knowe that for so long has only been built in my imagination.

Back in 1915, when she first saw The Manor at Hemingford Grey, Lucy M. Boston, then Lucy Wood, was working as a V.A.D. at Addenbrookes Hospital in nearby Cambridge. In 1914 Lucy had gone up to Somerville College in Oxford to study Classics, having (according to her memoir) taken her entrance exam and secured her place in 1913, and my interest was immediately picqued because I had been re-reading Testament of Youth and surely this would have been at exactly the same time as Vera Brittain.

I had no idea, but don't you love it when the most unlikely connections start to form, and even though this seemed like a very disparate set of dots to try and join up.

Whilst Vera slaved over her entrance exams Lucy, writing in her autobiography Memories, seems to have been much more relaxed. Sending a girl to university was, in Lucy's words, 'an ultra-modern idea' for her school which was woefully unprepared for educating to the necessary standard, and Somerville was chosen only because Lucy's brother declared he would never live down the appalling idea of a sister at Girton.

'I had no ambition. Formerly they had tried to make me a missionary, now it was to be a 'blue-stocking.'

'The entrance examination for Somerville...appalled me when I read it through. It was at once clear that I had received no education. There seemed to be nothing that I had ever heard mentioned, let alone knew anything about. The only question I now remember was 'What was Shakespeare's idea of Woman?' which struck me as so silly that I said so, and wrote quite a lot with vigour....in those days there was no competition and greatly to my surprise I was accepted.'

But apparently this was in 1913, Lucy had to wait a year to take up her place, and perhaps all is explained in Vera Brittain's diary entry for March the following year...

'This is the worst possible year for anyone trying to get into Somerville. Last year they had forty vacancies owing to new buildings, but this year they have only 18, and 82 people trying for them.'

I say 'apparently' and 'perhaps' because having made some inquiries with the archivist at Somerville College to check my theory about Vera and Lucy (and my thanks to them for taking the time and trouble to seek out the answers and reply) it would seem there is some discrepancy in Lucy's dates...she sat the entrance exam in March 1914 and went to the college that same year, so the competition must have been fierce.

But how interesting (well I thought so...) that Vera, largely self-tutored, experienced that same sense of inadequacy as Lucy when she read the exam paper...

'The moment I read mine, I realised that I could not have any chance at all. I was so petrified by the discovery that I sat staring for half an hour at the questions without writing a word...'

In fact Vera fared much better than she thought and was offered a scholarship to Somerville. War had been declared the month before both women headed for Oxford in the Michaelmas term to embark on their university education, and to study on the same course.

Though I can find no reference to a meeting I like to imagine that when Lucy faced this...

'The first evening was rather overwhelming. The whole college assembled outside the dining hall. It was the rule that senior students must always take in a junior. Some fourth year girl offered me her arm. Was this meant to be manly? It was always ritually done and we all crocodiled in. We addressed each other as Miss So-and-so. Among one's friends it was shortened to the surname only, as among men...for the first time my ears were affrighted by the violent treble vibrato of a hall full of intense females talking for dear life. I never got used to this detestable sound.

and Vera, writing in her diary, recounted this...

'Being a fresher here is very comic. It is like being a new girl at school, without the terror, on an enlarged scale & with full consciousness, which you never have at school, of the humour of the situation. One 3rd year girl asked me today if going into meals was not an ordeal, & another whether it did not worry me to see so many strange faces. I was able to reassure both ladies as to my freedom from perturbation on that point.

Well I'd like to think that perhaps they glanced and smiled at each other in a grimace of sympathy across the table or something.

In her second term Lucy, realising that she needed to be 'sharing the experience of my generation,' decided to leave Somerville and go to the war as a nurse, but perhaps her Greek was letting her down too...

'I was doing classics and quickly learned how badly I had been taught and that I should never pass the first exam, but I still loved Greek and with it the shrewd humorous Scottish don who tutored me...'

I wonder if that was the same one, Mr May, who tutored Vera Brittain to a well-deserved Pass attained during a term when her every spare waking moment was also spent watching and waiting for letters from Roland Leighton soon to be heading for the Front.

Vera was to leave Somerville during that Hilary term of 1915 too, putting on hold an academic career full of promise to be resumed after the war. Lucy Boston (nee Wood) would not return to Oxford instead marrying in 1917 and giving birth to her son Peter. It was following the break up of her marriage, and a return to Cambridge (because Peter was a student at King's College), that Lucy became reacquainted with her beloved future home, and The Manor finally became hers in 1938 and in the most fitting yet serendipitous way...

'Someone chanced to say,' I hear there is a house for sale in Hemingford Grey.' ...without further question or thought I took a taxi out to that sombre house standing in a perfect position.

    'I hear this house is for sale,' I said at the door. They asked how I knew. It was their intention to sell but they hadn't yet begun to advertise it. (The house I had been told of was another which I had never noticed.)

What a wonderful way for a house and its caregiver to find each other.

More soon but here's our first glimpse on the following morning...

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Lucy M. Boston

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Channelling my inner Lucy...

Tales From the Potting Shed...Garden Pleasings

In case you were wondering...well, no, the novelty hasn't worn off the greenhouse or the garden and we have all been working our socks off out there as you can see..

Having been very slow to get started ...no early spring for us and I heard that was because of the mild winter, nothing knew it was time to wake up, but now everything is suddenly taking off. Lots of things are still an experiment, some are working (we discover our garden loves Sweet William and they cope with the wind) some are taking their time (ornamental poppies and aquilegias by the hundred but won't be flowering until next year) so all today's pleasings are garden-themed, which doesn't mean that yours have to be so please do share your own in comments as always, but I would love to know what is doing well over on your patch too...

Alliums...

I wasn't quite brave enough to plant full height ones, thinking the wind would have them bent double and broken in minutes, so I settled for a short variety and we are loving them. Such clever looking things aren't they, and these have been going for weeks already and still haven't opened fully so we plan many more next year. Any varieties to recommend??

Roses...

Good old Munstead Wood, my single rose purchase last year, is throwing off flowers in its pot like a thing possessed, and this despite my pruning attempts (with the book in one hand and the secateurs in the other) so on this basis I am obviously now a Rose Expert and allowed to buy more. I am staying with either David Austin or Peter Beale varieties so have now added Winchester Cathedral and William Shakespeare, and I am playing safe and keeping them all in large pots for now.  Having lost so many roses in the past at least I can feed them, move them and generally keep an eye.

Sweet Peas...

As an experiment I sowed some Sweet Peas last autumn to see if they would winter over and give us early flowers. They flew away like crazy and then laboured on in the cold frame, through all that wet weather, and by the time I came to plant them out were looking pretty dreadful. Mottled and sickly (and no I won't use empty toilet rolls again) and I wasn't very hopeful...but now look at them. Some nice deep pots, fresh compost and a bit of tlc and we have had our first flowers before the end of May from the Wiltshire Ripple...

Of course I muddled all the labels but in there somewhere and on the way should be Captain of the Blues, Lord Nelson, Miss Willmott and a load of other important people and thus the autumn sowing of Sweet Peas moves from experiment to given. We have sown more through the spring too so we should have flowers well into October.

The Greenhouse..

I can hardly remember life without a greenhouse. Every day we all wander out there and check our various growings and this week we have moved all the flower seedlings and staging outside in readiness for some serious tomato, melon, aubergine, pepper and cape gooseberry (experiment...couldn't resist the plant) production.

And how about this then...

Your eyes do not deceive you...it is a Meconopsis...look here's another one...

I can't lie to you.

From the seeds I sowed last autumn I have managed to raise six young plants but this is not one of them. Mine won't be flowering this year (and apparently it is better if they don't in their first year) but I have been a martyr to the things ALL winter,  and when I saw some plants in bud at the local garden show a few weeks ago...well I just couldn't stop myself...just to see what mine will look like next year. 

So how about you...any Pleasings to report, garden or otherwise...

 

 

Port Eliot 2014 ~ Make a Tea Cosy

I have been over to Port Eliot for the planning meeting to sort out the line-up and running order for the dovegreyreader tent at this year's festival, and after a year off with no festival last year I had wondered whether the old buzz would return.

Could the old tent magic still be there...

Can we still bring the blog to life for a weekend...

Well all affirmative, we are good to go.

The gorgeous thirty minute cross country drive over the border into Cornwall, the lanes awash with droves of red campions and the last of the bluebells, great froths of hawthorn blossom, enough to make your heart sing until you remember you are supposed to be looking at the road and concentrating. Even though I drive a little Fiat Panda, which takes up no space at all, it is all narrow twisty-turny bends and perilously tiny stone bridges.

And the minute I walked into the library at Port Eliot and sat down in the chair Cathy St Germans and I were off..

Cathy has flying touch typists fingers ( which I envy...every word on this entire blog is written with two fingers...shame on me for never learning) and the emails were flying off all over the place...

' Please...we would love you to... sofa...conversation...dovegreyreader tent... informal...tea...knitting...'

and as we put together the running order it all started to look really interesting and exciting and I could feel my enthusiasm soaring at the prospect of some new books and authors (for me) as well as welcoming back some 'old' friends. Once everyone has confirmed I will share it all with you because as you know the dovegreyreader team will be reporting back on here as usual...so even if you can't be there for real you can enjoy it all virtually, and I will be canvassing for questions to ask beforehand too.

But that leads me onto something that you CAN all join in with from afar, in fact from anywhere in the world where there is a post box, and with eight weeks to go plenty of time to plan and execute ...

The Tea Cosy competition...

Anyone can enter...knit, crochet, stitch...in fact make a tea cosy out of anything (yes really...) and send it into the festival where it will be displayed and judged over the weekend, before being carefully transported for further display at Fortnum & Mason in London (how famous is that) prior to being auctioned in aid of The Royal Brompton and Harefield Trust in the autumn.

Now then... it has been agreed that if you put a little note on your tea cosy saying 'dovegreyreader' those entries will be grouped in a cosy huddle all of their own, each robing their Brown betty teapot so that I can take a picture of them and post it here.

The thing is that having made this rash and wild suggestion I am going to look a super nitwit if there aren't any...so what do you think...

Are there any tea cosy makers out there...

Do you have friends who might want to enter...

Do they have more friends who might want to enter...

Do those friends of the friends...etc

Could you give the heads up to any local knitting groups...

Maybe let your local knitting shop in on the excitement...

Please spread the word if you can...it is for a really good cause after all....me not looking an idiot The Royal Brompton and Harefield Trust.

 

 

And the winner is...

Thank you for sharing all those wonderful and special reading experiences, what an amazing three days of comments...I knew team dovegrey would come good with their suggestions. I haven't quite managed to compute which book of all of them has been mentioned the most times but your 'impact' books have added quite a few to my own reading mountain.

And congratulations to Eimear McBride on her Baileys Women's Prize For Fiction win with A Girl is a Half-formed Thing...

"Eimear McBride's debut tells, with astonishing insight and in brutal detail, the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist, to read A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator's head, experiencing her world first-hand. This isn't always comfortable - but it is always a revelation.

 Touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma, McBride writes with singular intensity, acute sensitivity and mordant wit. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is moving, funny - and alarming."

Just announced and I have to be honest and say that this is a book I have side-stepped on the basis of that description (words like 'brutal' and 'shocking' and 'vulnerable' and 'family violence' are subjects I shy away from these days after working with it all for so many years,) but I wonder if any of you have read it and would recommend..

The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction #ThisBook

I am so late to this party it is almost over, but I was invited to contribute to the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction #ThisBook project and...well you know how it is... seeds to sow, kitchen floor to wash, dogs to walk, great books to read, usual story but still we can probably sneak in the back door because we have three days before the announcement of this year's winning book (and of course my heart rests with this one to win.)

Meanwhile here's the thinking behind the #ThisBook...a dazzling array of well-known people... Mary Beard, Tanni Grey-Thompson, Martha Lane Fox, Jennifer Saunders, Kate Mosse, Joanna Trollope, Sharleen Spiteri, Sandi Toksvig to name but a few ..and...er ...me.. have been asked to suggest the book by a woman that has had the most impact on them.

I had no trouble in deciding on my book and I also suggested to the Baileys Women's Prize that I knew A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE... LOADS IN FACT... who would want to join in, and so I would post my choice of book here and THEN THEY COULD ALL ADD THEIR OWN CHOICES IN COMMENTS.

What a Grand Idea said the Baileys Women's Prize...oh we all love something like this said I.

Sorry...does it seem like I am shouting...panicking.. asking nicely... and with three days to go I just know you won't let the team down..

So my choice is Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain.

I first read Testament of Youth in 1996 at the age of ...oh dear forty-three, which seems very late in life for a book to become the one that made the greatest impact, but I clearly remember gaining such a clear and immediate insight into the earth-shuddering impact of the Great War, and in a way that hadn't happened before. It is indeed 'a haunting elegy for a lost generation' and I suddenly became acutely aware of the ongoing enormity of that loss.

Somehow, back in 1996 it placed my past, my life to date, with its blessings and advantages, its education and opportunities, but with its own sorrows and losses too, into a new framework with fresh perspectives. Cliche though it may seem, but as if I was looking out of new windows, and at a view I have never forgotten, and had I read it any earlier I wonder whether that impact would have been quite so powerful.

I have been re-reading it over the last few weeks, wondering whether the book would still feel so important, perhaps I had moved on, perhaps I have assimilated all those initial reactions, but of course this year of all years it feels as meaningful as ever, the book I would still want to encourage everyone to read at least once in their life.

It has everything therein... ambition and striving against the odds, service and sacrifice, love and loss, grief and sadness but also recovery and resilience in the life of a young woman. There's a sense that if a person can survive that...well I can survive anything too, and of course there are the horrors of the war itself.

Tucked inside my copy of the book I found something entitled Supplementary Notes which seems to be a copy of a lecture or talk/discussion given by Shirley Willams, Vera Brittain's daughter and a Paul Berry. He I discover here, in his obituary in 1999, was a distant relative of Winifred Holtby. I have no idea how I came by the notes but reading them again reinforces that initial impact.

Roland Leighton, Vera's fiance, her brother Edward and several other friends have gone off to war, imbued with the bravado of heroism, picturing themselves, as Shirley Williams elaborates...

'...as Knightly young men marching forward in the name of the highest ideals of civilisation, almost like the Periclean dream of freedom and liberty...'

The dream quickly turns to dust (and mud) and with it the feeling of having been cheated...

'...something somewhere doesn't fit, that both sides can't be fighting and dying for the noblest of causes - the the war is not about ideals but territorial ambitions and financial interests.'

The news of Roland's death that Vera hears on Christmas Day 1915 leaves her shattered, embittered and lonely...and it all captured my heart back in 1996. It was a book that made me think, and I discover that it still makes me think in 2014. Back then I had boys who would have been too young, but I remember thinking 'Wouldn't it be awful if...' now they would be heading to the trenches, and probably the daughter too, as a mother it's a truly sobering thought.

But that's enough from me...I think the Baileys Women's Prize will be eagerly awaiting your choices now, so over to Team dovegreyreader...

The book written by a woman that has had the greatest impact on you...

 

 

The Annual Dog Shearing...

Ringing up to make an appointment for the annual dog-shearing I was quite relieved to hear that Tom, at Animal Magic Dog Grooming, had 'gone mobile' since last year and would therefore pull into the driveway in his brand new van and do our pack at home. This would be much easier than loading, transporting, delivering, leaving, collecting, loading, transporting and so there was much excitement in the kennel when the day dawned fair, sunny and warm.

Nell and Rusty had been pawing over Harper's Barkzaar and Dogue (thank you Jzzy for that one!) all morning for styles, fashionable ear length, the latest in tail layering etc and as you can see, Nell, a little reluctant last year, soon settled into the pampering session and her pawdicure...

Forlorn and unimpressed by the bath or the bubbles, and we'll gloss over her time under the dryer

But she emerged looking all shiny and new with her lovely best ears on, 

....having gone in looking like...well like a dog's breakfast...it hadn't been a good look at all...

Rusty adores any sort of attention to personal detail so he was in his element, in fact almost asleep, emerging an hour later looking like a bit of a sweet-smelling, sultry Adonis I think you will agree..

We managed to persuade Father & Daughter to pose briefly...Nell, flaunting her new untangled, freshly shampooed ears, is smiling because she had already been for a dip in the muddy trough...

and then off they went for a scamper through the long grass which they always love for that first post-shearing moment.

But even more amazing this Animal Magic Grooming thing, because you put a dog in one end and look what comes out an hour later...

...a rabbit.