dovegreyreader scribbles

Reading...

Typepad is currently experiencing a glitch with updating links to Amazon UK on the sidebars at the moment so don’t be surprised if a few links head to Amazon.com for a while. Pending resolution I had typed this update on my current  'READING...' over here >>>>>>>>>>>>> because it was beginning to look as if all I have been reading is Daemon Voices for weeks now (which I have) but of course there is always more...

The Wardrobe Mistress by Patrick McGrath, (published in 2017) which I have almost finished and enjoyed immensely. Thoughts on it here eventually but definitely one I will be recommending, so this is by way of giving anyone who might want to read it a heads up on library reservations. Think 1940's London, post-war theatre-land and revered actor Gricey, in the midst of playing  Malvolio in Twelfth Night, has died in a mysterious encounter. Leaving his wife Joan, the wardrobe mistress at the theatre and their daughter Vera, an actress, to grapple with things previously unknown about their dearly beloved, a very intriguing story has developed.

 

The Mighty Dead - Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson and I have to say AT LAST. And with thanks to all of you who have been recommending it over the years. My Homeric lacuna is filling up very slowly and thoughtfully.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dazzling the Gods by Tom Vowler. Must read more short stories, I say it every year and I am grateful to South West-based writer Tom for sending me a copy of his latest collection. I thoroughly enjoyed his previous collection The Method as well as his first novel What Lies Within, which I wrote about here in 2013, and I am enjoying this volume just as much. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chugging along on my Kindle when I am travelling, or out and about, or awake at 3am (rare) I have The Dry by Jane Harper, which the world and its mother seems to be reading right now and I can see exactly why. The Kindle is perfect for thriller/crime page-turners like this one, voted Sunday Times Crime Book of 2017. It's Australia, it's scorchio and a husband has (supposedly) murdered his wife and two of his three children before turning the gun on himself...or has he.

 

 So that's me, how about you...what is on this week's reading pile?

 

Your best read of 2017...

...fiction, non-fiction or ONE of each and not necessarily books published this year.

If everyone who reads this leaves a comment we should end up with a delicious reading list of books we might have missed.

After several days of agonising deliberation my choices for 2017 are ::

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

Where Poppies Blow - John Lewis Stempel

Over to you.

On your marks...

Get set...

 

GO...

 

 

The Dark is Rising #thedarkisreading

Twitter has had a bit of a The Dark is Rising discussion sabbatical over the days of Christmas, before reconvening on January 3rd to read the final three chapters, so everyone seems to have hunkered down with the book and either read to the end because they couldn't put it down or have stuck religiously to the day-to-day timeline that will see the book reach its conclusion on Twelfth Night.

Me I'm somewhere in between.

Many people across the UK have found their reading enhanced by plenty of snow. Not us so I have had to revert to 2010 for the atmosphere...

There is much talk about rooks...someone has visited Stonehenge with its rooks and was struck by the antiquity of the scene "and for all that time humans have used that landscape (Owen Hewlett)

Then mention of cold blue candles (and the merits of white lights over blue LED), meals of bread and honey and their significance as well as the memories the book is awakening in those who read it as a child (how I wish) "like catching the scent of the house you grew up in" says one (Justine Paradis).

I have kept no notes, just immersed myself in the story and gone with the flow and am so steeped in the atmosphere it's hard to leave when I have to pay attention to other things.

How about you...

It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas Eve...

....and I was in Mrs Prothero’s garden, waiting for cats,

With her son Jim. It was snowing. It was

always snowing at Christmas. December, in my 

memory, was as white as Lapland, though there

were no reindeers. But there were cats."

I bought a new copy of A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas and illustrated by Peter Bailey a few weeks ago. It was one of those serendipitous and unexpected finds because it was in a church and I was there for a funeral.

Margaret Hele, the Nursing Office who had given me my first health visiting job in 1978, had died following unavoidable heart surgery at the age of ninety. We met again only this last summer with a couple of other ex-work colleagues and spent a wonderful afternoon reminiscing over old times and escapades. Age had certainly not wearied Margaret's mischievous grin or her wicked sense of humour, and her story about the spider-catcher kept on her bedside table that could be mistaken for something a little more risqué had us in stitches. What on earth did the cleaning lady think was all she could worry about.

Unbeknown to me Margaret had been following my dovegreyreader progress over the years, had heard me on various radio programmes, seen mentions in newspapers and was completely up to speed on it all. We talked books and poetry and Carol Ann Duffy, her new favourite.

Margaret was the sort of manager who always had your back, and that was a Good Thing for me as a rookie health visitor because, idealist that I was, I made plenty of blunders on the path to realism. I had much to be grateful to Margaret for and credit her as one of the people who set me off on the road to a good career. She made the unfurnished community nurse's house available to a newly-married Bookhound and I and ensured I had a health authority car for work too; an ex-police Panda car that went like a rocket.

I’m sure many of you will have experienced a person, or persons similar who have featured large in your life too.

Margaret had gone into surgery perfectly aware that she may not live to tell the tale and consequently had planned and written her own service which included a thank you message from her to all of us read out by the vicar. We were all weeping with that mix of laughter and sadness, but also gratitude for a life well-lived and replete with faith and friendship, as evident by the packed church and hearty singing of the hymns Margaret had chosen. Hymns that were played on a Hele organ, built  by the family she had married into. Many West Country churches swell to the sound of a Hele.

As I walked out of church I wandered across to the sales table. You know the sort of thing...knitted tea cosies and toilet roll cosies and matinee jackets and there, in the middle of this woolly mountain was a brand new single solitary book for £2.50...

My camera has bleached the colour, it is a beautiful shade of blue.

I had a copy already (now with Offspringette in New Zealand) but took this one as a clear sign from Margaret that I should buy it in memory of her. 

 

 

23rd December :: Day Four The Dark is Rising #thedarkisreading

Late home from one of the Christmas food shops (why does it take so many?) Bookhound and I walked up to the woods with the dogs at dusk on Friday. If it hadn’t been a walk we know and love we might have been spooked walking our own Old Way and listening out for the voices of the Old Ones.

As it was we had a fine walk though Nell did stop and wait for us to go first...

 

 Familiar landmarks took on a new emphasis...

And the chorus of birds lifting from their roosting perches as we went into the woods echoed all around us...

But even with The Dark is Rising uppermost in my mind, nothing felt spooky. Thankfully.

I am reading a bit ahead (sorry) and was suddenly reminded of The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susannah Clark; the latter a book I started to read in the week before Christmas back in 2004 and Christmas nearly didn’t happen. I was deeply entrenched in the world and the hinterland and have had that same feeling of other-worldliness as I read The Dark is Rising. It was the moment the carol-singing Stanton family are all frozen still in the middle of Good King Wenceslas that did it.

Here's Robert Macfarlane's tweet from today...

23 Dec: Day 4 of #TheDarkIsReading Speaking aloud (en-chanting) is vital in TDIR, as is the knowing of names. What are the powers of language in this book (from which so many people read aloud)? More from me on naming/spell-ing here inc. Cooper & Le Guin:

What thinkest thou... 

Midwinter Day & Day Two of #thedarkisreading

We have been busy getting the house ready for Christmas today, especially the kitchen, never knowingly under-decorated. Traditionally we eschew a tree for a bough from the hedgerow, and decorate it with all those things that have accumulated down the years, hold no semblance of design or cohesive style, but mean everything to us as a family. Offspringette, basking in the New Zealand heat, will ask if the three mice are on there somewhere and I will tell her that they are

This means I am doing my The Dark is Rising #darkisreading this evening, but I wanted to relay Robert Macfarlane’s Twitter thoughts today for those of you who might want to be thinking about them and comment.

I’ll be back dreckly.

Midwinter Day & Day 2 of #TheDarkIsReading!
Questions, wonderings:
What roles do animals play in TDIR?
What knowledge & agency is given to the more-than-human world (weather, landscape)?
Which sentences seem strongest, strangest to you...?

Midwinter’s Eve and Day One #thedarkisreading

First tweet from Robert Macfarlane...

Midwinter’s Eve & Day 1 of #TheDarkIsReading!
Questions, thoughts:
To those who've read the novel before - what are your memories of that first reading? How old were you; where; when; what weather?
To those new to it, what responses to these unsettled, unsettling opening pages?

I am new to The Dark is Rising, read the first chapter early this morning and have had it in my head for the rest of the day. Up on Dartmoor the mist was low, the world was grey and if it hadn’t been for good company, Christmas cheer and cheese and cauliflower soup ( it sounds awful but is our favourite) at the Fox Tor Cafe I may have felt that sense of foreboding all day.

I am enjoying the introduction to Will and his family, the sense of controlled chaos in the kitchen and the gathering chaos outside. The animals know there is something wrong. In a lesser way we know it here; the pheasants will hear thunder, or a loud noise (or in the olden day’s the sonic boom of Concorde at 9pm every night as it flew into the Western Approaches) long before we do and rise up from their roost as of one. It is the eeriest sound that rolls across the valley and around our house.

Lucky Will has snow, bringing with it the opportunity for things mysterious to unfold. The glittering white fog of fat snowflakes and the wind singing in the window frames have all been enough to see me deeply immersed and desperate to read the next chapter. 

Forgive me, I may cheat.

I am also very taken with the ‘amulet’, the circle of iron quartered by crossed lines and immediately had to draw it. I’d now like one for my pocket. 

We had a ‘halcyon’ day yesterday travelling by train on the Tamar Valley Line into Plymouth, more of which another day, but the light was stunning and I stocked up on it. The sun carving its lowest arc across the winter sky, the mist hanging low along the valley; magical and mysterious,  the perfect scene-setting for today’s reading. 

 

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper #thedarkisreading

It is Midwinter Eve in the Northern Hemisphere (for those in the Southern Hemisphere, Midsummer Eve), time for us to begin reading The Dark is Rising...

If you want to join in the discussion on Twitter head for Robert Macfarlane's feed here

and also Julia Bird's here and use the hashtag #thedarkisreading.

For those who don't tweet and for whom that is double dutch, maybe just smile at that early line in the book "joining in, twitter twitter twitter" and add comments here.

If I can contain my enthusiasm I'm going to try and read day by day in real time, so more dreckly, but for now let's get reading. 

Christmas Crackers...

As well as the old faithfuls...

I know I’m not the only one who sets aside a pile of books in the hope of reading them over Christmas. There is always something special about doing this for me, and whilst it might often turn out to be more in hope than expectation, it’s still a tradition on here for us all to share what we ‘might’ read.

I’m not adding Bleak House by Charles Dickens for the umpteenth time because I will fail for the umpteenth time. That book will have its day and I suspect that day will take me by surprise, but I do like to have an Everyman’s Classic up my sleeve for January if I can. Last year it was Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, this year it is The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.

More about the hows and whys to come, but if  anyone would like to join in there will doubtless be a few Team Magic Mountain posts coming early next year. I’m not doing it as a year-long prescribed read on a set day, more sharing thoughts as-and-when, but you are very welcome to grab a blanket and partake. I’m two hundred pages in and brimful of quiet enjoyment over this one. I keep finding pictures that shout Magic Mountain at me too..

This by Swiss artist and wood engraver Martha Cunz (1876 – 1961)

In other reading...why have I never read any of the Maigret novels by Georges Simenon?

A Maigret Christmas and Other Stories arrived from Penguin (in 2015 it was A Village Christmas by Laurie Lee) and an evening’s reading later I was in love with the Inspector and Madame. Madame dashing out for croissants early on a Parisian Christmas morning, he desperate to avoid breakfast in bed, which he loathed, but equally desperate not to upset his caring wife because there is an underlying and unsayable sadness about being childless. When something mysterious happens in the apartment across from theirs on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir and Maigret is called in a case unfolds and with it this laid-back pipe-smoking man’s gentle approach. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about it all...how after just fifty pages I had a clear vision of the man (whilst desperately trying to forget the trailers for the latest TV adaptation which, with apologies, I won’t be watching yet) and so now I’m on the search for much more Maigret. Bookhound and I reminisced over the presence of the TV series in our childhood before spending a hopeless off-on hour trying to hum the theme tune. It kept lapsing into the Harry Lime theme from The Third Man so thank you YouTube for sorting that one out.

I have sampled my first Val McDermid book recently. Well, this is right proper bells & whistles crime this is, really not for the squeamish or for bedtime reading, and The Mermaids Singing has certainly made even my nurse's stomach do a few somersaults, but  dare I say I am enjoying it and will read more and Maigret seems like the perfect crime antidote. 

With some uninterrupted reading time to come between Christmas and New Year (isn't it lovely) I have a few bookish treats coming next year lined up for sampling too, but more of those another day.

Meanwhile, over to you.

As always we would all love to know the contents of everyone’s Christmas reading stack...

And any more Maigret or McDermid fans out there...

And anyone else fancy a read of The Magic Mountain...

 

 

 

 

Making Winter - A Creative Guide for Surviving the Winter Months ~ Emma Mitchell

After two long-haul flights and those wonderfully uplifting visits to stay with Offspringette in New Zealand, one of many things I have learned is that no matter how much I love home, the saying goodbye, the long journey and the settling back down again needs careful thought and preparation. It takes me about a month to feel the right way up again.

Last year I had experienced high summer and came back to England for February. It was dark, cold and the prolonged impact of the jet-lag took me by surprise. I was felled by a stinking cough and cold and didn’t feel right for weeks. Luckily I had booked some craft courses for late spring (indigo dyeing at Cowslip Workshops and appliqué pictures with Janet Bolton) so I had things to look forward to, but it was hard, really hard and I wasn’t quite as prepared as I could have been, so this time I thought this aspect through more carefully.

This visit I enjoyed spring. The light and the colour and especially the blossom. I haven't taken you around the Botanic Gardens yet, I'm saving it for deepest darkest January (for us N.Hemisphere souls)

..and I planned the flights so that I would be coming back into daylight rather than darkness from Singapore leaving at 9am rather than midnight, hence the wonderful views over Afghanistan...

I knew that the jet-lag would descend so I had knitting and audio books at the ready and my thanks to Philip Pullman for The Book of Dust - La Belle Sauvage.

I had excursions and meet-ups with friends in the diary...

I had plans in my head for the garden and getting it ready for winter...

And plans in my head for my January craft projects because making has always been my method for getting through those months when all my family bereavements have happened and it only takes the colour and heft of the skies to remind me.

And to assist with all of this I had Emma Mitchell’s new book Making Winter - A Creative Guide for Surviving the Winter Months on pre-order and waiting for me when I arrived home.

If you don’t already know of Emma Mitchell then I urge you to seek her out. As Silver Pebble Emma has created a huge online following with her exquisite nature diary photographs on Instagram and her lively and honest voice on Twitter. Emma also makes this intriguing and very beautiful jewellery from silver clay...

’Silver clay is an astonishing substance, made from the finely ground silver recovered from the printed circuit boards within broken electrical devices.’

I had never heard of it until I started  following Emma’s work but I am smitten by this alchemy and can’t wait to try it out. Pressing leaves into the clay and some firing (I’ve left out a few stages along the way, but it seems very doable at home and without a kiln) plunge the object into water and polish it off and the transformation begins to reveal a unique and special piece of silver jewellery.

Making Winter is a cornucopia of sage advice and inspiration. With referenced pieces on the proven benefits of craft activities on serotonin levels I have been really impressed with the solid theory behind the book. This isn’t just another book of recipes and things to make that are nice, it’s a book as therapy  and should be available on prescription. I was a Nurse Prescriber, I'd have ditched the entire British National Formulary and dished out Making Winter  prn (as necessary) instead and saved the NHS a fortune.

I had always wanted to start a knitting or quilting group for mums with post-natal depression back in my health visitor days. I’d already had my time out of the NHS teaching patchwork and quilting when the children were small (anyone remember The Quilt Loft in Tavistock...it was a moment in my life) and run classes teeming with working people who were desperate for some distractions from the stresses of their jobs (and a lot from the NHS including a surgeon whose stitches were the tiniest I had ever seen) so I knew the benefits. But trying to do anything innovative in a cash-strapped NHS without the foundation of a strong evidence-base was impossible so it never happened. But the evidence is there now and Emma quotes it and uses it wisely in her book.

‘There is evidence that the sight of yellow and red trigger mood-boosting changes in our neuro-transmitters, so it is little wonder that many people experience less join de vivre in the winter months...’

This might be why I unwittingly bought the Knit Angel some dazzling red and yellow wool back from New Zealand for her late October birthday and can you believe she had crocheted it into the most elegant wrap within days.

I love Emma’s idea that a visit to the wool shop, with its beautiful skeins and dazzling array of colours can become ‘the vivid flowering meadow of winter’ akin to a ‘walk around a sun-drenched garden in full bloom in summer’ and with the helpful bursts of neurotransmitters to accompany.

We just knew it didn’t we, but now we have the evidence to prove it. Woolshops are good for you.

I haven’t told you yet about my whistle-stop turn around the Ashford Spinning Shop in New Zealand. Home of the famous Ashford Wheel. The shop had just closed for the day but they took pity and let us in for a dash around

Like many of us Emma is now discovering that her anecdotal findings are being backed up by scientific research..

‘It seems that yarncraft can lead to a relaxation or meditation-like response similar to the induced by yoga, and one study has shown that meditation increases the levels of dopamine, Another neuro-transmitter that is associated with elevated mood.’

And didn’t I just know it but couldn’t prove it...

’Knitting leads to improved feelings of well-being and this effect is markedly increased when it takes place within a group of people.’

I’m sure the same could be said for quilting.

Making Winter is chock-full of ideas and inspiration and crochet...

And of course crochet is my downfall because I’ve never mastered it...yet.

Yes, I know...go to Attic 24 and learn for goodness’ sake woman. I will.

But meanwhile there is preserving leaves in glycerine to be done and Blackberry and Almond Streusel Cake to be baked and feathers to be drawn and nature walks to do with collecting along the way.

I’ve already tried the 5-minute Chocolate Fondant in a Mug (8/10 for my effort, no double cream in the house for the gooey bit in the middle) and made a Winter Woodland Wreath from some gatherings on one of my walks along with making  a big pile of autumn out on the lane one day...

 The Teasels are picked and adorning the storm porch...

Pending the crochet eureka moment the knitting is on the go because having been allowed into the Ashford Spinning Shop, even though it had just closed, it seemed incumbent on me to buy some wool and this hand-spun, hand-dyed skein leapt into my arms and onto the needles.

In my sights the Hedgerow Bird Snacks and the Apple and Caramel Chelsea Buns.

Apart from the fact that Making Winter is a book to have on my own shelf, it also feels like a book that fulfils Robert Macfarlane’s idea of the book as gift in his little book The Gifts of Reading...

'that the gift can be transformative and that the act of giving encourages the onward circulation of generosity.'

Making Winter is book to give to a friend who might be challenged by the Winter grey or in need of distraction from something else, or in need of soothing through difficult times, or even the book to give yourself. I’ve turned to it over and again in recent weeks, and each time I think I don’t really want to to walk up to the woods on that grey dull gloomy day I take myself off out there and always within five minutes I am singing and the sky seems much brighter..

‘Suddenly the walk is transformed into something pleasantly medicinal, shifting your neurotransmitter dial towards joy.’

But now I'm interested and I'm sure you all have plenty more ideas for your own ways of  Making Winter too, so please do share them...

What sees you through the shorter darker days... 

 

 

 

Snow ~ Marcus Sedgwick

Well we don’t have any but I’m sure some of you do and over on Instagram this week, for those who don’t ‘do’ it I had a bit of a reminisce for something known as #throwbackthursday ( when you post a picture from your past) about the winter of 1978.

It all started when this picture of Bookhound surfaced and with it came a cascade of memories about the community nurse’s house in the Devon village of Buckland Monachorum that we had just moved into in the autumn of 1978. The house came with my first health visiting job and was an unexpected bonus (along with an ex-police panda car) which it seemed silly not to take for the chance it would give us to save up the deposit for a home of our own that the Halifax Building Society could then buy for us for £12,300 approx. That was our absolute limit. £14,000, which was the cheapest in the village at the time, was beyond our reach and we were sad to leave Buckland Monachorum when we eventually did in 1980, for the bustling metropolis (by comparison) that was Tavistock.

Anyway the house was unfurnished and freezingly bitingly cold as I think you can tell from Bookhound’s layering approach to clothing. We had painted the walls in Cinnamon and Spice aka brown and another shade of brown, which seemed like the height of avant-garde decoration, to match the vast amount of brown and orange accessories we had been given as wedding presents two years earlier. We had two orange chairs and a pub advert mirror (also the zenith of 70's household decor) until we eventually bought a pine table with benches (uncomfortable) and a pine Habitat sofa with big striped cushions (even more uncomfortable) and please take note of that Christmas spindle tree in the background. I think my mum and dad had donated it to our cause from their attic along with the chairs. My mum had knitted us one of those Aran jumpers each in that His and Hers 70' style, and I expect I’m wearing mine as I took the picture. 

But best of all, there’s our little border collie puppy Ben. We had bought him from a farm at Peter Tavy a few weeks previously. Ben would spend seventeen more Christmases with us, tolerate three children and two more house moves before a very tearful farewell on Boxing Day 1994.

Our 'now' dogs have barely seen snow, Nell especially being only five, though Rusty at seven was a newly-arrived puppy for this in 2010...

Ben on the other hand (or paw) was initiated instantly in 1978 and almost disappeared in a snowdrift after we took him for a walk and got caught in a blizzard that December. It’s hard to believe that even though we were familiar with the landscape and the fields it was nigh on impossible to find our way, or know which direction we were headed, so with Ben tucked down inside Bookhound’s jacket we were more than happy to stumble across the church and know that the pub was nigh. 

I have been waiting for the merest hint of the white stuff in order to read Marcus Sedgwick’s ‘Snow’, published by Little Toller as part of their Monograph series. I had bought this aeons ago in an effort to be completist about the Monographs which are a series I covet for their pocket-sized range of interesting topics...

'Snow, of all weathers has affected the author Marcus Sedgwick the most.While his friends and family went in search of sun, sea and sand for their annual holidays, Marcus travelled to the cold and snowy parts of the world: Russia, Scandinavia, the Arctic Circle. Then, five years ago, he moved to a mountain house, an old chalet d-alpage, high in the Haute Savoie. Here. for the first time, he truly understood what it meant to live in a place where snowfall shaped the boundaries of life.

Imitating the six sides of a snowflake, the six chapters of this book explore the art, literature and science of snow, alongside Marcus Sedgwick's own experiences and memories. Why is snow so powerful to our imagination ? So transformative? 

As fundamental as our responses to darkness and sunlight, our relationship with snow is both universal and deeply personal. By asking whether it really did snow more during his boyhood in Kent, Marcus also explores the implications of climate change for himself, asking if snow could become a thing of the past.'

I flicked through the book as snow fell everywhere else but here yesterday and read this...

'Our memories are not good. No matter how much we like to think we have strong and accurate power of recall, the evidence of psychologists suggests otherwise. We easily fabricate, recast, adapt and destroy our memories, and one of the greatest obstacles we face when trying to keep accurate memories is time...'

Now I'm thinking...was it 1978...did my mum knit those jumpers...was the house really that cold...did we paint the walls brown and brown, did we get caught in the blizzard. Fortunately the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.

I had been wavering about whether to read Snow now, whilst there's snow everywhere else but not in Devon, or hang on until we get our portion and the light and the sound do that magical bright and muffled thing, but I am now so intrigued I'm diving in this weekend in case that's it for the winter.

And alongside I'm going to be playing Marcus Sedgwick's playlist of snow songs.

Any snow over your way yet Northern Hemisphere residents...

I'm thinking some of you might have had enough of it already...

The Dark is Rising ~ Susan Cooper

I have been reading Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series this year...well sort of.

'The relentless battle between the Light and the Dark has raged since the beginning of time. Neither side has ever been able to claim absolute victory...and so the fight continues. But every so often the evil surges, and a member of the Light must step forward if the world is to find its way out of the darkness. 

It is at the center of this epic struggle that three ordinary children, and one not-so-ordinary child, find themselves. The danger is overwhelming and the stakes have never been higher. Will the Light finally be able to conquer the Dark--or will all good be lost forever?'

The series consists of five books published between
1965 and 1977.

Over Sea, Under Stone
The Dark is Rising
The Green Witch
The Grey King
Silver on the Tree

and it had all passed me by back in the day.

Even though the books were aimed at older children too I was moving onto Daphne du Maurier by 1965 and sadly leaving the children's section of the library behind. I have huge pangs of envy for those who did read this series as a child or teenager but mustn't grumble, I read everything else to hand. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is forever laced with grains of sand, Merlin's Cove and Cornish magic c1962 and all because all the playmates around were boys and a bit of bookish escape from all the gung-ho stuff was required. They all went off to build dens in St Nectan's Glen whilst I walked through the back of a wardrobe. 

 

This summer I thoroughly enjoyed Over Sea, Under Stone, also set in Cornwall, and was about to move onto The Dark is Rising until I read the opening pages and realised that there would be no other time to read this one than on Midwinter Eve.

    'Four days to Christmas, ' Will said. 'I wish it would snow properly.'

    And your birthday tomorrow.'

    'Mmm.' He had been going to say that too, but it would have been too much like a reminder. And the gift he most wished for on his birthday was something nobody could give him : it was snow, beautiful, deep, blanketing snow, and it never came. At least this year there was the grey sprinkle, better than nothing...'

and then this from Susan Cooper's website

'On the midwinter Day that is his eleventh birthday, Will Stanton discovers a special gift—that he is the last of the Old Ones, immortal guardians dedicated to keeping the world from domination by the forces of evil, the Dark. Introduced to this inheritance by the fierce and wise Merriman, Will is plunged into a quest for the six magical Signs that will one day aid the Old Ones in the final battle between the Dark and the Light. And for the twelve days of Christmas, while the Dark is rising, life for Will is full of wonder, terror, and delight.'

 

Well, this seasonal reading idea had all but slipped my mind until mention on Twitter yesterday from good friend of dovegreyreader scribbles Robert Macfarlane, who suggested this...

Question: would there be interest in a "The Dark Is Rising" Twitter book-club/reading group, starting - as the book does - on Midwinter Eve this year, ie 20th December? If so, I'll set one up.

Robert has championed this book on Twitter on several occasions and written more about it here....

'It is Midwinter Eve, four days short of Christmas and one short of the 11th birthday of a boy named Will Stanton. Far to the north a snowstorm is brewing, and things are not as they “normally” are in the landscape around. Animals are restless, rooks clatter from the treetops to swirl blackly above the fields. Local people have seen these signs before—they know what is coming. Warnings are issued: “This night will be bad,” an old farmer tells Will, “and tomorrow will be beyond imagining.” And so it is.'

 

Within hours yesterday 450 replies, over 1000 retweets and probably that whole Delia gravadlax/omelette pan thing going on in bookshops and libraries around the world.

Just to add to the crowd I asked  'Can I bring the blog along?'

'Yes!' said Robert.

And so if anyone else would like to join in please do and I thought posting now would give everyone sufficient advance warning to get hold of a copy of the book if they don't have one.

I shall be reading and joining in on Twitter (#TheDarkIsReading) and praying for snow. If I'm really clever I think I can make Twitter appear over on the side bar for a day or two, so please bear with me as I experiment. 

But not everyone does Twitter so I could also post here on December 20th and beyond for those that don't tweet but would like to read along and are happy to coo and comment along with the dove. 

Would anyone be interested...

Bookhound has offered to do the mulled wine and I'll sort the mince pies...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elementum

I had a fine day meeting up with the ‘old’ Port Eliot helpers crew in Dulverton a few weeks ago.

Having had such a wonderful few years running the tent up in the walled garden...who can forget Fran’s Flower Show victory (and the stolen rosette) Carol and Curzon and the cups of tea and steady presence, or the Happy Campers four day marathon run around and reportage on every event that I couldn’t get to, or the Knit Angel’s gift creations for all our guests...well it was a group friendship too strong to allow to lapse...

Those of us who can manage it meet up a couple of times a year somewhere interesting and squeeze in three sit-down refreshment breaks while we are there. The day ends with pots of tea and cake and bookish talk as we plan our next gathering.

Dulverton had been all about meeting Jackie Morris at Number Seven, hearing her read from The Lost Words and telling us about its genesis as well as getting our books signed and buying more, and then being tempted by the wonderfully eclectic stock in Davina’s shop.

And there was someone there with a camera taking pictures...

It was a while before I was introduced but it was Jay Armstrong, publisher, editor, image-maker and all-round grafter of Elementum, the journal I discovered last year and wrote about here. Jay and I had passed like ships in the night at Port Eliot this year but had agreed we would/must plan to meet up one day, so there was much exclaiming at Dulverton when we realised we had managed it by accident.

Jay and I huddled in a corner and quickly found that common ground. Journals come and go. I buy quite a few, read them and may never pick them up again but I knew instinctively that there was something very different about Elementum, and not just my free whale mug which started off a whole heap of whale-themed reading. Each large-format edition is shaped around a theme,  with images and the writing all of a stellar quality and so carefully laid out on delicious paper.There had been some unavoidable delays with Edition Three but I reassured Jay that waiting for it was absolutely no problem because I still turn to Editions One and Two and read them over and again, more than I ever realised I would and maybe Jay's vision for Elementum explains why...

 

'Our vision is to produce a publication about getting back to what really matters through nurturing our connection to the natural world. Constantly inspired and fascinated by the living world around us, we believe that in better understanding it we will better understand our place within it, our responsibilities and the possibilities open to us.

Elementum will give the reader a space to reflect and absorb ideas, not be harried by advertising, stories of human failing or imminent threat. Through the written word and the silence of image, guided by a theme for each edition, we will bring together the scientist’s findings with the artist’s response and the ecologist’s observation with the writer’s reflection to craft stories of transformation, exploration and intrigue. We will ask questions as well as seek to answer them, retaining curiosity and always a sense of wonder at the unknown and unseen

Guided by a different theme for each edition, Elementum is published twice a year.'

 

I know from talking to Jay that she pours heart and soul into this endeavour and it shows both in her enthusiasm and the finished journal, and I can tell you that something very special has just arrived with Edition Three and its theme of 'Roots'...

'This edition is about origins and things that lie hidden, about what we have lost and where to look to rediscover that knowledge...'

A unique piece on The Lost Words as Jay travelled to Jackie Morris’s studio in Wales to spend time with Jackie and photograph her at work, and there is a new Goldfinch word-spell from Robert Macfarlane which will bring a tear to your eye...maybe several tears.

A new piece of writing by Kathleen Jamie. Much loved and much-respected here for Sightlines and Findings. 

Alex Woodcock writes about The Green Man...

Owen Perry on the Haida Gwai. This a place that has held a mysterious fascination since Erica Wagner rated A Story as Sharp as a Knife - The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World by Robert Bringhurst as her favourite book in conversation on here. I bought the book and there it sits on the shelf...

A piece on Wolves by Jim Crumley whose The Company of Swans I loved a while back...and good news from the publisher, this is to be republished soon.

The wait is over and copies of Elementum Edition Three can be ordered here. Apart from the fact that you might want your own copy I think these would make splendid and usual C******s surprises. But in the meantime scroll down to the next post for gifts and leave a comment there (not here) to be in with the chance of winning a copy of either Edition One or Two.

Magnus is on his beam ends with all this ‘work’ but I’ve told him it is the giving and sharing season after all and we always pay forward the things we love on here. He glazed over a bit until I mentioned there may be pilchards for tea...

 

 

Joan Didion

Happy Thanksgiving for yesterday America, I hope you had a good one and are all sitting with your feet up and recovering and in the mood for a conversation.

And if anyone else wants to hide from Black Friday horrors (what madness is this?) please come in and hunker down here for the day. I have an endless supply of beverages and cake and maybe we could have a conversation about Joan Didion, because I would really welcome your thoughts. 

I wonder, has anyone else watched the recently released documentary about her on Netflix, The Center Will Not Hold. I settled down to watch it one evening last week thanks to a recommendation on Twitter from great friend of dovegreyreader Adele Geras.

Literary icon Joan Didion reflects on her remarkable career and personal struggles in this intimate documentary directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne.

 I had read The Year of Magical Thinking back in 2006 when dovegreyreader scribbles was very new and Blue Nights some time later. In fact I remember so clearly coveting a copy of the latter when it was first published in the USA and before it was published here in the UK. That very same week I had walked into a charity shop in Tavistock and there it was on the shelf...the US edition, hardback, brand new, unread and I had a feeling an angel might have delivered it into my hands. I gradually stocked up on more by Joan Didion but had never quite found myself in the right mood to read more until now.

I thought the documentary was all things astonishing and I need to watch it again because there is a great deal to miss. The New Yorker reviews the programme here and highlights one of the moments that I didn't miss...and yes, it took my breath away too, unexpected and showing the depths of Joan Didion's skill as a journalist.

Diminutive and doleful, eyes so melancholy, hands so expressive and choosing each word so carefully... yet not in a way that frustrated this viewer. Through the lengthy pauses I waited patiently, because when the words came out they were spare yet razor-sharp in their accuracy. And a countenance equally capable of showing an almost childlike joy at special moments...I’m thinking of the day Joan sat down with Vanessa Redgrave (who played Joan in the stage version of Magical Thinking) and they shared Joan’s family photo album and their own experiences of grief. It was all profoundly moving film-making I suspect more readily facilitated by the fact that Joan’s nephew Griffin Dunne was the producer. There was an ease and an openness that I doubt anyone other than a family member could have elicited and it worked for me.

And how fascinating to realise that Joan Didion had covered so many important moments in US culture and history in my lifetime. The hippies of Haight Ashbury, the death of Kennedy... more in the programme than I can remember, but often telling it slant; from an angle less noticeable, less obvious to the average onlooker, but subject beware...

'...people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.’

The loss of those closest to her remained the enormous tragedy that both The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights had revealed and the sadness and sorrow were palpable, but with it I felt a strong sense of Joan Didion as the family member left behind for a reason...to tell it like it is.

It all led me to the Joan Didion shelf. I had bought a copy of Live and Learn all those years ago, a three volume anthology of essays and journalistic pieces comprising Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album and After Henry and I am already deeply engrossed.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot Hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

...

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’

W.B. Yeats 

The W.B. Yeats poem, (written in 1919 but every word as prescient now as then) opens the first volume Slouching Towards Bethlehem and with it Joan Didion’s explanation that those few lines of the poem 

‘...have reverberated in my inner ear as if surgically implanted there.’

By her own admission many of the pieces are small and personal and I suspect that this is what is attracting me now that I have that image of Joan Didion imprinted in my mind from the film.

’But since I am neither a camera eye nor much given to writing pieces which do not interest me, whatever I do write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.’

 And how Joan Didion feels is transmitted with an innocent sort of guile (can there be such a thing) that has me marvelling at her skill. The reader is placed, located and already forming impressions and even making assumptions to the point where I felt this was like reading a Martin Parr photograph in words. There is irony and honesty and sharp focus on the very thing that Joan Didion wants the reader to spot...in much the same way Martin Parr wants you to spot the stain on the dress and draw your own conclusions. It’s about what Joan Didion chooses to see and how she conveys it, perceptions and illusions all chipping away at the reader’s own sensibilities and sympathies.

Her words about Joan Baez ( and who can know what Joan Baez thought of them at the time or since) have resonated with me for days...

’Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.’

and suddenly I could think of dozens of comparables. Those celebs catapulted to fame and stardom and are writing their autobiographies (or having them written for them) before they are twenty.

I can feel myself descending into purple prose as I try to describe all this (something which Joan would never do) Lives are filleted carefully and with seemingly exquisite ease, the flesh set aside to reveal the bones beneath and often lives are found wanting or perhaps the opposite, replete and fulfilled, but all in the most unusual ways.

John Wayne on the set of his final movie once cancer had made inroads was beyond moving... he knew, everyone knew, no one could say as much, but that moment when the final scene was filmed...

’Everyone was very still. And at 2.30 that Friday afternoon Henry Hathaway turned away from the camera, and in the hush that followed he ground out his cigar in a sand bucket. ‘OK, ‘ he said. ‘That’s it.’

Joan Didion tells it slant.

I’m trying to think whether we have such a writerly treasure here in the UK.

A woman who has been there and told it through good times and tough times and still has something  to say...

I’m sure we do and I’m sure you will all name a few, but America, can I ask you... is Joan Didion the treasure for you that she seems to me?

I’m interested to know because from afar I am worshipping. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Train to Nowhere ~ Anita Leslie

‘Whatever happens, remember to wear lipstick because it cheers the wounded.’

For the day after Remembrance Day this year Train to Nowhere by Anita Leslie, first published in 1948, and brought back into print by Bloomsbury. 

Treat the slower first half of the book as a bit a restful warm up and introduction to a remarkable woman. Conserve your energy (you'll be needing it later) whilst allowing Anita to get into her stride with this whole war thing; get to know her gimlet eye and her sense of humour because what follows is quite astonishing. Even then nothing will quite prepare you for the details of Anita Leslie’s experiences as an ambulance driver in the Second World War.

No stranger to a life of privilege, as Penny Perrick suggests in her excellent introduction, Anita Leslie was not the sort of person usually found in the battlefield. 

‘I feel I am helping the War effort by having as pleasant a time as possible which is just what he [Hitler] doesn’t want’

says Anita from the comfort of home. 

‘You can’t imagine how bored people are with the war here. No one wants to listen to fancy speeches.’

Especially if they are being made by your cousin Winston Churchill.

As an escape from a complicated personal life Anita would volunteer as a driver in the MTC (Mechanised Transport Corps) and comfortably slip into the uniform designed by Hardy Amies. With the advice of her mother ringing in her ears...

’Don’t get sunburned in Africa, men hate it.’ 

...Anita set sail for her new role on the Desert Front in Africa as a ‘light-headed, giddy girl’ and, quickly realising how much she relished the adventure, sought out ever more dangerous assignments. After three years in the Middle East, and sensing that she might miss the main action, Anita eventually effects a transfer to the French Forces who, unlike the British Army, allowed women on the front line and in August 1944 the adventure really begins.

It was at this point in the book, under the command of Jeanne de L’Espee (of that lipstick quote) that Anita, long ago divested of the Hardy Amies look but  nevertheless still striving to achieve it, joins the 1st French Armoured Division. The advance proceeds from Marseilles pursuing the blistering rearguard action of German Forces and towards the liberation of France. 

There will be bone-numbing cold and discomfort, ad hoc billets in barns, as-and-when food and much danger, plus some harrowing action amongst the casualties in the brutal theatre of war, but alongside there will be bonhomie and comradeship, sadness, sorrow and fear but above all courage. 

‘We lived now in squalor and discomfort, warming our hearts at cottage hearths with brave strategic talk...and Germans were encircled everywhere...that was the worst part of the medical service; sitting about listening to a fight and knowing there would be nothing to do until someone got hit.’

And Anita brings her British eccentricities to the fray as well....

’There were ten to twenty soldiers in every room in the village - which made it impossible to wash, to warm up, to cook or to think. I asked permission to go for a walk every afternoon to escape the bedlam.

What? said the officer,’walk alone in the drizzle? Very, very English.’ Hiking in winter over ploughland had never been the Continental idea of un jolie sport.’

But perhaps Anita's request also suggests the need to get outside and reflect because she sees much that is harrowing. However don't be put off because for every distressing episode there is the leavening effect of Anita Leslie’s indomitable spirit, her canny observations and wry sense of humour in the face of unimaginable adversity, all of which which turned the book into something quite unexpected and extraordinary.

And who had ever heard of Anita Leslie? I'm sure some of you will have done but she had missed my radar entirely.

The only woman to be decorated with both the Africa Star for her service in the Western Desert and the Croix de Guerre in 1945 by General Charles de Gaulle, Anita Leslie married Commander Bill King and would go on to publish seventeen books. In many ways I read Train to Nowhere as a book that represented so many of those other unknown, unrecognised heroes and heroines of war, and how right it seems to remember them right now.

But it has also sparked my interest in Anita Leslie herself and a simple search reveals an Alice-like rabbit hole of fascinating trails...

Marjorie Ide, Anita's American mother who had married Shane Leslie, the heir to Castle Leslie in Ireland, entering into the privileged but subsequently chaotic life of the Irish country house...

A long list of published biographies by Anita Leslie about people as diverse as Mrs Fitzherbert, Lady Randolph Churchill, Madame Tussaud and Francis Chichester, enough to send me scurrying to Devon Libraries catalogue to put in a few reservations.

And what about Anita's own burial instructions here...

'I would prefer to be buried without a coffin, just tied to a board, but if this is complicated take the lid off !"

Onward trails are an added bonus to good reads like Train to Nowhere so please do scroll down for gifts (a lot of them) if you are in the mood for some new reading paths. 

 

 

 

Spotlight on a friendship : Chris Chapman & James Ravilious

‘Another Devon photographer, Chris Chapman, was a long term ally....they shared a love of Devon and its communities and became great friends, going on photography walks together, and spending hours on the phone discussing darkroom problems and exchanging useful information, in the amiable non-competitive way that seems to be common in their profession.’

James Ravilious, A Life ~ Robin Ravilious

 

 

My sincere thanks to photographer Chris Chapman for today's post. I hope you will agree that it is something special and how privileged I am to be publishing it here.

James Ravilious   © Chris Chapman 1986

I first came across James Ravilious in the early 1980s. Like me he owned a Reliant Three Wheeler and one day we passed each other in the lanes. He was wearing a black beret and I knew it was him! Sometime later we met, and from that day on we became firm friends. In 1983 we exhibited together, along with the photographer George Tucker, at the Beaford Centre, Devon and were interviewed for television. I still have the stills of us both taken from the television screen but sadly no recording.

James died in September 1999, soon after his 60^th Birthday and there hasn’t been a week since where I haven’t thought about him. He was a jolly, kind hearted and gentle soul and a genius with his camera. As we were both working on not dissimilar projects in Devon we became mentor to each other, and I treasure those memories of him. When I heard his widow Robin had embarked on his biography I was delighted by the news, and having read it, I am delighted with the result.

I have to confess that I wasn’t aware of what a large role Robin had played in James’s career. I visited James at their cottage on the outskirts of Dolton, and later made numerous trips to their house in Chulmleigh. Apart from an offer of a cup of tea and a sandwich, Robin was rarely part of our conversations and I assumed that she wasn’t that interested. I knew she had written the text for his first book, but thought that James had saddled her with the task because she had read English at Oxford.  As you can imagine for me this is a truly wonderful book, beyond my bias for the eagerly awaited story. Robin takes us on a fascinating journey told in an accessible style and in great detail. We learn of James’s childhood and his famous artist parents, Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood (both died in tragic circumstances before James reached his teens), his schooling in the Cotswolds and Dorset, holidays with his siblings in Scotland, his misguided entry into the world of chartered accountancy, then a swap for the joys of art college, his chance meeting with Robin and living in London and then…… their life changing move to the depths of the North Devon countryside where Robin was bequeathed a tiny cottage and where they could set up home.

James was an accomplished artist and could have ventured into similar avenues as his father, but it seems Eric’s shadow fell on him and he found it difficult to come up with his own style. But his circle of friends included those of his parents. Peggy Angus owned an isolated croft in the Outer Hebrides and we learn about another side of James where, on leaving art school at the age of twenty-three, a long spell on his own at the croft reveals his competence in all things practical. All this stood James in good stead. The necessary discipline, the practical skills, being at ease with one’s own company, all required hallmarks of a photographer, and it was a visit in early 1969 to a Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition mounted by the V& A in London that set him on his true path. The photographs both thrilled and aroused him. He suddenly saw that there was a way to express himself – he would purchase a camera and forget about painting.

Photographers are by nature solitary souls, and it is unusual to find two photographers able to travel out together hunting for the same subject. It was the mark of James’ generosity that he and I could, and it was always great fun. I never once felt he was in the way. His humour was infectious and I liked the way he never laughed at his own jokes. One day we were in Wistmans Wood, an ancient remnant of stunted oak woodland once common on Dartmoor. He had brought with him a 120 roll film camera that had belonged to the photographer Edwin Smith. James was rummaging about in his camera bag and pulled out a wide angle lens. Without giving me a glance, he held it up to the light against the trees and gave it a curious look: ‘Why dangle when you can hang?’

On reading the book again there are some omissions, but I think that is inevitable and I  put that down to that fact that Robin was not only his friend and guide but also his wife, and we all know that not everything is shared in marriage!  I happen to know that James did fiddle with one of his images, just like an artist will sometimes overpaint when the composition is failing. He was cross about a chink of light that drew the eye, and so covered it up with another negative, masking it out with trees in leaf. We had the tools to change things: spotting brushes and ink to rid us of unwanted dust marks and scratches, and to tone down annoying highlights and other distractions. And as the digital age dawned there was now computer software that could alter the photograph beyond recognition. We had a long conversation one day about an image of mine that I was particularly perplexed about.  I had photographed a Quantock Huntsman feeding his hounds back at his kennels in Somerset. Just as I pressed the shutter on what would have been the perfect image a television producer walked into the enclosure with a video camera. I spent a whole day on my computer carefully taking him out, leaving only his boots to show where he once stood (and to send to him with an accompanying letter airing my irritation at the intrusion!). James and I debated the issue and after much thought he gave me the answer which has since stood me in good stead: ‘Leave him there. He’s part of history and in a hundred years’ time people will ponder over his presence.’

1998 was the Year of Photography and we were asked to put on an exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, Devon. James mounted a number of large prints of his North Devon landscapes and I showed a series of pictures telling the story of the selling of a family farm on Dartmoor. Over thirty-two thousand people visited the show and when I look back over both of our careers I think that was a real turning point and a mark of respect for our work. For much of the time we had been ignored by the art establishment and labelled ‘sentimental ruralists’ and ‘not cutting edge’. We described this jokingly as ‘our wilderness years’. We weren’t that bothered about it. Those on the outside often miss the point.

Nine days before he died I visited James in Chulmleigh and took him out for the afternoon. James was in good spirits but told me he would have liked another twenty years. It filled me with sorrow to think we were about to lose him. Robin helped him into my car and he led me ‘down the deep Lanes’ of his beloved countryside. We met up with one of his friends and subjects, Bill Hammond.

James Ravilious and Bill Hammond   © Chris Chapman, September 1999

        I still miss him, but nearly twenty years later there is much solace in the knowledge that his legacy lives on, especially as his photographs are now enjoying a new era of popularity. The publication of Robin’s book is perfect timing. Who cares about being ‘cutting edge’? He didn’t and neither do I.  Give me a soft, humour filled image, taken by a man who loved the countryside and its inhabitants with a big generous heart. Yes please, give me a James Ravilious photograph any day!

© Chris Chapman 2017

Throwleigh, Dartmoor, Devon

 

James and Robin Ravilious at Wistmans Wood, Dartmoor   © Chris Chapman 1992

 

 

 

 

James Ravilious - A Life ~ Robin Ravilious

Here we are, it's November at last and launch week for the two books on James Ravilious which I have been excited about for ages now. I’m going to the ‘do’ in Exeter and I can’t wait to see these books out on the shelves and into people’s lives. 

James Ravilious A Life by Robin Ravilious and firstly I have to mention the book itself, a thing of beauty from Wilmington Square an imprint of Bitter Lemon Press. The book is an unusual size, slightly squarer than the average, a delight to hold and read with 250 pages of the smoothest of smooth paper which shows the photographs off to their very best advantage. 

Author Robin Ravilious, the daughter of artist and glass engraver Laurence Whistler (will I ever forget that day at Moreton Church looking at the Whistler windows) and married to James Ravilious for twenty-nine years before his untimely death from lymphoma in 1999 at the age of sixty. Robin has done a magnificent job of portraying both James’s life before she met him and their life together afterwards.

The couple would move to North Devon, to a cottage left to Robin by her grandfather, and a home for which she frequently mentions her attachment and her gratitude for the life and the inspiration that it offered in the ensuing years. The couple integrated into the rural North Devon community with ease and James, never backwards in coming forward where conversation with strangers was concerned, quickly built up a reputation as a likeable man of honour, a genuine soul, a photographer who could be trusted, and that rapport translated into an archive of pictures nonpareil.

Ashwell, Dolton, 1977 by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts

It was never going to be easy being the son of the more famous Eric and the (now) equally famous Tirzah Garwood,  it would take time and much soul-searching before James could find his own metier, and ultimately work towards the many years creating the Beaford Archive from which we all benefit today (and from where copies of the pictures can now be bought) . I'm going to leave Chris Chapman to elaborate more about this on Wednesday.

Farmhouse window ledge by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts

Robin Ravilious doesn’t put a gloss on any of this aspect of their lives. James was often at odds with Beaford Arts, an organisation that aimed to bring cultural events to rural communities but often, through successive managements, failed to see the value of the work that James was doing for them. In a bizarre twist of early contractual negotiations (and pre new copyright laws) James surrendered all ownership of his images after his death. The negatives and copyrights would belong to Beaford Arts not to his family, and whilst the relationship currently seems to be on an even keel with the digitisation of the archive now in progress, it was not ever thus.

What becomes abundantly clear in the book is that any  lack of appreciation did not extend to those whose lives James was photographing...

’His love of the landscape and his rapport with its people, so clearly seen in his work, gave them...a sense of their countryside’s identity as a special place: not just a rundown backwater where life was a struggle, but a precious piece of old England worthy to be looked at intently, and evaluated, before it disappeared... ‘The thing about James is, he makes our lives seem important.’

And that was so apparent to Bookhound and I on the day we went to the event at Hatherleigh recently when the community came out in their droves to see the photographs and talk about their memories of them.

The village hall was bursting with pride and awash with reminiscences...we went up to complete strangers with a picture in their hands and they would tell us about the location, the day, the weather, what was happening in the world at that time and what their lives had been like.

I like to think that James was looking down on that day and was well pleased with his work because, as Robin Ravilious elaborates in this book, James was often deeply depressed and, despite his innate 'sense of responsibility towards the future', frequently convinced that his life's work had been of little use and would be worthless.

Two of James’s subjects who Peter, Chris and I talked about at Port Eliot were Olive Bennett and Archie Parkhouse and Robin Ravilious’s chapter on Archie in particular articulates something so evident in many rural communities...the presence of the wise old souls who have lived there all their lives, barely travelling further than the next market town but knowing their patch intimately, surviving by the code of make-do-and mend born of the poverties of the past. 

Archie Parkhouse and his dog Sally by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts

We have known them around us here though sadly, like Archie, they are a dying breed, but I doubt we will ever forget Jack, then in his eighties and wearing his old brown overcoat with its baler twine belt, who turned up at our gate one day soon after we had moved in (bearing in mind we live three miles out, up and down steep hills and along narrow lanes, from the village and Jack’s cottage) and proffered a rose cutting that he had picked from the garden of the derelict mill along our lane as a gift of welcome. My abiding sadness is that I didn’t manage to cultivate it into the glorious climbing rose that he had remembered from the days when the mill still stood, and I’ve been down there and looked since and I can’t see any trace, it’s long gone.

I would love to have met James Ravilious, indeed talking about him so much with those who did know him has been a real pleasure and inspiration this year, and now that I have read Robin Ravilious’s book I almost feel that I have met him. The book is beautifully written and James presents as an easy subject from whom to glean inspiration, the way that James Ravilious saw what he was looking at...if that makes sense, translates readily into my wanderings around us here. I find myself seeing with different eyes.

And I admire  so much about him....

....the way that he 'despised jargon and impenetrable 'artists statements' full of pretentious claims and concepts'

...the use of black and white film as a more profound medium without the distractions of colour..

...the way that genes will out revealed in James's shared love with his father Eric of 'English light, abstract pattern, muted colouring, old-fashioned shops, old machinery and quirky corners of junk half-buried in nettles'

Archie Parkhouse's shed collapsed in a blizzard, Millhams, Dolton, Devon. 1978.by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts

...the recognition 'that the rural idyll comes at a price: hard physical work.'

Archie Parkhouse and Ivor Brock moving a sick ram by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts

And so much more besides.

As I highlighted yesterday, Chris Chapman has written a fine and moving piece about his own friendship with James Ravilious especially for you (and with some pictures from Chris's own collection), which will be on here on Wednesday, but he recalls that whenever he answered the phone to James a voice would say 'It's James...' with a slightly questioning inflection...almost as if he needed to apologise and wasn’t expecting the person on the other end of the phone to remember who he was. Chris has signed my copy of James Ravilious A Life accordingly and I hope to add more signatures to it on Thursday.

What a precious book and please come back later in the week, because don't forget I'm sharing the love...there will be gifts.

 

 

 

 

Lyttleton and the Book

Do you know that moment where you see something in a shop, in this case a book in a second-hand bookshop.

It’s a book that you think you might want, but maybe not.

You pick it up, peruse, talk yourself into wanting it, then talk yourself out of wanting it and put it back on the shelf and move along.

But it haunts you madly afterwards and you can’t quite get it out of your mind, even visualising it sitting there in the shelf and GOD FORBID, someone else picking it up and buying it.

The book was Wednesday’s Children by Robin Hyde. Offspringette and I had been wandering around Lyttleton, the port from whence many of the historic Antarctic expeditions have set sail,

and had spent a happy hour browsing in The London Street Book Store there.

I’d picked the book up and put it down again, but a few days later we had gone to Hanmer Springs and made the discoveries about Iris  / Robin’s sojourn at Queen Mary’s Hospital and suddenly all I could see was the book that I had left on the shelf a few days before. 

I have had several lovely meetings with Hilary who lives and works in Christchurch and reads here, and who had offered to be a friendly face for Offspringette in her early days in the city and has been so ever since, Hilary filled me in on a wonderful radio dramatisation of Wednesday’s Children some years ago and agreed that is was a book rarely seen on the shelves and I definitely should have bought it. Before I knew it Hilary had me in her car and heading off from Christchurch, through the road tunnel to Lyttleton and The London Street Book Store.

We arrived at 4.15pm and they had closed at 4pm.

Can you visualise two women clawing helplessly at the glass of a bookshop window ( well mostly me, Hilary is much more restrained) 

And wondering whether the $12 book was still there....

I hope this is sounding like familiar behaviour to some of you because I’d hate to think it was just me.

Anyway, I was up bright and early the next morning, Offspringette dropped me at the bus stop and headed into work and I took the bus back to Lyttelton.

I’m getting to know and love Lyttleton by now. I’ve found a perfect hot chocolate venue and like so many places around Christchurch a warm and welcoming, well-stocked library with comfortable chairs and free Wi-fi. I’m not sure why I found it so, but it was both surprising and comforting to see familiar books from home on the New Zealand library shelves. 

 As the bookshop opened its doors I was in there and heading to the exact place on the exact shelf with indecent haste and there it was.

Mission accomplished and I headed off to celebrate and start reading. This coffee shop was completely destroyed in the earthquakes of 2011. In fact Offspringette was on a world-wander and happened to be living and working in Lyttleton for one of them. She reminded me of that day as we walked around; the shop window shattering around her and outside the rolling streets and the liquefaction never to be forgotten. This place has been rebuilt brick-by brick...

 More about Wednesday’s Children by Robin Hyde dreckly but in the meantime...

There’s something quite difficult to define about buying a book when you are in situ as it were. A book  by an author from that place, when you are in that place, but I suspect plenty of you will understand that, and if you do I’d love to hear about your special In Situ Purchases.

Or that thing you didn’t buy but wish you had... 

 

 

Hanmer Springs & Robin Hyde

Sometimes the title of a blog post just has to do what is says on the tin, persevere with this one and all will be revealed...

Within days of arriving in New Zealand Offspringette had whisked me off on a road trip north of Christchurch to Hanmer Springs. Breathtaking scenery and hot springs were the order of the day so the towels and togs (as they are called in NZ) were packed and off we went. I enjoyed weather various during my stay but this particular day was dazzling blue skies and warmth. The fifteen open-air thermal pools have been attracting visitors for 125 years and at 40 to 42 degrees centigrade were utter bliss after the rigours of a long-haul flight (and Los Angeles airport...which I will avoid ever hereafter). Heat radiating from the Earth’s core warms the percolated water and forces it to the surface and apparently it takes 180 years to get there, so the water we basked in had fallen as rain in the 1830s.  I could have stayed immersed all day.

As it was we stayed long enough to emerge prune-like but relaxed and warm to the core. The aroma of sulphur permeated our skin and stayed with us, we smelt like a pair of egg sandwiches, but then so did everyone else in Hanmer so no matter. The sensation is slightly other-worldly when you emerge from the springs, and that other-worldliness continued as we wandered around the deserted buildings and grounds of Queen Mary’s Hospital next door. 

There had been a sanitorium on the site since 1897, managed at one time by a Mr & Mrs Baring-Gould which I must investigate given that the Reverend Sabine Baring Gould (of Onward Christian Soldiers fame) was one of our local celebrities here in West Devon. That building burned to the ground in 1914 and a new hospital was opened in 1916 as a convalescent hospital for soldiers suffering from shell-shock during the First World War. HM Queen Mary had given special permission for her name to be used, whilst the wards were named after Lord Kitchener and General Joffre and the dining hall after Edith Cavell. Lord Kitchener had sent a telegram of appreciation just three days before he lost his life off the coast of Orkney.

Headed up by a UK trained doctor Percy Chisholm, the hospital was ideally placed in close proximity to the pools to offer holistic treatment and, though facilities were sparse, supplies distant and staff shortages a constant problem, it would seem to have been a positive place of care and respite from the horrors of war for many New Zealand men. Once the War was over civilian patients with nervous disorders were accepted and in 1922 a section for women was opened.

I’m not sure I have ever wandered around a more atmospheric place. The grounds, though not the buildings, are open to the public and we peered in all the windows and wondered...

Who had lived out their terrors in this place and come to terms with them...

What was life like in those big octagonal-shaped wards heated by steam radiators with the Nurses's Station, perched like a command module in the middle...

We could see beds and wooden crutches and wheelchairs... and almost nurses and patients.

There was rug-making and basketry, wood-carving and leather work, needlework and gardening for the patients as well as vocational training in subjects as diverse as poultry- keeping and boot-repairing. Attempts were made it would seem to prepare everyone for a life beyond the often hidden traumas of war.

And the Nurses’ Hostel with rooms like so many that I have lived in...

And then the grounds themselves. Late September is blossom time on South Island and Queen Mary’s was a-froth with it. 

 

 

The fact that we could only peer in through the windows made it all the more alluring and just added to the atmosphere. It was all an author’s paradise. If someone hasn’t visited and written a novel I’d be very surprised because it wasn’t hard to conjure up characters and plots as we walked around, and it all left an indelible impression on me. The voices were powerful and strong, the stories almost tangible and hanging in the air waiting to be plucked, and it’s a sense that I still haven’t shaken off, so vivid was it all.

And so it was, a few days later, that my attention turned to New Zealand author Robin Hyde. I had been reading The Godwits Fly (when in New Zealand etc) and was checking out some biographical details when to my astonishment I discovered that Robin Hyde had been an in-patient at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Hanmer in 1927.

’The hills around Hanmer seem at first like threatening giants - but not later! Dr Chisholm is perhaps a little more than middle-aged, sympathetic in a faintly absent-minded but absolutely agreeable way - and he let me alone, and left me free...’

Disappointed in love and suffering from the tragic stillbirth of her son Robin, Iris Wilkinson had been found wandering the streets distressed and paralysed with grief. Having kept her pregnancy a secret from most of her family and delivered her baby in Australia, Iris had  returned to her family in New Zealand unable to discuss her sorrow with anyone. In the midst of this enforced denying of the existence of her child, Iris made the startling decision to take his name (Robin Hyde) as her own, thus breathing life into him in order that he would never be forgotten. It was a decision that would often come to haunt her, keeping as it did the image of her lost child constantly in mind.

But for now, in 1927, Queen Mary’s Hospital, Hanmer worked its magic...the same magic that was so evident as we walked around and wondered...

’But the sheer beauty of that place saved my mind...in the grounds daffodil and crocus burst up, a thousand flames from the soil. The evening light on the mountains was that incredible Eastern blue. I came in Autumn, when the leaves flamed...the sunset light was clear terracotta. In the woods, when I could walk so far, were little patches of frozen snow mingled with brown leaves’

In the words of her biographers Derek Challis (also a son) and Gloria Rawlinson...

'No place more appealing to Iris’s sensibilities could have been found for her convalescence. There were mineral baths, physiotherapy, massage, ultra-violet ray treatment, physical training and relatively sedate sports. The hospital provided supportive care, a healthy atmosphere, and above all enforced rest and quietness.’ ( The Book of Iris A Life of Robin Hyde, Auckland University Press 2002) 

Iris, now writing as Robin Hyde, would emerge from Queen Mary's renewed and recovered having been given the time and space, and above all the care that she needed, to grieve the loss of her baby. This picture of Dr Chisholm with some of the nurses, taken in 1933, reveals a kindly, gentle face. The Women's Unit was built at his behest and named after him. How grateful Iris must have been for his care.

Writing to Rosalie Rawlinson in 1934  (though sadly five years before she would eventually commit suicide whilst living in London) Robin Hyde does at least seem to have achieved some optimistic equilibrium and insight..

’But we live in several different lives, all of us. And however things might seem to be destroyed or broken or changed, they can be restored to their former shapes,even born to a greater beauty as Truth comes out of embers.’

Isn't it remarkable how a place can give out those vibes of caring even ninety years later. On the day we visited there was something incredibly calm and still and peaceful about Queen Mary’s Hospital, Hanmer Springs and we knew it. The spirit of Iris Wilkinson and Robin Hyde lives on and Offspringette and I agreed we would forever remember the day we visited.

 

 

Where did my dream begin with Jackie Morris...

While I wait for my physiology to catch up with my anatomy (it’s taking a while...3am waking continues) and for all the New Zealand excitement to settle into some interesting (hopefully) blog posts, here is a post I wrote before I went away for just this moment. Yesterday I went to Dulverton to meet Jackie Morris who was reading from, talking about and signing copies of The Lost Words. It was a very special day but here’s where my dream began...

Where the Dream Begins is actually a very lovely book by the late Brian Carter, Devonian man and true whose pictures, created with Derwent colour pencils in the late 1970s, captured our imaginations when Bookhound and I first discovered him in 1979. The book has been on and off our shelves ever since, and revisited recently because of the forthcoming Brian Carter resurgence when A Black Fox Running is brought back into print early in 2018.

Where the Dream Begins  is a selection of prose, poems and artwork that evoke an acute sense of place and an interesting aura of what is being lost...and this was 1979. It has been like revisiting a younger self too, remembering our lives back then when £10.50 seemed an absolute fortune to pay for a book and oh my word, what has been lost since (think otters in 1979) though sometimes thankfully found again (think otters now).

The artwork is detailed and exquisite and it inspired us, but Bookhound was at art college, I was a rookie health visitor and we were saving up a deposit for our first house, we just couldn't stretch to an original. But it didn't matter because friends of ours had no such qualms and we would just go round and stare at theirs. They got divorced in the end and we lost touch as you do, but we often wonder who got the Brian Carter original. It wasn't either of these, but you get the drift..

Talking of 'stretching to an original' I am reminded yet again that Bookhound also turned down the offer of a Robert Lenkiewicz painting for £20 during a visit to his Plymouth studio in 1977. Ho hum.

But Where the Dream Begins... are four words that have stuck in my mind ever since and came to mind recently with my reading of The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris. I know and love Robert Macfarlane's words well, but I kept thinking 'Why don't I know much about Jackie Morris?.'

Surely an artist as accomplished as this should be high on my list of familiarity?

I'd come across Jackie's book designs for Robin Hobb with my recent foray into The Farseer Trilogy...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those book jackets and The Lost Words illustrations harmonised with something...but I couldn't for the life of me think where this dream had begun, except that buried deep in my imagination was a recognition that it had definitely already begun somewhere.

I traced it eventually and here's the culprit...

How the Whale Became & Other Stories by Ted Hughes, first published in 1963 and then this edition, with illustrations by Jackie Morris in 2000. I was quite relieved because not being able to fix the moment was starting to spook me everso slightly.

How the Whale Became apart from being a brilliant collection of creation stories by Ted Hughes, is also a microcosm of Jackie Morris's distinctively gentle yet gimlet eye for  the world and its flora and fauna, she sees something that I would like to think I have seen, but I haven't, not until she has revealed it....if that makes sense.

My 41st wedding anniversary gifts from Bookhound were two of Jackie Morris's books. Did you know the 41st anniversary is actually your Snow Leopard Wedding...

You didn't?

No me neither, but it is now...

We spent the day back in September in Dulverton, and some of that day in a very beautiful emporium of delightful things, Number Seven. Books, pottery, stationery, notebooks, gift cards, jewellery and so much more but also many of Jackie Morris's books. There is a newsletter you can sign up for and I can highly recommend a visit to meet Davina and her mum Jan if you are heading westward.

This a signed and numbered super-sized special edition of The Snow Leopard which I fell in love with the minute that snow leopard fixed my gaze, much more about this to come in the winter months because it definitely belongs here. When I pick these big books up it's almost like a reflex to hug them to my chest with both arms for fear of dropping them, but that brings them close to my heart without realising what I am doing. It's a bit of a new book experience and its most welcome.

East of the Sun, West of the Moon slipped in too. More compact book size but still a treasure...

Not only because that polar bear reminded me of my very most favourite scrimshaw in the Stromness Museum on Orkney...

...and not only because I have an intriguing book lined up to read this winter, Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada (thank you Granta) 

...and not only because Artic Dreams by Barry Lopez is nestled on my tiny shelf of Best Books Ever.

...but also because East of the Sun, West of the Moon  is signed by Jackie and she had drawn a beautiful polar bear inside...it needed a home and ours was the right one. I'm sure many of you will understand this.

So there you have it, from the acorns, bluebells, brambles, conkers et al of The Lost Words and I'm on my way with this next instalment of the dream.  

Has The Lost Words found its way to you yet? 

 

Jacob's Room is Full of Books ~ Susan Hill

It's no good, I can't keep quiet about this a minute longer and I need to squeeze in the news while I head off on my antipodean adventure from whence I will try and write the occasional blog post, but will definitely be putting pictures and a few words over on Instagram (recently described as the Radio 3 of social media) so please do follow and comment there if you want to. The link is here but the pictures will also appear on the sidebar over here <<<<<<<<<

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jacob's Room is Full of Books, with its glorious cover, will be published on October 5th. Obviously I am excited because, like Howards End is on the Landing, it is another book from Susan Hill about books and reading and, having read it, I know many of you are going to love it. Susan has written a memoir of her reading year and you will emerge with a fantastic reading list. Susan and I have regular e mail contact and bookish talk is top of the agenda once we've moaned about the world a bit, she keeps me up to speed on the world of publishing and always ready with an opinion or a reading suggestion (and I reciprocate). Many of you will remember that is was Susan who published the Tinker's memoir Bugle Boy (and who gave him that name, which he loved) and our friendship continued.

Yes, yes, that's all very lovely but really, the bit I am most excited about is this because it has never happened before...

Look who Jacob's Room is Full of Books is dedicated to...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Underground Railroad ~ Colson Whitehead

I had absolutely no intention of reading anything on the Man Booker short list this year.

Nothing, not a single book. I was over it.

That was until a reading friend persuaded me otherwise, lauding The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 in the same sentence. It was a Sunday morning, it was gloomy and raining and all of an instant I had to have the books in my hand, Kindle versions wouldn't do.

Does this happen to you...this all-of-a-suddeness about a book (or two books).

I had Waterstones Loyalty Card stamps to hand (£10-worth) so off we went and two hours, bookshop, cake-coffee and papers later I was home and clutching my spoils...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I added in Barkskins by Annie Proulx on the Buy-One-Get-One-Half-Price thing because it seemed rude not to, besides which I haven't read Annie Proulx since she was E.Annie Proulx and writing The Shipping News, Postcards, Heartsongs, Accordian Crimes et al, so I've missed a decade or two.

By Monday afternoon I had finished The Underground Railroad, that's how compelling it was for me and there was me thinking I couldn't bring myself to read any more about slavery.

"Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North..."

I'm not going to elaborate on content or plot but suffice to say that, though the reading is often harrowing, the detail is not gratuitous and I felt in very safe hands with Colson Whitehead's prose style. He creates tunnels, trains, rails and drivers when in fact of course the 'underground railroad' was actually a network of people and safe houses above ground who helped the slaves escape to freedom. I was reminded of the subterranean would in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and for Colson Whitehead this became a device that allowed his narrative to move Cora from one state to the next whilst examining the differing attitudes to slavery that she would meet. There were parallels with Biblical plagues, the life of Anne Frank and Messianic salvation that make me want to read the book again because I suspect there is much I have missed.

What I didn't miss was a startling moment when a savage incident of punishment witnessed in Cora's slave life is mirrored in another entirely different social event in her 'free' life, and it was as if I had touched 240 volts of live wire. I think there was an audible gasp as the connections arced across and I had to stop reading for a while.  

Of even greater interest and revelation to me was the gaping chasm (and with apologies to all of you who read this in the US) in my knowledge and understanding of early nineteenth century American history, for which there can be no excuse. I have remedied that with some background reading which has helped align dates, causes and conflicts whilst dispelling some of the myths and misinformation that had crept in along the way. I have done a lot of background reading on the apparent myth of the Underground Railroad quilt phenomenon too.

There is a moment in the book when Cora joins in with a quilting bee..

'She cut out a bird, a cardinal; it came out looking like something dogs had fought over. Sybil and Molly encouraged her, they had badgered her into their pastime - but the quilt was botched. Fleas had found the batting, she insisted. The seams puckered, her corners unjoined. The quilt betrayed a crookedness in her thinking: run it up a pole as flag of her wild country. She wanted to set it aside but Sybil forbid her. "You start something else when this one is finished," Sybil said. " But this ain't finished yet."

Cora needed no advice on the virtues of perseverance....'

For those that may not know about this, Underground Railroad quilts are something that have long hovered in my quilter's imagination...

The notion that quilts and the named blocks were used as a device to inform the slaves (most of them kept intentionally illiterate) of escape routes and directions to take....Jacob's Ladder, Bear's Paw, North Star, Tumbling Blocks, Crossroads, Wagon Wheel but the evidence is apparently flawed, with accusations rife of romanticising and a latter-day cashing in on the plight of the slaves. Historians require written evidence whilst all that exists, if at all, is largely oral history, 'informed conjecture' and with no evidence of accurately dated quilts, or that the names of the blocks even existed at the time (quilt historian Barbara Brackman is very definite about this.)

Others argue that written history at the time was the preserve of the few, and certainly not the slaves, so oral history is all there could possibly be.

And whilst not wishing to further propagate the myth the quilter in me understands the reasons and the opportunities ... the chance to attach significance, to reinterpret the symbolism, to pay homage and to stitch it into a quilt. 

I've done it plenty of times (with other symbolism) myself after all...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'd be interested to know your  thoughts on The Underground Railroad ...

 

The Lost Words ~ Robert Macfarlane & Jackie Morris

I've been digging around in the blog cellars again...

Imagine if you will it is June 1st 2015 and Bookhound and I have spent the day at the Hay Literary Festival specifically to hear Helen Macdonald talk about H is For Hawk and Robert Macfarlane talk about Landmarks. We were on the road at 5am and we have a long drive back to the Tamar Valley but I am allowed one more sortie...

"Granted one more sniff of the Festival Book Shop, off I trotted at about 7.30pm and there he was, Robert Macfarlane with his signing queue still snaking out of the door. I watched for a while... he was talking interestedly and at length to each person and it was clear plenty of people were prepared to wait for the opportunity. Plenty too seemed to be offering suggestions about more words for the glossaries in Landmarks, laying out books in front of him with carefully marked pages, turning to each one and pointing something out while Robert looked on and listened with patient attention. In the rarified microcosm that is a literary festival this all seemed to be signalling a heightened awareness and a genuine revival of respect for these disappearing words before it is too late, and it can only be hoped that the interest and enthusiasm spreads beyond the confines. As well as taking an interest in schools' projects, Robert Macfarlane revealed that he will be collaborating on a children's book in the near future, one that brings back the words lost from this year's Oxford Junior Dictionary, words like catkin and acorn, buttercup and bluebell (replaced by blog, broadband, cut-and-paste and voice-mail.) so it is clear that he has a commendable vision for this that goes far beyond the pages of his book.

Something interesting has begun...."

Well that 'something interesting' had begun and now it bears fruit because The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris will be published by Hamish Hamilton on October 5th and you can read more about the book's genesis from Jackie here.

Magicians the pair of them...

I could just say that and leave it there because The Lost Words  is such pure enchantment and genius of collaboration that I really don't want to spoil the magic for any of you by giving too much away, either about the spells or the pictures.

These spells deserve a little bit of mystery, anticipation and the unexpected, a big reveal; Robert's words conjuring up the 'near-lost magic' and the mood of twenty words from Acorn to Wren, whilst Jackie's illustrations wave like a wand across the pages bringing the words from near invisibility into being. The intention is to read aloud, to seek, to find and speak, to discover the things that are missing and hidden, the absence and the re-appearance, to unfold dreams and summon the lost words back into the imagination and the mind's eye. Bramble marches, conker glows, dandelion dazzles, fern flares. I sense the welcome stardust of Gerard Manley Hopkins in these pages, there is subtle assonance and alliteration, hints of in-scape and in-stress, spells that will commit to memory and it is easy to imagine little fingers seeking the words in the cascade of letters or tracing the goldfinches across the pages...

...or finding acorns and wanting to plant them because 'as kindness is to good so acorn is to wood.'

...or revisiting the forgotten beauty of conkers, their burnished glow. 

...or waiting for bluebell season with renewed anticipation to find 'the late-day light' and to step into the ocean.

When I turned the page to Jackie's double-page bluebell wood I was as startled as if I had stumbled on a real bluebell wood by chance, it is no exaggeration to say I was 'pulled down by the hue,' and 'lost in the depths' of the page. I want the colour in my mind's eye for ever, no camera can replicate Jackie's exactness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The book will be a gift of great magnitude for any child given that it measures 15" by 11" (you'll need a whole sheet of wrapping paper) and weighs in at premature baby size. It's a book that is scaled up rather than scaled down, a joy to see these days, and I am envisaging children clutching this under their arms with looks of acute concentration on their faces.

But the children can't have all the fun because I am imagining grown-ups doing likewise.

I'll be tramping in New Zealand on launch day and I'll never get the date right anyway with the time difference, but I'll be there in spirit and I'm giving you advance warning now, time enough to plan, because seriously, make sure you are somewhere special to buy a copy of The Lost Words on October 5th. Make it a memorable Day of The Lost Words (the official launch will be on that day with a ticketed event at Foyles in London) and if you don't have a child to buy for, don't worry, buy one for yourself (in fact buy one for yourself anyway) because I can promise you won't regret it. I have been regularly nursing mine on my lap for several weeks. For children The Lost Words is an early investment in awe and wonder, a chance to know the words that are disappearing from the dictionary; for us more weathered and cynical grown-ups it is a chance to rewind the wonder-clock and be enchanted once again. Each time I pick the book up, or maybe it picks me up, I'm not sure because I often abandon what I am doing and read some spells, and each time I see new things. Children will see even more. And each time I have a new favourite...

Maybe it's 'Huge-hinged heron'...

or perhaps it's the lark whose song is 'torrenting on.'

For now it is 'heather' because Dartmoor is awash with it at the moment...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and here the last few lines (note how the upper case letters have spelt the word)

'Hold a heartful of heather, never let

    it wither,

Even as you travel far from crag and river -

Remember heather, the company it keeps,

    its treasure.'

And...oh alright, I'll give you a tiny glimpse of the picture...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outskirts - Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt ~ John Grindrod

I might be jetting off soon but we have plenty of bookish thoughts still to come before I do and, having seen that Outskirts by John Grindrod was in the offing, I was more than pleased when a copy arrived in the post..

'Coined by National Trust co-founder Octavia Hill at the end of the nineteenth century, the phrase 'Green Belt' originally formed part of an impassioned plea to protect the countryside. By the late 1950s, those idealistic Victorian notions had developed into something more complex and divisive. Green Belts became part of the landscape and psyche of post-war Britain, but would lead to conflicts at every level of society - between conservationists and developers, town and country, politicians and people, nimbys and the forces of progress....

The first book to tell the story of Britain's Green Belts, Outskirts is at once a fascinating social history, a stirring evocation of the natural world, and a poignant tale of growing up in a place, and within a family, like no other.'

And I grew up there too as I mentioned in a post backalong. John Grindrod hails from 46 Fairchildes Avenue, New Addington, me from nearby Mitcham, mid-way between the two is Croydon, my mum's go-to shopping venue for dressmaking fabrics (Allders) and we'd get a ride on the donkeys (Kennards). It's hard to believe that there was such a thing as donkey rides in a shopping arcade, but Kennards in the 1950s was that special. Years ago now, when I did that interview with Ralph McTell, also a Croydon lad, we spent an age talking about those donkeys; something a child would never forget.

In fact, could donkey rides for children in shopping arcades make a come-back or might health and safety, crash helmets, RSPCA, insurance, CRB checks, safe-guarding or infection control get in the way?

In a seamless blend of social history and anecdote John Grindrod has created a unique interpretation of place in Outskirts, and in doing so made that place special. Who else would bother to take a close look at an ordinary housing estate on the edge of the woods 'an intermediate nowhere', let alone make it this fascinating for the reader.

Woven into the fabric is John's remarkable family, his parents Marj and John and two brothers. Marj disabled and wheelchair-bound but don't be deceived, set aside any notions of limitations because Marj is game for anything. Whilst it might have been terrifying to cadge an excursion in her Invacar it would have been memorable for neighbour Joan Blood I am sure...(my asterisks because said words are blocked on here or I end up with spam galore)

'Marjorie on a cushion in the driver's seat, Joan next to her, like an ironing board in a mac...once behind the wheel all of her street-fighting Battersea childhood came out and she'd f*****g b*****d her way round the streets, winding down the windows and giving some van driver or reckless motorist a piece of her mind, two fingers and a bagful of bad language.'

Blended into the narrative of John's family life in the 1970s are the origins, history and development of the Green Belt, the protected chain of green land that started to purposefully surround our cities here in the UK in the post-war years, bought by councils to prevent or control further building. But someone has to live in the edge of it, on the rural boundaries, ' the intermediate nowhere' and with that came tensions and snobbery, along with class and social boundaries...the townies seen as trespassers, mocked and scorned for their lack of country knowledge. Coupled with this are the often fragile and fractured aspects of family life challenged by the gaping holes created, despite her best efforts, by John's mum's disability and illness, his dad's coping mechanisms and the family's preference for mental and emotional self-sufficiency.

'In my family, keeping it all in was the very least that could be expected of you. Forget public displays of affection, we could barely manage private displays of acquaintanceship.'

This was no more acutely demonstrated for me than in Marj's concealment of a pregnancy. hidden not for reasons of disability but by the low expectations of others.

John Grindrod doesn't flinch from examining his family's past, nor how it has affected the present, acknowledging the truths that are revealed, but sharing too the joy of that woodland across the road waiting to be explored (though by his own admission it didn't turn him into nature boy) which all makes for a fascinating and highly recommended read and I learned surprising Did-You-Know things along the way like these statistics...

Constituent Parts of the British Isles

Arable and horticulture 25%
Grassland - pasure, silage and recreation 25%
Mountains, heaths and bogs 16%
Semi-natural grasslands 13%
Coniferous woodland 6%
Broadleaf woodland 6%
Urban areas 6%
and an awful lot of golf courses.

I tended to think that cities took up a lot of space but it would seem they don't.

I'm thinking some of you, like me, might have grown up in the Green Belt ' a band of tame outdoors held in stasis' or perhaps live there now so I'd love to know your thoughts...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Madonna of the Pool ~ Helen Stancey

Books still pop through the post and I am always grateful for them. Mostly I have to set them aside for the right reading moment but just occasionally the right one arrives at the right time.The Madonna of the Pool by Helen Stancey arrived on a scorchio summer's day when I had awarded myself some peace and quiet repose up in the summer house. Bookhound had arrived home with a new gravity recliner which needed to be tested and I was up for the challenge.

The book is published by a new venture, Fairlight Books whose mission is...

'... to promote contemporary literary fiction and quality writing, whatever the genre and however it is published. We aim to bring together a community with a shared passion – a love of books and great writing.'

All well and good but my fiction reading mood had been a bit uncertain for a while.

Does this happen to you?

Good, involving stories were evading me, there had been a lot of start-stop-set aside going on and a happy return to more non-fiction, so I wasn't particularly optimistic that the short stories in The Madonna of the Pool were going to be any different...

Wrong.

I read the first story Pavlov's Dogs. Mrs Turton and Miss Willoughby meeting each week to swap their copies of The Lady and People's Friend, the associations of taste, smell and memory woven into their conversations as their friendship develops.

And then onto Bonfire Night and Matthew, the lonely and isolated child made more so by his parents and their need to make every encounter educational and improving. Controlled, confined, constricted and effectively conned out of his childhood, the story ends with a blue touch paper moment and with it, for me, the analogy that his childhood was exactly that...the fuse that would ignite the rest of his life leaving me to wonder what sort of adult he might become.

Short stories that offer life beyond the final line whilst creating enough to be self-sufficient...I love them, and I was loving these, suddenly I was deeply involved and pleased I'd gone for the Factor 50 because it meant I didn't have to move.

There was brave and stoical (Anna's Mother) 

The lodger who becomes the surrogate father ( In Memoriam) 

The flirtatious teacher and the flattered mother ( How Are You, Mrs Crowther?)

 A brilliant insight into the confusions of old age as it becomes a jumble of tangled thoughts and memories. Perceptions mediated through a brain that is re-wiring itself ( Sum Ergo Cogito)

The self-contained and satisfied barrow-man and his dog ( We're Alright Jack)

These were stories about peoples' lives; the hand they are dealt and how they choose to play it, often making the best of it when trump cards are scarce and self-reliance and resilience must (or cannot) prevail.  As a psychologist Helen Stancey is well-versed in the foibles and fancies of people's lives, and I was impressed with her ability to use that wisdom whilst not overwhelming her stories with professional expertise. Potential exit strategies are on offer because there are answers here too; clues and pointers, but there are the grace notes of change alongside and either resistance to its tune or an acceptance.

The insidious onset of anorexia and OCD is compellingly drawn; the smallest thing allowing an obsession to develop which quickly morphs into comparisons with the carefree friend who rides life 'bare-back'. Before you know it the patterns of behaviour have knitted together so tightly that to unravel them will be tough (You Can't Rely on Pythagoras)

Sports Day offers new insights into the life behind the child who is bullied and isolated at school because he smells, and a mother's willingness to instigate change is beautifully drawn.

The final story, The Madonna of the Pool, perhaps sums up the essence of the book...those assumptions we make about the lives of others, comparing them with our own and somehow finding ourselves lacking.

Truly an excellent collection of short stories which I commend to the house (as one of our number says at the Endsleigh Salon) and if you could suggest some more I would be forever grateful, because it would seem short stories are the way forward when the Fiction Famine bites.

Meanwhile scroll down for gifts...

 

 

The Otter's Tale ~ Simon Cooper

We might not be big on swans out on Dartmoor but we are going stark-raving bonkers about otters this year....

Meet 'Mr Chips'...

The Moor Otters public arts initiative has really galvanised us all into becoming Otter Spotters as we trot round with our little books, finding the hundred otters created by local artists, scattered at locations many and various around the moors. Each otter is beautifully painted and waiting to be found...Sherlock Holmes assisted me with 'Otterhound of the Baskervilles'  for which I was grateful.

The Visitor's Centre shop at Princetown is bursting with furry otters of all shapes and sizes beseeching for forever homes, and of course Simon Cooper's Wainwright  Prize short-listed book The Otter's Tale is much in evidence too...

As we in Devon invented Tarka the Otter (well, thank you kindly Henry Williamson) I'm claiming a unique affinity before all the Ring of Bright Water  brigade butt in. In any case I read Tarka first when I was about twelve, and still have my beloved 3/6d copy, so that seals it. 

Conservationist Simon Cooper's mill house, straddling a small chalk stream in southern England, proves to be an ideal location for the otters to call home, and for him to observe them without interference whilst imagining their fictional life. It's a clever premise that works like magic and I was instantly committed to the adventure. In ways that other books on the Wainwright short list have also demonstrated, the overlap of issues and events has been fascinating. The Otter's Tale is the optimistic, against-the-odds confirmation of much that Stephen Moss hoped for in Wild Kingdom, because the otter is a species almost driven to extinction when our backs were turned and, yet again, it was the insecticides that did for them.

The true reach and impact of insecticides far exceeded anything I may have given serious thought to in the past, so reading this short list has really focused my attention. Whilst the pigeons and songbirds died by direct ingestion, and the foxes, falcons and barn owls ate the dead birds, it was the otters who absorbed the chemicals from the run-off into the rivers and became infertile. Salvation came from where least expected, because ironically it was the hunters who flagged up the decline which led to protected status for the otter in 1978.

Meanwhile Simon Cooper weaves the story of Kuschta in and around these fascinating facts as she finds herself deserted by her mother and must find territory and a mate of her own. I had no idea that otter cubs have a prolonged dependency on their mothers of more than a year, at which point they will just be 'left' alone to fend (prepare to bite your lip). Along the way other cubs may just have been abandoned to die (more lip-biting) in order to maximise food supplies and in Kuschta's case this is exactly what happens with her own brood but thus allowing Willow, Lutran and Wisp to thrive. 

I'm not saying any more but trust me, I was deeply involved in the lives and varied fortunes of this little family...it's hard not to invest them with human emotions, a fatal mistake of course as many have found out to their cost.

If you like otters you'll love The Otter's Tale with its good and optimistic news that otters are now thriving in every county in the country.

Meanwhile here's another favourite from the Otter Spotting trail and if you are in and around Dartmoor keep an eye out for them. The booklets are available at the National Park Visitor's Centre in Princetown (and probably elsewhere) and you'll find the very handsome 'Waterline' (depicting all the rivers that have their source on Dartmoor) in the gardens of the Bedford Hotel in Tavistock.

 

 

 

 

 

Wild Kingdom - Bringing Back Britain's Wildlife ~ Stephen Moss

Time is galloping on because this Thursday sees the announcement of the winner of the 2017 Wainwright Prize. Just to recap this is a prize of £5000 awarded to the author of the book that, in the judges' opinion,best reflects Wainwright’s core values of Great British writing & culture and a celebration of the outdoors.

And for those who might be asking 'Who on earth is Wainwright?'

'Born in Blackburn in 1907, Alfred Wainwright left school at the age of 13. A holiday at the age of 23 kindled a life-long love affair with the Lake District. Following a move to Kendal in 1941 he began to devote every spare moment he had to researching and compiling the original seven Pictorial Guides. He described these as his ‘love letters’ to the Lakeland Fells.' 

If I was a Lake District walker (which I haven't been yet) I would have all of these on my shelf and would use them constantly. As it is I walk out on Dartmoor every week and bemoan the fact that Dartmoor really has no latter-day pocket-sized, rainproof equivalent. William Crossing did a thorough job in the early twentieth century, and Eric Hemery an even more thorough job in the 1980s, and though both books are fascinating for their detail and description they lack Wainwright's detailed drawings, and neither book is portable. 

Criteria for the Wainwright Prize suggest that the book should be narrative driven with a subject that must be related to nature, the outdoors or travel writing (not guidebooks) covering Great Britain and Wild Kingdom - Bringing Back Britain's Wildlife by Stephen Moss (with another fine Carry Ackroyd jacket design) fits the bill well. As a TV producer (most notably in the BBC Natural History department and bringing us Springwatch) he is well-placed to possess an overview of the current state of affairs... 

'The newspaper headlines tell us that Britain’s wildlife is in trouble. It’s not just rare creatures that are vanishing, hares and hedgehogs, skylarks and water voles, even the humble house sparrow, are in freefall. But there is also good news. Otters have returned to the River Tyne; there are now beavers on the River Otter; and peregrines have taken up residence in the heart of London. Stephen Moss travels the length and breadth of the UK, from the remote archipelago of St Kilda to our inner cities, to witness at first-hand how our wild creatures are faring and ask how we can bring back Britain’s wildlife.'

And the state of affairs can be alarming if stats were all we had to work with...

99% of hay meadows lost in our lifetime

Likewise 96% of chalk and limestone grasslands

500,000 farm ponds...

300,000 miles of hedgerows....

Blame World War Two for some of this...

'For the countryside - and in particular the lowland countryside of southern and eastern England - the resulting transformation was sudden and extreme. Precious, complex habitats, which had evolved over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, were simply destroyed.'

Dig For Victory kept the nation fed but recovery after the war of what had been lost was nigh on impossible. For wildlife ' the changes were, quite simply, a disaster' but a near bankrupt nation still had to feed itself and sadly that intensive farming soon segued into the widespread use of insecticides, an even louder death knell for species already under threat. It's a sobering thought that for the generation of today the countryside has always looked like this...

'But those who can still recall the years between the wars know that our rural landscape was very different then : richer, more varied, and above all filled with a far greater variety of plants and insects, mammals and birds. This is not mere rose-tinted nostalgia - but a glimpse of the reality of what modern industrial farming has done to our countryside.'

If there is one aspect of reading this short list that I have enjoyed it is the way the books arc across each other and touch on similar themes before exploring them from a different perspective. Read The Wild Kingdom in tandem with The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel and prepare to emerge informed and ready to gird up thy warrior loins.

'How have we managed to preside over such a cataclysmic decline in our farm wildlife, a decline that may not be reversible?' asks Stephen Moss...well brace for some revealing and worthwhile reading.

Each chapter, ranging through farmland and grassland, woods and forests, mountains and moorlands, rivers and streams, coast and sea, towns, cities and gardens and through to the edgelands, the 'accidental countryside, spells out the perils facing our wildlife. I have emerged with a plethora of fascinating Did-You-Know that I didn't know before. I'll treat you to some of the random observations that Bookhound has been treated to of late...

There are only 5000 nesting pairs of Nightingales remaining in Britain...

Grey squirrels were introduced in 1876 and haven't left since...

The hedgehog population is down by 97%..

As a nation we spend £150 million on wild bird food

Capercaillie are on the brink of extinction yet again...40 years ago there were 20,000, now there are about 1200. (No, don't worry, I didn't really know what a capercaillie looked like either.)

That is partly because there are too many red and roe deer (750,000 of them) who remove the ground cover...

But deer stalking generates £70 million revenue each year...

Can you see the dilemma here...it's a massive wildlife Catch 22 situation. Solving one environmental problem all too often creates another. Put up a fence to restrict the deer's access to capercaillie ground cover and the birds fly into them and die.

It's not all doom and gloom though, and along the way Stephen Moss weaves in the success stories to be cheerful about...think otters, think peregrine falcons. But the balance is precarious. To be honest I've always thought it a minor miracle that salmon survive at all, let alone find their way back to their spawning beds, whilst that other beloved sight on the river bank, the kingfisher can be all but wiped out by a harsh winter.

Stephen Moss doesn't shy away from controversial topics either, culling for one, the re-introduction of predatory species for another, with the arguments for and against often emanating from the sides you might least expect. He has some interesting thoughts about nature reserves too and theories about conservation arguing that we got conservation policy wrong...

'In a last ditch effort to save what we had left, we focused not on the commonplace, but on the rare...so while we were making sure that avocets and ospreys were safe, the rest of our countryside was being trashed in the name of short-term profit...'

Wild Kingdom is Stephen Moss's valiant and important reveille to the rest of us. It has been time well-spent reading this book and I for one have heard the message clearly. 

 

 

The Running Hare ~ John Lewis Stempel

I will be dipping into Port Eliot Festival this weekend as well as doing an event there (Tiddy Tent, Walled Garden 1.45pm Sunday) with Chris Chapman and Peter Beacham in conversation about their friendship with photographer James Ravilious. The three of us met for lunch a few weeks ago for a spot of event planning and I had the best time, so it promises to be informative, funny and moving and everything else besides.

I'm also busy getting used to the This Varifocal Life and leading with my nose whilst realising that my feet and the ground beneath them will never be in focus again unless I bend my head forward at the most ridiculous angle. Nevertheless I am persevering and meanwhile have dredged up the fourth of my Wainwright Prize lists reads from the scribbles basement (written last August) so herewith The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel with a few italicised updates, and if you have read this one I would love to know your thoughts...

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

The harvest has just been gathered in here (no it hasn't this was last year) The Four Fields to the Woods were left as stubble through last winter before that memorable spring ploughing transformation; six months later and 'tis all done for another year.

We never know what has been sown so it's always a bit of a lottery as to what will emerge Will it be oil-seed rape, or oats, or wheat. One year it was maize and we lived through a summer of walking through what we fondly termed Mother Abigail's after that very scary Stephen King film The Stand. Now of course we have maize everywhere as a cover crop for pheasants. Anyway this year up came the green shoots until eventually we diagnosed it as barley (it's spooky old maize again this year). 

We've watched it ripen and once the combine harvester has been through we go in for the straw for Nell and Rusty's kennel for the winter (with permission and pay for it) and so the cycle will begin again. Maybe they will plough in the autumn and sow winter wheat (they didn't) but whatever happens I have a minute understanding of it all, the process and how it used to be start to finish, thanks to The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel. If you enjoyed his previous book Meadowland then I think you will like this one too.

John Lewis- Stempel takes a modern, conventionally farmed arable field and turns it into a traditional wheat field for a year. Following the old conventions of timing, equipment and methods, and weaving in history and literature as he writes, the result is a wonderful eulogy to John Masefield's line that 'the countryside is the past speaking dear.'

'Time does not erode it builds sedimental layers of particulate memory,' suggests John Lewis-Stempel and I was nodding my head in agreement and thinking on it every time I walked out to watch the progress of the highly mechanised fields around us here. It is sometimes hard to peel back that top layer of leased farm land to reveal the past that lies beneath, but we can usually talk ourselves into it ; exhausted to its limits by outside contractors, analysed by agronomists, sprayed and cajoled into production when sometimes I think it would like  a year off,

We'd much rather lean out of the bedroom window, as we did last week, (a year ago ) and watch Farmer Steve haymaking in Mowhay Meadow with his dad's 1960's baler. It's like watching a children's Britain's farm come to life...remember the choking hazard that was the little yellow hay bales...




Frequently the facts presented in The Running Hare are startling...

Withered margins and the erosion caused by the run-off of the top soil...something we see around us here as we watch the fields take off in a muddy stream down the lane in the winter storms. (Earlier this year highways came and 'ploughed' off approx 150 tons of topsoil  from our lane which was becoming impassable. A job they estimated as taking half a day in fact took four and that soil now gone from the fields forever.)

Spraying crops has reduced the numbers of hares by more than a million...

Only half the hedgerows present in 1945 still existed in 1990...

A 50% reduction in farmland birds since 1970...

DEFRA lists twelve birds that should be present. We are lucky I think, I have italicised those we see regularly

Corn Bunting
Goldfinch
Starling
Stock Dove
Grey Partridge
LapwingLinnet
Skylark
Tree Sparrow
Turtle Dove
Yellowhammer (we have these this year...'a little bit of bread and no cheese' ringing out from our  trees)
Whitethroat

JL-S (forgive the initials, I know...it sounds like a boy band) adds a few more...again italics for those we see around us here.

Rook
Quail
Barn Owl
Pheasant
Partridge
Corncrake
Cirl Bunting

And I learned new things too... about an acre being the amount of land one man could plough in a day with oxen and he would walk ten miles doing it. The arrival of horses in the eighteenth century sped things up by a mile an hour. Woven in are references to Shakespeare and Edward Thomas and John Clare as JL-S works to create a field that fills with the traditional wild flowers and butterflies and of course the hares return. The ultimate is to harvest and tie his crop into stooks, like these spotted by the Kayaker last year. It can still be done albeit by machine...

Whilst we might hanker for the past I am under no illusions about the impracticalities and neither is JL-S. The world has moved on as has farming and there are a lot of people out there to feed, but even in the smallest ways differences can be made that preserve what is good and which is so often at risk of being lost in the grand scheme. As JL-S points out, programmes like Springwatch, often based in reserves, give the mistaken impression that nature in Britain is busy and bountiful when in fact it is often not, much of it is under real threat and we must never assume all is well.

Despite that, as the blurb says this really is a rare and joyful book and definitely one for the shelf.

Meanwhile we have been doing our little bit for nature here having just taken part in the  Devon Greater Horseshoe Bat survey.  (this was last year we are booked to do it again this year ).We had a recent occurrence...thinking we had a swallow in the sitting room when in fact it was a very large bat (flew out of a bookshelf). Bookhound was on his own there, you didn't see me for dust and with Magnus under my arm who was looking very interested, but when news of the survey came up here in the Tamar Valley we booked the recording equipment, set it up in the garden for three nights, watched the bats swoop and swerve around the microphone, sent off the SD card and will get the results back later in the year....if we pressed the right buttons that is. (We did press the right buttons and apparently detected thirteen of the nineteen bat species known in the UK).

Right, that's quite enough from me...your turn.

 

 

Love of Country - A Hebridean Journey ~ Madeleine Bunting

Confession : I started to read Love of Country - A Hebridean Journey by Madeleine Bunting (published by Granta) soon after we returned from our trip to Orkney last year. I got as far as Rum before realising that my head and my imagination were still full of Orkney and all those amazing images; somehow I just couldn't shuffle off the memory of that beautiful day at Waulkmill Bay and the scattering and nor did I want to...

I set the book aside and decided to wait until I was properly ready for another excursion north, this time from the armchair because it's a very, very long drive from Devon. When you live down here at the other end it is easy to forget that the Midlands are actually the centre of England but the Borders are the centre of Britain. There is as much to drive again to reach Thurso and the ferry for Stromness and if we are being sensible it takes us three days.

That said the road trip did come in handy because Madeleine Bunting recounts several of her own including childhood holidays at Amatnatua sixty miles north of Inverness. We passed nearby as we motored up the east coast towards Golspie and Dunrobin, whist the ring I chose from Ola Gorie in Orkney is aptly named the Carron, also a river nearby. Little familiarities and affinities that I love to find when I am reading a book.

'A ferry departure brings its own frisson of anticipation,' says Madeleine Bunting and suddenly there I am, ready to hop on board as she heads off first to Jura, Iona and Staffa. The Hebrides consist of 270 named islands off the west coast of Scotland, 41 of them permanently inhabited, spread over 241 miles north to south and with 2500 miles of coastline.

With Madeleine Bunting's journey, completed in instalments over six years, come the disparate objects and their potential to shape our histories, the first of which, a family-owned Singer sewing machine made in the factory on Clydesdale, segued nicely into another recent read The Sewing Machine by Natalie Fergie. Natalie (a health visitor too back in the day) has woven a gentle fictional narrative around an old Singer machine, the factory in Glasgow, a hospital and the lives of everyone connected with it that in turn prompted so many memories of the place of my mum's Singer in my life too.

For Madeleine Bunting...

'Now I write instead, but the metaphors of stitching, embroidery and patchwork and the intimacy with fabrics and weave serve my sense of craft.'

Each Hebridean island proved to be a revelation to me as Madeleine Bunting invoked not only a sense of place...

'Islands as places of prestige and status as well as of insight and creative solitude,' 

...but also the echoes of a history which I had never really been clear about. Jura like all of them full of surprises because of course islands can be bought and sold (Jura currently owned by Australian zillionaire Greg Coffey) and thus developed by whoever can afford to own them. Cue, down the ages, much inappropriate building, landscaping, stately pseudo-castle construction, golf courses and high walls to 'defend' them against the intrusive eyes of the locals.

Iona was, in the words of George Macleod...

'A thin place - only a tissue paper separating earth from heaven.'

I loved this one with its legacy of monks and the Book of Kells (now in Dublin) and the spread of Celtic Christianity, though now 'hijacked and re-processed' and far-removed from its origins, but still a great source of comfort to many its translation to more widespread usage. I've read and been consoled by John O'Donohue's Anam Cara and Benediction and I am sure countless others have too; we have Iona and St Columba to thank for the privilege. Iona the burial place of politician John Smith, seen by many as the best Prime Minister we never had, a man whose principles of leadership and service are a perfect fit with the original ethos of the island community.

Onto Staffa... and with it an awakening sense of injustice that would grow as Madeleine Bunting travelled to other islands. Uamh Bhin, the Melodious Cave renamed as Fingal's Cave, cue Mendelssohn and the overture...

...but reminding me of the colonial renaming of New Zealand which effectively attempted to erase the Maori culture. Staffa would become the 'required destination for anyone with pretensions to a cultured sensibility,' and with more of this to come I started to understand the indignation felt by those to whom these islands have been home for generations. To her credit Madeleine Bunting's account felt consistently honest and unbiased, both factual and revealing whilst acknowledging her own prejudices. When a writer achieves that balance it somehow encourages a reader to walk alongside, and there is plenty of walking in Love of Country too. 

Rum is where the traumatic shadow of history most definitely begins to fall...clearances, colonialism, chieftains and clans. The follies and foibles of wealth and the associated shame made for darker days that deny the solace of romanticism invoked by the beautiful scenery (guilty as charged here) and explains much of the ongoing discontent. The beauty of the scenery is self-evident but Madeleine Bunting denies herself (and her reader) that indulgence until a fuller understanding is grasped.

I grasped it and needed to ...because how did I start writing this piece but with a sense of the overwhelming romantic, heart-stopping beauty of Orkney.

Onto Eriskay and Lewis (Donald Trump's mother was from Lewis...just saying).

I won't go into more detail or we'll be here until Christmas, but trust me Love of Country is a splendid read. Madeleine Bunting's final island visit is to St Kilda. I have always desperately wanted to go, but if I never manage it at least I can say I've tagged along from my armchair. If I'm honest, because Madeleine is very honest about it, perhaps I'm not quite so desperate to go now I know what I know... suffice to say that at times, in Madeleine's experience, the reality is slightly at odds with the pictures.

I am hoping you can tell just how much I enjoyed my Hebridean journey via Love of Country. I was engaged and involved and I learnt things I didn't know but in the best possible way, and to boot I emerged with a long list of other books to delve into from the bibliography (click to enlarge)

Seriously, if you are missing out on a holiday this year Love of Country - A Hebridean Journey and the companion reading is as good as and this book another worthy contender for this year's Wainwright Prize to be announced on August 3rd.

 

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Wainwright Prize 2017 @wainwrightprize

The January Man - A Year of Walking Britain ~ Christopher Somerville

This the second of my musings on this year's Wainwright Prize Short list, and I don't often splay a book out like this for your delectation but first things first with The January Man, A Year of Walking Britain by Christopher Somerville, and this delightful dust jacket...

The artwork is by Carry Ackroyd and this is one of those book covers that dawned on me as I read, realising that I was traversing the months across the jacket, written as they are chapter by chapter as Christopher Somerville 'walks' his father's life. Interesting that Carry has another book jacket on the Wainwright short list too, more about that one soon.

I was always going to love a book of memories, written by someone of my era (almost, Christopher Somerville four years older than me) and with the narrative structured around the scaffolding of a folk song.

Cue more diversions as I seek out renditions of The January Man. I knew I had heard it sung by Bert Jansch back in the day (I eventually find it on the Moonshine album)  and more recently by Rachel Unthank & The Winterset (now The Unthanks) on Cruel Sister..

'Oh the January man he walks abroad in woollen coat and boots of leather
The February man still wipes the snow from off his hair and blows his hand
The man of March he sees the Spring and wonders what the year will bring
And hopes for better weather

Through April rain the man goes down to watch the birds come in to share the summer
The man of May stands very still watching the children dance away the day
In June the man inside the man is young and wants to lend a hand
And grins at each new comer...'

  

It's a clever premise which drew me in and along with ease...

 

'The book follows a circle of walks around Britain, month by month through the course of a year, recording the nature, people, weather, landscape, music, and local traditions I came across, and whatever else called out to me along the way. It’s also a very personal account of a post-war father-son relationship, exploring the character of my father John, and the long walks we shared over many years which brought us closer together.'

 

The chances were high that at least some of Christopher Somerville's memories might chime with mine and I wasn't disappointed, and as a consequence there has been a lot of time spent meandering back through my own childhood too, and also my relationship with my dad. A sense of the values impressed upon him by his father's attitude to life... perseverance, strength in adversity, a belief in 'doing one's duty', a throw-away modesty about one's own achievements and a never-say-die approach all reminded me so much of my dad, despite their very different personalities and their post-war lives 

 

Somerville senior worked for GCHQ and was deeply involved in Cold War 'information' whilst my dad went into chemical engineering, but I understood this much...

'In the springtime of hope after the war young parents wanted to make everything perfect.'

And nor did they talk about the war for a long time... 

'We didn't have an inkling of how the war had stayed bubbling under the post-war lives of our parents' generation until, much later, hesitantly and by modest degrees, some of them began to talk about it.'

Like my dad, Christopher Somerville's father waited forty years before addressing 'the elephant in the room', his over a second pint of Old Peculiar, my dad's on a blog post that he wrote for me here back in 2006 entitled 'The Day War Broke Out'. To our amazement  Bugle Boy followed, and with thanks as always to Susan Hill who read that post and insisted that he should write a book, and if he did she would publish it. It was Susan who nicknamed him The Tinker, a name that he loved and certainly lived up to. 

 

The walks take Christopher Somerville to places various, the Lake District, the Long Mynd, Somerset, the island of Foula in Shetland, the Pennine Way, Lindisfarne and each with local history, folk-lore, geography and nature woven into the personal memories, and as the song makes its own way through the year too..

 

'And in July the man in cotton shirts he sits and thinks on being idle
The August man in thousands take the road and watch the sea and find the sun
September man is standing near to saddle up and lead the year
And Autumn is his bridle.'

 

I'm about an inch away from getting my guitar out of the loft as it is with my Summer of Joni pending but now it's imminent since reading this...

'The guitar was the instrument that liberated my whole generation of would-be music makers who never learned to decipher the dots...'

 

YES. YES, it absolutely was  My dad bought me my first guitar in the middle of my O Levels, who knows how much better I might have done in Physics had I not been busily wearing away the tips of my fingers learning C, F, Am, G in order to play Leaving on a Jet Plane. But it's still in there...when this guitar emerges I reckon I'll still be able to tune it and play it.

 

And so Somerville Senior ages with the song, and as the winter verse approached I was deeply engaged and braced for what December would bring...

 

'The man of new October takes the reins and early frost is on his shoulder
The poor November man sees fire and wind and mist and rain and winter air
December man looks through the snow to let eleven brothers know
They're all a little older...'

 

Strangely, given that I am already feeling a synchronicity and connection with The January Man, it should have come as no surprise that the death of Christopher Somerville's father would be almost identical to that of my own dad, three months from a diagnosis of cancer to the end.

 

And so the song moves through the year coming full circle...

And the January man comes round again in woollen coat and boots of leather
To take another turn and walk along the icy road he knows so well
The January man is here for starting each and every year
Along the way for ever.

 

Yes indeed, along the way for ever.

 

I'm not sure The January Man would have found me had it not been for the Wainwright Prize so how delighted I am that it has. I would love to know your thoughts...

 

Where the Poppies Blow - The British Soldier, Nature, The Great War ~ John Lewis-Stempel

'Few today would go to war for the fields, woods, brooks of Britain. Or, rather, what is left of them. We have become de-natured and über-urban.'

I take extra convincing to read a book about the First World War these days. That might sound callous and narrow-mined but that's not the case... the truth is that though I have read so much over the years the older I get somehow the more harrowing I find it. I felt I knew enough, almost too much and so, when I saw that Where Poppies Blow by John Lewis-Stempel was on the Wainwright Prize shortlist, I have to own up to a moment of heart-sink at what may be ahead.

Because surely every book that could be written has been written...

Can there possibly be an unexplored angle to this conflagration...

But I had committed to reading as many books as I could and writing thoughts on them here so there could be no exceptions, and I think it is to John Lewis-Stempel's credit, and on reflection to the ordering of the chapters, that I succeeded and with honours, because Where Poppies Blow quickly became a compelling and memorable reading experience over two special days.

Nature, unchanging, 'assured and permanent' and had I ever really given a thought to how reassuring that immutability might have been to the soldiers in the trenches. There was solace and consolation in the seemingly most ordinary of details. 'We've the stars to share,' writes Second Lt. Max Plowman in a letter home. And for the British soldiers it was the landscape  that was their identity and heritage. As JLS (we are on initial terms for the forseeable) elaborates, and it was something that explained a great deal, when the British viewed the countryside they saw nature, they saw God...

'British patriotism, unlike the patriotism of other countries, was not based on race, but shared values and love of countryside.'

After introductions JLS turns to the birds of the battlefield among them the nightingales who carried on singing regardless, and the skylarks...

'The song of the skylark was the soundtrack of the war on the Western Front wherever and whenever...'

The birds however were not a comfort to all, for many the sound of birdsong would invoke homesickness and melancholy, though Captain Charles Raven saw the swallows nesting in entrance to company HQ differently...

'These birds were angels in disguise. It is a truism that one touch of nature makes the world kin: those blessed birds brought instant relief to the nerves and tempers of men.

What a sobering thought that in peacetime we seem to have achieved what the war could not, with both nightingales and skylarks now on the RSPB endangered Red List. Indeed in another Wainwright short-listed book, The Wild Kingdom (more about it soon) Stephen Moss suggests that nightingale numbers are down to just 5000 birds in the UK.

John Lewis-Stempel moves on to horses ...160,000 rounded up in August 1914 and I was instantly reminded of a painting Bookhound and I saw recently at Torre Abbey in Devon. 

August, Gold of Earth was painted in Plymouth in 1914 by Katherine Maud Hogarth Clay (1880-1930) a direct descendant of the 18th century artist William Hogarth...

As we sat and looked (Torre Abbey's art collection is beautifully laid out, spacious and with strategically placed sofas) we both wondered whether those horses had been sent off to war, whilst having a wry smile at the information alongside with its correction...

What a relief it was to learn that despite the undoubted suffering involved for the horses at least lessons had been learned from the Boer war. With the establishment and training of the Army Veterinary Corps, care of the animals was paramount, with casualty and evacuation protocol when injured mirroring that offered to soldiers. 

Out of consideration that some may be eating while reading I'm going to gloss over the Lice and Rats and Microbes chapter but that's not to say I didn't find the details about Clostridium perfringens, Borrelia vincenti and Bacillus fusiforms fascinating and informative in that way that nurses do. Life was miserable for the men but they had ways of dealing with it all.

Moving swiftly onto flowers... well this chapter was a happy revelation though it should have come as no surprise, given the number of gardeners who enlisted, that trench flower beds were prolific and tended with great care and pride. Seeds were often sent from home, the gardens creating a sense of the familiar in the midst of the unknown and uncertainty, as well as offering opportunities for some control over the environment and a means of self-expression in the midst of an externally ordered and regimented existence. 

There's much more about dogs, cats, rabbits, hunting, fishing, and I've barely touched on the hidden depths and delicate nuances in Where the Poppies Blow, or the quotes from letters home; nature in all its forms giving the soldiers something to write about as a beacon of hope in the midst of the carnage. Ordinary men writing about seemingly ordinary things which for them had become lifelines to hope and home; the gardens in particular creating a sense of sharing... soldiers could be moved up the line at a moment's notice but knew that their gardens would be tended and enjoyed by those that followed them.

It all reminded me of the gardeners of Heligan in Cornwall and the sadness I often feel as we walk around there. The gardening workforce enlisted en masse in 1914, signed the wall in the thunderbox room and left for the trenches, leaving the garden deserted and derelict until its restoration began in the 1990s. I might not be quite so sad now if I can think about those gardens on the Somme, but a sobering fact nonetheless, and one to which Heligan is a witness, was that whilst nature was somehow thriving on the Western Front, on the Home Front it was under threat. Meadows under the plough and thus irreplaceable, and the estates about to be broken up with the loss of the heirs in battle.

The sad reasons for the rise of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance here in the UK are well-known...the land effectively ploughed to great depth by artillery bombardment, the nitrogen from the ammunition and lime from the rubble of buildings fertilising the soil, the bones and blood of the men and horses doing likewise, and the flower proliferating where it hadn't before. Something that the Lost Gardens of Heligan will never forget either. Where the Poppies Blow the perfect testimony, and an extraordinary (and different) elegy to the lives of the Fallen.

 

 

 

 

Our Horses in Egypt ~ Rosalind Belben redux

As I was writing my thoughts (for your delectation soon) on the Wainwright shortlisted Where Poppies Blow The British Soldier, Nature, The Great War by John Lewis-Stempel, I remembered that one book had come to mind constantly throughout the chapter on horses. I eventually found the book, Our Horses in Egypt by Rosalind Belben, and then donning my overalls I braved the dusty blog cellar and found this post from 2008. Given that this was written nine years ago I'm hoping anyone who was reading here back then will have forgotten all about it, so I am bringing it back into the light of day because I think it's a book that deserves to be read.

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

I don't quite know where to start and it's not often I say that.It's taken me about a week to recover enough to write this.

First up, I feel I need to seek complete absolution for never really liking horses that much and for ever linking them to tins of dog food. Now I'm having to stop myself flying out of the door every time a horse trots along the lane just to gaze at it and love it and then cry. If you read this book prepare to shed a vale of tears.

Our Horses in Egypt is an unusual, less-is-more book and I had to concentrate hard because Rosalind Belben has a unique narrative style and the dialogue often doesn't quite seem to make sense. In the early chapters I often found myself reading it aloud to really grasp the meaning and then it dawned on me, this is pure dialogue, a conversation as you would really hear it. It's pared down and spare, often unfinished, the voicing of a seemingly random thought.

Here was a writer who wanted me to work.

Rosalind Belben a writer who is constantly challenging her reader to fill in the gaps and silences and make the connections for themselves.You most certainly do not get it all on a plate, the challenge of ambiguity and the potential for confusion all far more representative of real life.It is often several chapters on before one moment of confusion becomes a eureka one. Just hold on to it in a state of unknowing and trust that it will sort out and it does. I can't tell you how pleased I was the moment I understood about the Billy Harris in the drinking water.

Alongside the story of war widow Griselda Romney dragging daughter Amabel and Nanny off to Egypt to track down her old horse Philomena, is the story of Philomena herself. Philomena had been requisitioned for Allenby's 1916 desert campaign from the Romney country seat, where she was more used to hunting to hounds than charging the dervishes in the Western Desert. Thankfully Rosalind Belbin doesn't offer a talking horse but somehow you know exactly what Philomena is seeing, thinking and experiencing without her being given an actual Black Beauty voice.That somehow wouldn't have done at all. I've had to read in very small chunks because the flavours here are so intense and concentrated it's almost too much to take in.

For a start there's the land itself, this is the Levant torn apart by the Great War but a land with a radiant beauty that often shines through at the most desperate moments. Rosalind Belbin is not daft, too much horse suffering too soon would have had even this non-horsey-but-now-warming-to-them person closing the book with a fit of the staggers.The accumulation is gradual and by the time you reach the height of battle you couldn't bear to leave Philomena's side for a minute. Fortunately each chapter of equine derring-do interspersed with the often hilarious adventures of Griselda, four-year old Amabel and Nanny and of course out of the mouths of babes, Amabel tells it like it is with that childlike innocence and Rosalind Belbin nails it.

Likewise you stay alongside Griselda as the full horrors of the life of the horses in post-war Cairo are revealed and her search for Philomena becomes increasingly desperate, with it comes that complete understanding for those of us not quite so devoted to family Equidae.

In fact Rosalind Belben doesn't miss a beat right the way through Our Horses in Egypt and I was constantly marvelling at her plotting, her characters, the voices, the settings. Everything fitting together to perfection and a pure mastery of words.Nothing to excess, those moments when I had to stop and think and work it out for myself became the norm, slowed me down and made me think very hard about the book. When you reach the final page you absolutely have to turn, sniffing and snivelling, back to the beginning and re-read at least the first few chapters.

I could go on and on but I won't because Rosalind Belben doesn't but right now, this very minute, I am reminded of another author who writes like this, Penelope Fitzgerald.

On the Marshes - A Journey Into England's Waterlands ~ Carol Donaldson

'I wanted to walk a songline into my past, peeling back the layers to touch the places which had been important.'

Carol Donaldson, a woman on a journey of self-discovery and in On the Marshes (published by Little Toller) offering a varied and different perspective to the 'journey'  which takes her to the Kent Marshes. This is not an area I know at all, and its one I might have been in danger of dismissing as 'uninteresting' if I'm honest...now I actually want to buy a map and have a really good look around.  

The break-up of a long-term relationship, employment and housing difficulties, some decisions that seemed right at the time but which have gone sour and Carol embarks, deciding to head out walking from Gravesend to Whitstable and exploring 'the different ways we live on this tribally divided island.' 

Carol quickly gets into her stride...

' Suddenly I had fallen into step with a person who had always been walking alongside me, just out of reach.'

...first passing through an area known as the Plotlands; small plots of land bought by working-class London families often as refuge from the war but also as a place to escape to at the weekend and for holidays. Author Lena Kennedy was a Plotlander, living happily among the self-built huts and sheds though sadly, but not unexpectedly, the Plotlanders way of life has been eroded by the encroachment of the city ..

'competing interests co-existing unsuccessfully in a an overcrowded corner...'

'When did we change?' asks Carol, 'when did we stop believing that we could do things for ourselves and instead give the reins of our lives over to others?' as she explores the simple things in life and where it had its origins.

But there is beauty to be found along the way too and in the most surprising places, we don't have a monopoly on the skylarks out on Dartmoor.

But what do you think...is it my imagination...

Because one of the aspects of On the Marshes that struck me time and again was how much easier it is for a man to up sticks and walk it all out of his system than it is for a woman. There are different risks and threats, different constraints. I'd like to think it wasn't more difficult ...but it would seem to be, and there are certainly moments when Carol Donaldson is fearful and wonders what she is doing and why. It is at these moments that Carol offers a very different, and to me fascinating, perspective on the whole Journey Memoir in this book which was a compelling read.

There is a hair-raising, and I mean really hair-raising, encounter with a tidal causeway being crossed with a male friend who urgently needs to get back to land (car in car park, car park locked at night, no mobile, worried wife and child) and the fear is palpable. I could feel my heart racing as if I was there...it's writing that segues perfectly into any reader's own near-miss encounters (mine probably getting caught walking and camping in the middle of Dartmoor on the weekend of the 1979 Fastnet storm) and equally fascinating is the male-female dynamic at play that Carol Donaldson describes, and her part in the decision-making process which would end in rescue by the coastguards.

A spade is a spade and Carol certainly doesn't mess about calling it a shovel because unlike so many of these memoirs, which often only meet nice, friendly, welcoming people (and perhaps seem obliged to stay on the side of political correctness ) she is not afraid to call out mean-spirited-ness when she finds it. I actually found this tell-it-like-it-is honesty very refreshing and along the way Carol is equally open and honest about her relationship and employment difficulties...

...and I wonder if this is another difference between the male and female writers...

...perhaps Amy Liptrot led the way with The Outrun, perhaps there are others who were already forging the path and I am blinkered.

...or perhaps I have been reading the wrong books and there are plenty of men out there sharing not just their physical journeys but the emotional journeys too.

I am sure you will be able to suggest plenty more reading in comments...

And if you know and love the Kent Marshes now is the moment to say so and persuade us all to visit...

Where would be a good base...

I gather Whitstable quite on-trend and up-market these days, Carol has this to say...

'I reached the Seasalter beach huts and entered the invisible force field of Whitstable, the Emperor's New Clothes of seaside resorts...'

If we visit what should we see...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Ravilious Afternoon..

We first saw it advertised in the local paper...

'New Perspectives', the launch of the Lottery Funded project to record and archive the hidden histories of North Devon which also includes the digitisation of the photographs of James Ravilious from the Beaford Archive. So off we trotted last Sunday afternoon to the Hatherleigh Community Centre to find out more.

For those who may be unaware, James Ravilious was the son of Eric and Tirzah Ravilious, an artist in his own right who married Robin Whistler (daughter of Laurence of those windows at Moreton Church that I wrote about a while back) and fell in love with a particular corner of North Devon where the couple made their home. For many years James Ravilious worked with the Beaford Archive to create a photographic record of the people and the places, some 80,000 images in total,
and Bookhound and I have been huge fans of his work since stumbling across this exhibition back in 2010. 

'When he moved from London to Devon with Robin to her family cottage near Dolton, he found an isolated community that was entrenched in tradition.

Son of painter, wood-engraver and designer Eric Ravilious and an artist by trade, he turned to photography after being bowled over by a V&A exhibition by French documentary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

He was considering a career as an art teacher until he was approached by James Lane, the first director of Beaford Arts to 'take a few photographs' for the Beaford archive.

It became a life's work which Robin collaborated on 'officially and unofficially'...

You can read more from that piece here.

Hatherleigh Community Centre was buzzing; scores of people poring over tables of old photographs as well as a wonderful display of many of James Ravilious's iconic pictures. Bookhound channelled his Inner Ravilious and took some nice pics...

Me (in stripes) having a ponder over tea and cake..

...and the conversation was flowing. Lots of town elders happy to remember life as it was, recognising old friends and family in the photos and willingly sharing their stories...and now I'm catching this Inner Ravilious thing with my camera too...

I talked to one gentleman in his nineties who had lived in Hatherleigh all his life. He picked up a picture of some workers on a local estate...

'Do you know where that is?' I asked him...'Oh yes, lots of people worked there,' and he proceeded to tell me all the details including his recollections, as a young boy, of being drafted in to help 'deal with' the rooks. 

'They'd give us half a dozen to take home and mother would know exactly which bit to use, because you can't eat all of a rook you know, and she'd make us the most delicious rook pie. 'Twas lovely. You see we'd eat it in those days, they call it vermin now, but we had to eat what there was, there were no food banks, no fridges but we never went hungry because we all ate what we were given and looked out for each other.'

Is it any wonder that generation might find themselves slightly bemused by 2017.

During the war he'd left the town and his job as an apprentice butcher to work as an RAF mechanic on the Spitfires...

'I'd never been out of town, let alone to London but I thought I'd best go and help so I decided I might as well be doing something I'd enjoy.'

Nearby was Bet (I hope I have the right name)

'I'm ninety-seven you know...'

And we chatted away as she named all the people in the picture she was holding.

What a fantastic project and hats off to Beaford Arts for such a wonderful afternoon, and for taking this project to digitise the archive out to the community, many of whom might never see a computer.

James Ravilious died in 1999 at the tragically young age of sixty and, in that blogendipitous way that these things happen, his planets seem to have aligned around me this year....

A couple of months ago I was invited to go back to Port Eliot Festival to do an event this summer.  I took a few days to think about it....just the one event I agreed, and no transporting house and home, or setting up a tent, or having to read a hundred books, or write it all up through August, but best of all it could be with guests and a subject of my choice. I decided that I would dearly love to be in conversation with Dartmoor photographer Chris Chapman and retired director of Heritage Protection for English Heritage Peter Beacham on the subject of James
Ravilious. Both had been good friends with James, and Peter and I had touched on that friendship at an event I had done at my last Port Eliot outing. He had told us the heart-wrenching story behind one of my favourite books Down the Deep Lanes and there followed an audience on the brink of tears and a mad stampede to buy the book.

How I came to discover Down the Deep Lanes is another whole story.

For anyone who might be at Port Eliot next month I think the event is scheduled for Sunday July 30th at 2pm in the Tiddy Tent up in the Walled Garden (where the dovegreyreader tent used to be) but check the schedule nearer the time in case it changes.

As if this wasn't excitement enough...

I had been up at the Devon Records office researching Dr Blackall and his Drive and thought I might as well see anything they had on James Ravilious while I was there...

'Are you interested in James Ravilious?' asked the man behind the desk as he handed me the file. I explained about Port Eliot at which point his eyes lit up and Bookhound and I were taken into the nether regions of the office to meet the people from Beaford who were digitising the archives...

So many dots joining up, and then this...

After I had written about Eric Ravilious last week I heard from a publicist who told me that there will be a new and very special edition of the photographs of James Ravilious published this autumn and the launch will be in Exeter...

...would I be interested, would I like to see the book and be at the launch....

But here's a question...I would be interested to know how many of you out there around the world know of James Ravilious's work...

How well known is he beyond the West Country...

Because, if he is in the shadows I have a feeling his moment is coming with the publication of this biography in the autumn too...

I'm starting to feel in need of oxygen.

 

 

 

 

Ravilious & Co ... a special gift for one of you

I mentioned my Book Bounty a while ago, and the fact that I had invested some of it in a copy of Ravilious & Co -The Pattern of Friendship by Andy Friend. I had been shamelessly coveting the book for weeks, surrender was inevitable. Sadly there had been a glitch with the binding and Wordery (who I buy from out of preference on You-Know-Where now) had very quickly taken responsibility for the problem, dispatched a replacement copy and organised free postage for return of the rogue book...good on them.

150 pages in and I am relishing every word, especially in light of my read about six months ago of Long Live Great Bardfield The Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood, a book I have yet to write about here, but brace because there will be a whole lot of Ravilious associated content soon. A capable and accomplished artist in her own right, it is all too easy to jump to conclusions about the impact marriage to Eric Ravilious may have had on Tirzah Garwood's own creative output. so I am enjoying reading Andy Friend's observations on that. But even better I am accumulating and researching an even longer list of artists of whom I knew next to nothing and thus can't recommend this book highly enough. Production levels are high and the endpapers that intersperse each chapter are a joy.

I now want to know much more about the likes of Barnett Freedman, Douglas Percy Bliss, Percy Horton, Thomas Hennell and very definitely Enid Marx. Bookhound's stash of endpapers for book binding holds a little treasure trove of beautiful designs and Enid Marx is among them and one of our favourites...

I'd love to know of the existence of, or that someone is writing, a biography of Enid Marx.

I also contacted publisher Thames & Hudson to let them know about my ailing copy and they assured me they think this is a one-off problem and also very kindly offered to replace my rogue book...

What's a girl to do other than be honest and own up that the matter is resolved, but how lovely to have a spare copy to offer to one of you, and my thanks to Thames & Hudson who have agreed with my suggestion and so will send the book to the eventual lucky winner, and this copy can go worldwide. Silver linings all round.

Names in comments as usual to win this copy of Ravilious & Co and the random number generator will choose a winner soon.

RIP Helen Dunmore

Sometimes there is news that we all know will come, but how sad when it does.

....the death of author and poet Helen Dunmore yesterday.

Helen Dunmore wrote so openly and honestly about her diagnosis and prognosis when her recent novel Birdcage Walk was published, and since then I have been reading her last collection of poems Inside the Wave and keeping her in my thoughts.

'To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead - the underworld and the human living world - and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage.'

This is a beautiful collection of moving and memorable poems; poems that offer avenues for so much thought and one of which, for reasons I can't really explain, I have read over and over and always it leaves me with the same warm feeling... and I think we could all do with some warm feelings this week.

 

Little papoose

If I were the moon
With a star papoose
In the windy sky
I'd carry my one star home.

If I were the sea
With boats in my arms
On this cold morning
I'd carry them,

If I were sleeping
And my dream turned
I would carry you
Little papoose
Wherever you choose.

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

Requiescat in pace Helen Dunmore.

 

The Company of Swans ~ Jim Crumley

We are not big on swans here. I love them of course but, to my knowledge the Tamar Valley is not natural swan territory and we never see them either drifting around or flying overhead. I'd be thrilled if we did, the nearest might be on the canal at Exeter, but we can't have a monopoly on all nature's glories after all...

Only the other day we counted fifteen buzzards flying overhead...

And Bookhound and I had this close encounter with a handsome fox up on Dartmoor a while back...

The Company of Swans by Jim Crumley, with engravings by Harry Brockway, caught my eye in a charity shop recently and I spent a happy/sad afternoon reading it because Jim Crumley's encounter with a pair of mute swans doesn't quite end happily, the denouement quoted on the cover of the book...

'A small mound of white feathers lies on a tussock of grass made grey by a Highland winter. It is all the monument there will ever be to the life of a swan.'

We're going to be talking about pens and cobs today, female and male swans for the uninitiated of which I was one. I think I knew but I'd forgotten... if it had been a quiz question would I have known...

The swans live and nest on a loch near to Jim Crumley's Scottish home from where he is able to watch year on year as the pen loses every batch of eggs laid to an unknown predator, whilst the cob increasingly spends more time away from his mate. It is apparently not quite true that swans mate for life because in the case of the Crumley Two, when a new and younger model appears on the loch, our cob's neck is turned and he's off a-wooing leaving his mate to fend for herself.

Despite Jim Crumley's best efforts to help the nesting swan lay her eggs in a safer place it is to no avail as batch after batch disappears (spoiler alert : if not floods then down the throat of an otter as it turns out) and it is clear, perhaps in the interests of the preservation of the species, that the cob must seek a new mate.

Exploring the myths and legends surrounding swans Jim Crumley emerges with a single common denominator...

'At the heart of many of these legends is a single idea - that the human soul flies on in the swan after death.'

He terms it an 'understandable obsession', the notion of the afterlife as a place to be reached and what better way than with wings, and if it is to be wings then none better ' than the exquisite and seemingly unstoppable flight of the swans.' Of course it all begs the question, when faced with the death of a swan...

'Who cares for the soul of a swan?'

At just forty pages the book is a treasure of a read. I defy anyone to emerge dry-eyed from Jim Crumley's close encounter with the deserted pen. Close enough to touch her the the swan grows still...

'Very slowly over several minutes, her neck fell further and further back and down towards her folded wings. Her head tipped slightly forward. For ten minutes she slept in my shadow.'

It's a bit like (but then again perhaps nothing like) that moment when you hypnotise a chicken, which we used to do with great regularity when we kept them, and I was as moved as Jim Crumley with the swan moment...

'I have always tried to be dispassionate, objective, in my dealings with wildlife; as matter-of-fact as nature itself. But I recognised the single emotion that was my response to the sleeping swan and it was love; as pure as it was undeniable.'

Forty pages of utterly joyous and emotional reading and a generous hat tip must go to Harry Brockway whose engravings give life, feeling and movement to The Company of Swans in ways it is hard to describe; the graceful curve of the necks of these preening swans perfectly captured in the wood.

If there is one even greater sadness than the death of the swan it is the fact that this book, published in 1997 and thus before the current rush of 'nature writing', is now out of print and at a time when it would sell by the barrow load given our new-found sensibilities for subjects like this. Here's hoping someone somewhere in the publishing world will pick it up and run with it again, and meanwhile I am hoping that if anyone wants to read it their library or You-Know-Where will oblige.

Swans...

Do they conjure up any literary, poetic or artistic thoughts or connections for you...

Me, I was dashing to the Stanley Spencer shelf to check out Swan Upping at Cookham...

And then this from the RSPB website...

'The role of swan-upping was to round up unmarked cygnets and once the parentage of the cygnets had been established to the Swanmaster's satisfaction, the birds could be marked appropriately and returned to the wild. The ceremony exists these days in a largely symbolic form, although as an exercise it is useful in monitoring the condition and number of swans on the Thames. 

The only two companies that still observe the tradition of owning swans on the Thames are the Worshipful Companies of Vintners and Dyers. The Royal swans are no longer marked, but an unmarked mute swan on the Thames is regarded as belonging to the Queen by default. The Queen still maintains an officially-appointed Swan Keeper, and the ceremony still takes place on the Monday of the third week in July.

The Queen has a prerogative over all swans in England and Wales. The Swan Keeper also dispatches swans all over the world, sent as gifts in the Queens name.'

So now we know.

 

The Long Dry ~ Cynan Jones

I'm certainly not averse to chunky 1000 page books, but when they do happen to be slim and come in at around the 100 page mark I find myself overcome with a little wave of optimism. The Dig by Cynan Jones arrived a couple of years ago, neat and tidy at 150 pages but sadly horribly messy in content and by page 11 I had surrendered.

That happened three times before I swore off it.

The 'messy' content is badger-baiting and I couldn't bear it...

I might be the mother of a gamekeeper and thus became immune to the sight of a dead deer on the veranda, or squirrel tails blocking the filter on the washing machine, in the days when he still lived here, but badgers, though present in serious numbers, were definitely off-limits. As I understood it at the time, better the badger you know than the ones you don't....lose one harmless lot and another, possibly diseased crew would move in...but what do I know about any of this.

What I do know is that, despite this being described as 'pure, pared-down, rural realism' I could live in the midst of it but I couldn't read it on the page... yet somehow I wanted to because I was hearing compelling things about Cynan Jones and his writing style...

'a writer of uncommon gifts...'

'sets a thrilling new standard...'

'shows what a transporting device the short novel can be...'

Of The Long Dry, the first novel by Cynan Jones, Sarah Waters says 'Lovely, poignant and resonant,' on the front cover so I felt reasonably safe and proceeded.

If I think about books about Wales and farming I think of On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin, or perhaps The Hill Bachelors by William Trevor, or maybe even that first volume of autobiography by Horatio Clare Running for the Hills which I enjoyed so much last year.

The pre-ordained setting will most likely include isolation, misery, treachery, angst, infidelity, bogs and rain ( a lot of both) and some traumatic animal stuff and, 'tis true, The Long Dry has a small measure of most except for the rain because the book is set on a Welsh coastal farm in the midst of a very long hot dry summer....maybe but not specifically 1976 (it's the only significant one I can think of)

Gareth and Kate and their children Dylan and Emmy are now living on the farm bought by Gareth's father after the war 'when he didn't want to work for the bank anymore,' so their farming skills and heritage are of just a single generation's experience.

It is early morning, one cow has given birth to a stillborn calf and another, heavily pregnant, has gone missing and Gareth sets out on foot to find her. Slowly and subtly, and with few words but plenty of silences, all the personalities emerge and I was suddenly aware that I had a really good grasp on the nuances of this family...

Gareth...

' He must be very careful with his anger because it is very big when it comes...'

Kate's low self-worth and fear of her diminishing self-image as age takes its toll, but something else, something much bigger is eating away at her conscience and will cause her to self-harm...

Dylan the awkward and recalcitrant teenage son...

Emmy, the innocent child....

Curly the faithful old sheep dog nearing the end of his days..

The cats, I am definitely knowing the cats...

'...he had adopted a placid, somewhat bourgeois cynicism; he also smouldered with the simple fury of having had his balls cut off and in defiance of his emasculation paced about the place with the slow steps of a tiger...'

and the other one...

'She was beautiful, a tortoiseshell with teardrop eyes and the inbuilt mischief anything with lovely eyes has naturally...she was frivolous as only the beautiful can be...'

Using his grandfather's memoirs to create some of the events in the book, Cynan Jones invests small episodes, some of them haunting and deeply moving, with great depth and veracity and all helping to create a remarkable whole whilst leaving much to the reader's own imagination. Here is a writer who says he trusts the reader, who, by his own admission, prefers to draw the eye rather than building a narrative and perhaps the most stunning twist involves a moment of catastrophe that will happen in nine days time, beyond the final page of the book.The reader knows about it in every detail, the family don't, and with the garnered knowledge of their personalities it is the reader who will gauge the reactions and go on to write the next fifty or so pages in their imagination long after the book is finished, Cynan Jones doesn't need to.

That feels like brave writing and I appreciated that trust invested in me.

For all its action The Long Dry feels quiet and understated, less is more and more is given.

I commend it to the house and if you have read it, or anything else by Cynan Jones I would love to know your thoughts...

Any more good reads about Wales to recommend... have I ever read How Green Was My Valley or am i just remembering the film...

And any more short reads to recommend...books that pack all you need and more into so few pages..

 

 

 

 

Four Fields & some big sky thinking with Tim Dee

Four Fields by Tim Dee, as I mentioned a while back, is a book that has had a bit of a history with me.

I had invested in a paperback copy as soon as it was published having started my Beating the Bounds project around the fields that surround us here in the Tamar Valley and with a view to uncovering all the original field names. That project grew into a close look at everything I could find within a mile radius of home...at the time I compared it to that thing we used to do at school, you know, making a square of a wire coat hanger, flinging it over your shoulder and then closely examining everything that lay within.

Tim Dee's premise is the story of four very different fields spread around the world...

'walkable, mappable, man-made, movable, knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested, and changing...'

I am sure there will be a series of posts to come on Four Fields because it is a book to savour and consider slowly along with the astonishing depth and breadth of Tim Dee's writing. The book becomes a meditation, lyrical and meaningful and with deep resonances that I find somehow echo through my days.

For example I read this early one morning... Tim Dee has moved on from the Fens of Cambridgeshire and is now in Africa as night descends...

'After the lone tyrant sun of the day, barging all over, came the democracy of night, ancient lights, a myriad silver pin-suns. Their waltzing spangle said you are there and we are here, here and there and everywhere; a concert of stars spun through space, distant, open-mouthed, silent yet shouting; now is yesterday, here was tomorrow.'

We do that concert of stars here in the Tamar Valley too and are so fortunate to live in an area of nil light pollution barring our own. If we switch off the houselights a velvet dark descends and the sky becomes our own private planetarium.

Suddenly, as I read, and in that way that a book has of being able to take you somewhere else in your mind, I was thinking about Offspringette in New Zealand. Our tomorrow is always yesterday for her, and of course we miss her hugely, but she is happy, has a wonderful new job, we talk a lot and one of the things we often do is hand over the sun. I will send a picture of the sun setting here...

...Offspringette will send me back a picture of the sun rising there.

Just imagine how long that would have taken back in the day. I'd have taken a shot on my Instamatic, waited until the film was finished, sent it off to be developed, forgotten I had taken the picture, eventually written a letter and included the picture, posted it off... heavens, we'd be through an equinox at least, summer would be into winter by the time I had handed over the sun and that moment.

'Coming your way,' I say, ' get ready to catch it...' and I ping off a picture of a Tamar Valley sunset as the sun sinks below the horizon.

'Got it,' will come the reply and a picture flashes up of dawn sun creeping over the South Island garden.

The world and the distance that felt so huge and so far suddenly feels a little bit smaller to both of us and we often say we're looking at the same moon too,  something that really resonated when I was in New Zealand visiting last year and Offspringette and I sat and watched that full moon rise over Kaikoura. I think we both agreed to etch that night in our memory banks and think of it when we watched the moon and the stars in future and were missing each other.

Meanwhile Tim Dee looks at the vastness of the stars in an African sky...

'The shock comes, once again, at the demonstration of so much other, a star for every lark, a star for every grain of sand. And once again the oldness of the view, the way looking up shreds your life, strips it back, joins you to all those who have looked up, millennia of watchers, a star for every gazer.'

A star for every gazer...isn't that just perfect.

Just about every thought has me dashing off to Alice Oswald these days; my go-to poet along with Gerard Manley Hopkins... something Miss Maud circa 1972 Nonsuch Girls A Level English would never have credited. Mention of stars had me reaching for Woods etc and a beautiful poem entitled A Star Here And a Star There..

'the first whisper of stars is a faint thing
a candle sound, too far way to read by

the first whisper of stars is a candle sound
those faraway stars that rise and give themselves airs
         A star here and a star there
the first whisper of stars is a faint thing
that candle sound too far away to read by'

More about Four Fields to come I'm sure because I haven't even mentioned the fact that when Tim talks about 'my friend Kathleen' and I ferret around in Sightlines until I find Kathleen Jamie talking about 'my friend Tim' that I start to make connections and understand here are two writers who share friendship, and common writing ground; who both see and relate the detail that it is so easy to miss, ploughing furrows (sorry) that I treasure and I know many of you do too.

If you have read Four Fields please do share your thoughts.

I have Tim Dee's other book The Running Sky here and unread too. It was one of my Dad's favourites so I will be reading that soon too.

And I wonder if you too can identify with that feeling of sky and the way it connects you with the out of sight but never out of mind...

And when you've done that please do scroll down for  the chance of a gift...

 

 

 

Dulcima ~ H.E.Bates

My turn-of-the-year Big Shelf Sort saw me revisiting H.E.Bates corner and a little nest of books that I hadn't picked up for quite a while.

I was looking for some short reads and there was Dulcima, my 1971 / 20p copy. Even then, in 1971, we were thinking back to how cheap things had been before the war, now I'm looking back and thinking a book now costs a week's wages in 1970s money, and the cost of a house wouldn't buy a car these days. It's an age thing I'm sure, but I love these old books for the reminders and the memories they hold; every time I have a book cull there is no question of ever throwing these out, I get the Pang of the Past and they stay because most of this vintage were bought during nurse training and packed and unpacked in every home I lived in around London. 

Rosslyn Lodge in Lyndhurst Road Hampstead...

Guilford Street Nurses Home ...almost and depressingly until a friend and I saw an advert for a room in another nurses home.. 

Rutland House in Bedford Place just off Russell Square. Eventually it was time for the rite of passage, our student nurse flat share...

Eade Road just along from the old Haringey Dog Stadium before being packed off to do our SRN year at the London...

Cavell Home in East Mount Street, Whitechapel..

...and finally back to the alma mater of GOS and a room in 28 Bernard Street, and thence to every home since.

I only have to look at this pile of books and I am stashing them on a shelf somewhere.

Dulcima, first published in 1953 and originally part of a collection of short stories by H.E.Bates entitled The Nature of Love, seems to have made it into a stand-alone book in 1971 on the strength of the film adaptation featured on the cover of my edition, and starring Carol White and John Mills. I haven't seen the film but H.E.Bates makes it very easy to imagine the opening sequence...

'She was a short girl, thick in the back, with stout legs covered by brownish cotton stockings and flat feet by big sloppy shoes. Her hands were large and coarse and her straight dark hair hung down over her solid cheekbones in uncombed strands...

Every afternoon she pushed an old hoodless pram with a baby in it, up the hillside...'

Dulcima is the eldest daughter of a large and impoverished rural family and, on her return journey down the hillside, the baby in the pram will be submerged in a heap of 'new-blown' branches, 'under a crooked roof of boughs.' First impressions are of poverty and deprivation...

Dulcima's mother...

'...a hollow-faced whining woman with meagre breasts that were like empty purses except when they filled briefly and fed another child. Her face was yellow, with a haunted look...'

Her father...

'...a man with cheeks fissured dark by long hours in brick kilns...work at the kilns seemed to have burnt the juices out of him, so that he was dry of kindliness...'

Everyone seems dessicated, living a depleted papery tissue-thin existence, bland and parched. Tis is a life that seems to take everything and guve nothing and very quickly I am reminded of the supreme storytelling and scene-setting powers of H.E.Bates. 

The children's names hark to some sort of wishful social aspiration on the part of Dulcima's mother... Rowena, Chalice. Spenser, Clarissa, Angel, Cassandra and Abigail along with the two who had died, Magnolia and Sharon. Who can know the disappointments and the destroyed dreams of her life and clearly Dulcima, in her sloppy-shod feet is destined to follow the same path.

It is little wonder that Dulcima sees a possible escape route in the home of the family's farming neighbour, the ageing Parker, and when she assumes the unofficial role of his housekeeper and discovers a horde of money in his attic, it is only a matter of time before her head will be turned at the thought of what this money could buy.

And when Dulcima meets a young and alluring gamekeeper in the woods it's only a matter of time before...

and...

and then...

Dulcima made for surprisingly breathless reading; you know that feeling of time well-spent with a book, this a tale that really did stand the test of time for me.

I have since turned to the much newer edition of H.E.Bates's short stories Day's End published by Bloomsbury who are reissuing all 300 of them according to 'A Note From the Family' written by Tim Bates about his grandfather, and flagging up the H.E.Bates Companion a really superb website. In a Foreword to this edition writer Lesley Pearse suggests of H.E.Bates..

'He managed to create a little world for you to enter into, and that soft focus would stay with you long after you'd finished the story.'

As a starter for ten Bloomsbury are offering a free download of Castle in the Air for Kindle and, delving a little deeper, I now see that Dulcima is also available as one of three stories included in The Nature of Love for just 99p.

Has anyone seen the film of Dulcima because I'm wondering how it matches up to the book...

Do you think he has stood the test of time... 

 And what about your favourite H.E.Bates titles...

 

 

 

 

 

Greengates ~ R.C.Sherriff

I wish I'd paid more attention to the lino when I was growing up.

It was the standard floor covering in our house, with rugs and coverings various, until the arrival of Marley Floor, but seeing the endpapers to the Persephone edition of Greengates by R.C.Sherriff was all it took to remind me of the patterns and the unique smell. Then of course cue a massive diversion as I look up linoleum, the word a composite of the constituents 'linum' - flax and 'oleum' oil and a mid-Victorian invention.

R.C.Sherriff sets his scene as well and as visually as ever as the novel begins with the retirement of Mr Baldwin, a clerk in the city,and the usual presentation of a clock at a time in a person's life when they can actually stop watching it. 

It is page forty-four before Mr Baldwin becomes Tom and with it a sense that he is shaking off the formality and routine of his working life in order to drive his long-suffering wife Edith to distraction. Suddenly thrown together the couples' lives are destined for disaster until, on a country outing, Tom and Edie suddenly realise that there could be more to this retirement thing than sitting around and getting on each other's nerves.

'Fancy forgetting the countryside was only half an hour away...' says Tom to Edie from their front seats on the bus, and with that excursion their new adventure begins; a new house and grand letting go of the past. The trauma of auctioning off a previous life is balanced with the excitement of establishing a new one as they move to a new housing estate and furnish their house accordingly.

There will be moments of doubt and terror but Tom is soon deeply involved in the community, finally achieving the status he had failed to achieve at work when he becomes the chairman of the newly-established social club.

Mind you, haven't we all met people like it...

Into the voluntary organisation with time on their hands, assume responsibility, refuse to delegate or trust others and then, as a conseqeunce, 'have' to do everything for themselves. Tom Baldwin, having let go of paid employment, soon finds himself working full-time for no payment, but he loves it and so does Edie, who hardly sees him, busy as she is with her garden and the Ladies Committee.

It's all a far cry from that immediate post-retirement ennui that had Tom sweeping leaves off the lawn on a daily basis...

'Against the lower wall lay the stack of leaves he had made in the autumn of the previous year: a little heap of embalmed sadness : a little monument to a futile groping for a happiness that has side-stepped him and slipped away.'

Roland Wales in his excellent biography of R.C.Sherriff From Journey's End to the Dambusters, suggests that with the extension of the tube line into the countryside came 'an explosion of house-building around the fringes of London,' likening it to John Betjeman's Metroland and in particular to the Surrey area that R.C.Sherriff knew well and to which my family also moved in the 1950s. He lived barely eight miles from us now that I think about it.

Cue a curious excursion onto Google street view as I go and have a wander up and down Russell Road in Mitcham fifty five years (approx) after I roller skated these very pavements...

That's it, the cream house, number 36 and there's my little bedroom window (youngest child always gets the box room). On this side lived the Vickers and on the other side the Nuns which we always thought was hilarious. Gone are the privet hedges, bane of my Dad's life with his hand shears, and long-gone the lino, but I'll bet there were a few Tom Baldwins around back in the day keeping us all organised and involved.

Greengates received positive reviews on publication in 1936...

'Brilliantly composed and splendidly persuasive...'

'A magnificent work...'

'A most engaging novel...'

And I feel a slight twinge of sadness at having read the last of R.C. Sherriff's three re-published novels, The Hopkins Manuscript, The Fortnight in September and now Greengates, what a joy they have all been, a perfect trilogy of great reading.

Your thoughts on R.C.Sherriff gratefully received..

And I'm thinking too about other male writers from this era and suddenly Nevil Shute has come to mind. Born three years later and a very different writer, but I haven't read any of his in ages...have his books stood the test of time and if so which would you recommend...

Postscript:: I am reading a new book entitled Outskirts - Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt by John Grindrod and am delighted to find that Greengates gets a good mention. More about it soon, but meanwhile head for library reservations, it's fascinating.

 

 

First Love ~ Gwendoline Riley (Baileys Prize Short List 2017)

My quest to read the Bailey's Short List moved on from Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo to First Love by Gwendoline Riley.

And as an aside...can I ask you something.

Is anyone else struggling with what seems to be a trend for small print coupled with close-spaced lines in paperback books especially? 

Filled with enthusiasm for my task, and wanting to spread-buy my book purchasing, I headed down to The Falmouth Bookseller for a copy of The Sport of Kings only to find that, for me at least, it was almost unreadable. Small print manageable on its own perhaps but not if you add in such tight line spacing. Now I only have glasses for reading, and I'm not even out of the I.0 category yet, nor has my eyesight changed much in the last four years, but I could tell there was an ocular migraine lurking therein and I can't tell you how upset I was to put the book down again. So for all those Kindle-Knockers out there all I can say is, if only for reason of enlarging fonts and spacing, what a blessing that they exist. That said, too much screen reading is another recipe for ocular migraines, so it's a Catch 22 brewing.

I almost wondered whether it was a ploy to make people buy on Kindle. More one-off purchases that can't be sold on, and have you noticed the steady climb in book prices on Kindles now.

Or an economic strategy to save on production costs perhaps? Squeeze more words into fewer pages, though you'd hope there would be at least one myopic publishing person who raised their hand in the planning meeting and said ' Think about the eyesight people.'

On the other hand it might just be me...

Anyway no such worries with First Love by Gwendoline Riley, well-spaced and readable and at 168 pages a marvel of precision.

Neve, a writer, is married to Edwyn, a curmudgeonly older man whose top skill would seem to be the verbal and emotional abuse of his wife. Slowly the details of Neve's life emerge...

The mother with the string of boyfriends...

The abusive father, 'the restless bully about town..'

And the dysfunctional relationships that have prevailed in Neve's life since childhood when her mother left her father and took Neve to live with her grandmother..

'I look back on a decade of barely managed helplessness.' 

As the 'little mite with the basilisk stare,' it is clear that Neve will take problems into adulthood where they will need some therapeutic unravelling; a process that is hinted at rather than overtly stated and much-evident in Neve's patient handling of Edwyn's irrascible and unpredictable behaviour. Edwyn, crabby, waspish and dyspeptic targeting Neve with his constant put-downs in this toxic marriage, Neve, the soul of patience with her therapy-like responses.

Doesn't it sound depressing.

Not even the sort of thing I might willingly read given all those years of working in amongst it all..

But don't be put off, there is humour here too because there is Neve's mother, so needy of the approval of others, almost comedic and reminding me, for some reason of the role Julie Walters played as Victoria Wood's mother in the TV series Dinner Ladies. A mother who frequently 'bares her teeth' when she smiles and yet, for all her flightiness, unreliability and needy presence remains a constant in Neve's life.

Something committed me to finish this one within the first few pages and ultimately I found myself asking all those questions of old...

Has Neve effectively 'married' her father...

How inevitable is the impact of a dysfunctional childhood and a peripatetic lifestyle with its insecurities and instability in later life...

Neve, seeking and craving the security and stability of a home is clearly prepared to make sacrifices no matter the consequences, her own happiness secondary to fulfilling this one basic need, and yet the more I read the more I realised that, in a way, Neve's childhood had actually prepared and trained her to cope with this life, with Edwyn and his mood swings. Perhaps the most quoted line from Gwendoline Riley about her writing is her description of is as “picking at scabs and lying awake and mulling over things that it would really be much more cheerful not to mull over” and she is probably heartily sick of people quoting it back, but scabs are the right word too for Neve's old injuries, and after the scabs come the scars, indelible marks in Neve's personality that she has to work hard to conceal.

And all this revealed in 168 pages. First Love a short book (by today's standards) but one that extends itself well beyond the final page and into the after-read, those thoughts that drift into the thinking in the days that follow. Picking it up again to write about two weeks later and it is as clear, if not clearer.

Another very worthy Bailey's short lister and Gwendoline Riley a writer who is now firmly on my radar and with apparently four previous novels for me to discover.

 

Bookish Gallimaufry

A little pile of my favourite sort of reading has accumulated so I thought I'd share the titles with you...

On the Marshes by Carol Donaldson and published by the inestimable Little Toller Books.

At a crossroads in her life, Carol Donaldson decided to take to the road and return to her old hunting grounds, travelling across the marshlands of North Kent from Gravesend to Whitstable. The inevitable journey of self-discovery evolves as Carol explores the world of people who have chosen to live 'on the edge of this lonely, beautiful waterland.' 

One of the questions I am sure I have put to the male of the species when I have interviewed them in a previous life (I think I might have asked Robert Macfarlane this at Port Eliot Festival) is how much easier it is for men to upsticks, take themselves off, sleep under the stars and walk themselves into self awareness and insight, versus the women who often stay home to care for the children, or perhaps feel slightly less able to get out there and do all this...though this might just be my age and perspective talking here, I'd be interested to know your thoughts.

Meanwhile, Carol has no such truck with gender expectations, dons her rucksack and she's off and I am thoroughly enjoying a woman's perspective on the people she meets with the stories of her life woven in among  'the different ways we live on this tribally divided island.'

Waiting for the Albino Dunnock by Rosamond Richardson continues the trend for women to go on the journey... bookish information that follows is from You Know Where...

"Written by a beginner-birdwatcher with the freshness and passion of a convert,Waiting for the Albino Dunnock  explores the world of birds through the seasons of a single year. It describes encounters with particular birds in the landscapes of East Anglia where the author is rooted. Occasional journeys farther afield take the reader to truly wild places in the Outer Hebrides and Eastern Europe. Yet the ordinary experience of birdwatching is also far more than just that. The beauty of birds has the power to change lives, as it did the author's, and as in the case of the all-but-legendary snow leopard, it is more about the search than the result.

Personal and elegiac in tone, the writing is an unusual combination of prose poems based on the actual experience of seeing a specific bird for the first time, woven with elements of science and wisdom traditions, ornithology (and its punning counterpart ornitheology), mythology and philosophy, taxonomy and history, literature and folklore, conveying the wider picture of what it means to be human in relationship to nature. Waiting for the Albino Dunnock explores the degree to which wildness is embedded in the human psyche and how beauty is central to our mental and emotional wellbeing, while highlighting the careless damage we are inflicting on the natural world."

I have become increasingly aware of my woefully inadequate knowledge of birds and bird song in recent weeks. Out on Dartmoor a bird flits past my Walking Friend and I and unless it's a recognisable bird, or a skylark, or a buzzard we call out, ' Oh there goes a Something Else.' Who knows what rarities we might have unwittingly seen.

Four Fields by Tim Dee has lain fallow (sorry) and unread on my reading pile for several years now, largely because I had the Small Print problem with the paperback edition. Since starting Beating the Bounds on here, and tithe maps and naming the fields around us I have been desperate to read this one. So desperate that I had a small moan in response to a glowing 140 characters written about the book by a reader on Twitter, and to which Tim Dee responded by very kindly offering to send me a hardback copy. People often don't follow up on promises like that but true to his word Tim did so I am really excited about finally being able to read this...

"In his first book since the acclaimed The Running Sky Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields. Four fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and their natural and human histories. Four real fields – walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable and knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested and changing. Four fields – the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life – looked at, thought about, worked in, lived with, written.

Dee’s four fields, which he has known for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his Cambridgeshire garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie field in Little Bighorn, Montana, USA, and a grass meadow in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild, to look at and think about the way we have messed things up but also to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass and fields."

It's all chiming with my recent discovery of Wendell Berry  and the Textithe Map of course...


This was the prototype (note the join in the backing fabric which I cut too small... now a design feature) few tweaks to finish and then need to find some wall-space (an ongoing issue) but yes, fields and I are very good friends.

And the top-most book in the pile is Landings by Richard Skelton. I'll wager you might not have heard of this one. I caught news of it, again on Twitter, where Corbel Stone Press (run by Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson) were asking for pledges via crowd-funding to enable the printing of a new and updated edition, and so I bought a copy on the strength of this description because again it chimes with my Beating the Bounds project here...

"In 2009, Richard Skelton published his first book, Landings, a deeply personal and unique response to the moorland landscape of Anglezarke, near his birthplace in south-west Lancashire, UK. Written over the course of half a decade, the book is assembled from a diverse array of materials: texts excised from his own notebooks and diaries are combined with excerpts from census and parish records, maps and historical treatises. The result is what Skelton terms 'mosaic sequences [of] reclaimed fragments' - discrete but connected strands forming an oblique and poignant testimony to personal grief, a meditation on memory and forgetting, a conjuring of the ghosts and voices of a landscape, and an exposition of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on rural lives."

I too have a whole heap of disconnected fragments about discoveries within that one mile radius around our house here in the Tamar Valley; piles of notebooks, folders and files, tithe maps, field names, census returns, copies of deeds and documents found in the Devon Records Office dating back to the 1600s and thoughts and ponderings as I walk and wander, so I was intrigued to see what Richard Skelton had done with his. This might be the best £14 I have spent on a book in a while (since the last £14 anyway) because I am deeply immersed and feeling very in tune with Landings and with that sense of the seemingly disparate pieces making up the whole (nice patchwork analogy there). We expect a book to have a start, a middle and an end but this book of fragments reveals that there are threads to be found that can join them, and that whole-cloth will emerge (I'm stuck on the analogy now, sorry).

I wrote about Reliquiae 4, Corbel Stone Press's annual journal of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, translations and visual art a while ago here. It has proved to be one of those journals that bears revisiting and repeated reading as, I think, will Landings.

How lucky we are to have so much bookish inspiration to choose from and as always please do share any other recent finds on this theme in comments.

And if you have read any of these please do share your thoughts...

And what about the Kent Marshes...reading Carol Donaldson is tempting me to visit a place I don't know at all.

 

Stay With Me ~ Ayòbámi Adébáyò (Baileys Prize Short List 2017)

So as I was saying, me and fiction prize-list reading weren't getting on, we seemed to be done with each other in fact, finished, history...the whole kit-and-caboodle was over. Too many lists that had led my reading astray, books that I felt I should enjoy because a group of judges had, and then being disappointed. And in any case I've been so deeply entrenched in reading fiction from the past for the last few months that I really hadn't had my eye on what is out there. I am still sent books (thank you to those who send) and do get invited to plenty of publishing events in London (thank you to those who invite) which would doubtless keep me up to date, but I eschewed the bright lights a while back, and I was dragging my heels over the contemporary scene until I happened to hear the short list announcement for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction on the radio. So interested was I that I hadn't paid much attention to the long list either, but this list of books piqued my attention, I scribbled the titles down.

I had already read, enjoyed and written about The Dark Circle by Linda Grant here and had copies of three others sitting in the pile of The Great Unread; Stay With Me by Ayòbámi Adébáyò (Canongate), First Love by Gwendoline Riley (Granta) and Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien (Granta again), so I fished them out and suddenly got that old frisson of reading excitement back, felt inspired to make a start and am giving what I have of this year's short list a go.

So as you can see I was fibbing when I said I was done with fiction prize lists....sorry.

In the way that these things happen (and it's what I love about my reading life) if I hadn't planned to read prize lists then I certainly hadn't planned a trip to Africa from my armchair until the Kayaker (son of us) announced that he was heading back to Uganda for a month to do something a bit different for the final major project of his BA (Hons) in Commercial Photography. Africa is a country he loves and knows well having led white water kayaking trips along the Zambezi and the White Nile in a former life, so he would be going back to friends and familiar places, but this time self-funding a trip to work with an NGO to provide photographs and video footage for their website....as well as some river trips of course (the kayak travelled too...don't ask me how). So for the last few months it's been all about Africa here, and very exciting it has been too, and now he's there its even more exciting watching pictures come through on Instagram. 

Set in Nigeria in 1985 alternating with 2008, Stay With Me by Ayòbámi Adébáyò tells the story of hairdresser Yejida and her bank manager husband Akin. There are rules and expectations among the wider family, and when, after four years, the marriage has produced no children Yejida is blamed and a second wife is introduced. Set against the backdrop of unrest, military coups and falling governments Ayòbámi Adébáyò gives the narrative to both Yejida and Akin offering two sides to the story that will unfold over more than twenty years as well as delving back into the distant past

Some 'review' this is, because I don't want to say much more as to do so would be to give away so many plot surprises that the book will be ruined, and guided by the end paper precis from publisher Canongate I see that they have been extremely circumspect too. I'm glad not to have read any reviews of Stay With Me either because one disclosure, of the many available, would have detracted from the ongoing and very compelling narrative and then the final impact, which saw me put the book down and go for a sundown walk.

Clever writing and superb plotting make it nigh on impossible to take sides in the trials and tribulations of Yejida and Akin, this book is like a reading see-saw...one minute I'm in the Yejida camp along the lines of 'how very dare they', the next I am feeling desperately sorry for Akin. My sympathies were torn through the moments of differing but utterly human (and deeply credible) reactions to the loss and pain, the tragedies, the deceits, the lies and the secrets that mire the couple's life, and as for the ending, well no I couldn't possibly breath a word beyond don't fear it, and you too may be choking back the tears and have to go for a walk.

All I can say is that this is an impressive debut novel, a unique voice and I look forward to more. I don't want to compare but if you enjoy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie then you may like Stay With Me, which fully earns its place on my Top Shelf of Top Reads alongside her. It's a book I can't fault in any way and very deserving of its place on the Baileys Prize short list too. Hie thee to library reservations and get your name down for this one, a quick check and I am pleased to see that at least Devon have three copies and nine reservations.

Next up First Love by Gwendoline Riley (Devon Libraries one copy, five reservations)

 

 

The Brooch

Some time ago I had started to read Making Conversation by Christine Longford as one of the Great Unread on my Persephone bookshelf and was struck dumb by the first paragraph...

"Here is a little present for you Ellen," Said Martha Freke. "We got it on the pier."

Ellen, the cook-general, undid the wrappings, which revealed a small cardboard box, and in it, on a bed of cotton wool, a brooch which said "Ellen," in bright gold, written in a cursive hand, with a line below it and a full stop after it.'

What follows, when Martha inadvertently reveals that it had cost 'only sixpence' quite took me aback...

"You little idiot," said Mrs Freke. " Now she won't think anything of it. People like that don't, if you tell them the price. Never do it again."

Struck dumb because in my mind was the notion that I had definitely seen something similar as a child in my mum's jewellery box. I could visualise the brooch, my mum's name Vera, and all wrapped up with it the memory of my mum telling me that my dad had bought it for her on a pier somewhere during their courting days.

First port of call was the jewellery box... 

...complete with nail varnish remover damage on the lid. I adored it then and still do.

There was nothing of great value in there, but it was all treasure to me. However, whilst the box remains, the jewellery seemed to have been scattered and what followed was the most almighty rummage and upheaval (maybe even a days-worth in total) before the Eureka moment. Once I had thought of it I had to find it.

The photo suggests something a bit hefty but in fact it is barely an inch long and the wire is very fine. A bit of research reveals that the lower loop may have been a place to attach a stone but I have no recollection of it and I have searched through the albums in vain to find a picture of my mum wearing this brooch. But I'd like to think it was on one of these shore-leave excursions that my Dad bought it, and knowing my mum, and thinking of the opening of Making Conversation, sixpence is probably the most she would have allowed him to spend, or maybe a shilling given that this picture was taken in 1947 (the book was first published in 1931) just as my Dad had arrived home from the East Indies. He had sailed in mid-1945, after VE Day, fully expecting to have to fight to the death with the Japanese but of course by August of that year the war was over and his ship's task had involved bringing back the prisoners-of-war from Burma... something which my Dad never ever forgot.

Thankfully it all seems miles away from the joy of this picture taken in Portsmouth I think and note my Dad, ever the chivalrous one, carrying my Mum's coat neatly folded over his arm.

And so that all began with a paragraph in a book which I never managed to finish after the Brooch Diversion because somehow I had diverted too far off the track and couldn't find my way back in.

Looking back on my notes (January) I see that Christine Longford was a strong-minded 1920's blue stocking, 'precociously clever' and with a circle of influence that included Rose Macauley, Noel Coward and Lady Ottoline Morrell. Invitations to Lady Ottoline's rural abode at Garsington also drew E.M.Forster and W.B.Yeats into Christine's orbit. Marrying into the titled Longford family (the more famous Frank was a brother-in-law) Christine's fiction apparently sets about dissecting the Anglo-Irish landed gentry to which she now belongs. The Longford's history and home at Tullynally Castle in Co. Westmeath clearly providing plenty of fodder for Making Conversation.

It is September 1911 and Martha is eleven, precocious and unphased by adults and thought to be 'in danger of becoming a very unhappy little girl,' for her out-of-the-mouths-of-babes pronouncements. I was finding her endearing, naive and innocent though I noted at the time that I was 'occasionally as confused as Martha'. I really must return and finish this book.

If you have read Making Conversation please do share your thoughts, perhaps you can steer me back with your enthusiasm.

And I wonder if single and seemingly insignificant moments, like a brooch in a book, can lead you off on an unexpected trail too...

 

 

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos ~ Dominic Smith

'So much of the forger's dominion is theater and subtext...a series of enticements. An obscure provenance, suggested by visual cues, is irresistible to a certain kind of buyer - it becomes a story of self-discernment, of plucking a second self from the folds of history.'

Has anyone watched that TV programme Fake or Fortune, where Fiona Bruce and art expert Philip Mould endeavour to solve the mysteries and provenance of paintings that may (or may not) be the lost work of a famous artist. The stakes are high and things get incredibly tense for everyone, investigators and owners alike, towards the denouement, because obviously there's a big difference between £50 and £5,000,000. I was reminded of this and much else as I read The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith (Atlantic Books) and the world that surrounds a famous painting.

It is 1957 and At the Edge of a Wood (1636), an oil on canvas measuring 30" x 24" by Dutch artist Sara de Vos, hangs above the bed of wealthy New York businessman Marty de Groot and his wife Rachel, in their plush penthouse. When artist Ellie Shipley is commissioned by an art dealer to create a replica of the painting, a forgery, she can have little idea of where this duplicity will lead, and it will be many years later and in a different country (2000,Sidney Australia) that the deceit will finally unravel. Now in her sixties, a successful and renowned artist and art historian and the curator of an exhibition on seventeenth century Dutch women painters, Ellie awaits the arrival of At the Edge of the Wood with some trepidation. A small private collection in the Netherlands has purchased the painting recently and agreed to its loan; Ellie does not need to hear her boss unwittingly announce that he has arranged for the loan of At the Edge of the Wood from a private collector in New York who will be delivering the painting in person.

Oh what a tangled web we weave and little know it might still be there to ensnare so many years hence.

Cleverly apportioning his narrative between 1957 and 2000, Dominic Smith also adds in a strand from 1636 as Dutch artist Barent de Vos and his wife Sara struggle to make ends meet under the auspices of the rigid and controlling art guilds of the day in Amsterdam, and to a backdrop of tulipomania and its demise.

'Poverty appeared first in their meals, then in their shoes, and finally in their thoughts and prayers...'

And it all came back to me...

I had done three years of Open University literature courses in the late 1990s and had opted for an art history year on the premise that a nice year of looking would be a rest from all the reading. In truth I knew so little about art I ended up having to read twice as much, and I discovered as much on Week One and that first tutorial when we were asked to name three famous pre-twentieth century women artists...

Cue silence and not just from me.

I can do it know because it was all such a revelation to me that I have never forgotten the likes of Artemesia Gentileschi and Sofanisba Anguissola.

Dominic Smith subtly interrogates the status of the women artists in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. More often than not the women were working as assistants to the men, less important and stifled by the constraints of the still-life genre, attendance at life-drwaing classes forbidden, anything else considered inappropriate or too demanding, and I am then reminded of the the paintings of Angelica Kaufmann displayed at Saltram House in Plymouth.

It all begs the question too... how many paintings attributed to men might have been painted by women, a possibility that Dominic Smith explores in the seventeenth century as well as in the twentieth. Three hundred years later but Ellie's painstaking work, commissioned by a man, yet for all its perfections will never be recognised as being painted by a woman.

The hook in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos comes with the playing out of the action in 2000 before a full account of the 1950's action becomes apparent. There are hints of 'old scalding regret' which create a page-turning intrigue but there is something else too..

Unlike say The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, (remember how much some us loved that and some loathed it) or Girl With the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, (likewise, the love/loath divide) there is no picture to refer to. The first thing I did when I started reading The Goldfinch was to print out the painting by Carel Fabritius and use it as a bookmark, a visual reference. At the Edge of a Wood is art as a fiction, if a painting can be such a thing, it has to be a figment of a reader's imagination, the author has to paint it for them. Initial frustrations turned to a strange sort of pleasure that this picture was mine, and mine alone to see, because every reader will be in possession of their own version...

'A winter scene at twilight. The girl stands in the foreground against a sliver birch, a pale hand pressed to its bark, staring out at the skaters on the frozen river. There are half a dozen of them, bundled against the cold, flecks of brown and yellow cloth floating above the ice...'

Please God, if anyone decided to paint At the Edge of a Wood   I really don't want to see it.

With its themes of deception and regret, retribution and forgiveness and all steeped in the art world,  I emerged from The Last Painting of Sara de Vos with the names of more women artists to discover ( Maria van Oosterwyck, Rachel Ruysch) and a renewed reverence for their work and their talent, as well as that feeling that I had just read a really good book.

If you have read this book I would, as always love to know your thoughts...

And apart from those already mentioned are there any other art-fiction books like this to be recommended..

I sowed teasels in our garden after reading The Goldfinch, this in an effort to lure them past the cat and back into our garden and they have been a huge success. we now regularly have nesting pairs and babies in the apple trees.

And do you have a favourite among the women artists...

 

Remembering Laughter ~ Wallace Stegner

I was mid-way through American Gods by Neil Gaiman which had inadvertently made me want to explore America again (from my armchair). American Gods is wild and whacky and I was loving every word of it.

And my return to the writing of Wallace Stegner came via the writing of Wendell Berry.

I am very new to Wendell Berry but having started to read the collection of his essays just published here in the UK, The World-Ending Fire I have become a complete convert...

'Wendell Berry is 'something of an anachronism'. He began his life as the old times and the last of the old-time people were dying out, and continues to this day in the old ways: a team of work horses and a pencil are his preferred working tools. The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress, and in defence of the local landscapes that provide our cultural heritage, our history, our home.

In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out to defend the land we live on. With grace and conviction, he shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the mass-produced madness that drives our global economy. The natural world will not withstand it.

Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can and must begin to treat our land, our neighbours, and ourselves with respect and care. We must, as Berry urges, abandon arrogance and stand in awe.'

More about Wendell Berry to come because I am so smitten I have ordered two more collections of his essays, but here's a snippet...

'The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly - an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilised and even from a 'practical' point of view it is the last degree brutalising and stupid.'

Wendell Berry was taught by Wallace Stegner and suddenly it all came back to me.

How much I had loved Crossing to Safety and the dash to my shelf revealed a slim novella, Remembering Laughter, Wallace Stegner's first book published in 1937.

Elspeth Macleod's father has died and she travels from Scotland to Iowa where she will live with her older sister Margaret and Margaret's husband Alec Stuart on their isolated farmstead. Where Elspeth is something of a free spirit her sister is puritanical, rather prim and very precise, whilst Alec though a hard worker is also a drinker.

Margaret decides to throw a party for Elspeth with a view to flushing out a suitable husband for her sister and it is here that Wallace Stegner clearly sets out his stall, showing the prize-winning literary form that will stand him in good stead for the future. As the guests arrive the 'many-chinned' Mrs Paxley, the 'mildly vinegarish Johnny Armstrong and Mrs Anderson 'bird-like...caged in ecru lace,' fill the room and the reader's imagination to the full. 

'The Bisom twins' bold stare and assured, rakish manner left her slightly discomposed. The rest of the people were vague faces, sets of teeth, freckles, high white collars, embarrassed grins.'

Elspeth is unimpressed; life becomes tedious, boring, repetitive and colourless and of course the inevitable happens when Alec suddenly seems like the only available romantic option.

I don't want to dwell on the detail for fear of spoiling the 'what-happens-next,' but I think you can sense the atmosphere that pervades the house once Margaret discovers the infidelity...

'...always behind the united family front was the intangible shadow of estrangement, an atmosphere of loveless frigidity, nurtured by wrong and fattened by the silence that seemed to to the three to have soaked into the very walls of the house, to have become a haunting presence...'

All those words of caring and plenty instead applied to something so starved and depleted, and then just wait until Christmas comes around...

Remembering Laughter has apparently been compared to Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and I can see exactly why. It is a compact novella about lives blighted by bitterness, recriminations and blame; an intense world, claustrophobic and stifling, and a book I might have missed but for Neil Gaiman leading me to an American reading trail, and Wendell Berry leading me back to Wallace Stegner.

Lead on America, I need some new names for the America page in my Book of Books, any lesser known reading suggestions that we might not know...

Authors we should not be missing right now...

And if you have read Wendell Berry I would love to know your thoughts about a man who writes this...

'Our only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy our place - a much humbler place than we have been taught to think - in the order of creation.'

 

 

 

 

 

Crossing to Safety ~ Wallace Stegner (redux)

I am back reading Wallace Stegner and had to have a wry smile to myself as I read this post on Crossing to Safety written by me in 2010 and posted here back in the olden days when I would obsessively read the Booker longlist and see it as some sort of Gospel of Prescribed Reading. 

How times have changed...

How my reading life has changed...

I barely glance at the Booker these days, it has lost its magic for me.

But how my thoughts about a book when I come to write about it have changed too.

If I wasn't careful there could be something narrow and restricting about always reading a book whilst knowing I will be writing about it here. It could easily turn a book into a stop-start experience as I pause to make notes, mine the book for salient quotes that seem relevant etc, so I have to be very careful not to squeeze every last ounce of pleasure out of the reading. That said, I think it would be hard to in any way diminish the joy of reading Wallace Stegner whose writing I have returned to with renewed enthusiasm. Revisiting my thoughts from 2010 have been a wonderful reminder of a writer I might never have read but for some of you (I hope you are still visiting) recommending him in comments so please forgive this redux post.

And Erika, if you are reading this today, thank you because you left this comment on that original post...

'If England discovers Wallace Stegner through Dovegrey Scribbles you are assured of an honored place in literary Heaven! I have said that I seldom read male novelists any longer. Stegner is a shining exemption.'

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

Crossing to Safety has been my first glorious introduction and may be single-handedly responsible for my ennui and lack of progress with this year's Bookerthon, because Wallace Stegner has written a quiet book that held my interest unfailingly over a period of about two months. In that time I read several other books, so a chapter of this here, a few pages there, a longer run and then a gap, but not once did I pick the book up and find my interest had waned, or that I couldn't pick up the thread, or that I'd lost the plot or the characters, and nor have I had to rush to my desk to write about it in case I forgot. The book has mellowed into a welcome permanence, all surely an indication of a very special sort of writing.

Wallace Stegner says this about his writing and now I see it...

' In fiction I think we should have no agenda except to try to be truthful. The shouters in thunder roar from their podiums and pulpits; I squeak from my corner. They speak to the deaf, but it takes good ears to hear me, for I want to be part of the common sound, a not-too dominating element of the ambient noise.'

He made this statement in response to a comment from Flannery O'Connor to which he took exception

'Thus the admirable artist Flannery O'Connor said that she dealt in the grotesque because when speaking to the hard-of-hearing one must shout. That remark rather offends me as a reader. I don't think I am hard-of-hearing; and anyway, with the truly deaf, shouting doesn't help it only confuses and annoys.'

I have been in the mood for some quiet listening too.

To place him in the literary time line, Wallace Stegner just twelve years younger than Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald but Crossing to Safety his last novel published in 1987.

The novel follows the lives of two young couples living in New England, struggling would-be author and college lecturer Larry Morgan, who narrates the story, and his wife Sally, and the prosperous, domineering and extrovert Charity Lang and her husband, academic Sid Lang. The Langs meet and adopt the Morgans and create an unexpectedly rapid and strong bond of friendship with them, leaving Larry and Sally feeling honoured and chosen, but also slightly phased by the gush of help and support that comes their way. Both Sally and Charity are pregnant so a bond of female friendship develops between the two women that readily draws their men into the circle, and the book opens many years hence with a visit to Charity, now in the terminal stages of cancer and as always completely in charge of events. What follows as the lives and the friendships are played out is a combination of flashback and reflection with moral boundaries established from the start.

'We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.'

Thus Wallace Stegner told me what to expect, I had quite thought there would be motive and mischief behind this, but this much is made clear; this was to be no gossip-fest but a loyal and honest account of a friendship with its trials and tribulations and with some clever devices too.
Where Larry the narrator cannot possibly have been present for events Wallace Stegner overtly declares his use of the imagined

'I realize that there is much about Sid and Charity Lang that I either invented or got secondhand. I didn't know them in college or when they met and married, and so I have neither memory nor documentation to draw on when I start to imagine what they were like when they first came together.'

 

And I found myself revelling in this narrative use of the imagined, 

'Who is this boy?' I can imagine her mother asking 'Do we know him? Do we know his family?' 

as Larry proceeded to construct his own fiction about Charity and Sid's courtship, it all struck me as clever and underused in fiction generally (but please correct me).

Wallace Stegner works some sort of magic with characterisation, something so unique that I had to stop reading Crossing to Safety last thing at night because I'd lie awake thinking about Larry and Sally, Sid and Charity as if they were real people that I knew and had just been talking to, it was most odd.

So of course I now have a growing Wallace Stegner collection and the Modern Library Classics edition Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs - Living and Writing in the West, which has just arrived, has started to slake my thirst, because now I'm at the 'Must Know More' stage.

Wallace Stegner writes about Crossing to Safety in some detail, it was his final book but also his most personal, deliberately close to to his own experience, opinions and feelings and based on a true friendship

'It's all very quiet, I intended it to be true. I wrote my guts out trying to make it as moving on the page as it was to me while I was living and reliving it.'

And, as he admits, a risky book for what it didn't contain,

' There is not a murder, a divorce, an illicit weekend, a gun, a liaison, a drug dream, a hot sex scene, even a wild party, in it. It deals with academics who by definition are said to be tepid and undramatic....nothing there to strain the acting powers of Clint Eastwood or Cher.'

Now then, no one wants literature to sit still, but after all this Booker reading, screaming all manner of Look-At-Me frills and fancies, to the point where I have often felt deafened and dazzled by the clamour, perhaps small wonder that a quiet understatement of a book has had such an enormous impact on me.

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

So hands up all the Wallace Stegner fans out there...my 2017 thoughts on Remembering Laughter will come later this week.

And one comment from 2010 from KevinFromCanada, who is sadly no longer with us but whose memory lives on in mine for the encouragement and advice he gave me in those early years of dovegreyreader scribbles (Kevin had been the owner and editor of the Calgary Herald, he knew a thing or two)...

"Whatever the subject (and however broad it might be), he has an eye for observation and description that puts him in the front rank of American writers for me. I place him with John Williams, William Maxwell and John Fante in a very special group of American writers who can apply their talent to a very wide spectrum of subjects and always produce a superior work.

And without being too grumpy about this year's Booker longlist, any of his books (or those of the other three authors I mentioned) makes a lot of those books seem very ordinary."

The Winds of Heaven ~ Monica Dickens

I'm not really sure why I went into nursing...

A re-read of One Pair of Feet by Monica Dickens a while back and I couldn't quite fathom how the book could have enthused me so much when I was sixteen that I carried on with the ambition and applied to train at Great Ormond Street. I travelled up to London on my own  for the interview when I was still sixteen, just after my O Levels, even though I knew I couldn't start until I was almost nineteen. I was overjoyed when the letter arrived offering me a place and I remember being the slight envy of my classmates at having my place and career sorted before the Sixth Form had even started, whilst many of them still had no idea of what they wanted to do. But Monica hardly painted that career in a flattering light.

Reading A.S.Byatt's 1970 afterword to Monica Dickens 1955 novel The Winds of Heaven, which includes a critical appraisal of several of the novels, I found myself nodding in agreement with her appraisal of Monica Dickens as an author...

'Monica Dickens... takes an archetypally 'ordinary' hero or heroine, leads them through mostly credible agonies to more or less credible conventional happy endings, making bearable the slow ordinary tragedies, gradual decline of energy and hope, and mitigating them by providing solutions at least partially tolerable.'

And there can be no more ordinary and maltreated heroine than Louise Bickford.

In her late fifties Louise, mother of three adult daughters, finds herself left unexpectedly impoverished and homeless following the death of her husband Dudley. With no home of her own Louise is passed from one daughter to another and thence to a friend's hotel on the Isle of Wight, at a reduced rate for the winter months . Mother must be looked after but with little consideration to her feelings or her comfort and I doubt it is possible to meet a more relentlessly downtrodden, bullied and oppressed woman than Louise, who seems to tolerate the most extraordinary levels of rudeness and insult from her family. I'm not sure there are many kind words for her from anyone other than her granddaughter Ellen. And having been made the child 'victim' in the family, for reasons that will become apparent, it is clear that Ellen urgently needs that loving relationship with her grandmother.

Sidelined in their lives, yet desperate to be helpful and a part of them, it occurs more than once to Louise and on just about every page to the reader that...

'Louise was merely killing time, and she felt that her life was slipping by unused...'

Someone once said to me that as a parent you are only ever as happy as your least happy child (and we find it is very true) but for Louise it is hard to know, between Miriam, Anne and Eve, who wins the Least Happy badge.

The allegory of the wind blowing will feature throughout the book...

'When the winds of Heaven blow, men are inclined to throw their heads like horses, and stride ruggedly into the gusts, pretending to be much healthier than they really are; but women tend to creep about, shrunk into their clothes and clutching miserably at their hats and hair.'